Boxer, Beetle

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Miss Erskine says you ain’t really a valet,’ said Tara.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Sinner.

  ‘Don’t need anyone else to tell me that, pet.’

  ‘What am I doing wrong, then?’

  ‘What are you doing wrong?’ Godwin loved the way Tara screwed up her big eyes so tightly when she giggled, as if momentarily blinded by a bright light. ‘Tell you what: next time I’ve got a few days’ holiday, I’ll sit down and make you a list.’

  Then Millicent Bruiseland ran into the kitchen through the other door. ‘Will you act in my play, Mr Roach?’ She tried to pass a sheaf of typewritten pages to Sinner, but Tara snatched it out of her hands.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Tara, and began to read.

  Enter MR. BRUISELAND and MRS. ERSKINE.

  MRS. ERSKINE: You have the most exquisite frenulum I have ever seen.

  MR. BRUISELAND: You are too kind, madam.

  They combine savagely, then have tea.

  MRS. ERSKINE: What a nice day to be ravished.

  MR. BRUISELAND: Shall I put it in your ear next time?

  ‘Oh, my sainted aunt, Milly!’ said Tara, throwing down the script. ‘There’ll be no more of this. You’ll shock our guest.’

  ‘I ain’t easily shocked, darling,’ said Sinner, overconfident for the first time that evening.

  ‘Do you know all about sex, Mr Roach?’ said Millicent.

  ‘I know a bit about it.’

  ‘What’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever done?’

  ‘Sure you want to hear?’

  ‘I am no shrinking violet, Mr Roach.’

  Before Tara could stop him, Sinner leaned over and whispered something in Millicent’s ear.

  ‘I’m not at all surprised,’ replied the twelve-year-old. ‘That is what Dr Karjalainen told me old-fashioned people used to do before they had the imagination to …’ and then whispered something to Sinner in return.

  Sinner’s eyes widened. ‘No fucker has ever done that!’

  ‘Don’t listen, lad,’ said Tara. ‘She don’t know what a single one of them words means. Now, clear off, Milly, so Sinner can have his tea in peace.’

  ‘No!’ said Millicent.

  Then Godwin sneezed. Tara looked up. He tried to cover his blunder by striding straight into the kitchen as if he had just been on his way there instead of hiding outside, but Tara still swore under her breath and hurried out through the other door. She had to squeeze past Battle, who had come to look for Godwin.

  As soon as she saw Battle, Millicent snatched up a carving fork from the sideboard and started to stab him in the buttocks, humming a tune as she did so.

  ‘Please don’t do that, Miss Bruiseland,’ said Battle, concerned for his trousers.

  While Battle was giving some instructions to Godwin, Millicent, reluctant to put down the fork, tentatively poked Sinner in the shoulder instead.

  ‘Careful, girl,’ said Godwin. ‘The lad isn’t the same as Battle. You’ll hurt him.’

  ‘I ain’t easily hurt, mate,’ said Sinner, overconfident for the second time that evening.

  ‘Aren’t you, Mr Roach?’ said Millicent.

  ‘Used to be my profession not to get hurt.’

  ‘Oh! Can we play a game?’

  And so, after a few minutes’ cajoling, Sinner and Battle were standing side by side with their backs to the sideboard, on which Millicent herself stood holding a heavy copper frying pan with a rounders player’s two-handed grip.

  ‘Ready, Battle?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  Millicent swung the frying pan as hard as she could into the back of Battle’s head. There was a loud clang, but Battle merely bent his knees slightly and coughed.

  ‘Ready, Mr Roach?’

  Sinner, concluding that the girl was even punier than she looked, kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t bother to brace himself.

  ‘All right.’

  Millicent swung.

  When he awoke, Sinner found himself lying on the sideboard with a cold damp towel wrapped around his aching head. At the kitchen table sat Tara and her mistress.

