Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  I took the opportunity of this social dislocation to order a drink.

  ‘Crème de menthe?’ queried Lottie, incredulously. ‘No beer?’

  ‘And beer,’ I yelled. ‘Monstrous beers—with liqueur chasers—all night long!’

  ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ chipped in Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘It’ll be green-bile time tomorrow.’

  ‘Tonight, I dream,’ I told them, ‘and step outside what is laughingly called my “life”. Tomorrow can mind its own damn business.’

  Mr Disvan had been studying me closely all the while. I was well aware of that. I also caught the tail end of something the landlord was saying to him.

  ‘...for that. Like you say, frustration’s given way to… what d’yer call it: despond. He’s on his...’

  Disvan’s eyes never wavered from me. He didn’t seem to share the landlord’s good cheer.

  ‘No,’ he said, part to me, part perhaps to himself, ‘it’s getting worse, driving deeper. Maybe forming permanent attachments.’

  I turned away, too tired, too removed to even comment on their gibberish. In any case, the withering glance I’d mustered had offered sufficient reply.

  Then, for a while, the bittersweet chill of crème de menthe and beer was revolting world enough to occupy me and stave off thought.

  Later on, responding sullenly to reality’s gravitational pull, I surfaced and caught the tail end of the Disvan/landlord summit.

  ‘I can even see a case for intervention,’ said Disvan.

  The landlord sounded shocked. That was unusual enough to be interesting, almost.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t see it. ‘Sides, it goes against the grain. An Englishman’s home is his castle—and I don’t want to lose the custom.’ This final word was unconvincingly disguised as an afterthought and, though it might only be a suggestion, Mr Disvan took account of just whose suggestion it was.

  ‘There is that,’ he agreed. ‘Tell you what, I’ll have one more try.’

  You didn’t have to actually see the landlord to know if he was pleased or relieved. It trumpeted its existence in the rattle of glasses and the placing of size 13 boots.

  ‘Now, you listen, mind,’ I heard him say to me, a gale of displaced pub air shooting by my averted eyes, ‘and dwell on it. Sales are bad enough as it is.’

  And then Mr Disvan was beside my shoulder, somehow directing his gaze round corners to get my attention.

  ‘I put it to you, Mr Oakley,’ he said quietly, ‘that “monstrous beers” are no answer to your problem.’

  ‘What about monstrous crème de menthes?’ I asked facetiously.

  ‘Nor them,’ replied Disvan, blindly literalist as ever.

  I pointedly ordered some more of both, hoping he would take the hint and go away. Naturally, he did neither, obliging me to be more direct.

  ‘And who says I have a problem?’ I asked him brusquely. ‘You?’

  He was quite shameless. ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’ That sort of honesty was shocking.

  ‘In my judgement,’ he continued, ‘I’d say your sub-Byronic look, your suicidal attack on Mr Bretwalda, your obvious Hamlet-proportioned disenchantment with life, are symptomatic of a problem, yes.’

  He had a good set of arguments there, which made it all the more annoying.

  ‘Just because I’m more thoughtful...’ I said. But that was as far as I got.

  ‘More morose, more aggressive,’ continued Disvan, in a telling litany, ‘more violent and—hard to credit—more promiscuous. The risks you’ve taken these last weeks, the people you’ve offended, Mr Oakley—and the drink you’ve put away!’

  ‘It does have its plus points, I grant you,’ said the landlord, before a glance from Disvan compelled him to silence.

  ‘It’s all out of character,’ Mr Disvan went on, ‘and accelerating. A mere two months ago, would you have said what you said to the Bishop of Goldenford?’

  ‘His car was in my way.’

  ‘Would you have done what you did to Bridget Maccabi?’

  ‘She shouldn’t have dared me. And I may sue about the scar.’

  ‘And would you have had an affair with your boss’s wife?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And put an advert about it in the Financial Times?’

  I shrugged. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Disvan shook his head sadly.

  ‘No, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘to quote a classic Sex Pistols lyric: “the problem is you!”’

  ‘And the solution?’ I asked, languid and unconvinced.

  ‘History,’ snapped Disvan.

  That took me aback. Such precision hadn’t been anticipated.

