by Peter Main
The Professor was reading the latest number of the Journal of Genetics and I was still trying to tidy up a paper which I had been writing. Mr. Carr grunted and threw his plug of wood into the fire, and slid the knife blade into the handle.
“Prof,” he said suddenly, “do you know my aunt?” The old man looked up from his reading and shook his head. I think he was wondering whether Mr. Carr was not asking him some obscure kind of riddle.
“Well,” Mr. Carr went on seriously, “you should know my aunt. Most extraordinary old cuss she is. Used to keep a brothel in Brussels, she did, but she found the wear and tear too great. Now she’s got a hotel in Bayswater. As hotels go it’s pretty mad, too. Would you like to pay her a visit?”
Professor Stubbs, it seems to me, is only too willing to go out visiting anyone at any time of the day or night, so I knew that he would go. If I had only been gifted by one of my Celtic forebears with just a little bit of second sight I think I would have hit him over the head with a poker to prevent his moving. Not, I must confess, that I really think that that would have been any good. Where there is trouble there you will find the Professor. Trouble to him is like the habitation of man to the nettle and the house-sparrow—they go together, and no power on earth can keep them apart.
I must admit, further, that I was feeling a bit bored myself and so I was quite glad to get out. My experience of Mr. Carr’s relatives had been confined to meeting his mother, who was a hundred and two years old and who boasted that she had not been sober to bed for ninety years. Mr. Carr’s relatives, it seemed to me, boasted of an eccentricity which would have frightened the pants off Ludwig of Bavaria, and all the rest of the historical eccentrics. Mr. Carr himself would not have supplied an alienist with a perfect norm from which others were supposed to deviate.
There was a distinct nip in the air, so I put on my heavy overcoat. The old man had announced his intention of driving us in his Bentley. Anything that the thought of Mr. Carr’s relatives might do to the historical characters was nothing to what the Professor’s driving does to me. I have seen strong men refuse to get into his car when he offered them a lift, and Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop, who loathes walking more than anything on earth, has been known to walk five miles rather than trust himself in the Bentley.
It may give some idea of the calibre of Mr. Carr when I say that he is the only recorded member of the human race who not only can put up with the Professor on the road but who positively enjoys it.
The journey was not enjoyable, and it was not made any happier for me by the fact that Mr. Carr seemed to take a positively ghoulish delight in cheering every time we missed death by the thickness of a rather fine hair. In addition he seemed to know exactly what fatal accidents had taken place at any given point on the route, and he enjoyed pointing out such places with considerable gory detail of description.
Mr. Carr’s aunt, it emerged, was the proud owner of a small hotel at the Notting Hill end of Bayswater. Even from the outside the hotel, The Boudoir, had a raffish and disreputable appearance. This was not helped by the fact that a nearby V2 rocket had blasted the lettering across the façade, leaving it drunken and awry.
We crossed the portal and entered the hotel, to find ourselves in a large hall. I had never been in a hall like it before. Every single inch of wall space seemed to have been covered; if it was not a signed photograph of some minor European royalty, or of the Eton first eleven in Edwardian days, it was the stuffed head of a stag or a fox’s mask, or a staggering trout in a glass case. The furniture itself seemed to date from the middle of the nineteenth century, and undoubtedly some of it must have won prizes at the Great Exhibition in 1851. I had never seen such perverted ingenuity outside the pages of the Art Journal describing the interior of the Crystal Palace on its original site.
In a large rocking chair, hung with faded green tassels, behind a heavily carved and twisted table, there sat Mr. Carr’s aunt. About eighteen stone of her. She seemed to be asleep, but as we advanced upon her she opened one eye, of a pale and intense blue, and took us in. Casting her mind into the recesses of her enormous body she seemed to place Mr. Carr.
“Hullo, Ben,” she wheezed, “you up from the country? Eh? Have you brought me any chickens or a nice dozen of eggs, now?”
Mr. Carr looked guilty. He seemed, for the first time since I had known him, to be slightly abashed.“
Oh,” he said uncomfortably, “you know, Aunt Lottie, that I’m not living in the country at the moment and that I can’t get you a chicken in town?”
