Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  Feeling that the afternoon’s work and his recent transcendental experience had released him from the standards of politeness he had previously maintained in Miss Hazelstone’s company, the Kommandant sat down uninvited in a chair well outside any likely arc of fire from the terrible elephant gun, and watched Konstabel Els’ gladiatorial conflict with the Dobermann with the air of a connoisseur.

  On the whole he thought they were pretty well matched both in physique and in intellectual grasp of the situation. Certainly Els suffered the disadvantage of a smaller jaw and fewer teeth, but what he lacked in biting power he made up for in concentration and experience in castration. The Kommandant did think, momentarily, of intervening but Miss Hazelstone had already acted with that decisiveness he had always found so admirable in persons of her class. She sent the Indian butler into the house and a moment later he returned with a bottle of ammonia and a large wad of cotton wool.

  ‘The best way of separating dogs,’ she shouted above the growls and groans, ‘is to hold a pad of cotton wool soaked with ammonia over their muzzles. They gasp for air and you pull ’em apart,’ and so saying she clamped the wad over Konstabel Els’ already purple face. The Kommandant wondered at her choice of Els as the first to be forced to release his grip, but he put it down to the English love of animals and, to be fair to Miss Hazelstone, he knew her to be particularly fond of the Dobermann.

  It was immediately apparent that the method was remarkably efficacious. With a muffled scream and all the symptoms of imminent asphyxia, Els released his grip on the dog’s reproductive organs and was assisted in discontinuing the struggle by the Indian butler who, hanging on to his ankles, attempted to drag the Konstabel away.

  Unfortunately for Els the Dobermann was less intimidated by the threat of death by suffocation, or else it had developed an immunity to ammonia, and it took several minutes to persuade the beast not to pursue the advantage it naturally assumed it had won by the intervention of its mistress. It may well have thought that Miss Hazelstone had joined it on the ground because Konstabel Els had transferred his quite appalling mandible attentions to her, which would at least have been more natural although, considering her age and lack of physical charm, not altogether understandable. Whatever the reasons for the Dobermann’s continuing attachment to Els’ groin, the interval allowed the Kommandant to concentrate his attention, interrupted only by the agonized screams of his assistant, on the case he had been forced to investigate.

  By the time peace and tranquillity had once more been restored to Jacaranda House and Miss Hazelstone had sent Oogly, the Indian butler, to serve tea in the drawing-room, Kommandant van Heerden had sufficiently recovered his faculties to begin the investigation of the case. But first he ordered Konstabel Els to retrieve the remains of Fivepence from the lawn and from what was clearly an unscaleable blue gum, an order which the Konstabel tended to dispute on the grounds that he was in need of immediate and prolonged hospital treatment for multiple and severe dog bites, not to mention battle fatigue and shell shock.

  In the end the Kommandant was able to resume his interrogation of Miss Hazelstone to the accompaniment of an old-fashioned tea with smoked-salmon sandwiches and cream scones and the almost equally enjoyable observation of Konstabel Els suffering severe vertigo some forty feet up the blue gum.

  ‘Now about this cook,’ the Kommandant began. ‘Can I take it that you were dissatisfied with his cooking?’

  ‘Fivepence was an excellent cook,’ Miss Hazelstone declared emphatically.

  ‘I see,’ said the Kommandant, though he didn’t, either literally or metaphorically. He had been having difficulty with his vision ever since he had been enveloped in that ball of flame. It sort of came and went and his hearing was behaving erratically too.

  ‘Fivepence was a culinary expert,’ Miss Hazelstone went on.

  ‘Was he indeed?’ The Kommandant’s hopes were raised. ‘And when did he do this?’

  ‘Every day of course.’

  ‘And when did you first discover what he was up to?’

  ‘Almost from the word “Go”.’

  The Kommandant was amazed. ‘And you allowed him to go on?’

  ‘Of course I did. You don’t think I was going to stop him, do you?’ Miss Hazelstone snapped.

  ‘But your duty as a citizen—’

  ‘My duty as a citizen fiddlesticks. Why in the name of heaven should my duty as a citizen oblige me to sack an excellent cook?’

