Грэм Грин / Graham Greene
Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Комментарии и словарь Е. Г. Тигонен

© КАРО, 2011

Об авторе

Грэм Грин (1904–1991) – знаменитый английский писатель. Некоторые критики полагают, что Грэм Грин – писатель, «кто одинаково нравится как обыкновенным читателям, так и интеллектуалам». Сам он делил свои произведения на «серьезные» и «развлекательные», но различия между ними вряд ли существенны: в большинстве романов Грина есть динамичный сюжет, запутанная интрига в сочетании с политическими концепциями, вырастающими из размышлений о жизни.

Будущий писатель родился в семье директора привилегированной школы. Он рано пристрастился к чтению приключенческих романов Хаггарда и Конрада и впоследствии утверждал, что ему было трудно избавиться от литературного влияния этих писателей. В школе Грин не пользовался популярностью, не интересовался спортом, предпочитая чтение, и в результате, после нескольких попыток самоубийства, ушел оттуда и дальнейшее образование получил в Бэллиол-колледже Оксфордского университета.

В начале 1920-х годов Грэм Грин работал журналистом. В 1926 году он принял католицизм и в дальнейшем называл себя «пишущим католиком». В католицизме его привлекала не ортодоксальная религиозная доктрина, а проповедь нравственности и добра. Свои романы он делил на «развлекательные истории», основанные на детектив-ной интриге, и «серьезные романы» с мощным социальным подтекстом, хотя граница между ними зачастую условна.

В 50–80-е годы Грин создает произведения, сделавшие его писателем мирового уровня: «Тихий американец» (1955), «Конец любовной связи» (1955), «Комедианты» (1966), «Путешествие с тетушкой» (1969), «Почетный консул» (1973), «Человеческий фактор» (1978), «Доктор Фишер из Женевы, или Ужин с бомбой» (1980), «Монсеньор Кихот» (1982), «Знакомство с генералом» (1984), «Капитан и враг» (1991).

В жанровом отношении все романы Грина сочетают в себе элементы политического детектива с психологическим и социальным романом. Этические понятия нравственности и цинизма, борьба добра и зла воплощены в образах многих его героев. Грин полагал, что задача писателя заключается в выражении «сочувствия любому человеческому существу». Более всего Грина интересует состояние человека в момент трудного выбора. Его герой существует в легко узнаваемой социально-политической ситуации, а внешняя реальность вынуждает индивида принимать решения, исход которых зачастую трагичен.

Писатель неоднократно выдвигался на Нобелевскую премию, но так и не получил ее. Шведский академик Артур Лундквист как-то заявил, что этот автор детективов получит премию только через его труп. По иронии судьбы Лундквист умер через полгода после смерти Грэма Грина.

Part I

Chapter 1

I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake[1]. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral.

My father had been dead for more than forty years.

He was a building contractor of a lethargic disposition who used to take afternoon naps in all sorts of curious places. This irritated my mother, who was an energetic woman, and she used to seek him out to disturb him. As a child I remember going to the bathroom – we lived in Highgate then – and finding my father asleep in the bath in his clothes. I am rather short-sighted and I thought that my mother had been cleaning an overcoat, until I heard my father whisper, “Bolt the door on the inside when you go out.” He was too lazy to get out of the bath and too sleepy, I suppose, to realize that his order was quite impossible to carry out. At another time, when he was responsible for a new block of flats in Lewisham, he would take his catnap in the cabin of the giant crane, and construction would be halted until he woke. My mother, who had a good head for heights[2], would climb ladders to the highest scaffolding in the hope of discovering him, when as like as not he would have found a corner in what was to be the underground garage. I had always thought of them as reasonably happy together: their twin roles of the hunter and the hunted probably suited them, for my mother by the time I first remembered her had developed an alert poise of the head and a wary trotting pace which reminded me of a gundog. I must be forgiven these memories of the past: at a funeral they are apt to come unbidden, there is so much waiting about.

Not many people attended the service, which took place at a famous crematorium, but there was that slight stirring of excited expectation which is never experienced at a graveside. Will the oven doors open? Will the coffin stick on the way to the flames? I heard a voice behind me saying in very clear old accents, “I was present once at a premature cremation.”

It was, as I recognized, with some difficulty, from a photograph in the family album, my Aunt Augusta, who had arrived late, dressed rather as the late Queen Mary[3] of beloved memory might have dressed if she had still been with us and had adapted herself a little bit towards the present mode. I was surprised by her brilliant red hair, monumentally piled, and her two big front teeth which gave her a vital Neanderthal air. Somebody said, “Hush,” and a clergyman began a prayer which I believe he must have composed himself. I had never heard it at any other funeral service, and I have attended a great number in my time. A bank manager is expected to pay his last respects to every old client who is not as we say “in the red,” and in any case I have a weakness for funerals. People are generally seen at their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

The funeral of my mother went without a hitch[4]. The flowers were removed economically from the coffin, which at the touch of a button slid away from us out of sight. Afterwards in the troubled sunlight I shook hands with a number of nephews and nieces and cousins whom I hadn’t seen for years and could not identify. It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes and wait I did, while the chimney of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.

“You must be Henry,” Aunt Augusta said, gazing reflectively at me with her sea-deep blue eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “and you must be Aunt Augusta.”

“It’s a very long time since 1 saw anything of your mother,” Aunt Augusta told me. “I hope that her death was an easy one.”

“Oh yes, you know, at her time of life – her heart just stopped. She died of old age.”

“Old age? She was only twelve years older than I am,” Aunt Augusta said accusingly.

We took a little walk together in the garden of the crematorium. A crematorium garden resembles a real garden about as much as a golf links resembles a genuine landscape. The lawns are too well cultivated and the trees too stiffly on parade: the urns resemble the little boxes containing sand where one tees up.

“Tell me,” Aunt Augusta said, “are you still at the bank?”

“No, I retired two years ago.”

“Retired? A young man like you! For heaven’s sake, what do you do with your time?”

“I cultivate dahlias, Aunt Augusta.” She gave a regal right-about swing of a phantom bustle.

“Dahlias! Whatever would your father have said!”

“He took no interest in flowers, I know that. He always thought a garden was a waste of good building space. He would calculate how many bedrooms one above the other he could have fitted in. He was a very sleepy man.”

“He needed bedrooms for more than sleep,” my aunt said with a coarseness which surprised me.

“He slept in the oddest places. I remember once in the bathroom…”

“In a bedroom he did other things than sleep,” she said. “You are the proof.”

I began to understand why my parents had seen so little of Aunt Augusta. She had a temperament my mother would not have liked. My mother was far from being a puritan, but she wanted everything to be done or said at a suitable time. At meals we would talk about meals. Perhaps the price of food. If we went to the theatre we talked in the interval about the play – or other plays. At breakfast we spoke of the news. She was adept at guiding conversation back into the right channel if it strayed. She had a phrase, “My dear, this isn’t the moment…” Perhaps in the bedroom, I found myself thinking, with something of Aunt Augusta’s directness, she talked about love. That was why she couldn’t bear my father sleeping in odd places, and, when I developed an interest in dahlias, she often warned me to forget about them during banking hours[5].

By the time we had finished our walk the ashes were ready for me. I had chosen a very classical urn in black steel, and I would have liked to assure myself that there had been no error, but they presented me with a package very neatly done up in brown paper with red paper seals which reminded me of a Christmas gift.

“What are you going to do with it?” Aunt Augusta said.

“1 thought of making a little throne for it among my dahlias.”

“It will look a little bleak in winter.”

“I hadn’t considered that. I could always bring it indoors at that season.”

“Backwards and forwards. My sister seems hardly likely to rest in peace.”

“I’ll think over it again.”

“You are not married, are you?”

“No.”

“Any children?”

“Of course not.”

“There is always the question to whom you will bequeath my sister. I am likely to predecease you.”

“One cannot think of everything at once.”

“You could have left it here,” Aunt Augusta said.

“I thought it would look well among the dahlias,” I replied obstinately, for I had spent all the previous evening designing a simple plinth in good taste.

“À chacun son goût[6]”, my aunt said with a surprisingly good French accent. I had never considered our family very cosmopolitan.

“Well, Aunt Augusta,” I said at the gates of the crematorium (I was preparing to leave, for my garden called), “it’s been many years since we saw each other… I hope…” I had left the lawn-mower outside, uncovered, and there was a hint of rain in the quick grey clouds overhead. “I would like it very much if one day you would take a cup of tea with me in South wood.”

“At the moment I would prefer something stronger and more tranquillizing. It is not every day one sees a sister consigned to the flames. Like La Pucelle[7].”

“I don’t quite…”

“Joan of Arc[8].”

“I have some sherry at home, but it’s rather a long ride and perhaps…”

“My apartment is at any rate north of the river,” Aunt Augusta said firmly, “and I have everything we require.” Without asking my assent she hailed a taxi. It was the first and perhaps, when I think back on it now, the most memorable of the journeys we were to take together.

Chapter 2

I was quite right in my weather forecast. The grey clouds began to rain and I found myself preoccupied with my private worries. All along the shiny streets people were putting up umbrellas and taking shelter in the doorways of Burton’s, the United Dairies, Mac Fisheries or the ABC. For some reason rain in the suburbs reminds me of a Sunday.

“What’s on your mind?” Aunt Augusta said.

“It was so stupid of me. I left my lawn-mower out, on the lawn, uncovered.”

My aunt showed me no sympathy. She said, “Forget your lawn-mower. It’s odd how we seem to meet only at religious ceremonies. The last time I saw you was at your baptism. I was not asked but I came.” She gave a croak of a laugh. “Like the wicked fairy.”

“Why didn’t they ask you?”

“I knew too much. About both of them. I remember you were far too quiet. You didn’t yell the devil out. I wonder if he is still there?” She called to the driver, “Don’t confuse the Place with the Square, the Crescent or the Gardens. I am the Place.”

“I didn’t know there was any breach. Your photograph was there in the family album.”

“For appearances only.[9]” She gave a little sigh which drove out a puff of scented powder. “Your mother was a very saintly woman. She should by rights have had a white funeral. La Pucelle,” she added again.

“I don’t quite see… La Pucelle means – well, to put it bluntly, I am here, Aunt Augusta.”

“Yes. But you were your father’s child. Not your mother’s.”

That morning I had been very excited, even exhilarated, by the thought of the funeral. Indeed, if it had not been my mother’s, I would have found it a wholly desirable break in the daily routine of retirement, and I was pleasurably reminded of the old banking days, when I had paid the final adieu to so many admirable clients. But I had never contemplated such a break as this one which my aunt announced so casually. Hiccups are said to be cured by a sudden shock and they can equally be caused by one. I hiccupped an incoherent question.

“I have said that your official mother was a saint. The girl, you see, refused to marry your father, who was anxious – if you can use such an energetic term in his case – to do the right thing. So my sister covered up for her by marrying him. (He was not very strong-willed.) Afterwards, she padded herself for months with progressive cushions. No one ever suspected. She even wore the cushions in bed, and she was so deeply shocked when your father tried once to make love to her – after the marriage but before your birth – that, even when you had been safely delivered, she refused him what the Church calls his rights. He was never a man in any case to stand on them.”

I leant back hiccupping in the taxi. I couldn’t have spoken if I had tried. I remembered all those pursuits up the scaffolding. Had they been caused then by my mother’s jealousy or was it the apprehension that she might be required to pass again so many more months padded with cushions of assorted sizes?

“No,” my aunt said to the taxi-driver, “these are the Gardens. I told you – I am the Place.”

“Then I turn left, ma’am?”

“No. Right. On the left is the Crescent.”

“This shouldn’t come as a shock to you, Henry,” Aunt Augusta said. “My sister – your stepmother – perhaps we should agree to call her that – was a very noble person indeed.”

“And my – hic – father?”

“A bit of a hound, but so are most men. Perhaps it’s their best quality. I hope you have a little bit of the hound in you too, Henry.”

“I don’t – huc – think so.”

“We may discover it in time. You are your father’s son. That hiccup is best cured by drinking out of the opposite rim of a glass. You can imitate a glass with your hand. Liquid is not a necessary part of the cure.”

I drew a long free breath and asked, “Who was my mother, Aunt Augusta?” But she was already far away from that subject, speaking to the driver. “No, no, my man. This is the Crescent.”

“You said turn right, lady.”

“Then I apologize. It was my mistake. I am always a little uncertain about right and left. Port I can always remember because of the colour – red means left. You should have turned to port not starboard.”

“I’m no bloody navigator, lady.”

“Never mind. Just continue all the way round and start again. I take all the blame.[10]”

We drew up outside a public house. The driver said, “Ma’am, if you had only told me it was the Crown and Anchor…”

“Henry,” my aunt said, “if you could forget your hiccup for a moment.”

“Huc?” I asked.

“It’s six and six on the clock,” the driver said.

“Then we will let it reach seven shillings,” Aunt Augusta retorted. “Henry, I feel I ought perhaps to warn you before we go in that a white funeral in my case would have been quite out of place.”

“But-you’ve-never-married,” I said, very quickly to beat the hiccups.

