Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks

by Alan Coren

  It was The Sorrows Of Young Werther which pointed the way out of this slough of painlessness. Egged on by a near-delirious schoolmaster, I had had a shot at Goethe already, since a bit of Sturm und Drang sounded just what the doctor ordered, but I’d quickly rejected it. I wasn’t able to manufacture the brand of jadedness which comes, apparently, after a lifetime’s fruitless pursuit of knowledge, and the paraphernalia of pacts with the devil, Walpurgisnachtsträume, time-travel, and the rest, were not really in my line. While I sympathised deeply with Faust himself, it was quite obvious that we were different types of bloke altogether. But Werther, that meisterwerk of moonstruck self-pity – he was me all over.

  The instant I put down the book, I recognised that what up until then had been a rather primitive adolescent lust for the nubile young bride next door had really been 22-carat sublime devotion all along. It was the quintessence of unrequitable love, liberally laced with unquenchable anguish. Sporting a spotted bow, shiny shoes and a natty line in sighs, I slipped easily into the modified personality, hanging about in the communal driveway for the chance to bite my lip as the unattainable polished the doorknocker or cleaned out the drains. I abbreviated the mirthless chuckle to a silent sob, cut out the spitting altogether, and filled the once-tubercular eyes with pitiable longing.

  The girl, who must have been about twenty-five, responded perfectly. She called me her little man, underlining her blindness to my infatuation with exquisite poignancy, and let me wipe the bird-lime off her window-sills and fetch the coal. What had once been K’s cell, Raskolnikov’s hovel, the Pequod’s poop-deck, now took on the appearance of a beachcomber’s strongbox. My room was littered with weeds from her garden, a couple of slats from the fence I’d helped her mend, half-a-dozen old lipstick cases, a balding powder-puff, three laddered stockings (all taken, at night, from her dustbin), a matted clot of hair I’d found in her sink, an old shoe, a toothless comb, and a pair of lensless sunglasses that had once rested on the beloved ears. Daily, I grew more inextricably involved. I began to demand more than silent service and unexpressed adulation. I dreamed of discovering that she no longer loved her husband, that she had responded to my meticulous weeding and devoted washing-up to the point of being unable to live without me. I saw us locked in each other’s arms in a compartment on the Brighton Belle, setting out on a New Life Together.

  In April I discovered she was pregnant. For one wild moment I toyed with the idea of claiming the child as my own, thus forcing a rift between her and her husband. But the plan had obvious drawbacks. The only real course of action was undoubtedly Werther’s. Naturally, I’d contemplated suicide before, but an alternative had always come up, and, anyway, this was the first time that I had something worth dying elaborately for. I wrote innumerable last notes, debated the advantages of an upstairs window over the Piccadilly Line, and even wrote to B.S.A. to ask whether it was possible to kill a human being with one of their airguns, and, if so, how.

  In fact, if the cricket season hadn’t started the same week, I might have done something foolish.

  7

  This Thing with the Lions

  The result of a bed-ridden afternoon, in which a romp through Hemingway concluded with a coda of Elsa the Lioness and the belief that enough was as good as a feast, however moveable.

  The windbrake crackled in a gust of hot breeze. She looked up but the leaves were still now. She could see the leaves through the open tentflap, and they were still. There was a lizard on the tentpole near the top. It was the colour of old sand, and it had one yellow eye that did not blink. She whistled at it, twice; but it did not move. A muscle twitched in its shoulder, but it did not move. It is one of the brave ones, she thought. It is one of the few brave ones left.

  The boy padded in with the drinks. Not that she drank so much any more, because drink did not do the thing that it used to do. All the drink in the world will not do that thing now, she thought.

  ‘There are vultures,’ said the boy.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She watched the soda bubbles rise in the long glass, and burst, impotently. ‘They have made a kill.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He looked away. ‘Missy not go no more kill?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘It is good,’ he said. He pulled a tick from his black neck and snapped it with his thumbnail, carefully. ‘It is not for lady, the thing with the guns.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. She took the tall glass, and the ice bumped against her lips, and she thought: they will be cold now, the lips. But she did not laugh. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘it is not for lady.’