  The Kommandant groped in the recesses of his shell-shocked mind for a suitable answer.

  ‘Well, you seem to have shot him for it,’ he said at last.

  ‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Miss Hazelstone snorted. ‘Fivepence’s death was a crime passionel.’

  Kommandant van Heerden tried to imagine what a Cream Passion Nell looked like. Fivepence’s death had looked more like an exploded blood pudding to him and as for the portions that Konstabel Els was still attempting to dislodge from the blue gum, even a dog butcher would have been hard put to it to think of an adequate description for them.

  ‘A Cream Passion Nell,’ he repeated slowly, hoping that Miss Hazelstone would come to his rescue with a more familiar term. She did.

  ‘A crime of passion, you fool,’ she snarled.

  Kommandant van Heerden nodded. He had never supposed it to have been anything else. Nobody in his right mind would have inflicted those appalling injuries on Fivepence in cold blood and without some degree of feeling being involved.

  ‘Oh I can see that,’ he said.

  But Miss Hazelstone had no intention of allowing him to remain under this comforting misapprehension. ‘I want you to understand that my feelings for Fivepence were not those which normally obtain between mistress and servant,’ she said.

  Kommandant van Heerden had already reached that conclusion off his own bat. He nodded encouragingly. Miss Hazelstone’s old-fashioned and formal way of expressing her thoughts delighted him. Her next remark had quite the opposite effect.

  ‘What I am trying to tell you,’ she continued, ‘is that I was in love with him.’

  It took some time for the full implications of this statement to sink into the Kommandant’s overloaded mind. By comparison his experience of bodily dissolution at the muzzle of the elephant gun had been a mere sighing of the breeze in distant meadow grass. This was a bombshell. Speechless with horror he gazed unfocused in Miss Hazelstone’s direction. He knew now what the face of madness looked like. It looked like a frail elderly gentlewoman of illustrious and impeccable British descent sitting in a winged-back armchair holding in her delicate hands a china teacup on which in gilt transfer the crest of the Hazelstones, a wild boar rampant, was underlined by the family motto ‘Baisez-moi’, and openly confessing to an Afrikaans policeman that she was in love with her black cook.

  Miss Hazelstone ignored the Kommandant’s stunned silence. She evidently took it for a mark of respect for the delicacy of her feelings.

  ‘Fivepence and I were lovers,’ she went on. ‘We loved one another with a deep and undying devotion.’

  Kommandant van Heerden’s mind reeled. It was bad enough having to try, however hopelessly, to comprehend what, in God’s name, Miss Hazelstone could have found in any way attractive in a black cook, let alone trying to imagine how a black cook could be in love with Miss Hazelstone, but when, to crown it all, she used the expression ‘undying devotion’ while what was left of Fivepence was splattered over an acre of lawn and shrubbery or hung sixty feet up a blue gum tree as a direct result of his lover’s passion for him, then Kommandant van Heerden knew that his mind was seriously in danger of utter derangement.

  ‘Go on,’ he gasped involuntarily. He had intended to say, ‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ but his professional training got the better of him.

  Miss Hazelstone seemed happy to continue.

  ‘We became lovers eight years ago and from the first we were delightfully happy. Fivepence understood my emotional needs. Of course we couldn’t marry, because of
the absurd Immorality Act.’ She paused and held up a hand as if to silence the Kommandant’s shocked protest. ‘So we had to live in sin.’ Kommandant van Heerden was past shock. He goggled at her. ‘But if we weren’t married,’ Miss Hazelstone continued, ‘we were happy. I must admit we didn’t have much of a social life, but then by the time you reach my age, a quiet life at home is all one really wants, don’t you think?’

  Kommandant van Heerden didn’t think. He was doing his best not to listen. He rose unsteadily from his chair and closed the french doors that led out on to the stoep. What this ghastly old woman was telling him must on no account reach the ears of Konstabel Els. He was relieved to note that the redoubtable Konstabel had finally made it to the top of the tree, where he seemed to be stuck.

