The Hippopotamus

by Stephen Fry

  On Wednesday afternoon David and I stood on the leads above the front portico and watched the helicopter land on the South Lawn. Michael clambered out, charged forward towards the house clutching his head (clutching his wig if grubby ru­mour is to be given house-room. I’ll find out about that one day, don’t you worry) and as soon as he had safely cleared the beating rotor-blades, looked up to where we stood. David waved, Logan waved back. I waved, Logan peered then waved and pranced. A welcome. A big bouncing welcome from a big bouncing man.

  Down the wooden rungs we streamed, me gasping in David’s wake; we clattered along the old nursery passage, tum­bling down the back stairs and hurrahing into the hallway to greet him, like Jo and Amy March in the gooiest Sunday after­noon serialisation you can imagine. Your Aunt Anne, coming from the front drawing room, had won by a length and was first to be kissed. Michael, in his wife’s arms, looked up as we braked our heels into the marble and skidded to an embar­rassed halt.

  “Davey! And Tedward! Ha-ha-ha!”

  My God, you can only envy this man. Not his power and his wealth and his position, though frankly one can envy that too, but his authority and his—well, yes, his power in that sense—his power within his family and his power over his family and the great radio beams of pure sodding charisma that he gives out so unsparingly and so unceasingly, much as weightlifters and literary editors give off BO.

  Compare and contrast:

  Last Christmas, Ted is invited to Helen’s house, Helen being my second wife and the mother of Leonora and Roman.

  Ted, not being a driver, makes landfall on schedule, as ad­vised in writing and by fax to the household, at Didcot Station. Anyone there to meet him? In a pig’s arse.

  So Ted gets a cab to drive him the twelve miles. He arrives, and presses the doorbell with the tip of his plum-pudding nose, for his arms are all laden with presents.

  Nobody comes, so Ted pushes and finds that the door swings open. He heads for the drawing room, staggering under the weight of his parcels. He reaches the threshold, cheeks ruddy with festive cheer, eyes twinkling like fairy-lights. Old Ted is the Spirit of Christmas Present, Henry the Eighth in one of his good moods, Friar Tuck and Clarence the Angel all rolled into one beaming bundle. He is Mirth, Jollity, Paternal Love and Yuletide Joy. He is chestnuts roasting on an open fire, he is a curranty wassail of mulling wine and plump mistletoe. His florid beam of bonhomie promises games, cheek-pinching, larks, piggy-back rides, jokes and mincemeat merriment.

  His ex-wife, his only son, his only daughter, his only daugh­ter’s boyfriend and his only ex-wife’s new husband look up from the television, where Cilla Black is presenting the Christ­mas edition of “Blind Date,” and say:

  “Sh!”

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Have you been drinking, Daddy?”

  “Hi.”

  “God you look awful.”

  “Sh!”

  Home-is-the-sailor-home-from-sea-and-the-hunter-home-from-the-hill, I don’t fucking think.

  This was no more than the kind of loutish, graceless, lumpen reception ninety-nine fathers out of a hundred are ac­corded every day of their lives. Nothing new or surprising in that. The only response to such brute behaviour, naturally, is to get so drunk and unpleasant that you do the bastards the fa­vour of justifying their icy welcome and guarantee another just like it next time.

  Moment of whining self-pity over, let me proceed. We had left your Uncle Michael (a man who had never in his life en­tered a room without everyone in it leaping to their feet and either clustering around him like tame gazelles or jumping out of the window in fright) standing in the hall.

  “So, Davey . . . what do you hear, what do you say?”

  “The strawberry patch is absolutely bursting. I had a look with Uncle Ted last night.”

  “We shall have strawberries for pudding. Yes. A mountain of strawberries. Tedward!” Michael’s bruisingest bear-hug. “I heard.” Outstretched arms, shoulders raised, like Christ cruci­fied.

  Suddenly you could see that Christ’s stance on the cross was in fact no more than a great middle-European Jewish shrug: “I’m being crucified, my mother’s at the foot of the cross and she’s moaning that I’m not wearing a fresh loincloth. Oi!,” that kind of shrug. The kind gentiles can’t do. I took it to refer to my dismissal from the rag.

  “Ah, well,” I said (my shrug, I could see in the hall mirror, gave me a sour and petulant dowager’s hump), “it’s only a bloody newspaper.”

  “Right! Only a newspaper. That’s what I said when I sold it in ‘82. It’s only a newspaper. Mind you . . .” He broke off and looked around him.

  “So where’s Simon?”

