Mr Allwright was so discreet.
Even if he had been able to explain to his employer the mystery of his glass marbles, it was possibly unnecessary. As for Mrs Allwright, there was no question. She was a voracious cat who could not digest half of what she gobbled up. He left her to the pleasures of Mrs Mutton’s company. Her elder sister, all in black, sat on the glassed-in veranda, sipping Indian tea, and masticating pumpkin scones.
After the storekeeper had taught him to drive the buggy, and he was allowed to go round delivering the orders, Arthur felt more independent than before. To flick the flies off Treasure’s rump, as the bay mare clumped and snorted down the empty roads, her rear opening curiously like a passion fruit. The yellow dung went plop plop. Arthur Brown would roll on his seat in time with the buggy long before its motion called for it.
Waldo decided in later years: Arthur is an unconfessed voluptuary.
Arthur liked that; it sounded in itself voluptuous.
He liked best of all to arrive with Mrs Musto’s order, crunching round the drive to the back, where Louie presided over the girls, behind the virginia creeper and the plumbing. After he had scrambled down, and gone inside with the deal case full of groceries, they would feed him cherry conserve, or peaches in brandy, or if he could get there early enough, voluptuous slices of boiled ham.
“I shan’t forget how to live, eh?” With difficulty he forced it out, through his stuffed mouth, past his fatty lips.
“Spare the masters, feed the servants. That’s my motter!” Louie used to say.
Then when the old girl got on the tube: “That’s ’Er. No one need spare ’Er. Not Fairy Flour.”
“Yes, madam. Oh no, madam,” Louie breathed into the mouthpiece. “There is the ham, madam, for luncheon, as we ’ad agreed, hadn’t we? Oh yes, madam. After the consommy jelly in tasses. And the celery sticks will taste lovely stuffed. And the marsala bomb to finish off with. Yes, madam.”
“No bomb would finish ’Er,” Louie said after she had stuck the stopper in the mouthpiece.
She and her mistress had been quarrelling it out for close on twenty years.
After the grocery items had been checked, more often than not Arthur would get up and wander past the green baize door to the inner parts of Mrs Musto’s house. He had never been denied access to them. Everyone was mostly too busy: dusting, digesting, looking for somebody who couldn’t be found, sulking, making it up, or preparing to give in their notice yet again. He would plunge deeper through the high rooms, fingering the blind busts, and books nobody ever read, the unused china, and the photographs of those who had ceased to matter. Mrs Musto seemed on the whole to prefer to know people only slightly. They were always preparing her crammed house for the entrance of someone she hadn’t yet got to know.
The morning he went so far as to explore an upstairs room Arthur was surprised to find Mrs Musto standing in her bloomers and camisole. Mrs Musto, too, was surprised. It appeared as though she had just finished having a cry. Her impulse was to scream, until she realized who it was.
“Oh dear, Arthur,” she said, “it is you! I am sure yer will understand.”
Then she flopped into a chair, as though she could not have stood any longer, her ankles and emotions swelling as they were, and sat like a half-filled bag of flour.
“What is it, Mrs Musto?” Arthur asked, not only because he was curious to know, but because she obviously wanted him to.
“As you are interested,” she said, “it is, well, it is Him. Stubbens, I mean.”
Then she re-arranged her arms, from which the skeins of flesh were dangling over the arms of the chair.
“It is that creature,” she said. “Nobody could call me difficult, but I am not wax in anybody’s hands.”
Remembering the blunt but well-kept hands of the elderly chauffeur who had been a groom, Arthur couldn’t help remarking:
“Wouldn’t mind betting he manicures them.”
But Mrs Musto ignored it.
“If my husband,” she mumbled, as she bungled her thoughts, “if my husband was only available.”
Arthur waited, because he saw it was intended.
“Ralph — ” Mrs Musto picked her way, “I lost me husband, Arthur, in Palermo. We had gone there against advice. It was already too late. Too hot. Perhaps you know I suffer from the prickly heat. And She — this woman from Boston — carried Ralph off by the scruff of the neck — in her teeth, yer might say — if they hadn’t been a denture. Out of a cathedral!”
Mrs Musto was so upset.
“Ralph could charm the ladies just by lecturin’ to ’em. He had fagged it up — out of books — for no other purpose. He could talk to ’em about the Crusades. He told them about those chastity contraptions. I can hardly bear to hear the term, let alone use it. Because, indecency apart, Ralph had assaulted their chastity before they ever guessed he had the key.”
All this was most mysterious but rewarding to Arthur Brown.
“How did things turn out in Boston?”
“I never cared to enquire. Or Cincinnati. Or Denver City. Ralph always had to play for higher stakes. He never stopped to think whether he had lost the game before. Me, I wouldn’t have let ’im lay a finger on the business. His head,” Mrs Musto explained, “his business head was abominable. Otherwise, Ralph was a personable man. One of the sculptured men.” Her voice added to it.
“And do you happen to have a photo of your former husband, Mr Ralph Musto?” Arthur asked. “I mean, it’s nice to keep some memento, even of the duds.”
He so much liked to see how other people looked, particularly the husbands of the wives and the wives of the husbands — to work it out.
Mrs Musto grumbled and frowned. Her bosom boiled inside the camisole.
“Ralph,” she said, “was not worth the silver to stand ’im in.”
And opening her mouth she cried out, out of the back of her throat, out of her matrimonial past.
But shut up pretty quick. As though she had realized something for the first time.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “this other one — this creature — is the dead spit of Ralph!”
She might have begun hollering again, but remembered enough to gather up her slackness from the chair.
“Oh dear,” she said, “there’s this mob I’m expectin’. Evelyn and Bertie are motorin’ up, with some divine Peruvian contralto, if she can be got out of bed bi luncheon.
At once Mrs Musto rushed at the pots on her dressing-table, and began to smear, and dab, and hit herself hugely with a powder puff, her bottom sticking out behind.
So Arthur knew he was dismissed.
He meandered down through the cool house, where slavery was made to look the most enticing freedom. He went touching such objects as he passed: the loaded sceptres of tuberoses, a crystal bird, the little Moorish torchbearer, the marbles of Mrs Musto’s solitaire board.
Something was nagging at him in the library. He began dawdling through the books, some of them almost too heavy to lift. Some of them. Then his nostrils dilated, with pure animal conviction, or else that psychic sense his mother hoped she possessed. His hair bristling. His blood racing him, his heart thundering, breath thicker. In no time he was all prickly, looking through the books from which Mr Ralph Musto had learnt more than was good for him. What they would have said at home made him swallow a mouthful of guilt.
He had found, but only just, what he must have been supposed to find, when Mrs Musto came downstairs.
“What,” she said, “Arthur, I never suspected,” she said, “that you were another one for books.