Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  ‘That’s extremely courteous of you. It’s Derek, please. Remind me of your name.’

  ‘Virgil will suffice.’

  ‘Thank you, sufficient Virgil. I hereby appoint you passer-round of the nuts and olives.’ He opened the champagne – ‘Not a drop spilt. Aren’t I the dexterous one?’ – and filled the glasses.

  ‘To Daddy, and to Derek.’

  ‘To my dearest darling Kitty.’

  ‘To sufficient Virgil.’

  ‘Noroc.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Happiness. Noroc is the word we use when we toast each other. Noroc is good luck, or happiness.’

  ‘Then loads of noroc, heaps and heaps of it, for all of us.’

  They drank.

  ‘Nectar. Sheer nectar. I should have treated myself to much, much more of this when I was younger.’

  ‘Then you would not have been svelte and you wouldn’t have sustained a career as a model, and the rich ladies wouldn’t have lusted for you if you’d had a paunch and a boozer’s flushed complexion. What nonsense you evacuate, Crozier. Tell me, sufficient Virgil, is Romania one of those plum brandy countries?’

  ‘We have such a drink: uicã, it is called. I prefer it flavoured with apricot.’

  ‘If it’s anything like slivovitz it’s not for me. Firewater, absolutely diabolical firewater. Thirty years on, the ghastly memory of losing my memory persists. Two days went missing from my life, thanks to a mere half-bottle of slivovitz. It still rankles with me – the idea of having lost control.’

  ‘Derek’s a controlling sort of person. Aren’t you, Derek?’

  ‘Someone has to be. Think of a world consisting only of Crozier here multiplied by billions, with nary a factotum in sight, and you’ll soon have a picture of total chaos blurring your vision. No, let’s not think of it, it’s too upsetting. I run a trim ship.’

  ‘With a helpless second-in-command, eh, Derek?’

  ‘You said it, Crozier.’

  The old men chuckled at this rejoinder, and the gentle noise they made struck Kitty and her lover as not unaffectionate.

  ‘My glass is empty, Derek.’

  ‘Is it, by Jove? And what of your daughter’s? And sufficient Virgil’s? In polite households, Crozier, the needs of guests usually take priority.’

  ‘I have enough, Derek. I must be careful.’

  ‘I’ll fill you up with gallons of coffee, so don’t be worrying this early in the proceedings about driving home. There you are, Kitty. There you are, Virgil.’

  ‘What has happened to my “sufficient”?’

  ‘Missing it already? It’ll be back in time for lunch. Oh, Crozier, there’s just a smidgen, the merest smidgen, of bubbly at the bottom. It’s for you.’

  ‘Open some more.’

  ‘No, no, no. You have Sauvignon to come and a heavenly Margaux, and a Monbazillac with dessert, and if you’re coherent after those I might allow you an Armagnac to settle your stomach. But for now, Crozier, be strong-willed and be patient. Meanwhile, the stove beckons me. Bring Kitty and her sufficient Virgil into the house at your leisure that is to say, this month, this week, this afternoon, today.’

  ‘How did you meet Derek, Daddy? And where?’

  ‘Wait for him to vanish. He’ll come back and correct every damned thing I tell you otherwise. There, he’s gone. Yes, well, dearest darling, I met him first when I was with the frightful Joan. Was it Joan, now I think of it, or was it Linda? No, it was Joan. It has to be Joan. Yes, it was in the Joan days. Joan had this thing about the English aristocracy, thought the sun shone out of their arses. Her idea of ecstasy was to stand outside a stately home and wonder what Milord and Milady were doing behind those great windows. I got to dread coming to England with her. Do you remember Joan, Kitty darling?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy, I do. I liked her more than Muriel.’

  ‘Anyone would. She’s dead, the bitch. Muriel, that is. Well, yes – Joan. It’s Joan we’re dealing with. Joan found out there was this viscount or duke or what the hell he was who was begging for money to restore his south wing or north wing, whichever wing it was, where his collection of paintings by that chap who specialised in barges – no, they’re not barges, what are they, the tiny boats the men dressed as barbers’ poles steer along in Venice –’

  ‘Gondolas, Felix. The paintings must be by Canaletto.’

