'Now,' said the willowy man, lifting a long forefinger. 'I shall be away for a little while. I don't want any of you people leaving this room and going out to get drunk and perhaps wandering on to the stage in the middle of any of the love duets. I want you to stay here and remain sober. Cards I do not object to, nor any other quiet pastime such as reading. But nothing boisterous or hobbledehoyish. Do I make myself clear?' He went off. Two minutes later Edwin also went off, quietly, with his clothes and shoes under his arm in a little bundle. The hospital cap had disappeared. Never mind. Wig soon. Nobody noticed him leave, as many became engaged in a kind of rugby game with something or other they found in the Salome basket.
Edwin wandered quietly round at stage level but saw Les nowhere. The orchestra was playing a kind of railway scherzo during a sweating scene-change, and various eminent Victorian Americans - people, Edwin presumed, with a separate line each in the vocal score - were coming from dressing-rooms and waiting in the wings. One of the male principals said: 'Bloody awful opera it is,' in a Welsh accent. It was certainly a very long opera if the first act was anything to go by. Edwin wavered like an old man, leaning heavily on his crook, towards the dressing-rooms. Most of the doors were open and all the rooms were empty, save where one tenor sprayed his throat and trilled abominably afterwards. Another room seemed inhabited by an ectoplasmic wraith of cigar-smoke. Edwin entered softly here and, to his delight, found a very good white shirt and a pair of nylon socks on a radiator. On the dressing-table, under hideous bright bulbs, was a small pile of signed photographs. Edwin could not read the signature, but he disliked at sight the podgy smirking face, consciously celebrated, and he looked for other things to steal. Money seemed somehow vulgar, barefaced, so he chose a ring from a ring stand and put it in his smock pocket. Stepping out of the dressing-room he paused, undecided. Then there was the fortissimo of a flushed cistern, a lavatory door opened, and a woman displaying opulent breasts, possibly from her largeness the heroine, came swinging out in a flowing robe. Edwin bowed low and took over the lavatory. He stripped himself, then put on the stolen garments. The shirt was somewhat loose at the collar, and Edwin saw in the mirror for an instant an ancient literary celebrity - Aeschylus head and tortoise neck, probably O.M. Still, it didn't look too bad. He left the smock on the lavatory seat, opened the door and peered out. Nobody there.
As he walked gently away from this star region he encountered, with a sudden shock, an ancient and formidable-looking woman, dressed in chatelaine black and trodden-down slippers. 'Well,' she said, chewing roundly, 'and what might you be after?'
'A wig,' said Edwin truthfully.
'Oh, a wig,' said the woman, mollified. 'What size and what colour, might I ask?'
'I take seven in hats, I think,' said Edwin. 'And, oh, any colour you like.'
'It is not a question of what you or I like,' said the old woman, 'but of what is wanted by them as knows. You don't know much about wigs, and that's a fact. You'd better come with me.' Edwin followed her to a store which smelt of matches, interpreted by him as human hair. 'An awkward sort of shape of a head,' said the old woman, still carrying on with her rotary chewing. She tried him with a full-length Adonis, Caroline ringlets, Jerry Cruncher spikes. 'How about this one?' she said finally. It fitted well, reddish Byronic curls. Edwin regarded himself in a fine old blue mirror. Quite the little poet. 'Thank you,' he said. 'Thank you very much indeed.'
He was now in a great hurry to get out, but the old woman was inclined to gossip. 'No tunes like the old ones,' she said, chumbling, 'either for sweetness or catchiness. Lot of noise it is nowadays.' To confirm this, the orchestra lurched into a long-held chord of twelve notes, all of them different, very loud. 'Mark my words,' said the old woman, 'the rot set in with them Germans - Andel and Waggoner and such. Sweet old airs there was before, as none of them nowadays could go nowhere near.'
Edwin excused himself and left. Suddenly he found himself caught up in a rather podgy gang of Red Indians, giggling before they made their choral entry. They waved tomahawks at Edwin, and one said, in a refined voice: 'How about a nice spot of scalping, old boy?' Edwin grew frightened. This, of course, was the medical staff of the hospital, all dressed up. There, surely was Railton, and that chief of many feathers was Begbie, all expert in scalping. 'How,' said the chief in greeting, now clearly not Begbie. But Edwin fled.
