‘Eat up your breakfast you two, it’s getting cold with all this yapping.’
‘Most certainly, dear Dawn. Sit down sir, please sit, and eat.’
Quirkstandard finally sat down and got on with eating his sandwich and drinking his tea. It was good stuff he thought and big portions too. As he chewed he happened to glance across the table where his eyes kept getting caught by those of his interlocutor. He couldn’t decide whether to match his gaze or to look away, and compromised by blushing, coughing and shutting his eyes.
‘What was it,’ his companion asked between mouthfuls. ‘What was it that happened to you on the day before yesterday that so reminded you of me?’
Quirkstandard liked being asked a question he knew the answer to and explained to this new friend the gist of his adventures so far, how he had woken up and been unable to find his clothes and how he had had to visit Mauve’s wrapped in a hasty dressing gown and so on until he reached the breakfast table. The old man watched and listened closely, grinning ruefully and sympathetically.
He chuckled when Quirkstandard had had difficulty with initially working the buttons and fastenings on his clothes, but not unkindly.
As Quirkstandard spoke the two Crepuscular sons, one of whom he hazily remembered having met the day before, came into the kitchen, sat down at the table and got straight on with their breakfast.
He finished his story by talking about the pamphlets he had read and as he spoke he remembered, once again, that there was a whole room of them next door, a whole room filled with knowledge that he had yet to know anything of, just next door. His genuine enthusiasm was clear in his face and he finished by mentioning his desire to better his education and to broaden his horizons.
‘Mr Quirkstandard, sir,’ said the bearded man, ‘I am Crepuscular, Simone Crepuscular, and those were my pamphlets you were reading last night.’
‘Oh,’ said Quirkstandard, suddenly a bit awed. ‘Did you know there was this dolphin that could speak …’
‘Yes, I remember Mr Quirkstandard, I wrote that after following the unfolding tale in a series of newspapers I discovered dated to the early …’
‘1760s, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s most correct Mr Q. It seems you were paying attention.’
‘Oh, rather. You see, the townspeople thought he was actually a Frenchman, but …’
‘Actually, they thought he was a Spaniard, Mr Q., but, yes I remember, because, if you recall, I wrote the pamphlet you read.’
Quirkstandard looked up at him and nodded firmly (which he regretted a moment later when the inside of his bruised skull began to throb redundantly).
‘Oh yes, of course you did, Mr …?’
‘Crepuscular.’
‘Oh, like the shop? Look I have a piece of card with the name of the shop on.’ He patted his pockets. ‘Oh, it’s here somewhere …’
‘And you, Mr Q., are here now – you’re in the shop. Don’t worry about finding the card, we trust you.’
‘Oh, jolly good.’
‘Mr Quirkstandard?’
‘Yes?’
‘I believe it is no coincidence that we have been brought together. I appear to have something you want,’ he waved a hand toward the pamphlet room, ‘and, I suspect, you have something, I’m sorry to say, that we need. That is, to put a blunt point on it, money.’
‘Money? Is that all? Oh yes, I should think so,’ replied Quirkstandard gaily. He felt relieved and light because for a moment from the portentous lowering of Mr Crepuscular’s voice he had feared that the payment was going to be taken out in something much more onerous than cash, something that involved work or something. Now cash he could do, he had buckets of the stuff.
Simone Crepuscular leant across the table, his beard sweeping crumbs from his plate, and held out his hand.
‘It’s wonderful to meet you, Mr Q.’
‘Oh, and you too, Mr Crepuscular,’ he said shaking the older man’s hand, ‘you too.’
Chapter 6
India, Literature & Poets
Alfred, Lord Tennyson spent two years toward the end of the 1870s working on a magnificent epic tragic memorial poem imaginatively investigating what had possibly happened to a famous battalion of the British Army that had gone missing in Northern India. Two whole years he spent in his study, dipping his pen in his ink pot, scratching away on the thick paper he preferred, crunching up sheet after sheet and throwing them at the waste paper basket which was several yards away from his desk. When he placed the final full stop at the end of the final stanza he heaved a great sigh of relief, packaged The Lost Company up in brown paper and string, addressed it to the Minister In Charge Of Military and Commemorative Poetry at the War Office, and took it by hand, himself, to the post box.
