Clubbed to Death

by Ruth Edwards

  Amiss heaved his suitcase on to his bed, unlocked it and began to unpack.

  ‘Why is Ganesh an elephant? Or do I mean, why is an elephant a god?’

  ‘Because Shiva, his father, who’d been away for a long time, found him in the wife’s bedroom on his return and assumed that he was her toyboy. Shiva is a bad-tempered chap—not for nothing is he known as “the Destroyer.” He chopped his son’s head off on the spot. Mother was furious and demanded the situation be put to rights. The only way that Father could do this was by giving his son the head of the first living creature he met, which happened to be an elephant. However, that handicap never held Ganesh back. He made the most of things.’

  ‘Are you religious, Sunil?’

  ‘Anything but. Don’t worry. You’ll be spared the flowers and the incense-burning and general carry-on. But some aspects of my family religion and culture appeal to me. Here, let me help. It’s very hard to get clothes into this wardrobe until you get the knack.’ Deftly he inserted Amiss’s suit and sports jacket into the minuscule space.

  Amiss finished flinging the rest of his belongings into the allocated drawers and lay down on his bed. ‘So why are you in a dump like this?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’

  ‘I want to be a poet.’

  ‘I want to be a novelist, but first I want to get a degree and ffeatherstonehaugh’s makes that possible.’

  ‘Do you drink?’ Amiss took out of his pocket the hip-flask that Pooley had thrust upon him as he left. ‘Whisky, that is.’

  ‘Rarely and very little,’ said Sunil, ‘for pragmatic reasons. However, I’ll make an exception in this case,’ and he accepted the hip-flask, took a swig and returned it.

  ‘So are you actually at university?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Sunil began to undress. ‘I’m taking a full-time degree at London University. I do nothing except work here, go to lectures and study.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get a grant?’

  ‘I didn’t qualify. My father earns too much money and he was not prepared to subsidise me to do what he thought was a ridiculous waste of time.’

  ‘But I thought Indians were always terribly keen on education for their children?’

  ‘My father would have paid for years and years to have me become a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. He was appalled that I wanted to study English and history, both of which he thought not only pointless but a danger to my identity. He thinks I’m Indian because he is. I think I’m English because I was born here.’

  ‘Have you fallen out over it?’

  ‘Yes, for the moment I’ve been cut off. And that’s a relief to me really. It saves me getting involved in all that endless round of relatives. And when I get a first-class degree, which I hope to do, I’ll be forgiven because I’ll bring status to the family. There will then be an outbreak of peace until I refuse to get involved in an arranged marriage.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t let it get me down. I regard the situation as part of the normal growing-pains of an immigrant Asian family.’

  ‘You’re very philosophical.’ Amiss took off his jacket.

  ‘Comes of being a Hindu. Even a lapsed one. What about you?’

  ‘Well, I have a degree, but I have no idea what career I want, if any, and for the moment I’m taking undemanding jobs and writing poetry.’

  Amiss hated lying to this nice youth: he changed the subject rapidly.

  ‘Sunil, do I gather from that jug and bowl that we wash in our bedrooms with cold water?’

  ‘Not necessarily. We have a choice. On this floor there is one bathroom, but there are twenty of us. The good news is that there are two lavatories. So I wash in the morning here and bathe when the others have all gone out. You can have the cold water here in the bedroom tomorrow morning if you like. I’ll be getting up early anyway. I’ve got an essay to finish.’

  ‘But how can you get to your lectures? Surely they clash with work.’

  ‘Because Gooseneck is actually very decent to me.’

  ‘Well, if he’s so decent,’ said Amiss, as he donned the pyjamas he had specially bought for the purposes of room-sharing, ‘why does he allow us to be fed so badly?’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with Gooseneck. That’s the provender committee. They decide on all the menus for members, guests and staff alike.’ He got into bed.

  ‘Well how can a whole committee be composed of shits?’

  ‘That’s not difficult in ffeatherstonehaugh’s. But this is a special case. The chairman is that old brute Fagg.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘He’s the one who’s always covered in snuff. You can tell where he’s been by the trail. And his pockets clank with snuffboxes. He carries about fourteen of them. Occupies most of his day really, pulling them all out, sniffing at what’s inside, choosing the one for the moment. That’s when he’s not stuffing himself with breakfast, lunch and dinner and occasionally calling a meeting of his cronies to think of more ways of misusing the club funds and treating the servants as he believes they should be treated.’

