No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “Damnedest nuisance,” he’d say, aware of the hard-on but unmoved by it. “I can’t feel the bloody thing anyway, and it just gums up the works.”

  As I sat down on the bedside stool, knife and fork in hand, Elizabeth peered in.

  “Try to be nice, Hans. How’s the duck?” she asked.

  “I haven’t tasted the damned thing,” he replied. “The American takes his time.”

  “The American will leave us high and dry if you can’t be civil. Small bits,” Elizabeth advised me once again. “The chewing isn’t a problem, but the swallowing can be.”

  Hans sniffed. “You’ll see she likes to repeat what I say,” he said. “Treats me like a baby. Do I look like a baby to you?”

  No, he looked ancient. I moved faster now, cutting, feeding, cutting, feeding. I was twenty years old and had never cared for anything in my life except a few goldfish that needed to be fed in the morning and some hamsters that died. This was surprisingly unnerving.

  The meal didn’t last long. After a few bites of everything, carefully assembled, forkful by forkful, Hans gave a little gasp, rolled back his head, and said, “That’s fine. You eat the rest.” A quarter of the plate was gone, if that.

  The first night, I had offended him by asking, “Here?”

  “Yes, of course here,” he had said with exasperation, breathing heavily as if I had taken him for a brisk walk.

  I looked at the partly eaten meal with chagrin, but I ate it, with the extra fork that Elizabeth had supplied for this unspoken purpose. I was not experienced in hierarchy, but I knew to be ashamed. Hans got something out of it, though he didn’t say what. Humiliation aside, from the first week, I knew I would eat well, though not all of Hans’s culinary adventures would sit well with my palate—long-hung venison was like eating rot.

  “Put ketchup on it,” Cristina would say, shaking the Heinz bottle until the deer meat was drenched. “Trick I learned as a little girl in Africa with antelope meat. I hated it.”

  I would follow suit, laughing with her, pleased with her attention. It still tasted horrible. But most of Elizabeth’s concoctions would be a surprising treat. I learned to love pâté de foie gras. Pheasant, rich and gamey, made any other poultry seem tasteless. Sheep’s kidneys in cream sauce were like succulent sautéed mushrooms, but with more substance. Calves’ brains in garlic took some getting used to. They offered no resistance as your teeth bit down, but as Hans noted, neither did Camembert or that stuff that we poor students ate, tofu. Skate, purple and firm, was like a steak fish that was more steak than fish. My portions, generous as they were, were almost always his leftovers.

  Every evening, after some time in silence, Hans would ask if I was through, which was my cue to return to the kitchen with the tray. Elizabeth would always be there, smoking a cigarette and paging through the Evening Argus. She seemed to be pretending to be engrossed in the story she was reading—usually some young girl gone missing from the council flats on the edge of town.

  “’Night, Mum, I’m going out,” Cristina’s voice would sing in the hall, a delicate hand holding her up in the doorway of the kitchen. She would flash me a smile. I would nod, dry-mouthed.

  “I’d tell you to leave my daughter alone, David, but you don’t stand a chance,” Elizabeth murmured as the front door slammed that first night of Cristina’s return home. “She likes basketball players, really big ones. ‘Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.’”

  I had gotten an important lesson in the thin walls of No. 4 Imperial Lane that first night. When I walked into Hans’s room for any final instructions, he cackled, the first hint of merriment in his voice, “My niece and the Moor are surely now making the beast with two backs.”

  He let out a breathy little laugh, then told me to strap the six-inch, rubber-tipped stick back on his wrist. I strained not to wince as my hand encircled his bone of a wrist.

  “Cover my head completely, and close the curtains tight,” he said. “I’ll wake you if I need you. Good night.”

  “Completely? Can you breathe?”

  “Does it look like I suffocated last night? All the Italians sleep this way.”

  Chapter Two

  “Our father was a man of some importance,” Elizabeth began in a weary voice. We were in the kitchen again, tea for me, vodka for her. She needed to talk, it seemed. I had no idea what to say.

  “What was his name?” I mustered.