  ‘I don’t like history,’ I said, rallying quickly. ‘It’s all dead and gone, a “petty pace from day to day... all our yesterdays, lighting fools the way to dusty death”…’ Mr Jarman wasn’t the only one who’d ‘done’ Macbeth for O Level.

  Mr Disvan regarded me with the deepest suspicion, far more in fact than a bit of out-of-character erudition really merited.

  ‘I’m talking specific history here, Mr Oakley,’ he said, his face very grim. ‘The life and times of office furniture, mid to late twentieth century.’

  ‘Sounds terminally boring!’ I trumpeted. ‘Who the ---- wants to know about that? What wrong with sticking to real life... and passion... and poetry!’

  ‘Poetry?’ gaped Mr Disvan.

  ‘Yeah, why not? I’ve written a fair bit of it lately. Listen to this...’

  Before anyone could stop me (and they looked as if they would if they could), I’d opened up the book of pensées that now accompanied me everywhere. There was a profound silence in the Argyll, the sort of horrified hush that immediately precedes an inevitable car smash.

  ‘This one’s called “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”,’ I announced.

  ‘Don’t do it to us, Oakley!’ said a desperate heckler (probably the landlord).

  ‘She undulates,’ I intoned, ‘like a juggernaut

  in the canyons of my mind,

  and the windmills of my soul

  crush the seed of goodness

  by order of her savage decrees.

  Life is insupportable; impermissible,

  a deep purple swoon assails me

  as though of Courage Directors Bitter

  I had drunk. Death, despair and Eternal night

  are the surprises in my lunch-box.

  And I, Oakley, have foresuffered all!’

  ‘That does it!’ said Mr Disvan, his face a cold mask. ‘Bad poetry! Grab him!’

  * * *

  ‘I’ve lost half an evening’s trade, thanks to you,’ said the landlord. ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself.’

  It was hard to feel proud being carried along, head almost scraping the pavement, like a giant, not very valued, teddy bear. Mr Bretwalda bore my weight, tucked under his ham-like arm, as though I wasn’t there. He felt sufficiently unstrained to be able to puff away at a cigar in his free hand.

  ‘Don’t feel too bad, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan who was walking alongside me.

  ‘But the blood’s all rushing to my head,’ I yelled, ‘and he’s trailed my face in some puddles. Of course I feel bad!’

  ‘I didn’t mean that sort of bad,’ said Disvan. ‘I meant bad about the landlord’s lost business. You can’t help it, you see. You’re just a bit under the weather, that’s all.’

  ‘And underarm, and underwater, and under pressure!’ I screamed.

  ‘That as well,’ agreed Disvan reasonably.

  In other circumstances and at other angles, I might have felt quite honoured. It wasn’t every day I had thirty-odd outriders to escort me. The whole public bar clientele had turned out, some with better grace than others, and now formed a protective circle (or shambling mob) around me and my porter. On the minus side, I had a feeling—and it was a nasty feeling—that we were heading in the direction of my home like some English parody of the peasants’ march on Frank
enstein’s castle.

  As if by cue, Mr Disvan put me straight on this.

  ‘We’re heading for your house,’ he said, ‘but don’t be worried. The damage should be minimal.’

  He mistook my upside down gape and gasp as affirmation by silence.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle except when it’s otherwise expedient. Even the gas board can get in nowadays if they’ve a mind to. And we’ve got better call than them.’

  ‘What! Why?’ I stuttered/shouted. ‘Bastards! Rabble!’

  ‘Well, there’s got to be a fair few of us,’ explained Disvan, the soul of sweet reason. ‘We need as many as possible to take the blast.’

  This caused me to struggle with renewed vigour but unaltered lack of success. Exhausted at last, I slumped speechlessly back.

  ‘It’s all a matter of history, like I said before,’ he continued, oblivious to my frantic escape attempts. ‘I mean, did it ever occur to you to consider that desk’s antecedents?’

  My look of pre-hysterical incredulity was answer enough.

  ‘I see not. Well, you should have. Everything has a history and it has to be taken into account. I partly blame myself. If I’d not gone for a cuppa, I’d not have let you buy the thing. And language like that won’t help the matter, Mr Oakley.’