Outside in the street a car, familiar to Edwin, was parked, a toffee-golden French loaf gleaming under the lamp. Bob was there, too. 'Thought you'd be out sooner or later,' he said. 'Now we'll go and really see about that smoked salmon. And the other things as well. I've got some lovely things to show you,' he said, gripping Edwin by the upper arm. 'Didn't fool me a bit,' he said, 'wearing that lot up there. I'd spot those eyes a mile off. Kinky, they are. We're two kinky ones, that's us.'
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Weak as kittens and water Edwin let himself be led to the car. But he felt himself protected by an armour of shirt and socks, a casque of curls, the talisman of a ring. The ring, however, he at once remembered, was still in the pocket of the stage smock that lay, with the stage crook, in that lavatory. At the wheel, Bob said:
'You should eat smoked salmon with brown bread and have red pepper on it, really. Now, I could nip out on the way to the flat and get those things, I suppose, but I don't trust you, see. You might take a leap out and get lost again. I don't bear any ill will about it, but I'm not having that happen.' He spoke like a man whose time was valuable. 'So we won't be having brown bread nor red pepper with that smoked salmon. I hope you don't mind.'
'We could,' said Edwin with hope, 'go into a shop together, couldn't we? There'd be no chance of my nipping away then, would there?' Oh, wouldn't there? he thought.
'Oh, yes, there would,' said Bob. He shook his head, sad, world-weary. 'And at traffic lights, too. That's why, as you see, I'm keeping to the side-streets. It's not very far, my flat isn't, that's one thing. We won't be long getting home now.' He spoke comfortingly, as though he were delivering Edwin from the frightful evil of freedom. Edwin looked out at freedom as the car sped on; pianos and candelabra in display windows; an illiterate milk poster; teenagers sitting over plastic coffee in a grotto, ill with ennui; the creamy square dead eyes of a television shop; people. 'Won't be long now,' Bob repeated, as if to allay a natural impatience.' Just round here, see, and at the end there. There, you see.' Edwin saw: a block of flats built in pre-war days, when flats spelt somehow Teutonic vigour, now, in the dark, cheerless-looking as a great workhouse. 'I'm at the top,' said Bob. 'It's better up there, really. Out of everybody's way. They used to have lifts once, so they tell me. Not now, though. Funny how a lift could just disappear, isn't it? We've got to climb all those steps at the end.' Bob stopped the car near the foot of a topless configuration of iron stairs with iron rails, each landing lighted dimly by a swaying bulb. A long climb, thought Edwin, and anything could happen on the way - a lithe vault over the first banister; a frantic knock at somebody's door and a shout of 'Police, police'; Bob tripped up and sent hurtling down, the salmon leaping with him; Bob brained with his own wine bottle, cunningly nicked out of the box. But it was not to be. Bob said:
'You go first up those steps.' This was while they were still in the car, Bob's mad watchful eyes on Edwin, his long arms reaching at the back for the box. 'And I'll be following close behind and there's not to be any more funny business, see. Because' said Bob, 'I carry a knife up my sleeve, and this time I'll use it. I can use it, too, mate, sticking or throwing. I'm on the look-out this time, so no more buggering about. I've had enough of that with you already, as well you know.'
At the fourth landing Edwin pleaded for a minute's rest. Just out of hospital, out of breath, condition. Ruthless Bob drove him up with the crusty point of the loaf. At the sixth and last landing Bob said: 'Here we are. I told you it wouldn't be long.' Edwin gulped in several chestsful of the rarefied air, his hands on the railings, looking far below at the street lamps. 'You see this door,' said Bob. 'Had it
specially fitted. Nobody can bash that one open, that's for sure. Came from a blitzed posh house, that did. Belgravia.' Panting Edwin saw a massive slab of oak beneath the swinging lamp bulb, the knocker a tarnished snarling lion-head. Bob fitted in a vast iron key. The ward squealed, then the whole door groaned a prelude to a stately home. 'You first,' said Bob. Darkness and the smell of somebody else's house, and then the light snapped on to disclose the squalor of Bob's tiny hallway. 'Six nicker a month,' said Bob, 'which is not too bad, all things considered.' They walked between two lines of empty gin-and whisky-bottles, a gleaming little guard of honour. Then Bob threw his living-room into the world of light. Beer bottles and sticky frothy glasses, a broken Victorian couch with dust lying on it, a record-player. Bob kicked the switch of his electric fire: mock coals and a hidden fan which pretended the movement of flames. 'Now,' said Bob, still with the food box under his left arm, 'don't you try to get this key.' He wagged it at Edwin. 'You're staying here for a bit, that's what you're doing, and I'm not having you trying to get out. You have a look round or a sit-down or something while I'm getting something for us to eat.' He went out, leaving the key on the chipped and kicked sideboard, a punished piece of furniture which aroused genuine pity in Edwin. Edwin went to the living-room doorway and saw, in the foul kitchenette, Bob's back, Bob preparing to prepare a meal. He still wore his raglan coat, smart amid the empty sardine-tins, cloudy milk bottles, and dry heels of bread. A little refrigerator sang quietly. Edwin stole softly with the key towards the front door of the flat. Not, however, softly enough. Bob turned, knife in hand, and came grimly. 'Look,' he said, his lower teeth showing, 'I won't bash you because, for all I know, you may like that. I don't know what you like and what you don't like, not yet I don't. That's what we're going to find out. But you're not getting out of here.' He snatched the key from Edwin and put it in his jacket pocket. Then he changed his tone and, leading Edwin back to the living-room, said plaintively: What's the matter? Don't you like me?'
