The Hippopotamus

by Stephen Fry

  “Well, Tedward,” said Michael to his friend Wallace, “God bless Mr. Maugham.”

  “Don’t you think,” said Wallace, “that others might have tried it first?”

  “What you have to understand, Tedward, is that ‘others’ don’t try anything. They leave it to people like us.”

  “You can count me out, darling one,” said Wallace. “Sounds like work.”

  A year and a half later Michael met Lady Anne Bressingham, which gave him something to work towards. She was eleven when they met and Michael not quite twenty, but he knew as surely as any man ever knew a thing that she would grow into the woman for him.

  Wallace accused him of being a pervert.

  “No, no, Tedward, you don’t understand. It is in the smile. She has the right smile. At the moment she is a bony girl, but I know what she will become. It is never the eyes alone, or the beauty, or the figure, it is always the smile. When she smiled I knew at once. It is that clear.”

  By 1955, Wallace had cause to remark that Logan news-agent- tobacconists were as familiar a sight in every English high street as dog-turds and Belisha beacons.

  “Clothes rationing will end soon,” said Michael. “People will want good, well-made clothes, brightly coloured and cheap. These new teenagers will want jeans from America. It is time we looked into the matter.”

  At a party in 1959 to celebrate the publication of Edward Lennox Wallace’s Odes of Fury, Logan took the rising poet aside.

  “I’m going into publishing, Tedward. We’ve bought APC Maga­zines Ltd. What do you think of that?”

  “Women’s magazines and children’s comics.”

  “Chiefly. But we have other titles too. New Insights, for instance.”

  “New Insights is older than God and just as dead.”

  “So tell me, who should I employ to nurse it back to life? They say Mark Onions is a coming talent.”

  “Stanley Matthews knows more about poetry and literature than Mark Onions. Mark Onions couldn’t nurse a sick vole.”

  “Perhaps I should ask my best man.”

  “Your what?”

  “Anne and I are to be married. I was hoping your waistcoat would be the one to hold the ring.”

  Over the next sixteen years Logan’s collection of companies was transformed into a kingdom and then into what the world could only call an empire. The genius, everyone agreed, lay in the grasp of de­tail, in the flexibility of strategy and in the remorseless gathering of comprehensive and grindingly technical intelligence. In the fifties Michael had picked up a telephone to sell his highly profitable valve-manufacturing plant the moment he had heard from a friend in America about the development in the labs of an object called the transistor.

  “But it will be a long time before they come on to the market,” the friend had warned. “Vacuum tubes have years in them yet.”

  “So I’ll get a good price for the factory now. Do you think I will get such a good price next year when everybody knows about this transistor of yours?”

  Logan bought into vinyls and man-made fibres in the early sixties and sold out five years later, just before wool and cotton and leather came triumphantly back into fashion. The teenage daughter of a management employee had told him that nylon was definitely out, square and dud.

  The high-street outlets were redesigned, at massive cost, to in­clude aisles and trolleys so that the customers could help themselves to their goods and pay at a cash desk. An unpleasant proceeding, but one which Logan was convinced showed the way forward. The name of these new supermarkets was changed from Logan’s to Lomark Stores. All companies, in fact, that Michael acquired traded either under their original names or under new titles which had nothing to do with their owner. The word “Logan” was used only by the parent corporation in the stock-market listings. “Nobody likes a smart-arse,” Michael said. “If my customers thought that the man who sold them marshmallows and cigarettes was the same man who published their magazines and manufactured their televisions, they would start to desert me. They have their pride after all.”

  The financial world knew, naturally, and smiled on what was then a rare treat for the markets, a diverse group of businesses controlled by one holding company; a company that was not afraid to borrow and to expand; to divest here and reinvest there. Every skin Logan shrugged off left pickings on the Stock Exchange floor, every corpo­rate marriage or rape was blessed with profitable issue.

