She stopped her girls with an outstretched arm. They’d already seen the jolly fat man, with his jolly alpenstock and his jolly little belt with its numerous pouches slung underneath his jolly round belly and just over his jolly little out-of-doors winkle which jiggled comically as he walked. Had the girls not spent the last few weeks following Miss Penultimate around and being educated they would have been aghast at such a sight (one which may well have caused their mothers to faint), but they were now somewhat blasé about the whole thing, and, besides, it was a very small winkle. All the same when he winked lasciviously they drew their breaths, wondering just what her response would be.
What Miss Penultimate had done next was something she was not proud of: she had reached into her rucksack and pulled out a wrinkled, though carefully folded, plain dress and pulled it on over her head. One of the girls helped with the fastenings at the back and in a moment all her modesty was restored. She had assumed, when she acted, that her dignity would be restored too, but that wasn’t the case. Even as the German shrugged disappointedly (though lewdly) and walked off she knew that what the portly foreigner had made her feel was shame, shame about being who she was, naked or not. Shame for being Penelope Penultimate. And this feeling had arisen as a direct consequence of his actions, and she hated having her freedom infringed like that, and she hated, even more, being swayed by such feelings. If she, Penelope Penultimate, wanted to be naked, especially in such a sweet little Alpine resort specially set aside for just such a state of being, then she should be able to do so, without worrying what anyone else thought or felt about it; it was her business and no one else’s. It was the twentieth century now, after all. And if fat, sweaty, German machismo-addled hikers couldn’t see that in an unaffected manner, if they had to bring their own sweaty sexual neuroses and hang-ups along with them, then that was their problem and not hers.
She took small comfort the next morning as she strolled naked to the dining chalet to have breakfast that at least that one particular disturbed hiker wouldn’t be disturbing anyone else, having had an unfortunate encounter in the night with a large glass paperweight. Later she partly regretted having been so impetuous.
But all that memory passed by in a moment, just a flash across her cerebellum that made her smile ambivalently. Now her attention snapped back to where she was standing.
Mr Crepuscular had just asked her a question.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said, ‘I was miles away.’
It turned out he had just asked where the lavatory was. Well, she thought, he certainly isn’t the usual stuffy gentleman with the normal shames about bodies and their functions and what can be said in front of ladies one has only just met. It made a nice difference. She pointed to the hut at the end of the garden.
‘Thank you, Miss Penultimate, you’re very kind.’
He bowed his head and wandered away.
Yes, she thought as she watched him go, he’s an unusual chap that one.
‘Auntie,’ said Quirkstandard, ‘I almost tied my tie all by myself this morning.’ He pointed to the piece of silk that was clumsily knotted around his neck. ‘Spiggot did try to help, but he’s no good at knots.’
‘Well done, dear,’ she said.
*
Ah, thought Simone Crepuscular, Miss Penelope Penultimate!
She reminded him of something. Or of someone? There was something that fluttered just at the edge of his memory when he looked at her. What was it? It was something to do with the way she spoke, the certainty of it, the surety. The way she held herself. She stood up straight, but at the same time there was something flighty, something impulsive about her. He noticed how her attention had wandered, how her mind seemed to flit about, not always present in the present. This was just like him, just like his mind, he thought, I’m always wandering off, following trains of thought that lead from this to that to that, making connections. That’s why he did what he did, wrote the pamphlets he wrote: one subject would lead to another, would suggest another, would encroach on another, and one pamphlet would turn into two or four or more …
And then it struck him. That handshake. Those eyes.
And suddenly he found he had thought of Teresa-Maria.
It had been twenty-four years, he realised, almost a quarter of a century, more than a third of his life, and he still woke in the night seeing her fall away from him; still thought to ask her advice, to ask her his questions. He hadn’t slept a full night since that day in the jungle. He could close his eyes now, just where he sat, and see her shrinking, rushing away from his hands. It was a helplessness that had enveloped everything he had done, that had coloured everything with just a touch of grey.
The pamphlets, he felt, the business was just something to keep him busy, something he had invented as an occupation for himself and the boys. Had she been with them … well, he had no idea what they might be doing now, though he was sure it wouldn’t be this. He was a ponderer, a slow thinker, a ruminator and always had been, and he was intimately aware of these facts. Of course, at its best the business was wonderful. When they were suddenly a success it had been the first thing to have really gone right in years, and there was just nothing to compare with it. But since then the hum and the drum had combined and the peaks, the exciting moments, were rare. Mr Q., Lord Quirkstandard, was one such peak – to see someone so honestly open and accepting of the work, of the life’s work that Crepuscular had extended through the pamphlets, well, naturally, that gave a man a boost. But when the pamphlets weren’t read, when the weeks went by without a customer and it was raining and the streets of London were paved with yesterday’s newspapers, well, then the façade was revealed to be the façade it was and the hollow fallacy echoed and the clock slowed and slowed until the spaces between the tick and the tock lasted an afternoon and he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about his wife; about his dead wife.
Ah, Teresa-Maria.