She paid no attention to this but opened her other eye, which, I realised with surprise, was a tawny orange.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Ben,” she said severely. “You know how difficult things are these days and you do nothing whatever to help me. I’ve a good mind to change my will.”
“You did that last week,” said Mr. Carr. He seemed to recognise this gambit. “I’ve given up worrying about your will. I never know if I’m on it or off it. If I was to start worrying about that I’d lead myself the hell of a life, wouldn’t I now, Auntie?”
She wheezed wearily and seemed to catch sight of us.
“Who’s that?” she asked, indicating us both with a dagger which seemed to be a relic of the Afghan War.
“This,” said Mr. Carr with dignity, “is Professor John Stubbs, and this is Mr. Max Boyle. They’re friends of mine,” he added, by way of explanation and apology.
“Stubbs,” she said thoughtfully, “Stubbs. Now I wonder if I didn’t know your father. Sir John Stubbs, eh?” The old man nodded his head cautiously, as if afraid of what was to come, as well he might have been. She went on with an air of faint triumph: “There you are, Ben. I told you I never forgot a name, or at least not for long. Your father now. He was a holy terror all right,” she chuckled with a wicked and out-of-date mirth, “always in and out of my house in Brussels he was. Oh, he was a lad, he was. I’d a little girl called Susie in those days, and your father had his eye on her all right. Oh, the bottles of bubbly in the private room and the parties that went on till morning.”
The Professor, rather startled, interrupted this flow of indelicate reminiscence of his father, whom I had heard of as a very respectable nonconformist, with a loud and horrifying cough. Mr. Carr’s aunt closed both eyes.
“Bubbly,” she said fondly. “A bottle of wine. Now that would be a charming gesture.” She reached out one heavily-ringed hand and pressed a bell which seemed to be a part of the monstrous table before her.
A very aged and bent man appeared down a corridor. He recognised Ben and came to a halt. “Yes, Mrs. Rattigan,” he said, “did you want anything?”
“A bottle of wine, Arthur,” she said wheezily. “Mr. Carr’s account.”
“You know, Mrs. Rattigan,” Arthur was firmly apologetic, “we haven’t had any wine since ’forty-three. The cellar ran dry during the autumn, and it’s not worth buying at the present price, particularly as nobody ever seems to pay their bills.” This explanation was addressed to the Professor and myself.
“Now, Arthur, now,” Mrs. Rattigan raised an admonishing finger. “You can wash your own dirty linen in public if you want to, but don’t wash mine. Three bottles of beer for the gentlemen and a large Bols for me.”
The decrepit waiter disappeared. I could hear his stumbling feet as he made his way down the corridor to the unknown land behind.
“Getting cheeky,” said Mrs. Rattigan. “Think they know everything, that’s their trouble. Now when I was a girl I wouldn’t have let a chit of a waiter speak to me that way. I’ve a good mind to sack him. I would if I thought I could get another one. Trouble with Arthur is he thinks he’s in my will.”
“Is he?” asked Mr. Carr curiously.
“I can’t remember,” she said. “He was in it but I can’t remember if I took him out or whether I left him in. No wine, indeed. There’d better be some wine or I’ll make certain that he comes out of my will. The war’s spoilt them. Things have never bee
n the same since the old king died.” She looked up affectionately at a large photograph of King Edward VII. “Nothing is what it is. Look at the drink—half the strength—and look at the drinkers—half the quantity and they’re dead drunk. Now in my young days a man couldn’t be called a man who couldn’t take all the drink that was offered him and then top it off with a couple of bottles of port. Real port, too, it was in those days. None of your Port-style or light stuff. Real crusty port.”
She sighed as she thought of the days and the drinks and the drinkers who had once populated the earth and who, with the death of Edward VII, had disappeared as completely as the inhabitants and the chattels of the cities of the plain. One of Lot’s wives she looked back regretfully and had been turned into a ball of flesh rather than a pillar of salt.
