The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard

by A. F. Harrold

  Crepuscular took his opportunity to slip away, walked quickly to Quirkstandard and took his arm. He was pointing at his Aunt, his mouth open, her face covered by clouds of anger, of loathing, and his own displaying his innocence, his entire and magnificent lack of understanding. If life’s a game, then what was this? His lower lip trembled, even while his upper one remained stiff, and Simone wrapped him up in his broad arms.

  ‘Hush now,’ he said as he began to hum a Mongolian lullaby he’d learnt a lifetime before. The horsemen had used it to calm foals who became fraught out on the broad grasslands, as they sometimes did when being, for example, branded or milked for the first time.

  ‘This is how you pay me back,’ continued Penelope, ‘acting like a common slattern in our bed …?’

  ‘Penny?’ this single imploring word, drawn up out of Nancy’s chest. It carried the subtext of ‘Stop, please stop, don’t you think I know what I’ve done, and can’t we just have a cup of tea now, get back to the way things were and never talk about this again – haven’t I suffered enough?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me you’d’ve been wandering the streets now,’ Penelope’s vehemence was terrible to behold, and perhaps even more so now that her eloquence was returning. ‘You know full well that only I would have taken you in, would have given you a job just like that. If you weren’t here, you’d be out there somewhere, selling yourself like a million other victims of this dreadful trammelling masculine world we inhabit … and I don’t even know if you’d be able to make enough money for bread … damn you …’

  Crepuscular held Quirkstandard in his arms. The boy, the young man, was gentled now, but he could feel his tears still flowing. His heart was shaken, his world was shaken, by his Aunt’s lack of decorum. If she could be like this, he was thinking (though not in words, not consciously), with the housekeeper, how might she be with me one day; what if I don’t please her, don’t live up to her expectations? Crepuscular tried not to listen to Miss Penultimate’s words as best as he could. Her wrath had certainly stilled his schoolboy crush, but he still felt compassion for her, he still liked her, but his deep caring was scarred by her anger, scared by it too.

  ‘In fact,’ she continued, ‘if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even be alive at all. If I hadn’t brought you back from that blasted jungle as the tiny puking, mewling babe that you were, you wouldn’t have had any life at all, except maybe co-habiting with some pygmies inside some alligator’s bloody stomach. If I hadn’t already saved you twice, my dear, you might already have been dead.’

  She stopped.

  The storm suddenly blew itself out with this realisation, with this sudden summoning up of a world with no Nancy Walker in it, a world bereft of love and of her lover. She looked down at Nancy and her eyes softened. How could she, she thought in a swift reversal of mental states, have ever been angry with her? She knelt down by the step, in front of Nancy, and held a hand out to her still red cheek. Even as she did so a chasm opened in her heart. She had, it was suddenly true, in that very moment forgiven Nancy Walker for every crime she had committed (as she had forgiven her before, and would again), for every stupid mistake she’d made in the long darknesses of the night … of all nights everywhere. This forgiveness was entire, unconditional and she could never, would never (she understood immediately), take it back. But what – she dreaded to articulate the thought – what if Nancy would not forgive her? Or what if it hadn’t been a mistake? What if she went off, that afternoon, that very minute, in Epitome’s Rolls-Royce with the Crepuscular boy? What if they drove off? What if Nancy had changed her mind, had changed her heart? How would Penelope cope then? What could she possibly do then?

  Attendant upon these thoughts came other thoughts of equally dark content. What if, for example, she was still loved but wasn’t forgiven? That is, what if Nancy couldn’t forgive her for the way she had just treated her (she’d never laid a hand on the girl in so violent a way before), for the language she had used, for the names she had called her? What if Nancy didn’t forget the horrors of this morning? Penelope was willing to forgive and move on, but wasn’t it she who had wronged Nancy? Didn’t she need to be forgiven herself and what would happen? What chance did she have of living, if that forgiveness was not forthcoming?

  She held her hand out to touch Nancy’s cheek. She wiped away the tears, touched her lips. She brought her face close and kissed her eyes, which were closed and screwed up. With one hand she neatened the loose hair, brushed it away from her face, traced the outline of her ear, of her jaw, her neck. Every contour, every line on the girl’s face she had known so well. Had she, she asked herself, thrown all this away with her wrath, with her unthinking and unhesitating anger?

