Fowlers End (33 page)

June Whistler said wistfully, “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to thrash me within an inch of my life?” “Definitely.”

She became pensive then but said in a little voice, “Then will you let me give you my all?”

I said, “Your all, no. Certainly not. On no account your all.”

“Why are you so cruel to me?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be such a bleeding idiot!” I shouted.

“There is no need,” said she, with sudden dignity, “I say there is no need to throw a lady’s condition into her face. Take my all!”

“Well, what’s your all?”

“Seven hundred and eighty-four pounds, eighteen shillings, and fourpence.”

“Well,” I said, “let me have two hundred and fifty, and I think I can guarantee you five hundred.”

“I’d rather you took my all, so long as I get it back.”

“This is an investment,” I said.

“It would have been so much easier to discuss it yesterday,” said she, discontented. “You can hit me if you like, where it doesn’t show. Oh, well,” she added, upon an enlivening afterthought, “perhaps this is some new, subtle way to hurt me. Have another eccles cake?”

Ignoring this last question, I said, “Do you want to invest two hundred and fifty pounds or do you not?”

“Yes,” she said, and went for her checkbook.

“Without guaranteeing the time, I promise you that you’ll have five hundred back for it.”

Tucking the check into my breast pocket, June Whistler whispered, “I’m sorry there won’t be any little Belisarius. I’m oogly-googly-guggly-wug. I mean—” her eyes refilled with tears—“it’s not my fault. Don’t blame me if I have the snorts. Really, it’s in the Bible, somewhere. But
you shall have your little Belisarius, believe me. Only, you know, you’ve got to plant your seed within me, or somewhere.... Are you sure that check’s enough? Won’t you at least take half of my all? ... Oh, how unkind nature can be! Couldn’t I persuade you, for example, to burn me with a lighted cigarette and pretend to strangle me with a silk stocking? I think I’ve got a cigarette somewhere, and I’m sure I have stockings ...”

“Perhaps some other time,” I said. “Meanwhile—” I tapped the check—“you’ll get this back, and with a vengeance.”

“I hate to twitter, but it’s in the Book of Deuteronomy. Or some Book. I shall wiggle like the devil until I’ve stopped blooping. Lover, come back to me—oh, damn this squiff!”

So we parted. I felt, somehow, that in taking leave of June Whistler I was taking leave of our senses.

In the street I saw a policeman and four or five Sunday loiterers staring intently at a puddle, so I could not help taking a look over the policeman’s shoulder. Something appeared to be festering on the tarmac. As I looked, it grew. It was fascinating to observe how this object was absorbing the puddle. It looked like an unearthly kind of green fungoid porridge. Aman touched it with the ferrule of his umbrella, at which it collapsed—only to rise again, while little puffs of escaping vapor made craters in its repulsive surface. The policeman said, “I have been on the force thirty-two years,
but I admit that this has got me baffled—” he wrote in his notebook—“this might be important.”

An excitable little fellow in a blue shirt and a black hat, probably a minor poet—they often live near the zoo— said, “It’s got a smell of decay, but it’s growing!”

Observing that the entire packet of June’s Greenburger had fallen into a comparatively small body of
water, I went away quietly but quickly; because if it was going to go on at this rate, I felt, it might block the street.

Then I went to see my mother. Perhaps she was getting old and tired: she had stopped being particular in her premonitions and was foretelling everything. She said, “Something seemed to tell me you were coming.” Ignoring my protest that I had promised a week before to visit her this Sunday afternoon, she went on, “So I got in extra crumpets and made you a surprise.”

“Not meringues?” I asked.

“Eccles cake. You always did adore eccles cake.”

Heavily, no doubt, I said, “I did. True, I did.” Then I said, “Listen. Do you remember telling me you had a few hundred pounds? Three hundred, I think you said?”

“Actually,” she said, “it’s more like five or six. I had a feeling—”

“If you lend me some of it, I’ll give it back double.”

“Oh, my darling Daniel, I’ve been saving it for you, and I don’t want it back double or single, truly I don’t. Only I want you to promise me one thing:
Not a word to your Uncle Hugh!”

“I promise,” I said, and, to please her, took another eccles cake, while she went to an old Sheraton cabinet that my father used to love and took out an antique tea caddy, carefully locked, but with the key still in it. From this she dragged a roll of bank notes big enough to choke a horse, saying, “Take it, Daniel, my dear boy, take it.”

“Why are you carrying so much loose cash in the house?”

“In case of burglars,” she said.

“Couldn’t you put it in the bank?”

“I can’t, in case of your Uncle Hugh. Oh, do please take it away. Only nobody must know.
Not a word to your Uncle Hugh.”

