The Hippopotamus

by Stephen Fry

  Encouraged by his discovery of Ted’s ignorance and innocence in the matter therefore and suddenly acutely aware that a best friend is a best friend, however many times he might lie to you and steal from you, Michael decided to accede to the original request and tell his life story to that old fraud Edward Lennox Wallace. It was, perhaps, the best and clearest way to get Ted up to speed and on-side.

  On the second day of their talk, which Michael found he was en­joying immensely, Ted revealing himself to be a surprisingly appre­ciative listener, the news about Lilac broke and the urgency and importance of their collaboration impressed itself all the more clearly on Michael’s mind. There was no evidence that David was behind the recovery in Lilac that had the vet scratching his head in astonish­ment, but there could be absolutely no doubt whatsoever, so far as Michael was concerned, as to the provenance of this miracle, nor, it would seem, was anyone else in the house uncertain. The business of Lilac, coming when it did, destroyed whatever illusion Michael may have had that he was controlling the situation. He broke with all re­straint and told Ted everything, not even omitting his differences with Lady Anne in the matter or the details of his sordid involvement in the reading of Ted’s letters to Jane. Since the day he had read Uncle Amos’s letter from Jerusalem telling him of his father’s death, Mi­chael had never placed himself at another’s mercy. He did so now.

  “There you have it, Tedward. The unvarnished truth. So what do I do? Is Davey’s gift meant for the world? Do I roar it from the battle­ments? Or is it a curse that should be hidden away in shame? Do we call for a priest? A doctor? A shrink? You are the boy’s godfather. Ad­vise.”

  “Hum,” said Wallace. “Hah.”

  “Well?”

  “I shall need some time. I have ideas. For the moment I’d recom­mend you sit tight and do nothing.”

  “Do nothing.”

  “Often the wisest course. In my case, I must think.”

  “Think? Think? What’s to think?”

  “Well, to be truthful, Michael, a man doesn’t like to learn at the age of sixty-six that everything he’s always believed in makes no sense.”

  “And what have you ever believed in, Edward Wallace?”

  “Oh, you know, little things. Little things, like how hard it is to write a poem.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I

  12a Onslow Terr.

  28th July 1992

  Dear Ted,

  I think you must be there now. Patricia tells me that you and Uncle Michael have been “closeted together” for some time.

  It’s time for me to come down. You can give me the fruits of your conversations with Uncle Michael when I arrive tomor­row, after my final tests. Can you understand now why I have been so excited? I’m so pleased that you have been sharing in this with me.

  You can talk to Patricia and Mummy now and let them know what you’ve been up to. But not a word to anyone out­side Swafford, of course.

  Look after Davey though. Make sure he keeps up his strength and isn’t made to feel isolated or used.

  When Davey first told me how he had healed Edward I knew that my decision to come to Swafford had been meant. Was “miracle” really too strong a word? I don’t think so. Surely you can’t now either. Tell me this isn’t going to change your life, Ted, and I’ll call you a liar.

  Much, much love

  Jane

  PS: My most urgent and final “proclamation” as you like to call them is this: Smile! We are loved. We are loved. Everything is going to be wonderful. Everything shines. Everything is as it could only be and must be.

  II

  From the diary of Oliver Mills:

  29th July 1992, Swafford Hall

  Everything has come to a head, dearest Daisy Diary. I write this in tumbling confusion. It’s eleven at night and in three hours’ time I shall . . . well, I don’t know what I shall, but it will be the terror of the earth and that’s a fact.

