Several people stopped and stared.
“Hush!” I said hurriedly, “Not so loud. What do you want a newspaper for? They have paper in the loos.”
“Yes, but it’s so thin, darling. I like a nice thick layer on the seat,” she explained, in a clear voice that carried like a chime of bells on a frosty night.
“On the seat?” I asked.
“Yes. I never sit on the seat,” she said. “Because I knew a girl once who sat on a loo seat and got acme.”
“Don’t you mean acne?” I asked, confused.
“No, no!” she said impatiently. “Acme. You come out all over in the most hideous red spots. Do hurry and buy me a newspaper, darling. I’m simply dying.
So I bought her a paper and watched her disappear into the ladies, flourishing it as a deterrent to germs, and I wondered if any one of her numerous boyfriends had ever described her as the acne of perfection.
She emerged, several minutes later, smiling and apparently germ-free, and I bundled her into a taxi and drove her to the restaurant where I’d booked a table. When we got to the restaurant and had established ourselves the waiter unfurled two enormous menus in front of us. Remembering my friend’s advice I removed the menu deftly from Ursula’s hands.
“I’ll choose for you,” I said. “I’m a gourmet.”
“Are you really?” said Ursula. “But you’re not Indian, are you?”
“What has that got to do with it?” I inquired.
“Well, I thought they came from India,” she said.
“What? Gourmets?” I asked, puzzled.
“Yes,” she said. “Aren’t they those people that spend all their time looking at their tummy?”
“No, no. You’re thinking of something quite different,” I said. “Anyway, be quiet and let me order.”
I ordered a modest but substantial lunch and a bottle of wine to go with it. Ursula chattered on endlessly. She had an enormous variety of friends, all of whom she expected you to know, and whose every concern was of interest to her. From the stories that she told it was obvious that she spent the greater part of her life trying to re-organise the lives of her friends, whether they wanted her to or not. She babbled on like a brook and I listened entranced.
“I’m very worried about Toby,” she confided to me, over the prawn cocktail. “I’m very worried about him indeed. I think he’s got a secret passion for someone and it’s just eating him away. But Daddy doesn’t agree with me. Daddy says he’s well on the way to being an incoherent.”
“An incoherent?”
“Yes. You know, he drinks too much.”
So rich is the English language, I reflected, that this word could, in fact, with all fairness, be used to describe a drunk.
“He ought to join Incoherents Anonymous,” I said without thinking.
“What are they?” asked Ursula, wide-eyed.
“Well, they’re a sort of secret society of... of... um... incoherents, who try and help each other to... well, to give it up and become... um... become...”
“Become coherents!” said Ursula with a squeak of delight.
I must confess this end result had escaped me.
Later on, over her filet mignon, she leant forward and fixed me with her blue, intense stare.
“Do you know about Susan?” she hissed. Her hiss was more clearly audible than her normal voice.
“Er... no,” I confessed.
“Well, she became pregnant. She was going to have an illiterate baby.”
I pondered this news.
“With modem methods of education...” I began.
“Don’t be silly! She didn’t use anything,” hissed Ursula. “That’s what’s so stupid, and her father, naturally, said he wasn’t going to have a lot of illiterates darkening his hearth.”
“Naturally,” I said. “It would turn it into a sort of Do-the-girls Hall.”
“Exactly!” she said. “So her father said she must have an ablution.”
“To wash away sin?” I inquired.
“No, silly! To get rid of the baby.”
“And did she have it?” I asked.
“Yes. He sent her up to London. It cost an awful lot of money and the poor dear came back looking terrible. I do think her father was unfair.”
By this time most of the other tables in the restaurant were listening to our conversation with bated breath.
Over coffee Ursula was telling me a long and very involved story about some friend of hers, who was in dire distress, that she had wanted to help. I hadn’t listened with any great attention until she suddenly said,
“Well, I couldn’t do anything about it then, because Mummy was in bed with a cold and Daddy wanted me to cook him an early lunch because he was taking the bull to the vet to have him castigated... And so...”
