“Oh pooh,” said Lady Therefore, chivvying him. “It’s not so much he’s a ruffler, Which, who wants to run around Greater London in the buff-tint until the reign of Queen Dick. Think, on the other hand, how extraordinarily tiresome it would be to be married”—she threw her eyes to the ceiling, maybe Beyond—“to such, to such an ostrogoth, never mind a man of colour.” Given, she had heard that the Church of Rome had honoured one of them recently: St. Martin de Porres might—might—have been a man of virtue, perhaps (though the Bishop had rumoured he was a Sicilian), but to raise to recognizable beatitude a man the colour of a tarry bowel movement was a bit much, really.
“To my mind,” she continued, her jaw creaking, “colour rhymes with trouble: always has, always will. It all goes back to Cain, doesn’t it, who stole his brother’s pottage, was turned black as a Newgate knocker, and, wrapped in his coat of many colours, was sent off in the direction of his face to Africa, the Wapping of the World, where gorillas wee-wee in waterfalls from the palm trees right in the wide-open, things go bump in the night, and where monkeys, so they say, could speak if they so wished but prefer to keep silent so they won’t be made to work, the beastly things, just like the niggers—or the Wesleyans. I’ll take my tea home, thank you.” She flapped her arms. “But will you listen to me?” She glowered and snatched a long puff. “I’ll rub-a-dub you will, my dear boy, and that” she reached up and snapped her fingers at his nose, “is your trouble.”
“There is the parish obligation, Mother.”
“That is to say?”
He looked away. “I’m to give him a marriage counsel tomorrow.” Lady Therefore stood paralyzed; she had urged Cyril’s departure too long now not to see it through to Test Match.
“Now this is something I haven’t heard,” she said with a sag that seemed to recognize the almost too late but implacably in time.
“I’m afraid it’s true, you see.”
Lady Therefore clasped her son’s chin and pulled him down to eye-level. She narrowed her eyes. “Well, I’d simply tell him how we apples swim and have done with it!”
“I could be wrong”—the palliative seemed called for—“but, well, he mightn’t understand,” Which whined.
“Haw!”
“It rather brings to mind the idea,” replied Which, marching into view on personal initiative a motive that seemed impregnable, “that broad-based under all is planted England’s oaken-hearted mood.” His fingers interlaced, neatly.
“Absolute bilge,” she snapped. “You will read poetry. Well, I’d as soon baste his jacket for him, and then see if you watch his teeth smile on the other side of his face.” She released his chin and shook her head in disbelief. “Was this well done?” she asked pointedly, aware, as she was, that remonstration was a privilege of motherhood, even if one’s son, puffed up as youngsters can get, presumed on more important business in the Temple. Which skated his shoe along its edge and looked for just a smile of corroborative solace. “Let me answer for you,” she said.
Which went rubbery to forfend disavowal.
“No!” came her answer, like a pea from a slingshot.
The two-minute interval bell sounded. Which directed his mother by the nose of her thin elbow back to their seats before the rise of the curtain, she a repository of racial declamation and torrential huffs, while he fanned from his mind thoughts that began to make manifest the easily accessible and not terribly new rubric that Life is a Bitch. He thought of St. Elmo who had his intestines wound out of him on a windlass. They sat down, but not before Which Therefore swivelled around in his seat and threw one furtive, almost pleading glance into the squash of the audience behind him to once more behold in the growing darkness, just before the Lilac Fairy blessed the marriage of the Prince and Aurora, the boy he loved.
II
Spring, so mellow, seemed an occasion of sin. The pale sky was tessellated into cirrus and white air, and the simple creases of hot sun that seemed the active gropings of a spiritual eye seeking to adjust the shafts of its focus on a country which self-assertively, almost capriciously, thwarted them with the not infrequent tesserae of thick clouds that this Royal Throne of Kings, this Other Eden, this Happy Breed of Men, this Realm, this England interposed as a disputatious sign it would reveal its infinite variety only in its own good time and would blot out with fluffy sullage any imposition, divine or otherwise, it did not ask for and consequently need not abide.
