Days of Your Fathers

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘You’ll look after it, mister, won’t you?’ Bill asked a little anxiously, for he did not want it put among all the old junk in the window and sold by mistake.

  ‘I’ll keep it safe up there in its own basket,’ said Timothy, pointing to a wide shelf at the back of the office where, for as long as any customers could remember, he stored a dusty collection of cannibal wickerwork, spears, paddles, charms and ghost masks. ‘And you’ll be protected by the law for one year and seven days; but if the pledge ain’t redeemed by then I’ll have to let him have it.’

  Bill Hackafree made that twenty quid last, and it added a deal of comfort to his evenings. But nothing else would go right for him. Summer was wet and autumn stormy, and the lobsters kept out of Bill’s pots as if the devil was at the bottom of them. When the year and seven days were nearly up he half thought of putting his case to the vicar; but old Bert had done so much for the island in youth and age that Bill did not like to upset him, for he was ninety-two and failing fast.

  Even on his boat Bill could not raise twenty quid since he was the only chap who could keep her afloat at all. He had nothing in the world but his old age pension, and when he went to draw his week’s money Peter Tollar, the postmaster, could not pay him because he had no cash in the office.

  ‘You been backing horses with Her Majesty’s money again?’ Bill asked him.

  ‘I promised I wouldn’t and I haven’t,’ Peter Tollar said. ‘It was the dogs this time. And I’ll get six months at the sessions if I get a day.’

  ‘Nothing you could take round to Timothy?’ Bill asked, for it was never any good being angry with Peter Tollar.

  ‘Nothing that my old woman wouldn’t notice.’

  It was not likely she would notice a little thing like Peter Tollar’s soul so Bill Hackafree told him how he had got out of his own difficulties.

  ‘Now, I’ll tell you what we can do, Peter,’ he went on. ‘We’ll put yours in and we’ll take mine out. How much have you borrowed, as it might be, from the Post Office?’

  ‘Thirty pound,’ said Peter, as near ashamed as Bill had ever seen him.

  ‘Well, that’s thirty for you and I need twenty more to take mine out. Suppose we ask Timothy for sixty. That’ll give us ten quid over and we’ll split it.’

  Peter Tollar of course would not believe him, so Bill rowed him across to the mainland then and there. Timothy could see nothing unbusiness-like in the transaction and said he had been authorised to lend to any reasonable amount. He paid out the sixty to Peter Tollar in clean pound notes and Peter gave Bill Hackafree twenty-five of them. Bill handed over twenty of them to Timothy, took his soul out of pawn again and put the change in his pocket.

  That was a lesson to Peter Tollar, for they got back to the island just ahead of the morning launch, and a Post Office inspector stepped ashore from it all ready to audit the cash.

  Peter could never keep his mouth shut; so the good news spread around among a few friends who had all grown old together and were not pestered by any young fools telling them how they ought to manage their money since the Herbrandsholm children all took jobs on the mainland as soon as they grew up.

  Bill and the rest were careful to keep the secret among themselves; but what with one buying a new boat and another starting to grow daffodils on his twenty acres and Solomon Titheroe sending off his clever son to be trained as a boat-builder, it was not long before Miss Fanshawe heard a rumour of how they were coming by the money.

  ‘Now is there a word of truth in all this?’ she asked Bill Hackafree when he was spreading a load of seaweed on her asparagus bed.

  ‘Well, m’lady, I couldn’t rightly say as I believe it myself, not to swear by it,’ Bill told her. ‘But I got the money like the gentleman promised me, and all the rest of us too. And as it stands at the moment Solomon Titheroe ’as his soul in for six hundred pound, and you can ask of ’im if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Then, Mr Hackafree, you will escort me to this so-called pawn-shop,’ she said.

  Bill was old-fashioned and he did not think Timothy’s was a proper place for her. For one thing, the Fanshawes had held Herbrandsholm against the Welsh for the last thousand years, though the barbican was all they had left to show for it; and, for another, she was still a young lady of fifty.

