The Hippopotamus

  “Well, it starts for me like this,” I said. “Bumped into Jane a couple of weeks ago. She knew me, but I felt the completest fool not recognising her.”

  “I think we know whose fault that is, darling.”

  “Yes, well, whatever. Went back to her place and she told me about the leukaemia and such like.”

  “Did you get an earful of God?”

  “There was talk of miracles certainly. Something emanating from here, from Swafford. She claims to be . . . well . . . cured.”

  “Don’t I know it? Ecstatic letters have arrived at Phillimore Gardens praising the Lord and rejoicing in many wonders.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Like you, that’s why I’m here, darling. To find out. As it happens, we share the same doctor, Jane and I.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “Well, you know doctors. He is surprised by the remission but cautious as cautious can be.”

  “There definitely has been a remission then?”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “Hum.” I sat and thought for a space while Rebecca started in on the strawberries.

  “But what has any of that,” she asked, “got to do with Pa­tricia’s splendid description of you as a wart-hog, a great fat vi­cious wart-hog?”

  “Does she know about Jane’s miraculous recovery?”

  “Sure to. Best buddies.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Search me, darling. It was last June I understand. Simon brought her back prostrate to this house from the Norfolk Show, white corpuscles practically oozing from her pores. Mi­chael and Anne were here of course, Simon and Davey had an exeat from school to celebrate the finishing of their exams, can’t be sure who else. Oh, Max and Mary, they were staying at the time, I’m almost sure.”

  “So do any of them believe in this miracle?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  I grabbed a fistful of strawberries and thought for a while.

  “Well, I don’t think Simon believes. He told me the other day about Jane’s collapse. Compared her overnight recovery to that of pigs he had known.”

  “Romantic bugger.”

  “Oliver on the other hand . . . He seems to know something. I’m almost certain he does.”

  “If there’s truffle, Oliver will snuffle it out, you can be sure of that.”

  “And Patricia clearly thinks that I am in on it, but scoffing sceptically up my sleeve.”

  “Well, that’s certainly how you sounded the other night at dinner, isn’t it?”

  Rebecca was alluding to a conversation I had with the Bishop and others about “healing” and “therapy.”

  “You do see, don’t you, my dear, that this talk of miracles is preposterous?”

  “Well, I know one thing, darling, and that is that Jane should have been dead by the end of June.”

  “Why did you never let me know? Why did I only find out by chance that my only goddaughter had leukaemia?”

  “Fat lot you’d’ve cared. It would have taken more than a dying goddaughter to get you to raise your red eyes from the whisky glass. I know what you’ve been like. Oliver tells me of your exploits. Not that he needs to—I read the newspapers. A glitterati drunkard rampaging around Soho and the West End insulting everyone you meet and sweating your fat arse over a bar-stool with your fellow has-beens, puking bile at everyone under fifty and tearing great chunks off hands that dare to feed you.”

  “Rebecca . . .”

  “But of course you’ve been sacked now, haven’t you? Sud­denly you need your rich and powerful friends to help you out of the tank of bitter piss you’ve been drowning in for the last twenty years. You’ll slobber with doe-eyed sympathy and moon with paternal concern—why, darling, you’ll even cut down on your drinking and go boaty-woaty with your godson like a white-haired old saint—so long as underneath you can remain the same cynical, evil-minded old turd that the world knows and loves.”

  There, in a nutshell, you have your mother. I suspect I am the only man in this world who has dared to spurn her. It may have been all of two decades ago but to a mind like hers this is no time at all. Revenge for Rebecca is a dish best served ice-cold, nestling in a coulis of vitriol, garnished with sprigs of belladonna and thrown hard into the poor bastard victim’s face.

  I arose, brushed the strawberry stalks from my lap and walked away, saying not a word.

  On my way to the house I collided with Clara the cross­eyed Clifford.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Wallace,” she said, “I was just coming to fetch you.” At least, that is what I think she said. I won’t try and emulate her lisp, poor dear.

