by Stephen Fry
knowledge of the details.
I trust this warning has come in time to save you making an unfortunate mistake.
Unable for the moment to join you for meeting as suggested.
Letter follows
Yours
J.S.
28-09-1992 09:57 from: logangroup plc to: ☎ 071 555 4929 page 001
LOGANGROUP plc
To ...................................................................................Jane Swann
Company .................................................................. Onslow Interiors
Fax No. .........................................................................071 555 4929
From ....................................................................................Patricia
Fax No. ..........................................................................0653 378552
Page ...........................................................................................l of l
Jane,
Bother! If your fax means what I think it does, then I’ve screwed up. Gave Ted an earful yesterday. Called him a foul and ugly old wart-hog. Hard to take those kind of words back but I had a go just now in the breakfast room.
I told him that I’ve been behaving irrationally on account of Martin leaving me and that I had had a go at him because I thought he had been having a go at me. Think he swallowed it. He leered what he imagines is a debonair smile and started dripping egg-yolk down his shirt, which I think is a sign of forgiveness.
You really should have warned me though. Does he really not know what’s going on? And why are you concerned with what he thinks or believes anyway? He’s not here on a commission from a newspaper is he? The mind boggles. Come to think of it, Michael announced last night that Ted is writing his biography. They’ve been closeted together for hours and hours. What’s that all about?
Wildest apologies, do come down soonest
Pat
If you encounter any difficulties with this transmission, please call Valene Myers on 0653 378551
IV
David closed the book and let his eyes lose focus as he gazed up at the ceiling-rose. By eleven o’clock the light had faded enough to silence the chimes of the stable clock. Two hours had passed by since then. In an hour he would be ready. For the moment it was safest, so excited was he, to relax his whole body and concentrate on nothing.
He thought of a circle and within that circle, another circle, within that another and another and another, allowing his inner eye to zoom at speed through the endless ring of rings, finding a central glowing spot that in its turn changed into another circle which itself contained yet more and more circles. It was like a dive into the centre of things and diverted the mind from any base or worldly thoughts. The technique came from a book on yogic meditation he had bought last holidays and worked extremely well so long as one was capable of concentrating with the utmost force while at the same time remaining entirely relaxed.
The time went surprisingly quickly in this state and David already knew, without looking at his bedside clock, when it was two o’clock precisely.
He stood naked before a tall mirror, breathing deeply. The night was warm but he would need some protection. He chose a T-shirt, baggy track-suit bottoms and a pair of trainers. No socks or pants. Taking from the bedside table a torch, an apple and a small jar wrapped in sheets of Kleenex, he left the room.
A gibbous moon, he had heard it called. Half and half. Enough light to see, enough dark to conceal. Light was not important, really. In his present state he felt he could accomplish the mission blindfold.
His trainers loomed white beneath him in the shadow of the house and against the greasy black of the grass, white flashes pumping back and forth. Looking up, he saw Orion’s belt twinkling on its waist and the dog star spinning blue to the east. The sound of his trainers scuffing the grass died in the velvet deep of the night.
“All the air,” he whispered to himself in the rhythm of the running and panting, “a solemn stillness holds. All the air . . . a solemn . . . stillness . . . holds. All the air . . . a solemn . . . stillness . . . holds!”
He was there. The long shadow of the clock fell on the stable yard and a warm savour of horse manure rolled towards him.
Soft as a moth he flitted to the door of the corner tack room. Inside, another smell awaited him, the perfume of saddle-soap and dubbin, so rich that it made him cough. Holding his breath, he felt for the wooden stool, picking it up by the carved hole in the centre of its seat. A loose item of tack, a bridle or unfastened martingale, fell to the ground with a brittle ring as he lifted the stool clear, but he knew that the sound penetrated no ears but his own and those of the horses, who knew what he was up to and approved.
He reached Lilac’s stall and unlatched the top section of the gate. Lilac, as though she had been waiting, moved her head forward to welcome him.
