by Ashly Graham
It was clear that Snipcock had, between the same time yesterday and now, gone from being doolally to as mad as a hatter, as a March hare. He was now officially bananas, barking, barmy, bats, batty, bonkers, crackers, crazy, cuckoo, daft, insane, loco, loony, mental, meshugga, nuts, potty, raving, round the bend, stark staring. Snipcock was off both his rocker and his chump.
Despite the fraternal atmosphere of the ward, a withdrawal into depression was apparent from the way that many Impatients slid down in their beds, and curled up in the foetal position, or pulled the sheet or hard flat pillow over their heads, to the extent that attached fluid-control tubes and vitals monitoring devices and restraining hardware permitted. The unspoken thought was that, for the good of all, the best and kindest thing would be if Snipcock were to be the next to be gathered to his fathers, and for Steerforth to assume the leadership.
Snipcock confirmed the ward’s assessment of his mental disintegration by continuing to speak, with an ease and expansiveness that his audience had not previously heard from him. Also new was the trace of a northern accent.
‘Bernard Bulstrode I am, and I hope you won’t think me immodest for saying that I am a public figure of some note. It is in that capacity that I address you this morning. Since it is a custom amongst us to while away the hours by telling stories, albeit hitherto none of a personal nature, I have decided upon my own authority to break with tradition and divert you with a couple of my own. And if some of you believe you already know all about me, from the several volumes of my memoirs, which I’m proud to say were written unghosted, I can assure you that you’re wrong.
‘For it is a fact, my dear friends,’—this was another solecism, for expressions of intimacy on the ward were a no-no—‘that there is more to tell about my early life than has been revealed in the numerous articles, celebrity profiles, and gossip columns that have been written about me.
‘One point I should make before beginning: my narrative will include nothing about my marital difficulties. Just as I never allowed myself to be blandished into intimate confessions by the most persistent interviewers—the Desert Island Discs woman was particularly obnoxious in this regard—and deep-pocketed newspaper editors, whose reporters did everything they could to delve into the details of my five marriages and discover the identities of my many mistresses…the seven-figure settlement I obtained from The Daily Grunge for phone-hacking may be recalled…I do not intend to say anything about them now. I believe strongly that a man is entitled to privacy in personal matters, so if that’s all some of you are tuning in for, I suggest you take a nap, if you can.
‘I was born the only son of Edwin Bulstrode, a Yorkshireman who made a fortune in the fertilizer business, and his wife Molly, who became famous for her ability to diet without dieting and exercise without exercising while meditating without meditating while travelling without the inconvenience of having to leave the house while being a prolific chick-lit novelist and jazz piano and singing recording artiste and award-winning container gardener while making a lot of money without playing the stock and bond and money markets. Although my mother died young, of over-exerting herself multi-tasking without doing anything, her books are still in circulation, and first edition signed copies in as-new or fine condition fetch substantial sums at the book auctions.
‘Bernard Bulstrode, or Barney as most people knew me as, was fortunate to find himself—myself—in possession of a substantial inheritance when my father also died, in tragic circumstances, at age sixty-three, by falling into a slurry pit while inspecting one of his processing plants. My financial independence had already been assured, however, by my having been bequeathed my maternal grandfather Cecil’s priceless stamp collection, about which more later.
‘My father self-composted when I was twenty-five years old, and for the next fifteen years I remained at a loss as to what to do with myself. Directionless and weak, I regret to say that I frittered away my monetary legacies on wine, women, and in place of song—for unlike my mother I was an indifferent crooner and tone-deaf and a musical philistine—I spent my time squandering bundles of dosh at the dog track, betting upon which greyhound, when pitted against its peers, was capable of the fastest turn of speed when in pursuit of an electric hare.
‘But as much of a caniphile as I was in my fondness for greyhounds when they had money on their heads, despite the amount of time I spent watching them and in the company of their breeders and owners and trainers, and trying to assess their form intelligently, I consistently lost money on them.
