the Education of
Epitome Quirkstandard
a ŋovel by
A.F. Harrold
published by
Quirkstandard’s Alternative
Dedicated to Rikk Smith and Karen Stenner
and with thanks to all those people who read earlier
versions of this story, in whole or in part,
or who listened to the first draft podcast,
and who passed comment one way or another.
Nescire quod antea quam natus sis acciderit, id est simper esse puerum; quid enim est aetas hominis nisi memoria rerum nostrarum cum superiorum aetate contexterit?
Cicero, Orator Ad M. Brutum
Chapter 1
Quirkstandard, Breakfast & The Club
It was during the last years of the Great War that Lord Quirkstandard received the first inklings of an outline of a hint of the original idea that would one day, after wrangling, coaxing and much eventual help from outsiders, emerge into the dawn light of a brand new day of a fairly new century as the crowning glory of his only lasting accomplishment: The Common University.
However, as this pre-emptive shadow of a notion first passed across the creases of his cerebellum he was simply cursing to himself in the kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t a typical place for Quirkstandard to be found, and the curses he used were the sort that might safely be used in the company of a lady without causing distress or embarrassment to either party since he was, without doubt, a gentleman.
Epitome Quirkstandard, Third Earl of Wainscoting, had woken up to find himself in a bit of a pickle. Owing to the ongoing war in France the last members of his domestic staff had been called away. Presumably, he thought, to do some tidying, dusting and cooking along the Western Front. This had left him all alone in his neat, but not overly large townhouse in the environs of Regent’s Park, attempting to make his own breakfast.
The saucepan contained what, he believed with luck and perseverance, might turn out to be a soft-boiled egg. He had filled the pan with water from the tap and had found an egg underneath a ceramic chicken on the kitchen table. He had followed Cook’s neatly written instructions and placed the pan on the stove, but now nothing was happening.
Cook had always liked him and had spent a little of his embarkation leave jotting down a variety of recipes and instructions for his employer to follow by himself until the new staff arrived. (The butler had placed a request with an agency who specialised in supplying elderly and/or inept domestic staff to stately homes, but he had told Quirkstandard that he didn’t hold out too much hope, since the competition for staff was fairly fierce and their advertisement had arrived somewhat late in the war.) Cook’s instructions were detailed and various, but he had neglected, on the ‘how to boil an egg’ page, to mention where the matches were kept or, in fact, the need to light the gas underneath the saucepan at all. Fortunately for Quirkstandard’s sake he had also neglected to instruct him to turn the gas on, so at least one tragedy was avoided on this warm summer’s morning.
As he stood over the floating egg, timing it by the kitchen clock, Quirkstandard thought back to the evening before. Cook had taken him aside and quickly talked him through the pile of recipes, and he wondered just a little now, as he watched the egg coolly bobbing, whether, perhaps, there was something in what Cook had said last night that he should have noted down, something that Cook hadn’t himself written in the notebook.
He remembered how, when he was a pupil at Eton, he had been encouraged to make notes when the Masters spoke about anything. That was a number of years ago now and he tried to remember if they’d ever taught him about egg boiling, but he quickly came to the conclusion that they probably hadn’t. As far as he remembered it, his schooling had been filled with things that had names like Classics and Latin. Well, not, he corrected himself, things with names like Classics and Latin, but things actually called Classics and Latin.
If only a man could have a decent education, he thought, filled with useful things, such as How to Boil an Egg, rather than the old Latin guff, which he had never even thought about until this very morning. The thought didn’t occur, however, that had they taught him Egg Boiling, he probably wouldn’t have remembered that either. It’s quite likely that anything he had been taught at school, however useful it might have been, would have stuck to his brain like leaves on an autumnal oak.
He had been one of those boys who dutifully attended every class (possibly because he knew a letter might be sent home to his Aunt if he bunked off and he didn’t fancy disappointing her (she was a woman he held in high esteem and who occasionally visited with a bag of sweets)) and had spent every lesson dozing in the back row, just as boys of his wealth felt, in that day and age, entitled to do. Occasionally he was woken by the noisy out-rushing of the other pupils at the end of a class, or by the sound of a board-duster as it bounced off the cranium of a slightly less well-off boy sat nearby, but even at these times he never felt the urge to write down what the master had been saying.
When it came to his final school exams Quirkstandard noticed that several of his classmates had sent along an Indian prodigy from a lower form who knew absolutely everything about everything. Little Perumparambil liked examinations so much that he would take your place for the price of a bottle of ginger pop and the satisfaction of a job well done. Quirkstandard, however, thinking he’d save the ginger pop for himself, sent his man along instead, dressed in his rather tight fitting school uniform.
This had seemed a remarkably smart idea at the time, and the extra hours he was able to spend in the bath instead of in the exam hall were, without doubt, several of the finest bathing hours of his life. However, when the results were posted a fortnight later he discovered that his valet turned out to have had as much grasp of the complexities of Classics and Latin as Quirkstandard himself had had.
