Watching the water and the slowly moving barges he wondered where to begin. There was so much in his head after fifty years of living and twenty years of jotting. He wanted to say it all, but he knew he had just a dozen sides of a single folded sheet of paper to fill tonight. He needed to find a method of ordering his life.
As the sun raised her first rosy finger above the horizon his great idea struck him with a flash. He would simply begin at the beginning and talk it through, all the way, he envisioned, to the end. And that is why What I Did In India began with a breathtaking description of a girl in sequined tights twirling high above the heads of a stunned and astonished crowd, flipping and twisting on a narrow trapeze with all the grace and beauty of starlight over the ocean and the thrill and danger of imminent death or paralysis at the merest slip of a finger. It then turned into a detailed, though cheerfully discursive, survey of the life, duties and observations of a soldier in Imperial India, with the customs, religions and weather of the natives, and descriptions of the flora and fauna and ruins that can be found round those parts. This information, which was as factually correct as Crepuscular could make it, was embedded in the seemingly autobiographical tale of an unnamed young clerk working in a curious battalion, headed by a handsome, brave Major and fenced in on one side by a thick brown river flowing slowly away.
What I Did In India was an immediate success, mainly, it should be admitted, though no one told Crepuscular this, to the presence on the first page of that beautiful girl in the sequined outfit. It was said that everybody in London bought a copy, or, if not actually everybody, then everybody who counted and had a spare penny. For a penny, from any one of three street corners (where Rodney, Simone and Simon each stood with a big bundle), you could transport yourself away from your dreary smog-bound London life to a world of sunshine, warmth and sequins, and share in the quiet but exotic life and dreams of a decent British Tommy.
Crepuscular had tapped a vein that, who would ever have guessed, was just waiting to be tapped, and at a price that made it popular with all classes. People would say things like, ‘I heard my neighbours laughing all night and when I went round to see if they were all right I found them sat up in bed reading the passage about … And well, the next morning, naturally, I had to buy a copy for myself.’
It was even rumoured that a copy had found its way into the Royal Household and was perched on the side of the Royal Lavatory, with an inscription on it saying, ‘Not for downstairs use. Ed.VII.’
*
By Christmas, Simone Crepuscular had published two more instalments of his story – The Behaviour & Habits of The Mountain-Dwelling Cattle, Gorses & Monks Of The Himalayas and Things I Did In An Outer Mongolian Ger Or Yurt. These sold just as quickly, despite the lack of any girls in sequins, and held the public’s attention well into the New Year.
Within a few months of the sale of the first pamphlet they had earned a small fortune. Unfortunately it was a small fortune consisting entirely of quite large penny coins, which meant it was rather heavy. His eldest son, Rodney, suggested that he either invest the money in some sort of project, if only to get it out from under the mattress, or that they raise the price of each pamphlet to a pound. Pound notes, he argued, when accumulated in bulk would probably weigh much less and be much less lumpy than a similar quantity of coins.
Crepuscular père wisely had no faith in the Pound Pamphlet and so invested his cash in buying a shop. He hoped that with permanent premises from which to sell his wares his educational pamphlets might gain a respectable name for themselves. Instead of having to buy one from a grubby urchin on a street corner for a penny, a customer would now be able to visit an well-presented establishment and purchase a copy from a smartly turned out gentleman behind a counter, though still, Crepuscular insisted, for a penny. He liked the ring of value that price had about it.
*
Quirkstandard read these first three pamphlets and felt like he was really getting to know the large, bald, mostly-naked man he’d met in the kitchen, and at the same time was expanding the borders of his horizons with regards to knowledge of the world at large.
The other two pamphlets that he read he simply picked at random from the shelves for a bit of variety. They were Gravity: What It Is, Where It Comes From, Goes To & What Colour It Might Be Were You Able To See It and How To Make Friends With Influential People Or Be Happy Not Doing So Should It Not Work Out For You. As he finished this last one Miss Dawn brought him a ham sandwich and a cup of tea.
‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, realising that he’d grown hungry without noticing it.
Miss Dawn nodded imperceptibly (or maybe she didn’t, Quirkstandard wasn’t sure) and walked back out to the kitchen.
Rodney got up from his stool behind the counter (no one had been in that morning to buy anything) saying, ‘I’m going out to have a fag. Watch the shop would you?’
He wandered out through the back room, presumably into the little backyard.
Quirkstandard was left all alone. He chewed happily on his sandwich and looked around. How long, he thought, would it take a man to read all this? It had taken him almost five hours to read just five. That was, he worked out in his head, approximately an hour a pamphlet. Looking at the walls he estimated that there must be thousands and thousands of pamphlets, and even though he knew that there were stacks of multiple copies of the same title, still it would work out at an absolutely tremendous number. His brain tried to engage itself in making some sort of further calculation but was thankfully interrupted by a knocking on the front door.
He stood up. The knocking happened again. He looked back to the kitchen to see if anyone was coming to answer it, but it seemed no one was. Then he remembered that Rodney Crepuscular had asked him, Epitome Quirkstandard, to mind the shop.
The knocking knocked again. It sounded quite urgent.