“Hello,” said David, mind to mind, with no movement of lips and no stirring of breath or vocal cords. “I’ve brought you an apple.”
Lilac took the present, like a patient with no appetite who knows they must eat to keep up their strength. While she was slowly masticating the apple, slewing it from cheek to cheek, David pulled off his T-shirt and slipped out of his track-suit bottoms. Feeling that it was ridiculous to be naked but for a pair of trainers, he took those off too and stood bare in the moonlight.
He shivered a little and felt a colony of goose-pimples start up around his legs.
“Are you ready, old girl?” he asked, again without use of his voice. “I am.” He stooped to take the jar and its tissue wrapping from the pocket of his track-suit. The torch he could do without.
He exerted the gentlest pressure on Lilac’s shoulders as he opened the lower gate and stepped in clutching the stool, but she made no move to make for the open yard. Slowly, he closed both gates together and they were alone in the absolute dark.
She was very peaceful, only a light sweat testifying to her terrible illness. She stood in silence, one rear hoof from time to time clopping the flagstones. David moved down her side, his body touching hers as he felt his way to the end of the stall. The heat from her flanks awoke the great heat in him and as he raised himself up on the stool he felt his glans push through the foreskin and his whole cock stand higher and straighter and harder than it had ever stood before. He straightened up on the stool, a hand steadying himself on Lilac’s hindquarters, and slowed his lungs to the rhythm of Lilac’s own breathing. She was oestrous and would not kick back with her legs as she might when off heat. Even had she been, David knew that she would welcome him.
When he was ready and he knew they were as one, he pushed two fingers into the jar and gathered up a thick lump of Vaseline. With his other hand he brushed Lilac’s tail to one side. Obediently she gave a twitch and the tail hung high above, leaving him free to work with both hands. Below the dock and anus the outer lips were easy to find and within them he could feel the clitoral hood and below it the soft tissue of the inner labia. Delicately pushing with his finger he found what he thought must be the urethra and gently he traced his finger down to the easy tender squash below. As if to confirm his discovery, Lilac blew gently from her nose and stamped a foot.
David worked the bolus of jelly into the vaginal opening, finding that his fingers slipped easily in and out. What Vaseline was left over he used to anoint himself, although he was already supplying himself with his own thin stream of juice.
The cock went in with splendid ease, its straight slicked hardness pulled further through by a quick spasm from Lilac. The wall closed all around to suck him deeper in and David gasped with the blinding joy of what he felt. A hand either side of the root of her tail, he experimented tentatively by pulling himself marginally back and pushing himself marginally forward. The sensation blinded his head
with stars. A millimetre this way, a millimetre that, hooves thundered in his brain and the hot crystals in his stomach were smashed into billions of burning grains. The absolute rightness and holiness and perfection and beauty of life charged through him. In this position he could stay for ever, he and the whole kingdom of life—animal, plant or human, locked in a whirlwind of love. The other time it had all been too quick for him to feel this ecstasy: that had been with a woman and there had been tension and the need to talk in words.
“You are whole, Lilac,” his voice inside him called to her. “With this gift of pure spirit I pronounce you whole and healed.”
The lights in his head spilled and toppled and spun in desperate agony as he pushed and pushed, unable to believe the unsurpassable depth and intensity of the tumult of pleasure that was overwhelming him, and then there flashed one great white sheet of light in his head and he felt the surge of his spirit course and course and course and course and course as though it would never stop.
As he finished, forcing the last drop, the Vaseline jar tumbled to the ground with a clatter and Lilac whinnied in alarm, pulling in her great ring of muscle with a bruising clench.
David winced but stayed calm, knowing that Lilac would subside too if he was still. The tension in her flanks eased away and she relaxed the muscle, letting David pull out.
He stood there for a moment, hot hands on her side, exultant and exhausted. At last he stepped down to pick up the wad of tissues that had wrapped the jar and began with care to wipe Lilac down, talking to her all the while.
