by Tom Sharpe
‘1925 Silver Ghost,’ said the barman who had followed him over. ‘Nice condition.’
The Kommandant grunted. He was beginning to tire of the barman’s company. He moved round the other side of the car only to find the barman at his elbow.
‘You after them for something?’ the man asked conspiratorially.
‘What the hell makes you think that?’ the Kommandant asked.
‘Just wondered,’ said the barman and with some remark about a nod being as good as a wink which the Kommandant didn’t understand, the man went back into the Clubhouse. Left to himself the Kommandant finished his inspection of the car and was just turning away when he caught sight of something on the back seat that stopped him in his tracks. It was a book and from its back cover there stared impassively the portrait of a man. High cheek bones, slightly hooded eyelids, and impeccably straight nose and a trimmed moustache, the face looked past the Kommandant into a bright and assured future. Peering through the window Kommandant van Heerden gazed at the portrait and as he gazed knew with a certainty that passed all understanding that he was on the brink of a new phase of discovery in his search for the heart of an English gentleman. There before him on the back seat of the Rolls was portrayed with an exactitude he would never have believed possible the face of the man he wanted to be. The book was As Other Men Are by Dornford Yates. The Kommandant took out his notebook and wrote the title down.
By the time Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon and his party returned to the Clubhouse, the Kommandant had left and was making his way to the Public Library in the certain knowledge that he was about to learn, from the works of Dornford Yates, the secret of that enigma which had puzzled him for so long, how to be an English gentleman.
*
By the time Luitenant Verkramp left the police station that evening and returned to his flat to change he was a supremely happy man. The ease with which he had allayed the Kommandant’s suspicions, the results he was getting from the questionnaires, the prospects of spending the evening in the company of Dr von Blimenstein all contributed to the Luitenant’s sense of well-being. Above all the fact that the Kommandant’s house was still bugged and that he would be able to lie in bed and listen to every movement the Kommandant was indiscreet enough to make in his home leant a piquancy to Verkramp’s sense of achievement. Like the Kommandant, Luitenant Verkramp felt himself on the brink of a discovery that would change his whole life and transform him from merely second-in-command into a position of authority more suited to his ability. As he waited for his bath water to run, Luitenant Verkramp adjusted the receiver in his bedroom and checked the tape recorder connected to it. Before long he could make out the Kommandant shuffling about his house and opening and shutting cupboards. Satisfied that his listening device was functioning properly, Verkramp switched it off and went and had his bath. He had just finished and was climbing out when the front-door bell rang.
‘Damn,’ said Verkramp grabbing a towel and wondering who the hell was visiting him at this inconvenient moment. He went out into the hall trailing drops of bathwater as he went, opened the door irritably and was amazed to see Dr von Blimenstein standing on the landing. ‘I don’t want …’ said Verkramp, reacting automatically to the sound of his doorbell at inconvenient moments before he realized who his visitor was.
‘Don’t you darling?’ said Dr von Blimenstein loudly and opened her musquash coat to disclose a tight-fitting dress of some extremely shiny material. ‘Are you sure you don’t …’
‘For hell’s sake,’ Verkramp said looking wildly round. He was conscious that his neighbours were extremely respectable people and that Dr von Blimenstein, for all her education and professional standing as a psychiatrist, was not at the best of times overly worried about observing the social niceties. And now, with a bath towel round his middle and the doctor with whatever it was she had round her middle and top and bottom, was not the best of times. ‘Come in quick,’ he squawked. Somewhat disappointed by the reception he had given her, Dr von Blimenstein drew her coat around her and entered the flat. Verkramp hurriedly shut the door and scurried past her into the safety of his bathroom. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he shouted softly, ‘I was coming up to the hospital to collect you.’
‘I couldn’t wait to see you,’ the doctor shouted back, ‘and I thought I’d give you a little surprise.’
‘You did that all right,’ Verkramp muttered, desperately searching for a sock that had hidden itself somewhere in the bathroom.
‘I didn’t quite catch that. You’ll have to speak up.’
Verkramp found the sock under the washbasin. ‘I said you did give me a surprise.’ He hit his head on the washbasin straightening up and ended with a curse.
