“Awful,” said Mrs. Cullinane.
Touching a finger to her chin, Mrs. Cullinane pondered the frightening aspects of seeing a bread line five miles long filled with beggars, schinocephalic pygmies, gypsies, old men in tatters, imported grobians teetering on the edge of some evolutionary mishap, and Negroes with eyepatches and their bronze-age cutlery, stropped, blood red and as long as broom handles, all marching with their ferocious wives and polydactylic offspring into Buckingham Palace where, in a stroke, they would chew past the carpets, do the buttery, weasel into the state bins and wardrobe, and devour everything in sight, up to and including the Queen’s Candles. She came to a quick decision and sat back quickly. “Well, why throw the helve after the hatchet? Give them mince and they want quince,” she said, sadly shaking her head.
“Honest,” said Mrs. Cullinane.
“And truly,” Mrs. Shoe sighed. “I don’t know why we just don’t build pens for them.”
“You can’t get the wood nowadays,” said Mrs. Proby, her face as crooked as a pastry wheel. “What, somebody told you you could get the wood? You just can’t get the wood.”
“Still,” replied Mrs. Shoe, “it’d be much better than tenting out, as I’m told they do, with all the foxes and midges up there in the Pennine Crags. There’d be an odour coming up, I should think, that would turn the world around. And then some.”
“It’s like catching wind in a cabbage net.”
“Aye, there’s where the shoe pinches,” muttered Mrs. Shoe as she sloshed an inch of Babycham to and fro in her glass and watched the motion, without much reaction. She was coming around.
Mrs. Proby slapped the table with take-charge force. “And so say all of us, Mrs. Shoe. I’ve pinched a shoe or two this morning,” said Mrs. Proby, captious and wreathed with simpers. “I’ve tightened the screws proper to the Chinee on my ground floor, and it will be a blue Thursday in Cornwall before he gets my business again, the bleeder.”
Mrs. Shoe finished her Babycham and looked at Mrs. Proby with chagrin. “No, I suppose you’re right. One can’t mix leaves with grass and come up with a forest.” It was something she remembered she read, she thought, in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help or possibly Eliza Cook’s I’m Afloat. Mrs. Shoe suddenly felt a grip on her wrist and Mrs. Cullinane’s face an inch from her own.
“There you are, dear, it’s all a question of a different crawl of life, and that’s why Mrs. Proby and I are absolutely shocked to see you princessing through every highroad in and about London as open and carefree as ten vicars. Leave that for the American tourists and the Jews.”
“Safety?” asked Mrs. Proby. “It’s a kicking shame, that word.”
“I believe in safety. And liberty, I think,” said Mrs. Shoe.
“Fair words butter no parsnips, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Cullinane.
Disconnected, mutually irrelevant sentences crackled along the communications, post to post.
“Life,” replied Mrs. Shoe thinking of the Middle Ages, “is different than before, it really is.”
“Well, that’s the bone of contention, isn’t it? Different. Say the word, it sounds different. And if things are different, how can they be the same, see? Do you see? Now we have a good sit-down, watch at the telly, smoke us a cigarette, and once a fortnight press a call,” said Mrs. Proby, her forehead corrugated with the worry that the world was not oriented the same way.
“Because this is what we like to do, see?” Mrs. Cullinane felt better. She crossed her hands. “When the going gets tough—”
“But what,” Mrs. Proby gruffly interrupted, “the Quashees and Pygmies or whatever is tossed your way, they’re not only different, they smell like the Freemasons and their queachy back-to-backs. You take a whiff of their gardens sometime. Pee, Yoo: Pew—and I don’t mean maybe.” Mrs. Proby held her hands out, palms upward, and slapped them down hard. “God strike me pink, we’re in for it, this country. I mean, we are in for it.”
“They think it’s the fashion.”
“Fashion, shmashion,” growled Mrs. Proby. Her corns were shooting. “They eat queer dishes, write upside down, and whatnot. Peddler’s French on the one hand, St. Giles’s Greek on the other. They say they can’t even swear an oath on the Good Lord’s Bible in the courts; they have to blow out candles or break saucers so people will believe they’re not lying, the sneaks. Now, you see, who gains?” Mrs. Proby knocked a tattoo on the table and said: “I’m off to the movies.”
Canikins clinked one final time.
Mrs. Shoe was leaning forward as Mrs. Proby rose. “So you told the Chinaman where to get off?”