“I have nearly always, during the last sixty or more years, had a friend,” Aunt Augusta said. She added, perhaps because I looked incredulous, “Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions – it does not destroy them.”

Even those words did not prepare me properly for what I found next. My life in the bank had taught me, of course, to be unsurprised, even by the demand for startling overdrafts, and I had always made it a point[11] neither to ask for nor to listen to any explanation. The overdraft was given or refused simply on the previous credit of the client. If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement. My aunt, I was to discover, had never been conditioned by anything at all, and she had no intention of explaining more than she had already done.

Chapter 3

The Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style[12]. Through the windows I could see men with exaggerated moustaches in tweed coats, which were split horsily behind, gathered round a girl in jodhpurs. They were not the type to whom I would have extended much credit, and I doubted whether any of them, except the girl, had ever ridden a horse. They were all drinking bitter, and I had the impression that any spare cash they might have put aside went on tailors and hairdressers rather than equitation. A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whisky-drinker to a well-dressed beer-drinker.

We went in by a side door. My aunt’s apartment was on the second floor, and on the first floor there was a small sofa, which I learnt later had been bought my aunt so that she could take a little rest on the way up. It was typical of her generous nature that she had bought a sofa, which could barely be squeezed onto the landing, and not a chair for one.

“I always take a little rest at this point. Come and sit down, too, Henry. The stairs are steep, though perhaps they don’t seem so at your age.” She looked at me critically. “You have certainly changed a lot since I saw you last, though you haven’t got much more hair.”

“I’ve had it, but I’ve lost it,” I explained.

“I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it,” She added surprisingly, “‘Rapunzel[13], Rapunzel, let down your hair’. Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat.”

“Aren’t you disturbed by the noise from the bar?”

“Oh no. And the bar is very convenient if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth[14] down”.

“Who is Wordsworth?”

“I call him Wordsworth because I can’t bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations – after Zachary Macaulay, who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop not the poet.”

“He’s your valet?”

“Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don’t let him ask you for a CTC. He receives quite enough from me.”

“What is a CTC?”

“That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone when he was a boy during the war. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo cigarettes, which all the sailors handed out generously.”

My aunt’s conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged Negro wearing a striped butcher’s apron who opened the door when my aunt rang.

“Why, Wordsworth,” she said with a touch of coquetry, “you’ve been washing up breakfast without waiting for me.” He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a CTC before he would let me pass.

“This is my nephew, Wordsworth,” my aunt said.

“You be telling me whole truth, woman?”

“Of course I am. Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth!” she added with tender banter.

He let us in. The lights were on in the living-room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments which flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl on which pink roses grew and green ivy. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier which might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale-blue, pink, and yellow blossoms.

“Venice once meant a lot to me[15]”, my aunt said rather unnecessarily.

I don’t pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.

“Such wonderful craftsmanship,” my aunt said. “Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskies. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony.” She spoke to him as though he were a child – or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.

“Everything go O.K.?” Wordsworth asked. “No bad medicine?”

“There was no contretemps[16]”, my aunt said. “Oh gracious, Henry, you haven’t forgotten your parcel?”

“No, no, I have it here.”

“I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator.”

“Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. Ashes don’t deteriorate.”

“No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen just the same. We don’t want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there.”

She had indeed. Her dressing-table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder-jars and ash-trays and bowls for safety pins. “They brighten the darkest day,” she said. There was a very large double-bed as curlicued as the glass. “I am especially attached to Venice,” she explained, “because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It’s a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed.”

“Age strikes us all before we know it,” I said.

“Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don’t look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he’s studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth’s snuggery,” and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse – all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

“From Venice too,” my aunt said, “clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man’s room.”

“Does he like them?”

“He spends very little time there,” my aunt said, “what with his studies and everything else…”

“I wouldn’t like to wake up to them,” I said.

“He seldom does.”

My aunt led me back to the sitting-room, where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a water jug with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label[17] looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party[18], a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

Wordsworth said, “The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.”

“It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,” my aunt said. “Was there no message?”

“Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick[19].”

My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

“A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.”

“I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral – the wife of a famous man of letters[20] who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended. I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians[21]. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail – if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel – trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length – he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.”

“No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.”

“Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H.G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald[22], and the widower, while the clergyman (nondenominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, ‘Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?’ But there was no coffin.”

“Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?”

“I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.”

I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. “How sad” seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true – only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, “We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.” He added, “In Mendeland – ma first wife she was Mende – they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and left the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.”

“There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,” my aunt said.

“Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.”

I said, “I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.”

“Will you miss your mother, Henry?”

“Oh yes… yes,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager, with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.

“I am afraid I didn’t share your mother’s taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid on condition she takes everything – everything.”

“It has made me so happy meeting you, Aunt Augusta. You are my only close relative now.”

“As far as you know,” she said. “Your father had spells of activity.”

“My poor stepmother… I shall never be able to think of anyone else as my mother.”

“Better so.[23]”

“In a new block under construction my father was always very careful about furnishing the specimen flat. I used to think that sometimes he went to sleep in it in the afternoon. I suppose it might have been in one of those I was…” I checked the word “conceived” in deference to my aunt.

“Better not to speculate,” she said.

“You will come one day and see my dahlias, won’t you? They are in full bloom.”

“Of course, Henry, now that I have found you again I shan’t easily let you go. Do you enjoy travel?”

“I’ve never had the opportunity.”

“With Wordsworth so occupied we might make a little trip or two together.”

“Gladly, Aunt Augusta.” It never occurred to me that she meant farther than the seaside.

“I will telephone you,” my aunt said.

Wordsworth showed me to the door, and it was only outside, when I passed the Crown and Anchor, that I remembered I had left behind my little package. I wouldn’t have remembered at all if the girl in the jodhpurs had not said angrily as I pushed past the open window, “Peter can talk about nothing but cricket. All the summer it went on. Nothing but the fucking Ashes[24].”

I don’t like to hear such adjectives on the lips of an attractive young girl, but her words reminded me sharply that I had left all that remained of my mother in Aunt Augusta’s kitchen. I went back to the street door. There was a row of bells with a kind of microphone above each of them. I touched the right one and heard Wordsworth’s voice. “Who be there?”

I said, “It’s Henry Pulling.”

“Don know anyone called that name.”

“I’ve only just left you. I’m Aunt Augusta’s nephew.”

“Oh, that guy,” the voice said.

“I left a parcel with you in the kitchen.”

“You wan it back?”

“Please, if it’s not too much trouble…”

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

“A brown-paper parcel?” Wordsworth’s voice asked.

“Yes.”

“You wan me bring it down right away?”

“Yes, if it’s not too much…”

“It’s a bloody lot of trouble,” Wordsworth said. “Stay there.”

I was prepared to be very cold to him when he brought the parcel, but he opened the street door wearing a friendly grin[25].

“Thank you,” I said, with as much coldness as I could muster, “for the great trouble you have taken.”

I noticed that the parcel was no longer sealed. “Has somebody opened this?”

“Ar jus wan to see what you got there.”

“You might have asked me.”

“Why, man,” he said, “you not offended at Wordsworth?”

“I didn’t like the way you spoke just now.”

“Man, it’s jus that little mike there. Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one see it’s only old Wordsworth. It’s a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses.

One day it was the parson come from Saint George’s in the square. An he says in a dear brethren sort of voice, ‘I wonder, Miss Bertram, if I could come up and have a little chat about our bazaar.’ ‘Sure, man,’ ar say, ‘you wearing your dog collar?’ ‘Why, yes,’ he say, ‘of course, who is that?’ ‘Man,’ ar say, ‘you better put on a muzzle too before you go come up here.’”

“What did he say?”

“He wen away and never come back. Your auntie laugh like hell when ar told her. But ar didn’t mean him harm. It was just old Wordsworth tempted by that little old mike.”

“Are you really studying for the London School of Economics?” I asked.

“Oh, tha’s a joke your auntie makes. Ar was workin at the Grenada Palace. Ar had a uniform. Jus lak a general. She lak ma uniform. She stop an say, ‘Are you the Emperor Jones?’ ‘No, ma’am,’ I say, ‘arm only old Wordsworth.’ ‘Oh,’ she say, ‘thou child of joy, shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy.’ ‘You write that down for me,’ ar say ‘it sound good. Ar like it.’ Ar say it over and over. Ar know it now good lack a hymn.”

I was a little confused by his garrulity. “Well, Wordsworth,” I said, “thank you for all your trouble and I hope one day I shall see you again.”

“This here mighty important parcel?”

“Yes. I suppose it is.”

“Then ar think you owe a dash to old Wordsworth,” he said.

“A dash?”

“A CTC.”

Remembering what my aunt had told me, I went quickly away.

Just as I had expected, my new lawn-mower was wet all over: I dried it carefully and oiled the blades before I did anything else. Then I boiled myself two eggs and made a cup of tea for lunch. I had much to think about. Could I accept my aunt’s story and in that case who was my mother? I tried to remember the friends my mother had of her own age, but what was the good of that? The friendship would have been broken before my birth. If indeed she had been only a stepmother to me, did I still want to place her ashes among my dahlias? While I washed up my lunch I was sorely tempted to wash out the urn as well into the sink. It would serve very well for the home-made jam which I was promising myself to make next year – a man in retirement must have his hobbies if he is not to age too fast[26] – and the urn would have looked quite handsome on the tea table. It was a little sombre, but a sombre jar was well suited for damson jelly or for blackberry-and-apple jam. I was seriously tempted, but I remembered how kind my stepmother had been to me in her rather stern way when I was a child, and how could I tell that my aunt was speaking the truth? So I went out into the garden and chose a spot among the dahlias where the plinth could be built.

Chapter 4

I was weeding the dahlias, the Polar Beauties and the Golden Leaders and the Requiems, when my telephone began to ring.

Being unused to the sound which shattered all the peace of my little garden, I assumed that it was a wrong number[27]. I had very few friends, although before my retirement I boasted a great many acquaintances. There were clients who had stayed with me for twenty years, who had known me in the same branch as clerk, cashier and manager, and yet they remained acquaintances. It is rare for a manager to be promoted from the staff of a branch in which he will have to exercise authority, but there were special circumstances in my case. I had been acting manager for nearly a year owing to my predecessor’s illness, and one of my clients was a very important depositor who had taken a fancy to me. He threatened to remove his custom if I did not remain in charge. His name was Sir Alfred Keene: he had made a fortune in cement, and my father having been a builder gave us an interest in common. He would invite me to dinner at least three times a year and he always consulted me on his investments, though he never took my advice. He said it helped him to make up his mind. He had an unmarried daughter called Barbara, who was interested in tatting, which I think she must have given to the church bazaar. She was always very kind to me, and my mother suggested I might pay her attentions, for she would certainly inherit Sir Alfred’s money, but the motive seemed to me a dishonest one and in my case I have never been greatly interested in women. The bank was then my whole life, and now there were my dahlias.

Unfortunately Sir Alfred died a little before my retirement, and Miss Keene went to South Africa to live. I was intimately concerned, of course, with all her currency difficulties: it was I who wrote to the Bank of England for this permit or that and reminded them constantly that I had received no reply to my letters of the 9th ult.[28]; and on her last night in England, before she caught her boat at Southampton, she asked me to dinner. It was a sad occasion without Sir Alfred, who had been a very jovial man, laughing immoderately even at his own jokes. Miss Keene asked me to look after the drinks and I chose an Amontillado, and for dinner Sir Alfred’s favourite Chambertin. The house was one of those big Southwood mansions surrounded by rhododendron bushes which dripped that night with the steady slow November rain. There was an oil painting of a fishing boat in a storm after Van de Velde over Sir Alfred’s place at the dining-room table, and I expressed the hope that Miss Keene’s voyage would be less turbulent.

“I have sold the house as it stands with all the furniture,” she told me. “I shall live with second cousins.”

“Do you know them well?” I asked.

“I have never seen them,” she said. “They are once removed[29]. We have only exchanged letters. The stamps are like foreign stamps. With no portrait of the Queen.[30]”

“You will have the sun,” I encouraged her.

“Do you know South Africa?”

“I have seldom been out of England,” I said. “Once when I was a young man I went with a school friend to Spain, but my stomach was upset by the shell-fish – or perhaps it was the oil.”

“My father was a very overpowering personality,” she said. “I never had friends – except you, of course, Mr. Pulling.”

It is astonishing to me now how nearly I came to proposing marriage that night and yet I refrained. Our interests were different, of course – tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both the interests of rather lonely people. Rumours of the great bank merger had already reached me. My retirement was imminent, and I was well aware that the friendships I had made with my other clients would not long survive it. If I had spoken would she have accepted me? – it was quite possible. Our ages were suitable, she was approaching forty and I would soon be halfway through the fifth decade, and I knew my mother would have approved. How different everything might have been if I had spoken then. I would never have heard the disturbing story of my birth, for she would have accompanied me to the funeral and my aunt would not have spoken in her presence. I would never have travelled with my aunt. I would have been saved from much, though I suppose I would have missed much too. Miss Keene said, “I shall be living near Kofiefontein.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t really know. Listen. It’s raining cats and dogs.[31]”

We got up and moved into the drawing-room for coffee. There was a Venetian scene copied from Canaletto[32] on the wall. All the pictures in the house seemed to represent foreign parts, and she was leaving for Kofiefontein. I would never travel so far, I thought then, and I wished that she was staying here, in Southwood.