  Michael’s family of second and third cousins proved a sore trial to him, however. Only the ageing Richard showed any aptitude for business: he died in 1962, followed soon by his brother Herbert. Their children were uninterested in the empire. Michael wanted very much to help them, as his father had helped them, but they pre­ferred to help themselves, moving to London, marrying into estab­lished Jewish families and making a quieter way in the world.

  “You’re not our father,” Danny had said to Michael, refusing an offer of money. “You mean well, but you will keep trying to swallow everything and everyone up.”

  Michael was hurt by this. He had a great gift, to make work for thousands, to make money for thousands. It was his duty, surely, to use this gift. Certainly to use it with kindness and consideration. No one treated their workers better. No magnate of comparable power and standing could claim to know the first names and family histories of so many of his employees. No magnate of comparable power wel­comed so enthusiastically the arrival of a Labour government. He paid his supertaxes like a man, never grumbling in public, however horrified he might have been in private. After the disasters of devaluation and the rising inflation of the 1970s he could never feel again any great respect for party politicians or interest in their short-term squabbles. He reserved his political energy for global matters, preferring crafty Third World statesmen with their fly-whisks and djellabas to the dull-witted borough councillors of Westminster. His style of beneficent paternalism was regarded with contempt by the domestic political parties but his even-handedly distributed money was welcomed by all.

  Michael’s sister, Rebecca, he never expected to be involved in business. He had high hopes that she might be a perfect second wife for his friend Wallace, whose poetry Michael could not begin to un­derstand or enjoy, but whose successful editorship of New Insights had given him real pleasure. She married instead a man called Patrick Burrell, a perfectly ghastly fellow in Michael’s estimation who inces­santly and gracelessly bothered him for money but at least provided the closest thing Michael ever had to a daughter, his niece Jane.

  “Since you always claim that you need money for her sake,” Mi­chael said to Burrell at last, “I will settle money on her once and for all. A million pounds is hers and hers alone. I will start an account tomorrow. She can have the cheque-book herself when she is twenty-one. If any school fees need to be paid or clothes to be bought for her meanwhile, you will let me know, Patrick, won’t you?”

  Burrell had taken this badly and some years later sent a telegram to Rebecca from New York informing her that he had found someone else. Michael had been unhappy for his sister, but relieved to be rid of the connection.

  A connection he was sorry to sever had come a little more than a year after Rebecca’s marriage. It had been drawn to Michael’s atten­tion that Edward Wallace had been stealing money from the maga­zine; not a great deal, it was true, but it was not the scale of the embezzlement that had been at issue so far as Michael was con­cerned. It took him some time to forgive his old friend. He watched in great despair as the poet declined in creativity and charm while in­creasing in girth and drunken misanthropy.

  In 1966, Michael knelt before the Queen and arose a knight. In 1975, he stood to make his maiden speech in the House of Lords as Baron Logan of Swafford. A year later, at the age of forty-six, he came to the decision that he had earned the right to divert his magisterial powers of concentration into the matter of starting a family. He began with a son
, Simon. Two years later Anne obliged him with an­other boy, David. It was after this birth that she persuaded Michael to pardon and absolve Wallace his peculations.

  “I can see that you miss him, darling. Let’s ask him to be David’s godfather.”

  Nine years following this, when a woman might reasonably for­give or even thank her uterus for slipping quietly into desuetude, Anne found herself pregnant again, this time with two boys at once.

  IV

  In 1991, with the twins approaching their fifth birthday, Edward, the younger by fifteen minutes, showed signs of developing serious prob­lems with his asthma. This inspired Lady Anne to order a regular nightly patrol to monitor his breathing.

  One hot night, with the air thick with pollen and spore, the twins’ nanny, Sheila, was heard to shriek in horror. She ran down the nur­sery passage howling for Lady Anne.

  Edward, she wailed, was blue and lifeless in his bed. Dead, not breathing at all. Quite dead. Most awfully dead. Anne and Michael ran for the stairs, their hearts jumping with panic and terror.