  ‘Gondolas, yes, thank you. Yes, by Canaletto. Yes, thank you, Virgil. Yes, well, Joan sent this viscount or duke one of her nice big healthy cheques, with the result that she and her husband, me, were invited to dine at the family pile. And that’s where I came across Derek, who was the duke’s or viscount’s butler. My God, did Derek turn that into a memorable evening for me. The nerve of the man. The gall.’

  ‘Why, Daddy? What did he do?’

  ‘What didn’t he, the rogue. He caught my eye at the reception in the picture gallery – oh, Joan was in her element being presented to Lord This, Lady That, and a couple of doddery near-royals – and he winked at me. He actually winked at me. The next thing was that he walked over to me and asked if the wine was to my taste, and I was on the verge of the expected “Yes” when he came out with “Because if it is, your palate is beyond salvation. You would have been safer with spirits, sir, but His Grace keeps those under lock and key.” And then he was off, nodding here, bowing there, to all appearances the perfect servant.’

  ‘Did he speak to you again?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Out of the corner of his mouth, like a clever ventriloquist. I was stuck between an ancient crone in a tiara and some inbred young oaf at dinner – Joan, of course, was up at the top with His Grace – and every time Derek passed he’d mutter something to me. Of the crone, for instance, he said “She had a booking on the Titanic, but cancelled at the eleventh hour. Very inconsiderate of her” and – this one I’ll never forget – “There’s an excellent fish-and-chip shop in the adjoining town. Warmly recommended” and “Be frugal, sir, it is Cook’s worst night in living memory.” The laughs, the laughs. I can’t recall everything he muttered in whichever ear was convenient for him, except for what he said as we were leaving: “I trust this has been an instructive experience, sir. You have seen how the turds live.” He winked at me again while he was helping madam, Joan, into her cape. “Oh, it’s been totally, totally wonderful, Harville,” she was gushing, and Harville – Derek – bowed and scraped and assured madam that he and his devoted staff were only content when they were certain that His Grace’s distinguished guests were contented also.’

  ‘Crozier!’ Derek Harville bellowed from the conservatory. ‘Today!’

  ‘Trouble, trouble. Let’s go in, Kitty darling. And your friend.’

  Kitty and Virgil followed Felix Crozier into the cottage.

  ‘I bought it for the beams,’ said Derek Harville. ‘A few of them are the genuine originals. Before we seat ourselves at table, does anyone want to wash those euphemistic hands?’

  Virgil did, and was told that the bathroom was to the right at the top of the not-genuine and not-original stairs.

  ‘He’s quite gloomy, your friend.’

  ‘He’s serious.’

  ‘His clothes, Kitty darling. His awful clothes. Forgive me for saying so, but he is drabness personified.’

  ‘I’m not bothered by what he wears.’

  ‘What’s his job?’

  ‘At the moment he’s working in one of the London parks. Virgil’s a poet.’

  ‘Airy-fairy type, eh? Can’t you do better for yourself, Kitty?’

  ‘What’s better?’

  ‘Someone with an income. Someone with a bit of dress sense. Someone, Kitty darling, with some flesh on him.’

  ‘You must excuse an intervention from the factotum. He is skinny, Kitty. What do they eat in Romania?’

  ‘Not very much, Derek. Unless they’re politicians, or privileged.’

  ‘I’ll feed him up for you. There’s plenty of everything. We’ve scallops, and roast lamb and –’

  ‘Lam
b? I forgot to say. I’m sorry, but Virgil can’t eat lamb. He has an aversion to it.’

  ‘He’s vegetarian?’

  ‘Not completely. It seems to be red meat he’s averse to. I’m very sorry, Derek. He’ll have the scallops, I’m sure.’

  ‘I assume it goes with being a poet, Kitty – not touching red meat.’

  ‘Quiet, Crozier. Ration your inanities, if you would be so kind. What lies was your loose tongue imparting to Kitty and her poet out there?’

  ‘No lies, Derek. No lies. Honestly, Derek, no lies.’

  Derek Harville mimicked her father – ‘“Honestly, Derek, no lies”’ – with an accuracy that would have caused Kitty to laugh in recognition had she not found herself slightly shocked by it.

  ‘He does me perfectly, doesn’t he? Uncanny, isn’t it? Gets my voice to a T. I wish I had his knack. I’d have earned myself a fortune as an entertainer.’