“It seems a very long way to go,” I said.

“If there was anything to keep me here… Will you take one lump or two?”

“No sugar, thank you.” Was it an invitation for me to speak? I have always asked myself since. I didn’t love her, and she certainly didn’t love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together. I heard from her a year later; she wrote, “Dear Mr. Pulling, I wonder how Southwood is and whether it’s raining. We are having a beautiful sunny winter. My cousins have a small (!) farm of ten thousand acres and they think nothing of driving seven hundred miles to buy a ram. I am not quite used to things yet and I think often of Southwood. How are the dahlias? I have given up tatting. We lead a very open-air existence.”

I replied and gave her what news I could, but I had retired by then and was no longer at the centre of Southwood life. I told her of my mother’s failing health and how the dahlias were doing. There was a rather gloomy variety in royal purple called Deuil du Roy Albert which had not been a success. I was not sorry. It was an odd name to give a flower. My Ben Hurs were flourishing.

I had neglected the telephone, feeling so sure that it was a wrong number, but when the ringing persisted, I left my dahlias and went in.

The telephone stood on the filing cabinet where I keep my accounts and all the correspondence which my mother’s death caused. I had not received as many letters as I was receiving now since I ceased to be manager: the solicitor’s letters, letters from the undertaker, from the Inland Revenue[33], the crematorium fees, the doctor’s bills, National Health forms, even a few letters of condolence. I could almost believe myself a business-man again.

My aunt’s voice said, “You are very slow to answer.”

“I was busy in the garden.”

“How was the mowing-machine, by the way?”

“Very wet, but no irreparable damage.”

“I have an extraordinary story to fell you,” my aunt said. “I have been raided by the police.”

“Raided… by the police?”

“Yes, you must listen carefully for they may call on you.”

“What on earth for?”

“You still have your mother’s ashes?”

“Of course.”

“Because they want to see them. They may even want to analyse them.”

“But Aunt Augusta… you must tell me exactly what happened.”

“I am trying to, but you continually interrupt with unhelpful exclamations. It was midnight and Wordsworth and I had gone to bed. Luckily I was wearing my best nightdress. They rang the bell down below and told us through the microphone that they were police officers and had a warrant to search the flat. ‘What for?’ I asked. Do you know, for a moment I thought it might be something racial. There are so many rules now for races and against races that you don’t know where you stand.”

“Are you sure they were police officers?”

“Of course, I asked to see their warrant, but do you know what a warrant looks like? For all I know it might have been a reader’s ticket to the British Museum library. I let them in, though, because they were polite, and one of them, the one in uniform, was tall and good-looking. They were rather surprised by Wordsworth – or perhaps it was the colour of his pyjamas. They said, ‘Is this your husband, ma’am?’ I said, ‘No, this is Wordsworth.’ The name seemed to ring a bell[34] with one of them – the young man in uniform – who kept on glancing at him surreptitiously, as though he were trying to remember.”

“But what were they looking for?”

“They said they had reliable information that drugs were kept on the premises.”

“Oh, Aunt Augusta, you don’t think Wordsworth…”

“Of course not. They took away all the fluff from the seams of his pockets, and then the truth came out. They asked him what was in the brown-paper package which he was seen handing to a man who had been loitering in the street. Poor Wordsworth said he didn’t know, so I chipped in and said it was my sister’s ashes. I don’t know why, but they became suspicious of me at once. The elder, who was in plain clothes[35], said, ‘Please don’t be flippant, ma’am. It doesn’t exactly help.’ I said, ‘As far as my sense of humour goes, there is nothing whatever flippant in my dead sister’s ashes.’ ‘A sort of powder, ma’am?’ the younger policeman asked – he was the sharper of the two, the one who thought he knew the name of Wordsworth. ‘You can call it that if you like,’ I said, ‘grey powder, human powder,’ and they looked as though they had won a point. ‘And who was the man who received this powder?’ the man in plain clothes asked. ‘My nephew,’ I said. ‘My sister’s son.’ I saw no reason to go into that old story which I told you yesterday with members of the Metropolitan Police. Then they asked for your address and I gave it to them. The sharp one said, ‘Was the powder for his private use?’ ‘He wants to put it amongst his dahlias,’ I said. They made a very thorough search, especially in Wordsworth’s room, and they took away samples of all the cigarettes they could find, and some aspirins I had left in a cachet box. Then they said, ‘Good night, ma’am,’ very politely and left. Wordsworth had to go downstairs and open the door for them, and just before he left the sharp one said to him, ‘What’s your first name?’ ‘Zachary,’ Wordsworth told him and he went out looking puzzled.”

“What a very strange thing to have happened,” I said.

“They even read some letters and asked who Abdul was.”

“Who was he?”

“Someone I knew a very long time ago. Luckily I had kept the envelope and it was marked Tunis, February, 1924. Otherwise they would have read all sorts of things into it about the present.”

“I am sorry, Aunt Augusta. It must have been a terrifying experience.”

“It was amusing in a way. But it did give me a guilty feeling…”

There was a ring from the front door and I said, “Hold on a moment, Aunt Augusta.” I looked through the dining-room window and saw a policeman’s helmet. I returned and said, “Your friends are here.”

“Already?”

“I’ll ring you back when they’ve gone.”

It was the first time I had ever been called on by the police. There was a short middle-aged man in a soft hat with a rough but kindly face and a broken nose and the tall good-looking young man in uniform.

“Mr. Pulling?” the detective asked.

“Yes.”

“May we come in for a few moments?”

“Have you a warrant?” I asked.

“Oh no, no, it hasn’t come to that. We just want to have a word or two with you.”

I wanted to say something about the Gestapo, but I thought it wiser not. I led them into the dining-room, but I didn’t ask them to sit down. The detective showed me an identity card and I read on it that he was Detective-Sergeant Sparrow, John.

“You know a man called Wordsworth, Mr. Pulling?”

“Yes, he’s a friend of my aunt’s.”

“Did you receive a package from him in the street yesterday?”

“I certainly did.”

“Would you have any objection to our examining the package, Mr. Pulling?”

“I most certainly would.”

“You know, sir, we could easily have obtained a search warrant, but we wanted to do things delicately. Have you known this man Wordsworth a long time?”

“I met him for the first time yesterday.”

“Perhaps, sir, he asked you as a favour to deliver that package and you, seeing no harm at all in that and him being an employee of your aunt…”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. The package is mine. I had accidentally left it in the kitchen.”

“The package is yours, sir? You admit that.”

“You know very well what’s in the package. My aunt told you. It’s an urn with my mother’s ashes.”

“Your aunt has been in communication with you, has she?”

“Yes, she has. What do you expect? Waking up an old lady in the middle of the night.”

“It had only just gone twelve, sir. And so those ashes… They are Mrs. Pulling’s?”

“There they are. You can see for yourself. On the bookcase.” I had put the urn there temporarily, until I was ready to bed it, above a complete set of Sir Walter Scott[36] which I had inherited from my father. In his lazy way my father was a great reader, though not an adventurous one. He was satisfied with possessing a very few favourite authors. By the time he had read the set of Scott through he had forgotten the earlier volumes and was content to begin again with Guy Mannering. He had a complete set too of Marion Crawford, and he had a love of nineteenth-century poetry which I have inherited – Tennyson[37] and Wordsworth and Browning[38] and Palgrave’s[39] Golden Treasury.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” the detective asked, but naturally he couldn’t open the urn. “It’s sealed,” he said. “With Scotch tape.”

“Naturally. Even a tin of biscuits…”

“I would like to take a sample for analysis.”

I was becoming rather cross[40] by this time. I said, “If you think I am going to let you play around with my poor mother in a police laboratory…”

“I can understand how you feel, sir,” he said, “but we have rather serious evidence to go on. We took some fluff from the man Wordsworth’s pockets and when analysed it contained pot.”

“Pot?”

“Marijuana to you, sir. Likewise Cannabis.”

“Wordsworth’s fluff has got nothing to do with my mother.”

“We could get a warrant, sir, easily enough, but seeing how you may be an innocent dupe, I would rather take the urn away temporarily with your permission. It would sound much better that way in court.”

“You can check with the crematorium. The funeral was only yesterday.”

“We have already, sir, but you see it’s quite possible – don’t think I’m presuming to suggest your line of defence, that’s a matter entirely for your counsel – that the man Wordsworth took out the ashes and substituted pot. He may have known he was being watched. Now wouldn’t it be much better, sir, from all points of view to know for certain that these are your mother’s ashes? Your aunt told us you planned to keep it in your garden – you wouldn’t want to see that urn every day and wonder, Are those really the ashes of the dear departed or are they an illegal supply of marijuana?”

He had a very sympathetic manner, and I really began to see his point[41].

“We’d only take out a tiny pinch, sir, less than a teaspoonful. We’d treat the rest with all due reverence.”

“All right,” I said, “take your pinch. I suppose you are only doing your duty.” The young policeman had been making notes all the time.

The detective said, “Take a note that Mr. Pulling behaved most helpfully and that he voluntarily surrendered the urn. That will sound well in court, sir, if the worst happens.”

“When will I get the urn back?”

“Not later than tomorrow – if all is as it should be.” He shook hands quite cordially as if he believed in my innocence, but perhaps that was just his professional manner.

Of course I hastened to telephone to my aunt. “They’ve taken away the urn,” I said. “They think my mother’s ashes are marijuana. Where’s Wordsworth?”

“He went out after breakfast and hasn’t come back.”

“They found marijuana dust in the fluff of his suit.”

“Oh dear, how careless of the poor boy. I thought he was a little disturbed. And he asked for a CTC before he went out.”

“Did you give him one?”

“Well, you know, I’m really very fond of him, and he said it was his birthday. He never had a birthday last year, so I gave him twenty pounds.”

“Twenty pounds! I never keep as much as that in the house.”

“It will get him as far as Paris. He left in time for the Golden Arrow, now I come to think of it, and he always carries his passport to prove he’s not an illegal immigrant. Do you know, Henry, I’ve a great desire for a little sea air myself.”

“You’ll never find him in Paris.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Paris. I was thinking of Istanbul.”

“Istanbul is not on the sea.”

“I think you are wrong. There’s something called the Sea of Marmara.”

“Why Istanbul?”

“I was reminded of it by that letter from Abdul the police found. A strange coincidence. First that letter and then this morning in the post another – the first for a very long time.”

“From Abdul?”

“Yes.”

It was weak of me, but I did not then realize the depth of my aunt’s passion for travel. If I had I would have hesitated before I made the first fatal proposal: “I have nothing particular to do today. If you would like to go to Brighton…”

Chapter 5

Brighton was the first journey I undertook in my aunt’s company and proved a bizarre foretaste of much that was to follow.

We arrived in the early evening, for we had decided to spend the night. I was surprised by the smallness of her luggage, which consisted only of a little white leather cosmetics case which she called her baise en ville[42]. I find it difficult myself to go away for a night without a rather heavy suitcase, for I am uneasy if I have not at least one change of suit and that entails also a change of shoes. A change of shirt a change of underclothes and of socks are almost an essential to me, and taking into consideration the vagaries of the English climate, I like to take some woollens just in case. My aunt looked at my suitcase and said, “We must take a cab. I had hoped we could walk.”

I had booked our rooms at the Royal Albion because my aunt wished to be near the Palace Pier and the Old Steine. She told me, incorrectly I think, that this was named after the wicked marquess of Vanity Fair[43]. “I like to be at the centre of all the devilry”, she said, “with the buses going off to all those places.” She spoke as though their destinations were Sodom and Gomorrah rather than Lewes and Pathcam and Littlehampton and Shoreham. Apparently she had come first to Brighton when she was quite a young woman, full of expectations which I am afraid were partly fulfilled.

I thought I would have a bath and a glass of sherry, a quiet dinner in the grill, and an early bedtime, so that we would both be rested for a strenuous morning on the front and in the Lanes, but my aunt disagreed. “We don’t want dinner for another two hours,” she said, “and first I want you to meet Hatty if Hatty’s still alive.”

“Who is Hatty?”

“We worked together once with a gentleman called Mr. Curran.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Forty years or more.”

“Then it seems unlikely…”

“I am here,” Aunt Augusta said firmly, “and I got a card from her the Christmas before last.”

It was a grey leaden evening with an east wind blowing on our backs from Kemp Town. The sea was rising and the pebbles turned and ground under the receding waves. Ex-President Nkrumah looked out at us from the window of the waxworks, wearing a grey suit with a Chinese collar. My aunt paused and regarded him, I thought a little sadly. “I wonder where Wordsworth is now,” she said.

“I expect you’ll hear from him soon[44].”

