27.
The scene changes abruptly. The office folds and fades away and they find themselves looking down on an ugly concrete house. The house stood alone in a green field site surrounded on every side by the grey industrial suburbs that sprawl on the outskirts of London.
At a distance the house resembled the hulk of an ocean liner, dragged ashore and sunk to its gunwales in grass. A salt-bleached wreck of funnels and narrow sun decks. But on closer inspection the house embraced all the conceits of a Hollywood hacienda, decorated with Spanish tiles, etched glass and elaborate iron shutters.
The house had been a wedding present, built on a priceless plot of land only thirty miles from the city. Ambrose Pangloss had chosen the architects and spared no expense in its grand design. He considered no detail too small. Nothing had been forgotten. He’d ordered triple-glazed windows, air-flow central heating, mirrored walls and polished cherry wood floors for the bedrooms; a kitchen with a range of full-sized kitchen equipment and handmade Italian bathrooms with climate control and clusters of halogen chandeliers. To protect his investment, he’d installed a security system involving a lot of laser beams and automatic steel shutters.
When Charlie and Baxter had arrived the builders were finished but the house needed carpets and furniture.
Confronted with such a challenge Baxter had felt obliged to quit art school, as her father had intended, and settle down to the urgent business of choosing curtains and kitchen cupboards. Her first purchase was a big brass bed.
Charlie, dazed by the changes in his life, was content to sit in the bed, exchanging caresses and Ideal Homemaker magazines. They had stumbled into the twilight zone of genuine Shaker stencil kits, Elizabethan cushion covers, illustrated place mats, silent curtain rings and solid teak outdoor furniture shipped direct from the Indian Ocean. There were real Victorian tapestry hangings, handcrafted Black Forest barometers and special containers for pot-pourri. There were even storage jars engraved with the names of their future contents: Pasta Shells and Preserving Sugar. So many methods of filling a space. Homemakers abhor a vacuum.
The marriage ceremony had been a brisk exchange of contracts, followed by a champagne and smoked chicken supper and a honeymoon in Marrakech, where it rained for seven days and Baxter wouldn’t leave the hotel.
It was Charlie’s first venture into the world beyond the smothering streets of London and he was impatient for foreign shores. He’d taken a camera, notebooks, maps, phrase books, pocket guides and a brand new watercolour box. He was bright and excited and armed to the teeth. This was the start of the great adventure.
Baxter had been to France, Spain and Switzerland but never before travelled so far south and was quite convinced that civilisation stopped at Gibraltar. They spoke English in Gibraltar and you could eat the food and drink the water without an instant dose of the squitters and gaze out at the smoke of Africa from a safe and respectable distance.
Morocco gave her the spooks. She had travelled the length of Europe like a seasoned cosmopolitan but here she found herself lost, surrounded by mysteries she couldn’t fathom, a prisoner in a tourist hotel. A cheap and nasty tourist hotel. There were cats roaming the restaurant and no proper night-club or shopping arcade. It was a loathsome place. She wanted nothing more than escape.
‘It’s horrible!’ she shuddered, whenever he suggested they go out to visit the mosques or make a tour of the souks. ‘The streets smell like shit, the food tastes like shit and everyone speaks in a foreign language. The whole damned country gives me the creeps. It’s a pain!’
Charlie had discovered that Baxter measured her life in pain. Anything tiresome was a pain. Anything difficult was a pain. Challenges were a pain. Art school had been a pain. Her father continued to be a pain. Morocco was a startling world of totally unexpected pain.
‘They speak French,’ Charlie said.
‘So what?’
‘I thought you spoke French.’
‘I don’t speak that sort of French,’ she retorted and rolled her eyes in that supercilious manner she had always reserved for her father.
‘We’ll soon get the feel of the place,’ Charlie said hopefully. ‘Don’t you want to see the Sahara?’ Tribesmen, camels and cargoes of spices. A desert so vast it could hide North America under its sand.
‘No!’
‘The mosques,’ Charlie pleaded.
‘No!’
