‘But, Mr Crepuscular,’ she went on, ‘I was under the impression … I mean, I have shown those pamphlets to my girls for … oh, for years … and I always thought … I mean, I have …’
Simone Crepuscular picked the dessert fork from his plate, pushed a few cake crumbs around into a straight line, then held it for a moment between finger and thumb, touched it to his lips absently and set it down.
‘But, sir, I thought they were written by … a woman. And you, I can’t help but notice, are rather definitely of the … uh … opposite gender, shall we say?’
‘Ah, my dear lady,’ at this Miss Penultimate raised an eyebrow, ‘my dear Miss Penultimate, therein lies the one gift I received from my mother. My given name is Simone and I have borne it for the last, oh, sixty-seven years, man and boy. Or more correctly, chronologically speaking, of course, as boy and man. I quickly grew used to it and so have the people who are my friends. It is only from a distance that it still causes confusion. I quite forget that. I should apologise, but extend the hope that in time you will be used to it too.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ said Quirkstandard, lifting his dessert fork in the air, in not quite the same way that Crepuscular had, though clearly in some sort of imitation.
‘Isn’t Simone a girl’s name?’
‘Yes, Epitome, it often is,’ his Aunt answered. ‘But, sir,’ she continued to Crepuscular, ‘for many years now I have regularly shown your pamphlet, Voting Practices From Abroad That Leave The English In Shame, to my girls. It’s a most insightful and moving tract …’
‘Thank you, it’s a delight to hear you approve of it.’
‘Approve? Oh, Mr Crepuscular, it is incendiary and truthful. How could a woman with any sense of justice not approve? And well written too. So many political tracts are well-meaning but illiterate, don’t you think?’
‘Well, I don’t know that it’s a political tract, Miss Penultimate, I just jotted down the picture as I saw it …’
‘Which is one of flagrant injustice to more than half the population of Great Britain, Mr Crepuscular …’
‘Well, I suppose that’s true, I just thought that the confused system of voting in New Zealand was an interesting story to try to disentangle and explain …’
‘A system in which women have already been voting for twenty-four years, Mr Crepuscular. That fact must put Mr Lloyd George to shame and force him to force the issue …’
‘But, it was, to be fair Miss Penultimate, the Maori question that was most confused … and still is, I believe.’
‘And you also wrote the pamphlet, How Birth Happens & Where Chocolate Comes From?’
‘Oh yes. That was me too.’
‘I’ve shown that to girls around the world, Mr Crepuscular, and they’re always astonished. But your descriptions and explanations and diagrams are so clear. None of that obfuscation or dithy-dathering that you find in the text books. I have recommended that pamphlet … oh, to hundreds of women. And you wrote it?’
‘I did, madam.’
‘Well sir. I have had to re-evaluate my impressions of you more than once today (Epitome, don’t go so near the pond) and each time I find that you come out on top.’ She smiled. ‘You’re a most interesting man. I congratulate you.’
‘Shall I take the lunch things away now, Penny?’ said Nancy who had just come out of the house. She glanced shyly at Simon as she said it and he stared, as subtly as his blushing countenance could manage, at her apron front.
‘What very charming lace,’ he said, for sake of something to say.
‘Yes, please do Nancy, dear,’ Miss Penultimate replied, resting her hand on the small of Miss Walker’s back as she bent to fill the tray. She left her hand there for a few moments before replacing it in her own lap.
Nancy collected all the crockery, straightened up, smiled as a splash was heard from the pond, and went back into the kitchen where she had been listening to the others’ conversation all along.
Chapter 26
Garden, River & Picnic
Hugh Nerrin watched the small party leave the garden and finally he was alone. He listened with one ear as they faded into the distance further along the river. He filled his watering-can from the pump. Once it was full, and he hadn’t heard the others for a few minutes, he put it down, beside the vegetable patch, and walked over to the table on the patio. He sat down on one of the benches and pulled a small tin out of his pocket.