Mrs. Proby winked like the sly fox. “If I didn’t,” she said, her eyes half-lidded with the tracelet of a smile in them like the seductress Phryne’s, “may I turn into a titmouse and go live in a teacup in South Wales, which,” she added, “God forbid.”
“Very trotty of you, dear,” said Mrs. Cullinane, pulling the pub door open. The cold air and dark sky held. A fog now hung over the streets like a nimbus, so thick one could have stuck a broomstick in it and it would not have fallen down.
“Think so?” asked Mrs. Shoe.
“Thought so,” Mrs. Proby proudly confessed.
“Think so?”
“Thought so.”
Mrs. Proby reminded the ladies of the ham dinner, pecked each of them with a kiss in an open space above the shoulder, roughly near the cheek, and bustled like a Christmas turkey across Mossop Street, up Pont Street, and toward the bus stop near the Cadogan Hotel.
IV
In the dim shaft of a doorway, set off in a mews past which Mrs. Proby swiftly moved, a small figure stood in the shadows, a dirty grey hat pulled down like a filthy bowl on his head, his hands in his pockets, and tucked beneath his right arm a black oblong box. He was as inconspicuous as the urine stains, used condoms, and gnawed cigarette butts which brought to the doorway more stink than notice: Mr. Yunnum Fun watched.
The tall metal arch on the corner where people queued up for buses was virtually empty, except for a very pretty girl with black boots and wearing a sort of black Victorian cape, around which was wrapped a multicoloured collegiate muffler thrown over her shoulder. She wore a miniskirt and was pencilling marginal notes in a green paperback book. A large red double-decker bus with No. 22 on its screen swung around the corner and lurched to a stop with a thin screech. Mrs. Proby lifted her coat, grabbed the support bar, and stepped aboard, moving slow as an egg-wife’s trot down the aisle of the bus. She sat down by a window and smacked her lips. The girl skipped up the rubber stairs. As the bus began to depart, the small man dodged from the doorway onto the bus and scuttled up the stairs like a dark, angry crab. The girl instinctively, her pencil in the air, turned to see who was sitting behind her, especially since she felt a hot, fetid snuff of air ruffle her hair several quick times. The small man sat rigid as a screw; two eyes glinted menacingly from a face that looked like a pan of failed cornbread. The girl stood up and went down the steps and took a seat opposite a fat lady whose arms were crossed sort of triumphantly and who was smacking her lips.
Anybody sitting on the benches near Hyde Park Corner or stepping about the foot of the Wellington Arch would never have noticed, so familiar it was, the rushing bus that wound its way through the teeming colony of cabs, scooters, and traffic, into Piccadilly; nor would have anything of the extraordinary been found in the passengers aboard: the heavy white-pink face of an English lady flat against the window on the lower tier, a dirty hat pulled over a greyish-yellow face pressed like a mat on a pane seven feet directly above her on the upper.
Mrs. Proby snapped open her purse, took out a sixpence, and paid the conductor, an Indian with a small goatee and a bright white smile set in perfect harmony against his smooth brown skin. “Fivepence,” Mrs. Proby snuffled. The conductor cranked out her receipt, wrapped it in a penny, and handed her both. “Wery veil,” the Indian smiled as he lurched toward the back of the bus. “Very well, my fanny,” said Mrs. Proby with a scratch of annoyan
ce. It was then that Mrs. Proby noticed in her handbag the movie ticket returned to her the afternoon before. A happy synapse took place in her mind: she suddenly decided that she would go back to the cinema, sit on throughout the whole film, to the end this time. “My bubble’s not for bursting,” she repeated to herself in a loud voice. The girl sitting across the aisle sat straight up and appeared nervously disgusted; she slammed her book shut and watched the buildings zipping by. Fine, Mrs. Proby thought to herself, there was time for the matinee, a quick bus back home to cook the ham, and the added glory—in her own eyes, in Mrs. Cullinane’s, in the world’s—of English stick-to-it-iveness by dint of further proof in the face of fear. England expects, Mrs. Proby recalled Nelson had said, every man to do his duty. That applied to women, she reminded herself, for who that fought at Trafalgar had not been born of woman? “You?” Mrs. Proby angrily asked the girl sitting opposite her as she surveyed the exposure of her legs. The girl peacefully stood up and, making an obscene gesture under her cape, walked haughtily and undismayed to the front of the bus. Mrs. Proby chuckled crazily. Everything was perfect. She stepped off the bus.