No one ever read the thing, which is believed to have been full of dark mysteries and effulgent beauty and danger, tigers and howdahs and maharajahs and magic and gems as big as duck eggs and spells and curses and dusky maidens dancing in the crumbling majestic ancient palaces in the almost altogether while Tommy Atkins watched with a dropped-jaw. No one read it because it never reached the War Office, being lost in the post almost immediately. This vexed Tennyson sorely, since it had been the only copy and he couldn’t remember much about it (other than the above details, though how they fitted together he could never quite say), and for years afterwards at poetry readings he would begin by saying, ‘I once wrote a very good and very long poem, harrumph, but thanks to that fat bastard Mr Anthony Trollope I lost my only copy, so please, please don’t buy the man’s books.’ Trollope, of course, had invented the pillar box and even when he died in 1882 Tennyson refused to be civil to him, going to his funeral with the sole intention of reading (and rustling) a newspaper throughout the service.
In India, however, things were going along much as they always had. Although the battalion may have lost touch with England and England with it, there was little consternation in the camp. With no orders arriving they were never asked to fight, nor sent to quell uneasy uprisings in the locals. In fact a lot of the soldiers, on their days off, married local girls and were busy getting on with raising families of lovely colourful children. It wasn’t an unusual sight to catch kids playing hopscotch or skipping on the parade ground, nor for the men to be dressed in native style loincloths and dhotis (over the top of their uniforms, naturally). The camp itself grew organically, spreading a little this way, a little that, like a small township, and had merged on the eastern edge with the western edge of the local village. There was a warm friendly atmosphere here, with no one getting uppity and telling someone else what to do, which was the usual cause of colonial conflict. At night the jolly everlasting plucking of sitars mingled with the merry thump of pianos and a panoply of curious twinkling stars shone down on what was, in effect, a contented extended family.
Simone Crepuscular was most happy with it all. He hardly bothered with clerical work at all and would remove his clothes almost as soon as he’d had his breakfast, slip on his loincloth (at the request of the mayor of the village after several ladies had fallen in the river whilst washing clothes near his tree, for no reason they felt like explaining to their husbands or fathers, though their sisters and mothers tended to giggle quite a bit), and head off down to the river in the cool of the early morning. In fact he often didn’t even bother to get dressed before breakfast either and if he wasn’t up his tree contemplating the world and dreaming of being exactly where he was right now, he could be seen wandering round the camp as happy and as nude as the day he first wore a nappy.
Each morning the Major came out of his hut, stood on the veranda and looked across the hard parade ground to the fat red rising sun. He would wait a few minutes, tapping his swagger stick against his boot, just to see if anything military was likely to happen that morning, before turning and heading back indoors for his breakfast. Normally nothing military did happen, after all no orders ever arrived unless he pinned them up to the notice-board himself, but just occasionall
y he would come out to find the men lined up waiting for him on the parade ground in their smartest red uniforms and, with a tear in his eye at their thoughtfulness, he’d shout at them for a bit and they’d march up one way and then down the other and he’d wave his stick about and shout again and funnily enough everyone enjoyed it. Then he’d go indoors for his breakfast and the men would go off for theirs and they’d all feel quite justified in drawing their pay at the end of the month.