Having rolled and smoked a short, narrow cigarette he felt inclined to get back on with his work. He had been with Miss Penultimate long enough to respect her work ethic, which was that, in short, if someone says they’re going to work, then they jolly well should, and if they’re not going to then that’s fine but we’ll find someone else to do the work that needs doing. He didn’t mind that. He liked the work he did. He’d first come to this garden as a boy, helping his old dad with it on the weekends, and now he tended it alone. He’d never really considered doing anything else, oh maybe doing this in a different garden perhaps – his skills were eminently transferable in that way – but he’d heard tell of jobs in offices and things and didn’t like the sound of them at all.
He’d spent enough time indoors when he was a lad. At school. And he hadn’t got on with that very well. Oh, he could read some and make a good stab at bits of writing, but all the talk had bored him. What did he care about things that always seemed to have happened so far away and so long ago, or in made up books, when he could kneel in the mud and finger the roots of a wilting rosebush to determine what was wrong? That was living right in the present, with no distractions, no prevarications. Yet at the same time, there was very little in the realm of horticulture that couldn’t wait five minutes for him to have a cigarette and a ponder. That was something about teachers, wasn’t it? They always wanted answers now. They’d ask a question and if a boy didn’t have his hand up in a second then they were already failing. Sometimes things took longer than that to work out, but by the time he put his hand up the teacher would have said the correct answer anyway, which made Nerrin wonder why she was asking in the first place.
He’d left school with a certificate that he later showed to old Mrs Wickloft who lived in the cottage before Miss Penultimate. The headmaster had been an educator far in advance of the staff he employed and had believed that each child deserved to take away from his or her education a bit of self-confidence, an understanding of exactly where their particular skills and abilities lay (highlighting their successes, not their failures) and an absolutely smashing certificate. To this end he always took extra time to soak the paper he used in tea before drying them, crumpling them lightly, and writing out each pupil’s achievements in an impressively large and scrolling hand. Nerrin’s had simply read ‘Good with plants’. That had seemed to satisfy Mrs Wickloft that he should carry on the work his father had done before he'd gone off to fight in the war (which war, no one quite remembered) and so Nerrin became a permanent fixture at the cottage.
Miss Penultimate never told him what to do in the garden. So long as he kept it looking fairly neat and tree roots didn’t undermine the cottage she was happy. Besides which, she was often away for months at a time, so Nerrin would simply potter and experiment along whatever paths his green fingers took him down. The only downside to the job, if it could really be considered that, was that, because he was a man, he was no longer allowed inside the house. Mrs Wickloft had often invited him in for a cup of tea, especially if it was raining or windy or sunny or overcast or early or late or lunchtime or teatime or some other, less prandial, time of day. She was quite a lonely old widow and Nerrin had been young and an employee, and so he drank the tea that was offered to him whenever he was invited.
Miss Penultimate, on very much the other hand, didn’t hold with having men in the house. She claimed it was nothing personal, she’d never spoken harshly to Nerrin or decried him on account of his gender, but men were by nature dirty, filthy, inconsiderate and not the sort of thing she wanted indoors. He did
n’t mind so much, because she never begrudged him a cup of tea. He just had to drink it outside. Sometimes that pretty Miss Walker would bring him a slice of cake, usually when he had his shirt off and was digging in the sunshine. It wasn’t a great hardship, not being allowed in to make himself tea. If it rained he could always go and sit in his shed and look at the pictures in his seed catalogue. He had his certificate hanging on the wall in there and his mum gave him some sandwiches every morning, so he could always eat those. It wasn’t a bad life at all.
And a few years earlier he’d shown Miss Penultimate a letter he’d had from the War Ministry, asking him to report for a physical examination with a view to his taking a short trip to France. He’d been stuck on some of the longer words and when he’d shown the letter to his mum to get her to read them out she’d burst into tears, so he turned to his employer who he knew full well was the smartest person he’d ever met. She took the letter from him and sent him back to work and that was the last he heard about the war (except for what mentions it got in his seed catalogues over the next few years). Exactly what she’d done he never knew, but he was thankful for it. He couldn’t speak French and had secretly been afraid that they might make fun of him when he got there. His mum had sent Miss Penultimate one of her inedible cakes, but he never delivered it, being, as he said, grateful.