I said, “He’s not such a bad sort. But I promise you I’ll pay you back with a hundred per cent interest.”

“If you do, I’ll give it straight back to you,” my mother said, “but first of all I’ll show it to your Uncle Hugh—”

“Oh, damn my Uncle Hugh!”

“Invest it wisely, is all I ask,” said she, beginning to cry. “Have another eccles cake—just a little teeny one?”

“I have a long journey ahead of me. Could I take it with me to eat on the way?”

She packed me twelve, and so I went away with a total of six hundred and fifty pounds, eighteen shillings, and sixpence in my pocket over and above what I’d had to start with. The odd sixpence, my mother’s, was a Canadian one with a hole in it; I put it in my pocket for luck, and there it rests to this day. Did it bring me luck? I don’t know. It is true that I am still alive to tell the tale, but is this luck? I cannot answer this question.

Before going back to Fowlers End, which I had come to regard as home, I went to a coffee shop and had what was ambiguously called a “pie,” with boiled potatoes. These nourishing tubers had all the qualities of unscented soap, except that they did not lather. God knows what was in that pie: if you offered it to me now I would hurl it right in your face—but then I enjoyed it.

To my astonishment, when I got back to Fowlers End, Sam Yudenow was there, in a state of rage bordering on the frenetic. Only he had it under control for the time being and was standing like Napoleon on the
Bellerophon
(but he was smoking a cigar and wearing a homburg hat) uttering almost Napoleonic phrases. I have read, somewhere, that Napoleon Bonaparte had a shrill voice. So, today, had Sam Yudenow. But instead of brandishing his fists in my face and calling me
Coglione,
Sam Yudenow said, “The little I ask of life, the minute I turn my back! The
Gveek has abdicated. Put that in your pipe and stick it up your arse!”

I asked, “What’s up with you?”

“Costas has abdicated,” said he, “miv his contortionist of a sister, so-called. Sister! They were living in horrible sin, the no-goodniks! In horrible sin they were living; and that’s what happens when Gveek meets Gveek. Uxcuse me, I’m upset. After all I done for this enemy of society, off he goes miv this contortionist! All right, all right, so I always suspected—so? She resisted the advances of the yobbos. This, in itself, was suspicious. Even me, when I tried to touch her a little bit—even me she resisted. Praps, I said to myself, she’s got syphorrhea and wouldn’t like to unfe
ct me, knowing I got a family, a piano, responsibilities? No. When Gveek meets Gveek, first thing they do they take their clothes off. It’s on record. Leverage, did you ever go to the Bvitish Museum? If not, do so—it’s got a seating capacity I haven’t yet worked out—but that’ll teach you Gveeks and Romans. You’d be surprised, Lavitoff, you’d be surprised.

“Some of them went about miv wings dressed like cows: Assyrians, which was a kind of Cypriot. My heart is too full, but the Romans had no bodies. My worst enemies should go bust like those fellows miv their carryings-on! But the Gveeks were the worst lot of bastards of the whole bloody lot. No exaggeration. Look, I’ve been around—specially in Fowlers End—but the Gveeks I do not know how to describe. I’m sorry, it’s not my fault—the men ran around stark bollock naked, except for a helmet, a randy shield, miv a shiv.
Miv
their things hanging out! Believe me, when you were twelve you
had such a thing—in marble, yet. And the women? Twenty times worse. What’s a Gveek idea of beauty? Confidentially, I’ll tell you: to take their arms off above the elbows so they can’t defend themselves and then, the
crook of the arm in the thvoat, and off miv their drawers. Believe me! Otherwise, would there be so many Gveeks?

“And what do they come to this country for? To make trouble miv the police.
Tutric acid
I got in the kitchen; a batch of Greenburgers ruined so they smell like cabbage; and the bloody Gveeks abrogated. I knew it all along; I felt it in my heart. And on top of it, the coppers are here—this is all I’m short of—accusing me of androcity miv putric acid! This reminds me: Mrs. Grue was sick in the aisle, and there’s enough acid in that carpet to burn a hole in your stumminck. On this I want you should get cracking.... Gveek women: their face is all in one straight line, and they got no ho
les—I seen it, in museums I seen it. Malnutrition. Give the layabouts a shiv and a shield, and that’s all they want, the uncivilized bastards. And putric acid—I suppose they drank it all up, the bloody foreigners! Oh, give me civilization or I don’t know what! No, Lavatory, there is a limit to the lucrid. I’m ruined.” Then he said, in a different voice, “Would you cook me up a few Greenburgers?”

“No,” I said.