The Major’s main interest was in polishing buttons. This had been one of the reasons he had sought promotion out as a younger man: the higher the rank the more buttons you were allowed. He liked the way they gleamed like little suns. Sometimes he would send his batman away on pointless errands for weeks at a time, so that he could take charge of his own polishing. (Normally the errands were so transparently pointless that the batman, not being an idiot, would spend the weeks in the mess talking, laughing, eating and playing cards.) Then the Major would sit out on his porch through the long sultry afternoons, when all the Indians were sensibly staying indoors, and he’d polish away, savouring the brassy glint of the bright sunlight as it flashed and dazzled across his retinas. Not only did he polish his own buttons, but the soldiers under his command would often, quietly, leave their shirts and jackets draped over the back of his rocking chair and he’d polish theirs too. Scrub, scrub, scrub he went, watching the dust devils swirl and listening to the hum of the heat haze. This was, he’d think to himself happily, not exactly what he’d expected when he’d signed up, but it would do quite nicely, what? Eh?
Crepuscular felt very much the same thing. Occasionally he thought about the circus, occasionally he’d feel a little thrill at the thought of a spangly leotard or a dancing tiger in a tutu, but then he’d look out at the beauty and quiet of the world around him and think, well, this isn’t where I expected to be, but it’s beautiful and quiet and I rather love it.
*
One day, a year or two after his thirtieth birthday in 1880, a friend of his, Jock Jones the Irish Quartermaster, showed him an advertisement he’d found in the back pages of the Gagargarh Echo & Weekend Advertiser. Crepuscular took the newspaper and looked at the page.
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Jones, who was homesick for the steady rain of his homeland (not absolutely everyone, naturally, was as happy as Crepuscular or the Major).
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What are you not sure about?’ asked Jones, grumbling a little in the heat, ‘I thought it sounded perfect for you.’
‘Well, the thing is, Jones, this advert here,’ answered Crepuscular, pointing to the bit of text, ‘well, I can’t quite read it.’
Although everyone knew that the reason this battalion never did any of the things the rest of the army in India did was because of the chronic illiteracy of their clerk, Crepuscular never liked to admit it. He’d simply sidestep the question if it came up and whenever people asked him how work had been today he would say he’d been busy with all sorts of forms and whathaveyou and hope they wouldn’t ask any more questions and let him get onto talking about the elephants he’d watched washing in the river that afternoon.
‘Shall I read it out? You know mate, just so it’s clear, like?’
‘Please.’
‘Can’t read or write in English? Then why not drop us a line and join our simple, quick and easy correspondence course in learning to read and write in English? Then there’s like an address you can write off to.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’
‘It’ll do you good Crepuscular, it’ll do us all good. It’s nothing, you know, nothing to be ashamed of, reading and writing, like. I get all sorts of smart things from books. They’re real sort of useful if you know how to treat ’em right.’
So, Simone swallowed his pride and asked Jock to write off on his behalf, claiming a little refresher course never hurt anyone, and within a few weeks the first instalment of the course arrived. When Crepuscular opened the packet and looked at the first instructional booklet and examined the pictures therein he felt a tingle of excitement arc up his spine. He found he was actually looking forward to the challenge; he felt the ineffable sensation of a world opening up to him, much as Epitome Quirkstandard would feel thirty-five years later perusing the first of the pamphlets. So, Simone sharpened his pen once more, dipped it in his inkwell and set about learning to mark marks on the paper which were neither arbitrary nor meaningless.
Within a few weeks he was reading and writing with the best of them. In his camp the best of them were a group of fellows who hung around under a great spreading banyan tree late at night reciting their poems to one another in shrill, hazy voices. They would light long cigarettes which perched precariously from the end of long ebony cigarette holders which dangled dangerously between dainty porcelain fingers and never seemed to be drawn on. Every week one or other of these figures was rushed to the infirmary with burns received when a feather boa went up with a woof and a scorched stink of singed ostrich. The remaining poets would linger under the tree, mincing in fear and shock, composing rhyming quatrains about the event and leaning in perpetual affectation. It didn’t take Simone very long to realise that he was actually much better than the best of them and he soon drifted away, taking with him one important lesson that he would remember for as long as he lived – to never, ever, under any circumstances, write poetry.