Cyril biked vigourously, in hoops, to a halt. He rolled his bicycle to the iron fence and peered up into the fanlight: dark. A card, embroidered in the margin with art nouveau squiggles, was tucked into the doorknocker under the stoop of the rectory of St. Peter Perpendicular, and a welcome message (“Adeste, fidus Cyrilus”) in vermilion ink told Cyril he need not bother to ring, simply to enter. He paused on one foot. He thought he heard music. He heard music. He loved music. Everybody loved music. These deep thoughts poured through his head. He wondered if he should simply open the door and go in. “Yes,” he philosophized.
The door opened: a wrench of his mouth mimed the wrench of the door handle. He was inside—and eased the door shut; he walked into a large living room which was filled with pots of melilot, Solomon’s seal, and prickly pear. There was an antique mortised faldstool in the corner, behind which was hung a burnished girandole mirror. Rows and rows of shelved books ran almost to the height of the high coved ceiling, a canopy so beautiful it harmonized only with that lowly self who stood below in proper dotlike awe and reverence. Such was Cyril: who then noticed a brown postcard of the Grand Hôtel, Cabourg, pinned to a wall, with a doily surround over the fireplace, and next to that was a large print of the famous Visscher Engraving of London, upon which was sellotaped a glossy photo of Marlene Dietrich, blue top hat, blue hose, inscribed “für meinen Schatz, Lola.” Music piped out from somewhere in the back of the large flat.
“Cyril,” sailed a voice from the bedroom, “is that you, dear?”
“I am, Sir Reverend.”
“Which,” the voice corrected.
Cyril shrugged. “Weetch.” He pulled off his bicycle clip.
“Have in here, honey.”
Which Therefore was sitting up in his four-poster bed, flipping through some sheaves of paper, stretching out only to momentarily flocculate one of the mauve silk pillows spread around him. Upon seeing Cyril, he peeped mischievously over the sheets, like an homunculus through a jar. A gramophone within easy access to him was blasting out, on an old 78 record, Fred and Adele Astair singing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” and he was kicking his feet up, keeping the beat, under a thick pink puff.
Fascinating Rhythm, you got me on the go!
Fascinating Rhythm, I’m all a-quiver,
What a mess you’re making! The neighbors want to know
Why I’m always shaking just like a flivver....
He scooped up a fistful of papers. “The Bishop’s directives for Mothering Sunday, damn his canonicals.” He threw them down, tittered, and spooned a globe of hippolyte from the top of a glass of Irish coffee on a tray beside him, slurping it in with a coy hunch of indulgence that implied that although he was such a bad boy, he really couldn’t help himself. Which extended another creamfilled spoon, but Cyril deferred with a goofy arm movement over his head that signified either embarrassment or, maybe, new seismic rumblings somewhere along The Great Rift.
“Yum Yums?”
“Sweeties,” Cyril said, “are being prohibited me.”
Which looked perplexed, his spoon in mid-air. “Why, pray tell?” He hesitated a moment and then looked very closely at Cyril. “Dear me, Cyril, do you pluck your eyebrows?”
“Yeep, no,” he replied. “I mean these nuts on my face are unsightly.” Which peered curiously to see several offensive nubs like seventh-cadency marks on the dexter side of his stubbled, if heraldic, cheek.
“Blemishes,” concluded Which in a bubbly, eupeptic tone, gulping the spoonful to show he was indifferent to any significance here. He waved the spoon. “But
you simply must put aside those second helpings of foo-foo you’re so keen on, mustn’t you?”
The question was rhetorical, due partially to the played-out record, for Which quickly hopped from the bed, puffed dust from the grooves, replaced the needle, and, alive with hyperboles for the immortal duo, danced for Cyril a feathery tattoo through the room, with an old faded album cover, presumably Adele, possibly Fred, as his partner. But just as Which swooped away, humming to finality on his toe and arched backwards in a deliquescent swoon image, he noticed the empty bedroom. Cyril had disappeared. He had ducked from the room, not so much mortified by as unable to cope with a circumstance then unforeseen, critical only in that it had no particularly exact precedence in his relationship with the clergy: the priest was stark naked.
... O how I long to be
The man I used to be!
Fascinating Rhythm,
Oh won’t you stop picking on me!