  ‘But doesn’t the chairman of the club object?’

  ‘Very tricky business politically. Would you mind turning the light out, Robert? I’m knackered. A new chairman came in a few months ago. By accident they chose someone who was half-way human. And he brought in a secretary who was at least three-quarters human. They were trying to introduce changes and then the secretary goes and kills himself and we’re back with the Commander, God help us.’

  Amiss switched off the light and climbed into bed.

  ‘Do you have a copy of the constitution and rules of the club?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to see them—just out of curiosity.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sunil. ‘They wouldn’t be available to servants. Anyway, I use this place as a convenience. I haven’t got time to get curious about it. If you want to dig the dirt your best hope is old Gooseneck, especially if he finds you attractive. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Amiss, ‘And, of course, goodnight to Ganesh. He seems to be the sanest bloke in this place, next to us.’

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ said Sunil.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘How did you sleep, Robert?’

  Amiss opened his eyes to see Sunil standing over him looking solicitous.

  ‘Fitfully,’ said Amiss gloomily. ‘I think this is the hardest bed I ever slept on in my whole life.’

  ‘Ah! Then you obviously didn’t go to public school like I did. The great advantage of such institutions is that they fit you for prison conditions. I can sleep anywhere for just as long as I’ve got. Did I snore?’

  ‘Well, a bit.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I was afraid of that. Sorry. The remedy is quite straightforward.’ Sunil walked over to the far side of his bed, searched among the books that stood in piles in the corner and selected half a dozen paperbacks. ‘Here you are, Robert. Just toss one of those at me any time I snore and I’ll turn on my side and shut up. Something else I learned at school.’

  ‘You’re very kind, Sunil.’

  ‘We need to be kind to each other. Nobody else in this place will be. But now, come on. It’s time you got up. Breakfast in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Oh, shit! And I’m on duty immediately afterwards.’

  ‘Aha! You’re doing breakfast, are you? Well, I think you’re going to find that an interesting experience. I’ve got the morning off. I’m going to lectures.’

  Amiss jumped out of bed. He queued miserably outside the nearer of the two occupied lavatories for five minutes until it was vacated by a depressed-looking oriental, washed and shaved unhappily in cold water, put on his ridiculous uniform and ran down to breakfast.

  Gooseneck presided over a table of thirty, one-third of whom were female. All except Gooseneck, Amiss and one of the girls were in ordinary clothes, and having looked at what was available for breakfast Amiss wondered why they had bothered turning up at all. Then he realised that they were presumably so poo
r that even a choice of cornflakes or lumpy porridge, along with underdone toast and margarine, had the overwhelming attraction of being free. He sat down beside the uniformed girl who introduced herself as Elsa from Hamburg. Unlike most of their colleagues she had fluent English, and they chatted politely as they ate. At five to eight Gooseneck took Elsa and Amiss aside for a briefing.

  ‘I normally try to avoid having two new people on duty simultaneously,’ he said. ‘However, on this occasion I thought it not unreasonable to take a risk. You both need training and you both speak English. It is, I can assure you, a rare event in this establishment to have not one but two newcomers with such a qualification. As you will have noticed, most of your colleagues possess an English vocabulary of no more than a dozen words.’

  Amiss wondered vaguely why ffeatherstonehaugh’s head waiter should speak like a prep-school master of the 1950s. Gooseneck noticed his look of preoccupation. ‘Pay attention, dear boy. Now here are the key instructions. You serve from the left, and you lose no opportunity to call the old bastards “sir.”’ He paused, bowed towards Elsa and said, ‘I do beg your pardon. You try to keep them happy, use your common sense and come to me if you have any problems. Elsa, you will deal with tables one to seven; Robert, you take the remainder. I will help each of you according to the pressure you are under. I will also relieve you, Robert, at eight-thirty, when you take Mr. Glastonbury’s tray upstairs to his bedroom. Come to me then for instructions.’

  As they moved towards the green baize door he added as an afterthought, ‘Oh, and Elsa, if anyone asks you what nationality you are, say you’re Swiss.’

  ‘Why? I don’t want to say I’m Swiss. I’m proud of being German.’