The aged waiter reappeared, slopping up the passage with tired and listless feet. He carried precariously a tray upon which were perched three silver pint mugs and a large glass of gin. I was offered, and accepted, one of the mugs. I realised that it had been won at some period during the eighties by a presumably long-dead athlete for running a mile. Beneath the inscription which recorded this feat, there was another, “To Lottie with lots of love.”
She took a sip of the gin which the waiter offered her and then scowled at him. “I said Geneva gin,” she grumbled, “and you bring me this. Does no one pay any attention to my wishes in my own house?”
“Sorry,” the old waiter seemed genuinely pained, “but you finished the Bols a month ago, madam, and since then you’ve been on Gordon’s.”
“Don’t believe you,” she said, “you must think I’m getting soft in my old age. Think I don’t know what I’m drinking, eh? Bols I said, and Bols I’ll have or I’ll know the reason. I can’t stand this stuff. Take it away and bring me a proper drink.”
She poured the contents of the glass into her capacious mouth and handed back the empty glass to Arthur, who looked at it doubtfully and then retired down the long corridor.
“Where’s Annie?” said Mrs. Rattigan suddenly, “that’s the trouble with these girls. Never there when you want them, and always around when you don’t. Nothing but the thoughts of men in their heads. Annie! Annie!”
She raised her voice in a howl like a desolate dingo, and from a door on the left of the hall there appeared a small wizened old woman.
“Hullo, Annie,” said Mr. Carr, and I felt startled, for from the way Mrs. Rattigan had spoken I had expected to see a girl. I realised that a great deal of Mrs. Rattigan’s life seemed to be lived in the past, and that she remembered people as she had first known them. This was suddenly made clear when she looked severely at Ben.
“Isn’t it time you were in bed?” she asked. “When I was your age my mother used to bundle me off smartly enough. Said she had enough of me during the day time without having me round her neck all night as well. In my opinion, children should be seen and not heard and put to bed early. I don’t know what your mother’s thinking of, letting you run around the town at this time of night.”
Mr. Carr looked decidedly sheepish. He plucked helplessly at his tie. He was saved by the reappearance of the waiter, carrying another glass of gin.
“Bah,” said Mrs. Rattigan as she took it and swallowed it in one continuous motion, “I don’t suppose you’ll ever learn that when I say I want something I mean to have it. I wanted Geneva and you give me London. What are you waiting for? Get Miss Aspinall a drink and fill up these gentlemen’s mugs.”
The Professor, I realised, had been struck dumb by Mrs. Rattigan and her suggestions about his father’s behaviour on the continent. She turned what I might almost call a basilisk eye on me.
“Boyle’s your name?” she asked, and I nodded. “Can’t say I remember you. Where did you say we had met? My memory’s not what it was. I blame it on that damned dark bread they’re giving us nowadays. What I say is, if you want brown bread buy brown bread, but if you want white then it should be white. Stuff looks as though it needed washing.”
She suddenly swung round on the Professor. He looked almost as though he was preparing to resist an attack by cavalry. He seemed to take up a mental position of defence.
“Are you eating?” she asked suddenly. “If so I hope you’ll join me. There’s nothing worth eating in the place, but one of these days I hope that young rascal,” she gestured at Mr. Carr, “will remember his aunt who can’t get around as well as she used to. Then we’ll have chicken.”
The Professor gravely accepted her invitation and offered her his arm. Getting her out of her rocking-chair was a job that really required a large crane, but somehow or other, with the help of Miss Annie Aspinall, he managed to get her upright and very slowly, to an accompaniment of accordionlike wheezing, we went down the long and dark corridor, the walls of which, like those of the hall, were covered with pictures, ranging from Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, to photographs signed “Lottie from Bertie,” “Lottie from Monty,” “Lottie from her old friend Cyril,” and so on. Like the stag’s and fox’s heads in the hallway, I supposed that these, too, might be called “trophies of the chase.”
