Mr Romance

by Mr Romance (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’m just trying to help,’ I grumbled.

  ‘You’re a good man. And I’m much obliged,’ he said, moving away and pulling open the front door. The rain punched his face, making him flinch and jerk back his head. The wind inflated his hair into a soft and trembling spire.

  ‘I hope you’re feeling better this morning,’ I continued quickly, hoping to hinder his escape.

  ‘I find myself greatly improved…’ he said and wheezed as he swallowed a draught of cold air.

  ‘Is it a weakness of some description?’

  ‘What?’ He turned and scowled at me as if I had made an obscene remark about the size of his private parts.

  ‘When you collapsed. We were worried. We thought it might be your pipes and tubes,’ I said innocently.

  He grinned by grinding his teeth. ‘If I might trouble you for a brolly…’

  I retreated to the coat stand and rattled the bundle of sticks in their deep, brass urn. After a moment’s fiddling I chose a black brolly with a bent cane handle and gave it a smack to shake out the dust.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, taking it from me and splashing into the porch. He grunted, unfurled the brolly and battled into the rain.

  I closed the front door and turned away in defeat. My curiosity burned like a rash that I couldn’t scratch. I knew there was something wrong but Marvel was too clever for my clumsy attempts at detective work. For a moment I considered following him but I knew, in the time it would take me to find my shoes, he’d have disappeared in the windswept streets. So I turned, instead, and hurried down to the cellar to share my suspicions with father.

  Old William Wandsworth had built the cellar to store his famous collection of wines. A door in the passage that led to the kitchen opened on a flight of wooden stairs that took you down to a large brick vault with stone shelves and a freezing, flagstone floor. The cellar had been whitewashed and fitted with electric lights and a small stove but still it had the chill of a tomb. It was so cold at night that father would wrap himself in a blanket to stay a little longer at his workbench. The surrounding stone shelves were used to store the raw ingredients of his art. There were cardboard boxes filled with broken watches, coffee tins loaded with radio parts and pickle jars stuffed with screws. There were coils of wire, baskets of spanners and buckets of brushes, pencils and probes. There were also those objects that father had collected with no understanding of their true purpose — scraps of metal and plastic trimmings — stored for the day when he knew they’d reveal their identity.

  I found him working at his bench. He was wearing a jacket against the cold with a knitted hat to protect his ears. He appeared to be engaged in a delicate operation on something that looked like a battleship klaxon. It was broken in half like a strange, metal fruit and while I watched he picked a loose washer from the works with a pair of long silver tweezers. He held up the washer and frowned.

  ‘Hello! What brings you down here, Skipper?’

  ‘It’s Marvel,’ I told him.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He doesn’t want anything.’

  ‘Good!’ said father, pleased with the news. ‘You can tell him he’s more than welcome to it.’

  ‘He’s been acting very strange again.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  I described the events of the previous day: Marvel’s mysterious errand, the way he’d returned home more dead than alive, and how I’d helped him back to his bed. Father wasn’t impressed. He leaned back in his chair and rolled the washer in the palm of his hand.

  ‘He probably had a few drinks,’ he said, hoping to sweep away my suspicions. ‘You have to understand. He’s not so young. And a man his age. It’s difficult. He must be lonely…’

  ‘Do you think that’s it?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But he wasn’t drunk,’ I protested. ‘I swear. It was something else. He was sick. He said he’d been poisoned.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  ‘He looked green,’ I said, watching my breath uncoil like smoke. It was cold! Father was so engrossed in his work he’d forgotten to light the stove.

  ‘Did you call the doctor?’

  ‘No. I suggested it to him but he seemed so scared — he was struggling to get away from me — I thought he would have a heart attack!’

  ‘At the mention of a doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did your mother feed him yesterday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what’s your theory?’

  I shrugged. There might be two possible explanations for his erratic behaviour.

  (A) He was a fugitive from justice and responsible for crimes too terrible to imagine. There was no evidence to support this opinion but it gave me an opportunity for hours of salacious speculation. Missing housewife drowned in honey. Naked nympho chained to rafters.