'That's not the point,' said Edwin, 'liking or not liking. I don't know what you've brought me here for, but if you think I'm perverted you're completely mistaken. I'm quite normal.'
'Normal? You? That's a laugh. You're kinky, the same as what I am. I can see it in your eyes. Everything you've been doing points to it. And when we've had some of this smoked salmon we're going to get down to it seriously. I'm going to show you one or two things and then see what you say about it. But we're going to eat first. You come into the kitchen with me so I can keep my eye on you.'
'It's pointless, I tell you,' said Edwin. 'I can't think of anything we'd have in common. You might as well let me go. You're just wasting your time.'
'We'll see,' said Bob, nodding. He pushed Edwin into the kitchenette and took two smeared gin glasses from the draining-board. 'We've got this champagne here,' he said. 'See.' Edwin saw that it was a Veuve Clicquot 1953. 'You open it,' said Bob, 'and we'll drink it while I'm cutting this salmon. And if you hit me with the cork I shan't complain.' Edwin began to see more. He said:
'You're a masochist. Is that it?'
Bob looked suspicious. 'A what?'
'A masochist. You like to be hurt physically. Perhaps you go in for flagellation. Is that it?'
Bob apparently knew what this second term meant. 'Whips,' he said, excited. 'Whips. It's whips I like. Come and see my whips. Now. Now. We can eat later.' He dithered with excitement, breathing fast and shallow, and dragged Edwin out and across the hallway to another room. He fumbled at the light switch and then pushed Edwin in. The room, except for a cupboard and a phalanx of empty bottles, was quite empty. Bob, half-blind, trembled over to the cupboard, pulled at its door, and then said: 'Look at them. Mine, all mine, all the bloody lot of them. Whips.' And he took whips from the cupboard, throwing them on the floor at Edwin's feet - stock-whips, a nine-tailed cat, a horsewhip, a long one for a mule train, one handled in mother-of-pearl, a child's top-whip, one cruelly knotted, a knout, a lash with spikes: whips. 'Take what you want,' he said to Edwin. He was on fire with excitement. 'Choose whichever one you like. Go on. Go on, blast you. I want to see you with one in your hand.' Edwin hesitated. 'Go on. Go on.' Bob was in agony, still wearing his raglan coat.
'No,' said Edwin.
'You will. You must. Look.' Bob began to tear his upper clothes off. 'I'll show you,' he said, muffled by his shirt. 'Now then,' he said, throwing the shirt away. 'Look at that. I've had fifty stitches in my back. Fifty.' He displayed a broad back gnarled and wealed with lashes. 'But I don't care. You can do it as hard as you like. I don't care. Go on. GO ON!' he yelled.
'I won't,' said Edwin. And then: 'If I do, will you let me go?'
'Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.'
'Only one, though. Just one. And then you'll let me go?'
'Anything, anything. Come on, get on with it.'
Edwin chose a whip with a stout short stump and a long lash. He cracked it in the air and then on Bob's back. An angry photograph of the lash appeared across the tortured puckered skin. 'Harder, harder,' moaned Bob. Edwin felt the joy of the sadist arising in his loins. This would not do at all. Angry with himself, he cracked the lash again. And again. Then threw the unclean thing across the room, letting it clank the bottles and then lie a dead snake. Bob lay on the floor on his face, panting, quiescent. He had fallen on the heap of his outer clothes. Edwin said:
'Let me go now. Give me the key.'
'No,' came the voice from the floor.
'You promised. Let me go.'
'No. No. Stay.'
Edwin, mild Dr Spindrift, kicked Bob viciously, trying to roll him off the jacket where the key nested. 'Yes,' said Bob. 'Do that again.'