“I very much doubt it,” she said. “My dear Henry,” she added, “at my age one has ceased to expect a relationship to last. Think how complicated life would be if I had kept in touch with all the men I have known intimately. Some died, some I left, a few have left me. If they were all with me now we would have to take over a whole wing of the Royal Albion. I was very fond of Wordsworth while he lasted, but my emotions are not as strong as they once were. I can support his absence, though I may regret him for a while tonight. His knackers were superb.” The wind took my hat and tossed it against a lamp-post. I was too surprised by her vulgarity to catch it, and my aunt laughed like a young woman. I returned, brushing it down, but Aunt Augusta still lingered at the waxworks.

“It’s a kind of immortality,” she said.

“What is?”

“I don’t mean the waxworks here in Brighton, they are rather a job lot, but in Madame Tussaud’s[45]. With Crippen[46] and the Queen”.

“I’d rather have my portrait painted.”

“But you can’t see all round a portrait, and at Tussaud’s they take some of your own clothes to dress you in, or so I’ve read. There’s a blue dress of mine I could easily spare. …Oh well,” she said with a sigh, “it’s unlikely I’ll ever be famous like that. Idle dreams…” She walked on, I thought a little cast down. “Criminals,” she said, “and queens and politicians. Love is not highly regarded, except for Nell Gwynn[47] and the Brides in the Bath”.

We came to the saloon doors of the Star and Garter and my aunt suggested that we take a drink. The walls were covered with inscriptions of a philosophic character: Life is a one-way street and there’s no coming back; Marriage is a great Institution for those who like Institutions; You will never persuade a mouse that a black cat is lucky. There were old programmes too and photographs. I ordered a sherry and my aunt said she would like a port and brandy. When I turned round from the bar I saw her examining a yellowed photograph. There was an elephant and two performing dogs drawn up in front of the Palace Pier behind a stout man in a tail-coat wearing a top hat and a watch chain, and a shapely young woman in tights stood beside him carrying a carriage whip. “There’s Curran,” my aunt said. “That’s how it all began.” She pointed at the young woman. “And there’s Hatty. Those were the days.[48]”

“Surely you never worked in a circus, Aunt Augusta?”

“Oh no, but I happened to be there when the elephant trod on Curran’s toe, and we became very close friends. Poor man, he had to go to hospital, and when he came out, the circus had gone on without him to Weymouth. Hatty too, though she came back later when we were established.”

“Established at what?”

“I’ll tell you one day, but now we have to find Hatty.” She drained her port and brandy, and out we went into the cold blow of the wind. Just opposite was a stationer’s which sold comic postcards and she stopped there to inquire: the metal stands for the cards rattled and strained and turned like a windmill. I noticed a card with a bottle of Guinness on it, and a fat woman in a snorkel floating face down. The legend read Bottoms Up![49] I was looking at another of a man in hospital saying to a surgeon, “But I said circumcision, doctor,” when my aunt came out. “It’s just here,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t far wrong,” and in the window of the very next house a card in front of some net curtains read HATTY’s TEAPOT. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. There were photographs by the door of Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra and the Duke of Edinburgh which seemed to have been signed by their subjects, although it seemed unlikely in the case of the Duke.

We rang the bell and an old lady answered it. She was wearing a black evening dress and a lot of jet objects jangled when she moved. “You’re too late,” she said sharply.

“Hatty,” said my aunt.

“I close at six-thirty sharp except by special appointment.”

“Hatty, it’s Augusta.”

“Augusta!”

“Hatty! You haven’t changed a bit.”

But remembering the young girl in tights carrying the whip and looking sideways at Curran, I thought there had been greater changes than my aunt made out.

“This is my nephew Henry, Hatty. You remember about him.” They exchanged a look which I found disturbing. Why should I have been discussed all those years ago? Had she let Hatty into the secret of my birth?

“Come on in, the two of you. I was just going to have a cup of tea – an unprofessional cup of tea,” Hatty added and giggled.

“In here?” my aunt asked, opening a door.

“No dear, that’s the waiting-room.” I just had time to see an engraving by Sir Alma-Tadema of a lot of tall naked ladies in a Roman bathhouse.

“Here’s my den, dear,” Hatty said, opening another door. It was a small overcrowded room, and everything seemed to be covered with fringed mauve shawls, the table, the backs of chairs, the mantel – there was even a shawl dangling from a studio portrait of a stout man whom I recognized as Mr. Curran.

“The Revered,” Aunt Augusta said, looking at it.

“The Revered,” Hatty repeated, and then they both laughed at some secret joke of their own.

“The Rev. for short,” Aunt Augusta said, “but that, of course, was only a coincidence. You remember how we explained it to the police. They’ve still got a photo of him, Hatty, stuck up in the Star and Garter.”

“I haven’t been there for years,” Hatty said. “I’m off the hard liquor.”

“You are there and the elephant too,” Aunt Augusta said. “Can you remember the elephant’s name?”

Hatty was putting out two more cups from a china cabinet. There was a fringed shawl over that too. She said, “It wasn’t a common name like Jumbo. Something classical. How one forgets things[50], Augusta, at our age”.

“Was it Caesar?”

“No, it wasn’t Caesar. Do you take sugar, Mr. – ?”

“Call him Henry, Hatty.”

“One lump,” I said.

“Oh dear, oh dear, I had such a good memory once.”

“The water’s boiling, dear.”

The kettle was on a spirit ring close to a big brown teapot. She began to pour out.

“Oh, I quite forgot the strainer,” she said.

“Never mind, Hatty.”

“It’s because of my clients. I never strain theirs, so I forget when I’m alone.”

There was a plate of ginger-snaps and I accepted one for politeness’ sake. “From the Old Steine,” Aunt Augusta told me. “Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe. You don’t get gingersnaps like that anywhere else in the world.”

“And now they have turned it into a betting shop,”

Hatty said. “Pluto, dear? Was it Pluto?”

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t Pluto. I think it began with a T.”

“I can’t think of anything classical beginning with T.”

“There was a point to his name.”

“There certainly was.”

“Historical.”

“Yes.”

“You remember the dogs, dear. They are in the photo too.”

“It was them gave Curran the idea.”

“The Revered,” Aunt Augusta repeated again, and they laughed in unison at their private memory. I felt very much alone, so I took another ginger-snap.

“The boy has a sweet tooth[51]”, Hatty remarked.

“To think that little shop in the Old Steine survived two great wars.”

“We’ve survived,” Hatty replied, “but they aren’t turning us into betting shops.”

“Oh, it will need an atom bomb to destroy us,” Aunt Augusta said.

I thought it was time to speak. “The situation in the Middle East is pretty serious,” I said, “judging from today’s Guardian.”

“You can never tell,” Hatty said, and they were both for a while buried in thought. Then my aunt picked out a tealeaf, put it on the back of her hand and slapped it with the other; it clung obstinately to a vein which was surrounded by what my mother used to call grave-marks.

“Can’t get rid of the fellow,” Aunt Augusta said. “I hope he’s tall and handsome.”

“That isn’t a stranger,” Hatty corrected her. “That’s the thought of a departed you can’t get out of your mind.”

“Living or dead?”

“It could be either. How stiff does he feel?”

“If he’s living I suppose it could be poor Wordsworth.”

“Wordsworth is dead, dear,” Hatty said, “a very long time ago.”

“Not my Wordsworth. It’s stiff as wood. I wonder who a dead one could be.”

“Poor Curran perhaps.”

“I have thought a lot about him since I came to Brighton.”

“Would you like me to do a professional cup, dear, for you and your friend?”

“Nephew,” Aunt Augusta corrected Hatty in her turn. “It would be fun, dear.”

“I’ll make another pot. The leaves have to be fresh and I use Lapsang Souchong[52] professionally, though I drink Ceylon – Lapsang gives big leaves and good results.”

When she came back after washing the pot and our cups my aunt said, “You must let us pay.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, dear, not after all we’ve been through together.”

“With the Revered.” They giggled again.

Hatty poured in the boiling water. She said, “I don’t let the pot draw. The leaves speak better fresh.” She filled our cups. “Now toss the tea away, dear, in this basin.”

“I’ve got it,” my aunt said. “Hannibal.”

“Who’s Hannibal?”

“The elephant that trod on Curran’s toe.”

“I do believe you’re right, dear.”

“I was watching the tea and it came to me suddenly in a flash.”

“I often notice that with the leaves. Things come back. You are watching the leaves and things come back.”

“I suppose Hannibal’s dead too.”

“You can’t tell, dear, with elephants.”

She picked up my aunt’s cup and studied it closely. “It’s interesting,” she said, “very interesting.”

“Bad or good?”

“A bit of both.”

“Just tell me the good.”

“You are going to do a lot of travelling. With another person. You are going to cross the ocean. You are going to have many adventures.”

“With men?”

“That the leaves don’t say, dear, but knowing you as I do, it wouldn’t surprise me. You will be in danger of your life and liberty on more than one occasion.”

“But I’ll come through?”

“I see a knife – or it might be a syringe.”

“Or it could be something else, Hatty – you know what I mean?”

“There is some mystery in your life.”

“That’s nothing new.[53]”

“I see a lot of confusion – a lot of running about this way and that. I’m sorry, Augusta, but I can’t see any peace at the close. There’s a cross. Perhaps you find religion. Or it could be a double-cross.”

“I’ve always been interested in religion,” my aunt said, “ever since Curran.”

“Or it could be a bird, of course – a vulture perhaps. Keep away from deserts.” Hatty gave a sigh. “Things don’t come to me so easily as they once did. I exhaust myself with strangers.”

“But you’ll take one look at Henry’s cup too, dear, won’t you? Just one look.”

She poured my tea away and looked in the cup. “Men are difficult,” she said. “They have so many occupations beyond a woman’s knowledge and that affects the interpretation. I had a client once who said he was a bevel-edger. I don’t know what he meant. Are you an undertaker?”

“No.”

“There’s something that looks like an urn. Do you see it there? On the left of the handle. That’s the recent past.”

“It might be an urn,” I said, looking.

“You will do a lot of travelling.”

“That’s not very likely. I’ve always been rather stay-at-home. It’s quite an adventure for me coming as far as Brighton.”

“It’s in the future you’re going to travel. Across the ocean. With a lady friend.”

“Perhaps he’s coming with me,” Aunt Augusta said. “It’s possible. The leaves don’t lie. There’s a round thing like a target. There’s a mystery in your life too.”

“I’ve only just discovered that,” I said.

“I see a lot of confusion too and running about. Just like in Augusta’s cup.”

“That’s most unlikely,” I said. “I lead a very regular life. A game of bridge once a week at the Conservative Club. And my garden, of course. My dahlias.”

“The target might be a flower,” Hatty admitted. “Forgive me. I’m tired. I’m afraid it was not a very good reading.”

“It was most interesting,” I told her for politeness’ sake. “But of course, I’m no believer.”

“Have another ginger-snap,” Hatty said.

Chapter 6

We had dinner that night at the Cricketers’, a small public house nearly opposite a second-hand bookseller, where I saw a complete set of Thackeray for sale at a very reasonable price. I thought it would go well on my shelves below my father’s edition of the Waverly novels. Perhaps tomorrow I would come back and buy it. The thought gave me a warm feeling towards my father, a sense of something in common. I too would start at Volume I and continue to the end, and by the time that last volume was finished it would be time to begin again. Too many books by too many authors can be confusing, like too many shirts and suits. I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, but the bank had taught me to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.

When I wrote that we had dinner at the Cricketers’, it would have been more correct to say we ate a substantial snack. There were baskets of warm sausages on the bar, and we helped ourselves and washed the sausages down with draught Guinness. I was surprised by the number of glasses my aunt could put down and feared a little for her blood pressure.

After her second pint she said, “It was odd about that cross. In the leaves I mean. I’ve always been interested in religion – ever since I knew Curran.”

“What church do you attend?” I asked. “Didn’t you tell me you were a Roman Catholic?”

“I call myself that for convenience,” she said. “It belongs to my French and Italian periods. After I left Curran. I suppose he had influenced me, and then all the girls I knew were Catholic and I didn’t like to look superior. I expect you’d be surprised to hear that we ran a church once ourselves – me and Curran, here in Brighton.”

“‘Ran’? I don’t understand.”

“It was the performing dogs that gave us the idea. Two of them came to see Curran in hospital before the circus moved on. It was visiting day and there were a lot of women around to see their husbands. At first the dogs weren’t allowed into the ward. There was quite a fuss, but Curran got round matron, telling her they weren’t ordinary dogs, they were human dogs. Bathed in disinfectant they were, he told her, every dog, before they were allowed to give a performance. It wasn’t true, of course, but he was very convincing. They came up to the bed, wearing their pointed hats and pierrot collars, and each gave Curran a paw to shake and touched his face with its nose like an Eskimo. Then they were taken quickly away in case the doctor might appear. You should have heard those women. ‘The darlings, the sweet little doggies.’ It was lucky neither of them had raised a leg. ‘Just like humans.’ One woman said, ‘You can’t tell me that dogs haven’t got souls.’ Another one asked, ‘Are they gentleman doggies or lady doggies?’ as though she had been too refined to look. ‘One of each,’ Curran said, and just out of devilry he added, ‘They are married as a matter of fact.’ ‘Oh, isn’t that too sweet? Oh, the darlings. And have any little doggies come yet?’ ‘Not yet,’ Curran said. ‘You see, they have only been married a month. At the doggies’ church in Potters Bar.’ ‘Married in church?’ they squealed and I really thought he’d gone too far, but how they swallowed it down! They all gathered round Curran’s bed and left their husbands abandoned. Not that the husbands minded. Visiting day is always a horrible reminder of home to a man.”