  ‘Be guided by me, my dear girl. If you wish to keep your job, Swiss is what you need to be. Oh, and one thing more, Elsa. I have given you the section of the room in which Mr. Fishbane does not sit. Always try to avoid him.’

  ‘Which is he?’ she asked.

  ‘His appearance is a trifle anachronistic. Rather dandyish. He sports Edwardian sideburns and wears embroidered waistcoats during the day and in the evening always a black tie.’ Elsa looked completely confused. ‘Sorry, Elsa. I mean by that a tuxedo, as I think you will probably know it. Should he call you over to him, Elsa, I advise you to stay as far away from him as possible, and at all costs, never turn your back. Unless, that is, you enjoy being pinched. Mr. Fishbane is obsessed with sex and while I imagine he can’t do a great deal about it any more, poor old boy, until he’s finished his breakfast he’s almost out of control if he spies an attractive girl.’

  Elsa directed at Amiss a look of desperation. He shrugged and together they went into the dining-room. One by one, the aged tottered in, each one seemingly more decrepit than the one before. Amiss made a mental note to find out what the average age of members was. To judge by his observation so far, it was somewhere in the region of eighty-seven.

  Their charges proved pretty uniform in their habits. They each came in and looked expectantly at Gooseneck, who showed them to a table with great ceremony and handed them a newspaper. Amiss was not surprised to see that all the members—even the residents—had separate tables. The members of this club might be odd, but they were English: the notion of socialising at breakfast would be anathema. They sat behind their newspapers. To his surprise, very few of them took the quality papers: middle-of-the-range tabloids were the norm. Fishbane was one interesting exception. He took both the Telegraph and the Sun. Indeed, as Amiss saw with fascination, his first act on sitting down to breakfast was to open the tabloid at page three, fold it and prop it against the sugar bowl in such a way that the topless pin-up of the day was there to be looked at every time he got bored with the Telegraph.

  Having taken the orders and observed the quality of the breakfast on offer to members, Amiss was relieved that Colonel Fagg had been allocated to Elsa rather than to him. A man who could decree that the waiters should be given a disgusting breakfast prior to serving their masters with cold ham, kedgeree, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, grilled wild mushrooms, devilled kidneys and much, much more, was a man who deserved to have his teapot emptied over his scrofulous head. It was while he was bringing a second helping of kedgeree to Fishbane that the row broke out a few tables away.

  ‘I asked is the haddock finnan?’ said a querulous voice.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Elsa. ‘I do not understand. Could you please repeat it again?’

  ‘Finnan. Surely you know about finnan haddock. What’s this club coming to when a fellow can’t get a straightforward answer to a straightforward question.’

  ‘Girl sounds like a bloody Kraut,’ said Fagg, joining in. ‘Are you a Kraut, girl, eh? Come on, come on. Tell the truth. Are you a Kraut?’

  ‘A what, sir?’

  ‘Kraut,’ roared Fagg. ‘Boche, Hun, bloody German. Are you a bloody German?’

  ‘I am Swiss,’ said Elsa, backing away nervously and turning and fleeing to Gooseneck. Amiss hurriedly joined them.

  ‘It’s all right, Elsa,’ Gooseneck was saying. ‘Old Mauleverer is obsessed with food. I should have warned you that regularly as clockwork, whenever he stays in this club, he checks if the haddock is finnan, if the skin around the black pudding is made of hog’s intestines and so on. For your information, finnan is merely a superior variety of smoked haddock.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elsa, sobbing. ‘But why does that horrible old man shout at me?’

  ‘I warned you,’ said Gooseneck. ‘Colonel Fagg has never quite come to terms with the end of the Second World War, I’m afraid, Elsa. He has ruled that the club should not employ anyone from a nation which fought against us. We ignore the rule and deceive him. Now dry your eyes and get back to work.’

  ‘And try to look Swiss,’ said Amiss encouragingly. ‘It’s eight-thirty, Mr. Gooseneck.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Now listen carefully, Robert. Have you come across Mr. Glastonbury yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amiss cautiously. ‘I’ve seen him asleep and I’ve seen him waking up. That’s about it.’

  ‘Ah, then you probably have the general picture,’ said Gooseneck. ‘Now go into the kitchen and take the tray which you’ll find waiting on the table on the left and take it up to room five on the third floor.’

  ‘Can I go in the lift?’