  Annie had taken his arm. “Simon has been staying with Robbie. Tractor racing, as you very well know from the fax I sent you. He’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

  So Annie sends faxes to Michael telling him of the comings and goings of his brood, does she? I must say, Jane, that sur­prised me mightily, for I had been there in the drawing room on Monday, if you remember, when Simon languidly announced that he was staying away for the night, and Annie had hardly seemed to take it in at all. They say the only skill needed to be a financial genius is grasp of detail. Perhaps it ap­plies to parenthood too, in which case I’m a dead loss, as it’s all I can do to remember the genders, ages and names of my two.

  Everyone satisfactorily greeted and hugged, Michael hur­ried upstairs to bath and change out of his financial suit and into the familial polo-shirt and shorts. The knowledge that he was upstairs made Swafford a different house. Hard to explain how altered the atmosphere was. It was as if we had been doing nothing over the last few days but filling in. I’m a few years older than him but he is still capable of making me feel like a four-year-old. All the more stupid of me, therefore, to break the news to him so suddenly on his first evening back.

  “You want to do what?” His brows came together to form an expression which could have been either a scowl of thunderous rage or a frown of amused perplexity. In my rather watery fear, I interpreted it as the former.

  “Michael, Michael . . . it’s not . . .”

  “So now you’re some kind of hack? Some kind of . . . what is her name? Some kind of dirt-mongering Kitty Kelley? The Pri­vate Life of Michael Logan. No, no, worse than that, too tame. The Private Lives of Michael Logan. The Very Private Lives of Michael Logan. Tedward, Tedward. This is terrible.”

  Oh shit. Oh shitey-shitey-shit-shit. I spread my hands.

  “Michael, old walrus, I knew this would happen. I’ve gone and explained myself all wrong. It’s not you, I’m not interested in you. Not you per se. It’s the whole . . . the whole thing.”

  “For a poet you have a less than wonderful way with words.”

  I leaned back, flustered. The man had been so pleased to see me, so hugely and powerfully delighted. Now I had rushed in and hustled him. We were sitting alone around the dinner table, the covers having been cleared away, Annie having gone into the drawing room and Davey having bedded himself down for the night. There were strawberries and cream in us—Michael’s words are never lightly spoken—the proper old-fashioned kind of strawberries at that, late fruiting, the kind you can twist the pith out of as easily as pulling a baby carrot from compost, not the modern travesty whose leaves snap off and which taste of stale cider; there was good wine in us too and a mellow cloud of Michael’s Havana and my Rothies hanging in the air. I had thought the moment propitious.

  “Bloody hell, Michael, you know me,” I said with a winning smile.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he replied.

  “Unworthy of you. I’m not interested in gossip or scandal . . . not that there is any, I’m sure, and if there is I don’t care. I say biography, but I’m thinking as much of a kind of history, a kind of outline. You see, Michael,” I leaned forward again, “I think the two great threads of twenti
eth-century history are the Anglo-Saxon and the Jewish. It may be that next century it will be the Hispanic and the Arab, or the black and the Asian, or the Venusian and the Martian for all I bloody know, but for the last hundred years” (I was improvising madly here, of course) “the Jew and the Anglo have more or less defined the entire shape of the globe, of intellectual thought, of art, of pop­ular culture, of history, of . . . oh, I don’t know . . . of mankind’s destiny, if you will. Now, it’s not uncommon for Jews to marry out of their race, nor uncommon for an Anglo-Saxon to do so. But you and Anne, you see, you make a particularly intriguing, a particularly vivid case-study, the outlines stand out. You’re not just any Jew, you’re maybe the most powerful in Europe. Anne isn’t just any Anglo, she’s from one of the oldest families in Britain, whose ancestors have ruled, rouéd and ruinated for over a thousand years. Her mother’s connections mean there’s a spot of Russell, as in the Prime Minister and as in Bertrand, in the mix, and there’s a helping of Marlborough and Churchill too, with a side-salad of Cecils and Pagets. So your family is a union, an interweaving of the two great threads. Perhaps the tradition of Anglo-Saxon and Jewish dominance in the world is over, from Christ to Marx, Einstein, Kafka and Freud, by way of Shakespeare, Lincoln, Franklin, Jefferson and Colonel Sand­ers. Your offspring, your marriage, your family, it all becomes almost a symbol, doesn’t it? I’m not interested in whether you’ve been faithful to your wife, Michael, or what dirty deals you may have done in your time. I really think there is a most marvellous book here.”

  Fer-rankly . . .

  Michael stared at me for what seemed a week. “I’ll think about it, Tedward.”

  I smiled. “That’s all I ask.”

  “You’re staying a good long while. There’ll be time to dis­cuss later. Let’s go join Anne.”