  ‘You are not exactly impoverished, Crozier, and in certain respects you were employed in the entertainment industry. Night after gruelling night.’

  The old men’s second outbreak of chuckling was interrupted by the return of Virgil. ‘I smell meat cooking,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and it is not for you. Kitty has forewarned me regarding your – your aversion, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aversion, yes.’

  ‘I shall ply you, sufficient Virgil, with a sufficiency of beans and baby, baby carrots. There’s masses of hearty lettuce, too, delicately enhanced with my own vinaigrette. You will not starve.’

  ‘No, I won’t. You are a kind man.’

  ‘Did you hear, Crozier? Did you catch Virgil’s compliment? Please don’t pay me any more, I beg of you, or my already sizeable head will swell. One will suffice, sufficient Virgil.’ He clapped his hands. ‘To your places, to your places.’

  (In later years, in the years of utter desolation, Kitty Crozier would be seated at the exquisitely set table with the vase of sweet-peas from the garden at its centre; would be seated in that low-ceilinged, oak-beamed room, marvelling that the constant banter of her father and his Mephistophelean companion had progressed to a state beyond words, had become a kind of fearsome music, high and shrill; would be seated there, again, looking across at the soulful man in a stranger’s cast-offs, willing his eyes to meet hers in fond conspiracy – willing them and willing them for ever.)

  ‘You’re obviously not averse to coquilles Saint-Jacques.’

  ‘No. I am not. Thank you.’

  ‘Crozier’s partial to them, aren’t you? The first time I prepared coquilles for him I had to stop him trying to consume the shell.’

  ‘That’s a lie, Derek. I’m not a gastronomic cretin, whatever else I am. And I wasn’t telling lies to darling Kitty and her Romanian out on the lawn. I was regaling them with stories about the evening I had the misfortune to meet you, you scoundrel.’

  ‘Ah, yes. A truly nightmarish occasion, even by the nightmarish standards maintained by the Duke. He was meanness incarnate. Fund-raising to restore the west wing gallery, indeed! He could have restored it a hundred times over and still have had tons of shekels left in the family’s – beg pardon kitty. The only thing he was generous with – to the point of being lavish – was his ignorance. He was a gastronomic cretin, to purloin your phrase, Crozier, and by far the worst of many I worked for. All in all, however, I was happiest in his employment.’

  ‘Why was that, Derek?’

  ‘Because, Kitty, he afforded me the greatest scope for insolence. I was cautious to start with, testing the waters of sarcasm, as it were, but little by little I ventured out of the shallows and into the depths, the sublime depths, of rudeness. I despised him. I despised him – I can say it now, calmly – with a ferocity that was uncontainable. I considered quitting his service when my feelings became – yes, murderous. I wanted to, needed to, murder him. But then, one morning, he and I were both saved – he from a possible violent death; I, as a possible consequence, from the hangman’s rope – by his response to a comment I was convinced would render him puce with fury. There was a moment, and what a moment, of silence between us – he stared at me, gasping; I stared back, astonished at my daring. “Goodness, goodness, goodness,” he spluttered, eventually. “Goodness, Harville, what a bold man you are. Goodness me, is it your intention to be always so frank with your master?” I nodded and thus began a working relationship that survived until the monster died of bowel cancer in his ninth decade.’

  ‘What was the comment?’

  ‘It was of a personal, a very personal, nature. I was privy, it dismays me to recollect, to a knowledge of the ducal anatomy otherwise only in the possession of himself, his wife and his doctor. I made use of my knowledge on that historic morning by suggesting – none too subtly – that his notorious parsimony was not unconnected psychologically to the scanty object on his person that the Duchess needed a magnifying glass to discover. That was my comment, Kitty, of September the twenty-third nineteen forty-seven – a rare day; a joyous day; the day I exhibited true courage.’

  ‘Derek’s being untypically modest. He was decorated in the war. He –’

  ‘Silence, Crozier. Pour the red wine, if you please. Are you aware, Virgil, that John Keats enjoyed a glass or two of Margaux? Hence the “purple-stained mouth”, I presume.’

  ‘No. I was not aware.’

  ‘You are now. Is there, perchance, a Romanian Keats? Someone similar?’

  ‘Yes, there is. Eminescu. Mihai Eminescu.’

  ‘And is he as melancholic?’