‘We can’t miss the famous Koutoubia Mosque.’ Take my hand and walk with me for behold we have entered the secret city of minarets, tombs and palaces.
‘No!’
‘We may never have the chance to come here again,’ Charlie grieved, pressing his nose against the window of their hotel room and gazing down on the rain-sodden lawns.
An old man wearing a polythene sack for a hat was raking leaves from the boiling surface of the swimming pool. A colony of wet cats was watching him work from their shelter in a stack of upturned chairs.
‘Good!’ Baxter said. ‘I never want to go anywhere again!’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Trust me! I wish that we’d never left home. It’s a pain!’
She was slumped in a chair, arms hanging loose, legs askew, a studio portrait of boredom. She had thrown herself into lethargy with spirit and energy. She rolled her head and sighed. She yawned and picked at the ends of her hair. She raised herself up and threw herself down again. She was trapped and restless. The bedside radio played nothing but Perry Como tapes or tunes from the Arabic hit parade and the television, to her disgust, would broadcast nothing but African football. It was such a pain that she wanted to scream.
Charlie was disappointed. It had been his own idea to come to Marrakech. He’d imagined how they would spend their mornings exploring the souks to haggle for rugs and silver bracelets and how, in the afternoons, they would seek the shadows of pavement cafes to sip at glasses of sweet tea to emerge through the jasmine-scented twilight into the famous market square to gawp at the snake-charmers, fire-eaters, jugglers, dancers and desert traders.
It had been a bad idea. He felt angry with himself for suggesting it and mad with Baxter for hating it with such determination. But when she reached out for him, to turn him away from the window, and kissed his face and conducted his hands on a guided tour of her bathrobe, he knew he would forgive her anything. The desert and mountains could wait for them. There was time. This was the morning of their lives.
‘It’s raining,’ she whispered as she moved him slowly towards the bed. ‘It’s stupid to walk in the rain.’
28.
He was happy to be married but he wanted to return to work. He’d had to stop painting until a room could be found that would make a suitable studio. Baxter would plan it for him.
‘As soon as we’ve finished the decorating we’ll put a studio in one of the north rooms,’ she promised him. ‘You can work there undisturbed and have a chance to really develop some of your own ideas. You’re going to love it, Charlie. And I’ll sit for you whenever you want and we’ll play music and make love every afternoon and get drunk every night and dance naked in the garden whenever the moon is full. And you’ll be doing real work—no more sugar-coated landscapes.’
‘And what about your own work?’ he asked anxiously. Her portfolio was gathering dust. She hadn’t touched it since quitting art school. He was half-afraid she had lost her commitment.
‘What about it? You think that getting married is going to stop me painting?’ Baxter said indignantly. ‘As soon as I’m ready I’ll find a room of my own and you can sit for me.’
She sat beside him now in the new brass bed. She was wearing her Hot Bitch Rubber Harness purchased at great expense from a Chelsea fetish fashion store.
At a glance it looked like a skin-tight red rubber diving suit but the limbs were welded to a wasp-waisted corset that might have come straight from the pages of a specialist mail order catalogue. Her breasts protruded through a pair of black rubber rings that clasped them so tight they look
ed alarmingly hard and swollen. The back of the harness was cut away to leave her buttocks exposed. There was a mask with holes cut out for the eyes, mouth and nose and a sinister ventilation nozzle set at the back of the skull. There were straps and hoops at the ankles and wrists that seemed to have no regular purpose and even Baxter had dared not inquire about their true function, although she supposed they must be designed to secure her limbs to sweet contraptions of torture. She could be spread upside down from hooks in the ceiling or held like a slave from chains in the wall.
The costume had baffled Charlie when she’d brought it home. He didn’t know what to make of it. Did she suppose that he harboured desires for women in bondage, or had she bought it for the hell of it, in the way that she chose the rest of her wardrobe? What did it mean when your wife walked around in a bright red rubber sausage skin? Was it fetish or mere charade, confession or passing fancy? He wasn’t complaining. He didn’t want to discourage these brief but passionate flights of fancy.