'I,' said Edwin, 'will kick you to bloody death if you don't give me that key.'
'Yes, yes, do that.'
It was no good. 'You're a swine,' said Edwin. Bob started to cry. Disgusted with himself, Edwin went into the hallway and tried the outer door. It was certainly locked. He entered the bedroom and found it paved with bottles, its bed unmade and the sheets in need of changing, torn lurid magazines everywhere. The window opened on to six storeys of emptiness. Edwin came away from it and was surprised to find, on a chair, a magazine devoted exclusively to flagellation. Fascinated, he turned over the glossy pages, box after box of eager advertisements, fierce pictures of whips in action, a scholarly article on Babylonian torture chambers, a chatty editorial which mentioned the blood brotherhood of its readers. As he read, open-mouthed, he heard the lion-head knocker thud thrice. Groaning Bob went to the door in his overcoat, looking in calm-eyed at Edwin on the way. 'You,' he ordered, 'stay in there. This is business.' Edwin found a pack of lewd pictures on the dressing-table and flicked through them, amazed at the twisted variations possible on what, in his healthy days, had seemed so simple a theme. He heard a Scottish voice enter: the Gorbals man, presumably. He heard a conversation in the living-room.
'Witch the narnoth and cretch the giripull.'
'Vearl pearnies under the weirdnick and crafter the linelow until the vopplesnock.'
'Worch?'
'Partcrock mainly at finniberg entering. Word fallpray when chock veers garters home.'
'Wait. Weight. Wate.'
'Vartelpore wares for morning arighters. Jerboa toolings in dawn-breakers make with quicktombs.'
'Good.'
Bob came back to the bedroom as Edwin was examining from many angles a most complex multiple position. 'I'm off,' he said. 'Going to never-you-mind-where in the car. Business. I'll be back tomorrow. Say about lunch-time. You're going to stay here.'
'I'm bloody well not.'
'Oh, yes you are. You'll be all right. You won't starve. Two smoked salmons at a nicker each. Now I'm going to get dressed.' He went back to the torture-chamber and could be heard kicking bottles around. The Gorbals man came in to see Edwin. He nodded, winked with his remaining eye, and leered knowingly.
'Yu,' he said, 'duckterer fellosserfee?'
'That's right,' said Edwin. 'Ph.D.'
; 'Deevid Hume,' said the Gorbals man. 'Berrrrkeley. Immanuel Kunt.' It was not really surprising to hear such a parade of names from such a person. French criminals would, Edwin knew, quote Racine or Baudelaire in the act of throat-cutting; and Italian mobsters would at least know of Benedetto Croce. It was only the English who failed to see human experience as a totality. 'Metterfezzecks,' said the Gorbals man, and would have said more had not Bob returned knotting his tie. 'On our way,' said Bob, 'if we're to make it. You're sure he'll be there?'
'Sure.'
'You be good,' said Bob to Edwin. 'You have a nice kip. You watch the telly in the front room. Have some of that smoked salmon but watch your fingers when you're slicing it.'
'It's about watches, isn't it?' said Edwin, 'this business of yours.'
'Our business,' said Bob, 'that's what it is. Not yours. See you tomorrow.' And they went off, nodding. The door slammed and the key creaked. Then Edwin was left to what was, after all, his first night of freedom for a long, long time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With a beer glass full of champagne and a wedge of smoked salmon on a tear-off from the loaf, Edwin sat down to watch television. The armchair, the only one, made a winging broken-spring noise and dust rose, making him sneeze. He switched the set on, and almost at once was plunged into a medical lecture so technical that he fancied he must, by a quirk of chance, have blundered into some hospital closed circuit. The white-coated lecturer looked fatly unhealthy and, because his spectacles were full of light, blind. 'The minimum identifiable odour,' he was saying, 'or MIO, is determined by means of Elsberg's apparatus. Olfactory testing methods have an obvious, though limited, application in clinical neurology. In about seventy-five per cent of patients with tumours in the frontal lobes, or about that area, the MIO was invariably found to be somewhat elevated.' He beamed at Edwin. 'Elsberg's methods,' he said, 'as well as Zwaardemaker's, only yield relative thresholds. As far as absolute thresholds are concerned . . . ' Edwin depressed a white tab on the set and immediately a man with a hat on shot a man without a hat and said to a cowering woman: 'Don't worry any more. He'll never trouble you again.' To the most noble of processional music the names of the cast rolled up the screen:
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