‘No,’ said Cale. ‘Just got here.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not feeling very well. We could continue tomorrow if you wouldn’t mind.’
Cale nodded.
Sister Wray stood up and walked him to the door. As he was about to leave she said, ‘Thomas, Poll didn’t say anything to you while I was asleep?’
‘Don’t believe a thing that snivelling little chisler tells you!’ squawked an alarmed Poll.
‘Be quiet,’ said Sister Wray.
Cale looked at her. This was odd stuff to grasp even for a boy who had drunk deeply and at a very early age from the fountain of the strangeness of others.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It didn’t say anything and I wouldn’t have paid any attention even if it had.’
9
‘That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever allowed another man to fondle you?’
‘Not as far as I can remember.’
Conn was arguing with Lord Vipond, watched by Arbell and a fascinated IdrisPukke.
‘Has the King ever touched you?’ asked Arbell, not altogether patiently.
‘No.’
‘Then why all this fuss?’
‘Every philosopher can stand the toothache,’ said Conn to his wife, ‘except for the one who has it.’
This was a reference to one of IdrisPukke’s most carefully polished sayings.
‘Well,’ said Vipond, ‘if you’d like to swap banalities …’ this was aimed at his brother … ‘why don’t you consider this one: every problem is an opportunity.’
The difficulty and the golden chance they were discussing involved King Zog of Switzerland and Albania, who’d taken a very particular shine to Conn Materazzi. Many, of course, felt the same about the tall and beautiful blond young man, so strong and graceful with his easy manners and openness to all. The cocky little shit of less than a year before had needed to grow up and had done so in such an appealing way that he surprised even his admirers. Arbell, who had once had a crush upon the spoilt young boy – though she treated him with coolness and even disdain as a result – now found that she was falling in love with him. A little late perhaps, given that they had been married for more than seven months and had a son whose early arrival, yet plump size, had been the subject of some ungenerous rumours. Though certainly more biddable than before, and considerably so, he had his limits, one of them being his aversion to everything about his royal admirer: his stained clothes (‘I can tell you everything he has eaten in the last month’), his tongue (‘It flaps about in his mouth like a wet sheet on a washing line’), his hands (‘Always fidgeting with himself and his favourite’s trousers’). His eyes (‘watery’). His feet (‘enormous’). Even the way he stood (‘Repulsive!’).
‘The King,’ said Vipond, ‘holds all of us in his hands – and more besides. Every country nervous about the Redeemers looks to him for a sign of what they might do. Without him, the Materazzi will descend into a kind of nothing – that’s to say your wife, your child and you.’
‘So you want me to lick his arse?’
‘Conn!’ A sharp rebuke from his wife.
There was an unpleasant pause.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Conn at last.
‘I’ve heard worse,’ replied Vipond.
‘Can I say something?’ asked IdrisPukke.
‘Must you?’ said Vipond.
IdrisPukke smiled and looked at Conn.
‘My dear boy,’ he began, winking at Conn so the others couldn’t see – a sign that he was on his side in conspiring against the other two.
‘If he touches me, I’ll cut his bloody head off,’ Conn said, interrupting IdrisPukke’s attempt to handle him.
IdrisPukke smiled again as the others sighed and grimaced in exasperation.
‘You’re not going to cut his head off because you’re not going to let him touch you.’
‘And what if he does?’
‘You stand up,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘look at him as if you’d seen more lovely things coming out of the back end of a dog and leave the room in silence. You say nothing.’
‘If that’s the best you can do, don’t let us keep you,’ said Vipond.
‘The King is a snob,’ replied IdrisPukke, ‘and, like all snobs, at heart he’s a worshipper. All his life he’s been looking for someone who looks down on him to adore. Conn looks like a young god – a young god with a bloodline that goes back as far as the great freeze. He’s wonderstruck.’
‘I can think of another word,’ said Conn.
‘Maybe that, too. But he wants you to treat him with contempt. He won’t dare touch you. Every time you look at him – and don’t look at him except once or twice a meeting – you pour every quintilla of your loathing and disgust into it.’
‘That won’t be hard.’
‘There you are, then.’
With this unexpected resolution, IdrisPukke chatted away about a dinner he’d been at the previous night and then Arbell eased Conn out of the door and the two brothers were left on their own.
‘I thought that went very well.’ It was not IdrisPukke talking in honeyed tones of self-congratulation but Vipond, whose scowl had vanished completely, to be replaced by a look of considerable satisfaction.
‘Do you think she caught on?’
‘Probably,’ replied Vipond. ‘But she’s a smart little miss. She won’t say anything.’
‘You’re wrong, by the way’ said IdrisPukke.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said, “Every problem is an opportunity.”’ IdrisPukke walked over to the window to catch the last rays of the setting sun. ‘What I actually always say is, “Every opportunity is a problem.”’
Vague Henri was disturbed, but in an unusual a-fish-has-just-fallen-out-of-the-sky-in-front-of-you way. Two days earlier he had reached into his pocket to pay for a pack of cigarillos at Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco shop and discovered that his loose change was gone and had been replaced by a carrot. More precisely, a carrot that had been not very skilfully carved into the shape of an erect penis with the word ‘YOU’ cut into the testicles. Eventually he decided that he’d been the victim of some smart alec street lurcher. The question why a skilled thief would steal the loose change in his left pocket but not the wallet in his right, which had nearly thirty dollars in it, he put to the back of his mind. But now the oddly peculiar thing that he had put to the back of his mind couldn’t stay there any longer because it had happened again. This time he had discovered a hard-boiled egg, with the two staring eyes of a village idiot and a mouth with the tongue flapping to one side drawn on the shell. On the reverse of the egg was a statement:
VAGUE HENRI
TRUE
All through the night Vague Henri turned over in his brain what the significance of the two gibes might be and whether they were a threat or not. Then there was a knock at the door; he answered it, taking the precaution of hiding a long knife behind his back. But his visitor had the sense to stand well back.
‘So, it was you?’
‘Who else would it be?’ said Kleist. ‘Nobody else knows what a prick you are the way I do.’
Vague Henri was so pleased to see his old friend that the bollocking that followed for running off on his own when they were in the Scablands lasted barely five minutes before they were sitting down and smoking two cigarillos of Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco and drinking what remained of a bottle of hideous Swiss wine. Both of them, of course, had extraordinary events to speak of. ‘You first as you’ve sinned the most,’ said Vague Henri and was astonished as Kleist, without warning, began to weep uncontrollably. It was half an hour before Kleist had recovered enough to tell him what had happened. As he listened Vague Henri grew pale and then red with anger and disgust.