  (B) He was barking mad and thought himself tormented by alien forces / international terrorists / government agents. I was beginning to favour this theory and, if it were true, it would help explain his hunted expression and violent changes of mood.

  ‘I don’t think he’s right in the head,’ I confessed.

  ‘I like him,’ said father, tossing the washer to the floor. He frowned. He already regretted having thrown it away and had to crawl around on his hands and knees, sweeping the floor to retrieve it.

  ‘I like him,’ I said. ‘But I still think he’s wrong in the head.’

  My father grinned. ‘What do you make of this?’ he said, changing the subject, returning to his work on the bench. He waved his hand at a pile of rubbish, inviting my gasps of admiration. His fingers were gnarled with old adhesive.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a new kind of home security system,’ he said proudly. ‘It’s a revolution in domestic intruder alarms. The sentry that never sleeps. Now children can romp in their rooms in safety. Women can sing in their showers secure. And — here’s the secret — it’s so simple that anyone with a screwdriver and a basic working knowledge of advanced electronics could fit one in just a few minutes.’

  ‘How does it work?’ I said, fearing that he was going to tell me.

  He grinned and stared at the chaos before him. ‘Well, the entire fandangle depends on a thin beam of light projected between these widgets,’ he said, pointing to a pair of plastic boxes packed with wires and batteries. ‘You rig the whamdoodle to shine across a doorway or window like a tripwire. Do you follow me? When you pass through the beam you break the connection and trigger the doodah that sounds the alarm in the whatsit. I’ve been working on it for weeks. What do you think? It looks primitive, of course, but this is only the prototype. What do you think?’

  He turned to look at me, searching my face, anxious for approval.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that you could buy a far more sophisticated version of his security system from any gizmo catalogue. The idea had fermented in his brain with no knowledge that such a gadget already existed. He was a genius, no doubt, but he seemed cursed to make discoveries that were already common knowledge. He’d achieved this remarkable handicap through years of working in isolation. In a long and undistinguished career he’d invented the nostril hair trimmer, the handy folding pocket scissors and the world’s most brutal electric toothbrush. If you gave him enough time he’d invent the microwave oven and telephone answering machine.

  ‘When it’s finished you can help me install it,’ he said, pleased that I seemed to be showing an interest.

  ‘How long will it take you?’

  ‘Oh, I just have to track down a couple of gremlins…’

  ‘Is it safe?’ I asked doubtfully. His inventions were varied and dangerous. He had once made me a pair of electrically heated gloves, wired to a bulky battery pack that I’d worn beneath my vest. The gloves had exploded on my way to school and flames had shot from my fingertips.

  ‘Safe?’ he snapped. ‘How do I know if it’s safe until we’ve test
ed it?’

  It was too cold to argue with him. I left him tinkering with his invention and went upstairs to the kitchen to make him a flask of hot soup. I forgot my doubts about Marvel because an hour later Franklin returned, drenched to the skin and bellowing for attention.

  6

  He was in an ugly mood. He snapped and snarled and stalked the house like a harpy. He complained that we’d ransacked his attic, shuffled his books and muddled his papers, opened his letters and pried at his diaries. When I gave him the newspapers — carefully hoarded those past few days for the sake of the arts pages — he took it as an insult and had a tantrum. I watched him rip the papers apart, throw them to the floor and trample on them, weeping with frustration, ridiculous with rage. He was in a dark and dangerous mood but we had to wait until supper was served before he revealed the cause of his anger.

  It was early when we gathered in the dining room — there was a TV wrestling spectacular later in the evening and mother was determined to have a ringside seat. The Wandsworth dining room had lost most of its ornamental plasterwork and the brilliant, illustrated window had sagged and fractured and been repaired with ugly panels of grey, knobbled glass, creating the effect of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. But the room was large and warm and contained the original dining table served by a group of press-ganged chairs. Franklin came down and took the most comfortable chair for himself, sitting opposite Janet who kept watch over him with love in her eyes. It was a good supper. A big beef stew spiked with Guinness, served with carrots and baby dumplings.