  Now in her mind she saw the wet platform of the Estacion Norte, and the great black tank engines, and the shuffling lines of khaki puppets and the anaesthetized faces of men who have lain beside the dead, and have got up and walked away. She saw the bars of the Madrid-Floride, and the Metropole, and the others, which were all the same after a while; like the fresh-faced boys who would never quite be fresh anymore. It was a long war, but they had still gone to it, and they had come back, more or less. Mostly less. She remembered the purple Spanish nights when she sat up in the room smelling of ordinario and cartridge-belts, holding their hands and telling them it did not matter the way everyone said it mattered, and that this thing with the woman was not all it was cracked up to be, anyway.

  She could hear the bearers singing now, and she wondered about the kill. I hope they got a water-buff, she thought. I hope they got a big black sweating buck, one of those that keep on coming, even with a couple of 220 solid-grain Springfields buried in their guts; one of those big, hard males with the great spread of horn. Those were the best ones, in the old days. George would not let her go for them any more. Not after the time she had gone into the bush after the bull that had tossed him. She had dropped it, finally, with one so clean you had to part the forelock to find the hole. When she got back, George had been lying in the sun for three hours.

  ‘He was a tough one,’ she said.

  ‘I know’, he said. ‘I have lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘Where did he get you?’ she said.

  He took his hands away.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That is the way it is, sometimes.’ He laughed, briefly.

  ‘Like Manolete,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He began to cry. ‘Like Manolete.’

  Things had been different between them after that, and he would not let her hunt the water-buffs any more. He did not like what it did to her, he said. So she sat around the camp, in the brass African heat, raising mongeese and cross-breeding scorpions. Sometimes she would stick pins in little clay models; but even that did not help.

  She saw the first two boys come over the hill with the animal slung on poles between them. George walked alongside, carrying the big Remington by its strap. He waved at her, the way he always did, and she took another finger of scotch, and waved back. She got off the camp-bed and went towards them.

  ‘It’s a lioness,’ she said, quietly. ‘You son-of-a-bitch.’

  ‘I didn’t want to do it, but it happened that way. She came out of the bush, and no one had time to ask questions. She was a big one,’ he said, ‘and she was coming fast.’

  She looked at the animal, with its guts torn open and its swollen teats hanging down, heavy with uselessness. She saw the belly full of old fertility, with the fat black flies buzzing around it.

  ‘Cojones,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ said George again.

  ‘I hate it when you kill females.’ She looked at the bronze horizon. ‘I hate it when you take it out on them.’

  ‘Don’t pity me,’ he said, ‘for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘She just calved. Is that why?’

  ‘I didn’t know she had cubs, I swear. When she came at us, I thought she was just one of the mean ones.’

  ‘I hope it was a clean shot.’

  He pumped a used shell out of the Remington.

  ‘Some things you just don’t
lose.’

  ‘You’re so damned clever,’ she said.

  Two boys came up, grinning, with a basket between them.

  ‘I brought you a present,’ said George. He flipped open the lid. Inside there were three lion cubs; their eyes were still closed. There was something terrifying about their innocence.

  ‘You and your goddamned metaphors,’ she said.

  He turned and walked into the tent. He pulled his bed a little further away from hers and sat down. He looked at the typewriter. Someday he would write about it, he thought. You can get rid of it when you write about it. He would write with symbols, so that when he was dead they would know he had been one of the big ones all the time. Turgenev was one of the big ones. And Flaubert. And Jack Dempsey. He was one of the big ones, too. And Ludwig von Beethoven. Turgenev and Flaubert and Dempsey and Beethoven and Peter Abelard and that old man in Key West who caught the biggest goddamned sailfish he’d ever seen in his life with a two-dollar rod. They were the great ones.