  (The moon appearing above the tree tops melancholic? A sad heart stirring at the faint sound of a distant horn melancholic? The poet’s sweet wish for an early death melancholic?)

  ‘Yes, Derek, he is as melancholic as Keats. More so, in my opinion.’

  ‘Dear, dear. Poor man. He must have had a rotten time of it. Died young?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No doubt a happy release, as they say. I shall carve the joint in the kitchen, sufficient Virgil, to lighten your burden somewhat. Crozier and I favour our lamb on the bloody side.’

  ‘Excellent cook, isn’t he, Kitty darling.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Derek’s making sure I go to seed in the grand manner. It’s marvellous not having to watch my figure any more. Not watch it so closely, rather. I was never quite as skinny as your Romanian friend, God forbid, but I had to be jolly careful with my diet. Derek chose the right word when he said I was “svelte”. You remember me as being svelte, don’t you, dearest darling?’

  ‘How could I forget, Daddy?’

  ‘That’s my daughter.’

  Derek Harville advised his guest with the aversion to concentrate on the vegetables while the carnivores disposed of the lamb. ‘Your agony will be short-lived, I guarantee, since Crozier here is already showing the remnants of his fangs. This decanter is yours to empty.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  (‘Why didn’t the shepherd listen to what the faithful lamb of Birsa told him? Why didn’t he kill the traitors with his fierce dogs and German knife?’ Matilda Florescu patted the head of her son Aureliu and smiled. ‘You don’t wonder how it is that the lamb, Miorita, can speak human speech?’ Aureliu answered that if Harap Alb could have a clever talking horse, why couldn’t the shepherd have the clever talking Mioria? ‘Yes, Aureliu, why not? And you, Virgil, what are you thinking?’ He was thinking, he said, of the star falling to earth, of the mountain suddenly becoming a priest, of the singing birds with bright features and of the old woman with tired feet wandering everywhere in search of her son, the shepherd with hair like the wings of a raven.

  ‘You have a lot to think about,’ his mother whispered, ‘but sleep first.’

  Aureliu, his voice thick with drowsiness, murmured, ‘That shepherd was a fool, Mama. That shepherd was stupid.’)

  ‘Each Monday morning, at nine o’clock, I was summoned into His Grace’s presence to be given a cheque made out to cash for the coming week’s household expenses. “Same as us
ual, Harville?” was his rhetorical question prior to the autumn of nineteen forty-seven. “Not exactly the same, Your Grace,” I replied on the second Monday in October and elaborated: prices were rising; certain items of linen had to be replaced, et cetera, et cetera. The amount on the cheque grew marginally bigger. “You are worse than those damned Socialists in Westminster where my money’s concerned, Harville,” he complained once as his writing hand set off on its reluctant journey towards his fountain pen. It was that half-humorous remark of his that inspired what I consider my pièce de résistance, my wiliest ruse. I asked myself what was really worse, in his blinkered eyes, than the Labour Party (which, unbeknown to him, I supported) – and the answer I came up with was of a radiant simplicity. Why, the Communists were worse. Their guiding star shone over Moscow. Oh, the excitement, the giddying excitement I felt when I wrote that inaugural letter – as it were from the Duke, on the Duke’s embossed notepaper – to Mr Pollitt, the leader of the British Communists, expressing his, the Duke’s, enthusiasm for Mr P’s ideas and ideals. I forged the Duke’s signature and enclosed five pounds and advised the worthy Mr P not to write in response to this no doubt surprising missive as the Duchess was a tartar who always opened his mail on the look-out for evidence of an adulterous kind. She was also – it saddened him to report – a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, who would emasculate him for his treachery. This one-sided correspondence continued on a regular monthly basis, a regular fiver attached to the Duke’s wilder and wilder endorsements of the Communist faith, for a satisfying lengthy period. I think it was those zestfully composed letters that led the Communists to put up a candidate for election in the Duke’s constituency. I voted for the pitiful wretch, as did fifty-six others.’

  ‘That was your luxury, Derek.’

  ‘Luxury? Yes, I suppose it was.’

  ‘The luxury of choice, any choice, is one we do not have.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Your countrymen are under Communist rule.’

  ‘No, Derek. We have a ruler and the ruler has a wife, and the people who let them rule over us call themselves Communists or Socialists, but any name would do. If Communism is a doctrine of equality then we are not under Communist rule.’