‘You’re not angry with me coming like this?’ the doctor enquired. In the bathroom Verkramp sat on the edge of the bath and pulled his sock on. It was wet.
‘No, of course not. Come whenever you like,’ he said sourly.
‘You do mean that, don’t you? I mean I wouldn’t like you to think I was being … well … intruding,’ the doctor continued while Verkramp, still protesting his delight that she should visit him as often as possible, discovered that all the clothes he had carefully laid out on the lavatory seat had got wet thanks to her precipitate arrival. By the time he emerged Luitenant Verkramp was feeling distinctly clammy, and quite unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. Doctor von Blimenstein had taken off her musquash coat and was lying provocatively on his sofa in a bright red dress which clung to her body with an intimacy of contour which astonished Verkramp and made him wonder how she had ever got into it.
‘Do you like it?’ the doctor enquired stretching voluptuously. Verkramp swallowed and said that he did, very much. ‘It’s the new wet look in stretch nylon.’ Verkramp found himself staring at her breasts hypnotically and with the terrible realization that he was committed to an evening spent in public with a woman who was wearing what amounted to a semi-transparent scarlet body-stocking. Luitenant Verkramp’s reputation for sober and God-fearing living was something he had always been proud of and as a devout member of the Verwoerd Street Dutch Reformed Church he was shocked by the doctor’s outfit. As he drove up to the Piltdown Hotel the only consolation he could find was that the beastly garment was so tight she wouldn’t be able to dance in it. Luitenant Verkramp didn’t dance. He thought it was sinful.
At the Hotel the Commissionaire opened the car door and Verkramp’s sense of social inadequacy, already heightened by the knowledge that his Volkswagen was parked next to a Cadillac, was increased by the man’s manner.
‘I want the brassière,’ Verkramp said.
‘The what, sir?’ said the Commissionaire with his eye on Dr von Blimenstein’s bosom.
‘The brassière,’ said Verkramp.
‘You won’t find one here, sir,’ the Commissionaire said. Dr von Blimenstein came to the rescue.
‘The brasserie,’ she said.
‘Oh you mean the grill room,’ the Commissionaire said and, still finding it difficult to believe the evidence of his senses, directed them to the Colour Bar. Verkramp was delighted to find the lights low and that he could sit hidden from public view in a high-backed booth in a corner. Besides, Dr von Blimenstein had come to his rescue and had ordered dry martinis from the wine waiter who had been looking superciliously at Verkramp’s efforts to find something vaguely familiar in the wine list. After three martinis Verkramp was feeling decidedly better.
Dr von Blimenstein was telling him about aversion therapy.
‘It’s quite straightforward,’ she said. ‘The patient is tied to a bed while slides of his particular perversion are projected on a screen. For instance if you’re dealing with a homosexual, you show him slides of nude men.’
‘Really,’ said Verkramp. ‘How very interesting. What do you do then?’
‘At the very moment you show him the picture, you also administer an electric shock.’
Verkramp was fascinated. ‘And that cures him?’ he asked.
‘I can well believe it,’ said Verkramp, whose own experiments with electric shock treatment had resulted in much the same anxiety on the part of his prisoners.
‘The process has to be kept up for six days to be really effective,’ Dr von Blimenstein continued, ‘but you’d be surprised at the number of cures we have achieved by this method.’
Verkramp said he wouldn’t be in the least surprised. While they ate, Dr von Blimenstein explained that a modified form of aversion therapy was what she had in mind for treating cases of miscegenation among policemen in Piemburg. Verkramp, whose mind was cloudy with gin and wine, tried to think what she meant. ‘I don’t quite see …’ he began.
‘Nude black women,’ said the doctor smiling across her plank steak. ‘Project slides of nude black women on the screen and administer an electric shock at the same time.’ Verkramp looked at her with open admiration.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Marvellous. You’re a genius.’ Dr von Blimenstein simpered. ‘It’s not my original idea,’ she said modestly, ‘but I suppose you could say that I have adapted it to South African needs.’
‘It’s a breakthrough,’ said Verkramp. ‘The breakthrough one might say.’
‘One likes to think so,’ murmured the doctor.
‘A toast,’ said Verkramp raising his glass, ‘I drink to your success.’
