Mr Romance

by Mr Romance (retail) (epub)

  ‘She seems very pleasant.’

  ‘Pleasant!’ he echoed. ‘The woman seemed excessively pleasant! She died from a surfeit of pleasantness!’ He bared his teeth and poked a finger into my chest. ‘Are you acquainted with the works of William Wilkie Collins?’ he inquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Novelist, companion to Dickens and slave to the mistress Laudanum,’ he continued, as if these clues might help me place him.

  I shook my head.

  Franklin snorted at my ignorance. ‘Well, be warned, my tremendous testicle, that your pleasant Dorothy Clark seems most suspiciously similar to a character in The Moonstone,’ he said darkly. ‘I don’t like it. There’s something very queer abroad! I would urgently recommend, should you care for some educated advice, that you don’t get involved with the woman.’

  ‘There’s no harm in it!’ I protested.

  ‘No harm in it?’ Franklin thundered, very much enraged. ‘You tell me there’s no harm in it? The church is the simpleton’s soporific, Mrs Grundy’s breeding box, divider of nations, palace of prejudice, tomb of tolerance, death of reason, poverty’s favoured promise!’

  But Dorothy never once tried to make me embrace the faith as I followed her tour of the city’s churches. She neither preached nor prayed. She seemed happy enough to have a companion. We paid our respects to the lofty Church of St Barbara with its fine Victorian brass and echoing blue brick pillars. We walked the arcades of St Theodore with their grieving pink alabaster angels. We saluted Boris the sufferer and the hermit Hilarion.

  We paid particular attention to the saints of sorrow and tragedy. Scholars and kings held scant attraction. Popes and bishops meant nothing. Dorothy had a passion for martyrs. She lit candles for the blessings of Blandina who was tossed by bulls and St Agatha who had her breasts removed and was seen to carry them in a dish, high in a stained-glass window. Pantaleon was decapitated. Chrysanthus was buried in sand. Lawrence was roasted. Jonah was crushed, Julian of Antioch was sewn in a sack and drowned.

  While she counted the roads to martyrdom I found myself developing a fondness for relics and, as we wandered from church to church, I searched eagerly for the phials of black blood, the varnished bones and miraculous fingernails that were part of the holy mystery. This sacred memorabilia could usually be found in shrines of splendid design but occasionally we were forced to squint through the keyhole of an iron casket for a view of a yellow tooth or holy cobweb of human hair, and this measure of voyeurism would add melancholy to my fascination. These morbid fetish objects, these tiny scraps of charred skin and bone, seemed as remote as dragons’ teeth, as ancient as fossilised shell.

  Sometimes, grown chilled in the gloom of nave and transept, we took our picnic to the cemetery of St Gilbert at the Gate and stretched ourselves on the clipped lawn beneath the cypress trees. Here we would unpack the satchel and nibble on fruit, wedges of cheese and slices of pressed sultana cake. And when she had eaten and finished a little flask of coffee, Dorothy would yawn and bask in the sun, flat on her back like a stone knight, eyes closed, arms crossed and her long legs locked at the ankles, while I sat contentedly at her feet and followed the breeze as it rummaged beneath her petticoats.

  Marvel’s poor opinion of my friendship with Dorothy seemed unusually pessimistic. But after several days in her company I began to notice symptoms of a strange malaise. There were moments when, having pressed myself against her in some confined chamber as we searched the walls for faded inscriptions, I would find myself stammering uncontrollably, as if a demon had seized my voice and were shaking it like a rattle. My face would begin to burn, my mouth turn dry and my heart push painfully into my throat.

  And there were other, more alarming signs. Whenever she joined us for supper my appetite would shrivel to nothing and no tempting titbit or fancy morsel had the power to revive my flagging interest. I sat and stared at my plate in confusion. I dipped my fork but I could not eat. My stomach might have been filled with pebbles. At the same time I felt exhausted yet found it difficult to sleep. I roamed the house like a shadow. The dust settled. Janet’s shoes lost their shine.

  Mother, suspecting malingery, gave no sympathy to my condition.

  ‘You don’t get enough exercise,’ she complained, when I’d unexpectedly fallen asleep during one of our wrestling evenings. No matter how hard I worked in the house, her remedy for any complaint was always more vigorous exercise. She was half-submerged in a pile of old cushions, eating leftover coconut cakes from yellow Tupperware.