‘The reason for this perhaps was that, feeling as sentimental towards greyhounds as I did, which is what made me so lacking in objectivity, though I never regarded them as pets, I was always more interested in their well-being than any financial advantage I might gain from their surpassing celerity. After all I was, at the time, very well-heeled.
‘It is a sad fact that when a greyhound is injured or becomes too old to race, its owner has no compunction about sending the meek-hearted, quiet, thin-skinned creature—the muzzles they wear at the track are only to prevent them from nipping each other while still excited—whose only crime has been to do its best to please its owner, to the glue factory or incinerator. The poor dog upon whose diet and exercise and condition so much attention has been lavished, becomes overnight a liability, ignored and unwanted.
‘This practice offended me so much, that I embarked upon a crusade to rescue as many greyhounds as I could from being boiled down and pasted on the backs of postage stamps; including I dare say many of those in my albums, and envelope flaps, to be licked by the public. In choosing which animals I might save when they no longer had the oomph to win races, I adopted only those I had backed against the heaviest odds and lost; for I was drawn to the ones people had the least confidence in, and wanted to make their retirements as pleasant as possible after their many competitive failures. Their names were readily to hand, for they were noted throughout my form books and gaming records.
‘During my life as a gambler, my dogs won as frequently as tortoises do against live hares, on four occasions; two of those were a photo finish, one animal had been injected by the trainer with a performance-enhancing drug, and one was the result of a White City racetrack judge being bribed by a man who stood to make a great deal more than I. My fellow punters made a practice of waiting to place their bets until I had made my selection, and then avoiding it, even betting against it amongst themselves. I lengthened thousands of odds at the racetrack totes and bookmakers, and was the curse of many a breeder, and the ruin of more than a few owners.
‘I could not help every dog who would have benefited from my assistance, because as my financial resources dwindled I could barely afford to support and feed myself. I’ll spare you the worst of the miseries I endured after my last pennies ran out, except to tell you that I spent a year living on the street with my charges, sharing cans of dog food that I scrounged from grocery stores when their sell-by dates were past. I was quick to discover that it is easier to secure nourishment for a needy animal than it is for a human: one has only to show up at a person’s door with a dog, twin soulful bags of skin and bone, to ensure that at least the canine party is taken care of.
‘At night my animals, for there were always at least several, and I would huddle together for warmth in subways. Unfortunately greyhounds are skinny animals, not generating much heat, and many was the winter night when I disloyally wished that I had developed an earlier fondness for Saint Bernards, especially those who came with little barrels of brandy round their necks.
‘After spiralling downwards in fortune for years, somehow I found the will to pull myself together. Gradually I conquered my demons, and crossed from the dog track to the right track; and because it was my nature to pursue my goals, whether they were right or wrong, with single-minded passion, my ultimate success was guaranteed in the same way that my previous indulgences were destined to fail.
‘My determination was such that I never faltered or looked back. Des
pite my reputation as the most compulsive and impulsive of gamblers, I sought treatment for my vice through counselling, and regular attendance at Gamblers Anonymous, and succeeded in kicking the habit; though I kept the dogs, whom I continued to rescue free from the pound in order to enjoy a degree of companionship that no woman is capable of providing...but, as I said earlier, there will be no more on that subject.
‘People used to say to me after my recovery, “Barney, why did you go to the dogs? You strike me as more of a horse-racing man.”
‘Well, in that they were very wrong, for I had always loathed horses. I found the look of them absurd and offensive, and I was afraid of them. In the comment attributed to Alec Issigonis, who created the Mini motor car, that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, I consider the analogy to the camel redundant: a horse, in my opinion, is an animal designed by a committee.