My aunt took another sausage and ordered another Guinness. “They all wanted to know about the church in Potters Bar. ‘And to think,’ one said, ‘we have to leave our doggies at home when we go to Saint Ethelburga’s. My dog is as good a Christian as the vicar is with his raffles and his tea-fights.’ ‘Once a year,’ Curran said, ‘they have a collection of dog biscuits. To help the poor strays.’ When at last they left us alone and went back to their husbands I said, ‘You’ve started something,’ and ‘Why not?’ Curran said.”

My aunt put down her glass and asked the woman behind the bar, “Did you ever hear of the doggies’ church?”

“I seem to remember hearing something, but it was donkey’s years ago[54], wasn’t it? Long before my time. Somewhere in Hove, wasn’t it?”

“No, dear. Not a hundred yards from where you are standing now. We used to come to the Cricketers’ after the service. The Rev. Curran and me.”

“Didn’t the police interfere or something?”

“They tried to make out that he had no right to the title of Rev. But we pointed out that it stood for Revered and not Reverend in our church, and we didn’t belong to the established. They couldn’t touch us, we were breakaways like Wesley[55], and we had all the dog-owners of Brighton and Hove behind us – they even came over from as far as Hastings. The police tried to get us once under the Blasphemy Act, but nobody could find any blasphemy in our services. They were very very solemn. Curran wanted to start the churching of bitches after the puppies came, but I said that was going too far – even the Church of England had abandoned churching. Then there was the question of marrying divorced couples – I thought it would treble our income, but there it was Curran who stood firm. ‘We don’t recognize divorce,’ he said, and was quite right – it would have sullied the sentiment.”

“Did the police win in the end?” I asked.

“They always do. They had him up for speaking to girls on the front, and a lot was said in court that wasn’t apropos. I was young and angry and uncomprehending, and I wouldn’t help him any more. No wonder he abandoned me and went to look for Hannibal. No one can stand not being forgiven. That’s God’s privilege.”

We left the Cricketers’ and my aunt took a turning this way and a turning that until we came to a shuttered hall and a sign which read: TEXT FOR THE WEEK. “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, Then how canst thou contend with horses? Jeremiah, 12,” I can’t say that I understood the meaning very well, unless it was a warning against Brighton races, but perhaps the ambiguity was the attraction. The sect, I noticed, was called The Children of Jeremiah.

“This was where we held our services,” Aunt Augusta said. “Sometimes you could hardly hear the words for the barking. ‘It’s their form of prayer,’ Curran would say, ‘let each pray after his own fashion,’ and sometimes they lay there quite peacefully licking their parts. ‘Cleansing themselves for the House of the Lord,’ Curran would say. It makes me a little sad to see strangers here now. And I never much cared for the prophet Jeremiah.”

“I know little about Jeremiah.”

“They sank him in the mud,” Aunt Augusta said. “I studied the Bible very carefully in those days, but there was little that was favourable to dogs in the Old Testament. Tobias took his dog with him on his journey with the angel, but it played no part in the story at all, not even when a fish tried to eat Tobias. A dog was an unclean beast, of course, in those times. He only came into his own with Christianity. It was the Christians who began to carve dogs in stone in the cathedrals, and even while they were still doubtful about women’s souls they were beginning to think that maybe a dog had one, though they couldn’t get the Pope to pronounce one way or the other, nor even the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was left to Curran.”

“A big responsibility,” I said. I couldn’t make out whether she was serious about Curran or not.

“It was Curran who set me reading theology,” Aunt Augusta said. “He wanted references to dogs. It wasn’t easy to find any – even in Saint Francis de Sales. I found lots about fleas and butterflies and stags and elephants and spiders and crocodiles in Saint Francis but a strange neglect of dogs. Once I had a terrible shock. I said to Curran, ‘It’s no good. We can’t go on. Look what I’ve just found in the Apocalypse. Jesus is saying who can enter the city of God. Just listen to this – “Without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth or maketh a lie.” You see the company dogs are supposed to keep?”

“‘It proves our point,’ Curran said. ‘Whoremongers and murderers and the rest – they all have souls, don’t they? They only have to repent, and it’s the same with dogs. The dogs who come to our church have repented. They don’t consort any more with whoremongers and sorcerers. They live with respectable people in Brunswick Square or Royal Crescent.’ Do you know that Curran was so little put off by the Apocalypse he actually preached a sermon on that very text, telling people that it was their responsibility to see that their dogs didn’t backslide? ‘Loose the lead and spoil the dog[56]’, he said. ‘There are only too many murderers in Brighton and whoremongers at the Metropole all ready to pick up what you loose. And us for sorcerers —’ Luckily Hatty, who was with us by that time, had not yet become a fortune-teller. It would have spoilt the image.”

“He was a good preacher?”

“It was music to hear him,” she said with happy regret, and we began to walk back towards the front; we could hear the shingle turning over from a long way away. “He was not exclusive,” my aunt said. “For him dogs were like the House of Israel, but he was an apostle also to the Gentiles – and the Gentiles, to Curran, included sparrows and parrots and white mice – not cats, cats he always regarded as Pharisees. Of course no cat dared come into the church with all those dogs around, but there was one who used to sit in the window of a house opposite and sneer when the congregation came out. Curran excluded fish too – it would be too shocking to eat something with a soul, he said. Elephants he had a very great feeling for, which was generous of him considering Hannibal had trodden on his toe. Let’s sit down here, Henry. I always find Guinness a little tiring.”

We sat down in a shelter. The lights ran out to sea along the Palace Pier and the edge of the water was white with phosphorescence. The waves were continually pulled up along the beach and pulled back as though someone were making a bed and couldn’t get the sheet to lie properly. A bit of pop music came from the dance hall standing there like a blockade ship a hundred yards out. This trip was quite an adventure, I thought to myself, little knowing how small a one it would seem in retrospect.

“I found a lovely piece about elephants once in Saint Francis de Sales,” Aunt Augusta said, “and Curran used it in his last sermon after all that business with the girls had upset me. I really think what he wanted was to tell me it was me he loved, but I was a hard young woman in those days and I wouldn’t listen. I’ve always kept the piece though in my purse and, when I read it, it’s not the elephant that I see now, it’s Curran. He was a fine big fellow – not as big as Wordsworth but a good deal more sensitive.”

She fumbled in her bag and found her purse. “You read it to me, dear, I can’t see properly in this light.”

I held the rather yellowed creased paper at an angle to catch one of the lights of the front. It wasn’t easy to read, though my aunt’s handwriting was young and bold, because of the creases. “‘The elephant,’” I read, “‘is only a huge animal, but he is the most worthy of beasts that lives on the earth, and the most intelligent. I will give you an example of his excellence; he…’” The writing ran along a crease and I couldn’t read it, but my aunt chimed gently in. “‘He never changes his mate and he tenderly loves the one of his choice.’ Go on, dear.”

“‘With whom,’” I read, “‘nevertheless he mates but every third year, and then for five days only and so secretly that he has never been seen to do so.’”

“He was trying to explain,” my aunt said, “I am sure of it now, that if he had been a little slack in his attentions[57], it was only because of the girls – he didn’t love me less.”

“‘But he is to be seen again on the sixth day, on which day, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river wherein he bathes his whole body, for he has no desire to return to the herd until he has purified himself.’”

“Curran was always a clean man,” my aunt said. “Thank you, dear, you read it very well.”

“It doesn’t seem very applicable to dogs,” I said.

“He turned it so beautifully that no one noticed, and it was really directed at me. I remember he had a special dogs’ shampoo which had been blessed at the altar on sale outside the church door that Sunday.”

“What became of Curran?”

“I’ve no idea,” Aunt Augusta said. “He must have left his church, for he couldn’t have carried on without me. Hatty hadn’t the right touch for a deaconess. I dream of him sometimes – but he would be ninety years old now, and I find it hard to picture him as an old man. Well, Henry, I think it is time for us both to sleep.”

All the same, I found sleep difficult to attain, even in my comfortable bed at the Royal Albion. The lights of the Palace Pier sparkled on the ceiling, and round and round in my head went the figures of Wordsworth and Curran, the elephant and the dogs of Hove, the mystery of my birth, the ashes of my mother who was not my mother, and my father asleep in the bath. This was not the simple life which I had known at the bank, where I could judge a client’s character by his credits and debits. I had a sense of fear and exhilaration too, as the music pounded from the Pier and the phosphorescence rolled up the beach.

Chapter 7

The affair of my mother’s ashes was not settled so easily as I had anticipated (I call her my mother still, because at this period I had no real evidence that my aunt was telling me the truth). No urn was awaiting me in the house when I returned from Brighton, and so I rang up Scotland Yard and asked for Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. I was put on without delay to a voice which was distinctly not Sparrow’s. It sounded very similar to that of a rear-admiral whom I had once had as a client. (I was very glad when he changed his account to the National Provincial Bank, for he treated my clerks like ordinary seamen and myself like a sub-lieutenant who had been court-marchialled for keeping the mess books improperly.)

“Can I speak to Detective-Sergeant Sparrow?” I asked.

“On what business?” whoever it was rapped back.

“I have not yet received my mother’s ashes,” I said.

“This is Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner’s Office, and not a crematorium,” the voice replied and rang off.

It took me a long while (because of engaged lines) to get the same gritty voice on the line again.

“I want Detective-Sergeant Sparrow,” I said.

“On what business?”

I was ready this time and prepared to be ruder than the voice could be.

“Police business of course,” I said. “What other business do you deal in?” It was almost as though my aunt were speaking through me.

“Detective-Sergeant Sparrow is out. You had better leave a message.”

“Ask him to ring Mr. Pulling, Mr. Henry Pulling.”

“What address? What telephone number?” he snapped as though he suspected me to be some unsavoury police informer.

“He knows them both. I am not going to repeat them unnecessarily. Tell him I am disappointed at his failure to keep a solemn promise.” I rang off before the other had time for a word in reply. Going out to the dahlias, I gave myself the rare award of a satisfied smile. I had never spoken to the rear-admiral like that.

My new cactus dahlias were doing well, and after my trip to Brighton their names gave me some of the pleasure of travel: Rotterdam, a deeper red than a pillar-box, and Dentelle de Venise, with spikes sparkling like hoar-frost. I thought that next year I would plant some Pride of Berlin to make a trio of cities. The telephone disturbed my happy ruminations. It was Sparrow.

I said to him firmly, “I hope you have a good excuse for failing to return the ashes.”

“I certainly have, sir. There’s more Cannabis than ashes in your urn.”

“I don’t believe you. How could my mother possibly…?”

“We can hardly suspect your mother, sir, can we? As I told you, I think the man Wordsworth took advantage of your call[58]. Luckily for your story there are some human ashes in the urn, though Wordsworth must have dumped most of them down the sink to make room. Did you hear any sound of running water?”

“We were drinking whisky. He certainly filled a jug of water.”

“That must have been the moment[59], sir”.

“In any case, I would like to have back the ashes that remain.”

“It isn’t practicable, sir. Human ashes have a kind of sticky quality. They adhere very closely to any substance, which in this case is pot. I am sending you back the urn by registered post. I suggest, sir, that you place it just where you intended and forget the unfortunate circumstances.”

“But the urn will be empty.”

“Memorials are often detached from the remains of the deceised. War memorials are an example.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose there’s nothing to be done. It won’t feel the same at all. I hope you don’t suspect my aunt had any hand in this[60]?”

“An old lady like that? Oh no, sir. She was obviously deceived by her valet.”

“What valet?”

“Why, Wordsworth, sir – who else?” I thought it best not to enlighten him about their relationship.

“My aunt thinks Wordsworth may be in Paris.”

“Very likely, sir.”

“What will you do about it?”

“There’s nothing we can do. He hasn’t committed an extraditable offence. Of course, if he ever returns… He has a British passport.” There was a note of malicious longing in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s voice that made me feel, for a moment, a partisan of Wordsworth.

I said, “I sincerely hope he won’t.”

“You surprise and disappoint me, sir.”

“Why?”

“I hadn’t taken you for one of that kind.”

“What kind?”

“People who talk about there being no harm in pot.”

“Is there?”

“From our experience, sir, nearly all the cases hooked on hard drugs began with pot.”