At the far end of the corridor there was a room scattered with tables of all sorts and sizes. This gave the room the appearance of the tearoom at a fête, where everyone in the district had been called upon to lend tables and chairs, and had had recourse to the attics to find articles for which they had no attachment, even sentimental.
At the far end of the room there was an attenuated bar. Lottie led the Professor, by virtue of her weight, towards a table near the bar. We sat down on such chairs as there were. Mine creaked in violent protest. Lottie looked across at me
“Don’t be frightened, dearie,” she said fondly, “that chair’s never been the same since young Lord Brimble pulled it away from under old Sir Charles Chrumpet. Let’s see now. That must have been in ’fifteen. Lor, how the years do pass.” She turned briskly to Ben. “Talking of years, how’s your mother?”
“On the bottle,” said Mr. Carr gloomily. Mrs. Lottie Rattigan apparently believed that by addressing each of us in turn she was doing her social duty. She turned to the old man.
“Yes, my dear Professor,” she said brightly, “I remember your father, dressed in lavender silk combinations, dancing the can-can in my rooms. He was a one, he was. What a boy for the ladies!”
The admiration in her voice was almost cloying. The Professor choked suddenly. He knew that I was noting all this down in my mind and that I would produce it again sometime when I had had more baiting than I could stand from him. It dawned on me, gloriously, that Lottie was fathering the old man with the wrong father, and that he could think of no way of correcting her. I remembered some of the details of his father which I had gathered from the Professor at different times; how he had been a furious teetotaller and an opponent of anything which might have been described as pleasure. He had, in fact, been one with the fathers of Edmund Gosse and Samuel Butler. I was delighted.
Chapter 2
Fitful Fever
IT WAS, I think, one of the most satisfactory evenings I have ever spent. Professor Stubbs had no chance to put in any word of his own. When he tried he was shouted down by Lottie, and when he finally got round to insisting that she had mixed his father up with someone of the same name, she sniffed.
“When I was a girl,” she said haughtily, “no gentleman would have thought of interrupting a girl when she was speaking. I must say that manners have changed and, if I might say so, not for the better.”
The Professor was definitely set back. He looked at me as though he could gladly have murdered me. By my expression I tried to show that I did not consider that I was to blame for anything which had happened in the course of the evening. I might as well have signalled to him in Chinese. He went on glowering at me.
When we finally left Lottie’s rather dubious hotel, an escape which was not attended without expense, for she kept on trying to add a bottle of wine to our bill in spite of our protests that we had had no
wine (in her experience all gentlemen always drank wine). When we finally escaped the old man was in a temper that would have boiled the mercury in a thermometer. He climbed into the car with tremendous dignity, which would have been greater if he had not caught the end of his trousers on the handbrake and torn them. He looked round at us ferociously, his eyes glaring through the gap between the steel rims of his glasses and his bushy grey eyebrows.
“Must say, Carr,” he hooted, “that yer aunt’s one o’ these women who’d be much improved by bein’ dead. Public danger she is. What me father’d ha’ said an’ done if he’d known she was mixin’ him up wi’ a rake, I don’t like to think. He’d ha’ had her scrambled an’ would ha’ danced on her grave, singin’ methodist an’ revivalist hymns.”
“Yes,” I said sweetly, “he must have looked tasty in his lavender silk combinations.”
“Pah!” the old man snorted and crashed his gears. If the ride out to Bayswater had been bad, words fail me to express my feelings about the return home.
Mr. Carr did not stir a hair. He climbed out of the car with the happy expression of one who had been riding on a tram. I followed the two of them back into the house.
“Well,” said Mr. Carr helpfully, “fine old bird, isn’t she? Must be ninety if she’s a day, too. As spry as a chicken and as full of beans as a pod. Great thing about our family. This last generation on the female side seems to have become immortal.” He appealed to me, “How’d you like her, cock?”
Choosing my words carefully, I said, “I think she’s wonderful. She must have a wonderful memory. I’m surprised that no one has tried to make her write her autobiography. I’d like to see her stories about the Professor’s father in print.”
The old man growled. I felt rather as though I had poked a stick into the den of a grizzly bear and found the occupant at home.