  Meanwhile the two older boys had been awoken by the same screams and commotion. They hurried straight to the twins’ bedroom in equal alarm. Simon took one look at Edward’s immobile form and started to pump the lifeless child’s arms and legs back and forth, per­haps in some dimly remembered re-enactment of first-aid instructors at school or more probably in imitation of the procedure of vets when dealing with suffocating piglets.

  “No!” David had shouted. “Let me!”

  He pushed aside his older brother, who was now pummelling the ribs with some violence. Anne and Michael arrived in time to see Simon being elbowed roughly away.

  Then they saw, they all saw, David kneel at the bedside and lay a hand gently on Edward’s chest. Immediately, absolutely at once, they are all agreed on this, the child twitched and started to choke and whoop. Michael and Anne were too excited at first, too concerned with calling the doctor and seeing Edward to hospital, to ponder much on what they had witnessed. Michael remembered, though, that when he had taken his older sons aside and told them that they must go to bed, David’s hand in his felt scorchingly hot, where Simon’s was cold.

  Some weeks later Michael took David aside.

  “Davey, we must talk about your talent.”

  “My talent, Daddy?”

  “You know what I mean when I use that word. Your healing. I should have spoken before.”

  Michael related to David those episodes from the life of Albert Bienenstock that he had previously kept from him: the healing and then the death of Benko, the persecution that followed and the suspi­cion and ostracism of the community and its rabbis.

  “Your gift, you see, is not something that the world will welcome.”

  “But why does Mummy look at me sometimes as if I’m ill or as if I’ve done something wrong?”

  “She’s confused, Davey. You must try to understand.”

  David nodded. Michael went next to speak to his wife.

  “Tell me truly, what are your feelings about Davey’s gift?” he asked.

  “Gift?” Anne looked at him in surprise.

  “The gift he used to bring Edward back to life.”

  Anne turned away, but Michael took her by the shoulders and brought her round to face him.

  “You know what we saw, Anne.”

  “I know . . .” she said.

  “It confuses you and worries you.”

  Anne nodded.

  “We must make sure,” Michael said, “that Davey’s life will not be disrupted. We cannot allow the thing to be known.”

  Anne considered this in silence.

  “You’re thinking of your father, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I’m thinking of Davey. Just of Davey. He is not to be treated as a freak.”

  “But, darling, you can’t really . . .”

  “We’ll say no more.”

  “I agree,” said Anne. “We should say no more.”

  More had to be said, however, the following year. Michael’s niece Jane arrived in the midsummer of 1991 for her last stay at Swafford. She had spent many months fighting the exhausting cruelty of her disease and was not expected to survive for many weeks longer. All she wanted now, she said, was the peace of the countryside and the love of her uncle and cousins; these she would take away as a mem­ory to comfort her last few sterile days in hospital.

  Her collapse at the Royal Norfolk Show was held to be the onset of a terminal and irreversible decline. Simon had been forced to drive her back to Swafford himself despite being too young for a licence and surer of tractors than of Jane’s twitchy BMW. He had carried her white and feeble form easily up the stairs, “light as a plucked par­tridge, really,” and laid her on the bed of the Landseer Room. The room, the doctors agreed, in which she would shortly die.

  During the first week of her confinement David and Simon were able to visit her. Simon would look in each morning with fruit, flow­ers and stories of life on the estate, and in the afternoons David would come with a book and sit by the bed, reading and chatting until din­nertime, never minding if Jane drifted in and out of sleep while he talked.

  On the boys’ last morning at Swafford they went in together to the sick room, solemn and elegant in their school uniforms, to bid her farewell.

  “You look like dreadful pale undertakers,” she said. “You shouldn’t. I feel so much better today.”

