Fillets of Plaice

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That should fix it.’

  I lifted my savagely aching head off the pillow and surveyed Veraswami.

  ‘Has anyone ever suggested to you, Doctor, that you gave up trying to heal the sick and took up taxidermy?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no one,’ said Dr Veraswami, puzzled.

  I eased myself off the bed and started putting on my clothes.

  ‘Well, I should try it,’ I said. ‘In taxidermy you get no complaints from your patients.’

  Veraswami had watched me dressing with increasing alarm.

  ‘But, vere are you going?’ he asked. ‘You can’t leave. Not now. Supposing your nose started the bleeding again, I vould be left vith the can.’

  ‘Take your forceps to a quiet corner and sit on them,’ I advised tiredly. ‘I’m going back to Abbotsford.’

  I found a taxi and drove back in it, thinking evil thoughts about the medical profession in general and Dr Veraswami in particular. I remembered that even in the 1920s if you took a short course in medicine in France, you were not allowed to practise medicine there but your papers were marked ‘Suitable for the Orient’. I wondered whether this was the Orient’s revenge.

  Then I remembered the story, probably apocryphal, about the Indian who wanted above all else to get his BSc. He sat exams year after year and failed. At last, in desperation, the authorities suggested that he gave up trying to get a degree and turned his talents elsewhere. So he became an adviser on how to obtain the BSc., and to prove his worth he had cards printed which read ‘Mr Ram Sing, BSc (failed)’. Obviously, I thought, nursing my aching head, Veraswami (whose Christian name was probably Chipati) was what was known in the profession as Chipati Veraswami, MD (failed).

  I arrived back at Abbotsford and Pimmie took a swift look at me.

  ‘Did they fix it?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I said. ‘They butchered me and I’m one gigantic exposed nerve ending. Offer me euthanasia and I’ll be your friend for life.’

  ‘Into bed wit yer,’ said Pimmie. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Tiredly, I removed my clothing and flopped into bed. Anything, even death, I thought, would be preferable to the pain I was now experiencing. I remembered, somewhat wryly, that I had come to Abbotsford for peace and quiet.

  Pimmie entered the room with a hypodermic.

  ‘Give me yer behind,’ she commanded. ‘Morphine. Doctor’s orders.’

  She administered the drug deftly and then peered at my face with great earnestness. I was not a prepossessing sight. My right eye was swollen and half closed, my nostril spread wide like a boxer’s by the preponderance of bandage, my beard and moustache an unlovely filigree of matted blood. She drew in her breath sharply and frowned.

  ‘Sure and if I had them here I’d give them a bit of me mind,’ she said with sudden savagery.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to care,’ I said drowsily. ‘I didn’t know you worried about me.’ Pimmie drew herself up sharply.

  ‘Worry about you?’ she asked witheringly. ‘I’m not worried about you. It’s all the extra work they’ve given me. That’s what worries me. You go to sleep now and stop yer blarney.’

  She went to the door.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said, ‘and don’t let me find you awake.’

  Chipati Veraswami, I thought, soothed on a cushion of morphia, MD (failed). Pimmie could teach him a thing or two. She passed.

  6. Ursula

  Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two quite a number of personable young ladies drifted in and out of my life and none of them made a very deep impression upon me with the exception of Ursula Pendragon White. She popped in and out of my life for a number of years with monotonous regularity, like a cuckoo out of a clock, and of all the girlfriends I had I found that she was the only one who could arouse feeling in me that ranged from alarm and despondency to breathless admiration and sheer horror.

  Ursula first came to my attention on the top of a number 27 bus that was progressing in a stately fashion through the streets of Bournemouth, that most salubrious of seaside resorts, where I then lived. I occupied the back seat of the bus while Ursula and her escort were at the front. It is possible that my attention would not have been attracted to her if it had not been for her voice which was melodious and as penetrating and all-pervading as the song of a roller canary. Looking around to find the source of those dulcet Roedean accents I caught sight of Ursula’s profile and was immediately riveted.

  She had dark, naturally curly hair, which she wore short, in a sort of dusky halo round her head and it framed a face that was both beautiful and remarkable. Her eyes were enormous and of that deep blue, almost violet colour, that forget-me-nots go in the sun, fringed with very dark, long lashes and set under very dark, permanently raised eyebrows. Her mouth was of the texture and quality that should never, under any circumstances, be used for eating kippers or frogs’ legs or black pudding, and her teeth were white and even.

  But it was her nose that was breathtaking. I had never seen a nose like it. It was long, but not too long, and combined three separate styles. It started off by being Grecian in the strict classical sense but at the end the most extraordinary things happened to it. It suddenly tip-tilted like the nose of a very elegant pekinese and then it was as though somebody had delicately sliced off the tip of the tilt to make it flat. Written down badly like this it sounds most unattractive, but I can assure you the effect was enchanting. Young men took one look at Ursula’s nose and fell deeply and blindingly in love with it. It was a nose so charming and so unique that you could not wait to get on more intimate terms with it.

