The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  ‘He’ll need a fillit.’

  ‘What’s a fillit?’

  ‘I thought you knew all about stitching.’

  ‘If that was true I wouldn’t be needing you. What’s a fillit?’

  ‘There’s a finger-sized hole in his face. I can’t just stitch over a hole even in cloth let alone skin. I’ll need to fill it with something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How would I know? In a suit or something we’d use felt.’

  ‘We can’t do that. I’ve seen what happens to wounds with even a bit of cloth left in them.’

  ‘If we’re reparing an old suit we use a bit of material from somewhere you can’t see. That way it’s the same an’ don’t pull away when it gets wet.’

  ‘Are you saying we should cut a bit off him from somewhere else and stuff it in the hole in his face?’

  She had just been thinking aloud but now she caught fright.

  ‘No, I wasn’t saying that, I was just thinking that’s all. Like with like is what we say. I was just thinking.’

  ‘Why not? It makes sense.’

  ‘You could make things worse.’

  ‘You can always make things worse.’

  ‘If he’s your friend – praps you could cut a finger piece from yourself.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Cale gently, ‘be bloody stupid.’

  ‘Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend.’

  ‘What idiot told you that?’

  She was greatly put out by this disrespect but by now she had her heart set on the money and, also, the challenge. She was no shirker when it came to getting on in the world.

  And so the ingenious operation born of luck, wit, skill and ignorance began and proved a wonderful success. Cale, reassuring the seamstress that he knew what he was doing when it came to knives, cut an exquisite round sliver of flesh from Vague Henri’s buttocks where he felt he would miss it least and the seamstress duly filled the deep hole in his face. With a skill that made Cale’s heart warm to witness she carefully cut and stitched, Tailor of Gloucester perfect, Vague Henri’s sorely battered face. Throughout, Vague Henri accompanied her with more songs concerning spiders, old ladies, cats and goats. When she had finished they stood back to admire what she had done and it was worth admiration. Red-raw as it was, anyone could see the skill with which a ragged hole had been transformed into something that simply looked right. Cale knew that it might become infected or the sliver of flesh he had taken might die and then God knows what. But for now it looked right.

  And indeed it was. For two days it looked worryingly angry for all the neatness and then on the third morning it began to pinkify and grow calm and was obviously on the mend. Vague Henri had only one complaint: ‘Why is my arse so sore?’

  As for their great co-operation and the good fortune in happening upon this ingenious process it was rarely thought of by either Cale or the seamstress and was utterly lost to mankind.

  30

  It was the night of the banquet and IdrisPukke and his half-brother, Vipond, were in particularly good form. The former had teased the women concerning their beauty and bantered with the men about their failure to live up to the women, and Vipond, a more restrained humorist when he felt like it, created storms of laughter with a dryly amusing story about the vanity of the Bishop of Colchester and a misadventure involving an Aylesbury duck that concluded with the observation that ‘Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.’

  Not to be outdone, IdrisPukke smoothly passed into one of his aphoristic moods and was giving those around him the benefit of his many years’ experience of mankind’s idiocy, absurdity and wickedness, including, it must be said, his own.

  ‘Never argue with anyone about anything. No, not even Vipond, though he’s possibly the wisest man who ever lived.’ Vipond, just across the table and enjoying his half-brother’s performance and the double flattery involved in the mockery, laughed along with the others and the banging of approval of half a dozen now tipsy Materazzi.

  ‘When it comes to self-delusion my brother is completely right. You could talk to Vipond for a thousand years and barely touch on the number of absurd things he believes.’

  Then Vipond’s face fell and for a brief moment IdrisPukke wondered if he had gone too far. But it was something he had seen not heard that alarmed the Chancellor. IdrisPukke followed the apprehensive look to the top of the room. Though the chatter and laughter of the rest of the vast room carried on, the table around the half-brothers went very quiet.

  At the top of the stairway leading down into the hall stood Cale, dressed neck to foot in a black suit not unlike an unusually elegant cassock then very much the style among the rich young men of Spanish Leeds and which he’d had specially made by his seamstress and paid for again with Kitty the Hare’s money.

  He looked like a nail and didn’t care who knew it. But, unsurprisingly, the greatest shock among the few dozen there who knew him by sight was that felt by Arbell Materazzi, sitting next to her husband and eight months pregnant. If a woman can be white as a ghost and blooming at the same time then so she was, the blue veins of her eyelids like the thready filaments in Sophia marble.

  IdrisPukke, heart sliding out of humour, watched as Cale walked slowly down the aisle like the wicked witch in a fairy tale, his eyes in their black circles to match his clothes fixed on the beautiful pregnant girl in front of him. He should have realized thought IdrisPukke, he really should. The chair next to him, meant for Cale’s non-arrival, was eased back by a servant as Cale, full of himself at the satisfying catastrophe his presence was causing, came up, gave a gentle nod to Vipond and then fixed his murderous scowl on Arbell Swan-Neck. There was no word sufficiently strong to describe the look on Conn’s face but no one had much difficulty imagining what was going on inside his soul. The question of whether or not he knew often crossed IdrisPukke’s mind afterwards. It was hard to believe that if he did know the evening would end well. Bose Ikard must have hoped for trouble given what he must have known about Conn and Thomas Cale. But he had stumbled on something much worse than a glorified squabble between precocious boys.