  In a flash she realised that what she reminded herself of, by acting like that, was a man. As retribution went it had been swift and righteous, meted out upon the innocent. She shuddered later, but now the thought simply worried her. Like the last bolt keeping one of Brunel’s great bridges upright, all the strain was on her and she knew at any moment, at any moment soon, it might just pop, she might explode and the world would suddenly be falling. In fact, she could see the sky above her as she fell backwards, as the world spun, a vertiginous coiling in her stomach, in the pit of her stomach, and then …

  And then Nancy’s arms were around her neck, her cheek pressed against hers. Penelope felt their bosoms press against one another, warm and full of life, the blood beating faster through those veins than ever before, capillaries working overtime to contain the situation, to shed the heat. Penelope half sat on the ground as Nancy’s mouth found hers and her arms clasped her back, the back of her head, held her close.

  Crepuscular let go of Epitome, allowing him to stand for himself. Now Miss Penultimate’s shouting had stopped, now the storm of her wrath had calmed itself, Quirkstandard too felt calmer. Crepuscular looked at him.

  ‘Do you have a handkerchief, Mr Q.?’

  ‘Er, no, I don’t believe I do,’ Quirkstandard answered, patting his pockets.

  ‘Here, use mine.’ Crepuscular handed him one he produced from under his beard, saying, ‘Blow your nose, Mr Q., and wipe your eyes, or the other way round if that seems better, then maybe step down to the outhouse to splash your face. We want you looking your best for your Aunt don’t we? Run along.’

  Epitome followed his friend’s advice. It seemed sensible and filled with no ulterior motives. However, had he noticed the slightly distracted look in Mr Crepuscular’s beard he might have thought twice about the question of motivation, because it was looking ever so slightly ulterior. Crepuscular wanted the young man out of the way. He needed to discover something that it would be easier to discover, easier to discuss with as few people around as possible.

  ‘Father,’ said a voice by his side.

  Simone looked at Simon and Simon looked at him. He, for one, had washed and shaved this morning, thought his father. And, he added, he should stay for this.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the emergence of Mr Spiggot. He yawned and yapped and squeezed past the two ladies on the kitchen doorstep. He looked around the garden with quite the normal carefree expectation of someone who’d slept well for the rest of the night after a brief nightmare had woken them early on and was now just looking for a handy tree and maybe a spot of breakfast. When he saw Simone he wandered over.

  ‘Mr Spiggot,’ Crepuscular began, squatting down so as to be more on the little gentleman’s level, ‘perhaps you’d be so kind as to go and help Mr Q. with his ablutions, you know how muddled he gets sometimes, and then perhaps you’d like a little walk along the river? Just for half an hour or so. I doubt I’ll need much longer than that.’

  Spiggot looked up at the big man as if he understood every word. Quirkstandard probably didn’t actually need any help with his abluting, but the sound of a walk did sound good, especially where there were ducks and water and maybe even a vole or two. So, intuiting the glint in his eye as being one that suggested the suggestion he had
just suggested wasn’t actually much of a suggestion, per se, Spiggot toddled off toward the outhouse where the sound of splashing water could be quietly heard.

  ‘Simon …’

  ‘Yes father?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Yes father.’

  The younger Crepuscular looked towards Nancy and felt his heart sinking. He hadn’t expected her to come to him, not last night, and if he hadn’t been quite so lightheaded with the unaccustomed extra bottle of wine she’d offered him after the charades had ended he would never have acted quite so out of character when she had. He’d noticed her during the afternoon, of course, there weren’t many pretty girls of a similar age who came into the pamphlet shop and so he was always reduced to a blushing imbecile when he met one. Rodney had always had the luck with women, he thought, it was something to do with those exotic eyes he had, that and the fact he was, off the bat, more sociable, joining clubs and things while Simon stayed at home copying out the old man’s handwriting.

  And after the mess he’d made of last night (what he remembered of it) before his father stormed upstairs and rescued him, he hadn’t really expected Nancy to come back to him this morning. And, of course, she hadn’t, and now it was quite clear that he was right to assume she wouldn’t, and in amongst everything else it was actually a nice feeling to finally be right about something, even something as sad and untidy as this.

