Vintage Stuff
Page 25
‘That’s called the Spitfire effect,’ said the Sister. ‘Lots of pilots who crashed in the Battle of Britain looked like that.’
‘In that case I’d have thought the Messerschmidt effect would have been more appropriate,’ said Glodstone. ‘Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life with these pustules? There’s one actually swelling on what’s left of my nose.’
‘They’re just leeches. We use them for scavenging—’
‘Shit,’ said Glodstone, and had to be held down to prevent him from trying to dislodge the things.
‘We’ll have to give you a sedative if you don’t behave like a good boy.’
‘Madam,’ said Glodstone, managing to rally some dignity under threat of the needle, ‘I have had some considerable experience of boys and no sane one would allow his face to be used as a watering hole for scavenging leeches. I could get tetanus, or die from loss of blood.’
‘Nonsense. We ensure they’re all perfectly healthy and they’re only cleaning up the scar tissue.’
‘In that case they’ll get bloody awful indigestion,’ said Glodstone, ‘they’ve got enough grub there for the Lord Mayor’s banquet. And get that sod out of my left nostril. I can’t with my hands in bandages. And what’s that for?’
‘Fingerprint removal,’ said the Sister, and left Glodstone to contemplate a life without any physical means of identification. Even his closest friends wouldn’t know him now. Or want to.
But at least the Countess had been delighted. ‘Darling,’ she said when she came to collect him, ‘you look wonderful.’
‘You’ve got fucking peculiar tastes is all I can say,’ said Glodstone bitterly, and was promptly rebuked far using filthy language.
‘You were something hush-hush in the war and you’d rather not talk about it. That’s the line you’ll have to take,’ she said, ‘and from now on you’re to call me Bobby.’
‘But that’s a boy’s name,’ said Glodstone, wondering if he was about to marry some sort of lesbian with a truly horrific lust for disfigured men. It was a wonder he hadn’t had a sex-change operation.
‘It’s nice and thirtyish. Lots of girls were called Bobby then and it’ll blend with the peke.’
Glodstone shuddered. He loathed pekes and it was clear he was no longer going to be allowed to call his life his own, let alone his face.
*
It had proved only too true. After a swift register marriage at which he had had to declare himself to be Clarence Sopwith Hillary, a combination of names Glodstone found personally humiliating, unnecessarily provocative and, in the case of the last, in exceedingly bad taste, they had driven on in Bobby’s dinky Mini (‘We mustn’t be thought to consider ourselves a cut above the neighbours, Clarence,’ she told Glodstone, who knew damned well he was a hell of a lot of cuts just about everywhere else) to the bungalow in Bognor Regis. It had fulfilled his direst expectations. From its green-tiled roof to the petunias bordering the weedless lawn and the cubistic carpet in the drawing room, it represented everything he had most despised.
‘But it’s pure art deco, Clarence. I mean it’s us.’
‘It may be you,’ said Glodstone, ‘but I’m damned if it’s me. And can’t you call me something other than Clarence? It’s almost as foul as Cecil.’
‘I shall call you Soppy, darling. And this is Beatrice.’
‘Hell,’ said Glodstone, who had just been bitten on the ankle by the peke.
Now as he stood gazing at his own nonentity in the bathroom he knew he was beaten. They would play bridge all evening with the Shearers and he’d get told off for bidding badly and have to make the coffee and have to take that bloody Beatrice for a pee before going to bed. And he knew what they’d drink. Crème de menthe. Constance Sugg had returned to her roots.
*
In a hedge in South Armagh, Peregrine, now Number 960401, stared through the night-sight of his rifle at the figure moving in the field below. It could be a Garda but he didn’t care. He’d already notched up five IRA men, two poachers and an off-duty RUC constable, not to mention an Army Land-Rover, to such awful effect that even the local Protestants had joined with the IRA in declaring his sixteen square miles a No-Go Area, and the Army avoided the place. Peregrine didn’t care. He was in his element, doing what he had been trained to do. And every few weeks an unmanned balloon (there’d been an unfortunate incident with a helicopter) would drift over for him to shoot down and collect his ammunition and supplies.
Not that he needed the latter. He’d already bagged a sheep for his supper in the burrow he’d dug halfway down an old well and was rather looking forward to it. The Major had said one should live off the land, and he did. He squeezed the trigger and watched the man drop. Then he obeyed another of the Major’s dicta, that an army marched on its stomach, and crawled the two miles back to his hideout. Presently, in the happy knowledge he was doing exactly what he’d been told, he pulled his rifle through and oiled it, and settled down to leg of lamb.