‘It was true however that my father, who had become a great social climber as his financial star rose owing to his success in the fertilizing trade, in addition to flaunting his wealth in other ways, laid out lurid amounts on the gee-gees. But with him there was a major difference: he owned the horses, and at Ayr, Doncaster, Newmarket, Cheltenham, Goodwood, Epsom, Haydock Park, Sandown Park, and Plumpton racecourses, Dad was backing his own nags and wanting to impress others, not satisfy a personal craving for risk. He was a canny buyer and trader who won a lot more races than he lost, and went on to make a lot more in stud fees.
‘For my father was dead set on putting his working-class roots behind him, and he considered the best way to do this was to mingle and ingratiate himself with the horsey set, and learn how to ride and shoot, so that he might get asked to as many toffs’ country homes at the weekends as he could. Not in Yorkshire, naturally, where our family was from and everyone knew him, and where the portals of Chatsworth House, a seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, were to remain forever closed to him, but down south.
‘Dad did the job properly. He began by buying a well-reputed stable from the estate of a famous breeder of racing thoroughbreds, and replacing the manager with a new man whom he hired away from the King—an action that thereafter excluded my father from Society at a very many other gracious establishments—and gave a mandate to improve the stock without regard to cost. Meanwhile Dad acquired a tolerably good seat of his own, that of his own bottom on a horse, and a fair knowledge of bloodlines.
‘He also took lessons from a voice and grammar coach, a man fortuitously named Henry Higgins, or so the man said, to get rid of my father’s northern accent and teach him to talk in the approved manner through his nose in the third person. Soon he could say “Air hellair!” and “At one’s hice” instead of “Oh, hello,” and “At my house” with the best of ’em, and without the trace of a burr. To say “I dain’t neigh”, rather than “I don’t know”, soon came as first nature to him. “Snare”, as Frank Muir once defined it, he would have agreed was flakes of the white stuff that falls in Mayfair in winter.
‘Higgins was delighted, as he was with his fee, half of which was contingent upon results, and he took my father to Ascot, where—despite a relapse when Pop yelled at his losing jockey using an expression that made Eliza Dolittle’s outburst at poor horse Dover in the George Cukor directed film version of My Fair Lady, coming from the unlikely mouth of Audrey Hepburn, sound like a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury—he attracted favourable notice from everyone…in fact the racy insult became popular in upper-class circles…and a desire to be acquainted with him.
‘Because at this time I, Bernard Bulstrode, was still a cocksure youth yet to depart on my sojourn in Dogland, you shall understand that rubbing shoulders with the elite in the company of my father did nothing to teach me the self-control and sense that I only acquired much later after I realized the folly of my existence, and reformed my character. Throughout my earlier life I often drew censure for my strong opinions and outspokenness, and my lack of reluctance to defend words with fists. It was the Yorkshire way.
‘There was one particular time when I let Pop down badly, during a fancy gathering at some storied pile where he had finagled the two of us—my father was between wives at the time, whereas I had not yet contracted my first marriage, the one to...—an invitation. The place would have boasted, had the upper classes not deemed boasting vulgar, thousands of acres that had been occupied, farmed, and shot over by the same family for five hundred years if they had for a day. It was well furnished with Old Masters, suits of armour, wine cellars, dowager aunts, butlers, and ghosts.
‘Although my father was in the habit of trolling for the next Mrs Bulstrode whenever he had an opportunity, he had on this occasion magnanimously subordinated his interests to mine, having formed an opinion that the last remaining unmarried daughter of the house, a Lady in her own right, and I might get along…an association which of course would redound to his own benefit.
‘The woman Dad had designs on for me, whom he had met briefly at a race-meeting—she was vulture-ugly, but he had not told me that—though no longer in the first flush of youth was very flush, or so he presumed, in gilt-edged bonds. My father’s great hope was that I should not only marry a title, but an heiress who came with a dowry large enough to make me financially independent of him; for although he was generous where I was concerned to a fault—he preferred to spend his own money.
