By the end of those first six months he had plans and sketches prepared for the next 23 pamphlets. What he now needed however was some cash with which to pay the printer to print even one of them. And all they had to do to raise the money was to sell the remaining stocks of the originals.
He called a meeting with his sons.
Rodney waved a hand in the air in the backroom to get his father’s attention.
‘Yes Rodney?’
‘Daddy, I think I have an idea.’
‘Go on.’
Rodney, aged 12, explained his theory and Crepuscular found himself sadly agreeing with the boy. They had alienated their clientele by trying to better themselves. The sort of people who had ceaselessly bought the pamphlets from small boys hawking them on street corners were reluctant to go and seek them out in a quiet shop, under a pristinely painted sign and with a gentleman stood behind an imposing counter. By removing themselves from the passing foot-trade of the hurly-burly on the street it was as if, Rodney suggested, they had (unwittingly) cocked a snook at their loyal customers. And even though their work was, at heart, about bettering oneself, they had thoughtlessly attempted a step too far too soon.
So the boys went back out onto two street corners, with bags full of the first three pamphlets and began singing out their hawkers’ songs once more.
When they returned in the evening they each had a bag of pennies, but also a half full sack of papers. They’d sold some, but not all.
‘I’m not used to bringing any home, dad,’ said Simon, aged 10.
‘No, but times change, son,’ said his father. ‘We have to be adaptable.’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, Rodney?’
‘There was this man on this corner right near me, right, and he was selling cakes fresh from inside a little portable oven thing that he had, and people kept coming up and buying them from him, all steaming and buttery.’
‘Yes …’
‘Well, I heard him say to a gent who came along and who asked how, you know, how trade was, right? And he said to this bloke, to the gent, he said, you know, about his hot cakes … he said, ‘They’re selling like new pamphlets, mate’, is what he said. Does that mean us?’
‘It meant us, I’m afraid Rodney. Past tense. It meant us.’
A small tear came to his eye as he remembered the golden days of the previous autumn.
‘Ah, my boys,’ he said wistfully, ‘Once, we were the best. But now, we’re just us.’
‘You’re still the best to us, daddy,’ said Simon, very sweetly, though a little sickly too.
*
Through a careful use of promotions, two for the price of one offers, free toast and limited editions (available upon presentation of the appropriate number of coupons snipped off previous pamphlets’ back covers) they managed to gather a small but loyal base of regular readers. The spread was never as large as it had been in the beginning and occasionally someone would be overheard in the street saying, ‘I wonder whatever happened to that bloke with all those bits of paper?’ but those who still read the things, well, they knew.
Crepuscular sold pamphlets by mail order and various libraries and mutual improvement associations around the country subscribed. The growing boys would still take new pamphlets out onto street corners for a week each month, as they were freshly printed, and they had a few loyal browsers in the shop and Crepuscular ran the place as a lending library. It all served to keep the family’s heads above water, if not ever allowing them to get out of the pool, as such.
In the long run though, Simone was happy, scribbling away, researching, drawing and writing. His world was circumscribed by the British Museum on Great Russell Street to the north and the galleries on Trafalgar Square to the south, and in-between were all the varied bookshops of Charing Cross Road. He rarely went outside of this area, but, as he thought to himself, he had seen so much of the world before this, that he could spend the rest of his life sat in a single chair and not have time to consider everything he’d seen. Unexpectedly he had found happiness in his writing, in his life and in his study.
*
Buying the shop hadn’t been the first mistake that Simone Crepuscular had made, and not all of them had ended up turning out quite so well. Nine years earlier he had made another one, which became something of a shot albatross to him.
Whether it was through the inadequacy of the maps he had examined or whether it was due to subtle tectonic movement or voracious plant growth or shifting political borders, he had found himself intractably lost in the Amazon Basin. To a certain extent and looked at from a certain point of view he wasn’t lost at all. If someone had asked, ‘Where are you?’ he would have been able to answer, ‘In the Amazon Basin,’ without a moment’s hesitation and with tragic ease. However, the detail was lacking. This jungle all looked the same to him. There were some trees and bushes and hanging things over there, some upright greenery and shrubs over here, and always the noise of things living, eating and multiplying all around them.
He tried his hardest to maintain an eastward march each day, but often they had to change direction, or double back, due to impassable bits of undergrowth or sudden cliffs or small shrunken heads mounted on poles, and they often ended up making their progress in the opposite direction entirely.
By now the highly gravid Teresa-Maria was finding it hard going to keep up with her tall, stridingly fit husband. Simone found this frustrating and naively kept believing that in just a few more days they’d be out of the jungle and on the coast, where they could find a room in an inn and maybe even a midwife. He saw no other alternative but to keep pushing the family onwards. His eternally optimistic open-minded, shut-eyed but conversationally cheerful outlook on the world only caused Teresa-Maria to writhe, when she wasn’t huffing with the effort of walking further. She was clear-sighted about their predicament and when her time of confinement drew too close to ignore any longer, she did the only thing she could in order to make Simone face up to the truth.
