Sauve Qui Peut: Stories

by Lawrence Durrell

  He wouldn’t until I’d handed over the money. Dovebasket counted it respectfully and stowed. Then he said: “Actually old Blenky is acting in perfect good faith; it’s just that he is short on humour and doesn’t know how the other half live. His vision is warped. I was just about to send him over another lot of info for tomorrow’s organ. But since you ask so nicely I’ll desist. Here, have a look. There’s no mystery; I’ve been selling him the fruit of H.E.’s wastepaper basket. He will insist on paper games.”

  I saw a clutch of paper Consequences which explained all. The Baron had been working upon texts which must have seemed mysterious enough to him in all consequence but which were as clear as daylight to the normal F.O. mind:

  The British Ambassador met

  Mrs Krushchev

  In a lift

  He said: “Will you be my satellite?”

  She said “Squeeze me when the lights go out.”

  The result was The Warsaw Pact

  Polk-Mowbray met

  Pandit Nehru

  Outside a public lavatory in Bombay

  He said: “Never a dull moment”

  N replied: “I would sell you my soul”

  The result was a small inedible.…

  But why go on? In a flash one could see how the Baron had been misled. I mounted triumphantly to Mowbray and waved the papers. I told him how I had saved the day. The money would have to come from the secret fund of course. He mopped his brow and thanked me fervently. Yet Dovebasket did not escape a Grave Reproof. I distinctly heard Polk-Mowbray saying to him on the phone: “You can damn well take a hundred lines, Dovebasket, yes a hundred. And let them be In future I must not be such a blasted Borrogrove.’”

  I thought that rather met the case.

  7

  All to Scale

  The thing was (said Antrobus) that Professor Regulus was sent to us by Protocol as the Embassy sawbones. He was a nice compact little man with pince-nez and a fine reputation with the full syringe. Moreover he was pro-British, unhealthily so as it turned out. He kept closely in touch with home affairs, borrowed my Times and so on; and this was how he got to learn of the PM’s gout. I expect you remember the time when it got so bad there was talk of a Day of National Temperance and Prayer, a special service in Paul’s and so on. Well Regulus took it much to heart and one Monday he tapered up to the Mission holding a bottle of something called The Regulus Tincture—his own invention he said. Pie set it down on my desk and gave me a brief insight into gout. It was, he said, just a sort of scale which collected on the big toe like the scale in a kettle. His Tincture, which was made of a mixture of arrowroot and henbane on a molasses base and macerated with borage—his Tincture simply dissolved the scale and liberated the shank. It had, I must say, a funny sort of colour; when you shook the bottle it kind of seethed. I took it in to show Polk-Mowbray who was very touched by this proof of anglophile concern. “By Gad” he said, “we shall pack it off to the PM. Perhaps there’s enough for the whole front bench. What a fine fellow Regulus is. Stap me but I’ll put him up for a gong.” I went down to have the bottle wrapped up and bagged; on the way I met Dovebasket, who was always keen on science, and dazzled him a little with my grasp of things medical. “Just like scale?” he said with curiosity. “I think we ought to try a drop or two.” I did not quite understand, but followed him into the garden where his new sports car stood. Before I could bring to bear he had tipped a cupful of the Tincture into the radiator. Talk about scale! There was a tinkle and a rain of scale fell out on the gravel. Smoke rose from the radiator tap. “Stand back” I cried. It was heating up. There was a snap.… By Goodness this was some mixture. “We ought to try some on Drage” he said moodily, but I did not want to experiment any further. The stuff was good on scale and that’s as far as I wanted to go. I didn’t wish to probe any further. I hoped it would bring great and lasting benefit to the nation and the party. I took the bottle down to bag room and sped it off.