  “Gordon, Gordon Bromwell. If you are of a certain age in the UK, you’d know of him.”

  Gordon Bromwell, I came to learn, was a gentleman farmer from Hampshire—not the sort that planted anything but the kind that trod over his land in a tweed suit and Wellington boots regardless of the weather, an uncocked shotgun bent over one arm. His estate, Houndsheath, it was called, on the North Downs south of Basingstoke, wasn’t the largest, but it was worthy of his title, viscount. It was outside a little village that proudly included one last thatched roof and a few miles of charming old fences. A meandering, one-lane road from the village center ended in a sweeping, circular driveway of yellowed gravel. The manor itself dispensed with the flat roof favored by a particular type of English aristocracy. It was topped instead by a more Continental steep slate pitch plunging down to stone walls, unpainted and multihued. It was elegant and lovely, but Sir Gordon preferred to call it “a heap,” as in, “My father died and left me this heap.”

  “‘Houndsheap.’ That’s what he called it in Parliament when the inquisitors learned that the taxpayer had paid for the dredging of our pond,” Elizabeth said with a rueful little laugh. “Didn’t work. The Sun called it a moat.”

  Gordon set aside his title in middle age, along with his seat in the House of Lords, to pursue the less genteel but more effective politics of the House of Commons, where he became a Tory MP. That was in 1968, before Africa and the unpleasantness with his daughter and son that had wrecked all their lives. As young Margaret Thatcher was penning her conservative manifesto and pursuing her grand vision of a dismantled British welfare state, with its broken miners’ union and poll taxes, Gordon had more parochial ambitions. He cheered her on, no doubt, but he was driven to politics by two more personally pressing issues. Foremost was the estate tax, which had forced his father to sell half their land to their banker neighbor, whose fortunes were swelling as the Bromwells’ waned. Indeed, the tax was threatening to end the Bromwell claim to North Hampshire altogether. His second cause was inspired by the scruffy students of the Animal Liberation Front, who invaded what was left of his land with their infernal pepper and garlic sprays to disrupt his foxhunts. It was the latter crusade—saving the hunt—that made his name. He figured that anyone would be driven to activism if he had the maddening experience of sitting astride a befuddled horse as a pack of dogs scattered in the woods, unable to find the scent.

  Toward the end of his life, licked by the forces of ALF progress, various parliamentary inquisitions, and the misfortunes of his own family, Gordon Bromwell retired with his rifle to a sun-filled, sparsely furnished guest room upstairs, where he fired down from the picture window at rabbits, foxes, or any living creature, save the help. He would then tally his kill with chalk hash marks on the wall. Foxhunting may have been out of favor, but the foxes still needed taking care of. The occasional guest would ask who was scrawling graffiti on the walls, wondering if old Sir Gordon had finally taken leave of his senses.

  “Goddamned right, I have,” he would grumble to himself if he had overheard.

  “By that time, I had pretty much taken over the affairs of the manor as best I could,” Elizabeth continued. She loaded it with flotsam from Angola and the place she called Portuguese Guiné, and sold off most of its prized contents to a couple of traders with an antique shop in London. Hans was by then a hopeless cripple.

  Gordon was in his pajamas, standing at the top of Houndsheath’s sweeping front steps, the first time he saw the agents of his estate’s demise. A burly bloke with a Mohawk and another with peroxided, spiked hair wer
e carting off the mahogany trestle table from the breakfast nook. He drew the line when his daughter came for the sixteenth-century kingwood bookcases adorned with fronds of ormolu, which had been in the family for centuries. They had shielded his first-edition Thackerays and Coleridges behind their finely carved gilt screens, and they would continue to, thank you very much.

  Gordon would resist, but he couldn’t deny that the Bromwell empire was being dismantled before his eyes. Though Hans and Elizabeth had moved back home, everything else appeared to be moving out. And it wasn’t just the furniture. As the bills began to mount, the neighbor who had already done away with half of the Bromwell estate had offered to take the horses and hounds as well. His skittish daughter—“What a burden I had proven to be”—had been too quick to oblige.