  ‘If it will do for you, it will do for me,’ she answered, standing no nonsense from Bill. ‘And I will tell you what I have told no one yet, Mr Hackafree. I owe a thousand pounds for income tax which my poor, dear father did not find it necessary to pay because he hoped they did not know they were entitled to it. And I can’t pay and they’re going to sell me up.’

  Bill Hackafree knew nothing about income tax, but he reckoned they would all rather have Fanshawes at Herbrandsholm manor than the Inland Revenue. So he borrowed a red cushion for his boat and started up the outboard motor which he had bought with the small commissions he used to take on new business and ran Miss Fanshawe over to the mainland. Timothy looked serious but after shutting himself up for five minutes in the back office where he kept the telephone he paid Miss Fanshawe one thousand six hundred pounds with no fuss at all. She gave him back six hundred to take Solomon Titheroe’s pledge out of pawn and left her own.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ she said when they were outside. ‘If you will be so good as to fetch me a large Madeira from the bar, Mr Hackafree, I shall sit down in the garden of the hotel a minute. And what will you take yourself?’

  When she had recovered she walked straight round to the office of the Inland Revenue and paid out the thousand in cash. That was where she made a mistake. Month after month the Inspector bothered her with letters asking her how she came by it; he reckoned that if she had made enough money to pay his tax demand she ought to pay tax on the money she had made.

  Miss Fanshawe couldn’t give him any explanation, and every time she swore it was capital not income the Inspector insisted that she should prove it. She broke down and took to her bed with a nurse in attendance and the doctor calling every day.

  It had never occurred to any of the old fellows who had been doing business with Timothy that they might go and die before the year and seven days were up. They did not hold with dying till they were tired of living; and with all that cash flowing they were not tired of it at all. Miss Fanshawe’s illness reminded them of the terms of the bargain. They were determined to get her soul out of pawn at once, even though the doctor told them that there was no immediate cause for alarm.

  They held a private meeting below the quay at low tide but all the cash they could scrape together in this awkward emergency was ninety-seven pounds. When they called on Timothy he was no help. He said that his principal had so far made a loss on the deal and would not entertain any more advances on security of that nature. That was government policy, too, he told them.

  There was nothing else for it but to ask old Bert’s advice; and Solomon Titheroe, who was a churchwarden, had a word with him when he was helping him home after matins. Solomon expected him to say that the story was all nonsense – not that the vicar was an unbelieving sort of man, but religion is one thing and plain fact quite another.

  Old Bert listened till he was safely home and back in his bed.

  ‘Solomon, you and Bill Hackafree must tell this Timothy that I am going to put my soul in and take Miss Fanshawe’s out, and see that you bring him here with two thousand pounds in cash. The devil doesn’t like changing with the times any more than we do, and he will be sure to reckon a priest’s soul as worth more than a layman’s.’

  ‘We all hope that you’ll be with us a long time yet, sir,’ said Solomon a bit anxiously.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, old friend,’ the vicar replied. ‘But you know and I know that I shall not be with you next Sunday, which will put an end to these irregularities once and for all.’

  Solomon Titheroe did as he was told though the wind was getting up against the tide; and he and Bill Hackafree brought Timothy across to Herbrandsholm with a bag full of money
padlocked to his wrist.

  ‘What was the arrangement with your principal, Timothy?’ old Bert asked when all three of them were at his bedside.

  ‘He was to take over any pledge which was not redeemed, sir,’ Timothy answered. ‘But he can’t touch it before the statutory period of one year and seven days because it would be against the law and I’d lose my licence.’

  ‘That’s just as I remember it when I was young,’ said the Reverend Bertram. ‘Now you pass over that two thousand and make a note that I give your principal the security he requires. I shall pay you sixteen hundred back to release Miss Fanshawe and, since one may as well be damned for a sheep as a lamb, Mr Titheroe will take the balance of four hundred for the Church Roof Fund.

  ‘But I warn you, Timothy, that I won’t last even the seven days, and that gives me a whole year in your basket before you must deliver me to your principal. It’s not a place my soul would choose for prayer,’ he sighed, ‘but I have been told to fear no evil, and I have faith that before time is up there will be no need of money to redeem the pledge.’