  ‘I feel so tired,’ I mumbled, yawning and rubbing my face in my hands.

  ‘Fresh air and plenty of it.’

  ‘What happened in the clash of the titans, Nasty Harris and Scrubber Norton?’ I said, peering at the TV screen. A woman was smiling back at me, wearing a swimsuit, selling toothpaste with spearmint stripes.

  ‘You were here,’ she said.

  ‘I missed it,’ I said. ‘I must have shut my eyes for a moment…’

  ‘It was a cracker!’ she grinned. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’

  ‘What happened?

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I couldn’t help falling asleep!’ I protested.

  She sighed, set down her Tupperware and made several sharp little tutting sounds as she tried to suck coconut strands from her teeth. ‘Head butt. Head butt. Slap. Gouge. Rake to the eyes. Head lock. Back-breaker. Body slam. Atomic drop. Chin lock. Roll over take-down. Body scissors. Figure four. Elbow. Elbow. Flying head butt. Chair. Belt. Bucket. Chair. Mid-air collision…’

  I nodded and tried to stay awake, but even the wrestling, for the moment, had lost its power of enchantment. Hulk Hogan’s farewell performance did nothing to stir my imagination. Gilda Galore, the thunder-thighed female champion, failed to revive my flagging interest.

  I did my best to resist, yet the fever continued to rage and the more time I spent with Dorothy, the brighter the flames that consumed me. The torment became relentless. She could set me ablaze with a smile or dampen me down with a frown. When she granted small favours or blessings I flared like a human torch. I made feeble attempts at a cure but gained no relief from my sickness. Did I claim as much for Janet? Did I tell you that Janet distracted me? Well, I must have exaggerated. There was no comparison. And the truth, when it dawned, was terrible.

  I’d been seized again by Mr Romance!

  20

  Dorothy brushed back her glossy dark hair and lay daydreaming in the daisied grass, drinking in the abundant scent of sun-warmed flowers where bees were dipping their furriness, and thought again of the young Mr Romance and the mysterious darkness that brimmed his beautiful eyes whenever he watched her enter the chapel for daily devotions. What was the terrible secret locked in the living depths of his soul that took him to the far shore of the ornamental lake on moonlit nights and why had she overheard Janet, the simple yet deceptively pretty chambermaid, describe her master to the cook as His Satanic Majesty? Dorothy sighed and opened the strings of her bodice to let the sunlight caress her bosom. Since her arrival at the old house the brooding young nobleman had treated her every whim with grace and gaiety, and yet there was something distracted about him, a haunted look to his countenance that suggested he wrestled with demons in pursuit of his strange, nocturnal desires.

  21

  I don’t think Dorothy was to blame for my ultimate disgrace. She did nothing to encourage me. And in the beginning I struggled as best I could to shrug off my infatuation. I felt obliged to offer myself as an escort but, after ten days of viewing churches and monuments, I returned to my household duties. She didn’t protest and I was happy enough to retire to a routine of cooking and cleaning. There were new and more exotic pleasures to be explored. I knew that when I reported for work I’d be sent up to Dorothy’s room with my duster. And there, alas, despite my very best intentions, deaf to reason and blind to danger, I would step inside her
wardrobe and, hidden away in that perfumed chamber with my heart pounding against my ribs, I would grant myself the freedom to push my head up her Doris Day skirts or practise the delicate art of unpicking buttons and sliding my fingers into her shirts.

  How can I explain the misery and excitement of my fascination? I was doomed to love shadows and phantoms. But stealing into her room, disguised as an imbecilic cleaner, I would quickly become the invisible man. No one would challenge or question me. I could strike up a love affair with her shoes, her brushes and combs and necklaces. I might trace with infinite tenderness the hollows she made in the armchair cushions or draw to my sensitive nostrils the intimate scents of her skin from the discarded sheets and pillows. Dorothy everywhere! Seek and ye shall find. An impression of her mouth pressed in lipstick and softly printed onto the edge of a water glass. Teeth marks in the stub of a pencil. The smudge of a thumb on a makeup mirror. A single glittering strand of hair. Ah, sweet pain of that shadow world! The stealth employed by the secret admirer! Where God hath a temple, so the devil will hath a chapel.