  The next day he went up-country on a Government weevil survey. He did not get back for five months, and when he walked out of the bush, waving and calling the way he always did, it took six houseboys to get the lion off him.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said. He lay on his back in the tent, his one good eye bright among the bandages. ‘You didn’t have to alienate her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She smiled. She was looking better than she had for a long time. ‘Elsa’s funny with strangers. I had to send the other two away. I hope you don’t mind?’

  The eye glittered.

  ‘As it turns out,’ he said, ‘you did the right thing.’ He paused. ‘How come you kept the third one?’

  She did not answer. In the stillness, a baboon vomited. Elsa came in silently, lapped from a basin of pink gin, and padded out again.

  ‘You got her pretty damned well trained.’

  ‘We understand one another,’ she said. ‘That’s all it takes. Understanding. And a little love.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. He tried to laugh, but the stitches dragged, and he fell back writhing. After a time, he said: ‘You girls have to stick together. That’s the way it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘That’s the way it is.’

  That evening, they were closer than they had been since the time she worked the epidiascope at the Royal Geographic. They hand-wrestled, and laughed about the time he had smashed in the French ambassador’s face with a bottle of Pernod on the train to Pamplona, and they went through the Book of Job together, looking for a title for that short story he planned to write some day; he felt good, with the old, half-familiar thing. At ten o’clock, he put his arm round her, and as he did, Elsa came in out of the dark and looked at him in a way that made him put his arm down again.

  ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘The stitches still hurt, anyway. I guess I’ll just take a walk before we turn in.’

  When he got back, the tent was dark. He sat down on his bed to take off his boots. There was a sudden roar of thunder in his ears, and a stench of stale caviare, and something heavy struck him in the back. He fell across his wife’s bunk.

  ‘What happened?’ she said.

  ‘There’s something damned funny about my bed,’ he said.

  ‘Whose bed?’

  He paused. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I took your mattress out into the open,’ she said. ‘It’s a fine night. There are shooting stars. You’ll be happier there.’

  At three a.m., the monsoon broke. It was a good monsoon, as monsoons go, but the thunder was loud, and nobody heard the shouting. The boys found George three days later, after the flood went down. He was stuck in a gau-gau tree eight miles away. After four months, the hospital in Dar-es-Salaam sent him home.

  ‘How was it?’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘They said plenty of people go around with one lung.’

  ‘It’s good for a man to know suffering,’ she said. A locust flew past, and she drew the Luger he always kept under his bed for medicinal purposes, and hit it three times. ‘Animals suffer,’ she said. ‘The strong survive. That is the law. That is the only law that counts.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I did a lot of thinking while I was in there,’ he said. ‘It isn’t good for Elsa to be brought up with human beings. She is a lioness. She is being deprived of her natural inheritance.’

  ‘I thought of that,’ she said.

  They had raw okapi meat for lunch, but he let Elsa have his share, because she was a year old now, and had a way of crunching bones that put him off his food. After the meal, Elsa and his wife sat around roaring at one another.

  ‘I wish you’d teach me that,’ he said.

  ‘It’d only make Elsa more jealous,’ she said.

  He did not see much of them after that. They went out hunting at dawn, and did not return until sunset. Once, he wanted to go with them, but they would not let him take his rifle or his trousers, so he stayed behind and thought about the good time before the war and the time Dominguin got both ears and a tail and the time before that when he was a zoology student in Camden Town and he knocked a policeman’s helmet off in Regent’s Park Road. That was one story he had saved to write. He looked across the dung-coloured scrub to the dead tree where the vultures waited, cleaning their beaks. Somewhere it had gone wrong, he thought. Something had come and it had waited a while, and then it had gone and it would not ever come back any more. And he was no nearer to knowing what it was than he had been on those pale mornings in Edgware in the days when his father had done that thing they did not talk about.

  One evening, his wife came back alone. He saw her loping across the twilit scrub, growling. She stopped in front of him, and he saw the blood on her, and the bad marks, and the bald patch.