  ‘Father, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry to have embarrassed you like this …’

  His father silenced him with a gesture.

  ‘Simon,’ he said at last, after a sigh, ‘these next few moments are more important than anything, son. Just be quiet and come with me. Whatever happens, please, do not say a word. You were there, but you were too young to remember, to know … Only I know what happened.’

  Simon didn’t understand, but followed.

  ‘Miss Penultimate,’ began Crepuscular as he approached the ladies, his hand held up as if he were a schoolboy wishing to ask a question.

  Penelope turned away from Nancy’s face, where she had been contemplating the crinkled lines that had formed at the edges of her young eyes.

  ‘Mr Crepuscular.’ She breathed in. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot you were still here.’

  ‘Miss Penultimate, we shall be going shortly, of course, but, well, needs must … May I …’ he paused here, as if finding it hard to go on. ‘May I ask one final question of you, before we leave you?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Crepuscular. You know you can ask me anything, of course.’

  She didn’t look at Simon.

  Nancy squeezed her hand, as a moment’s coldness passed over her eyes. Perhaps it was jealousy, or perhaps it was merely the ghost of jealousy. It was swift and then it was gone.

  ‘When was it, Miss Penultimate, that you were journeying in the Amazon?’

  ‘In the Amazon?’ Penelope thought back, trying to calculate the years, before suddenly turning to Nancy.

  ‘How old are you now, my dear?’

  ‘Twenty-four Penny, you know that.’

  ‘Of course, I forgot the numbers for a moment. There you are Mr Crepuscular, twenty-four years ago was the last time I was there. I lost my little toe to some piranha on that journey. A most invigorating experience really. Oh, I lost one of the girls to them too, not so much fun that …’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘The insurance was quite comprehensive, but all the same, it was infuriating.’

  ‘Now, Miss Penultimate, can I just check. That would have been 1893, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I guess it must have been.’

  ‘And it was on that journey, am I to infer from your method of calculation,’ he held a hand toward Nancy who grimaced inwardly, ‘that you discovered the baby that grew up to be Miss Walker here?’ The younger woman looked at his hand again, where it now hung in the air and something deep in her hindbrain flashed and sparked. She ever so briefly felt the unbelievable sensation of lightness, of flying through the air; she thought she might faint, but then, in an instant, was sat back on the doorstep, just looking up at his gnarled old hand.

  ‘Yes,’ said Penelope, ‘that’s true.’ There was a question sketched out in those words which she completed by asking, ‘What is this, Mr Crepuscular?’

  ‘In 1893, Miss Penultimate, I lost something.’ As he began to speak Simon suddenly understood where his father was heading with this. He looked at Nancy, at her dark hair, her dark eyes, at that profile that had aroused his heart so with a pulse of recognition, and he shuddered in a combination of love, surprise and revulsion. ‘What I lost was my wife. She was beautiful and wise … and a pirate. I would like to think, Miss Penultimate, that had you met, that is to say had you and she ever had occasion to meet, you would have been, could have been friends.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Mr Crepuscular, I think I know what you’re saying.’

  ‘What? What is he saying?’

  ‘Nancy, shush my sweet.’ Penelope pulled her girl closer, hugged her tighter. ‘I think Mr Crepuscular lost something else that day, besides his wife. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He breathed deep. ‘In that jungle … in that bloody, stinking jungle …’ Here he sat down heavily on the bench, silent tears already in his beard. ‘We were lost, you see. We hadn’t meant to take so long crossing it, the rainforest. It hadn’t looked so big on the maps I’d studied … But close up … oh, close up it was so confusing. There were circles and routes and paths that wound around and about each other and I failed to find my way through. They all trusted me, Miss Penultimate, they trusted me and I failed them. Do you understand?’

  Simon stood behind his father and laid a hand on his wide back, fuzzed as it was with a white fur. ‘Dad,’ he said quietly, ‘you don’t need to go on …’

  ‘Mr Crepuscular.’ This said with a sort of emptiness, as a word of empathy.

  ‘She fell, Miss Penultimate. She fell and I lost her forever.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Both of them, Miss Penultimate, both of them.’

  Penelope looked at Simone and then at Nancy. Was there something akin about the nose? Take away the beard and was there a similarity? Even as she wondered she knew the truth. She glanced up at the younger Crepuscular.