Which clicked off the machine. He slipped into a black kimono and some rope-soled canvas shoes, blaming himself for having embarrassed Cyril: a bad complexion, he knew, could be the very devil, but it would certainly clear itself up and was simply the result of his ravenous penchant for coagulate meals of half-rotten skate and greasy chips in those fourpenny ordinaries in the Notting Hill backstreets, for instance, and elsewhere in those teashops where the knives and forks were chained to the table and the gurry on the floor lay thick as an afghan. He thought of St. Rocco, patron saint of acne and skin diseases and, by extension, teenagers. Simply, the muse Hexachlorophene was not Cyril’s. Lately, for lack of a care Which would have gladly provided, Cyril had come to show himself somewhat ratty: his eyes, once handsome, now looked like two rubber grommets; two brown shrubs of moustache looked like two small animals burrowing into his nostrils; and one had to look several times at his flaring bushy hair to ascertain for sure that he was not wearing a Russian shepka. On the other hand, Which was thankful that Cyril was a cut or more above the usual Negro who, more often than not, took to the streets of London with more cheek than Dick Whittington’s Cat, showing feet the size of shovels, soiled eyes, and a kind of paraphimosis of the nose. But he did not want to offend Cyril. Not at all. That was the last thing he wanted to do.
Cyril had appeared a quite different fellow before he got settled in London, that is, just when he had presented himself, at Which’s invitation, fresh from Negroland to the parish council with only a tarnished pitchpipe, a tunable voice, and the chewed manuscript for a “Kyrie” for wooden clackers and reed fingerpipes in his back pocket. The vicar from the old St. Mary Overie’s, visiting Rev. Therefore at that time, remarked, in fact, that he, Cyril, actually had the beautiful Greek profile of Master Ludovico Ariosto, though he felt he needed to add, lifting his bumper of ale and squeaking with laughter and wheezes, that he was “in his altitudes” and blamed that on Which’s inexhaustible cellar.
Which worshipped Cyril on the spot, thinking, as he was, of the legendary beauty of the Hamites—tall stature, oval face, and magnificent physique, each one to the last. And now, lethargic and crablike, the poor fellow was crawling in a most unbeautiful way toward that subterranean cave, demonstrably female and the so-called apotheosis of the patently attainable she, which shuts to with the speed of the Cyclades and the noise of thunder, whereby the feelers snap and, unpincered, the shells shatter like slate in an implosion of foolish microscopic crusts. Which, however, hoped with all his heart to exorcise him of this little chit, and he thought of St. Equitius who once expelled a devil which a nun had inadvertently swallowed on the duct of a lettuce leaf. From that still pulsant body must the good curate of St. Peter’s now pluck those arrows, twanging still, shot from the hot little hands of that hideous Cupidette who had forced him to his knees and sent him into a blind, even ridiculously happy, valediction to all good sense. His Dark Angel would sing again.
The Shilluks, the tribe of which Cyril was a member, occupied the country along the west side of the Nile, northward from about Lake No. Cyril’s grandfather was a Bongo of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province and made enough money in the red and white gum business to send his grandson to the Gordon College of Khartoum (“Old C.G., eh?” Which once smiled in recognition), at which time he converted to Anglicanism—the angels, it was clear, were of the same persuasion—got interested in music, met Anita, and flunked out, in that order. His grandfather—for his father, whom God recompense, he never knew as that good soul, having one day carved a boat from a sunt tree for the Independence Day flotilla, suffered a rather embarrassing and inopportune cardiac arrest just at the moment of launching—refused to be demoralized and sent Cyril with his three stuffed carpetbags to London, or, as he said, The Land of the White Gums, with the express order that he was to translate into Tshi, Ewe, Efik, and Mandingo the company’s multicoloured gum catalogue and not to come back until. Anita, still à la barre in a local dancing school, promised to follow and pressed a kiss into his palm that burned still.
Cyril’s grandfather, the night before Cyril would leave to sail up the Nile, threw a huge outdoor banquet for him there underneath the stars and moon, having invited all the villagers to eat freely of all the roasted collops of bushbuck, dik-dik, and warthog, all spitted to a juicy brown, after which Cyril moved clockwise around the guests and kissed them all—for it was in perfect accord with an old Shilluk rite to offer to rise and kiss everyone chastely on the brow, after each meal, as a post-prandial symbol of agape and goodwill. He found himself in a backwater of London nine days afterwards in a bed-and-breakfast with his dictionaries, a snippet of Anita’s thermogene hair, and an acute case of homesickness.