  So entranced was I by her nose that it was some moments before I came to and started eavesdropping on her conversation. It was then that I discovered another of Ursula’s charms, and that was her grim, determined, unremitting battle with the English language. Where other people meekly speak their mother tongue in the way that it is taught them, Ursula adopted a more militant and Boadicea-like approach. She seized the English language by the scruff of the neck, shook it thoroughly, turned it inside out, and forced words and phrases to do her bidding, making them express things they were never meant to express. Now she leant forward to her companion and said, apropos of something they had been discussing when I had got on the bus:

  ‘And Daddy says it’s a half a dozen of one and a dozen of the other, but I don’t think so. There’s fire without smoke and I think somebody ought to tell her. Don’t you?’

  The young man, who looked like a dyspeptic blood-hound, seemed as confused at this statement as I was.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Ticklish situation, eh?’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about it, darling. It’s serious.’

  ‘Some people,’ said the young man with the air of a Greek philosopher vouchsafing a pearl of wisdom, ‘some people never let their right hand know what their left hand is doing.’

  ‘My dear!’ said Ursula, shocked. ‘I never let either of my hands know what I’m doing, but that’s not the point. What I say is . . . Ooooo! This is where we get off. Darling, hurry up.’

  I watched her as they threaded their way down the bus. She was tall, carelessly but elegantly dressed, with one of those willowy, coltish figures that turn young men’s thoughts to lechery, and she had long and beautifully shaped legs. I watched her get down onto the pavement and then, still talking animatedly to her companion, disappear among the crowds of shoppers and holiday-makers.

  I sighed. She was such a lovely girl that it seemed cruel of fate to have given me a tantalising glimpse of her and then to whisk her out of my life. But I was wrong, for within three days Ursula had been whisked back into my life where she remained, intermittently, for the next five years.

  I had been invited to a friend’s house to celebrate his birthday, and as I entered the drawing-room I heard the clear, flute-like voice of the girl on the bus.

  ‘I’m just a natural voyeur,’ she was saying earnestly to a t
all young man. ‘Travel is in my blood. Daddy says I’m the original rolling moss.’

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said to my host. ‘And in return for this extremely expensive present I want you to introduce me to the girl with the extraordinary nose.’

  ‘What, Ursula?’ he asked in surprise. ‘You don’t want to meet her, do you?’

  ‘It’s my greatest ambition in life,’ I assured him.

  ‘Well, on your own head be it,’ he said. ‘If she takes you up she’ll drive you mad. The local asylum is already bursting with her various boyfriends.’

  We moved across the room to the girl with the ravishing nose.

  ‘Ursula,’ said my friend, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice, ‘here’s somebody who wants to meet you. Gerry Durrell . . . Ursula Pendragon White.’

  Ursula turned and enveloped me in a blue stare of prickling intensity, and gave me a ravishing smile. Her nose, seen fullface, was even more enchanting than in profile. I gazed at her and was lost.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘You’re the bug boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘I would prefer to be known as an elegant, handsome, witty, devil-may-care man-about-town,’ I said regretfully. ‘But if it is your wish that I be the bug boy, then the bug boy I shall be.’

  She gave a laugh that sounded like sleigh-bells.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was rude of me. But you are the person who likes animals, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘Then you’re just the person I want to talk to. I’ve been arguing with Cedric for days about it. He’s terribly stubborn, but I know I’m right. Dogs can have inhibitions, can’t they?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I said judiciously, ‘if you beat them seven days a week . . .’

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Ursula impatiently, as to a dimwitted child, ‘inhibitions. You know, they can see ghosts and tell when you’re going to die, and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t you mean premonitions?’ I suggested tentatively.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Ursula sharply. ‘I mean what I say.’

  After we had discussed the noble qualities of dogs and their soothsaying prowess for some time, I cunningly steered the conversation on to music. There was a concert on at the Pavilion for which I had managed to acquire seats and I thought that this would be a very dignified and cultural way of beginning my friendship with Ursula. Did she, I asked, like music?

  ‘I simply adore it,’ she said, closing her eyes blissfully. ‘If music be the bowl of love, play on.’

  She opened her eyes and beamed at me.

  ‘Don’t you mean . . .’ I began unguardedly.

  From being warm and blurred as Love-in-the-mist Ursula’s eyes suddenly became as sharp and angry as periwinkles under ice.

  ‘Now don’t you start telling me what I mean,’ she said mutinously. ‘All my boyfriends do it and it makes me wild. They go on correcting and correcting me as though I was an . . . exam paper or something.’

  ‘You didn’t let me finish,’ I said blandly. ‘I was about to say, “don’t you mean that your love of music is so great that you would accept with delight an invitation to a concert at the Pavilion tomorrow afternoon”?’

  ‘Ooooo!’ she exclaimed, her eyes glowing. ‘You haven’t got tickets, have you?’

  ‘It’s the accepted way of getting into a concert,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You are clever. I tried to get some last week and they were sold out. I’d love to come!’

  As I left, feeling very pleased with myself, my host asked me how I had got on with Ursula.

  ‘Wonderfully,’ I said, elated with my success. ‘I’m taking her out to lunch tomorrow and then to a concert.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed my host in horror.