He left school labelled a dunce of fairly significant proportions and had felt, in a place deep down inside which he couldn’t quite reach to set a finger on, a light but rising sense of failure. The fact that he hadn’t even achieved the rank of biggest imbecile in the school (which would’ve been some sort of accomplishment) only helped to further widen his confused and salty gashes of lacerated pride. (As it happened, the boy who was placed lowest in the school that year was a good friend of Quirkstandard’s: a small schnauzer named Nigel Spiggot. (His parents had been hoping for a son but had only managed to acquire a pet. Since, however, they had placed their expected offspring’s name on the school’s waiting list some years earlier the Spiggots felt obliged to use the opportunity when it came up, and, it should be added, the governors of Eton College were not shy to the sound of money jangling into their Cash Office, even as old rope was seen leaving through the Porter’s Lodge.)) His Aunt, on the other hand, had expected no better result from a school run by men (she held ‘views’ about that particular gender) and didn’t even speak sternly to the boy about it. Instead she bought him a large cream cake in one of the little teashops of Windsor and sent him home on the train: this reaction from his Aunt (whom he looked up to and respected) mostly mollified his feelings of failure and very soon he thought nothing else about it.
If there was one thing Quirkstandard had learned from that exam fiasco, however, it was that one should never send a man to do a boy’s job. And now that he was a man, a tall and attractively slim and healthy twenty-six year old example of one, with a flouncy moustache of his own drooping over his top lip (due to the absence, during the War, of the chap who popped in once a day to wax and prink the old topiary), he found himself coming to the sincere conclusion that boiling eggs really must be boy’s work, since he seemed entirely incapable of doing it hims
elf.
Abandoning the saucepan he decided that today (like most days) would be a fine day to go and dine at his Club in Town.
He had another look through all the rooms around his bedroom in an effort to find where his man kept his clothes. He knew he’d seen them all stored away once, neatly stacked and folded, but was dashed if he could find them now. So, drawing the cord of his dressing gown tighter over the top of his pyjamas, and slipping his feet into two tall boots he found in the hallway, pulling a stick from the elephant’s foot beside the front door and a hat from a nearby hook, he stepped out of his house into a gloriously sunny morning, fell down the steps and, after having gathered himself up on the pavement of Devonshire Terrace and dusted himself off, strode purposefully in the direction of Mauve’s Club For Gentleman.
*
As Quirkstandard looked around the interior of the Great Room at Mauve’s he was amused to notice that he wasn’t the only gentleman who had arrived in his pyjamas. In fact, he noticed several proud, and pinkly Imperial, members of the club standing out in their full natal nakedness. These were chaps, he recognised, who had spent time in the Colonies and had got into the habit of sleeping, he chuckled to himself, in the altogether. Seeing them there he didn’t feel quite so silly for not having been able to track down his daytime clothes. The War Office really hadn’t thought, he thought, when they called up all these servants from across the houses of the Home Counties, that they’d be leaving the Home Front quite so exposed. He chuckled at his little joke and looked around to see if there was anyone about this morning who liked him enough to listen to it, but just then another thought popped into his old grey matter which quite chilled his spine.
If the Domestic Situation had reached such a pass in other people’s houses too, then quite a few of them might not have had their breakfast either, which could well mean a run on the lunch menu.
He hung his hat on the appropriate hook of the hatstand and strode purposely into the gloaming of the Club, straight toward the stairs that led to the Dining Room. As he ascended he noticed in a corner of the Great Room below him a gaggle of gentlemen in various states of dress and undress surrounding Snatchby, Mauve’s elderly doorman. He stood at the centre of this quiet throng and Quirkstandard noticed how his hand would drift, with near tectonic grace, to point at the throat or the waist of a gentleman and exhibit or imitate some peculiar motion or other. Attendant on these movements was each gentleman’s rapt attention. Quirkstandard was too far away to catch any of the dialogue other than his pal Harris Flirtwater’s cry of ‘By Jove!’ as he pumped Snatchby’s withered and dusty hand vigorously.
A few minutes later as they sat down to a big plate of bubble and squeak (which Quirkstandard noticed, was much more squeak than bubble) he engaged Flirtwater in conversation. It turned out that Snatchby had been instructing the gentlemen in the art of self-dressing. He had explained, named and identified each article of clothing, along with the usual and likely locations for clean and folded items in a typical household setting, and had then detailed and displayed the unique and precise movements, motions and actions required to fasten them onto appropriate parts of a gentleman’s anatomy.
Quirkstandard felt a thrill pass through him as he saw, for the second time that morning, the value of useful and practical knowledge. No amount of Latin or Classics could ever help a gentleman to look dapper and respectable, but this, this wisdom that Snatchby had shared with Flirtwater and the others … oh, that was the real business of education.
After spending the hour following elevenses with Snatchby, Quirkstandard relaxed into one of Mauve’s famous lilac sofas. He felt better now with his digestive juices bubbling away (although he swore they were still squeaking a touch more than was ideal), and he felt the future was open before him, especially now that he had instructions on where he was likely to find his clothes.
After all, there is only so much a gentleman can do in a dressing gown.