  ‘May you,’ corrected Gooseneck absentmindedly. ‘No. I fear you may not go in the lift.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ said Amiss under his breath, beginning to turn towards the kitchen.

  ‘Not so fast, my fine fellow,’ said Gooseneck. ‘There’s more. When you get to room five you knock loudly and shout “Good morning, Master Boy. Here comes Nanny with your breakfast.”’ Their eyes met: there was a brief silence. ‘“Master Boy,”’ said Amiss.

  ‘“Master Boy,”’ said Gooseneck.

  ‘“Nanny.”’

  ‘“Nanny.” Now perhaps you understand why it helps to have the occasional English person working here. Try explaining that to a Greek.’

  ‘What happens then?’ asked Amiss apprehensively.

  ‘All plain sailing after that,’ said Gooseneck. ‘He will call, “I’m awake, Nanny.” If he doesn’t, you go through the drill again until he does. Then you go in and by the time you’ve arrived at his bedside, he will have acquired a dim grasp of where he is. You then revert to the norm and say, “Good morning, sir,” It’s perfectly simple, really.’

  ***

  As Amiss placed the tray on the table beside Glastonbury’s bed, he quickly sized up the room. Window wide open, no curtains and a narrow iron bedstead that looked no more comfortable than the one he had himself. Otherwise, the room was quite pleasant. An armchair, desk, a couple of straight chairs and other bedroom furniture were all Victorian. On the wall there were a few decent water-colours of the English countryside and in the far corner, several framed group photographs. Glastonbury was clearly not a scholar. Out of the corner of his eye Amiss could see that the single bookshelf seemed to contain mainly school stories and adven
ture yarns. Poor old devil, thought Amiss, as he fussed around the old man, removing dish-covers, undoing the napkin, helping him settle himself upright. His compassion intensified when he saw the other inhabitant of the bed—a small, shabby teddy-bear.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Glastonbury. ‘Thank you. Now you’re new, aren’t you? Aren’t you? I haven’t seen you before, I don’t think. Who are you?’

  ‘Robert, sir.’

  ‘Ah! English chap then. Jolly good, jolly good. Don’t get many of them any more. Can’t think why.’

  ‘Would there be anything else, sir?’

  ‘No, no. Thank you.’ Glastonbury gave him a vague smile of great sweetness and then fell upon the vast mound of ham and eggs. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  Amiss was stunned by the courtesy and curiously uplifted to find that not everyone in this establishment was like Colonel Fagg. He returned to his dining-room duties in a state bordering on good humour.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m becoming institutionalised,’ wrote Amiss to Rachel a week later. ‘I’m forming habits and staking claims to little pieces of territory. Sunil has shown me places in the club where the members rarely go and where, therefore, it’s safe to read or write or sleep as long as you wear your uniform and can pretend to be doing something vaguely official if someone comes in.

  ‘I wait at breakfast every morning, including weekends, when only the long-term residents get fed. I’ve graduated to serving at lunch-time also: some even newer employee has been put in charge of the bar. In the afternoon I attend to the needs of the inhabitants of the Smoking Room and the gallery. Three or four nights a week I also wait at dinner. I’m known to be keen to earn extra money on overtime, so I volunteer for everything and I get most of it because—wait for it—I am prized! I am good-humoured, adaptable and I can understand instructions. I am therefore bliss for poor old Gooseneck, who this week has already suffered five losses. Elsa departed because she couldn’t take Fagg’s oft-repeated loud muttering of “Swiss maybe, but Swiss-Kraut certainly”; two male Chinese took umbrage when he denounced them as Nips; an observing Hindu became revolted when Mauleverer, an occasional resident, subjected him to intense cross-questioning about whether the liver was from a Dutch calf and was being served sufficiently rare; and a delicious-looking Filipino, who strayed too close to Fishbane at breakfast, received a pinch which made her hysterical. Never a dull moment in this establishment. Despite my many and varied duties I have quite a lot of free time and this is where the ritual sets in. Nine-thirty to ten-thirty, stroll in St James’s Park, having, I hasten to say, changed out of my uniform. I may not suffer much from amour propre, but I’m fucked if I’m prepared to run the risk of running into people from my past life while clad as a bellhop. Return and change into uniform. Ten-thirty to eleven-thirty, read in the Card Room, and then off to staff lunch and work.