  ‘It is over,’ she said.

  ‘Over?’

  ‘She has found a mate.’

  ‘That’s how it is with kids,’ he said. ‘You bring them up, teach them everything you know, and they turn round and go off with the first creep who whistles at them.’

  She laughed once, very high, and the vultures flew off in a rattle of black wings. She looked at him with eyes tinted yellow by the dying sun.

  ‘Is that the way it is?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is.’

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ she said.

  8

  Bohemia

  English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. It does not belong in the great, mad, steamy glasshouse in which so much of the art of the rest of the world seems to have flourished – or, at least, so much of the pseudo-art. Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensually up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the rich warm beds, kumquats ripen, tremble, and plop fatly to the floor – and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen garden, English Bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.

  In our Bohemia, there are no beautifully crazy one-eared artists, no sans culottes, no castrated epistolarians, no genuine revolutionaries, no hopheads, no lunatics, not even any alcoholics of note; our seed-beds have never teemed with Rimbauds and Gauguins and Kafkas and d’Annunzios and Dostoievskys; we don’t even have a Mailer or a Ginsberg to call our own. Our Bohemia is populated by Civil Servants like Chaucer and Spenser and Milton; by tough-nut professional penmongers like Shakespeare and Dryden and Johnson, who worried as much about underwear and rent as about oxymorons; by corpulent suburban family men like Thackeray and Dickens and Trollope. And whenever an English oddball raises, tentatively, his head, he’s a pitifully pale imitation of the real thing – Thom. Gray, sad, thin Cambridge queer, Cowper, mad among his rabbits, Swinburne, a tiny fetishistic gnome as far from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as water is from blood. The private lives of our great powerhouses of passion, Pope and Swift, were dreary and colourless in the extreme, and Emily Brontë divided her time between Wuthering
Heights and the Haworth laundry-list. And history, though it may offer our only revolutionary poet the passing tribute of a literary footnote, will probably think of William Morris mainly as the Father of Modern Wallpaper.

  There was, however, one brief moment in this socially unostentatious culture of ours when we were touched, albeit gingerly, by the spirit of Bohemia. I am not (how could you think a thing like that?) referring, of course, to the Wildean shenannigans at the fin of the last siècle, which were the product not of an authentic Bohemianism but of the need to dig up a literature and a modus vivendi you could wear with spats and a green carnation: that Café Royal crowd was the first Switched-On, With-It Generation England ever had, and the whole megillah should be taken with a pinch of pastis. No, the gang I have in mind are the Lake Poets, who had, for once, all the genuine constituents of real adjustment problems, social malaise, illegitimate offspring, numerous tracts, a hang-out, a vast literature, and, most important of all, a date: 1798. And since at first sight, and for several thereafter, the Lake District, a sopping place of sedge and goat, seems as unlikely a Bohemian ambience as you could shake a quill at, much can be gained by examining the area itself; one can do no better than take the career of its most eminent son, a William Wordsworth, and relate it (as all the local tourist offices do) to every cranny, sheep and sod between Windermere and the Scottish border.

  I realise, naturally, that the aforementioned bard left a meticulous record of all that made him what he was, but since all writers are extraordinary liars, poseurs, distorters, and self-deceivers, I have chosen to ignore most of his farragos and interpretations; and for the background to this chapter, I am not indebted to The Poetical Works Of William Wordsworth (5 vols, Oxford 1940–49), Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation by F. W. Bateson (London 1954), The Egotistical Sublime by J. Jones (London 1954), or Wordsworth and Coleridge by H. G. Margoliouth (London 1953). In particular, I am not indebted to Strange Seas of Thought: Studies in Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Man and Nature by N. P. Stallknecht (North Carolina 1945). However, I gather from friends in the trade that no work of serious scholarship is complete without a list of references and sources three times the size of the thing itself, so for devotees of this sort of narrischkeit, a fuller bibliography will be found sewn inside the lining of my old green hacking-jacket.