  Space Fiction

  Pepe de Cea must have remembered that I was born in Argentina and could communicate with Spanish-speaking horses. I was also the only one of his intimate friends likely to be at home and in bed at 1.30 a.m. He did not even apologise for his arrival.

  ‘It’s my mother-in-law again,’ he explained. ‘And I will not calm myself. And I do not need a drink. Get dressed and come!’

  ‘Oh, God! Not donkeys?’

  ‘A mule. When I came home it was in the courtyard.’

  Mrs Fellowes had a vague and gossamer charm. Her daughter, Barbara, who had impulsively married Pepe when he was a minor attaché in the London Embassy, inherited the charm and added the assurance proper to a young Spanish matron. Pepe adored the pair of them and welcomed the frequent visits of his mother-in-law to Madrid, although on occasion he had to explain her peculiarities to the police. Nothing could shake Mrs Fellowes’ belief that Spaniards were cruel to animals. She had a habit of wandering about the more primitive quarters of the city – since animals had pretty well disappeared from the glittering centre – with a bag of carrots and breathless rebukes.

  ‘She hasn’t stolen it?’ I asked.

  ‘She says it chased her home trying to bite her.’

  ‘What is she doing about it?’

  ‘Nothing. It terrified her. She has gone to bed, more convinced than ever that my cruel countrymen brutalise their animals with whips and red-hot pokers.’

  ‘And Barbara?’

  ‘Barbara is with her. In the way of women they have both decided it is all my fault.’

  ‘I don’t see how it could be. You were out.’

  ‘That’s why.’

  ‘Well, shoo the mule away!’

  ‘I can’t. You never saw such a vicious-looking brute. I think its mother was a hyaena. Its ears are about half a metre long and it bares its teeth at me.’

  ‘Any flame from its nostrils?’

  ‘Not yet. But don’t light a match when it snorts at you!’

  I had no experience of mules, only knowing that some of them can kick forwards, which a horse usually can’t, and that the seat of one’s pants is by no means safe even when holding the head. Still, it seemed a simple matter to accompany an unduly nervous friend and remove the beast. Other complications he would have to settle himself. The mule’s proprietor might turn out to be an angrily obstinate carter who would refuse compensation and insist on an official complaint. The worst risk was what Mrs Fellowes would say in court if the police ran her in. No magistrate was going to take a lenient view after being lectured on his compatriot’s supposed cruelty to animals.

  Pepe’s seventeenth-century house was in an unfashionable district off the Atocha, but within its courtyard he had the quiet and privacy of a village. He parked his flashy sports car in the street and we entered the court through a narrow archway. The mule was standing on the cobbles – a huge, black draught mule, a mediaeval gargoyle of a mule. Half a wooden post dangled from its halter. Its tail was bald except for an obscene tuft at the end. Its snarling teeth were bright yellow in the light over the front door and quite long enough for any reasonable hyaena.

  ‘It pulled that post down for the sake of carrots?’ I asked.

  ‘Or to attack my mother-in-law. When they met, it was tied up in front of a tavern with the cart alongside.’

  ‘Well, we’d better start with some more carrots.’

  Edging past the mule, Pepe disappeared into the house. He returned with only two carrots, saying that he couldn’t find any more in the larder. I sent him back to forage for something else and to assure his women, if they came down, that I would handle the problem without unnecessary violence. I certainly was not going to force that mule to do anything against its wishes.

  I advanced upon it, preceded by the longest carrot. One ear was reassuringly forward; the other was half way down its neck, apparently investigating sounds from the broken pillar. It accepted the carrot with a snort and a start as if it had been dreaming of the things and suddenly found they were a real presence.

  With head and neck aligned like a striking snake and baring its fearful yellow teeth it proceeded to examine me. I stood still only because I did not dare to turn my back. Its oddly prehensile nose was velvet and friendly. Its brown eyes, though mischievous, were showing no white. When I found that it enjoyed being patted and talked to, I realised that the fighting-stallion effect was artificial. That mule had been deliberately taught to smile – either to keep off thieves or, more probably, to earn free drinks for its owner. Quite obviously it had been treated with affection as one of the family. But the family was poor. Carrots had seldom come its way. Its intent in breaking loose and chasing Mrs Fellowes into a smart trot had been to get some more from her bag.