She sat down, with her back to a tree, folded her hands on her round, tight belly and refused to move any further.
Simone was about to argue the point, explaining how ‘lost’ was a relative concept, and how, besides, better people had been lost before, when he really looked at her.
In the dim light of the evening, with the occasional shaft of sunlight running almost horizontally under the canopy, she was a sad, small figure, dark amongst the undergrowth. Then, suddenly, one of those shafts struck her face, after having rushed many millions of miles through space, and as the photons reflected off the moist spheres of her eyes Simone saw himself reflected there too. They were joined by this, joined together, in this together, lost together. How far would they have to travel? Millions of miles too? How could anyone ever know? Then, somewhere above them, a branch shifted in the wind and the beam of light was blocked, a few hundred meters suddenly removed from its journey, by something as simple as a breeze. Her face fell into darkness and he fell into her eyes.
One moment he was standing still, staring down at his beautiful but weary and teary wife, the next moment he found himself fainting away, as if drugged. He collapsed to the leafy ground and into a troubled dream-filled sleep, in which he was visited by the yak he had met so many, many years before high in the Himalayas. In the midst of the humid jungle it stood, chewing insolently on a mouthful of cud. As Crepuscular looked at it, as he reached out a hand to touch it, as he ruffled his fingers through that thick, rough hair he remembered so well, that had saved his life once before, it shrugged.
He was silent.
The yak looked up at him and shrugged again.
It looked all around it, as if looking for the path home, and shrugged for a third time.
A shrug from a yak is not something that can be ignored. A yak has enormous shoulders, humped, muscular, certain and strong, and in a moment Crepuscular found himself shrugging along with them. Following the yak’s lead.
When he woke he found his head
was resting in Teresa-Maria’s lap and Rodney was holding a sponge (made out of chewed-up vine leaves soaked in a nearby streamlet) to his brow.
As he looked up into his wife’s face he said three words. Three little words he should have said to her, he realised, long ago, but had never had the courage or the clearness of mind, had never quite had the faith in her to believe that she would understand, that she might be able to help, even. He looked up, into her eyes and said, ‘We’re lost, Maria,’ before slumping back into a feverish, though dreamless, sleep.
Chapter 17
Jungles, Telegrams & Tips
In another jungle, some ten years later, Penelope Penultimate, Quirkstandard’s Aunt, also received some bad news.
She was on an expedition with a gossiping gaggle of schoolgirls exploring the uncharted rainforests of the small island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles. They had been wandering purposefully for three months (purposefully only in the sense that the girls were taking turns navigating, in order to learn basic orienteering and map reading skills, but such skills were, she was almost ready to admit, slow in coming this trip), subsisting on rainwater, hummingbirds (she always carried a butterfly net for catching just such light snacks) and the ubiquitous forest food of vine leaves, stuffed with other vine leaves. The girls were becoming restless.
Miss Penultimate was becoming restless too. She was a professional expedition leader, a teacher and educator of young ladies in the more abstruse skills of world-survival (skills which she argued were transferable into the lives her wards were likely to face upon return to England: marriage or a season in London), but this group of girls, as warm-hearted and friendly as they all were, were the most hopeless bunch of incompetent young ladies she had ever happened to take under her wing. They tried, and kept trying, but they also kept failing.
Miss Penultimate hated few things more than giving up on a girl. She believed the world, and what laughingly passed under the name of ‘civilisation’, would do that for them, or to them, by itself. She wanted to see her girls capable of kicking back at the outmoded, uninteresting lives that were being prepared for them back home, where they were expected to be nothing more than pretty accompaniments on their husbands’ arms and perambulatory factories for churning out heirs. She knew that most of her girls would end up in marriages just like that (since she only dealt with the nice upper middle class and lower upper class families who could afford her fees) and she wanted them to have something else, even if it was only a slight, unfulfilled sense of their own worth as individuals, their own beauty as unique creatures in their own rights, even if they never did anything more than occasionally think about those four months spent in the rainforest. That’s all she really expected, to sow a little seed of dissatisfaction in their humdrum, day-to-day, carbon copy lives. If she’d done that much for them she’d be happy-ish. Of course, if they went on some demonstrations requesting the vote or demanding better working conditions and equal pay for women in factories and service industries and if they let their maid wear the pearls once in a while, then Miss Penultimate would feel even better.
But, as far as she could tell, this present gaggle were just looking forward to getting home, even though not a one of them had the faintest clue in which direction home lay. But they were nice handsome girls and none of them actively simpered anymore, which was a step forward from the first night they’d all spent in their tent. So at least, in a small way, that was something, she thought.