  Franklin looked around and waved his fork at an empty chair. He was wearing a velvet jacket with a large but flaccid bow tie, giving him the air of a rampaging game-show host. ‘Do we find ourselves deprived of Mr Marvellous tonight?’ he growled at the assembly. ‘How shall we entertain ourselves without the light of his wit and wisdom?’ He never forgave an insult, real or imagined, and had written Marvel’s name large in his book of enemies.

  ‘He doesn’t take supper,’ mother said gently. Marvel had returned to the house, damp but undamaged, and promptly retired to his room. He’d asked for nothing throughout the day but coffee and sultana biscuits.

  ‘No doubt he dines on his own bile,’ Franklin muttered, filling his mouth with buttered carrots.

  Janet blinked and looked startled. ‘That’s not a very kind remark,’ she said, blushing at the sound of her own voice and hoping to hide her embarrassment by hooking her hair behind one ear. She was wearing tiny crystal earrings that sparkled and flashed as they caught the light.

  Franklin was in no mood to be criticised by an uppity shopgirl, no matter how much she might adore him. ‘I strongly advise you to concentrate!’ he barked. ‘If you eat and think at the same time you’ll do yourself damage.’

  ‘Are you upset about something?’ Janet asked him nervously. She was sitting beside me. Whenever she squirmed in her chair she brushed my sleeve and set fire to my arm from wrist to elbow.

  ‘Poke!’ Franklin shouted, making me drop my dumpling. He was in a most peculiar temper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Poke!’

  ‘Poke what?’ I said.

  ‘Language!’ father said sharply. He rapped his fork against the rim of his plate in a bid to restore law and order.

  ‘Poke!’ Franklin repeated, his face seemed bruised by the fury that the word provoked in him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s the Dwarf!’ he shouted. ‘Poke! It’s the Dwarf! He’s written another damned novel!’

  There was a long silence. The Dwarf, aka Maxwell Bizarre, was a rather clever young man fresh from Oxford who had written a string of bestselling novels. His first book, Muck, had featured a rather clever young man fresh from Oxford and set adrift in a crude and stupid world. The rather clever young man is cast into a twilight zone where people are beastly to him. I don’t know what happens because I couldn’t find the energy to read beyond the third chapter. It was one of those books that has the power to make everything else in the world seem suddenly more interesting. You pick it up and read a page and find yourself thinking about the length of your fingernails, or the temperature in the room or the odd little burbling noise in your stomach. So you slip an envelope or an old bus ticket between the pages and close the book for a moment to stretch your legs and make a sandwich and you walk away and never return. Bookshelves are filled with these unwanted guests, waiting years to be boxed and discarded. But Senior Franklin despised the book as much as he despised the author. He declared that (1) the Dwarf was a plagiarist; (2) that the Dwarf knew next to nothing about the horrors of life at street level since his own short span had been one of comfort and privilege; (3) that the Dwarf had such a loose grasp on the language his publishers had been forced to employ a team of editors to shape and polish his prose; (4) that the Dwarf had carnal knowledge of children and domestic animals; (5) that the Dwarf had contrived to include amusing portraits of all his Oxford chums in the story, which had the desired effect of making said chums fight each other, tooth and claw, for the privilege of praising the book in every available literary organ. These were serious allegations. But nothing could stop the Dwarf’s progress. His other books, Spit, Jerk and Vomit had been hailed as penetrating satires on the moral decay in urban culture. Vomit had been awarded the Stanley Butler Prize for its perky, pornographic prose.

  ‘Poke!’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘That’s a good title. What’s it like? Do you recommend it?’ I knew he was jealous of the Dwarf’s success, it cut very deep and I wanted to twist the knife. Everyone seemed impressed by the Dwarf, including Franklin’s most loyal friend, Polenta Hartebeest.

  ‘It’s dog dirt!’ he shouted indignantly. ‘It’s a pompous prick-song from a dangerous, priapic pygmy!’