  ‘My wife and my baby girl. My daughter. My tiny baby girl, Miss Penultimate. I watched her falling, falling away from me, spinning …’

  ‘And I found her?’

  ‘The dates are right. I can’t think how many other little white babies may have been lost that year in the forest there … but I suspect, by looking, by feeling these things … that we have stumbled, blindly, into the truth.’

  ‘What? Wait?! Hang on?! Him? He’s my father?! Is that what you’re all saying? Is that what you’re saying?’

  She stared at Simone, and then she stared at Simon.

  ‘Oh … oh dear,’ she said, understating her feelings remarkably well.

  This was quite a lot to deal with all of a sudden.

  ‘I’ll go put the kettle on,’ she decided out loud, standing up. ‘I think we could probably all do with a nice cup of tea.’

  As the others agreed and as she stood and placed her hand on the doorknob, Quirkstandard and Spiggot appeared at the foot of the garden returning from the river and a voice was heard at the garden gate.

  ‘Don’t anyone move from where you are, I’m holding a gun,’ said a small man, perched on the gate’s bottom bar, holding a gun.

  Chapter 30

  The Lawyer and the Frying Pan

  Love is a force for good in the world, but it has a darker side too. It can drive normal, well-balanced people to extremes: those of devotion, those of foolhardiness. At times love walks hand in hand with fear: fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of insufficiency. Jealousy and pride and obligation stalk the lover, and then, unexpectedly, he finds himself being unwarrantedly brave. He steps out of the shadow and stands up to the bully, not for himself, but on behalf of the
one he loves, for love is sometimes selflessness – unexpected, unnecessary selflessness.

  Epitome Quirkstandard did something then that he would remember proudly for the rest of his life. As he took in the scene from halfway down the garden he raised a finger, pointed and shouted.

  ‘Mr Funicular? Are you pointing a gun at my Aunt?’

  At these words a spark of recognition flashed in Miss Penultimate’s mind. She’d been wondering, for the long moment the silence had lasted, just who this little man was, with the gun and the dandruff. His face had tinkled a distant bell, but she wasn’t sure that wasn’t just the church bells signalling the arrival of noon. Mr Funicular? Ah, she thought. After she’d left his office, fourteen years earlier, she had spared him no more than a pair of thoughts, and even that, at the time, had seemed overly generous. And here he is now, almost in my garden, she thought, maybe he’s discovered another clause in Sarah’s will.

  Of course, she suspected that was unlikely.

  ‘It was true, I’m afraid,’ the lawyer said, directing his words toward Quirkstandard, ‘but now,’ he continued, changing the pistol’s aim as he finished his sentence, ‘it’s pointing at you.’

  Epitome thought of saying, ‘Oh,’ in a sort of surprised and meek way and then being quiet again, which seemed to be what he suspected he really ought to do. It was certainly what his brain expected of him, and also what Funicular expected too. If he did this, his brain was telling him, he would aptly acknowledge that his question had been answered clearly, exhibit a benign stupidity and be, most likely, ignored for the rest of the episode (however it unfolded). And that’s exactly what he didn’t do.

  ‘Well,’ he spoke, surprising everyone, except Spiggot, and perhaps his Aunt, who always knew that he had something special in him, ‘I think that’s much better, Mr Funicular. I don’t much appreciate people threatening my Aunt. I mean, sir, just how dare you? How bloody dare you? (Excuse my language, Auntie.) Look – she’s just a meek, harmless, defenceless, charming little old lady. And you point a gun … I mean, a gun of all things … Oh, Mr Funicular …’ (Had the circumstances in which he said these most inapposite things about Miss Penultimate been different there would have been the unmistakable accompaniment of people stifling incredulous giggles, as it was Penelope just smiled wryly and not without a small touch of pride, though at the same time she felt a trickle of ice water down her spine.) ‘She only has me left to protect her, Mr Funicular. You knew this … you know this. And here you come, to her own home, waving a pistol around as if it were a sandwich you felt like sharing with everyone … and what I want to know, sir, is … is this …’ he’d begun to bluster, his cool having evaporated, and he began to undo his shirt cuff with a view to rolling it up, ‘is, just, well … how dare you? Just how bloody dare you point that damned pistol at her?’