  “Oh yes? And why is this?”

  She looked steadfastly at me (and at some other unidenti­fied object a hundred and twenty degrees to the west). “Uncle Michael would like to see you in his study.”

  The visitor to Lord Logan of Swafford’s study is put in mind of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s headquarters. Control consoles, electri­cally operated curtains and projection screens, telecommuni­cation devices, globes containing whisky decanters and large-screen videophones represent only the visible and iden­tifiable elements of gadgetry.

  “Choose a city for destruction, Mr. Bond. Which is it to be? New York? Leningrad? Paris? No, wait! London! Of course! Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square, as you British are so fond of saying.”

  “Ted!” Michael half-rose from his chair, a cigar in his mouth. “Forgive me for summoning you like a disorderly cor­poral. I’m awaiting a call from South Africa.”

  “Business or politics?” Michael is well known for dabbling his hands in the affairs of nation states. Around the walls there are hung photographs of him beaming at the camera in varying postures of intimacy with World Leaders: an arm around Walesa, stiffly side by side by Mandela, toasting Yeltsin with a shot-glass of vodka, sharing a preposterous gilded Louis XVI sofa with Arafat, on the golf course with James Baker and George Bush.

  “So what’s the difference? There’s a tobacco company I’m looking at in Johannesburg. South Africa’s the coming state, you know.”

  “I admire your optimism.”

  Michael backhanded away a waft of cigar smoke and with it the reservations of any so small-minded as to doubt him. “So. Tedward. What do you want to know?”

  I didn’t understand what he meant at first. Then I saw and a big smile spread across my face. “You’ll do it? You’ll co­operate?”

  “My lawyers and I receive an absolute right to veto?”

  “Certainly.” I nodded vigorously. As if it would ever come to that.

  Instantly, Michael pushed across the desk a sheaf of papers, densely type-written in narrow margins, secured with green thread fasteners.

  “Read and sign,” he said. “Initial where I have initialled, full signature where I have signed in full.”

  Ah, the ways of the mighty. “Do I have to read it?” I asked.

  “Tedward, so plaintive, like a child with homework. Your ‘Ballad of the Workshy Man,’ that must have come from the heart. Me, I read documents twenty times this size on the crapper before breakfast.”

  “No wonder you’ve got piles,” I said.

  “You knew I have piles?” Michael frowned.

  “Fellow-sufferer,” I said hastily. “One sees it in the way you sit down.”

  “You writers! Not working at all. All your work is done ob­serving people.”

  Sweet of him to choose to believe that. “So tell me,” I said, mimicking one of his favourite opening phrases, “what exactly is in all this?”

  “Standard contract for an authorised biography. Rights of injunction. Don’t worry, there’s nothing that stops you from making full royalties. Talking of which, you owe me one penny.” He opened the palm of his hand and stretched it across the desk.

 
“I do?” I looked up in surprise.

  “In law,” said Michael, “a contract is meaningless without consideration. Someone must pay someone. You will see in the document you are signing that in consideration for the sum of one penny, I agree to co-operate in your biography, known hereafter as The Material. So. One penny please.”

  Fazed by the combination of legalese and earnestness, I fumbled in my trouser pocket for a coin.

  “Do you have change for a five-pence piece?”

  “Certainly.” Michael caught my shilling, opened a drawer, took out a small strong-box, shook inside it with his fingers and drew out two tuppenny bits. “And four is five,” he said. “Shake, business-partner. We have a deal.”

  I stood to shake his hand and was disconsolate to see him burst out laughing.

  “Tedward! Smile! Deals are causes for celebration.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I am overawed by your solem­nity.”

  “It was your first lesson in how we work. Up to the moment of signature and handshake is grim determination. The mo­ment the ink is on the paper and the hands are clasped to­gether, we are locked in an ecstasy greater than love.”

  Michael placed two tape-recording machines on the desk and pressed their record buttons.