  After a minute or so, my Anglo-Saxon began to repeat itself and petered out in impotent fury.

  ‘Ponder the desk’s origin,’ Disvan continued as though nothing had happened. ‘Cut down in the vigour of its prime. Sawn, shaped and varnished into a new form—and for what? To sit in the same spot for half a century and minister to generation after generation of bureaucrats.’

  ‘Judging by Oakley’s state,’ interrupted Bridget Maccabi, leaning in from the outer circle, ‘I reckon it was in the accountancy department.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Disvan nodded. ‘It’s certainly a bad case. But can you imagine it, Mr Oakley? All those different faces over the years, decent sorts in their way, but the same old work stored in and on you. All the petty office dramas you’d see, all the sordid politicking and gossip you’d be forced to overhear. And what about all the careers slowing down and dying, the slow growths of disillusionments and the relinquishing of dreams you’d be party to? All those fresh energies you’d see arrive and see get worn down with the dreariness of it all. Can you conceive of what it can be like to see fifty—fifty!—final account cycles—estimates, revised estimates, trial balances and verifications—come and go?’

  ‘I wish you’d shut up,’ I said bitterly. ‘You’re depressing the hell out of me.’

  ‘Exactly,’ snapped Disvan, as if he’d got me to concede some important point. ‘It doesn’t bear contemplation. All that negative psychic energy oozing into the pores and grain of the wood over the years, the atmosphere of unspoken desperation gradually seeping into the fabric of your being.’

  ‘A Luke 2:29 situation,’ contributed Mr Jarman, tilting his head upside down so as to grin at me properly.

  ‘Just so,’ agreed Disvan sagely. ‘”My eyes have seen too much, now let thy servant depart in peace.” Honestly, it can’t be too much fun, being a gently lapping, brimful basin of despair.’

  On one level I could hardly dispute this. But, it being applied to a desk and me being upside down, I found the perversity to do so in no uncertain terms. Then Mr Bretwalda dipped my head into another villainously polluted puddle and shut me up

  ‘Suddenly,’ said Disvan, blithely continuing through my coughs and splutters, ‘the desk is removed from the source of spiritual venom. It’s sold to some unsuspecting bargain-seeker. The inflow of black thoughts stops and then slowly reverses. All the feelings and experiences it’s imbibed start to ebb outwards.’

  Some pretty overweight pennies were starting to drop and the dawn of self-doubt across my inverted face did not escape Mr Disvan’s attention.

  ‘You mustn’t blame it, Mr Oakley,’ he said. ‘It’s not evil. Just tired, that’s all. It’s seizing the chance to spew out all those fleeting associations of unallieviated greyness—and you got in the way. Okay, so maybe there’s an element of revenge on mankind in dousing the new owner in despond...’

  ‘Self-defence, surely,’ suggested Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘How’s it to know Mr Oakley’s not just another man in a suit come to top up the tub of tedium?’

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed Disvan. ‘And anyway, we weren’t expecting things to get as bad as this. “He’ll have a few weeks of melancholy,” I said, “and then the desk will be drained. It’ll be a valuable spiritual exercise for him.” How could we guess you’d bought the most misery-sodden desk of all time?’

  There’d been a subtle gear-change from ‘I’ to ‘we’ at the end of that and I pointed it out—tacked to a reference to my wishes for the future health of his eyes.

  ‘Well, there it is, Mr Oakley,’ said Mr Disvan unperturbed, signifying that’s how things were and I could love it or shove it. ‘And coincidentally enough, here we are. Kibbutz Oakley.’

  I inclined my head and, to my horror, caught a brief topsy-turvy view of my house. The barbarians were before the gates.

  ‘Keys, please,’ said Mr Bretwalda pleasantly.

  ‘No!’ I howled.

  And that was all the encouragement or excuse he needed. I was dumped in a bedraggled heap and Bretwalda was away up the drive like a red-faced, fleshly version of all five Thunderbirds.

  ‘Revenge is a dish best savoured cold,’ Mr Disvan advised me as I saw the Bretwalda boot meet my front door and sunder it into matchwood. ‘Count your blessings. It’s better he takes it out on your door than you.’