The reason he’d just thought of her, he remembered, pulling himself back onto a logical path, devoid of diversions, digressions and yet other digressions, was that he was comparing her with Miss Penultimate. No. That wasn’t true. He felt a twinge of guilt even at the thought that that might’ve been what he was doing. In the years that had passed he had dedicated himself to his boys, to his work, and had hardly noticed a woman (at least, not in the way that the phrase suggests), let alone compared one to his beloved, to his lost Maria. What was it, he tried to think, that had reminded him of her?
It took a moment but it came to him.
The handshake. That was it. Miss Penultimate had had this delightful strong grip, this assuredness, this self-confidence, this implacable trust that the world was under her control, or if it weren’t then, at least, that she was above its control. This was what he thought he intuited from that handshake. But more important than that, he had enjoyed it simply for what it was, for the contact it made between two strangers, between two people who had never met one another and who, in all likelihood he admitted, would probably never meet again after this weekend. But the handshake would be something that remained, inviolable. It existed and could be remembered. Ah, he said to himself, now it is that I finally see, now it is we finally come to the rub.
With a certain guilt and with a certain heaviness of heart he remembered that never, in the few years he knew her and loved her, never, not once in those three and half years (was that all it was?) that they had been inseparable companions, lovers and parents, not on a single day while they worked side by side in his Mayoral office or slept side by side in their galleon-sized bed, had he ever shaken hands with his dear, his darling Teresa-Maria. Of all the attachments on her ingenious silver stump there was nothing suitable for such a gesture of greeting. It wasn’t, to be honest, a common gesture amongst pirates who preferred to spit heartily, so he could see why such a device might have been missed off, but the sheer sadness of the fact of the absence, a fact he’d never noted before, that only this morning, only in the last few minutes had become alive for
him … the sadness of it seeped down his spine and accumulated in his cold feet. He wiped a tear away from his eye with the back of his hand and looked around.
This was a very nice lavatory, he noted. It was a flushing design, plumbed in with an upraised cistern and a sweet little seahorse motif carved on the chain end handle. To his right was a stack of old magazines. He picked one off the top – Gentleman’s Relish it said. Simone hadn’t seen this publication before (he rarely read anything other than what he’d piled up for reference material), and as he flicked through he noticed all sorts of nonsense. Advice for gentlemen on the best way to curl their moustaches and how to keep their ladies satisfied. As he flicked further nothing remotely more sensible or less offensive appeared. Here was a page filled with vapid questions asked by ‘readers’ which were answered by what the magazine referred to as an ‘agony uncle’ (agony for obvious reasons, though whose uncle he was supposed to be remained unclear). He offered ridiculous advice as some sort of ‘solution’. Presumably, Crepuscular thought while reading a few examples, the solution to each gentleman’s problem was to make them look like an idiot.
There was also an article in which government ministers and other distinguished gentlemen were asked pertinent and fawning questions by simpering journalists. Is this, Crepuscular frowned, what we fought the Enlightenment for?
The front few pages of the magazine had been torn out and with a smile he realised what it was that Miss Penultimate collected them for. He rubbed the paper between his finger and thumb – it was a nice quality, thick but soft stock, quite ideal.
He tore a few sheets out, used them to his satisfaction and then reached for the seahorse. After a few moments, to check that he had cleared his face of all trace of tears, he stood up, adjusted his loincloth, opened the door and rejoined the lunch party.
Chapter 25
Nancy & The Lunch Party
Once she’d seen the car come to a stop in the hedgerow and had seen the men disembark Nancy Walker went back to the cottage to get the kettle on. She didn’t hang around for shaking hands and all that sort of thing, since, whatever else she was, she was also still the housekeeper and it probably wasn’t her place.
Once in the kitchen though, and once the kettle was filled and sitting snug on the gas, she thought about what it was she had seen. There was Lord Quirkstandard, a young man of around her own age, who was as thick as the dictionary. For some reason Penny seemed to care for him, even though he was hopeless, gormless and about as interesting as a bout of Shakespeare. Naturally Nancy had met him a number of times during the previous five years that she’d been employed in the household and he had never noticed her once. This, perhaps, was what actually irked her most, since had she been pressed she would have admitted that he was harmless and not really worth the sorts of knots that she felt. As far as he was concerned she was a servant and servants all looked the same to him. He rarely remembered her name.
With Lord Quirkstandard came that funny chap, Nigel Spiggot. Nancy liked Spiggot, who may have been a Lord as well, she couldn’t remember, and he seemed to like her. But he was a dog, she thought, even when certain other people seemed to forget this fact, and as such she didn’t feel threatened by him. (Was that what Lord Quirkstandard made her feel? Threatened? Did she have the feeling that he could somehow put the scuppers on her situation, because he was a Lord and she was a housekeeper? Or was it just that she’d become quite fed up with the very idea of the aristocracy long before she’d left the orphanage to go and work for one? (There had been a Sports Days every summer at the orphanage and local dignitaries came and placed bets on the children. Nancy was quite a fast girl and not above a few dirty tricks if it meant she might get an extra portion of grub at dinner, but because none of the winnings that the nobs made off her speed returned to her – she’d see them tucking wads of notes into their inside pockets and tipping their hats at her before buggering off to wherever it was they’d come from – the whole event left a sour taste of frustration in her mouth.))