  ‘And none of them said a word for the rest of the meal,’ said Evelyn. ‘They’re all such infants. We haven’t even got to the speeches yet – if world war isn’t declared before Friday we shall have made a lucky escape. Oh, look, the young pugilist has been roused. I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable, but we just weren’t quite sure what to do with you after your mazzatello. Now, Sinner – as Tara tells me you like to be called – you must promise me that you will never listen to another word that awful little girl says.’

  ‘I think you might have knocked me on the head once yourself.’

  ‘Yes, but I had a point to make.’

  ‘That butler. …’

  ‘Oh, butlers can’t feel anything.’

  ‘I’d best be off, miss,’ said Tara. ‘There’ll still be a fair bit to do upstairs.’

  ‘All right, Tara, I’ll see you in the morning.’ Evelyn gave Tara a goodnight kiss on the cheek and then Tara went out.

  ‘You’re nice and familiar with your girl,’ said Sinner.

  ‘Yes. I can tell from your infinitesimally elevated eyebrow what you’re trying to imply, and it’s nothing at all like that. We are great friends. I’ve known her since we were both quite young and she is the only person with any sense in this whole house. She tells me when I’m being a fool and she tells me when I’m being a coward. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to taking her off to London so she never has to see that ghastly slug ever again.’

  ‘Which one? Lot of slugs around here.’

  ‘Godwin. The footman. He’s been oozing after her ever since he got here. She sometimes finds him standing outside her room at night. My father once caught him menacing her in the library, and of course he got the wrong impression, and now he thinks they’re having a secret love affair when in fact she can’t stand to be near him. He talks about nothing else but coffins. Although, actually, I can’t admit this to Tara, but I did have one fascinating conversation with him. Do you know anything about waiting mortuaries?’

  Sinner shook his head, so Evelyn explained them to him. ‘And naturally it’s supposed to be that the harmonium only plays a note if someone has woken up and is wiggling their toes,’ she finished. ‘But Godwin says a corpse will keep bloating and stiffening for days, so the wires will be yanked over and over again, and the harmonium will be sounding practically all the time. Can you imagine the music? Such unearthly dissonance. I should love to go there and transcribe it. And Godwin says that gas builds up in the corpse’s stomach and sometimes when the gas escapes through the mouth the corpse will groan almost as if it’s singing. Like a Webern lieder about putrefaction. I’ve tried to write down what I think it might sound like, but I can’t quite. … Why don’t I play it to you?’

  There had once been a shabby upright piano in the servants’ dining room for carol-singing at Christmas, but soon after he bought the brass brain William Erskine had replaced it with an ondes Martenot which nobody knew how to play, so Evelyn and Sinner had to creep upstairs to the drawing room. The more he saw of the house, overflowing as it was with antiques and trinkets and tassels, not unlike Rabbi Berg’s but somehow with none of the same cosiness, the more Sinner understood why Erskine had wanted to keep his own flat so empty.

  Evelyn sat down and played for a few minutes and then said, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You ain’t much good at the piano,’ said Sinner, who sat on the floor beside her.

  ‘It’s supposed to sound like that. Didn’t you like it? That’s a shame – Brecht insists the working classes love avantgardism,’ she said, half-serious. ‘I’ll play it again.’

  She did.

  ‘Sounds wrong.’

  ‘It sounds wrong! That’s exactly it – in a manner of speaking. You see, everyone says atonality is a perversion. Serial music is supposed to be foreign and sinister and subversive. All those fools think the tonal s
ystem is God’s law, so if you cast it aside you must be mad or bad. And they’re right that the tones pull towards triads and triads pull towards tonality, but the whole point of life is to resist whatever pulls on you – you must know that even better than I do.’ She played a few more bars. ‘Schoenberg says, “What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or less degree of comprehensibility.” But he’s wrong. Beethoven is no easier to understand than Berg. It’s not about beauty or comprehensibility. It’s about life. Dissonance is the sound of life in the twentieth century.’