Now he stood up from the bench, tucked his cigarette tin back in his shirt-pocket and began to wander happily over to where he had left his watering-can. Before he got there he was distracted by a cough. It was one of those attention-seeking coughs – not a hearty bronchial type that was necessary to do a job of work such as clearing an air tube, but a dainty, little discreet hand-wave of a cough, designed solely to make someone look in its direction. Nerrin looked in its direction.
There, leaning on the garden gate, was a short little man. He was stood with his feet on the bottom bar and his arms resting on the top. He was dressed in a dark suit, such as one might wear, Nerrin imagined, in an office. It was tightly buttoned up and had a drift of snow on the shoulders. Nerrin wondered if he was a Russian freshly arrived for the war, but then he remembered that that was something to do with boots, not shoulders, so this chap couldn’t be one of them. The quickest way to clear this matter up, he thought, was to ask this fellow who he was and what he wanted, but just as he opened his mouth to do so the stranger spoke.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ he began. ‘Am I by any chance stood at and upon the gate of the thrilling Penny Penultimate?’
Nerrin looked at him. He considered for a moment trying out one of Miss Penultimate’s stares, but then decided not to, since (a) he wasn’t her and (b) he had the feeling it mightn’t work anyway. He was aghast that this complete stranger (he’d never seen the bloke before, so he had to be a stranger, yes?) should use such a familiar term of address for his employer. Nerrin would never even have dared to say ‘Penelope’, let alone the shorter form. Only Miss Walker ever said that, and that, Nerrin admitted, was a special case; a situation that he was fairly sure this little man was not ever likely to be a party to.
‘Yes,’ he answered after a minute. ‘This is the house of Miss Penultimate. She’s not here right now.’
‘Wonderful. That’s all I wanted to know, dear sir, dear chap. Now I’ll be off. Good day.’
And with that the stranger straightened himself up, climbed down from the gate and jaunted off up the lane toward town.
It was only after he had gone that Nerrin thought to ask his name and his business and whether there was any message. But, he added mentally a minute later, he would have suggested leaving a message himself if he had wished to do so.
Nevertheless, something in the air made Nerrin feel uneasy about what had just happened. As if the sun had gone in for a moment he felt a little colder.
He looked up. The sun had gone in. That would explain it. Within a minute or two the cloud passed and he was bathed in glorious solar warmth once more. He wandered over, picked up his watering-can and, finally, got on with his job.
*
It being a sunny and warm day, with bees buzzing round the garden lazily and the coots and moorhens fussing about with twigs in the shade, they had decided to go for a walk along the riverbank. Nancy packed a basket with ginger beer and lemonade, some apples, a tin of home-baked biscuits and a few spare rounds of sandwiches and Miss Penultimate had given it to her nephew to carry. Quirkstandard had then left it behind on the lawn and Simon had gone back for it as soon as Spiggot had wanted a biscuit, which had only been a few minutes into the walk.
They walked arranged in this manner (although the order was free to change and from time to time did): at the front of the party Quirkstandard and Spiggot skipped and gambolled. They had often, over the years, visited Aunt Penelope here and they knew the countryside around the cottage quite as well as they knew anywhere. Spiggot would occasionally run up ahead, tug at branches that were clearly a dozen times his own diminutive size, jump up and down in excitement, run back to where Quirkstandard was, catch him up, run ahead, scrabble at the earth, tug at the branch once more and refuse to be satisfied until Quirkstandard had extricated the log from the bracken and brambles and had it tucked under his arm, at which point naturally (perhaps having something of a cat’s fickleness in him) he would become much more interested in the smell of a duck, leap in the river, paddle furiously and ineffectually before climbing out of the cold water, scrabbling noisily up the muddy bank, where he’d wait for Quirkstandard to get up close before shaking himself dry and panting in exhaustion for a minute, before repeating it all over again. In short, Spiggot rather enjoyed the freedom of nature compared to the amenities of civilisation that surrounded him up in Town.