Out in the stable yard he shivered sharply as he put on his T-shirt. He looked down at the spongy dangle of his cock.
“You must be sparing of this great gift,” he said to himself, “very, very sparing.”
CHAPTER 6
I
Albert and Michael Bienenstock grew sugar beet in a part of Hungary that in 1919 was redesignated Czechoslovakia. This act of cartographical tyranny had transformed Michael into an overnight Zionist and, inspired by a childish sense of adventure and the inflammatory writings of Chaim Herzog, he took a boat to Haifa in 1923, under a proud new name, Amos Golan. Golan, Michael had satisfied himself after extensive, and in Albert’s view preposterous, researches into family history, was the Bienenstocks’ true Israelite patronymic. Golan was a fit name for a man travelling to claim his homeland for his people.
“Sailing into trouble,” said Albert, words with which he was later to mock himself.
Albert’s own son was named Michael in honour of his foolish uncle, to the great consternation and scandal of Albert’s cousins in Vienna. Tradition held it to be bad luck for members of the same family to share a given name. Albert was not a traditionalist. He had no religion, he had no real sense of Jewishness. He was a farmer and a horseman, closer to the anti-Semitic Magyars of the old Habsburg Empire than to the scholarly gabardine beetles of shtetl and city, who scuttled about the streets with their heads down, cravenly hugging the walls when the gentiles walked by, as if fearful of catching or perhaps transmitting some terrible disease.
As a young man in 1914, Albert had fought for his Emperor. Rigged up like a chocolate soldier in gleaming cuirass and nodding plume, Albert the Blue Hussar was among the first to charge the Serbian guns in the early weeks when the Great War was a small Balkan affair that nobody believed could matter. Later, the proud troops of horses humbled by the titanic ordnance of the twentieth century, Albert was appointed to their reassignment as no more than drays and dispatch ponies, pulling with lowered heads the carriages and ambulances that shuffled behind the lines in the frozen Carpathian mountains or relaying fatuous messages between staff and field. With ironic resignation he told himself that loyalty to a great moustache in Vienna was no more stupid than loyalty to a great beard in Jerusalem. By the end, however, he had seen too many white worms crawling in the eye-sockets of too many dead comrades, and too many living comrades frying up the livers and lights of too many slaughtered Cossacks with baby faces. He exaggerated the symptoms of some light shell-shock he sustained during a bombardment and was happy to be transferred to a remount division in that district of Romania known as Transylvania, where he was to sit out the war processing the remnants of the cavalry.
Albert possessed a very special gift with horses. He understood them far better than did the equestrian instructors and veterinary surgeons of the Imperial Army, a fact which generated ill-feeling in some of his brother officers. Others preferred to trumpet Albert’s skills as a healer, making extraordinary claims which he was always quick to repudiate.
“There is nothing so mysterious about what I do,” he said. “I am patient with the animals. I show them that they are loved. I keep them calm. The rest is up to nature.”
Such protestations were so much spitting in the wind. Albert’s reputation grew and was even extended to humans, the result of a stupid incident over his batman, Benko. This foolish soldier had allowed his foot to be stamped on by a frightened stallion one afternoon. Instead of reporting the injury immediately to an orderly, Benko had kept quiet and allowed the wound to fester overnight. The next morning, when he hobbled in with the morning coffee, Albert had questioned him.
“Why are you limping so badly, Benko?”
Benko had burst into tears.
“Oh, sir!” he cried. “Would you take a look at it? I daren’t go to the surgeon, for I know he will amputate from the knee. He never does anything else.”
It was certainly true that there existed many standing jokes about soldiers who had made the mistake of visiting the regimental sawbones. There was one private, they said, who rather lost his head and went to see this doctor with nothing more than a migraine—after which he lost his head completely. This joke worked better in Romanian than in Hungarian. Another story concerned Jana, the local whore. One day a soldier called Janos had gone to see the doctor with a genital wart. He was never seen again, but Jana set up her stall only a week later.