  I mentioned yesterday that the Hearty Hetties of the house­hold were getting all dismal about some horse, a hunter owned and ridden, as they say on race cards, by Michael himself. The name of the beast, Lilac, besides being camper than a jamboree of Danish scouts in Spandex briefs, betrays the Jenny Gender. Lilac is a big brown mare and the Cox’s Orange Pippin of Logan’s eye. Yesterday, as I made most meticulous mention, she began to display symptoms of something madly amiss. Vera Vet pronounced that it had all the hallmarks of Ragwort Poisoning. The common ragwort, dread thing, possesses some alkaloid which degenerates the liver: no Auntie Dote is known to man. Horses don’t usually eat Rachel Ragwort as she’s bit­terer than a forgotten poet, but Lilac was grazing in the park at the front of the house last week and might have nibbled away without noticing. Yesterday she was seen to be bleeding from the mouth like Chopin, circling round and round and leaning her head against the wall looking dismal: this means a Dysfunc­tion of the Liver, sure as eggs are oval. Terminal. Incurable. Why horses possess livers I can’t for a moment imagine. I’ve yet to see one with a voddie and tonic. However, I mustn’t rat­tle on, there’s lots to write and do before beddies: oh my, is there ever lots to write and do. Dysfunctions of the liver, ac­cording to Vera Vet—real name Nigel Ogden, and rather a choice arrangement, as it happens, amber corduroys sheathing the second most provoking bottie in Norfolk—are a guaran­teed one-way ticket to Horsy Heaven. Nige would leave Simon and Michael with a day to think what they wanted to do with Lilac and return on the morrow (i.e., today) with a humane killer, should disposal—which Vera Vet frankly recom­mended, so excitingly harsh, so maddeningly cruel, so thrillingly unsentimental these country people—be the preferred Oprah Option.

  Dinner last night, Daisy, was thuswise rather a forlorn affair. Simon, naturally, was all for a bash on the head and a quick sale to the glue factory. Probably would have bought a jar of recon­stituted Lilac and used it to mend his wellies too, heartless beast.

  I was thinking “Go on, Davey boy! Lay on with your hands. Don’t just sit there . . .” and so I bet were Patricia and Rebecca. Annie was looking daggers at all of us and at Davey especially, so he stayed quiet. If there is such a thing as telepathy then my silent screaming entreaties should have deafened his cute little inner ear. There was a sparkle in that velvet eye and a flush to those nectarine cheeks that bespoke something, I’m sure of that. There could not be a more clearly heaven-sent and angel-scented opportunity to test his powers than the War of Lilac’s Liver and he must know it.

  Michael was very quiet, as he has been most of the week. He looks worn out, poor lug. He spent the afternoon and early evening closeted with Ted Wallace which, let’s face it, would shag out a Jack Russell. I give up with Ted. When I think back to the merry piglet I knew in the sixties and early seventies and then look at the mud-encrusted lump that confronts us today I want to weep. He won’t let anyone in. The cheap pose of the cantankerous old griffin is bad enough in the talentless journalists and layabouts he associates with, but in Ted, who once had a real helping of that thing called talent, it’s heart­breaking. You try and talk to him, try just to bring him out of his private hell and he can’t bear it, as if emotional frankness were a distasteful social boo-boo, like saying “pardon” or fit­ting a candlewick cover to your loo-lid. All I want to do is see him break down. Whoops, sounds cruel. I mean by it that I just want to hear him say, once, “I know, Oliver. It’s awful. I’ve lost it and I hate it and you must forgive me if I get all choleric and sour. Inside, I’m still the Happy Hippo with a heart. Help me.” Would that be too much? It would transform him, I’m sure it would. But you can’t get in. The bolts are drawn.

  Aside from anything else his attitude is far from simpatico on the Davey front. I cannot understand why Annie encour­ages his attentions in that quarter. If anything is guaranteed to break the spell it will be Ted’s crapulent can’t-impress-me scepticism.

  All in all, with Ted wearing his wors
t “what boring children you are” face, Michael glowering at one end of the table, Annie nervous as a grass-hopper at the other, and the rest of us in varying states of electric tension in between, a pretty glum dinz all round. I shot off to bed early. Cheryl Chest was beating her terrible tattoo and I needed my pills and the soft snog of Sandra Sleep.

  A strange waking this morning. I thought at first that Vesta Vision was playing the giddy goat with me. “This is it,” I moan to myself. “Next, the tingle down the arms, then the tightness in the throat, finally the big cardiac club that fells me once and for all.”