‘Also, by rendering me more acceptable to those he wished to associate with, as the ugly bird’s father-in-law Pop would gain unlimited access to the gentrified circles he so yearned to be included in. Killing two birds with one stone—which was a feat that my father was far more likely to achieve metaphorically than were he to spray the brace with gunshot, for when he had a loaded unbroken twelve-bore on his arm he drove beaters faster than they did the pheasants before them—was ever his goal in life as it was in business.
‘While in our Gloucestershire hosts, the Bentnose-Farquarsons, my father saw an opportunity to pull off an alliance with one of the most pedigreed families in the land, the B-Fs had their own agenda. Owing to a decades-long unwillingness to reduce the complement of household servants, a reluctance to curb their wasteful spending habits, and a refusal to resign themselves to a lesser standard of living, the funds in the Bentnose-Farquarson family account at Coutts Bank were now low enough to have these not-so-nouveaux pauvres thinking in terms of a matrimonial association with anyone rich enough to keep the B-F banner flying...anyone at all.
‘For Bentnose-Farquarsons were not the sort to entertain ideas of turning over the deeds to their home to the National Trust, or opening the house and grounds to tourists, or making the estate into a safari or theme park, or organic farming, or establishing a motor museum where the garages were, or allowing anyone to film sappy period or costume dramas at it. The B-F’s noses did not unbend or tilt downwards, and they were accustomed to farquing as and when and how and for as long and as much as they pleased, and not having to associate with the sort of people who knew what “weekend” meant, or those who dropped their aitches, unless they worked for them.
‘So when my pater came along, dropping hints with the subtlety of an American televangelist drumming up donations that he was in search of a daughter-in-law, the B-Fs saw a golden opportunity. They were of course fully aware that my father had in their case mistaken privilege for pelf; they recognized instantly his motives in wanting to introduce me to the dusty spinster on the family shelf; and they were generationally expert in playing similar games themselves. And had the Bentnose-Farquarsons’ need for refinancing not been so pressing, there was no way that they would condescend to have down for the weekend a scrofulous upstart like my old man, who was in trade, and his under-other-circumstances totally ineligible son.
‘Given their druthers, the B-Fs would not have hired Bulstrode & Son to cart manure from the Augean stables, had they owned them, the old Yorkshire saying of “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” notwithstanding.
‘On the appointed Friday afternoon I tooled down on my own in
the Bentley two-seater—a twenty-first birthday present from Dad—an hour or so later than my father, and only just arrived in time to dress for dinner.
‘It was one of those occasions when dozens of extended family in long dresses and formal evening attire are gathered up and down a long table, on which the array of crystal and silver and white linen is enough to blind one, staring at each other with ill-concealed dislike.
‘I was even later coming downstairs than I should have been, wearing a naff penguin suit, owing to a sudden but intimate acquaintance that I had struck up with a housemaid I’d rung for in my room, and asked to bring me the stiff brandy I needed to fortify me for the coming ordeal. The stiffness of the drink proved to be contagious, and I satisfied one appetite hard upon the other.
‘At the golden trough for the meal proper, I found myself sitting next to the woman on whom my father and the B-Fs had mutually-exclusively advantageous designs on for me: the Hon. Terebinthia Bentnose-Farquarson, known as Binty. Even in the dusk with a light behind her, I doubted whether Binty might pass for forty-three—as the future Judge was assured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Trial by Jury, by the rich attorney whose elderly ugly daughter he decided to fall in love with as a means of advancing his prospects. However much I might have been looking forward to whatever we were about to be given to eat, for I was famished after the exercises my personal trainer had put me through in my bedroom, one look at this gal was like swallowing a bottle of diet pills.
‘It is customary to describe such a female as “rejoicing” in such a name as Terebinthia; but it was as plain as the nose on the plain of Binty’s face, which was very plain, that she’d never rejoiced in anything unless it were the discomfort of the bachelor unfortunate enough to have been seated next to her at dinner...and there had been a good many of them, which meant that she might have been the merriest of women; except that she wasn’t, nor was I prepared to be the one charged with improving her disposition.