I think he meant to quote a play he must have seen in some penny gaff before the turn of the century, saying,
“Et tu, Brute?
Then fall, Caesar!” It came out as: “Ertcher, Brute—I got Scissors—” and pretended to faint. There being no Pompey’s statue, he fell into the ladies’ lavatory, out of which I hauled him by the lapels of his coat. He moaned, “Cut out that lark, ruffian—this suit cost me seven and a half guineas. Oh, ungratitude!”

He got up, and his lips were trembling now, as he said, “The bogeys ask me, ‘So? How come putric acid in the kitchen?’What can I say? I can only say, ‘Ask the Gveeks; don’t ask me. If you want my opinion, Booligan has got something to do miv this.’ I offered them twenty complimentary tickets. They wouldn’t take ‘em. There was traces mytroglycerin in the Greenburger boiler. I’m a married
man—already I’m astigmatized as a b
low-off. I count on you.”

“What for?” I asked.

That stumped him. He shouted, “I don’t want you should ask idiotic questions! I’m counting on you, I told you—isn’t that enough?”

“Buy an abacus,” I said, “and count on that.”

Sam Yudenow rose to the occasion. “What’s an abacus?”

“Something you can count on, made of
wire and beads.”

“Oh,” he said, relieved, “we got plenty wire in the genevator room, and a lot of pearl beads. Tell Copper to knock one together. So I’ll count on it. In the meantime, what am I going to do about my Greenburgers?”

“Pack ‘em dry,” I said.

Sam Yudenow said, “I must think—” clutching his forehead and taking a green pencil out of his pocket—“I must think, Lavenduck. You don’t know what a comfort you are to me after those Gveeks. Believe me, you don’t know what they are. But Gord will punish them. Look at Socrates—he poisoned himself. Don’t think I’m ignorant just because I don’t know nothing. One of them went about in a tub miv a lamp: Diogenes. Alexander the Gveat died from alcoholic poisoning after he knifed his best friend. There’s show biz for you. Oh, the Gveeks, the Gveeks! Some of them were blind (but that was a poet,
so what do you expect?) and mark my words—” he tapped my chest with an impressive forefinger—“they’re all dead. If they’re so tough, why aren’t they still alive?... Gveeks!”

“You’ll die, too,” I told him.

Loftily he said to me, “This is a subject I prefer not to discuss.”

“I will die.”

“Well,” said Sam Yudenow philosophically, “I suppose we must make exceptions?”

“But not you? Upon my word, Mr. Yudenow, you shall decay—die and decay, and your flesh shall be eaten by worms. You can take it from me, the worms are waiting ...”

“Worms I bar.”

“Worms you cannot bar, unless you get yourself cremated to ashes.”

“Ashes I don’t like. Play a game cards—so what you got in the ash trays? Ashes. And they smell. Boy, did you ever get up in the morning and smell an ash tray full of ashes? And where there’s ashes there’s smoke. No, did you ever come down miv bare feet to ashes, dust, and the curtains full of smoke?”

“No,” I said. “I only know the smell of dead smoke. I mean, the smell of live cigar smoke is the soul going upwards. When it is cold and clings, it is rotten—”

“I don’t like this kind of talk,” said Sam Yudenow. “There is a Gveekishness in it. So cut it out.”

Then he left, thoroughly depressed. Before he got into his big car, he shouted, “And I hate the thought of bloody worms. Get that for a start!”

But I saw in his eyes an anguish, an appeal. He yelled, “What’s more, I don’t like your altitude!” Then he was driven away.

Copper Baldwin came out of the shadows, smiling his up-and-down smile, and said, with quiet relish, “Scared the balls off him, eh? You should ‘ave seen poor old Sam when the Greeks buggered off in a taxi—livid, definitely livid. Then the ice-cream machine broke down, a batch o’ Greenburgers got burnt, and when the police came in and a bogey tapped ‘im on the shoulder ‘e ‘ad a kind of convulsion and lost ‘is truss. No, I mean it was a scream. Well, this truss sort o’ slipped—it was out o’ nervousness—and clipped itself onto ‘is organs o’ reproduction. It’s in the
Bible, you know, in the Song of Solomon: ‘My love put ‘is ‘and into a hole in the door and my belly shrank at the touch.’ Oh boy, did his old bastard of a belly shrink at the touch! You should ‘ave ‘eard ‘im yell, ‘Copper! For Christ’s sake, Copper!’Plainclothes-man says, ‘You’ve got one, Mr. Yudenow: I’m one. And I’d like the favor of a word.’ But poor old Sam keeps on yelling, ‘A file! Bring a small trilingular file, and get me out o’ this!’ Naturally, they make a note o’ that. Well, I came along, I surveyed the situation, and got ‘im out of bondage with an oil can and a ta
ck hammer. Laugh? It’s a shame you wasn’t ‘ere, you would ‘ave died.”