And then there were the two strangers. One of them was a big old almost naked man and the other, so she gathered, was his son. She’d always found almost naked old men a bit creepy, especially ones with long grey and white beards. (She had a flash in her memory of the Santa Claus who visited the orphanage late at night shortly before she was sent off to the Duke.) Beards in themselves unnerved Nancy. They made men look like they were hiding something, probably a detrimentally ingrown inbred chin. But this beard was long and wild, making the old chap look a little less than sane. It reminded her of beards she and Penny had seen in Madagascar, where certain tribal elders stopped plucking their chins once they became too weak in the knees to continue hunting. Some of these old blokes lived for years after they had stopped being useful to the tribe. All they did was sit around and tell stories, like respected elders were supposed to, except, according to Penny who understood a little of the local tongue, what they actually did was mumble into the mass of curly grey hair in a way that made any meaning indecipherable. What was the point of them?, Nancy had asked, and Penny had had to agree that these old men were rather a waste of resources. But they didn’t travel in order to make judgments on or make changes to the traditional cultural practices of the indigenous peoples: that was one of Penelope’s rules. When she explained to the girls, however, about the folly of keeping elderly bearded men alive beyond their use, and one of the girls pointed out that under at least one beard she could see a pair of withered breasts dangling, Penelope had at once stormed into the chief ’s hut and insisted that elderly women be treated with respect and dignity and should be shaved at once.
That was probably enough reason, Nancy reflected, to be a little unnerved by the old man’s beard. But then add to that the fact that here, two decades into the twentieth century in a civilised country, someone should wander around in a loincloth and sandals, well, that just made her blush and wonder what he thought he was doing. Penny had hardly blinked at the unusual get up and so Nancy determined not to mention it or let it affect her politeness when serving tea, but all the same, it wasn’t normal, and however iconoclastic Nancy felt herself to be, she certainly retained something of the set of standard mores she’d been taught as she grew up. Admittedly she had spent, and still did spend, some time exploring outside of them – but she knew that she was transgressing and usually there was a good reason for it – but for other people to play so fast and easy with the morals of the time, well, that was just a step on the road to anarchy, surely?
The other chap, the son, was dressed properly and looked quite nice. He didn’t have a silly moustache like Lord Quirkstandard and didn’t have a silly beard like his father. He could almost drive a motorcar and had probably dressed himself and he did have a smart haircut. In short, she decided, he was the only normal person to climb down from the car this morning. And he’d looked at her. She’d noticed that. He’d blushed when he saw her, but that might’ve been something to do with the exertion of parking the car in such a narrow lane. But all the same, a blush was a blush. How sweet. How idiotic.
If Nancy had taken that moment, just as the kettle boiled and she turned away from the washing up she’d been doing in the sink under the window which looked out into the garden, to look out of the window, she would’ve noticed that Master Crepuscular was looking at her again. In fact, she’d’ve noticed that his fair, though slightly Latin looking, eyes had hardly left her. He’d been watching her as if the window between them had been no barrier at all, which of course, in a way, it wasn’t.
Having turned the gas off underneath the kettle, filled the teapot and set the cups, spoons, milk jug and sugar bowl out on the tray, she turned back to the sink to get a teaspoon from the draining board. She happened to glance up through the window and accidentally caught his gaze. For a moment their eyes met and locked, just for a moment, before he blushed again and looked away.
Nancy chuckled. The boy was probably a freak, hanging round with the rest of the party, but he ha
d a nice smile and a little bit of attention from a stranger now and then was quite sweet.
*
‘May I ask you a question, Mr Crepuscular?’
‘Of course you may, Miss Penultimate, of course. Please go ahead.’
‘Are you by any chance (Epitome, do put that down, you don’t know where it’s been) related to the author of those educative pamphlets? Do you know the ones I mean?’
Simon Crepuscular’s eyes flickered to his father and Spiggot stopped licking himself on the lawn.
‘Why, Miss Penultimate … those humble pieces? I thought you must know … I thought Mr Q. might’ve said … why, those pamphlets, well … I … I write them myself.’
Miss Penultimate peered closely at him. Simone Crepuscular blushed and ran his hand through his beard and made noises like a Madagascan elder for a moment to fill the silence.
‘You?’ she said, her voice refusing to show the surprise she felt. ‘You write them?’
‘Yes. Me. I write them. I mean, of course, sometimes one of the boys helps out with an apposite phrase or an idea or two and Simon here,’ he waved a hand in Simon’s direction and smiled, ‘is a good little artist and he often does some of the illustrations or maps, but the text of them … well, really, the text of them is all my own work. Generally speaking, as a matter of course. Usually …’
‘But I thought?’ she began, nonplussed.
‘Madam … Miss Penultimate … you have shown me the highest compliment by exhibiting such disbelief, and I thank you for it.’ He blushed much as his son had been blushing on and off all morning. ‘But please … do stop it now …’
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 19