In the office of Baldry and Blacker, the Cornhill seed merchants where I worked before Mummy and Daddy passed on, the clerks used to call me Squinty instead of Rupert, which is my true name. And the typists used to laugh at me a lot. Because of my limp, and also because of a big, brown birthmark which stuck to one side of my face like some giant, furry beetle. They never knew that I could see them laughing. But I did. Oh yes. Lizzie never laughed at me. She told me that she could see in me the soul of a poet and I explained that this was probably because my heart was bent on a literary career rather than that of a pen pusher in a seed factory. I courted her for several months and when the first warm days of spring skipped in to cheer the year, I proposed that we be married. Lizzie was delighted and for the first time since we met she kissed me. Not a long, soft, passionate kiss but a sweet, ladylike touch upon my birthmark, an action which caused my blood to run cold and my heart to beat wildly in my chest.
I’ve never understood why she went and eloped with this bloke Georgie Milford out of Dingwell’s garage in the Fulham Palace Road. I do realize that a lot of it was due to my Mummy and Daddy. They only met her once, but they hated her on sight and said she was nothing but a slut… a gold-digging slut… but Lizzie did love me, she told me so often… so why she went off the way she did completely bamboozles my imagination.
It was so sudden. One minute she was my betrothed… and the next she was hot-footing off with this excuse for a garage mechanic. He was six feet odd, blond and bearded and apparently he used to try a spot of this weight-lifting caper in his spare time. The man was an ox. An illiterate, ill-bred ox. Lizzie met him at Further Education classes apparently and Lord only knows what lies he told her to entice her away from me but they wound up flitting off to some new town in Herefordshire where they were given a council house, garden back and front at the expense of rate-payers like muggins. I can tell you truly I was very upset. Very upset indeed because I always thought that Lizzie was the perfect lady. But she was nothing less than a two-timing, underhanded little hussy and I can tell you I was in half a mind to go down to that there Herefordshire and do something. Pay her back. Throw a drop of acid at her or something. You know, throw it in her face. Scar her a bit. Make her pay. The vicious, ungrateful little hussy.
Still, I was well rid of that little tramp. I decided in my heart that I would not ally myself with any such painted hussies again but I would search for… well, a plainer, more reliable type. Someone you could trust. Put your faith in. A kind of perfect lady if you like.
I met Daphne in the Hammersmith Bingo Hall. She was a Midlands girl from. Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. About forty. She had blue eyes and a thin face and little hairs curling from her chin and she possessed a distinct body smell which was in its own way quite attractive. Yet there was about her one thing which reminded me of that slattern, Lizzie. Her hair. It was soft and natural blonde and hung about her shoulders like silken bubbles. Very nice. We got talking and after Bingo we walked slowly together through the back doubles towards her digs in Greyhound Road. She didn’t stop talking for one second. Talk, talk, talk, in this horrible nasal accent of hers. If it hadn’t been for that gorgeous head of hair, I’m sure I would have fled from her after the first five eternal minutes. But it fascinated me. That hair. It didn’t really belong to her. Didn’t suit her. She wasn’t fitted to keep it. Hair so beautiful was created for Lizzie, though I’m not praising Lizzie in any way of course, she was what she was and that’s that… but the more I stared at this shining glory of pale gold on this ugly head, the more I realized that I had a duty to perform… that head of hair just had to be rescued from that talkative head.
With my four-bladed penknife, which I’ve carried since I was a lad in Beaver patrol of the 29th Fulham, I slit Daphne’s throat. So swiftly and expertly that she hardly gurgled as she slithered from my loving embrace. Then with infinite care, I knelt beside her and gradually sawed the scalp from her noggin. She looked really horrible laying there all dead and bald, so I dragged her to a wheelbarrow which some builder had left in this dark and narrow alley and I dumped her body in that barrow and covered her gently with some dusty cement sacks to protect her from the rain and marauding rats, then tucking the warm and bloody head of hair under my raincoat, I hastened home.
I met loads of girls after that. There was Mildred from Hemel Hempstead, who had the most beautiful brown eyes I’ve ever seen, well, I should say the second most beautiful pair really, because Lizzie Spring’s were the most beautiful; that I must confess, even though we all know what a tramp that Lizzie was. I used to like looking into Mildred’s eyes, admiring them… but I couldn’t stand her stutter. Couldn’t say two words on the run without hissing and stumbling like an idiot woman and after two whole nights of miserable courting I took her for a stroll along the Putney towing path where I cleverly garroted her with a rusty cheese wire which had fallen into my possession. I lay her carefully on the damp night grass and very tenderly I gouged out those fascinating eyes with a teaspoon which I had brought along for that very purpose, then I tipped her in the swollen river and, with brown eyes carefully wrapped in tissue paper and popped into an Old Holborn Inn, I made my way home where I transferred the eyes to a jar of pickling vinegar and put them on a shelf in the pantry right close to Daphne’s head of hair which I kept, brushed and washed daily, under a Stilton cheese dish which had once belonged to my grandmother.
Now although I might have earlier hinted at it, I never exactly told you that I am quite the little rich man. All inherited of course from Mummy and Daddy. Mummy and Daddy died quite suddenly you see, a couple of years back (not long after Lizzie done the dirty on me in fact)… died after their car brakes failed when travelling down a mountain roadside in Wales where we had gone for a month’s holiday. Luckily, I had stayed behind in the hotel at Aberystwyth looking at my stamp collection of British and Commonwealth commemoratives, else I too would have joined them in that ghastly five thousand feet plunge to eternity. Mummy and Daddy left me this house on Lavender Hill, which is big and Victorian, two others in the better part of Chelsea, a portfolio of the most excellent shares and sixteen thousand, eight hundred pounds in cash. Yes, they left me very comfortable.
I often wonder, you know, if it was my wealth, or rather my one-day-to-be-inherited wealth, which so attracted that strumpet Lizzio to me and not my looks and personality as she would have me believe, because I can strongly recall that my opening gambit to this Jezebel of the washing machine shop was. ‘Hi, babe, how’d you fancy getting hooked up with a millionaire?’ And her eyes, those lovely brown eyes, just sparkled with LSD signs. She pursued the subject and when I told her all about Mummy and Daddy and their piles of loot, she all but volunteered to accompany me to the Victoria and Albert museum the following evening for a night out. Still, why should I care what her stinking attitudes were. I don’t even want to think about that harlot… feature for feature she doesn’t even compare with my Winnie.
Penelope was a young lass from Carlisle way whom I met at West Brompton underground station. She was just getting on and I was just getting off, but some strange compulsion made me do a swift about turn and leap back into the train to land like some white knight errant beside her. We got to chatting about the weather and money and work, and by the time we arrived at Liverpool Street station, I’d given her a tenner as she told me some very sad story about not being able to afford a maxi coat for the winter, and we were indeed on the most intimate terms, I arranging to meet her from her place of work that very afternoon.