  ‘All the fighting,’ ventured Sinner. When Pearl or Erskine had tried to instruct him he’d been bored and irritable, but as Evelyn talked on he found himself thinking back to all the times that he had sat and listened as Anna gave him a lesson: knitting, hopscotch, cracking eggs without getting your fingers gooey. He was never a good pupil, and he had nothing to teach her in return; she did like him to tell her stories, but he never had many that she was old enough to hear.

  ‘Very good try, but, no, it’s not as simple as that – wars are as unequivocal as mountains. Very tonal. It’s about the horror of peacetime! All capitalism’s lies and illusions and hypocrisies and suppressions and denials and analgesics. People are afraid of dissonant music because they recognise in it, deep in it, the truth about their own condition. It’s not that they don’t understand it – they understand it much too well. Dissonant music is honest, whereas tonal music buys a sort of silly superficial unity at the price of annihilating all resistance. When you understand that, you realise that consonance is a great deal uglier than dissonance because consonance is the sound of bloodless tyranny.’

  Sinner looked at her blankly. She smiled.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I just never have anyone to talk about it with, now that Alistair Thurlow’s gone abroad.’ Sinner remembered the similar admission that Philip Erskine had made to him a few weeks ago. ‘I found out there’s a man called Ronald Slater at the BBC who’s “sympathetic to modern music”, so I made up a parcel of a few scores and sent them down there. I thought he might at least write me a letter. But I just got them sent back to me about six months later with a printed card that said they were “unsuitable”. It was obvious they hadn’t even been opened. Made me feel rather pathetic. It’ll be easier when I’m in London all the time. I can meet the right people.’

  ‘How long until then?’

  ‘Morton and I are getting married in the spring.’

  ‘Your brother seems to think that bloke is a bit of a cunt.’

  ‘Yes, well, Morton did bully Philip terribly at Cambridge. But I was a perfect little bitch myself when I was at school. He’s not so bad, really.’

  ‘He’s not so bad?’

  ‘No. I was very impressed with him at dinner tonight.’ She shut the lid of the piano and then opened it again. ‘You mean to say, why am I getting married if that’s the best I can find to say about him?’

  Sinner shrugged.

  ‘When I’m in London I always stay with Caroline who is my best friend from school,’ said Evelyn. ‘Her parents live in Kensington. But now she’s getting married to an absolutely lovely Scottish chap and they’re off to Edinburgh, so I will have nowhere to stay unless I stay with my brother, and now that he’s got you I would feel terrible about putting a damper on … you know. So I shall be trapped down here all the time. And I can’t write anything here. I can practise, but I can’t compose. I need to be in town. I need the noise and the grime and the maze. London’s so inscrutable, and there’s something so erotic about the inscrutable, isn’t there? I’m useless in the country. If I marry Morton I shall be able to live in London for the rest of my life, and Father won’t be able to threaten me about his will – and what’s more, Morton does always seem to have the most interesting people coming to dinner, despite being a stuck-up fascist. I know he’ll let me do whatever I like, and I can have a lot of glorious affairs and so on. And he’s handsome, although not nearly as handsome as you, in your odd way. The alternative is to sit here in Claramore going mad until I meet some jowly squire’s son at a hunt ball and end up living somewhere just like this, married to someone just like Father, or, worse, just like Philip. I know one is supposed to marry for love, but that’s not a very realistic proposition when you’re. …’ She realised she was about to cry, and she couldn’t stop herself. After a time she looked up at Sinner, hoping he might try to comfort her, but he didn’t move. She sniffed. ‘Aren’t you going to say something, at least? A friend of Caroline’s once told me that homosexuals make the most wonderful confidants but I’m not finding you very wonderful.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sinner.

  And then Evelyn reached for his hand and hauled him up towards her, clamping her mouth over his.

  Sinner was surprised, but he thought he might as well do what she wanted – he still felt an unusual fondness for this demanding girl. He could taste the wine on her breath and feel her tears on his cheeks. Like rotten fruit, women’s bodies were too soft, yielded too easily.