“Your father was doing what?” I asked.
“Taking the bull to the vet to have him castigated. He was getting terribly fierce and dangerous.”
How, I wondered, enraptured by the thought, did one castigate a fierce and dangerous bull? But I was too wise to ask Ursula.
“Look, hurry up and finish your coffee,” I said. “Otherwise we’ll be late for the concert.”
“Oooo, yes,” she said. “We mustn’t be late.”
She gulped down her coffee and I paid the bill and ushered her out of the restaurant. We walked through what are laughingly called the Pleasure Gardens of Bournemouth among the faded rhododendrons and the paddling pool and came eventually to the Pavilion.
As we made our way to our seats Ursula insisted on taking her miniature hamper with her.
“Why don’t you leave it in the cloakroom?” I asked, for it was a fairly bulky object.
“I don’t trust cloakrooms,” said Ursula darkly. “They do strange things in cloakrooms.”
In order to save embarrassment I didn’t inquire what strange things they did in cloakrooms, and we got into our seats and wedged the hamper between our legs.
Gradually the Pavilion filled with the normal crowd of earnest music lovers that attended the concerts. When the leader of the orchestra appeared, Ursula joined in the clapping with great vigour. Then she leaned across to me and said,
“I think he’s such a handsome conductor, don’t you?”
I didn’t feel that at that moment I should correct her. Presently the conductor came on and again Ursula threw herself into the applause with great enthusiasm and settled back with a deep sigh. She glanced at me and gave me a ravishing smile.
“I am going to enjoy this, darling,” she said.
The concert was a hotch-potch of Mozart, a composer that I am very fond of. I soon discovered what my friends had meant about Ursula’s distressing effect upon music. Should there be the slightest pause for one brief second in the music, Ursula’s hands were up and clapping. Soon, after people had been hissing and shushing us, I became quite adroit at catching her hands as they came up to clap in the middle of a piece. Each time she would turn anguished eyes on me and say,
“Darling, I’m sorry. I thought he’d finished.”
It was, I think, after the fourth piece when I felt the basket move. At first I thought I was mistaken but I pressed my leg against it, and, sure enough, it was vibrating. I looked at Ursula who had her eyes closed and was waving her forefinger in the air in time to the music.
“Ursula!” I whispered.
“Yes, darling,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“What have you got in your basket?” I asked. She opened her eyes, startled, and looked at me.
“What do you mean?” she said defensively.
“There is something moving in your basket,” I said.
“Hush!” came a chorus of angry voices around us.
“But it can’t be,” she said, “unless the pill’s worn off.”
“What have you got in your basket?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just a present for somebody,” she said. She leant down and fumbled at the lid, raised it, and then
lifted out of it a minute, snow-white pekinese, with enormous black eyes.
To say I was shocked would be putting it mildly. After all, the concert-goers in Bournemouth took their music very seriously, and the last thing that they wanted or, indeed, would have allowed, was a dog in the sacred precincts of the Pavilion.
“Oh, damn!” said Ursula, looking at the pekinese’s rather charming little snub nose. “The pill’s worn off.”
“Look, put him back in the basket!” I hissed.
“Hush!” said everybody around us.
Ursula bent down to put the puppy back into the basket. He yawned voluptuously into her face and then gave a sudden and unexpected wiggle. She dropped him.
“Oooo!” she squeaked. “I dropped him! I dropped him!”
“Shut up!” I said.
“Hush!” said everyone around us.
I reached down to try and find the puppy but, obviously exhilarated by the fact that he had been released from his prison, he had trotted down the row through the forest of legs.
“What are we going to do?” said Ursula.
“Look, just shut up! Shut up and leave it to me,” I said.
“Hush!” said everybody around us.
We hushed for a minute while I thought frantically. How could I possibly find a pekinese puppy in amongst all those seats and legs without disrupting the entire concert?