  While Miss Hazelstone mumbled on with her catalogue of Fivepence’s virtues, the Kommandant paced the room, frenziedly searching his mind for some means of hushing the case up. Miss Hazelstone and Jacaranda House were practically national institutions. Her column on refined living and etiquette appeared in every newspaper in the country, not to mention her frequent articles in the glossier women’s journals. If the doyenne of English society in Zululand were known to have murdered her black cook, or if falling in love with black cooks was to come into the category of refined living and the fashion spread, as well it might, South Africa would go coloured in a year. And what about the effect on the Zulus themselves when they learnt that one of their number had been having it off with the granddaughter of the Great Governor, Sir Theophilus Hazelstone, in Sir Theophilus’ own kraal, Jacaranda Park. freely, practically legally, and at her insistence? Kommandant van Heerden’s imagination swept on from wholesale rape by thousands of Zulu cooks, to native rebellion and finally race war. Luitenant Verkramp had been right in his reports to Pretoria after all. He had shown astonishing perspicacity. Miss Hazelstone and her Zulu bloody cook were indeed capable of ending three hundred years of White Supremacy in Southern Africa. Worse still he, Kommandant van Heerden, would be held responsible.

  At last, after gazing long and prayerfully into the face of a moth-eaten hyena which, in his distracted state of mind, he assumed to be a portrait of Sir Theophilus in his younger days, the Kommandant mustered his last remaining faculties and turned back to his tormentor. He would make one last attempt to make the old bitch see her duty as a lady and a white woman and deny that she had ever entertained anything more lethal or passionate than mildly critical thoughts towards her Zulu cook.

  Miss Hazelstone had completed her catalogue of Fivepence’s virtues as a sentimental and spiritual companion. She had begun to describe the cook’s attributes as a physical and sensual lover, a sharer of her bed and satisfier of her sexual appetites which were, the Kommandant was to discover to his disgust, prodigious and, in his view, perverse to the point of enormity.

  ‘Of course, we did have our little difficulties to begin with,’ she was saying. ‘There were little incompatibilities in our attitudes, not to mention our physical attributes. A man of your experience, Kommandant, will naturally know what I mean.’

  The Kommandant, whose experience of sex was limited to an annual visit to a brothel in Lourenço Marques on his summer holiday, but whose experience of Zulus was fairly extensive, thought that he knew what she meant and hoped to hell that he didn’t.

  ‘To begin with Fivepence suffered from ejaculatio praecox,’ Miss Hazelstone continued clinically. For a brief, all too short moment the Kommandant’s lack of Latin and his limited knowledge of medicine spared him the full implications of this remark. Miss Hazelstone hastened to explain.

  ‘He used to have emissions prematurely,’ she said, and when the Kommandant ventured to suggest incomprehendingly that, in his humble opinion, Fivepence could not have gone to mission prematurely enough considering his filthy habits in later life, Miss Hazelstone stooped to the level of the stable and explained in language the Kommandant was forced, however unwillingly, to recognize as all too intelligible.

  ‘He used to ejaculate almost as soon as I touched him,’ she continued remorselessly, and mistaking the Kommandant’s look of abject horror for an indication that he still didn’t grasp her meaning, she administered the coup de grâce to his dumbfounded sensibilities.

  ‘He used to come before he could get his prick into me,’ she said, and as she said it, the Kommandant seemed to be aware, as in some ghastly nightmare, that the corners of Miss Hazelstone’s mouth turned upwards in a slight smile of happy remembrance.

  He knew now that Miss Hazelstone was clean out of her mind. He was about to say that she had blown her top, but the phrase, being all too reminiscent of Fivepence’s disgusting propensity, not to mention his ultimate fate, was throttled on the threshold of his consciousness.