*
It was just after supper, on this particular night in this particular jungle, and the sleeping mats had been unrolled and the cocoa was being boiled, when there came a knocking from outside the tent.
Drawing her dressing gown around her, handing her pipe to one of the girls and checking that her knife was tucked in her boot where she could quickly reach it, Miss Penultimate drew aside the tent flap and stepped outside.
‘Telegram for Penultimate, ma’am,’ said the telegram boy.
‘That’s me, thank you,’ she said, taking the envelope from his hand.
She opened it quickly and read it through twice. It wasn’t long.
‘There’s no reply, thank you.’
‘Ma’am.’
Before she turned to duck under the flap and re-enter the warm fug of the tent, she looked back at the young chap, his hand still half-outstretched.
‘Oh, can I give you a tip, young man?’
‘Please ma’am. That would be kind.’
‘Very well. My tip is to stop calling me ‘ma’am’. I’m not the bloody queen.’
‘Yes, ma’ … Miss,’ he said as she vanished behind canvas.
‘That’s better,’ she called from inside, with more gaiety than she felt. ‘Well done.’
*
As she stood just inside the tent she read the note one more time, before becoming uncharacteristically selfconscious. She glanced up to see the half dozen young ladies staring up at her expectantly. They looked up to her, she knew, and not just because she was taller than them, but because she was their leader who could be relied upon to solve any fix, to undo any mishap. She’d applied splints and insect repellent, sucked the poison out of more than one foot, arm or thigh and had turned Gertie’s map the right way up just before they walked over the cliff. She was their strong and correct leader, who could talk on any subject and be interesting, who could answer any question and who was staunchly confident in the face of even the most credulous vapidity.
But now she felt her lip tremble. Damn it, she said to herself, what’s happening? Pull it together Penny, these are only girls, they shouldn’t have to see weakness in a woman. Pull it together! And she did. Her lip stood firm, unquivered, and, without one word that might have given some sign of her sudden grief, she walked through the tent to her own sleeping mat over in the far corner, slumped down, pulled a blanket over her shoulders and drifted into unpleasant dreams.
The girls, naturally, not being total idiots, knew there was something wrong. After all, supper hadn’t long been over and although darkness had fallen quickly outside, they usually spent this time playing games or wrestling or, at the very least, practising a little swearing. But tonight, while Miss Penultimate slept miserably in the corner, the girls were forced to amuse themselves.
In the morning they began packing up the tent and all their equipment and before lunch they were marching in the direction of the nearest seaport, ready to head back to England and the future. They were leaving a month ahead of schedule (not to anyone’s great chagrin, it should be noted) and Miss Penultimate finally, grudgingly explained why.
‘Girls,’ she announced. ‘My dear sister has passed away. This was the gist of the telegram I received last night. And although we are all sisters, in a way, she was the only one for whom I cared utterly and unconditionally, the one with whom I grew up and who I loved. She has passed away, back home in England, and I …’ here she had to pause to find the correct way to approach these difficult, unexpected words … ‘Girls,’ she began again, ‘my dear girls, I appear to have inherited … a boy.’
Chapter 18
The Baby, The Lost Temple & Simone’s Good News
Simone Crepuscular had a fair idea of what to do when it came to giving birth. He was exactly the sort of man who couldn’t help but pay attention when something as interesting as that happened on, for example, the wide and often unexciting grasslands of Mongolia (even when the horse-doctor barred his entry he had listened very carefully through the tent wall). He thought that the moment had now come, here in the rainforest, for him to take charge, since Teresa-Maria was sitting down breathing deeply and looking flushed. Had she not been otherwise preoccupied she might have taken charge herself, having done this once already, but she didn’t really care who thought they were in charge, just so long as it didn’t take long.
Rodney kept Simon at a safe distance and lit a fire so that his daddy could heat some water up. Crepuscular had impressed on his boys the importance of washing one’s hands, especially a
t a time like this. Rodney sat with his arm round Simon as they watched their mother and stepmother groan and swear and sweat and their father mutter to himself from between her legs. Naturally Simone had explained to both boys exactly what was about to happen, but they didn’t entirely believe him. They leant closer to get a better view.
After a fairly short and pleasingly trouble free time their father stood up and showed them their new sister and the two of them gasped in amazement. She really was a breathing and squealing little baby girl, with tiny hands and feet and face and everything: everything that is, except a winkle, as Rodney observed. His father washed his hands and explained certain things about the world, including girls.
Teresa-Maria held her daughter to her breast, in the deep nest of leaves that Simone had made for her to rest in. The two boys snuggled up beside her, desperate not to be left out and, shuffling across, she made space for them. Only Simone remained outside the familial bed. He hadn’t made it quite big enough for the five of them and so, as they all dozed, sighed and whimpered, he sat up through the night beside the fire, keeping a weather eye out for jaguars. And for alligators. And for vultures, insects, snakes and all the rest. None came near.
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 12