“We’ll have to leave it,” I said. “I’ll look for him after everybody’s gone, after the concert.”
“You can’t!” said Ursula. “You simply can’t leave him, poor little thing. He might get trodden on and hurt.”
“Well, how do you expect me to find him?” I said.
“Hush!” said everybody around us.
“He’s got all tangled up in the seats and the legs and things,” I said.
“But darling, you must find him. He’ll get terribly, terribly lonely,” she said.
There must have been all of seven hundred people in the hall.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll pretend I’m going to the loo.”
“What a good idea,” said Ursula, beaming. “I think he went down that way.”
I got to my feet and ran the gauntlet of outraged faces and mumbled profanity as I worked my way down the row and out into the aisle. There, I saw, just ahead of me, the pekinese puppy, squatting down as dog puppies do before they’ve learnt to cock their leg, and decorating the red carpet with a little sign of his own. I went forward cautiously and grabbed at him. I caught him, but as I lifted him up he uttered a loud and piercing scream that was clearly audible even above the rather exuberant piece of music that the orchestra was playing. There was a great rustle as people turned round indignantly to look in my direction. The puppy continued his screams. I stuffed him unceremoniously under my coat, and, almost at a run, I left the concert hall.
I went to the cloakroom where, fortunately, I knew the girl in charge.
“Hallo,” she said. “You leaving already? Don’t you like the concert?”
“No... it’s... it’s a question of force of circumstances,” I said. I pulled the puppy out from my jacket and held it up in front of her.
“Would you look after this for me?” I asked.
“Oh, isn’t he sweet!” she said. “But you didn’t have him in there, did you? Dogs are not allowed you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “He just got in by mistake. He belongs to a friend of mine. Would you look after him till after the concert?”
“Of course I will,” she said. “Isn’t he sweet?”
“He’s not terribly sweet when he’s in a concert hall,” I said.
I handed the puppy over to her tender care and went back and stood quietly in the shadows until the orchestra had finished the piece that they were playing. Then I made my way back to Ursula.
“Have you got him, darling?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “I put him in charge of the cloakroom attendant. She’s a friend of mine.”
“Are you sure he’ll be all right?” she said, obviously with dark thoughts about what they did in cloakrooms to pekinese puppies.
“He’ll be perfectly all right,” I said. “He’ll be loved and cherished until after the concert. I can’t think what induced you to bring a dog to a concert.”
“But, darling,” she said. “I meant him as a present for a friend of mine. I... I meant to tell you only you talked so much that I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. I want to take him after the concert.”
“Well, don’t, for heaven’s sake, do it again,” I said. “The Pavilion is not a place for dogs. Now let’s relax and try and enjoy the rest of the concert, shall we?”
“Of course, darling,” she said.
When the concert was over and Ursula had, as she put it, clapped herself hoarse, we extricated the puppy from the cloakroom and put it back in its basket and made our way out through the throngs of music lovers avidly discussing the prowess of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
“Darling, I did enjoy that,” said Ursula. “It’s all those archipelagoes. They go running up my spine. There’s nothing like Beethoven, is there?” she asked loudly and clearly, hanging on my arm like a fragile maiden aunt, gazing earnestly into my eyes and clasping in one hand the programme, which had embossed in large letters on the front, “A Concert of Mozart.”
“Absolutely nothing,” I agreed. “Now, what about this puppy?”
“Well,” she said. “I want to take him to a friend of mine who lives on the outskirts of Poole. Her name is Mrs Golightly.”
“I’m not at all surprised,” I said. “But why do you want to take the puppy to Mrs Golightly?”
“She needs it,” said Ursula. “She needs it desperately. You see, she’s just lost her own Bow-wow.”
“She’s lost her what?” I asked.
“Her Bow-wow,” said Ursula.
“You mean her dog?” I said.
“Yes,” said Ursula. “That’s what he was called. Bow-wow.”