“And from my experience, Sparrow, all or nearly all the alcoholics I know have started with a small whisky or a glass of wine. I even had a client who was first hooked, as you call it, on mild and bitter. In the end, because of his frequent absences on a cure, he had to give his wife a power of attorney[61]”. I rang off. It occurred to me with a certain pleasure that I had sowed a little confusion in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s mind – not so much confusion on the subject of Cannabis but confusion about my character, the character of a retired bank manager. I discovered for the first time in myself a streak of anarchy. Had it been perhaps the result of my visit to Brighton or was it possibly my aunt’s influence (and yet I was not a man easily influenced), or some bacteria in the Pulling blood? I found a buried affection for my father reviving in me. He had been a very patient as well as a very sleepy man, and yet there was about his patience something unaccountable: it might well have been absence of mind rather than patience – or even indifference. He might have been all the time, without our knowing it, elsewhere. I remembered the ambiguous reproaches launched against him by my mother. They seemed to confirm my aunt’s story, for they possessed the nagging qualities of an unsatisfied woman. Imprisoned by ambitions which she had never realized, my mother had never known freedom. Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful, and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

It was with these muddled and unaccustomed ideas in my mind that I awaited the arrival of my aunt for dinner. We had arranged the rendezvous[62] before leaving the Brighton Belle at Victoria the day before. As soon as she arrived I told her about Sergeant Sparrow, but she treated my story with surprising indifference, saying only that Wordsworth should have been “more careful.” Then I took her out and showed her my dahlias.

“I have always preferred cut flowers,” she said, and I had a sudden vision of strange continental gentlemen offering her bouquets of roses and maidenhair fern bound up in tissue paper.

I pointed out to her the site where I had thought to put the urn in memory of my mother.

“Poor Angelica,” she said, “she never understood men,” and that was all. It was as though she had read my thoughts and commented on them.

I had dialled CHICKEN and the dinner arrived exactly as ordered, the main course only needing to be put into the oven for a few minutes while we ate the smoked salmon. Living alone, I had been a regular customer whenever there was a client to entertain or my mother on her weekly visit. Now for months I had neglected Chicken, for there were no longer any clients and my mother, during her last illness, had been too ill to make the journey from Golders Green.

We drank sherry with the smoked salmon, and as some small return for my aunt’s generosity to me in Brighton I had bought a bottle of burgundy, Chambertin 1959, Sir Arthur Keene’s favourite, to go with the chicken à la king. When the wine had spread a pleasant glow through both our minds my aunt reverted to my conversation with Sergeant Sparrow.

“He is determined,” she said, “that Wordsworth is the guilty party, yet it might equally well be one of us. I don’t think the sergeant is a racialist, but he is class-conscious, and though the smoking of pot depends on no class barrier, he prefers to think otherwise and to put the blame on poor Wordsworth.”

“You and I can give each other an alibi,” I said, “and Wordsworth did run away.”

“We could have been in collusion, and Wordsworth might be taking his annual holiday. No,” she went on, “the mind of a policeman is set firmly in a groove. I remember once when I was in Tunis a travelling company was there who were playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude the Player King was really killed – or rather not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear – by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasn’t empty and was hot to the touch. Oh no, they knew Shakespeare’s play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlet’s uncle.”

“What a lot of travelling you have done in your day, Aunt Augusta.”

“I haven’t reached nightfall yet[63]”, she said. “If I had a companion I would be off tomorrow, but I can no longer lift a heavy suitcase, and there is a distressing lack of porters nowadays. As you noticed in Victoria.”

“We might one day,” I said, “continue our seaside excursions. I remember many years ago visiting Weymouth. There was a very pleasant green statue of George III[64] on the front”.

“I have booked two couchettes[65] a week from today on the Orient Express.”

I looked at her in amazement. “Where to?” I asked.

“Istanbul of course.”

“But it takes days…”

“Three nights to be exact.”

“If you want to go to Istanbul surely it would be easier and less expensive to fly?”

“I only take a plane,” my aunt said, “when there is no alternative means of travel.”

“It’s really quite safe.”

“It’s a matter of choice, not nerves,” Aunt Augusta said. “I knew Wilbur Wright[66] very well indeed at one time. He took me for several trips. I always felt quite secure in his contraptions. But I cannot bear being spoken to all the timely irrelevant loud-speakers. One is not badgered at a railway station. An airport always reminds me of a Butlin’s Camp.”

“If you are thinking of me as a companion…”

“Of course I am, Henry.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank manager’s pension is not a generous one.”

“I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. It’s excellent.”

“I’m not really accustomed to foreign travel. You’d find me…”

“You will take to it[67] quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travellers. I think I must have caught the infection through your father.”

“Surely not my father… He never travelled further than Central London.”

“He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, ‘The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago.’ And then there was your uncle…”

“I didn’t know I had an uncle.”

“He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young.”

“He was a great traveller?”

“It took an odd form,” my aunt said, “in the end.” I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

“Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,” Aunt Augusta said. “A very fat man. I don’t know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man.[68] Perhaps travelling with me, you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.”

“I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,” I said jokingly.

“You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your Uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard HONEST JO PULLING, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long.”

“Is that why you have travelled so much, Aunt Augusta?”

“At first I travelled for my living,” Aunt Augusta replied. “That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone, and in any case I never got on very well with Angelica. The two A’s we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister’s name fitted her. A saint she may well have been[69], but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic.”

One of the few marks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page twenty to page ninety-eight and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star, and even quite a different fiction from the one so abruptly interrupted.

“The question of names,” my aunt said, “is an interesting one. Your own Christian name is safe and colourless. It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which has to be lived up to. I once knew a girl called Comfort and her life was a very sad one. Unhappy men were constantly attracted to her simply by reason of her name, when all the time, poor dear, it was really she who needed the comfort from them. She fell unhappily in love with a man called Courage, who was desperately afraid of mice, but in the end she married a man called Payne and killed herself – in what Americans call a comfort station[70]. I would have thought it a funny story if I hadn’t known her.”

“You were telling me about my Uncle Jo,” I said.

“I know that. I was saying that he wanted to make life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the world (there were no currency restrictions in those days), and he began his tour curiously enough with the Simplon Orient, the train we are travelling by next week. From Turkey he planned to go to Persia, Russia, India, Malaya, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, U.S.A., South America, Australia, New Zealand perhaps – somewhere he intended to take a boat home. Unfortunately he was carried off the train at Venice right at the start, on a stretcher, after a stroke.”

“How very sad.”

“It didn’t alter at all his desire for a long life. I was working in Venice at the time, and I went to see him. He had decided that if he couldn’t travel physically, he would travel mentally. He asked me if I could find him a house of three hundred and sixty-five rooms so that he could live for a day and a night in each. In that way he thought life would seem almost interminable. The fact that he had probably not long to live had only heightened his passion to extend what was left of it. I told him that, short of the Royal Palace at Naples, I doubted whether such a house existed. Even the Palace in Rome probably contained fewer rooms.”

“He could have changed rooms less frequently in a smaller house.”

“He said that then he would notice the pattern. It would be no more than he was already accustomed to, travelling between Newmarket, Epsom, Goodwood and Brighton. He wanted time to forget the room which he had left before he returned to it again, and there must be opportunity too to redecorate it in a few essentials. You know there was a brothel in Paris in the Rue de Provence between the last two wars. (Oh, I forgot. There have been many wars since, haven’t there, but they don’t seem to belong to us like those two do.) This brothel had rooms decorated in various styles – the far West, China, India, that kind of thing. Your uncle had much the same idea for his house.”

“But surely he never found one,” I exclaimed.

“In the end he was forced to compromise. I was afraid for a time that the best we could do would be twelve bedrooms – one room a month – but a short while afterwards, through one of my clients in Milan…”

“I thought you were working in Venice,” I interrupted with some suspicion.

“The business I was in,” my aunt said, “was peripatetic. We moved around – a fortnight’s season in Venice, the same in Milan, Florence and Rome, then back to Venice. It was known as la quindicina.”

“You were in a theatre company?” I asked.

“The description will serve[71]”, my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. “You must remember I was very young in those days.”

“Acting needs no excuse.”

“I wasn’t excusing myself,” Aunt Augusta said sharply, “I was explaining. In a profession like that, age is a handicap. I was lucky enough to leave in good time. Thanks to Mr. Visconti.”

“Who was Visconti?”

“We were talking about your Uncle Jo. I found an old house in the country which had once been a palazzo or a castello[72] or something of the kind. It was almost in ruins and there were gypsies camping in some of the lower rooms and in the cellar – an enormous cellar which ran under the whole ground floor. It had been used for wine, and there was a great empty tun abandoned there because it had cracked with age. Once there had been vineyards around the house, but an autostrada had been built right across the estate not a hundred yards from the house, and the cars ran by all day between Milan and Rome and at night the big lorries passed. A few knotted worn-out roots of old vines were all that remained. There was only one bathroom in the whole house (the water had been cut off long ago by the failure of the electric pump), and only one lavatory, on the top floor in a sort of tower, but of course there was no water there either. You can imagine it wasn’t the sort of house anyone could sell easily – it had been on the market for twenty years[73] and the owner was a mongoloid orphan in an asylum. The lawyers talked about historic values, but Mr. Visconti knew all about history as you could guess from his name. Of course he advised strongly against the purchase, but after all poor Jo was unlikely to live long and he might as well be made happy. I had counted up the rooms, and if you divided the cellar into four with partitions and included the lavatory and bathroom and kitchen, you could bring the total up to fifty-two. When I told Jo he was delighted. A room for every week in the year, he said. I had to put a bed in every one, even in the bathroom and kitchen. There wasn’t room for a bed in the lavatory, but I bought a particularly comfortable chair with a footstool, and I thought we could always leave that room to the last – I didn’t think Jo would survive long enough to reach it. He had a nurse who was to follow him from room to room, sleeping one week behind him, as it were. I was afraid he would insist on a different nurse at every stopping place, but he liked her well enough to keep her as a travelling companion.”

“What an extraordinary arrangement.”

“It worked very well. When Jo was in his fifteenth room he told me – I was back that week in Milan on my tour and I came out to see him with Mr. Visconti on my day off – that it really seemed at least a year since he had moved in. He was going on next day to the sixteenth room on the floor above with a different view and his suit-cases were all packed and ready (he insisted on everything being moved by suitcase, and I had found a second-hand one which was already decorated with labels from all kinds of famous hotels – the George V in Paris, the Quisisana in Capri, the Excelsior in Rome, Raflfes in Singapore, Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Pera Palace in Istanbul).

“Poor Jo! I’ve seldom seen a happier man. He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room, and if fifteen rooms had seemed like a year, then he had several years of travel still before him. The nurse told me that about the fourth day in each room he would get a little restless with the wanderlust, and the first day in the new room he would spend more than his usual time in sleep, tired after the journey. He began in the cellar and worked his way upwards until at last he reached the top floor, and he was already beginning to talk of revisiting his old haunts. ‘We’ll take them in a different order this time,’ he said, ‘and come at them from a different direction.’ He was content to leave the lavatory to the last. ‘After all these luxury rooms,’ he said, ‘it would be fun to rough it a bit[74]. Roughing it keeps one young. I don’t want to be like one of those old codgers one sees in the Cunard[75] travelling first-class and complaining of the caviar.’ Then it was that in the fifty-first room he had his second stroke. It paralysed him down one side and made speech difficult. I was in Venice at the time, but I got permission to leave the company for a couple of days and Mr. Visconti drove me to Jo’s palazzo. They were having a lot of difficulty with him. He had spent seven days in the fifty-first room before the stroke knocked him out, but the doctor was insisting that he remain in the same bed without a move for at least another ten days. ‘Any ordinary man,’ the doctor said to me, ‘would be content to lie still for a while.’

“‘He wants to live as long as possible,’ I told him.

“‘In that case he should stay where he is till the end. With any luck[76] he’ll have two or three more years’.

“I told Jo what the doctor said, and he mouthed a reply. I thought I made out, ‘Not enough.’

“He stayed quiet that night and all the next morning, and the nurse believed that he had resigned himself to staying where he was. She left him sleeping and came down to my room for a cup of tea. Mr. Visconti had bought some cream cakes in Milan at the good pastry-cook’s near the cathedral. Suddenly from up the stairs there came a strange grating noise. ‘Mamma mia,’ the nurse said, ‘what’s that?’ It sounded as though someone were shifting the furniture. We ran upstairs, and what do you think? Jo Pulling was out of bed. He had fixed an old club tie of his, the Froth-blowers or the Mustard Club or something of the kind, to the handle of the suitcase because he had no strength in his legs, and he was crawling down the passage towards the lavatory tower pulling the suitcase after him. I shouted to him to stop, but he paid me no attention. It was painful to look at him, he was going so slowly, with such an effort. It was a tiled passage and every tile he crossed cost him enormous exertion. He collapsed before we reached him and lay there panting, and the saddest thing of all to me was that he made a little pool of wee-wee on the tiles. We were afraid to move him before the doctor came. We brought a pillow and put it under his head and the nurse gave him one of his pills. ‘Cattivo,’ she said in Italian, which means, ‘You bad old man,’ and he grinned at the two of us and brought out the last sentence which he ever spoke, deformed a bit but I could understand it very well. ‘Seemed like a whole lifetime,’ he said and he died before the doctor came. He was right in his way to make that last trip against the doctor’s orders. The doctor had only promised him a few years.”