  The boys departed feeling greatly hopeful. A week later Jane was out of bed, professing herself not just better but truly cured. Cured not only in body, but cured all through. She felt more well now than she ever did before the leukaemia had come. She claimed that her previous life had been that of a caterpillar and that now she was re­born as a free and perfect butterfly.

  Anne asked her, very seriously and in private, if she believed that there was any tangible cause or agency involved in this cure. Jane prevaricated, hiding behind a wide and tangled linguistic bush. Her words were of angels and grace and purity and becoming. Anne went away puzzled and alarmed.

  Michael’s visit was more straightforward.

  “My love, we are so happy. So happy that you are better. However this may have happened, it is best, do you not think, to celebrate it in peace as a quiet and wonderful thing that took place in the privacy of what I hope you will always think of as your family home?”

  “Whatever you say, Uncle Michael.”

  Logan’s friend Max Clifford was staying at this time and Michael wanted to speak to him on the subject too.

  “It’s just this, Max. You know what devils journalists can be.”

  “We’ve sacked plenty in our time between us, eh?”

  “Jane is going to London for tests. It may be that she is right and, as does sometimes happen with leukaemia, she has truly managed to overcome the illness. We don’t want, we really don’t want any publicity attached to this. Newspapers are so hysterical when it comes to anything connected to cancer and there are always religious or mys­tical freaks who have something to sell. Jane herself is not quite in her right mind about things yet . . .”

  “There have been rumours, Michael. Mary tells me she heard her praying in the woods yesterday.”

  “Max,” said Michael, “this is precisely what I mean. While she is so disturbed it is essential that everything is played down.”

  “Mm,” said Max. “She was kneeling there on the ground. A lot of Druidical guff apparently and a great deal about David.”

  “If you are my friend, Max,” Michael was very sharp now, “you will say no more on this subject. Not to me, not to anyone.”

  The following year, however, it was made clear that, despite Logan’s injunctions, word had spread. Firstly, Ted Wallace arrived with a quaint story about wanting to write Michael’s official biography, a claim that Michael frankly found absurd and a typical, Tedwardly
piece of transparent deviousness. Anne had the idea in her head that Wallace might prove a “steadying influence” on David, but it was clear to Michael that he was there, as usual, to upset apple carts and set pumas among pigeons. The Logans found it difficult to talk to each other about David. Michael wondered if his wife might be in some submerged way envious of the genes David had inherited from Albert Bienenstock. Perhaps she found Ted’s worldly cynicism a welcome relief. Perhaps she even welcomed the idea of Ted corrupt­ing David with alcohol or initiating him into Norwich’s few sad specimens of harlotry, anything to upset the delicate balance of the qualities in her son that she found so disquieting. Michael considered all these possibilities carefully. To appease her and because it was better to have a man like Ted inside his tent pissing out, then outside pissing in, Michael concealed his misgivings and made a show of being pleased to see the old drunkard at Swafford. He never went so far as to trust him; that would be insanity. Instead, he required Pod­more to maintain a discreet watch and found out from this that Ted appeared to be in constant postal communication with Jane. Podmore had been quite happy to take it upon himself to do some dusting around the computer currently installed in the Landseer Room and as a result of this zealous housework Michael had discovered, much to his surprise, that the contents of Ted’s letters revealed an apparent ignorance of what had been going on as far as Davey was concerned.

  Meanwhile, Oliver Mills had invited himself for a few weeks, then Max and Mary Clifford had asked if they might come with their daughter Clara, a girl they never usually took anywhere if they could help it, embarrassed as they were by her unfortunate appearance. Jane’s close friend Patricia Hardy was the next to arrive. When Re­becca rang her brother to see if she too might “pop down for a week or so,” Michael began to grow seriously worried. He felt the thing was growing too fast. He knew, in business terms, how hard it was to keep things secret. You cannot cap a volcano. True, the house-party now convened at Swafford constituted none but close, if not trusted, friends, but for how long could such a state of affairs be maintained?