  ‘In the end we got over the problem,’ Miss Hazelstone went on. ‘First of all I got him to wear three contraceptives, one on top of the other, to desensitize his glans penis and that was quite satisfactory from my point of view though it tended to restrict his circulation a teeny bit and he did complain that he couldn’t feel very much. After an hour I would get him to take one off and that helped him a bit and finally he would take the second off and we would have a simultaneous orgasm.’ She paused and wagged a finger mischievously at the stupefied Kommandant who was desperately trying to raise enough energy to call a halt to these appalling disclosures. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it,’ she went on. ‘I want you to know that I finally arrived at an even better solution to dear Fivepence’s little trouble. I was having my six-monthly check-up at the dentist and Dr Levy gave me an injection of local anaesthetic to deaden the pain.’ She hesitated as if ashamed to confess to a weakness. ‘Of course in the old days we never bothered with such nonsense. A little pain never hurt anyone. But Dr Levy insisted and afterwards I was so glad I had had it. You see I suddenly realized how I could stop Fivepence being overcome by the intensity of his feelings for me.’ She paused. There was indeed no need for her to continue.

  Kommandant van Heerden’s lightning intellect had raced ahead and had grasped the point quite firmly. Besides he was beginning to understand, though only fitfully, the train of thought that Miss Hazelstone was bound to follow.

  At this moment he visualized the scene in court which would follow the disclosure that Miss Hazelstone had made it a habit to inject her black cook’s penis with a hypodermic syringe filled with novocaine before allowing him to have sexual intercourse with her. He visualized it and vowed that it would never happen, even if it meant he had to kill her to prevent it.

  Despairingly his gaze wandered round the assembly of long-dead Hazelstones adorning the walls of the drawing-room and he hoped they appreciated the sacrifices he was prepared to make to save their family name from the shame that Miss Hazelstone seemed hell-bent on bestowing on it. The bit about the novocaine injections was an innovation in sexual techniques of such a bizarre nature that it wouldn’t just hit the national headlines. The newspapers of the world would splash that titbit in foot-high letters across their front pages. He couldn’t begin to think how they would actually word it, but he had every confidence in their editors’ abilities to make it sensational. He tried to imagine what sort of sensation Fivepence had found it to be and reached the conclusion that the cook’s death at the muzzle of that awful elephant gun must have seemed a relatively comfortable release from the continual practice of Miss Hazelstone plunging the needle of her hypodermic syringe into the top of his cock. The Kommandant wondered idly if Fivepence had had a foreskin. It was a fact that they would never be able to ascertain now.

  The thought caused him to glance out of the window to see how Konstabel Els was getting on. He noted, with what little astonishment Miss Hazelstone’s confession had left in him, that Els had regained his head for heights, not to mention Fivepence’s, and had somehow managed to reach the ground where he was busily seeking promotion by kicking the Indian butler into collecting the scattered remains of the Zulu cook and putting them into a pillowcase. Els was, as usual
, the Kommandant thought, being a bit optimistic. They didn’t need anything as large as a pillowcase. A sponge-bag would have done just as well.

  4

  Behind him Miss Hazelstone, evidently exhausted by her confession, sat back silent in her armchair and gazed happily into her memories. Kommandant van Heerden slumped into a chair opposite her and gazed with less satisfaction into his immediate future. What Miss Hazelstone had revealed to him he had no doubt she would reveal to the world if he gave her half a chance and at all costs those revelations had got to be stopped in their tracks. His own career, the reputation of Zululand’s leading family, the whole future of South Africa clearly depended on Miss Hazelstone’s silence. His first duty was to ensure that no word of the afternoon’s events leaked out of Jacaranda Park. Kommandant van Heerden had little faith in his own ability to prevent that leak. He had none whatsoever in Els’.

  The Kommandant knew from bitter experience that Konstabel Els was incapable of keeping anything, money, wife, penis, prisoners, let alone gossip, to himself. And what Miss Hazelstone had to recount wasn’t in the nature of mere gossip. It was political, racial, social, you name it, dynamite.

  It was just at this point in his musings that the Kommandant caught sight of Konstabel Els approaching the house. He had the air of a good dog that has done its duty and expects to be rewarded. Had he possessed a tail he would undoubtedly have been wagging it. Lacking that appendage he dragged behind him a terrible substitute which, Kommandant van Heerden noted thankfully, he had the decency not to wag. What remained of Fivepence were not things that anybody, not even Els, would wish to wag.