Life broadened somewhat: Cyril had taken one long trip to see some of his fellow countrymen who were studying religion up in Thedwastry, a school world-renown for its plain chant, and one afternoon he spent all his time in the British Museum, not only the Areopagus of British culture but a building, it turned out, with long, long corridors where he loved to just sit around and bellow, the echo was so pleasing. But the guards, on that particular day, blew their whistles and told him never to come back again. Another spasmodic, but engaging, diversion for Cyril was found in the tunnels of the Underground, where, as a kind of Aeolean refreshment, he jumped against the warm rushes of wind. He waited. Wind blew. He jumped. He waited. Wind blew. He jumped. But this was a pastime not terribly over-reaching in its variety. That was when he began to spend his afternoons in Green Park, where, sitting under a tree by himself, he boomed out to stuff the void of longing with the shatter of flying muscles, a never before heard music beat either plaintively or rapidly on a zebra-hide drum he carried along with him and which, one day, caught the attention of Rev. Therefore, at that time walking his schnauzer in St. James. The music conveyed to Which what he felt must be the night side of Africa’s consciousness, the pagan throb and delightful menace of rhythms that had thundered timelessly over a continent through the uncorrupted songs of strong, black giants he’d read about, dreamt of, but never met. A bead of sensation had now appeared on Which Therefore’s faucet—and one, he felt, that could never stop dripping. “Where are you from?” Which had asked. “There,” a voice announced in a single vibration from a dark, lovely body. Cyril was pointing across the park to Africa.
There were small, uncomplicated interludes that followed the first formal visit to the rectory: Which lent Cyril the odd pound, took him to an occasional play, and eventually convinced him to channel his talents through the rationally directed aesthetic of a High Church choir which for some time the priest had been trying to organize. And now his charge was about to forsake the merry servitude of God’s Work for the corrosive and fugitive state the insufficiently self-reliant euphemistically called marriage. Dedication napped.
“You. Wicked. Young. Thing,” announced Which, who entered the living room and moved through it like Henry pacing the Cloth of Gold. “Failing to show up at Evensong yesterday, Cyril, I should give you a jolly good hiding is what I should do.” He threw up the shades. “Rather a do
dge you’ve put me into, as well, may I add?” Then Which held up a bottle of cognac. “Drinkie, mmm?” Cyril slapped his hands together and gawked, nodding with delight. Which filled two tumblers; Cyril grabbed his glass, smiled, and rolled his eyes with satisfaction. “You will have an excuse, of course, fifty of them, but I shan’t hope you imagine that will make me any happier.” He tossed back his drink, smacked his lips. “It won’t.”
“It was imperative for me to will have gone to Royal Ballet to disgust this conference with Miss Anita,” explained Cyril. He laughed. “Oh me, I have a scheme.”
“Anita?” Which could be obtuse.
“Anita the girl,” Cyril replied, turning away and selecting a self-conscious prop from the shelf in the form of a book; he opened it to the bookplate, a ferroprussiate reproduction of one of Rouault’s mauled Christs, with Which Therefore’s name in ten-point type substituted for Pilate’s inscription (Which could not resist off-beat humour). Cyril began drumming his fingers on the plate. The priest, a booklover, saw the motion, owing to some strange sense of urgency, shift into a claw, a scrape, and immediately pulled it away and returned it lovingly to his collection, among which numbered: The Compleat Adrian Beverland; a facsimile of “The Porkington Manuscript”; Simon the Anker’s The Fruyte of Redemcyion; The Dramatic Works of Shakerly Marmion (1602-1639); Josephus Petrinus’s Pomettes; Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook; The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art; Coryat’s Crudities; Edward’s Gangroena; a copy, in boards, of the Complutensian Polyglot; P.C.T.’s Nosterel; Sacrapanti’s Le Capucin Démasqué; A treatise of fysshynge, wyth an angle (the first piscatorial essay in our mother tongue printed by Wynkyn de Worde); a stained codex of bromides from the not always reliable Nennius; Fuller’s Gnomologia; Pierce’s Supererogation; The Wooden Works of Thos. Anonymous; the rare Whimzies (1631); Geo. Coleman’s The Rodiad; a black-letter tract called “The Nun in Her Smock”; E. Ramberg’s Die Zuchtrute von Tante Anna; an extremely peculiar bisexual roman à clef called Raymond; the Church History of St. Benet Sherehog; The History of Costume; a few incunabula; and R. M. Ince’s Lipstick, reputed to be the locus classicus of the dildo.
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