  Well, Gordon thought, a lot of good the animals will be, once the fight to preserve the hunt is lost completely. Two benders—Wills and James, they were called—prattled on about first-edition books from the family collection with his cripple of a son, who had requisitioned his study. Yes, first floor and all that, he understood the reason his stricken son was now sleeping there, but that didn’t make it any easier, especially since the study lay directly below the guest room he had taken up residence in. The staff appeared to be leaving as well, one by one. When the cook left with her underlings, Elizabeth began handling the culinary duties, whipping together one overwrought Continental confection after another—venison, duck, sheep’s innards—all in indulgent cream sauces or wine reductions, under the orders of his paralytic son.

  His son, he thought. It pained him, that thought. He was loath to express it, but just the image of him downstairs made Gordon Bromwell ache. Sure, he had some wild oats to sow, who didn’t? But the boy had finally been coming along and would have soon been in position to assume his place in society. Gordon had no doubt he would have taken his peerage, a seat in the House of Lords, or, if he caught the political bug, on the backbenches in the Commons.

  That wouldn’t be happening, not now. A cripple would be useless on the stump.

  How different it had all turned out. Gordon and Charlotte Bromwell had had only two children—Hans, much loved and totally unappreciative, and Elizabeth, not loved much at all. Hans got his German name from his father’s softness for Oswald Mosley, the baronet, philanderer, and British fascist. He liked the sound of a single-syllable Teutonic name followed by his unmistakably Anglo surname. “Hans” was Germanic without all those guttural noises that sounded like dragging up phlegm after a dusty summer day. But the politics of the right or left were not to be Hans’s “thing,” as they say. He was a rogue from the start. He had charm and looks and he knew what to do with them.

  At eight, he was sent to boarding school, Ludgrove, and at thirteen Eton, of course, on the shoulders of his lineage. His academic skills weren’t much, but that was hardly worth noting. He was a success from the start.

  “Elizabeth has the brains. I have the charm,” he became fond of saying by the age of thirteen. “I’d take charm any day of the week.”

  Elizabeth, two years younger, with none of her brother’s smooth sophistication, was not sent to school at all. She had a tutor, a kind and well-meaning woman who knew nothing but Shakespeare. So that is what Mrs. Parsons taught—no maths, no science, nothing practical even, like knitting—just Shakespeare. Charlotte Bromwell did not see much use in mathematics or science for her daughter. Penmanship was good, as were reading and writing. And what better to read and write than Shakespeare? The 1960s were bursting out all over. London was swinging. But Elizabeth’s mother saw nothing odd or impractical in the education her daughter was getting.

  “‘He reads much; he is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men,’” Charlotte would tell her daughter, as she yanked back Elizabeth’s nest of hair into a tight, taming bun that would hold maybe half the day, quoting Julius Caesar as if she were preparing Elizabeth for the greatest of deeds. And maybe she was. Algebra and calculus could carry you only so far. Shakespeare, well memorized and properly sprinkled in speech, could make you a force.

  Charlotte’s personal contribution to Elizabeth’s education was piano lessons, most often bellowed at top volume. “It’s pianissimo, Elizabeth. Can’t you read?” Or, “No, no, no, forte, pianoforte,” screamed in her own forte. She would run over and bang at the instrument in brutal demonstration or take her daughter’s hands in hers and pound the keys with them. Elizabeth took it stoically and went on tinkling at the keys without expression. She silently plotted the day when she would never have to look at a piano—or her mother—again as she neatly put away her sheet music at the end of each daily practice session.

  Before Hans’s escape from Houndsheath, to boarding school and beyond, he and Elizabeth had been as close as you’d expect children who live miles from any others would be. There was a creek that meandered through the estate before spreading into the marshy, useless pond that would later become such a scandal. They would catch tadpoles and try to fish, without understanding that a fishing pole needed more than a line on the end of a stick fetched from the woods. Their father hadn’t bothered to tell them about such things as hooks and bait, although he would shout out a warning if he was going shooting. Their mother allowed them free and unsupervised rein over the out-of-doors, as long as she did not have to be involved. The governess made sure the children were scrubbed clean of mud and bathed to a ruddy, high polish before meals.