  There are many words for the different kinds of silence that exist between people who hate. IdrisPukke considered that if he was ever in prison again with a year or two weighing on his hands he might be able to arrive at a suitable list. But whatever kind of silence it was, it was ended by a guest of Vipond’s, Señor Eddie Gray, an ambassador of sorts for the Norwegians trying to get a handle like many others on what, if anything, the Materazzi would do next and how it might affect them. Provocative and supercilious by nature, Gray looked Cale up and down ostentatiously.

  ‘You’re the right colour for an Angel of Death, Mr Cale. But a little short.’

  There was the unheard sound of souls drawing breath. There was hardly a pause from Cale as he took his eyes for the first time from Arbell and looked at Gray.

  ‘It’s as you say. But if I was to cut off your head and put it under my feet I’d become taller.’

  The cordon of silence of those who realized something was up had now extended either side of the Materazzi, including and not by accident Bose Ikard. Alerted by the contempt in Gray’s tone and the odd appearance of the young man in black they had caught both Gray’s dismissal and the devastating reply and burst into laughter.

  Filled with a noxious mixture of hatred, adoration, love and considerable smugness at the sharpness of his own wit, Cale allowed the chair to be eased under him and turned his gaze at once ludicrous and terrifying to the hapless Swan-Neck. No bullock in a perfumier’s maddened by wasps could have let loose such an ungovernable mix as the clouds of desires, resentments, betrayals and disappointed lusts that mingled and fumed within that stupendous hall. It was no wonder that the baby in its mother’s womb began to kick and squirm like a piglet in a sack. It was a monument to Arbell Materazzi’s good breeding that she didn’t drop her firstborn on t
he spot.

  There was, however, a sign of poor breeding and it, quite deliberately, came from Cale: as the servants began double-spooning meat and beans and petit pois onto his plate, Cale thanked each one of them knowing full well, because IdrisPukke had told him repeatedly, that it was not done at all to acknowledge the appearance of food upon the plate but to carry on talking to the left or right as if the larks’ tongues or peacock cutlets had appeared magically by their own suicidal will. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he said, with each expression of utterly false gratitude intended as a blow to the heart of the beauty sitting opposite him and a kick to the shins of her glaring husband.

  We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy. But even though Conn had dismissed certain suspicions exiled to the very back of his mind and even though he must dislike the man who’d saved him from a hideous death at Silbury Hill – yet he could in the oubliettes of his unlikeable soul still remember the horrors of the purple death crushing him and which he still relived in terrible dreams: he could not, however hard he tried, shake off a clinging gratitude.

  The trouble with Cale was that he had opened his opera of revenge brilliantly but now was lost for a song. Señor Eddie Gray’s mockery had been like throwing buns to a bear. He knew how to deal with aggression, verbal or physical. Arbell simply looked down at her soup bowl as if she hoped the contents would part like the Reed Sea and swallow her whole. Conn just glared at him. For all her misery she looked utterly and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her lips usually somewhat pale brown were a deep red and the white teeth just showing beneath them made him lyrical in his hatred and he thought of roses with snow between the scarlet petals. He had spent so much time thinking about her over the last hideous months that now she stood only a few feet away, it seemed incomprehensible for all the hatred that she would not laugh with delight, as she used to when he closed the door of her rooms behind him, and squeeze him tightly in her arms and smother his face with kisses as if she could never get enough of the touch and taste of him. How was it possible that she had tired of him? How was it possible that she could prefer the creature sitting next to her, have let him ... ? But that thought was too near madness and he was already too close. It had not even for a moment – you must excuse his utter ignorance in these things – occurred to him that he might be the father of the leaping bastard folded in its mother’s womb. Nor had it occurred to him that in the eyes of any objective person the obviousness of Arbell Materazzi preferring a tall and beautiful youth of her own kind and breeding, the great hope for the future of all the Materazzi, over a dark-haired, shortish, harsh-souled murderer with a grudge against the world was a matter anyone would have even thought of questioning. It was true that she owed her life to him, and in an extraordinary way the life of her younger brother, but gratitude is an awkward emotion at the best of times, even or especially towards those you once adored. It is particularly difficult for beautiful princesses because they are, in a manner of speaking, born to be given things and even a normal capacity for gratitude would weigh more heavily on them than human nature is generally able to bear.

  ‘Are you well?’ said Cale at last. At no time in all the history of the world has such a question been asked as if it were a threat.

  She briefly looked up, her natural boldness getting the better of her confusion.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. For myself times have been hard since we last met.’

  ‘We’ve all suffered.’

  ‘Speaking personally I’ve caused more suffering than I’ve endured.’

  ‘Isn’t that always your way?’

  ‘You have a short memory – and worse since you were so many times in my debt.’

  ‘Mind your manners,’ said Conn, who would have stood and thrown his chair back with a dramatic flourish were it not for the fact that Vipond had gripped his thigh and squeezed with a strength surprising in a man of his age and profession.