On the street a pale, hollow-cheeked young man with afflicted eyes—an evangelist who looked like a pair of pliers—handed Mrs. Proby a throwaway, a single sheet which headlined in large type: “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” Mrs. Proby snorted and sent the sheet into the wind. “I’ll take it right here, duckie. And a thousand pounds to a gooseberry that that is just where it will be.”
A thin soot of rain had begun to fall. Mrs. Proby whipped over her grey hair a transparent plastic headcover and, with a halting gait of jerks and starts and fury, beat it over to a nearby tobacconist for two packs of tipped Players, a box of matches, and the sweet narcotic of three Cadbury’s Fruit-and-Nut Bars: the innutritious artillery of the easily appeased. A dirty grey hat, invisible to Mrs. Proby, bobbed up and then down behind a posting box not ten feet away. She scampered into the theatre.
The theatre, with its smell of weak lilac and cheap caporal, was the perfect hush in soft red lights that Mrs. Proby loved: funereal, anonymous, the nethermost retreat where the tired, amorous, and lonesome could sleep or fondle or expatiate in ones or twos or threes, far from the madding crowd and unbothered in the reliquary of pure imagination. Mrs. Proby walked past a short arcade over the top of which a sign read “Mind Your Head” and, following the direct line of the usherette’s beam, padded down the soft carpet and into her seat, where, after stuffing her plastic headcover into her coat, she rearranged herself with one fat leg tucked under her bottom and the other dangling in a manner which indicated mitral insufficiency.
Mrs. Proby bit into her first sweet in the middle of a highly coloured, animated cartoon: a black silly-looking duck, with a collar of white feathers, was standing on a bathroom sink and whistling a tune while lathering his reflection in the mirror. Then, stropping a straight razor, the duck proceeded to shave the mirror with delicacy, oohs and aahs, and the increasing relief and sense of freshness of the newly shaven clean. Suddenly, a huge humanoid body, visible from the shoulders down, lumbered onto the screen and stood behind the duck who happily continued his shaving, humming and whistling. The arms of the body crossed in the patience that is a danger sign. The duck, seeing the humanoid reflected in the mirror, did a double take, and, as a light bulb appeared and flashed over its head, smirked and pointed to the half-shaven reflection in the mirror. The arms fell and a massive fist crashed into the mirror, shattering the glass, and a loud human howl followed. A red circle closed in on the screen and zeroed in on the duck doubled up with laughter and malicious quacks. The cartoon ended to random applause. Mrs. Proby slapped her hands together twice in amusement, but a question intruded: why, she wondered, did they never show the heads of human beings in the cartoons? It was not the first time it had occurred to her. Mrs. Proby was now into her second sweet. I’m delighted, she thought.
The balcony, high above, swooped into a dark ellipsis to where the eye of the camera sent out a widening cone, filled with smoke, of jumping prismatic combinations and riddled the screen with colour and movement. No one was about. Mr. Yunnum Fun stepped cautiously down each carpeted step to the front row, running along in front of which a much-thumbed bronze rail passed the whole length of the balcony. He inched forward slowly, peered down, and spanned the audience with a kind of mathematical radar, in concentric semicircles: children directly below; two men on the right, coats in their laps; a group of teenage girls far to the left, all tucking into ice-cream sandwiches; an older boy with long hair, his feet hung over the seat in front of him. It was dark, very dark. Mr. Yunnum Fun blinked. He watched patiently. His small head moved slowly and confidently from row to row, from seat to seat, just as if, in tracing along a continuous rope of pearls, one should be startled by the discovery of a bead so base that one would wonder how it could possibly have escaped detection. There: the bead was found. Yunnum Fun sat down devoid of emotion, wiped his hands on his coat, and placed the oblong box in his lap. He watched.
The movie had begun: a full screen, stained in a deep jelly red, began to drip away in vertical collops and slow ooze, and, to the accompaniment of atonal wooden clacks and the ping-pang of Oriental drums and strings, was revealed, in the distorted size of wide-view, the enormous, menacing face of Fu Manchu. A blue mist of cloud curled around the head, his eyes shut, and, with the crash of a shattering gong, the hint of a cruel smile played around his mouth. The eyes slowly opened. Mrs. Proby slid her leg out from beneath her bottom and grabbed for a cigarette. Her third match lighted it.