  “One for each of us,” he said. “Just so we know where we stand.”

  Thus, interrupted only by two calls from Johannesburg, fourteen faxes from there and elsewhere and a call to tea, we sat while Michael embarked on the story of his life.

  I will save the details of the conversation for a long week­end, Jane. Let it just be said that Much Has Become Clear.

  This morning, however, an oddity.

  I slouched in to brekker, hoping to catch the bacon before it had turned to leather in the tureen, and sat myself down, as usual, alone with the Telegraph at the end of the dining-room table.

  Patricia came in, flushed and excited.

  “Ted!” she cried. “I’m so glad to have caught you.”

  “Have a coffee,” I said, a little frigidly. I find it difficult to treat a girl who has recently called me a wart-hog with any real warmth of manner, however much I may want to jam my cock up her funnel.

  She was not much interested in coffee, however. She had something on her chest. Lucky something.

  “Ted, I want you to forget everything I said to you yester­day afternoon.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m just so terribly sorry. I really don’t know what came over me. I was quite unbearably rude.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  “And I talked such a great deal of nonsense.”

  At this point, Simon loomed in looking for Logan, a worried look on his customarily vacant face.

  “I think he’s working in his study,” said Patricia. “Anything wrong?”

  “Oh, not really. Well, it’s Lilac, actually. Dad’s hunter. She seems no better. Just wanted to let him know, that’s all.”

  And off he lumbered, leaving Patricia and me alone once more. She continued with her rather strained apology.

  “I can’t think why I was so horrid to you. I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I think that must be it. You’ve probably heard that my . . . that Martin, the man I’ve been living with, he left me. I get very . . .”

  “My dear old girl,” I said. “Please. Think no more about it.”

  “I suppose I imagined at that dinner that you were getting at me. All your talk about therapists. I’ve been seeing one, you see, and I thought you must have known and were mocking me.”

  “Patricia, I would never for a moment . . .”

  “Well, of course I realise that, now. I lay awake last night thinking what a brute I’d been to you. You were just talking in general. How could you possibly have known?”

  “It was entirely my fault for jabbering on in such a thought­less fashion. I should be apologising to you.”

  She smiled. I smiled back. Somewhere deep in the trouser region the neglected old worm twitched and wriggled in his sleep.

  She kissed me on the cheek. “No hard feelings?”

  “Of course not, my dear,” I lied.

  I watched that magnificently constructed arse swing out of the room and allowed those hard feelings to subside in my lap. A high arse, ledging out from the coccyx; the kind of arse you can stand a tea-pot on.

  But, Jane, what the deuce had she been talking about? Didn’t fool me for a second. The smile was too bright, the kiss on the cheek too theatrical. I recognise pride thwarted when I see it. She was apologising because she had been told to. Hm. Thinks.

  I return now to my schedule and address Proclamation the Sixth:

  You have talked only about the guests. The house is full of other men and women. There are indoor and outdoor servants, there is Podmore. I have heard nothing of them.

  What do you want, blood? I am not one of those easy aristo­cratic types who can walk with kings or lose the common touch. I’m a tight-arsed bourgeois masquerading as déclassé. Give us a break, baby-doll.

  Of the servants I know by name I can tell you this. There is Podmore, first name Dick, who looks and behaves more like a disbarred time-share salesman than a butler, but then that is how all butlers have looked for years now, even in ducal households (as if I really know). Upper servants have lost the knack of seeming to have no provenance, no private life, no family and no sexuality. One look at Podmore and you can sur­mise all too readily that he was born in Carshalton Beeches, that he flirted with the Teddy Boy movement in the 1950s before moving with his wife Julie to Norfolk (just great to get away from all that traffic and what was then called the rat-race . . .), that he has his eye on a retirement condo hard by a golf course in Florida and that he can’t understand why Logan hasn’t replaced the french windows in the main drawing room with sliding patio doors.