  I stared at the vision helplessly. It was that of a fiendish child, or rather two fiendish children, for it was doubled, like the split-field effects they used to employ to indicate drunken­ness in zany Tony Randall comedies. You were supposed, in that tradition, either to clutch your head and groan “Uh-oh, too many Martinis,” or to gurgle, hiccup and ask the barman for another and another, all on account of how Doris Day doesn’t understand you.

  I was not drunk, however, and was certain, as I always have been, that Doris Day understands me perfectly. Nothing symp­tomatic of coronary unpleasantness, just the double demons.

  I closed my eyes tight and opened them again. Still the same identical child-beasts. The one on the left spoke.

  “He’s awake.”

  The image on the right giggled and I realised that Mother had been reacting like a hysterical old ninny. It was all simply explained.

  “You’re the twins,” I managed to croak.

  “Yes we certainly are,” says the one on the left.

  “Which is which?”

  “He’s Edward and he’s James,” they chirrup simultaneously, which is no help.

  “Can’t you wear badges with letters on them so we know?” I suggest.

  “Ha, ha! We like people not knowing.”

  I look at them for a while.

  “You’re James,” I decide, pointing at the one on the left.

  “How do you know?” he says, disappointed.

  “Ha, ha! I just knew.”

  “No, go on, tell.”

  “Well,” I say, “your breathing isn’t as dramatic as Edward’s and I happen to know that Edward has asthma.”

  They glare at each other with recrimination. James starts to try and imitate Edward’s gulping breaths. I know I will always be able to tell them apart though, because now that I look, Ed­ward’s chest is notably larger than James’s and his shoulders set more upright.

  “You had quite a bad turn last year, didn’t you?” I ask.

  Edward responds with great pride. “Simon thought I was a sodding goner. Looked very bad he said. Blue as a still-born runt.”

  “But somehow you pulled through?”

  James and Edward exchange glances. “Mummy says we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Never mind,” I say. “I’m Oliver, by the way.”

  “We know that. How do you do?”

  “How do you do?” I reply, with matching ceremony.

  “Do you want to hear a good joke?” asks James.

  “Always want to hear a good joke.”

  He clears his throat grandly, as if about to recite “Gunga Din.”

  “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “I done up.”

  I pray this isn’t going to be one of those tiresome non-jokes that children inflict upon us without understanding them themselves.

  “I done up who?”

  “Eurgh!!” They scream with delight. “You done a poo! You done a poo!”

  So pleasing to have someone on my level at Swafford at last.

  “Well, you must leave me now while I dress. Any idea of the time?”

  With the practised ease of synchronised swimmers they each inspect a watch.

  “Twenty-five past nine,” they chorus.

  “Anyone still at breakfast?”

  “Everyone else is round the stables. We’re not allowed be­cause the horses make Edward wheeze.”

  “The stables?”

  “Mr. Tubby came round to say that Lilac’s ever so better.”

  Yippy-dido! I fling on my clothes and streak round to the stable yard. Vera Vet is stepping into his Volvo. Lovat green cords this time, not quite such a good colour for him, it seems to me. Simon, Davey, Michael, Anne, Patricia, Rebecca, Ted and the Cliffords are all there.

  “Let me know if there’s any change. It’s really most . . .” He shakes his brown curls. “I’ve seen recovery before, but never so fast.”

  We watch his car disappear. Michael turns towards Lilac’s kennel or whatever they’re called, where Simon stands strok­ing Lilac herself: she certainly looks in my ignorant estimation as bright of eye and glossy of coat as one could wish. David lurks modestly in the background, tracing patterns in the dust with the point of his shoe. The Cliffords, Rebecca and Patricia are staring at him.

  “So what are we all hanging around here for, then?” Mi­chael wants to know. He claps his hands. “She’s a mare, not the Mona bloody Lisa. Let’s go inside. Ted, we’ll get on, shall we?”

  Michael and Ted return to the house. Simon pats Lilac and goes off to talk to Tubby the groom. I take my courage in both hands and snaffle David, much to the boiling rage of the others.

  “Well,” I say brightly, “there’s a mercy. I don’t have a thing in black. If there’d been a funeral I should have looked horribly festive.”