  But on my first morning, as soon as I’d tied my apron strings, mother came running into the kitchen with news that Franklin had gone to spend the day with Julian Fancy, the poet and social historian. Julian Fancy was husband to Clara Fidget, the influential editor, and we knew that Franklin would cling to her skirts and remain attached until he was dragged away screaming. It was a rare opportunity. So we dashed upstairs to raid the attic with brushes and buckets of hot soapy water. I was forced to postpone my invasion of Belgium. China and Mexico lay forgotten. We couldn’t waste this chance to cast some light into Lilliput.

  The attic rooms smelt stale. There were dozens of newspapers strewn on the floor. The chairs were gritty with biscuit crumbs. We had stripped the bed and cleaned the carpets before I inspected the great oak writing desk. And there, spread before me like a treasure map, was the answer to the mystery of the mutilated magazines. A pair of scissors. A large pot of pungent paper glue. A box of alphabet confetti. Franklin had been mounting a poisonous attack on the Dwarf’s reputation! He was sending anonymous letters to every literary editor and critic in the country. And every word of these scandalous diatribes had been cut and assembled from newsprint and glued to sheets of coarse blue paper. The enterprise must have taken him days of painstaking labour.

  He maintained that the Dwarf HATed WOMEN, huRT DOgs and had recently grown addicted to Xtreme FORMS of cHiLD PornoGraphY. He claimed that the Dwarf was a PlagiarIST and had sTolen IDEAS & eNtirE PASSages of pROSE from OtheR distinguiSHED WriTErs. He described the Dwarf as a turD a THief and a tosSPOT.

  ‘He’s barking mad!’ I complained.

  ‘What is it?’ mother muttered, without much interest, squelching to the desk and shuffling through the evidence.

  ‘Poison-pen letters!’ I said, stabbing at turD a THief and a tosSPOT. The tos came away on my fingertip and I had some trouble restoring it.

  ‘He’s always writing something,’ mother said, shaking her head. She screwed up her eyes as she tried to read one of the blue paper sheets but, to my relief, she didn’t have enough patience for it.

  ‘We’ve got to stop him!’ I said. ‘It’s criminal. He’ll probably get himself arrested.’ Police swoop at dawn. Break down door. Scramble upstairs. This is a raid. Men barking. Women screaming. Franklin bending the bars at the window. Accused of libel on divers occasions. Threatening behaviour. Defamation. Malicious wounding of English language.

  ‘Arrested?’ mother said, bewildered by the excitement. ‘But they’re nothing but a lot of nonsense!’ She surveyed the letters with a new interest. ‘Let’s throw ’em away!’ she said finally. ‘I don’t suppose they’re important.’ She began searching her apron pockets for a roll of plastic rubbish sacks.

  ‘No!’ I said, trying to shield the desk with my arm. ‘This is serious. If we interfere he’ll know that he’s been discovered.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, anything could happen,’ I warned. ‘We’d be involved. And if he’s caught we might be held responsible for him. And we don’t know how many of these things he’s already sent. He could have been doing it for weeks!’

  ‘So what’s your advice?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said feebly. ‘I suppose, under the circumstances, we could always pretend that it isn’t happening.’

  ‘Good idea!’

  ‘We’ll forget that we’ve seen them,’ I said, pulling away from the writing desk. ‘Did you move anything?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘He probably won’t know the difference.’

  ‘Scribblers!’ mother said in disgust.

  We finished cleaning the rooms but were careful to leave the desk undisturbed. There was nothing we could do to save him. The letters were anonymous. And the Dwarf, unknown to Franklin, was beyond the range of his rage, on a triumphant book-promotion tour of America to trumpet the merits of Poke — an episode he would turn into his next sensational novel in which a rather clever young man embarks on a triumphant book-promotion tour of America. That book would, in its turn, provide the material for another novel in which a rather clever young man sets himself the challenge of writing a novel about a man writing a novel about a man selling a novel on a triumphant book-promotion tour of America. You couldn’t stop him. The critics and camp followers clung to him like flypapers. ‘Seek only to write from your own experience,’ was Katie Pphart’s advice to rookie writers with no elastic sewn into their imaginations and, by God, the Dwarf had taken the maxim and made it his life’s work. No hagiographer could have larded his name with more glory than the praise he heaped upon his own head.