  Not much else to say about him really except that I suspect him of being a closet nance, Mrs. Podmore or no Mrs. Pod­more. He has a way of eyeing Davey up that argues something of the gaysexualist.

  Julie Podmore acts as housekeeper, her duties largely com­prise bossing the maids shrewishly and lowering her head whenever she passes a house-guest. She is in her fifties, of me­dium height, weight and fuckability: she dyes her hair. Beyond that I know nothing to her credit or detriment.

  The only maid whose name I can remember is called Joanne. I remember her name because she has a combination of ample thighs and noisy tights. As a result she makes a frishing noise whenever she climbs the stairs or walks the corridor. To match the thighs she sports a cantilevered bust: I should imag­ine she has to make an effort to lean backwards at all times in order not to fall over. The other maid is woundingly plain and will never rise in her profession until she learns that guests are unlikely to be interested in her brother’s exploits on the speed­way track.

  There are kitchen staff into whose eyrie I have not pene­trated, but I can tell you that the cook’s name is Cheryl and that she bakes a sinful egg custard. Liberality with the nutmeg is the key here, I fancy.

  Venturing outside we encounter Alec Tubby, the chief groom. He is stoutly Norfolk and entirely without discernible character. His son Kenny assists him in the muckings-out and rubbings-down around which stable life revolves. He will be a bit depressed at the moment on account of the vet expressing dark forebodings this afternoon as to the chances of Lilac pull­ing out of her decline.

  A splendour called Kate supervises the kennels and, as is traditional with such specimens, presents to the world a hand­some beard and moustache. It must take at least a square yard of stout blue corduroy to trouser her arse alone. She is rather fun as a matter of fact, and a pleasure to talk to. She has per­suaded me to puppy-walk some of the young hounds, which is a thing that needs doing at this season and which I find highly enjoyable. There is something tirelessly entertaining about the wa
y puppies widdle.

  Further afield we find Tom Jarrold, the gamekeeper. He is aggressively jealous of his cocks, hens and chicks and can spot a no-good townie like me a mile off. We have little to say to each other. Henry, his assistant, aspires to be no more than a carbon-­copy of Tom. Simon seems to be the only person alive who can communicate with either of them. Jarrold has a hare-lipped daughter, Katrina. Not just hare-lipped, actually, but hairy-lipped too. Nature can be unbearably cruel.

  The only other member of staff to mention is Valerie, Michael’s secretary or PA. She keeps herself very much to herself and is only here on certain days. I have not determined if there is a pattern. When she is here she dines alone, in Michael’s study, guarding the telephones. This is her choice apparently, since she has been offered a place at table amongst persons of rank and tone.

  I really am afraid, my angel, that there is nothing more I can tell you. But, as required by the last of your dictates, Proclama­tion Seven, the Four Constants will ever be my guide.

  Constant vigilance; constant awareness; constant observation; constant openness.

  So rest assured that I shall not cease from mental strife, nor shall Simon’s computer sleep by my hand, till we have built Je­rusalem in Norfolk’s green and peasant land.

  Assuring you, madam, of my good faith in this and all matters.

  Yours (for Logan-Wallace Biogs Plc)

  Ted Wallace (CEO)

  28-jul-1992 08:23 from: Onslow Interiors Ltd to: 0653 378552 p.01 of 01

  Onslow Interiors

  12a Onslow Terrace • South Kensington • LONDON SW7

  URGENT FACSIMILE TRANSMISSION

  To: Patricia Hardy, c/o Logan, Swafford Hall, Norfolk

  From: Onslow Interiors Ltd

  My fax: 071-555 4929

  Your fax: 0653-378552

  For the private and personal attention of Miss Hardy

  Dear Miss Hardy,

  You suggest in your letter that you might consider making an approach to E.L.W. to raise the question of his recent remarks on the subject we discussed.

  We would recommend with extreme force that you do not make such a move. T. is not an expert in this field and has no