Dr von Blimenstein raised her glass. ‘To our success, darling, to our success.’ They drank and as they drank it seemed to Verkramp that for the first time in his life he was really happy. He was dining in a smart hotel with a lovely woman with whose help he was about to make history. No longer would the danger of South Africa becoming a country of coloureds haunt the minds of White South Africa’s leaders. With Dr von Blimenstein at his side, Verkramp would set up clinics throughout the republic where white perverts could be cured of their sexual lusts for black women by aversion therapy. He leant across the table towards her entrancing breasts and took her hand.
‘I love you,’ he said simply.
‘I love you too,’ murmured the doctor, gazing back at him with an intensity almost predatory. Verkramp looked nervously round the restaurant and was relieved to find that no one was watching them.
‘In a nice way, of course,’ he said after a pause.
Dr von Blimenstein smiled. ‘Love isn’t nice, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s dark and violent and passionate and cruel.’
‘Yes … well …’ said Verkramp who had never looked at love in this light before. ‘What I meant was that love is pure. My love is, that is.’
In Dr von Blimenstein’s eyes a flame seemed to flicker and die down. ‘Love is desire,’ she said. Beneath the nylon sheath her breasts bulged onto the table imminent with a motherly menace that Verkramp found disturbing. He shifted his narrow legs under the table and tried to think of something to say.
‘I want you,’ whispered the doctor, emphasizing her need by digging her crimson fingernails into the palm of Verkramp’s hand. ‘I want you desperately.’ Luitenant Verkramp shuddered involuntarily. Beneath the table Dr von Blimenstein’s ample knees closed firmly on his leg. ‘I want you,’ she repeated and Verkramp who had begun to think that he was having dinner with a volcano on heat found himself saying, ‘Isn’t it time we went?’ before he realized the interpretation the doctor was likely to put on his sudden desire to leave the relative safety of the restaurant.
As they went out to the car, Dr von Blimenstein put her arm through Verkramp’s and held him close to her. He opened the car door for her and with a wheeze of nylon the doctor slid into her seat. Verkramp, whose previous sense of social inadequacy had been quite replaced by a feeling of sexual inadequacy in the face of the doctor’s open intimations of desire, climbed in hesitantly beside her.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said starting the car, ‘I don’t want to do anything that would spoil the beauty of this evening.’ In the darkness Dr von Blimenstein’s hand reached out and squeezed his leg.
‘You mustn’t feel guilty,’ she murmured. Verkramp put the car into reverse with a jerk.
‘I respect you too much,’ he said.
Dr von Blimenstein’s musquash coat heaved softly as she leant her head on his shoulder. A heavy perfume wafted across Verkramp’s face. ‘You’re such a shy boy,’ she said.
Verkramp drove out of the hotel grounds onto the Piemburg road. Far below them the lights of the city flickered and went out. It was midnight.
Verkramp drove slowly down the hill, partly because he was afraid of being booked for drunken driving but more importantly because he was terrified by the prospect that awaited him when they got back to his flat. Twice Dr von Blimenstein insisted they stop the car and twice Verkramp found himself wrapped in her arms while her lips searched for and found his own thin mouth. ‘Relax, darling,’ she told him as Verkramp squirmed with a feverish mixture of refusal and consent which satisfied both his own conscience and Dr von Blimenstein’s belief that he was responding. ‘Sex has to be learnt.’ Verkramp had no need to be told.
He started the car again and drove on while Dr von Blimenstein explained that it was quite normal for a man to be afraid of sex. By the time they reached Verkramp’s flat the euphoria that had followed the doctor’s explanation of how she was going to cure the miscegenating policemen had quite left him. The strange mixture of animal passion and clinical objectivity with which the doctor discussed sex had aroused in the Luitenant an aversion for the subject that no electric shocks were needed to reinforce.
‘Well, that was a very nice evening,’ he said hopefully, parking next to the doctor’s car, but Dr von Blimenstein had no intention of leaving so soon.
‘You’re going to ask me up for a nightcap?’ she asked and when Verkramp hesitated went on, ‘In any case I seem to have left my handbag in your flat so I’ll have to come up for a bit.’