He’d loved the sight of her in the French maid’s uniform. The glossy black stockings and puffed white knickers like a froth of stiffened egg whites. He’d been sorry when she’d torn the skirt during a bedside breakfast skirmish. He’d relished the spangled boots and the buckskin shirt of her cowgirl rodeo outfit despite the bullwhip and cutting spurs. During a few brief weeks he’d ruined a smirking schoolgirl in pigtails, molested a starchy, pale-faced nurse after hanging her helpless in traction and fondled the strong yet yielding thighs of a mortified Mother Superior. He’d risen to every occasion with a lechery brinking on madness, but he wasn’t certain how to respond to a hot bitch rubber wife.
Baxter for her part never considered for a moment that Charlie would be puzzled by her exotic wardrobe of disguises. There was no mystery. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing. She was mounting her own exhibition of erotic comic strip art for the sake of the adoration of shadows held spellbound in the bedroom mirrors. This was Baxter as Batman’s Bride. Baxter the Battling Amazon. Baxter the Slippery Slut of Sleaze.
It had taken her twenty minutes and a tin of dusting powder to get dressed that morning and the effort had so exhausted her that she’d had to retire to bed. But Baxter loved it. Behind the mask she felt lewd and dangerous. The Hot Bitch Rubber Harness clasped her like a cannibal lover, licking the salt from her skin and sucking greedily at her bones. Its muscular embrace was hot, relentless and suffocating. The bold display of her buttocks and breasts only heightened her state of arousal.
‘Don’t you adore the smell of warm rubber?’ she murmured, raising a brightly polished arm and offering her hand.
‘You smell like a winter’s dark afternoon of raincoats and wet umbrellas,’ Charlie grinned reaching out to catch the hand and kissing the pungent fingertips.
‘Gas masks,’ Baxter said. ‘Waterproof sheets and lunatic’s pillows.’ She pulled her hand away and caught him securely by the throat, trapping his breath and making him choke.
‘Party balloons,’ Charlie croaked.
‘Truncheons, mouth clamps and torture chambers,’ Baxter said. She was suddenly astride him, pulling herself forward and squashing his face between her hot and heavy breasts.
‘Rubber ducks,’ Charlie mumbled and laughed, a deeply muffled rumble of pleasure.
‘Dead men’s gloves,’ Baxter whispered and shivered. ‘Dead men’s gloves and strangler’s shoes.’
Charlie spluttered something that she couldn’t understand. But she felt him reach out with his hands, groping for her buttocks beyond the clinging ribs of rubber.
29.
The days slipped away and Charlie continued to play the buffoon in Baxter’s bedroom pantomimes. But as the time passed he considered his new surroundings and began to feel uneasy in them. The Pangloss Chicken Empire had paid for the house and furniture, laid the garden to lawn and filled the freezer with Fancy Chicken Tidbits™. Now Charlie began to wonder how they could afford to live in such idle luxury. It seemed to him that the house was a monstrous machine that would soon demand money with menaces.
‘This place is too big,’ he complained one night when Baxter sent him downstairs to investigate some phantom in the woodwork and check the locks on the doors and windows.
They had switched off the laser security after triggering the alarms and finding themselves locked in the bathroom for hours until the rescue services had arrived to cut through the steel shutters.
‘Was anybody down there?’ she muttered, half-asleep, her face obscured in a cobweb of hair.
‘No,’ Charlie said.
‘So what took you so long?’ she murmured, reaching out for him with one of her evil-smelling arms.
She was still wearing her Hot Bitch Rubber Harness. The contraption had perished and welded itself to her skin. She was too embarrassed to tell Charlie. He would eventually have to cut her out with a pair of bacon scissors. She would emerge, slippery and stinking, as wrinkled as a newborn baby.
‘I got lost. I took a wrong turn at the top of the stairs,’ he said miserably, pulling the blanket over his ears.
‘Did you check all the windows?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you locked all the doors?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered, creeping forward stealthily to grope for her hot and rubbery comforts.
‘You’re cold!’ she gasped as she shrank from his touch and slipped once more into sleep.