“He died in the passage?” I asked.

“He died on his travels,” my aunt said in a tone of reproof. “As he would have wished.”

“‘Here he lies where he longed to be,’” I quoted in order to please my aunt, though I couldn’t help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door.

“Home is the hunter, home from sea,” my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, “and the sailor home from the hill.”

***

We were silent for quite a while after that as we finished the chicken à la king. It was a little like the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day[77]. I remembered that, when I was a boy, I used to wonder whether there was really a corpse buried there at the Cenotaph[78], for governments are usually economical with sentiment and try to arouse it in the cheapest possible way. A brilliant advertising slogan doesn’t need a body, a box of earth would do just as well, and now I began to wonder too about Uncle Jo. Was my aunt a little imaginative? Perhaps the stories of Jo, of my father and of my mother were not entirely true.

Without breaking the silence I took a reverent glass of Chambertin to Uncle Jo’s memory, whether he existed or not. The unaccustomed wine sang irresponsibly in my head. What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. I betrayed myself with a hiccup while I changed our plates, and with the blue cheese the sense of material problems returned.

“Uncle Jo,” I said, “was lucky to have no currency restrictions. He couldn’t have afforded to die like that on a tourist allowance.”

“They were great days,” Aunt Augusta said.

“How are we going to manage on ours?” I asked. “With fifty pounds each we shall not be able to stay very long in Istanbul.”

“Currency restrictions have never seriously bothered me”, my aunt said. “There are ways and means.[79]”

“I hope you don’t plan anything illegal.”

“I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta said. “How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”

Chapter 8

It was my aunt herself who suggested that we should fly as far as Paris. I was a little surprised after what she had just said, for there was certainly in this case an alternative means of travel; I pointed out the inconsistency.

“There are reasons,” Aunt Augusta said. “Cogent reasons. I know the ropes[80] at Heathrow”.

I was puzzled too at her insistence that we must go to the Kensington air terminal and take the airport bus.

“It’s so easy for me,” I said, “to pick you up by car and drive you to Heathrow. You would find it much less tiring, Aunt Augusta.”

“You would have to pay an exorbitant garage fee,” she replied, and I found her sudden sense of economy unconvincing.

I arranged next day for the dahlias to be watered by my next-door neighbour, a brusque man called Major Charge. He had seen Detective-Sergeant Sparrow come to the door with the policeman, and he was bitten by curiosity. I told him it was about a motoring offence and he became sympathetic immediately. “A child murdered every week,” he said, “and all they can do is to pursue motorists.” I don’t like lies and I felt in my conscience that I ought to defend Sergeant Sparrow, who had been as good as his word and posted back the urn, registered and express.

“Sergeant Sparrow is not in homicide,” I replied, “and motorists kill more people in a year than murderers.”

“Only a lot of jaywalkers,” Major Charge said. “Cannon fodder.” However, he agreed to water the dahlias.

I picked my aunt up in the bar of the Crown and Anchor, where she was having a stirrup-cup[81], and we drove by taxi to the Kensington terminal. I noticed that she had brought two suitcases, one very large, although, when I had asked her how long we were to stay in Istanbul, she had replied, “Twenty-four hours.”

“It seems a short stay after such a long journey.”

“The point is the journey,” my aunt had replied. “I enjoy the travelling not the sitting still.”

Even Uncle Jo, I argued, had put up with each room in his house for a whole week.

“Jo was a sick man,” she said, “while I am in the best of health.” Since we were travelling first-class (which seemed again an unnecessary luxury between London and Paris) we had no overweight, although the larger of her suitcases was unusually heavy. While we were sitting in the bus I suggested to my aunt that the garage fee for my car would probably have been cheaper than the difference between first and tourist fares. “The difference,” she said, “is nearly wiped out by the caviar and the smoked salmon, and surely between us we can probably put away half a bottle of vodka. Not to speak of the champagne and cognac. In any case, I have more important reasons for travelling by bus.”

As we approached Heathrow she put her mouth close to my ear. “The luggage,” she said, “is in a trailer behind.”

“I know.”

“I have a green suitcase and a red suitcase. Here are the tickets.”

I took them, not understanding.

“When the bus stops, please get out quickly and see whether the trailer is still attached. If it is still there let me know at once and I’ll give you further instructions.”

Something in my aunt’s manner made me nervous. I said, “Of course it will be there.”

“I sincerely hope not,” she said. “Otherwise we shall not leave today.”

I jumped out as soon as we arrived, and sure enough the trailer wasn’t there. “What do I do now?” I asked her.

“Nothing at all. Everything is quite in order. You may give me back the tickets and relax.”

As we sat over two gins and tonics in the departure lounge a loudspeaker announced, “Passengers on Flight three-seven-eight to Nice will proceed to customs for customs inspection.”

We were alone at our table and my aunt did not bother to lower her voice amid the din of passengers, glasses and loud-speakers. “That is what I wished to avoid,” she said. “They have now taken to spot-checks on passengers leaving the country. They whittle away our liberties one by one. When I was a girl you could travel anywhere on the continent except Russia without a passport and you took what you liked in the way of money. Until recently they only asked what money you had, or at the very worst[82] they wanted to see your wallet. If there’s one thing I hate in any human being it is mistrust.”

“The way you speak,” I said jokingly, “I suspect we are lucky that it is not your bags which are being searched.”

I could well imagine my aunt stuffing a dozen five-pound notes into the toe of her bedroom slippers. Having been a bank manager, I am perhaps overscrupulous, though I must confess that I had brought an extra five-pound note folded up in my ticket pocket, but that was something I might genuinely have overlooked.

“Luck doesn’t enter into my calculations,” my aunt said. “Only a fool would trust to luck[83], and there is probably a fool now on the Nice flight who is regretting his folly. Whenever new restrictions are made, I make a very careful study of the arrangements for carrying them out.” She gave a little sigh. “In the case of Heathrow I owe a great deal to Wordsworth. For a time he acted as a loader here. He left when there was some trouble about a gold consignment. Nothing was ever proved against him, but the whole affair had been too impromptu and disgusted him. He told me the story. A very large ingot was abstracted by a loader, and the loss was discovered too soon, before the men went off duty. They knew as a result that they would be searched by the police on leaving, all taxis too, and they had no idea what to do with the thing until Wordsworth suggested rolling it in tar and using it as a doorstop in the customs shed. So there it stayed for months. Every time they brought crates along to the shed, they could see their ingot propping open the door. Wordsworth said he got so maddened by the sight of it that he threw up the job. That was when he became a doorman at the Grenada Palace.”

“What happened to the ingot?”

“I suppose the authorities lost interest when the diamond robberies started. Diamonds are money for jam, Henry. You see, they have special sealed sacks for valuable freight and these sacks are put into ordinary sacks, the idea being that the loaders can’t spot them. The official mind is remarkably innocent. By the time you’ve been loading sacks a week or two, you can feel which sack contains another inside it. Then all you’ve got to do is to slit both coverings open and take pot luck[84]. Like a children’s bran tub at Christmas. Nobody is going to discover the slit until the plane arrives at the other end. Wordsworth knew a man who struck lucky the first time and pulled out a box with fifty gem stones.”

“Surely somebody’s watching?”

“Only the other loaders and they take a share. Of course, occasionally a man has bad luck. Once a friend of Wordsworth’s fished out a fat packet of notes, but they proved to be Pakistani. Worth about a thousand pounds if you happened to live in Karachi, but who was going to change them for him here? The poor fellow used to haunt the tarmac whenever a plane was taking off to Karachi, but he never found a safe customer. Wordsworth said he got quite embittered.”

“I had no idea such things went on at Heathrow.”

“My dear Henry,” Aunt Augusta said, “if you had been a young man I would have advised you to become a loader. A loader’s life is one of adventure with far more chance of a fortune than you ever have in a branch bank. I can imagine nothing better for a young man with ambition except perhaps illicit diamond digging. That is best practised in Sierra Leone, where Wordsworth comes from. The security guards are less sophisticated and less ruthless than in South Africa.”

“Sometimes you shock me, Aunt Augusta,” I said, but the statement had already almost ceased to be true. “I have never had anything stolen from my suitcase and I don’t even lock it.”

“That is probably your safeguard. No one is going to bother about an unlocked suitcase. Wordsworth knew a loader who had keys to every kind of suitcase. There are not many varieties, though he was baffled once by a Russian one.”

The loud-speaker announced our flight and we were told to proceed at once to Gate 14 for immediate embarkation.

“For someone who doesn’t like airports,” I said, “you seem to know a great deal about Heathrow.”

“I’ve always been interested in human nature,” Aunt Augusta said. “Especially the more imaginative sides of it.”

She ordered another two gins and tonics immediately we arrived on the plane. “There goes ten shillings towards the first-class fare,” she said. “A friend of mine calculated once that on a long flight to Tahiti – it took in those days more than sixty-four hours – he recuperated nearly twenty pounds, but of course he was a hard drinker.”

Again I had the impression that I was turning the pages in an American magazine in search of a contribution which I had temporarily lost. “I still don’t understand,” I said, “about the luggage-trailer and the suitcase. Why were you so anxious that the trailer should disappear?”

“I have an impression,” my aunt said, “that you are really a little shocked by trivial illegalities. When you reach my age you will be more tolerant. Years ago Paris was regarded as the vice centre of the world, as Buenos Aires was before that, but Madame de Gaulle[85] altered things there. Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples survived a decade longer, but then the only cities left were Macao and Havana. Macao has been cleaned up by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Havana by Fidel Castro. For the moment Heathrow is the Havana of the West. It won’t last very long, of course, but one must admit that at the present time London Airport has a glamour which certainly puts Britain first. Have you got a little vodka for the caviar?” she asked the hostess who brought our trays. “I prefer it to champagne.”

“But, Aunt Augusta, you have still not told me about the trailer.”

“It’s very simple,” my aunt said. “If the luggage is to be loaded direct on to the aircraft, the trailer is detached outside the Queen Elizabeth building – there are always traffic hold-ups at this point and nothing is noticed by the passengers. If when the bus arrives at the BEA or Air France entrance you find the trailer is still attached, this means that the luggage is going to be sent to the customs. Personally I have a rooted objection to unknown hands, which have fiddled about in all kinds of strange luggage, some not overclean, fiddling about in mine.”

“What do you do then?”

“I reclaim my bags, saying that after all I don’t require them on the voyage and wish to leave them in the cloakroom. Or I cancel my flight and try again another day.” She finished her smoked salmon and went on to the caviar. “There is no such convenient system as that at Dover, or I would prefer to go by boat.”

“Aunt Augusta,” I said, “what are you carrying in your suit-cases?”

“Only one is a little dangerous,” she said, “the red. I always use the red for that purpose. Red for danger,” she added with a smile.

“But what have you got in the red one?”

“A trifle,” Aunt Augusta said, “something to help us in our travels. I can’t really endure any longer these absurd travel allowances. Allowances! For grown people! When I was a child I received a shilling a week pocket money. If you consider the value of the pound today, that is rather more than what we are allowed to travel with annually. You haven’t eaten your portion of foie gras[86].”

“It doesn’t agree with me,” I said.

“Then I will take it. Steward, another glass of champagne and another vodka.”

“We are just descending, ma’am.”

“The more reason for you to hurry, young man.” She fastened her seat-belt. “I’m glad that Wordsworth left Heathrow before I came to know him. He was in danger of being corrupted. Oh, I don’t mean the thieving. A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation. The Spanish Empire would have decayed far more quickly if Sir Francis Drake[87] had not kept a proportion of the Spanish gold in circulation. But here are other things. I have mentioned Havana, and you mustn’t think me straitlaced. I am all for a little professional sex. You have probably read about the activities of Superman. And I am sure that the sight of him cured many a frigidity. Thank you, steward.” She drained her vodka. “We have not done badly. I would say we have almost covered the difference between first-class and tourist, if you take into account a little overweight with my red suitcase. There was a brothel in Havana where the Emperor’s Crown was admirably performed by three nice girls. These establishments save many a marriage from boredom. And then there was the Shanghai Theatre in the Chinese quarter of Havana with three blue films which were shown in the intervals of a nude review, all for the price of one dollar with a pornographic bookshop in the foyer thrown in. I was there once with a Mr. Fernandez who had a cattle farm in Camagüey. (I met him in Rome after Mr. Visconti had temporarily disappeared and he invited me to Cuba for a month’s holiday.) The place was ruined, though, long before the revolution. I am told that to compete with television they put in a large screen. The films, of course, had all been shot on sixteen millimetre, and when they were enlarged practically to Cinerama size, it really needed an act of faith to distinguish any feature of the human body.”

The plane banked steeply over Le Bourget.

“It was all very harmless,” my aunt said, “and gave employment to a great many people. But the things which go on around Heathrow…”

The steward brought another vodka and my aunt tossed it down. She had a strong head – I had noticed that already – but her mind under the influence of alcohol ranged to and fro.

“We were talking of Heathrow,” I reminded her, for my curiosity had been aroused. In my aunt’s company, I found myself oddly ignorant about my own country.