There was to be no funny business: Fu Manchu, from his throne of gold inlay, ordered right off with an incomprehensible monosyllable and a pointed finger three bald Mongols to abduct a rich old English lady (hyphenated surname, photographs in close-up) and bring her back to him. The finger curved and indicated, in the fashion of a vermilion-tipped dowsing rod, the spot directly in front of him. He tapped the spot with an embroidered slipper. A sloe-eyed Chinese girl, her skirt split to her third rib, purred up to Fu Manchu’s elbow. He kicked her onto the floor, but she loved him for it, she loved him for it. The camera quickly moved in on the skirt, over the legs. Then Fu Manchu clapped his hands and a bulb-headed Chinese servant entered bearing a tray, upon which sat two pieces of hewn ibex horn. Fu Manchu grabbed the two objects and jammed them together, making a pipe, which the servant speedily lighted, bowing awkwardly, because backwardly, out of the room right afterwards. As Fu Manchu puffed, a pensive evil expression spread over his countenance, and a poetic haze was simulated on the screen by means of a semi-opaque camera lens of purple, green, and sepia. Images flattened, distorted, distended. The ping-pangs were now hysterical, as was one wild boom of thunder.
“Opium,” Mrs. Proby blurted out in unmusical reflex.
“Oh for chrissakes,” said a man two rows in front of her who had turned around and glared.
“Go pee in your knickers,” Mrs. Proby yelled.
The close dark of the balcony had no effect on the immaculate precision with which Yunnum Fun unlocked his black box. He dropped the key into his pocket and carefully lifted two black ivory tubes out of the green velvet interior, closed the box, and placed it quietly on the floor directly between his two small feet. Then, with surgical delicacy, he neatly screwed the two pieces of black tubing together, making of the conjunction a sort of long, hollow wand. He glanced to either side of him, lifted it, and peeped through the open space at the end like a rangefinder, where on a certain point below came into focus, just above a thick ring of smoke, a blocky, cuboidal head. Yunnum Fun then dipped into an inner pocket of his coat and withdrew a tiny sack from which he preciously lifted a small pellet: a corrosive sublimate of letharge, orpiment, and stramonium, hardened into a microscopic ball, touched with a drop of aconite, and shaped to a pin. He clasped it in his hand. He watched. He waited.
Mrs. Proby wondered, at this point, if she were in any shape for her ham.
Fu Manchu, his finger s
upporting his cheekbone, leaned back onto his throne like a bored king. A gong, three kowtows: and the bald Mongols entered, carrying over their right shoulders a large Oriental carpet rolled into a cylinder like an enormous anchovy. All the while, in the role of a kind of town crier, a slant-eyed attendant lord, in silver pajamas covered with miniature pagodas done in spangles, recited from a scroll of rice paper the lady’s proscription (a dossier of her crimes, doubtless), an afflatus breathed through with unintelligible but flowery Chinese subjunctives. It sounded, Mrs. Proby tried to tell herself, like her letters of complaint to the dry cleaner. She spat, for she had just at that moment fired the wrong end of a filter-tip cigarette. The burnt smell of synthetic toast or galoshes in flame sickened her. Mrs. Proby had begun to perspire for some time now. The ham was off, for sure.
The homily, jagged with invective, ended. Fu Manchu again clapped his hands: in perfect sequence, the three bald accessories stepped a shade to the left, simultaneously dropped the rug to the level of their six large extended hands, and, then, threw it with a heave and a grunt flapping toward the center of the throne, where, after completely unravelling, it deposited in a squat and rubbery heap a blue-haired old English lady, bound, muffled, spavined. The woman struggled. Fu Manchu rose and tore from her throat a diamond-studded, collarwide necklace, dangling it from his fingers over her nose, over her navel. The girl beamed like a lotus. The servants folded their arms.
Mrs. Proby stiffened, gripped the armrests of her seat. Her jaw moved.
From the folds of his silk cowl, Fu Manchu slipped out a chopstick and drew it across his hands. The sloe-eyed girl salivated. The English lady gnawed hysterically at her gag, her eyes blazing like zircons, her little feet kicking the floor rapidly like a metronome gone insane. Fu Manchu moved closer to her, one slim eyebrow crooking into a perfect caret in his no-nonsense, veridical way as he examined the circuit in the shell of the fashionable lady’s ear, pinched it, pulled it as wide as a small flag. He gripped the chopstick like a dagger, and his face shook like a wobbling blanc-mange. Mrs. Proby, ready for murder, opened her mouth wider and wider. Her face was washed of all colour, and an involuntary leverage was lifting her slowly from her seat.
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