  Once Eton began, such adventures were relegated to summer vacations and spring breaks, and then disappeared altogether. Elizabeth grew up without her brother, alone, unkempt, and fanciful. Her eyes could be wide open but see nothing, as she sunk into the depths of her inner life. She would mutter to herself and make little dancing motions, tiny outward manifestations of the elaborate choreography playing out inside her head. Once Charlotte gave Elizabeth a Madame Alexander doll she had picked up on a jaunt with Gordon to New York, a Scarlett O’Hara in a flowing, green Christmas gown—not that her daughter had a clue who that was. For a time, Scarlett was her best friend—until she reverted back to her Paddington Bear, whose face was smeared with marmalade in keeping with her storybooks. By ten, her favorite companion was Suzy, a sad-eyed, droop-eared hound from her father’s hunting stable. Suzy’s short coat and rubbery countenance contrasted wonderfully with Elizabeth, all hair and arms and legs, sharp elbows and kneecaps going every which way.

  “Oh, Suzy,” she would say as the two sat beside the pond, its sulfurous smell masking the dog’s, “whatever will we do with that big, boxy head of yours?” She would then grab her by the ears and plant a wet kiss on her spongy black nose, thankfully out of sight of her mother and the governess.

  As for Hans, given his station, his choices at nineteen boiled down to Oxford or Cambridge. Naturally, he picked Edinburgh. It put the entire country of England between him and his father, which suited him fine.

  Hans began his culinary adventures with internal organs in Scotland. He quickly learned to discern between true haggis—sheep’s pluck (heart, liver, lungs, suet, and assorted offal) encased in stomach—and the modernized variety squeezed into sausage casing. He pulled off a fine Robbie Burns after a few drams of Glenfiddich.

  Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,

  And dish them out their bill o’ fare,

  Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware

  That jaups in luggies;

  But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,

  Gie her a haggis!

  He read politics and dabbled in art history, not with any great passion, but he did fine. He also flirted with Shakespeare to please his benighted sister. With enough Shakespearean knowledge, he could tease her at her own game. Besides, he liked the bawdy bits. It was a revelation that Shakespeare thought of the beast with two backs, better yet that the context was interracial, delicious in a household so steeped in Oswald Mosley.

  Hans’s only regret about rejecting Oxbridge was the quality of his classmates. He was certa
in he could have gotten a richer, better sort of friends farther south, which would have come in handy later. But he did alright. Julian, who came from London via an estate outside Norwich, could be unctuous, but his father had a villa in Tuscany where the help fattened geese for foie gras, mixed up something he called corn porridge and the Americans called grits, and bottled their own red wine. The cold, gray weather of southern Scotland suited Julian’s pallor. His skin matched the sky on its brighter days. His ill-defined chin and sharp nose foreshadowed the jowls that would one day swallow his face and make his neck disappear altogether.

  Simon, Hans’s other best mate, was a Francophile with a father who had left his mother and him in Lincolnshire for a spacious flat in Paris and a posting at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whatever that did. He appeared to do nothing but entertain. He owed Simon for this abandonment, and Simon intended to take full advantage as soon as he could sweat out his exams.

  Vibrant primary colors were in style then, even in Edinburgh: tattered fishermen’s jumpers along with bell-bottoms, ripped at the ankles then enlarged with bright-colored weavings. Long hair was meant to signify freedom and androgyny. But somehow, at least a decade early, Simon was something of a goth. Black, pencil-cut trousers clung to his sticklike legs. His jumpers were properly tattered, but they were colorless and hung limply, as did his hair, which did not so much signal freedom as surrender. Gravity and grease relieved his mane of any buoyancy with which to match the Age of Aquarius. Despite all this, Simon Fellowes exuded magnetism. Women were drawn to him as they were to an urchin that needed their care. He lapped it up, though he was careful not to express too much joy in their affections.

  “All the girls wanted Simon, God only knows why,” Elizabeth said, giving me an appraising glance as she took a deep drag from her Silk Cut. “He’s still a bastard about it.”