  Pepe, returning from the house with a long parcel in greaseproof paper, was impressed. If he had been brought up among horses he would soon have seen, as I did, that this hideous monstrosity was as friendly as a child’s pony. But I did not disturb his opinion of me and asked him what he had in the parcel.

  ‘Brazos de Gitana,’ he replied. ‘It was all I could find. Barbara is giving a party tomorrow. Do you think he’ll like it?’

  I said it would certainly be new to him. There were over a couple of feet of this delectable cake, somewhat resembling a Swiss Roll and stuffed with gently foaming cream. I tried a piece on the mule. I doubt if he found it as welcome as carrots, but it was an agreeable change from hay and the remains of the family’s chick-peas. He faced it boldly and with growing interest like a man trying out a first-class French restaurant with a lunch voucher.

  ‘Do you think you can entice him back with that?’ Pepe asked.

  ‘I think we can. Where to?’

  ‘She isn’t quite sure. You know how she wanders about dreaming that she is St Francis. She believes the tavern was somewhere between the Atocha station and the Plaza de la Cebada.’

  They were the best part of a mile from each other. We were bound to attract a following of idle and interested spectators while leading a draught mule on a random search through the back streets of Madrid. Pepe could not be anything but a young and monied señorito and I am always recognised as English.

  ‘Have you decided what we are going to say to the police?’ I asked him, removing the length of worm-eaten post from the mule’s halter. It was deeply carved and suggested the pillar of a verandah rather than a mere hitching post.

  ‘We just found it wandering. And you with British public spirit and responsibility …’

  ‘On the contrary. You, Pepe, with the splendid and generous impulse of a Spaniard …’

  ‘Suppose you ride it?’ he suggested.

  I pointed out that there was no reason to believe the mule had ever been ridden and that it was a long way to the ground. If we had a cart, we might drive it.

  The mention of wheels brought Pepe back to the automobile age.

 
‘I’ll run down to the Atocha goods yard and hire a cattle truck,’ he said. ‘There’s sure to be one about and we’ll only need it for ten minutes.’

  That was probable. The tavern and deserted cart could not be far away since the mule seemed to have vanished round corners and into Pepe’s courtyard before anyone could spot what had happened and take off after it.

  When he had left, the night wore on for me and my peaceable companion. In the street outside there was even an hour of silence. I supplied the mule with a bucket of water and another mouthful of cream and sponge cake. He then went to sleep on his feet; so did I on the front steps, for I felt reluctant to ring the bell and wake up the house just to tell Barbara and Mrs Fellowes that their mule at present was contented and affectionate. While the future was uncertain, witnesses were better away.

  About four in the morning Pepe silently free-wheeled into the courtyard, taking the corner with the skill of long practice.

  ‘Got one!’ he exclaimed. ‘There was nothing at the station, so I had to go down to the slaughterhouse. I found a man who had just delivered some cattle and was glad to have the job.’

  ‘Did you tell him what it was?’

  ‘Only to move a beast to the Atocha station.’

  A dilapidated van backed up to the archway which was too low for it to enter the court. The driver came round and let down the tailboard to form a ramp. He was a real sun-dried tough from Burgos. He said that if he had expected a mule, which he hadn’t, it should not be one frothing at the mouth. God knows what he did expect! Livestock in the centre of Madrid must be rare.

  I had no time to explain that the froth was whipped cream, for the mule panicked. Evidently it had never travelled in a van. It folded its ears back and flung up its gaunt, black head to have a better look, nearly lifting me off the ground. The man from Burgos circled cautiously round it and caught it a whack with his stick which would have earned him a lecture from Mrs Fellowes. The mule, too, was scandalised by this normal method of starting nervous cattle up a ramp. It bucked and let go with its off hind leg. Not viciously. It was only protesting against such treatment when out of harness. That hoof fairly whistled past the driver’s stomach; the head then twisted right round at an unnatural angle to inspect him.