It really did seem as if no one was coming from the back room to answer it and so Quirkstandard walked over to the door, reached down for the handle, twisted the key in the lock, forgot to wonder whether that might explain the lack of customers throughout the morning, and opened the door.
Chapter 11
Rafts, Stars & The Peace Of The Open Sea
As Simone Crepuscular island-hopped his way across the Pacific he often thought about all the things he had left behind (such as security, family (of sorts) and dry land). It was a lonely time for him. As much as he loved Rodney, he would readily admit (had anyone been there to ask him) that a baby was less than ideal company on a boat, and especially on a vessel that yawed and rolled as much as this one seemed to. Sometimes, for variety, it pitched and rolled, and at other times it would pitch and yaw. Occasionally (usually just as he was finally drifting off to sleep) it would roll, yaw, pitch and toss all at the same time, throwing him out of his hammock and onto the damp reed deck of the raft. All Crepuscular wanted was someone to hold onto his ankles as he vomited copiously over the side, and, of course, it was little things like this for which young Rodney was especially unsuited.
At first the Crepusculars had found passage on a real ship, sailing out of a port whose name had been written, on the sign they passed on their way into town, in strange pictographic symbols Simone had been unable to decipher. But that ship had been lost midway across the Sea of Japan when it was looted by pirates. The passengers had been stripped of their valuables and dumped in a lifeboat while the pirates repainted the ship and sailed off in the opposite direction.
The unnavigated lifeboat ran ashore a few weeks later on the west coast of Japan where a number of the other passengers had homes, family, friends and livelihoods to return to. During the ordeal in the lifeboat Crepuscular had been more than generous with the last few rolls of his horse-cheese, which had staved off starvation but had won him few friends. (In part his shipmates were suspicious of him since whenever he wasn’t offering the remains of his horse-cheese he was being hideously sick over the bulwarks and, frankly, they weren’t sure (having smelt, seen and tasted the chees
e) that he didn’t occasionally get confused about which activity he was doing at any one time, but the Japanese, being a polite people, had conflicting feelings about which was worse: refusing a gift or consuming ‘reconstituted foodstuffs’. Good manners can be such a bind.)
One man who hated him slightly less than the others lent him enough yen to take a train across the island to the port of Shiogama where he was able to barter passage on a ship heading out into the Pacific. This ship too was soon attacked and sunk by pirates (Crepuscular’s nautical luck always holding true) and the new lifeboat washed up on one of those uninhabited desert islands with palm trees, coconuts, a little rainy forest and plenty of spare sand. On this small island it didn’t take too long for the atavistic impulses of the shipwreckees to rise to the surface and as soon as Simone spotted a fat lad eying Rodney up hungrily he decided to make a move. Under cover of night he slipped away from his companions and hastily lashed together a raft on a beach on the other side of the island and sailed away.
Navigating by the stars they sailed in circles until they bumped ashore on a completely different desert island. This one was also uninhabited and he stocked up with coconuts, fruit and fresh water and sailed on. For months they repeated this routine, just him and Rodney, one man and his son, scanning the horizon for signs of ships and islands and chucking up hearty chunks of coconut into the brine. Crepuscular hated every single moment. Seconds dragged by with nothing but the sound of the doldrums in his rigging, the stench of caked salt in his beard, the rare squawk of a seagull or albatross overhead, but most of all he hated the endless, dreary lap of the waves all around his raft. The vast inhumanity of the ocean sank into his heart, oppressive and faceless, and he oscillated between deep depression and even deeper seasickness. Only the sight of little Rodney every morning, swaddled tightly to the mast, grinning at his daddy, kept him working.
He paddled when there wasn’t any wind, ran up the sail when there was, and eventually, one night, the battered old raft shuddered ashore on its final beach.
When the morning arrived he looked one way and then the other and saw that the coast went on forever in both directions. This was not another island.
He had landed in America.
Chapter 12
The Aunt & The Doorman
Quirkstandard was briefly confused and then amused when he opened the front door of Crepuscular’s shop. There, stood outside in the street, was Snatchby, Mauve’s elderly doorman. Quirkstandard had never opened the door for the doorman before.
‘Ah, Lord Quirkstandard, sir, I had hoped to find you here,’ said Snatchby, cutting, with his usual deftness of conversation, to the point of the matter.
‘Oh, yes, really? Well, here I am and no two ways about it, ha-ha! You’ve run me to ground Snatchby without a doubt and now here I stand before you, um … found, as it were. Yes. Um …?’
‘Sir,’ said Snatchby. ‘It’s your Aunt, sir.’
‘Aunt Penelope?’ asked Quirkstandard, suddenly worried.
‘What’s happened?'
‘Oh, nothing to be concerned about, sir. As far as I can tell she is in rude health and still enjoying her old tricks.’
‘Oh, thank goodness for that. You did startle a chap just then Snatchby, with all this mysterious talk and trekking halfway across London to deliver the message that a fellow’s Aunt is quite all right.’
‘Well, sir. I came to deliver more than just that message, you see.’ With this Snatchby reached a hand deep inside his coat, clearly seeking for a pocket that the tailor had never intended anyone but an astonishingly close friend to ever know about. ‘Ah, here we go sir,’ he said, pulling out a piece of card. ‘She has sent another postcard to the Club, sir. I thought I would take the opportunity of using my post-luncheon break to pop it over to you. After all it’s only two streets from here to Mauve’s.’