  Some time passed before we heard anything from London; then came a somewhat sullen response saying that the PM had tried it on one of his foodtasters who had gone berserk and run the length of Ealing Broadway shouting “Thrope for Labour”—his name. The bottle was returned to us with this disquieting information and with the distinct order from the F.O. to try it out in the Mission and to report on its properties to the Foreign Secretary. Well, I mean to say: I have never been backward when it comes to self-sacrifice but I did not fancy a dessert-spoonful of this stuff after what I had seen it do to Dovebasket’s radiator. Besides the only one of us who was honestly scaly was Polk-Mowbray; he had in fact been rather proud of his gout and inclined to boast about it. Here was his chance, you would have said; but no he did not seem to see it in this light. He sat, a somewhat pale individual in his heather mixture, and glared at the bottle on his desk. “I don’t want to be cured of my gout” he wailed. “It’s the one proof I have that the blood of the fourteenth earl runs, though in somewhat tributary fashion, through my veins.”

  We debated the whole matter at length; the F.S.’s order could not be lightly set aside. Someone would have to report. Finally it was decided to try a control experiment on Drage and see how that went. It was not hard, for Drage used to drink an occasional glass of Gaskin’s Imperial Ginger Wine; in fact he was allowed whenever we had a Royal Toast with lowered lights etc. to join us in pledging his sovereign with a sip of the cordial muck. What easier than to insert a normal dose of the Tincture into his bottle? We watched with intense scientific curiosity that night as Polk-Mowbray dowsed the glims and raised his glass while Drage padded across the room to his cordial and poured out a medium-sized firkin of the stuff.

  It was impressive, even riveting. The fellow appeared to have swigged off a glass full of molten lead. A high screech rang out, and he seized his own ears as if he were about to pull them off. Then he started to shadow box, upsetting the candles, and incidentally setting himself alight. What with trying to restrain and comfort him and at the same time to beat out his burning waistcoat there was a vast amount of confusion. What an impartial observer would have made of the scene I know not. Drage vaulted on to the window-sill and still screeching raced off into the night like a hare, tearing off burning articles of clothing as he ran. He left us, a sobered group of palish persons contemplating the ruins of the dinner and the fearful effects of the Regulus syndrome. “By God, what cracking stuff” said Polk-Mowbray. “I suppose we’d better tell the police to look out for a flaming butler what?” It was a pity really that the PM hadn’t had the benefits of this terrific tonic; he might have galvanized the party on it. But our hearts were heavy, for we loved Drage; and there he was galloping across Vulgaria tracing a comet’s path. It was three days before the police found him and brought him back to us on a stretcher looking pale but sentient. He told us that the stuff had turned him into a werewolf for twenty-four hours. At this Polk-Mowbray, always capricious, suddenly flew into a temper with Regulus. “Imagine it” he cried, “this man solemnly urging on us stuff capable of turning a Head of Mission into a werewolf, however harmless. By Gad it is not in nature. It might have happened to me anywhere. Suppose I had bitten Hasdrubal or some other member of the Central Committee? I must speak to Regulus and sharply.”

  But the next morning the O.B.E. which Polk-Mowbray had secured for Regulus came through on the wire. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow” he said. “Just as I was about to berate the man here comes this blasted decoration; what possessed me to do it?” How was I to know what possessed him? One could only say that at the best of times Polk-Mowbray’s sense of cause and effect was jolly sketchy. “And the final annoyance” he said, giving rein to his mean side “is that we’ll have to toast him in champagne and it’s gone up a pound a case.” By custom Heads of Mission paid for this out of their own frais. It was Dovebasket who suggested that we should touch up the Professor’s drinks with the Tincture as a sort of revenge, and on the purely superficial plane the idea had charm. But the risks were great. We could
not have werewolves cantering about the Embassy grounds yelling “Thrope for Labour” in Vulgarian and perhaps dishing out septic bites. No. We debated the matter from every angle but finally we agreed that Regulus should drink of the true the blushful in a state of nature: if there were any beaded bubbles winking at the brim it wouldn’t be the Tincture. So grave was the danger, however, that I did not dare to leave the bottle lying about. Not with people like Dovebasket and De Mandeville in the Mission. So we trotted solemnly out on the lawn in the presence of each other and there I uncorked and poured away the Tincture. Everything smoked and turned blue for a minute. Then we walked back through the clouds to the buttery for a Bovril. If ever you revisit the Vulgarian Mission you will see that there is a huge circle burnt in the lawn; despite every effort nothing has ever managed to grow in that place. Some Tincture, what?