  ‘Please …,’ she said, looking into his eyes, and lifted the hem of her dress. He got the sense that she hadn’t known that she wanted this even one minute earlier but now that she did know she couldn’t wait even one minute longer.

  She was too low on the piano stool, so he picked her up and moved her awkwardly on to the piano itself, her arms wrapped around his neck. As he undid his flies, she pushed her knickers down to her ankles and spread her trembling knees, still kissing him as if she were trying to steal a piece of chewing gum out of his mouth.

  (At that moment Leonard Bruiseland was walking past the drawing room. He wondered who was so thoughtless as to practise the piano after most of the house was already in bed, and then realised from the ugly, thudding chords that it could only be Evelyn Erskine. He was about to go in and reproach her, but then reasoned brightly that at least if she was playing the piano she couldn’t be off fornicating.)

  Abruptly Sinner entered her, and she gasped and bit into his lip. The angles were wrong and he had to stand on awkward tiptoes, feeling a bit as if he were doing some special exercise in Frink’s gym, sharply aware of the moon-drowning purplish night sky outside the drawing room windows and of the piano’s cold rosewood against the skin of his forearms. ‘Are you going to … ? You know that you mustn’t. … Not now,’ Evelyn murmured uncertainly, but Sinner knew he was in no danger of that, so he kept going – trying to be gentle, but thinking about some of his favourite boys from the Caravan to keep himself hard – until Evelyn had what she wrongly took to be an orgasm and went slack in his arms. She winced again as he withdrew and a trickle of blood chased him down her thigh. He helped her down to the carpet, where she lay on her side, panting; he sat beside her. The whole thing had only lasted three or four minutes.

  ‘Have you ever been with a woman before?’ she said after a long time.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘A few times.’

  ‘Do you hate it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. You know, it’s lucky you are how you are, most of the time. Imagine if you made it your business to go after people’s wives. Think of the jealous husbands. Legions of them. You’d have been shot dead a dozen times by now.’ She stroked his hand. ‘Well, that’s that. Now at least I have a proper secret from my dear fiancé. He’ll never have the whole of me. And even if I don’t have all those glorious affairs, I can say I was deflowered on a piano in a country house by a foul-mouthed Jewish boxer. How fantastic. And all my babies will be Jewish according to that German oaf.’ She laughed, but he didn’t laugh with her, so she looked up at him and said, ‘Oh, come on, doesn’t it get dull being so surly and serious all the time? Never even smiling? I bet you wish you could. I bet you would if you knew no one would see. I mean, I know I do a good job of being blithe and ironical and all that, but it doesn’t mean I’m utterly without. …’ When he stil
l didn’t reply, she scowled. ‘For Christ’s sake, say something to me. Instead of just grunting and shrugging all the time. Say something you mean. Once. Please. Or can’t you?’

  There was another long silence and then Sinner said softly, ‘I don’t want that prick to get my body.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your brother.’

  ‘What about your body?’

  ‘I sold myself to him.’

  ‘Philip?’

  ‘He owns me. For ever. For his experiments and everything else. I made a bargain.’

  ‘My God, I thought you were with him because—’

  ‘I don’t give a toss what he does with me now. But after. …’

  ‘After?’

  ‘After I’m dead. He’s going to keep me. Probably wants to measure my bones or something. Like in that picture of his. I don’t want that. I’d rather be buried alive like your slug.’

  ‘You want a Jewish burial?’

  ‘I don’t give a toss about any Yid burial. I just don’t want him to have me for ever. I want to be buried in a hole with no name on it so he can never find me. I could run away now, but if I’m in a hole with my name on it then he’ll find me and dig me up. He’ll take what belongs to him.’ Then Sinner got to his feet. ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘Please don’t. I must go and wash, but it’s too depressing to think about you getting drunk on your own.’

  ‘Who the fuck am I going to drink with around here?’