Verkramp led the way upstairs quietly. ‘I don’t want to disturb the neighbours,’ he explained in a whisper. In a voice that seemed calculated to wake the dead, Dr von Blimenstein said she’d be as quiet as a mouse and followed this up by trying to kiss him while he was fumbling for his key. Once inside she took off her coat and sat on the divan with a display of leg that went some way to reawakening the desire which her conversation had quenched. Her hair spilled over the cushions and she raised her arms to him. Verkramp said he’d make some coffee and went through to the kitchen. When he came back Dr von Blimenstein had turned the main light off and a reading lamp in one corner on and was fiddling with his radio. ‘Just trying to get some music,’ she said. Above the divan the loudspeaker crackled. Verkramp put the coffee cups down and turned to attend to the radio but Dr von Blimenstein was no longer interested in music. She stood before him with the same gentle smile Verkramp had seen on her face the day he had first met her at the hospital and before he could escape the lovely doctor had pinned him to the divan with that expertise Verkramp had once so much admired. As her lips silenced his weak protest Luitenant Verkramp lost all sense of guilt. He was helpless in her arms and there was nothing he could do.
4
Kommandant van Heerden emerged from the Piemburg Public Library clutching his copy of As Other Men Are with a sense of anticipation he had last experienced as a boy when he swopped comics outside the cinema on Saturday mornings. He hurried through the streets occasionally glancing at the cover with a cartouche on the front and with the portrait of the great author on the back. Each time he looked at the face with its slightly hooded eyelids and brisk moustache he was filled with that sense of social hierarchy for which his soul hankered. All the doubts about the existence of good and evil which twenty-five years as an officer in the South African Police had naturally inflicted on him vanished before the assurance that radiated from that portrait. Not that Kommandant van Heerden had ever for a moment had reason to doubt the existence of evil. It was the lack of its opposite that he found so spiri
tually debilitating, and since the Kommandant was not given to anything approaching conceptual thought the goodness he sought had to be seen to be believed. Better still, it had to be personified in some socially acceptable form and here at last, breathing an arrogance that brooked no question, the face that looked past him from the jacket of As Other Men Are was proof positive that all those values like chivalry and courage, to which Kommandant van Heerden paid so much private tribute, still existed in the world.
Once home and ensconced in an armchair with a pot of tea made and a cup by his side, he opened the book and began to read. ‘Eve Malory Carew tilted her sweet pretty chin,’ he read, and as he read the world of sordid crime, of murder, and fraud, burglary and assault, cowardice and deception, with which his profession brought him into daily contact, disappeared to be replaced by a new world in which lovely ladies and magnificent men moved with an ease and assurance and wit towards inevitably happy endings. As he followed the adventures of Jeremy Broke and Captain Toby Rage, not to mention Oliver Pauncefote and Simon Beaulieu, the Kommandant knew that he had come home. Luitenant Verkramp, Sergeant Breitenbach and the six hundred men under his command were happily forgotten as the hours passed and the Kommandant, his tea stone cold, read on. Occasionally he would read some particularly moving passage aloud to savour the words more fully. At one o’clock in the morning he glanced at his watch and was amazed that time had passed so un-noticeably. Still, there was no need to get up early in the morning and he had come to another stirring episode.
‘The pearls that George gave me sprawl, pale and indignant by my side,’ he read aloud in what he vainly imagined was an adequate impersonation of a female voice, ‘I’ve taken them off. I don’t want his pearls about me; I want your arms.’
*
While Kommandant van Heerden was finding it a wonderful relief to escape from the real world of sordid experience into one of pure fantasy, Luitenant Verkramp was doing just the opposite. Now that the sexual fantasies he had entertained about Dr von Blimenstein through many sleepless nights seemed all too likely to be fulfilled in reality, Verkramp found the prospect unbearable. For one thing, the attractions which an absent and imagined Dr von Blimenstein had held had quite disappeared to be replaced by the awareness that she was a heavily built woman with enormous breasts and muscular legs whose sexual needs he had no desire whatsoever to satisfy. And for another, the walls of his apartment were so constructed as to allow the sounds in one flat to be clearly heard in another. To add to his worries the doctor was drunk.