  ‘Language!’ father warned again.

  ‘It’s dung! It’s offal! It plumbs new depths of banality! It’s a battological dirge of filth and fornication!’

  ‘So you don’t think much of it,’ I ventured.

  ‘I haven’t read it!’ Franklin shouted.

  ‘That’s very queer,’ I said. ‘I thought you read everything…’

  ‘They dared not take the risk of sending a copy for review. The book was strictly reserved for his sycophantic Shirlies!’

  ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ mother said, stirring her stew with a spoon. ‘Books! A lot of nonsense.’ She didn’t trust the written word. Her only weakness was Chinwag, a weekly magazine devoted to Hollywood gossip, horoscopes and picture puzzles.

  ‘Why don’t you just ignore it?’ father suggested. ‘You should write a good adventure yarn. That’s more like it. Everyone loves a good yarn. Think of Godfrey Bowman. I used to read a lot of Godfrey Bowman before I was married. You should write a good, old-fashioned yarn with speedboats and sports cars and poisoned fountain-pen ink and special exploding Havana cigars. Something with lots of action. A proper beginning, middle and end. Nobody wants it artsy fartsy.’

  Franklin looked infuriated and tried to cut his plate in half with the frantic work of his knife.

  ‘You mustn’t upset yourself…’ Janet said kindly.

  ‘What?’ He cocked his head and glared across the table.

  ‘Well, I was thinking…’ she began nervously and felt herself frightened into silence.

  ‘Come, what fragrant thought hangs suspended?’ He leaned forward by digging an elbow into the table. He could sense her discomfort. It pleased him. I wanted to puncture his lungs with my fork.

  ‘Nothing.’

  But Franklin would not be discouraged. ‘Speld yourself, my toothsome toady, and grant me a glimpse of your moist cogitation!’ he coaxed softly and then sneered, revealing his long upper teeth.

  ‘Language!’

  Janet braced herself to try again. ‘You really shouldn’t upset yourself because one day you’re going to finish your own book and it’s sure to be a tremendous success and then you’ll be so famous they’ll want you on talk shows and everything t
o meet film stars and all sorts and you won’t even want to know people like me…’ she said quickly. This pathetic confession made me prickle with jealousy. It was utterly wasted on Senior Franklin.

  ‘Is that it?’ he gasped, clutching at his drooping bow tie in a pantomime of astonishment.

  ‘Yes,’ Janet whispered. She set down her knife and fork and stared forlornly into her gravy. Her eyes were too bright. She puckered her mouth as if she were sucking on gristle.

  ‘I’m astounded by its simplicity!’ Franklin shouted gleefully. He began honking with laughter, leaning back in his chair and staring around at his audience as if he wanted to share the joke. ‘I hadn’t understood that life was so little complicated. I shall press your advice into service at the earliest opportunity…’

  Janet withered in the blast of laughter. She bent towards her plate and pressed her knuckles against her throat. I turned to give her a word of comfort but the crystal earring disappeared as her hair swung down to hide her face.

  For a moment she seemed to hesitate, slumped forward in silence, and then she uncoiled, pushing at the table, kicking loose from her chair, catching me deliciously in the warm and perfumed draught of her skirt.

  ‘Janet!’ mother called anxiously.

  We turned but it was too late. Janet had already rushed from the room and was running towards the stairs.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ mother scolded. ‘I hope you’re satisfied with yourself.’

  Franklin flared his nostrils and reached for the mustard pot. ‘I did nothing!’ he protested. ‘The cut and thrust of common chitchat. The ebb and flow of fireside banter. No harm intended. None. Am I to take the blame if the girl is a hopeless neurotic?’

  ‘You ought to apologise,’ said father, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘She was looking very upset.’

  Franklin grew sullen and smeared the remains of his dumplings with mustard. ‘I shall not stand accused of forcing an entry into her bedroom.’

  ‘Someone should go after her,’ I said, resisting the desire to volunteer myself without pause for a little encouragement. I didn’t want to raise suspicion.