A few days later he sat down at his clerk’s desk and tipped up a small sack of post. Over the last fifteen years or so the post had dwindled until virtually nothing arrived at the camp each month, and today, for the month of May, there were just three items. He picked up his paper knife and opened the first envelope. He held up the sheet of paper and began to read it. He recognised the English letters immediately and soon managed to work out the words. With a mighty thrill he recognised an approximation of his own name – Sinone Crempatular – typed cack-handedly above a dotted-lined space on the pre-printed form. This was the first time in thirty-three years that he had seen his name (sort of ) written down and a sudden tear of pride trickled down his cheek. It was his Discharge Paper.
Chapter 7
Chequebooks & Mountain Walks
‘So,’ asked Quirkstandard. ‘How much money do you actually need?’
‘Oh, only what you owe us Mr Q. There’s a tariff up beside the counter in the shop. Let’s see …’ Simone Crepuscular pulled a little notebook out from underneath his beard and a stub of pencil from behind his ear and licked the point.
‘What was it that you read last night?’
Quirkstandard answered brightly, reeling off the names of the pamphlets as if they were exquisite items he had ordered from the menu in some particularly classy restaurant. ‘The Birds Of Hyde Park & South-East Iceland, The Goodness Of Bread & Other French Cheeses, Fastenings Of All Descriptions & Colorations and The History Of The English Speaking Porpoise.’
‘Oh, very good. I am fond of that that Bread & Cheese one, though it makes me a bit peckish, I find. So, Mr Q., that’s the hire of four pamphlets (on premises), one in Band A and three Band C, plus board and breakfast …’ he pointed at the empty plate in front of Quirkstandard.‘So …’
His pencil performed the lengthy calculation in silence.
‘So, that’ll be two shillings, seven and a half pence. Is that agreeable, Mr Q.?’
‘Oh,’ answered Quirkstandard, a bit startled and patting his pockets, ‘I don’t actually seem to have any money on me, well, not that much anyway, would you perhaps take a cheque?’
‘But of course, my dear sir,’ replied Crepuscular, unfazed.
Epitome Quirkstandard reached deep inside his jacket and pulled out a large chequebook. He offered it to Simone.
‘I can never quite remember how this thing works, but I brought it along today anyway, thinking that ‘an education’ might be a pricey affair. I wonder if you know how to work it?’
Simone Crepuscular took the chequebook from the offering hands and laid it on the table which Dawn had j
ust cleared. He pulled a pen from the behind the ear that hadn’t housed the pencil and one of his boys placed an inkwell in front of them. As he dipped the pen in the pot and wrote the requisite words on the piece of paper he made sure that Quirkstandard watched.
‘I hate to think,’ he said as he did so, ‘that some people don’t realise that every and any moment of the day can be an opportunity to learn new things, don’t you feel that way too, Mr Q.?’
‘Um, yes, you’re exactly spot on the money there Mr Crepuscular,’ said Epitome with more resolution than he felt. He’d had an immediate liking for this big bearded chap and had the strange presentiment that to disagree would be to let him down. Even the fact that he’d obviously forgotten where he’d put his clothes the evening before didn’t dissuade Quirkstandard of his new friend’s fine qualities, in fact it seemed to remind him of his own humanity and fallibility. It was just the sort of mistake anyone could make, and, besides, Mr Crepuscular had listened to Quirkstandard talk as if he were saying the most sensible or understandable things in the world, as if his views actually counted for something, and that was a most novel and gratifying sensation. Even Spiggot hadn’t been so supportive of his new quest for education, and he was his best friend.
Oh, the chequebook! Quirkstandard woke from his reverie with a start, realising that he hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening on the table.
‘Um, could you repeat that please, Mr Crepuscular,’ he said, seeing that the cheque had writing in almost all the spaces that had been blank a minute before, ‘just so,’ he flustered a little, ‘I mean, just so I have it absolutely clear, again, you see? Yes?’
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 5