  ‘How’s your leg?’ replied Cale. He was, after all, in many ways still young.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ whispered IdrisPukke. By now the wave of attentive silence had spread down one half of the hall. But having come with the intention of tormenting Arbell at length Cale realized that the control that would have made this at least plausible had deserted him – a reservoir of loss and anger had opened up far deeper than he had realized he felt – and he had certainly known that it was deep. ‘You’re not wanted here,’ said Conn, ‘why don’t you stop embarrassing yourself and leave.’ Either of these would have done. Like some hypocaust bellows – fed by a frenetic bedlamite – Cale was fired up beyond control. He stood up and was reaching for his belt when a weak hand curled around his wrist.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ said Vague Henri gently. ‘I’ve brought someone to see you.’ Like cool water his voice poured over the expectant silence of the lookers-on. Cale stared for a moment at the white skin and the still striking mark along his face and then the two standing next to him: Simon Materazzi and the always reluctant Koolhaus.

  ‘Simon Materazzi says hello, Cale,’ said Koolhaus. Then the deaf and dumb young man folded him in his arms and would not let him go until they were out of the hall and having a smoke in the damp cold air of Spanish Leeds.

  It was two hours later before IdrisPukke tracked them down by the simple expedient of waiting in Cale’s room until he returned.

  ‘Take Henri and Simon back to bed before they fall down,’ he told Koolhaus, who very gladly did as he was told. Cale sat down on his bed not looking at IdrisPukke.

  ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Your reputation is no longer that of being God’s wrath, more his village idiot.’

  This stung enough at least to get Cale to look at him, although he still said nothing, miserable as a limp drum.

  ‘Do you think you can bully the world?’

  ‘I’ve done all right so far.’

  ‘So far I suppose you have. But that isn’t all that far considering you’re so very young and there’s such a lot of the world to go.’

  Neither of them said anything for a full minute.

  ‘I want her to suffer. She deserves it.’ He spoke so softly and with such sadness IdrisPukke hardly knew what to say.

  ‘I know how hard it is to give up a great love.’

  ‘I saved her life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did I do something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘Nobody knows the answer to that. You can’t say to someone love this woman or love that man.’

  ‘But she used to.’

  ‘What lovers say to one another is written in the wind and the water. Some poet or other said that but it’s true all the same.’

  ‘She gave me away to Bosco. It’s not right to let that go.’

  IdrisPukke might, in the interests of balance and fairness, have pointed out that Arbell had been in something of a difficult position at the time. But it had been years since he was foolish enough to have said so.

  ‘Unfortunately we live in interesting times. You can have a great say in them, perhaps the greatest – so, young as you are and however much this is a pain to you, in matters of love and politics and war small things in life must give way to greater.’

  Cale looked at him.

  ‘Not if the small come first.’

  Another long silence. Not even IdrisPukke could think of a reply. He changed the subject.

  ‘I don’t know what the Redeemers and their Pope are going to do about you. I wouldn’t bank on it being nothing. You make enemies the way other people breathe. To speak angrily the way you do, to show your hatred by what you say or by the way you look, is an unnecessary proceeding: dangerous, foolish, ridiculous and vulgar – though I suppose vulgarity is the least of your problems. You must either learn more discretion or start running now.’

  Cale said nothing while IdrisPukke sat on the bed feeling sorry for the stra
nge boy next to him. After a few minutes IdrisPukke began to worry that in his silence Cale was drifting too far.

  ‘Did you look up at the night sky while you were out?’

  Cale laughed, softly and oddly, thought IdrisPukke – but it was better than the silence before.

  ‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Do the stars still shine?’

  ‘You have been the Master of Ceremonies,’ said Vipond to IdrisPukke later that night, ‘to a great many disasters but this must be one of your finest.’

  ‘Not at all. I’ve been involved in many worse things than a squabble between two lovers.’

  ‘You know it’s a good deal worse than that. Bose Ikard wants us expelled and you can be very sure a report about a brawl between the Materazzi heirs and your friend Nogbad the Bad will be on its way to the King of Switzerland as we speak, and a carefully embroidered one at that.’

  ‘King Zog may be an old woman but he’s not going to throw us out over a squabble like this – however much Ikard stirs it up.’

  ‘He will if he tells him that there is some question over the paternity of Arbell’s child.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘There’s no arguing with that. The point is that the rumours are leaking under every doorway in Spanish Leeds. King Zog takes a very dim view of promiscuous behaviour and particularly between an aristocrat and some yob who carries the coal into her bedroom.’

  ‘He’s a great deal more than that.’

  ‘Not to King Zog of Switzerland. God never created a greater snob. His only reading is to spend hours sighing with pleasure and delight over his ancestry in the Almanach de Gotha.’

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, brother’- IdrisPukke never called him this unless he was particularly annoyed with him – ‘the Materazzi have descended into a kind of nothing. Without Cale to stop them the Redeemers are ready to roll up the Antagonists, the Laconics, Switzerland and everyone else like an old carpet. And they’ll piss on King Zog as they go by.’