Understanding Benko’s reluctance to make an official appointment, Albert agreed to examine the foot, but could not help wincing with disgust when Benko gingerly pulled off his boot and sock. He was not a hygienic soldier, indeed had not in all likelihood separated that boot from that foot in many weeks. Benko saw Albert’s gagging reaction and immediately began to gibber with fear.
“It’s gangrene, isn’t it, sir? It’s gangrene and I shall lose my leg! I know it, I know it.”
“There, there, you stupid boy. Let me see.”
“No, no! I’m done for, I’m done for!”
Albert took him by the shoulders and spoke looking into his eyes. “Listen to me. You must be very calm now. You must breathe slowly and deeply. Breathe very slowly and very deeply for me.”
Trembling, Benko tried to obey. Albert kept on talking to him, firmly but with kindness, until he was satisfied that the boy had wound down from his hysteria. Horses were easier, you could communicate such confidence without words.
“Now I’m going to look at your foot. Be sure there is no real problem with your foot. It is sore and it smarts, but that is not the end of the world.”
Benko turned his head away in squeamish terror as Albert took a deep breath, stooped and pressed his hand to the swelling, which was purple with poison. Immediately, a small splinter flew from the centre of the wound, followed by a jet of pus.
“There,” said Albert, “that’s better.”
Benko turned round to stare at Albert. “Better?”
“Yes, I’m sure you will find that your foot will mend now.”
“You place your hand on my foot and you say it will mend?”
“No, no, I merely . . .”
But it was too late. Around the barracks the rumour flew.
“Benko’s foot was black with gangrene . . .”
“Bienenstock himself nearly fainted at the stench . . .”
“Just put a hand . . .”
“A hand that seared with heat, Benko says . . .”
“Nearly burned him . . .”
“Just rested it for a second . . .”
“Would have had to amputate from the knee . . .”
“Look at the boy now . . .”
“Skipping like a terrier . . .”
“Bienenstock is a strange man, I’ve always said so . . .”
“Not Christian, you know . . .”
“Not even a proper Jew . . .”
“Never seen in synagogue, according to Corporal Heilbronn . . .”
After a while even Albert himself began to wonder what he had done. He was sure that he had seen that splinter fly, he was sure that the smell he recoiled from was nothing more than the Limburger reek of filthy socks, he was sure that his “skill” lay in no more than the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify. But the damage had been done, and from that day Albert never knew a moment’s ease amongst his men. A horse that he had “miraculously” nursed to health had later gone mad, throwing a recruit, who broke his back and never walked again. Everywhere that Albert went he saw the sign of the cross or of the evil eye. Then Benko, silly superstitious Benko, made an appointment with his commanding officer and asked to be reassigned to other duties. Serving Captain Bienenstock made him nervous. A week later Benko died after stepping on a landmine.
“He trod with that foot,” the men said. “Bienenstock’s curse.”
Albert’s loyalty would never be given again: so he swore when he returned in 1919 to his neglected Hungarian fields, soon to become his neglected Czechoslovakian fields. Michael his brother, who had stayed behind with Imperial blessing to tend those fields that the people of the Empire might have something to sweeten their war, had not been a good farmer. The Zionist bug had bitten him early in the Gentile’s Quarrel, as he called it, and he had higher things to think of than the husbandry of, as it were, alien corn.
After Michael’s departure, Albert spent the next ten years working to become the largest grower of beet in all of Czechoslovakia. In 1929 he set the seal on the triumphant achievement of this ambition by building a small refinery on his land and marrying the daughter of his foreman, a small girl with brown eyes and lustrous hair. Within a year she bore him a son, Michael, and in the spring of 1932 perished in the delivery of a daughter, Rebecca. Albert tried, but he could not save her. Grieve as he might, he could still reflect that it was perhaps as well that he had not succeeded in nursing her back to health after the doctors had pronounced her all but dead. His reputation as an unholy sorcerer had followed him back home and even rabbis, who were supposed to be above the credulous herd, shunned his society.