‘You see,’ he said to his friend Spiggot who was dozing on the floor beside the sofa, ‘What a chap could really do with is a first rate proper education to prepare him, as it were, for the vicissitudes … is that a word? … for the vicissitudes (we’ll assume it is, I think – it has a nice ring to it) of life. Without an education,’ he concluded, ‘one is required to rely on other people for everything,
to do and to think, and at the end of the day, don’t you think, Spiggot old chum, in the long run as it were …’ (Spiggot’s ears jerked up at the word ‘run’ and he raised his head and yawned eagerly) ‘… well, what I mean to say is, other people simply aren’t one, are they?’
Spiggot nodded in agreement, turned round, licked himself and then cocked his little leg against the corner of the sofa.
As he and Quirkstandard left the Reading Room the familiar distant clank of a mop and bucket approached slowly through Mauve’s labyrinthine corridors.
*
Quirkstandard spent the evening, once he’d returned home, rummaging through the wardrobe he found behind a door in his dressing room, which, as it happened, was just off his bedroom, exactly where Snatchby had suggested. He examined row upon row of shirts, trousers, jackets, cravats, ties, long johns, underwear, bodices, girdles, socks, shoes, spatses, cummerbunds, waistcoats, vests and a variety of items he could give neither a name nor a use to. There were drawers filled with cufflinks and tiepins and novelty pocket watches, that he could only assume belonged to him. He had never dreamed he would be faced with such choice. He wasn’t one of these dandies who’re always playing about with their costumes and hairstyles, who read the fashion magazines day in and day out with one eye on next week’s trend and the other on the competition. No, he’d prided himself on having little vanity and little interest in much besides the serious things in life, such as dinner, billiards and literature (which isn’t to say that Quirkstandard read books, as such, but he did enjoy flicking through the reviews of books in one of the free newspapers he found lying around at Mauve’s – the world felt a good place with books in it, and he always liked the smell of his father’s library, which was the only room in the house, besides the kitchen, which remained even vaguely warm in the winter).
Passing his eye along the hangers and shelves and neatly folded piles that lay inside this large wardrobe was startling. Normally his man would simply place the day’s clothes at the foot of his bed and help him into them after his bath and that would be the process of dressing dealt with for another day (unless he was visiting somewhere that required the same thing to be done again just before dinner, that is). But now, faced with making the decisions himself, he felt daunted.
Some of the clothes hanging in the half-light had been his father’s. He recognised the feel of the tweed, and he knew they had hung there untouched for years. As he ran his hand over them, with a touch of awe, he breathed in the memory-jogging scent of camphor.
Balustrade Quirkstandard, Second Earl of Wainscoting, had been born into a remarkably wealthy family. His father (Epitome’s grandfather), Old Man Quirkstandard, the First Earl, had been a frugal but uncaring miser. It was rumoured that he had only ever parted with money freely on two occasions in his life. The first was on the day of his marriage. So pleased was he, the legend ran, with his beautiful young bride that he actually gave her a tip: a shiny threepenny bit. Many years later, at her funeral, so moved was he by the service that, when he thanked the vicar afterwards, he palmed a well-scrubbed ha’penny into his hand.
When asked about the truth of this legend Old Man Quirkstandard would pause, sigh and be heard to say, ‘It was love, sir, love that made a man so impulsive.’
Within years of his wife passing away he opted to retire from both public and private life and the running of the family finances passed into the hands of his eldest and only son, Balustrade. Within six months the younger Quirkstandard had managed to lose the lot.
One Sunday afternoon he had ventured out across Regent’s Park for his usual post-prandial stroll. He left the house one of the wea
lthiest young men in London and returned to it an hour and a half later a penniless soul. Even as he placed his hand on the doorknob a nagging doubt settled on his mind: he couldn’t remember where he had put the family fortune.
As he opened the door and entered the front hall the doubt grew and he checked the hall table to see if he’d left it there. Of course he hadn’t, and after checking every drawer in the house, behind every cupboard and between the cushions of the many sofas, settees and armchairs in the sitting rooms and bedrooms he reached the conclusion that he was an utter idiot and that he had, without doubt and quite possibly with irrevocable consequences, simply lost it.
He waited several months before telling anyone, just in case it turned up. But it didn’t.
He was scared to admit his incompetence to his father, even by means of a séance, and he knew there was only one course of action open to him by which he might recoup his losses.
In the summer of 1890, Balustrade Quirkstandard got married.
He married Sarah Penultimate, one of the beautiful young heiresses to the Penultimate Aglet Fortune. Fortunately he had been engaged to her for a year prior to misplacing his own fortune, and so by the thinnest scrape of good luck he was able to pay off the butcher, the baker and the other clamouring tradesmen without anyone knowing quite how hopeless he had been.
Epitome Quirkstandard remembered his mother with some affection. She had always been so friendly whenever they had met and he knew that she had always insisted in the sternest terms that his Nanny dress him appropriately for the weather. There had even been a photograph of her in his nursery which he would think of in the darkness after he’d been tucked up and read to and kissed goodnight by that same marvellous Nanny.
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