  8

  Aunt Norah

  More than once (said Antrobus) have I seen my Chief shaken, sometimes even brought close to breaking point: but you should have seen his face when intelligence came that his Aunt Norah was heading south towards Vulgaria, leaving a train of carnage behind her in Paris and Rome. It was a cruel thing to happen to him, particularly at his time of life with retirement so near. Yes, he was old by then, a somewhat battered repaint; but this bit of news had him skipping like a stag. In those days he was rumoured to wear dunlopillo trousers so that he could sit down without bruising his ideas—but this was mere malice on the part of Dovebasket. Aunt Norah now.… Of a sudden he was sad, bowed; he lowered his undercarriage and trimmed his flaps and cried: “No.” Once, just like that, “No.”

  I cannot disguise the fact from you that she had gone a little queer in the head with the passage of the years. At first she was mildly eccentric; but what got her turned off clear was that she happened upon some Labour Party pamphlets and was at once captivated by their attitude to sex. I mean about having lots more about and teaching the young and so on; and to have more pictures of Bernard Shaw over the nuptial bed to promote conception. I don’t know. I never took a lot of it in myself. Rum stuff I found it, in places downright unmannerly. But that is what Labour stands for they say. Well anyway the Scales Fell from Aunt Norah’s eyes when she read Shaw on how to be more all-embracing. Why Shaw I wonder? Nobody came down with powder markings after kissing him did they? Anyway she was converted and decided to promote the good cause by lecturing on sex to the young of foreign nations, starting with the French. Of course the trouble is that you can’t illustrate sex for young people as clearly as you can Euclid; the human body has too few acute angles or hypotenuses—or so they tell me. But she did her best. Her huge diagrams looked like a study of the internal measurements of the Grand Pyramid; there were logarithms, isotherms, isobars and heavy pressure belts like a weather forecast. It was impressive. We first heard of traffic jams and cheering crowds and police charges in Paris. The French love intellectual diversions and here she was; she lectured from a table covered in a Union Jack and with a bull terrier called Bernard tied to the leg. She had trained it to growl at various points in her lecture as if to give point to it. Of course all this may have seemed a bit strange to them but then everyone knows that the British have their own way of doing things.

  So now Aunt Norah was heading south after tearing Rome apart. “If storied urn or animated bust” I reflected as I saw my Chief sitting there with bowed head looking as if he had been passed through muslin and was weak and fizzy enough to be sipped through a straw. “I will hand over the administration of the secret fund for ONE WHOLE WEEK to whoever can think of a way to stop her” he vowed. Naturally such an idea had great appeal and many were the ideas tried out. De Mandeville, pushed for lolly as always, hit upon a notion that almost worked; he and his chauffeur dressed up as Carmelites and delivered an aide-mémoire to the Vulgarian F.O. protesting about her being allowed in on religious grounds. They were somewhat shaken but stood firm. I think they had glimpsed the suede hacking-shoes underneath the gown. Or perhaps their rosaries looked dubious. Anyway Polk-Mowbray’s alarm communicated itself to all of us; we grew morose, edgy, jumpy. After prayers one day De Mandeville struck his head on a beam and was knocked almost insensible; we had to give him the kiss of life with a bicycle pump. When he came to he confessed that he thought he saw Aunt Norah advancing down the drive, hence the jump. Just to show you what a state we were in.