He lay awake in the dark and counted the cost of the good life. He had his money from the Church Street gallery—Harry had bought his share of the business—and that would keep them secure for a time, but then he would have to find some kind of work. He had a wife and a house to support.
Charlie liked to think of himself as a simple working man. His father worked as a barber and his grandfather had worked in a pickle factory where he’d suffered a heart attack, drowning in a vat of malt vinegar—a few weeks short of his eighty-third birthday—so the factory had felt obliged to pay the funeral expenses and arrange a cold beef and pickle supper for the widow and mourners.
He had seen a snapshot of the old man—a small, dainty figure in shirtsleeves standing on a seaside promenade and scowling in the sun as he smoked a Woodbine. He held a small child by the hand. A scowling child in a black woollen swimsuit, leather sandals and a brutal, kitchen chair haircut. The reason, Charlie had always supposed, why his father had been destined to become a barber.
His great-grandfather had worked in the coalyards of the Great Northern Railway and shovelled coal for forty years, retiring with emphysema, a silver watch engraved with his name, a bottle of sherry and his own shovel. The stationmaster had made a speech, explaining how he could use the shovel to work in his cottage garden to grow prize-winning vegetables. Golden years of spinach and cabbage, potatoes, leeks and onions the size of human skulls. The old man didn’t have the breath to stand and express his gratitude.
His great-great-grandfather had worked on the land and lived in a fine brick stable, sleeping on a mattress of straw with his wife and other beasts of burden. He had a slow and stubborn body. His face had been weathered like leather, whipped by the wind and burnt by the sun. He picked stones from the fields, scared crows from the crops, repaired buildings, laid hedges and built fences. He was thirty-seven years old when a carthorse threw a fit, startled from a troubled sleep, and trampled him to death.
They hadn’t been important men engaged in affairs of state, but they had been honest and true to themselves. They’d all taken pride in their work and they’d worked hard and hadn’t stopped working until they’d dropped down dead. Charlie was proud of them. He liked to imagine that he was part of some grand tradition. He wanted to be a painter and make his own way in the world. But if he couldn’t support Baxter with his earnings as a painter, then he’d have to take some other kind of employment. He wasn’t comfortable without labour. It didn’t seem natural. It didn’t feel healthy.
If Charlie could have traced his family back another twenty million years he’d had been sur
prised to find that he came from a large and happy tribe of dedicated idlers. For millions of years his ancestors had done nothing but loaf around in the trees, eating fruit and hoping that it wouldn’t rain. They had eaten when they were hungry, slept when they were tired and copulated without restraint whenever the mood was upon them, which was often since the only work involved in earning the next meal was the effort of reaching out an arm to pick at the nearest branch. When the food ran out they stirred and stretched themselves, yawned and moved to another tree.
Charlie’s own convoluted method of filling his stomach and hiding from storms, involving, as it did, a lifetime’s drudgery of little lendings and borrowings, not to mention the part it played in the relentless destruction of wilderness, the poisoning of lakes and rivers, the draining of wetlands, the flooding of lowlands, the stripping of jungles into deserts, the slaughter of animals, birds and fishes, insects, plants and microbiota, would have seemed insane to them.
But Charlie was a long, long way from his family in the forest and the forest was burning and he was sitting in an ugly concrete fortress somewhere at the end of the world. He had to find some kind of work. They couldn’t live on love and Fancy Chicken Tidbits™. But whenever he tried to express these concerns to Baxter she would only laugh and shake her head and stop his mouth with kisses.
30.
Ten days later Ambrose Pangloss called at the house. One of his senior secretaries made the appointment. He would arrive at nine-twenty and stay for thirty-five minutes.
It was a cold Monday morning with a frost gleaming on the great lawn. Beyond the distant garden walls rooks flapped like prayer flags in the skeletons of trees. Charlie and Baxter dressed themselves for the occasion and did their best to clean the kitchen and bedroom.
At nine-twenty precisely they watched the Pangloss Mercedes glide silently to the house and deliver its tiny tycoon to the freshly painted front door. He looked smaller away from his office.
Einstein Page 10