  ‘Jealousy will get you nowhere,’ I said. ‘You’re a nice enough chap in your humble, uncouth way, but when it comes to attractive girls like Ursula you need a bit of charm, a bit of the old bubbling wit, a touch of the je ne sais quoi.’

  ‘I cannot do it,’ said my host. ‘In spite of your appalling arrogance, I cannot let you, a friend of mine, rush headlong into one of the blackest pits of hell without stretching out a hand to save you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, genuinely interested, for he seemed serious.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, earnestly. ‘Be warned. The best thing would be for you to phone her up this evening and tell her you’ve got flu or rabies or something, but I know you won’t do that. You’re besotted. But for heaven’s sake, take my advice. If you take her out to lunch, keep her away from the menu, unless somebody’s just died and left you a couple of hundred pounds. She has an appetite like a particularly rapacious python, and no sense of money. As to the concert . . . Well, don’t you realise, my dear fellow, that the Pavilion authorities go pale and tremble at the mere mention of her name? That they have been trying for years to think of a legal way of banning her from attending concerts?’

  ‘But she said she was very fond of music,’ I said uneasily.

  ‘So she is, and it has a horrifying effect upon her. But not nearly as horrifying an effect as she has on music. I’ve seen the leader of the orchestra in tears, gulping sal volatile like a baby sucking its bottle, after a performance of The Magic Flute. And it’s rumoured, I think quite rightly, that the conductor’s hair went white overnight after she’d attended a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Don’t you realise that when Eileen Joyce gave a recital here and Ursula attended she had such a detrimental effect upon that unfortunate pianist that she forgot to change her dress between pieces?’

  ‘It . . . it could have been an oversight,’ I said.

  ‘An oversight; an oversight? Tell me, have you ever known Eileen Joyce to run out of dresses?’

  I must confess he had me there.

  He propelled me with the gentleness of a kindly hangman to the front door.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ he said in a low voice, squeezing my arm with sympathy, ‘I’m your friend, if you need me, phone me. Any hour of the day or night I’ll be here.’

  And he shut the front door firmly in my face and left me to walk home, curiously disquieted.

  But the following morning my spirits had revived. After all, I thought, Ursula was an exceptionally lovely girl and I was quite sure that anyone as attractive as that could not behave in the boorish manner that my friend had described. Probably he had tried to date her and she, being wise as well as beautiful, had given him the brush-off. Comforting myself with this thought I dressed with unusual care and went down to the railway station to meet her. She had explained that living out in Lyndhurst in the New Forest, she had to come into Bournemouth by train because ‘Daddy always uses the Rolls when I want it’. On the platform I awaited the arrival of the train anxiously. Whilst I was rearranging my tie for the twentieth time I was accosted by an elderly lady, a pillar ofthelocal church, who was, unaccountably, a friend of my mother’s. I stood, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, wishing the old harridan would go away, for when meeting a new girlfriend for the first time the last thing one wanted was a sanctimonious and critical audience. But she clung like a leech and was still telling me about her latest jumble sale when the train dragged itself, chunting and grimy into the station. I was giving scant attention to her story of what the vicar said; I was too busy looking at the opening carriage doors to try and spot Ursula.

  ‘And the vicar said, “I, myself, Mrs Darlinghurst, will tell the bishop about your selfless dedication to the organ fund”. He has no need to say it, of course but I thought it was most Christian of him, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes . . . yes . . . Most, er, perceptive of him.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. So I said to him, “Vicar,” I said, “I’m only a humble widow . . .” ’

  ‘What other secrets of her private life she had vouchsafed to the vicar I was never to learn, because from behind me came an earsplitting scream of recognition.

  ‘Darling! Darling, I
’m here,’ came Ursula’s voice.

  I turned round, and only just in time for Ursula flung herself into my arms and fastened her mouth on mine with the avidity of a starving bumble bee sighting the first clover flower of the season. When I finally managed to extricate myself from Ursula’s octopus-like embrace I looked round for Mrs Darlinghurst, only to find her retreating along the platform, backwards, with a look on her face of one, who having led a sheltered life, is suddenly confronted with the more unsavoury aspects of a Roman orgy. I smiled feebly at her, waved good-bye, and then taking Ursula firmly by the arm steered her out of the station while endeavouring to remove what felt like several pounds of lipstick from my mouth.

  Ursula was dressed in a very smart blue outfit that highlighted her unfairly enormous eyes, and she wore elegant white lace gloves. Over her arm she carried a curious basket like a miniature hamper with a large handle, which presumably contained sufficient cosmetics to withstand a siege of several years.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, peering raptly into my face, ‘I am going to enjoy this. Such a lovely day! Lunch alone with you, and then the concert . . . Uuummm! Paradise!’

  A number of men in the ticket hall, on hearing her invest the word ‘paradise’ with a sort of moaning lechery that had to be heard to be believed, looked at me enviously, and I began to feel better.

  ‘I’ve booked a table . . .’ I began.

  ‘Darling,’ interrupted Ursula, ‘I simply must go to the loo. There wasn’t one on the train. Buy me a newspaper so I can go.’

  Several people stopped and stared.

  ‘Hush!’ I said hurriedly, ‘Not so loud. What do you want a newspaper for? They have paper in the loos.’