  Meanwhile the lady herself was advancing methodically on the capital in a large caravan with “Hurrah For Sex” on one side, “Glory to the population bulge” on the other; she pursued her leisurely course across the smiling countryside, stopping in the little towns to dish out pamphlets and fertility charms and harangue the multitudes. Of course they couldn’t understand … and this is where Dovebasket earned a whole week of the secret fund. His face ablaze with joy he rushed into the Chancery shouting: “I’ve got it.” We hardly dared to hope by this time. “We are fools” said the youth. “Aunt Norah knows not a word of Vulgarian, and who in Vulgaria knows more than the words ‘whisky and soda’ in our native bow-wow?” We mulled him over a bit. “But the riots in Paris and Rome, the march on Florence—how was this achieved, for clearly she knows neither French nor Italian?” Dovebasket whinnied. “Of course. Interpreters. We must offer her official interpreters and then suborn them. While she thinks she is throwing them into a fine lather with her sex palaver they can be reading strips of Holy Writ like Engels or Kingsley Martin. In this way we will save our souls.” Polk-Mowbray had tears in his eyes. “I believe you have it, my boy” he said fishing out the key and handing it over. “Now we must find the translators. Yea, go out Antrobus and find me two little Vulgarians with flared nostrils and ears too close to the head—men with the bad breath of taxmen or Marxists.” For once I saw the road clear. “Ay Ay, sir” I said; and so the whole matter fell out. Aunt Norah had one of the most successful rallies of her tour and apart from us all being deafened by Engels all was well.

  9

  A Corking Evening

  All day today (said Antrobus) I have been addressing Christmas Cards, an occupation both melancholy and exhilarating; so many of us have gone leaving no address. They have become “F.O. BAG ROOM PLEASE FORWARD” so to speak. Some are Far Flung, some less Far Flung, some Flung out altogether like poor Toby. It is a season which sets one wondering where dips go when they die, old man. Do they know that they can’t take it with them, or is there perhaps a branch of Coutts’ in Heaven which will take post-dated cheques? And if they live on as ghosts, what sort of? Is there a diplomatic Limbo—perhaps some subfusc department of UNO where they are condemned perpetually to brood over such recondite subjects as the fishing rights of little tufted Papuans? Ah me! But perhaps it would be more like some twilit registry where a man might yet sit down to a game of coon-can with a personable cipherine.…

  Yes, as I riffled my address book so many forgotten faces drifted across my vision! Who will ever tell their story? Not me. What has become of Monksilver and Blackdimple—those two scheming Jesuits? What of “Tumbril” Goddard who believed in the Soviet way of life until he tried kvass? What of old “Tourniquet” Mathews, and “Smegma” Schmidt, the Polish avalanche? If ever the secret history of The Office is written their names will be blazoned abroad. Some have never had their due—like poor little Reggie and Mercy Mucus, the British Council couple. They died in the execution of their duty, eaten by wolves. Despite a falling glass they fried to cross the frozen lake bearing a sackful of Collins’ Clear Type Shakespeares; they were heading for some remote and fly-blown khan where their eager clientele of swineherds waited patiently, eager to ingest all this foreign lore. In vain! In vain!

  Then my eye fell upon the name of Dovebasket and forgotten scenes thronged back, one more painful than the next. I remembered, for example, the age of emulation … I have often remarked how emulous Heads of Mission can be. That winter it was champagne. Several old European cellars had been up for sale, and those who had not overspent on their frais had cried Snap, among them Polk-Mowbray.
He was at that time going through a difficult period. He had become much enamoured of young Sabina Braganza, daughter of an Italian colleague; mind you, all this in a perfectly proper and avuncular way. When she announced her engagement, he was so pleased that he decided to throw a party for the event which would both celebrate her beauty and allow him to show off his champagne. Though often misguided, he was a good man at heart. But he had offended Dovebasket. And Dovebasket harboured a Grave Grudge. He decided to touch up, or as he put it to “excite”, Polk-Mowbray’s cherished cases of Pommery. With a blowlamp in hand and clad in a steel-welder’s casque he prowled the cellars like a figure from Greek tragedy, warming the stuff up and loosening the wire. The result was unforeseen but satisfying from his point of view. The banqueting room was shaken by dull explosions; some of the bottles went off like Mills bombs, others threw out parabolas of foam. I saw Drage holding one of these spouting bottles up with the astonished look of a man whose umbrella has been blown inside out. Worst of all the Braganza child received a black eye from a cork.