Occasionally Miss Penultimate’s voice could be heard shouting, ‘No swimming here boys, save it for later.’ And although Spiggot respected Aunt Penelope as one of the finest, most generous and nicest smelling of all human beings, he didn’t pay very much attention to this ruling. Quirkstandard, on the other hand, did. He was still drying out after Spiggot had helped him into the garden pond and was striding along in the sunshine in his long underwear and vest, with his trousers and his shirt and jacket draped over his arms drying. Normally, had he been forced to do such a thing in, say, The Strand or up Bond Street, he would have felt something of an embarrassed idiot, but here in the countryside he felt nothing of the sort. He loved getting out of Town for just this reason: the constraints and confines of polite society were loosened here; no longer was he expected to be the superior, to be an example of wit, wisdom, manners and morals to the lower classes – no, here he could just be human, dignity be damned! So, striding along with his clothes steaming gently in the sun and the breeze he felt like a nature boy, like one of those chaps he might’ve read about in Classics and Latin if he’d done the reading at school – he felt sure there was probably something relevant in there, he just had that sort of feeling about it. Maybe I should ask Mr Crepuscular about it, he thought, he’s smart and will almost certainly know what’s what, and besides he dresses a bit like I do, or rather I’m dressed a bit like him, I suppose. Yes, he’s the chap. Wandering along Bond Street in his underwear would have had Quirkstandard worrying that some ladies might spot him and be shocked – he cared about not shocking ladies – but here by the riverside there was only his Aunt, who really didn’t count among the shockable people of the world, and her housekeeper who was only the housekeeper and so didn’t really count as a lady. He felt quite at ease.
Behind the two gentlemen of the party walked Simon Crepuscular and Nancy Walker. They walked together only because they were next in line. Miss Walker was very quiet and initiated no conversation. She kept glancing back to the couple behind them, looking back at Miss Penultimate, even turning around and walking backwards for a few paces with her hands crossed across her lap. Simon could hardly bring himself to glance at her, feeling a blush rush into his face whenever he did. He cursed his capillaries and wondered why today of all days they were behaving quite s
o ludicrously. Maybe it was just the heat of the day, or perhaps it was the weight of the picnic basket he was carrying, which didn’t get noticeably lighter even when Spiggot had eaten all the biscuits. He also felt nervous: there was an unevenness in his heartbeat and a flutter in his lungs, or maybe his stomach.
As they walked he kept up a light patter of conversation, hoping that he might say something that might possibly be perhaps somehow of some sort of possible interest to her. When he, very occasionally, did look in Miss Walker’s direction, not only did he blush but he also lost track of just what it was he was saying. At times like this, in order to regain his thread, or pick up a new one, he’d look out at the river and make an observant and perceptive remark about it, which always seemed to come out sounding like, ‘Oh, a duck.’ Miss Walker would look at him in these moments and feel a strange compassionate confusion, for although what the young fellow was saying was clearly stupid and obvious and dull (and long before she ever met Miss Penultimate, she had formulated her own opinions of worth concerning stupid, boring and obvious people), the way he said it – the flutter in his voice, the question, the hesitation, the tone (somewhere between a squeak and a baritone) – was oddly striking, his eyes actually dark and intelligent, his hair dark and attractively flicked behind his ear. Noticing these things Nancy would feel a strange mixture of guilt, jealousy and internalised warmth. She would turn and look back at Penny talking with the old man, try to steady her beating heart on that calm and imperturbable rock of womanhood, and her jealousy would well up a bit further, spilling, sometimes, over the brim. It was all most unwelcome. Apart from occasionally saying something like, ‘Yes, a duck,’ she remained quite quiet as they walked along in the dappled sunlight by the river.
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 20