  Franklin might have chosen from half a dozen fashionable writers as the target for his abuse. The arts pages were stuffed with swaggering braggarts and hobbledehoys shouting and spitting and posing for pictures.

  There was Mad Max Mullah, resident fellow of Oxford, son of a French industrialist and Moroccan socialite, who used his writing to insult people on two continents and in three different languages; and whenever challenged by his enemies to stand and fight, would claim diplomatic immunity by switching his country of origin. ‘A professional darkie,’ is how Franklin had once described him, ‘wrapped in a flag of convenience.’

  There was Big Bertha Mappelthorpe, aka E B Morris, the drama critic, art collector, traveller, translator, gardener, wine expert, classical scholar and TV personality. A woman with a brain almost the size of Franklin’s huge pudding and who used her monstrous organ to write nothing but detective novels (or ‘puzzle books’ as Franklin called them) set in a world of classical scholars. She regularly infuriated Franklin by announcing from her rambling country estate that, although a literary genius, she was really just like any other plain and ordinary housewife in a string of pearls and an outsized, floral-print kaftan.

  Franklin despised Mullah and Mappelthorpe but concentrated his hate on the Dwarf. I think he loathed him with such a passion because he saw in his rival some dim reflection of himself and his own vain aspirations. Whatever the reasons, Franklin was mad and dangerous.

  I watched him closely over the next few days and although he remained bombastic, beneath his brittle carapace he seemed unusually nervous. The telephone startled him. A ring at the door would make him flinch and look around anxiously until the visitor had been safely identified as harmless. Even Marvel grew sorry for him, but this amounted to nothing more than a sullen silence between them. I don’t know what he’d hoped to achieve from his campaign of mischief. If the charges against the Dwarf were hollow insults then the author of the letters would be dismissed as a heckler, an idiot, another lunatic in the crowd. If the charges were published and proved to be true then the Dwarf would almost certainly enjoy a massive surge in his sales and be sent forth on a fresh publicity campaign. He wouldn’t for a moment feel ashamed. He would probably write another book. His reputation as a wildly dangerous and rather clever young man would be complete. And that re
putation would be his shield. He couldn’t be slain by his enemies. But in trying to damage him it was clear that Franklin had injured himself. He grew queasy with guilt. Paralysed by his own poison. It was terrible to watch him suffer.

  22

  The next morning I tried to raid Belgium again. The house was quiet. Marvel was still asleep in China. He was trying to summon the strength to pursue his mysterious weekly errand and was not to be disturbed. Franklin was in the attic putting the B into BasTArd. Janet had gone to work at the usual time. Dorothy, with a little coaxing, had returned to St Boris the Sufferer to purchase a full set of colour postcards. Father had taken himself to market. And mother, tired of waiting for me to finish clearing breakfast away, had already gone into Mexico. It was perfect. Mr Romance loitered in the kitchen for a few minutes, trying to gather his courage and at nine-fifteen precisely, armed with a bucket of dusters and polish, he finally tiptoed up the stairs and slipped across the Belgian border.

  The room was still charged with her perfume. A shot of Pandemonium that drifted on the air like mist. The heavy doors of the wardrobe had been closed but left unsecured. Her make-up stood crowded among the many glass knickknacks scattered about the dressing table. There were books arranged on top of the polished chest of drawers. A travel alarm on the bedside table. A Glad Tidings Bible Tract paperback bible. A water glass. Spare spectacles. A half-eaten bar of hazelnut chocolate. It was everything I’d imagined. Dorothy was everywhere.

  There were one or two disappointments. She had made her own bed, depriving me of the heart-stopping pleasure I had anticipated in driving my arms, with shirt-sleeves rolled, between the fading warmth of her sheets to smooth out the night tide of folds and wrinkles. She did not abandon her clothes on the floor, which might have allowed me some insight, with no more work than to walk the carpet, into her taste in underwear. These items were of more than passing interest since I fancied she must gird her loins with garments made from nothing but cotton, pure and simple, uncompromising and durable, with sensible, warm designs built on secure, unyielding foundations. The buckle-down Invincible. The Dreadnought draughtproof superior. Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together, as you’ll know from Deuteronomy. No pagan panties for Dorothy, with their soft silk ribbons and beards of lace. But I saw not a shred of evidence. The carpet was bare. The chairs were empty. Perhaps it was enough, for the moment, to be in her room and to sense her presence surrounding me.