“There are a number of big firms around Heathrow,” my aunt said. “Electronics, engineering, film manufacturers. Glaxo, as one would expect, is quite untouched by the Heathrow influence. After office hours some of the technicians give private parties; air crews are always welcome, so long as stewardesses are included in the party. Even loaders. Wordsworth was always invited, but only on condition he brought a girl and was willing to exchange her at the party for another. Pornographic films are shown first as an encouragement. Wordsworth was genuinely attached to his girl, but he had to surrender her in exchange for a technician’s wife who was a homely woman of fifty called Ada. It seems to me that the old professional brothel system was far healthier than these exaggerated amateur distractions. But then an amateur always goes too far. An amateur is never in proper control of his art. There was a discipline in the old-time brothels. The madame in many ways played a role similar to that of the headmistress of Roedean[88]. A brothel after all is a kind of school, and not least a school of manners. I have known several madames of real distinction who would have been just as at home in Roedean and have lent distinction to any school.”

“How on earth did you get to know them?” I asked, but the plane was bumping on to the Le Bourget field, and my aunt began to fuss about her luggage. “I think it better,” she said, “if we pass through customs and immigration separately. My red case is rather a heavy one and I would be glad if you would take that with you. Employ a porter. It is always easier to obtain a taxi with a porter’s help. And show in your manner that the tip will be a good one before you arrive at the customs. There is often an understanding between a porter and a douanier[89]. I will meet you outside. Here is the ticket for the red case.”

Chapter 9

I had no clear idea what my aunt intended by her elaborate precautions. There was obviously little danger from the douanier, who waved me through with the careless courtesy which I find so lacking in the supercilious young men in England. My aunt had booked rooms in the Saint James and Albany, an old-fashioned double hottel, of which one half, the Albany, faces the Rue de Rivoli and the other, the Saint James, the Rue Saint-Honoré. Between the two hotels lies the shared territory of a small garden, and on the garden front of the Saint James I noticed a plaque which tells a visitor that here La Fayette signed some treaty or celebrated his return from the American Revolution, I forget which.

Our rooms in the Albany looked out on the Tuileries gardens, and my aunt had taken a whole suite, which seemed rather unnecessary as we were only spending one night before we caught the Orient Express. When I mentioned this, however, she rebuked me quite sharply. “This is the second time today,” she said, “that you have mentioned the subject of economy. You retain the spirit of a bank manager, even in retirement. Understand once and for all[90] that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flags a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth (the other Wordsworth I mean of course) if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Love-making too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino[91] is not a writer for the young”.

“Perhaps it’s not too late for me to begin,” I said facetiously in an effort to close that page of her conversation, which I found a little embarrassing.

“You must surrender yourself first to extravagance,” my aunt replied. “Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times. In any case, this suite is not wasted. I have to receive some visitors in private, and I don’t suppose you would want me to receive them in my bedroom. One of them, by the way, is a bank manager. Did you visit lady clients in their bedrooms?”

“Of course not. Nor in their drawing-rooms either. I did all business at the bank.”

“Perhaps in Southwood you didn’t have any very distinguished clients.”

“You are quite wrong,” I said and I told her about the unbearable rear-admiral and my friend Sir Alfred Keene.

“Or any really confidential business.”

“Nothing certainly which could not be discussed in my office at the bank.”

“You were not bugged, I suppose, in the suburbs.”

The man who came to see her was not my idea of a banker at all. He was tall and elegant with black sideburns and he would have fitted very well into a matador’s uniform. My aunt asked me to bring her the red suitcase, and I then left them alone, but looking back from the doorway I saw that the lid was already open and the case seemed to be stacked with ten-pound notes.

I sat down in my bedroom and read a copy of Punch[92] to reassure myself. The sight of all the smuggled money had been a shock, and the suitcase was one of those fibre ones which are as vulnerable as cardboard. It is true that no experienced loader at Heathrow would have expected it to contain a small fortune, but surely it was the height of rashness to trust in a bluff which depended for its success on the experience of a thief. She might easily have tumbled on a novice.

My aunt had obviously spent many years abroad and this had affected her character as well as her morality. I couldn’t really judge her as I would an ordinary Englishwoman, and I comforted myself, as I read Punch, that the English character was unchangeable. True, Punch once passed through a distressing period, when even Winston Churchill was a subject of mockery, but the good sense of the proprietors and of the advertisers drew it safely back into the old paths. Even the admiral had begun to subscribe again, and the editor had, quite correctly in my opinion, been relegated to television, which is at its best a vulgar medium. If the ten-pound notes, I thought, were tied in bundles of twenty, there could easily be as much as three thousand pounds in the suitcase, or even six, for surely bundles of forty would not be too thick… Then I remembered the case was a Revelation. Twelve thousand was not an impossible total. I felt a little comforted by that idea. Smuggling on such a large scale seemed more like a business coup than a crime.

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Примечания

1

with an adequate pension and a silver handshake – (разг.) с достойной пенсией и поздравлениями по поводу 25-летия беспорочной службы

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2

had a good head for heights – (разг.) хорошо переносила высоту

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3

Queen Mary – Мария Стюарт (1542–1587), королева Шотландии, казненная по приказу Елизаветы I

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4

went without a hitch – (разг.) пошло как по маслу; без сучка без задоринки

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5

during banking hours – (зд.) в рабочее время

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6

À chacun son goût – (фр.) У каждого свой вкус

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7

La Pucelle – (фр.) Девственница

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8

Joan of Arc – Жанна д’Арк (1413–1431), Орлеанская дева, в юности слышавшая «голоса», которые велели ей возглавить борьбу с англичанами; вела французское войско, разбившее Англию под Орлеаном; сожжена на костре как ведьма

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9

For appearances only. – (разг.) Это только для вида.

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10

I take all the blame. – (книжн.) Это моя вина.

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11

had always made it a point – (разг.) всегда старался

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12

Georgian style – георгианский стиль в строительстве, архитектуре и проч. Датируется 1714–1830 гг., когда Британией правили короли Георги I, II и III (неоклассицизм)

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13

Rapunzel – персонаж немецкой сказки, девушка, заточенная в башню; она расплетает косу до земли, прекрасный принц взбирается по ее волосам в башню и спасает ее

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14

Wordsworth – Уильям Вордсворт (1770–1850), английский поэт-романтик, представитель «озерной школы»

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15

Venice once meant a lot to me – (зд.) когда-то я была просто влюблена в Венецию

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16

contretemps – (фр.) помеха, препятствие

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17

bottle of Black Label – (разг.) бутылка хорошего виски

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18

fancy-dress party – (разг.) бал-маскарад

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19

go away double quick – (сленг) быстро смылись

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20

a famous man of letters – (книжн.) известный писатель

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21

the Fabians – британская политическая группа, поддерживавшая идеологию и цели социализма

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22

Ramsay MacDonald – Рэмси Макдональд (1866– 1937), британский политический деятель, премьер-министр (1924)

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23

Better so. – (зд.) Оно и к лучшему.

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24

Ashes – разговорное название соревнований по крикету между командами Англии и Австралии

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25

wearing a friendly grin – (разг.) добродушно ухмыляясь

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26

if he is not to age too fast – (разг.) если не хочет быстро стареть

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27

it was a wrong number – (зд.) кто-то ошибся номером

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28

ult. – (лат.) сокр. от ultimo, этого месяца

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29

once removed – (разг.) троюродные

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30

With no portrait of the Queen. – Без портрета королевы (на марках стран Британского Содружества всегда в правом верхнем углу есть профиль королевы Британии)

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31

It’s raining cats and dogs. – (разг.) На улице льет как из ведра.

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32

Canaletto – Антонио Каналетто (1697–1768), итальянский художник

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33

the Inland Revenue – правительственная организация, занимающаяся сбором налогов с физических и юридических лиц

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34

seemed to ring a bell – (разг.) казалось, звучало знакомо

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35

in plain clothes – (разг.) был в штатском

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36

a complete set of Sir Walter Scott – (разг.) полное собрание сочинений Вальтера Скотта (1771–1832), шотландского поэта, писателя

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37

Tennyson – Альфред Теннисон (1809–1892), английский поэт

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38

Browning – Роберт Браунинг (1812–1889), английский поэт

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39

Palgrave – Френсис Тернер Полгрейв (1824–1897), английский критик, поэт

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40

was becoming rather cross – (разг.) уже начинал злиться

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41

began to see his point – (разг.) начал понимать, к чему он клонит

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42

baise en ville – (фр.) дорожный несессер, косметичка

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43

Vanity Fair – «Ярмарка тщеславия», роман В. Теккерея (1811–1863)

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44

you’ll hear from him soon – (разг.) он скоро даст о себе знать

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45

Madame Tussaud – имеется в виду музей восковых фигур, принадлежавший мадам Тюссо (1760–1850), в котором демонстрируются отлитые из воска фигуры известных людей, в том числе тех, кто был гильотинирован во времена Французской революции)

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46

Crippen – доктор Криппен (1862–1910), американский доктор, убивший свою жену и попытавшийся скрыться из Англии в Америку на корабле

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47

Nell Gwynn – Нелл Гвин (1650–1687), английская актриса, возлюбленная короля Карла II

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48

Those were the days. – (разг.) Хорошее было время.

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49

Bottoms Up! – (разг.) Пей до дна!

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50

How one forgets things – (разг.) Память совсем плохая стала

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51

has a sweet tooth – (разг.) сластена, сладкоежка, лакомка

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52

Lapsang Souchong – сорт китайского чая

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53

That’s nothing new. – (зд.) Подумаешь, удивила.

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54

it was donkey’s years ago – (разг.) это же было сто лет назад (в незапамятные времена)

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55

Wesley – Чарльз Уэсли (1707–1788), английский евангелист, писал гимны; Джон Уэсли (1703–1791), английский теолог, евангелист, основатель методистской церкви

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56

Loose the lead and spoil the dog – видоизмененная пословица «Spare the rod and spoil the child», Пожалеешь розгу – испортишь ребенка

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57

if he had been a little slack in his attentions – (разг.) если он и был неразборчив в своих привязанностях

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58

took advantage of your call – (зд.) воспользовался вашим визитом в своих целях

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59

That must have been the moment – (разг.) Наверное, тогда это и произошло

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60

had any hand in this – (разг.) имела к этому хоть какое-то отношение

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61

power of attorney – (юр.) полномочия

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62

rendezvous – встреча; от франц. rendez-vous – свидание

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63

I haven’t reached nightfall yet – (разг.) Мое время еще не вышло

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64

George III – Георг III (1738–1820), король Великобритании и Ирландии, возглавил страну во время борьбы Америки за независимость от британской короны; страдал душевным расстройством

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65

couchettes – (фр.) спальные места (в вагоне)

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66

Wilbur Wright – Уилбур Райт (1867–1912), один из братьев-авиаторов, которые построили и испытали первый самолет в 1903 г.

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67

will take to it – (разг.) привыкнете

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68

It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man. – (разг.) Уютнее чувствуешь себя именно с толстяком.

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69

A saint she may well have been – (устар.) Может, конечно, она и была святой

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70

a comfort station – то же, что public convenience, общественный туалет

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71

The description will serve – (зд.) Можно и так сказать

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72

palazzo, castello – (итал.) дворец, замок

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73

it had been on the market for twenty years – (зд.) он уже лет двадцать выставлен на продажу

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74

to rough it a bit – (разг.) пожить без удобств

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75

Cunard – крупнейшая компания по организации круизов; имеет филиалы в разных частях света

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76

With any luck – (разг.) Если повезет

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77

Armistice Day – 11 ноября, отмечается во многих странах как годовщина окончания Первой мировой войны (1918)

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78

Cenotaph – памятник, воздвигнутый в Лондоне в честь погибших во время Первой мировой войны

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79

There are ways and means. – (зд.) Всегда можно найти выход из положения.

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80

know the ropes – (разг.) знаю все ходы и выходы; хорошо ориентируюсь

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81

was having a stirrup-cup – (разг.) тяпнула «на посошок»

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82

at the very worst – (разг.) в худшем случае

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83

Only a fool would trust to luck – (разг.) Только дурак может полагаться на удачу

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84

take pot luck – (разг.) все забрать

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85

Madame de Gaulle – мадам де Голль, жена Шарля Андре Жозефа де Голля, французского генерала, государственного деятеля, президента Франции (1959–1970) много занималась благотворительностью

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86

foie gras – (фр.) фуа-гра, паштет из гусиной печени

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87

Sir Francis Drake – сэр Френсис Дрейк (1540– 1596), английский мореплаватель, корсар, исследователь новых земель; был первым англичанином, проплывшим вокруг света; стоял во главе английского флота во время победы над Испанской армадой (1588)

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88

Roedean – очень дорогая частная школа для девочек в Англии

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89

douanier – (фр.) таможенник

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90

once and for all – (разг.) раз и навсегда

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91

Aretino – Пьетро Аретино (1492–1556), итальянский сатирик, драматург

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92

Punch – «Панч», британский еженедельный журнал, известен своими юмористическими рассказами и иллюстрациями; выходил с 1841 по 2002 г.

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