‘Just two streets?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I thought it was further than that.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Oh. It seemed quite a fair distance when I did it.’
‘Might you have taken a taxi cab, sir?’
‘Well, I might have, yes, that’s a distinct possibility.’
‘It’s possible, sir, that the driver of the taxi took, what I believe in the trade they call, the scenic route, sir.’
‘Oh, well, maybe. I don’t really remember all that much. Do you know, Snatchby, what has happened since we last met, back at the Club … oh, when was it?’
‘Yesterday, sir.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s right, but it seems like a lifetime. Oh, Snatchby the things I’ve read.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘Oh yes, they’re enough to make a chap think, I’ll tell you that. Why there was once this dolphin that was found by some people somewhere at some time and it spoke, well, English, just like you or me.’
‘Goodness, sir.’
‘Yes. That’s just what I thought and there’s no mistake – Goodness, indeed!’
‘Ahem,’ said Snatchby, indicating that his luncheon break was only short and that he had other matters he wished to discuss before returning to Mauve’s.
‘Oh yes, go on, old chap. Ignore my wittering and just come out with what you want to say. You know I’ve never been one to stand on … um, what is it I haven’t stood on?’
‘I couldn’t rightly say, Lord Quirkstandard. But if I may be permitted to change the topic for a moment.’
‘Of course, fire away as the Bishop said to the … oh, who did he say it to?’
‘The firing squad, perhaps sir?’
Quirkstandard thought for a moment.
‘Oh, maybe it was, but I don’t think so. I mean why would a Bishop be up before a firing squad?’
‘Maybe they didn’t like him, sir?’
‘Oh, maybe. But you wanted to say something, Snatchby. Come on, out with it.’
‘Well sir. It concerns your Aunt.’
‘Oh, yes, you’ve brought a postcard.’
‘That’s right, sir. And that’s the problem.’
‘Hand it on over there, old chap. Don’t just clutch it like a ticket … I’d best read it, what?’
‘Oh no sir, the message isn’t what’s important here. Rather … well, sir, she sent the postcard to the Club.’
‘Yes, Snatchby, and …’
‘Well, sir, this one is innocuous enough, but you know the view that the management take of postcards from, well, certain ladies being sent to the Club.’
‘I don’t believe I do,’ replied Quirkstandard with uncharacteristic impetuousness.
‘Sir …’
‘What?’
Snatchby gazed at Quirkstandard over the top of his half-moon spectacles and sighed.
‘Snatchby?’
Snatchby continued to look, with what Quirkstandard could only describe as ‘one of those looks’.
‘Oh, all right. Yes, I know they disapprove, but Snatchby, really, what can I do?’
‘Well, sir, you could ask her not to send postcards to the Club.’
‘You know that I did ask her. I did. And she started sending more, and foreign ones, after that. You know the ones I mean, Snatchby, with the pictures of those foreign ladies with the fruit and …’
‘Yes, sir I remember very well indeed.’
The two men stood silent for a moment before Snatchby spoke again.
‘The first one of her ‘artistic’ postcards gave Mr Lillytit an apoplectic fit, sir, and he turned quite puce in the face.’
‘I thought it was in the hallway.’
‘Ha-ha, sir, very good,’ Snatchby said, without laughing.
‘But seriously sir, he wasn’t the only member of the management to take a dim view. Especially once they turned the card over and accidentally read the message she’d written.’
‘Oh crikey, yes, I remember. She didn’t keep her thoughts to herself, but then you’ve met Aunt Penelope, Snatchby, and you know she’s never been one for keeping quiet about, you k
now, well, things that get on her wick, as it were.’
‘Indeed not, sir.’
‘I told her what effect her postcard had on Lillytit and asked her to apologise, but she refused. She’s very stubborn.’
‘Yes, and as I recall sir, her postcards started arriving ever more frequently after that.’
‘Well, she does love me, Snatchby. I’m her only nephew and she’s my only Aunt. What can I do?’
‘Perhaps, sir, you could ask her to send your post elsewhere? I hesitate to say it, sir, and naturally I would never think to side with the management against a gentleman, but I believe the issue of her correspondence is beginning to have some effect on one’s standing at the Club, vis-à-vis respectability, sir. Perhaps you could ask her to write to you at home, sir?’
‘She is very much her own woman, Snatchby, and I did suggest to her that she write to Devonshire Terrace, but she persisted and insisted on keeping on writing to Mauve’s in order to, oh how did she put it? Um, I think it was ‘to chip away at the last bastions of the gentleman’s world of undeserved and abominable exclusivity.’ Or something like that. And besides, I think she enjoys
it, Snatchby.’
‘I’m sure she does, sir, I’m quite sure she does.’
The two men looked at each other.
‘Do you want to come in, Snatchby?’
‘No sir, I’d best be getting back to the Club now. You know what happens if I leave the door unattended for too long – there’ll probably be a queue of gentleman halfway down the street by the time I get back.’
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 9