  Annie trolls over. “Any plans today, Oliver?”

  “Well . . .” say I.

  “Like to come on the lake again?” Davey suggests, eyes round and lovely.

  Annie checks this move.

  “Looks like rain,” she says, scanning the cloudless sky. “There’s talk of it anyway. Today or tomorrow. Why not go into town? See a film or something?”

  I get the sitch. She wants her boy-child safe in a city, not standing on the lawn laying hands on her guests like Bernadette at a fête.

  “Good idea,” I say.

  Whatever happens I plan to ask Davey about the horse. Did he press a hand to her flank, pop a crystal in her ear . . . what?

  “All right then.” Davey doesn’t look too excited, but he’s game. It may be my turn. Nothing wrong with Rebecca so far as I can tell, Patricia’s in a bate because that Rebak piece jilted her and Clara just needs a squint corrected and her teeth pushed in. I could do that myself with enough follow-through. No question in my mind or, I hope, Davey’s: Mother’s angina comes first.

  Bitch it . . . I’m out of voddie now. I shall steal down for a bottle . . .

  . . . Betterness. Much of betterness. No one saw me, full flask of Stolly by my side, now I can concentrate. Where had I got to? Davey and Mother’s Day Out. Much to tell.

  We walked round the corner to where my Saab was quar­tered.

  “What’s on?” I asked.

  “On?”

  “At the cinema, bum-brain.”

  “Oh . . .” He kicked a stone. “Who cares?”

  I started in on the questioning as soon as the car had cleared the driveway. “Now, Davey. Darling. I want to know every­thing.”

  He looked across at me with a smile. An overwhelming urge to run my tongue around and into his lips threatened to unseat my reason. Dreadful. Simply dreadful. I’m an Esau girl, these days. Give me an hairy man, not an smooth, that’s my glad cry. Davey has a power though, oh Jessie, does he ever have a power. Mother knew that she was going to have to be very, very careful.

  “Look,” I said. “Time for Trudie Truth and her cheerleader chums Connie Candour and Fanny Frankness. I know and you know about Jane. I know and you know about Edward and his asthma. And now we have Lilac and her magic liver.”

  David breathed out deeply and drummed his heels in the footwell.

  “I have to fin
d out, Davey. I’m sick myself, as you know. I must find out what’s been going on.”

  There was a pause while he wrestled with his . . . I don’t know, conscience or pride I suppose. “I have very hot hands,” he said at last. “Feel.”

  He offered me his hand. It was a warm day so I wouldn’t have expected a cold feel from a fish, but Davey’s hand . . . cub’s honour, Daisy . . . it scorched. Not a wet heat, nothing sweaty, but Lord, hotter by far than 98.6°F, I would swear to that.

  “Bloody hell, darling! That’s, that’s . . .”

  “I’ve always had very hot hands, you see. When I saw Ed­ward lying there I knew that my hand on his chest would help.”

  “So that’s it, is it? That’s all you have to do?”

  Davey shook his head. “No. You see I tried that with Jane when she was here last month and nothing happened.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing. The leukaemia is deep in the bones, you see, the platelets of the blood are manufactured in the marrow. I knew I would have to . . . have to get right inside her.”

  Oh my God, thinks Mother. He fisted her. The little darling fisted her.

  “When you say . . . get right inside her?”

  Davey hovered on the brink. He’s never told anyone, I think to myself. He’s on the verge of pouring it all out. All the secrets of his sorcery.

  “You see . . . there’s . . .”

  He dries up.

  I take the next turning in the road, down a little lane and towards a wood. Fuck the cinema, we can find out what was on and pretend we saw it.

  The sound of the ratchets of the handbrake bring him out of his trance.

  “Where are we?” he whispers.

  “Let’s go for a ramble and you can tell me everything.”

  A sign on the fence surrounding the wood says “Private,” but I figure we’re unlikely to run into anyone. David springs over like an antelope as I straddle the wire clumsily, snagging a perfectly good pair of Ralph Lauren chinos.