  * * *

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t pay that much for a door,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr, stepping daintily over the wreckage, ‘carriage lamps or no carriage lamps.’

  ‘I could have got it for you cheaper, Mr O,’ added Mr Jarman, following up behind.

  In fact, each of the passing Binscombe vigilantes had some bon mot to deliver as they entered, but they were quite safe in doing so as I was once again restrained by the mighty hand of Bretwalda. Pinned to the wall like a butterfly, I was obliged to witness the boarding of my house.

  Like their Saxon forebears raiding a Roman villa, they spread out, poking and prying where the spirit took them. The odd comment concerning my taste in furniture and decoration reached my ears and increased my futile rage all the more.

  ‘You like tubular chairs and stripped pine, don’t you, Mr Oakley?’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘And everything else matt-black and chrome.’

  ‘It’s like being inside the mind of a Swedish chemist,’ said the landlord, looking about in shocked wonder.

  My choice reply was pre-empted by Mr Jarman emerging from a detailed survey of my drinks cabinet.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t have any calvados, Mr O?’ he said, accusingly holding the guilty bottle aloft.

  Embarrassment hit home where all else hadn’t, and I was shamed into silence. Until, that is, Mr Patel and Mr Limbu came into sight on my stairs, hefting my desk between them, and gouging a groove in the staircase wallpaper as they went about it. Mr Disvan was following on, perusing a book purloined from my study.

  ‘This is interesting,’ he said to me when they’d blundered their way down. ‘The Story of O—a real classic of erotica, I’m told. Can I borrow it?’

  ‘No!’ I said with commendable control. ‘And also no to whatever you propose to do with my desk, you... you...’

  The mob awaited my concluding epithet with interest but I couldn’t think of anything offensive enough.

  Disvan placed my book on a shelf with, it seemed, genuine regret and then turned to face me.

  ‘I’m afraid the desk thing is a unilateral, non-negotiable option,’ he said sadly. ‘Things have escalated beyond our expectations, and in your present condition you might end up hurting yourself.’

  ‘That “poem”, for instance,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr, attempting to soften Disvan’s bald statement with reasoning,
‘had definite tones of the pre-suicidal.’

  ‘Although refreshingly free of talent,’ said the landlord brightly.

  ‘So,’ said Mr Disvan, ‘it has to be sorted out. Right now, before anything else happens.’

  ‘One can of sorting-out juice, all present and correct,’ smiled Bridget Maccabi, elevating a once garish-red jerry can.

  It was the work of a few short moments to get the desk into my garden and douse it in petrol. The Binscombe mob gathered in an expectant semi-circle before it.

  ‘Have you got anything in there you want to salvage?’ Mr Disvan asked me.

  ‘My poetry!’ I said feverishly. ‘The manuscript of my spiritual autobiography!’

  By silent consensus, the crowd, as one, feigned deafness and prepared to press on. Disvan stepped forward, matches in hand and tipped his hat—to the desk.

  ‘We’re very sorry,’ he said politely, ‘but there seems little alternative. Our friend is not able to take what you have to tell him.’

  It should have been utterly ludicrous—a man in front of an audience, apologising to a desk—but somehow it wasn’t. The other Binscomites believed in what they were seeing and in what was to come, and their credulity was contagious.

  And, I must now admit, there was more. An unmistakable anticipation in the garden. I could feel a crispness in the air, a presence not entirely human, something other than us listening and waiting.

  It was close to dusk now, and in the shadows cast by the privet hedges there were already deep pools of darkness. Looking up, I could see both the first star and nosey neighbour of the night, gazing down on our strange little gathering. I thought of the comparative life-spans of men and stars and felt even more depressed. But that may just have been the desk.

  ‘Is there anything you would like to say?’ asked Mr Disvan gently. ‘Any last words?’

  A long, long pause followed. Even the nosey-Parker gave up and left her net curtain, and the spell the scene had woven over me almost faded to death. Perhaps this really was just tenth century Binscombe mumbo-jumbo after all.

  Then the desk’s central draw slid slowly open of its own accord. Most of us took a step back and blundered against each other in the gloom.