“And so she needs another one?” I said.
“Of course,” said Ursula. “She doesn’t want one, but she needs one.”
“Are you, um, giving her this puppy because you think she needs one?” I enquired.
“But of course! Anyone with half an eye could see she needs one,” said Ursula.
“It strikes me,” I said, “that you spend most of your time interfering in your friends’ affairs when they don’t really want it.”
“Of course they want it,” said Ursula earnestly. “They want it but they don’t realise that they want it.”
I gave up.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go to Poole.”
So we went. When we got to Poole, Ursula dived immediately into the back streets and eventually ended up at one of those tiny little houses, two up and two down, that stare frostily at each other across streets. This one had a highly polished brass doorknob and I noticed that the step was a beautiful white as evidence of hard scrubbing on someone’s part. Urusla banged vigorously with the knocker and presently the door was opened by a tiny, grey, frail, old lady.
“Why, Ursula!” she said. “Miss Ursula, it’s you!”
“Emma, darling!” said Ursula and enveloped this fragile wisp of a person in a vast embrace.
“We’ve come to visit you,” she said, unnecessarily. “This is Gerry.”
“Oh, do... do come in,” said the little old lady, “but I do wish you’d let me know. I’m all untidy and the house is in such a mess.”
She ushered us into a living-room full of the most ugly furniture I have ever seen in my life, that glowed with love and polish. It spoke of the most impeccable bad taste. It was a room which had been cherished as things are cherished in a museum. Nothing was out of place; everything glittered and gleamed and the air smelt faintly of furniture polish and antiseptic. Carefully arranged on the upright piano, that didn’t look as though it had ever been used, were a series of photographs, two of them portraits of a heavil
y moustached gentleman standing rigidly, and the rest of a fluffy mongrel in various attitudes. Most of them were blurred and out of focus, but it was obvious that the moustached gentleman took second place to the dog. This, I suspected, must have been Bow-wow.
“Do sit down. Do sit down,” said the little old lady. “I must make you a cup of tea. I’ve got some cake. What a merciful thing, I made a cake only the other day. You will have a slice of cake and a cup of tea?”
My one desire at the precise moment was for several very large pints of beer, but I said that I would be delighted with tea.
Over tea and a slice of sponge cake that was as light and frothy as a pound of lead, Ursula chattered on. It was obvious that Emma Golightly had, at some time, been somebody in her father’s household for whom she quite obviously had a great affection. It was extraordinary to watch the effect of Ursula’s exuberance on Emma. When she had opened the door to us her face had been grey and gaunt, now it was flushed and smiling and she was obviously injected with some of Ursula’s enthusiasm.
“Yes, yes!” she kept saying, “and do you remember the time...”
“But of course!” Ursula said.
“And then do you remember that other time when...” And so it went on interminably.
Eventually, with masterly adroitness, Ursula steered the subject on to Bow-wow.
“Er, Gerry doesn’t know about Bow-wow,” she said, looking at Emma commiseratingly. “You tell him.”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears.
“He was a wonderful dog,” she said. “A wonderful dog. Really. you know, he could almost speak... almost speak, he really could. And then, one day, I let him out and some bloke in a car came down here and knocked him over. Didn’t even stop... he didn’t even stop. I took him to the vet... he was all covered in blood. I took him to the vet, and I said... I’ll pay anything, anything to keep him alive. ’Cos, you see, after my husband died, he was all I had. And he was a lovely dog, he really was. You would have loved him if you’d known him. And he was all covered with blood and he didn’t seem to be suffering much, but they said there was nothing they could do. They said the kindest thing would be to put him out of his misery. Well, now, he’d been my companion ever since my husband died. For... for years I’d... I’d had him... For nearly twelve years. And so you can imagine it was a bit of a shock to me. So as they said it was the only thing to do, I said, ‘Well, all right, well — go ahead and do it.’ And so they... they put him down.”
Fillets of Plaice Page 18