  So we left it at that.

  Have I done right, Jane? I think he’s swallowed my story—why shouldn’t he? It’s bloody convincing—and I don’t think I’ve queered the pitch for any other developments. But I wish, I wish, Jane, my dearest of dear, dear things, that you would tell me exactly what it is I’m supposed to be looking out for.

  Give me time to stretch and pour myself another whisky and then we’ll look at Thursday.

  III

  Thursday saw what we might call the opening of the house for the summer. When I heard that others were coming, it occur­red to me that for Davey I was something in the nature of an advance guard and that the reason he was so especially pleased to have me early was that he could form a prepared alliance against any nasty grown-ups that were coming later and not be relegated to the status of Left-Out Child or Hanger-On. This was a hasty and ill-formed diagnosis, as we shall see.

  We had a conversation about people in which we found ourselves pretty much in agreement. I said that I was nervous of meeting anyone new and Davey said he was in much the same case. He remarked that it was hardly surprising we thought the same about things: we were after all, he explained, to all intents and purposes the same age.

  “You’ve gone all funny on me now, young walnut. What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m fifteen years from the cradle and you must be about fifteen from the tomb.”

  Not precisely the kind of words you expect to hear from neatly brushed and polished youth, but he has a point, of course, bis pueri senes and all that.

  The first house-guest to turn up was your chum, Patricia. My lord, Jane, there’s a pair of breasts if you like.

  She had come on her own, recuperating from a “devastat­ing” affair with Michael’s underling, Martin Rebak. You proba­bly know this. Rebak, CEO of Logan’s (it stands for Chief Executive Officer and is a sort of cross between a managing di­rector and a chairman I believe), was her man for a year: there was talk of marriage and eternal love, but then he cruelly upped and tupped a PR girl, leaving Patricia simply squelching in misery. Michael rather sportingly told this CEO that he was a cunt and a beast and he and Annie have, as it were, officially taken Patricia’s side. The CEO’s still “in place” in Simon’s words (Simon came back from his tractor racing this morning) and slightly miffed to be the recipient of Logan’s old-fashioned Mafia boss disapproval. Whether Michael’s sympathy for the devil springs from a desire in him to sauce her himself, only the Lord and yourself (probably) knows. There are rumours to the effect that Michael is a consistent and conscientious putter-about, but there are rumours about everybody. That the ru­mours are nearly always correct is neither here nor there for the moment.

  Still, what a piece. She doesn’t appear to be wearing the wil­low for her lost love, in fact she’s brighter than a bag of buttons and merrier than a gallery of grigs.

  “I remember you,” she says to me after bestowing a kiss on Podmore, I mean . . . Podmore . . . “you’re Ted Wallace! There was an article about you in the Evening Standard yesterday. You’ve just been sacked from something, haven’t you? A. N. Wilson wrote defending you and Milton Shulman said you were a disgrace to the good name of critics.”

  “As Myra Hindley is a disgrace to the good name of child-murderers.”

  “And we met twice,” she went on. “Once at a launch for something, was it a Ned Sherrin theatrical-anecdote book at The Ivy?”

  “You won’t believe this,” I said, “but I have missed every one of Ned Sherrin’s theatrical-anecdote book launches. It goes against the laws of probability, but I’ve done it. I put it down to rigorous training and self-discipline. The trouble is, you see, if you go to one, you can’t stop yourself from going to another, and another, and so on. And before you know it, you’re going to one every week. I suppose the only other solu­tion would be for Ned Sherrin to stop writing them, but that would be cheating somehow, wouldn’t it?”

  “I know! It was at the National Portrait Gallery. Portraits by children, for some charity.”

  “Ah, a dim memory is surfacing.”

  “There were all these portraits,” Patricia explained to Mi­chael and Anne. “You know, of Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher and so on, done by five-year-olds. And Ted said in a loud voice, ‘Call those paintings? Why, a modern artist could have done them.’ And then you made a fuss because you couldn’t smoke.”

  “Yes, well, not above making an arse of myself, I’d be the first to concede . . .”

  “But the first time we met was at a dinner party in 1987 in Pembridge Square.”

  She was beginning to sound like one of those “Embarrassed by Lapses of Memory?” people who advertise on the front page, bottom right-hand corner, of the Telegraph.

  “Pembridge Square? Pembridge Square? I don’t believe I know anyone who lives in Pembridge Square . . .”

  “The Gossett-Paynes.”

  “. . . except, of course, for Mark and Candida Gossett-Payne. Well, well, well. Nice to meet you again, Patricia.”

  I could see out of the corner of my eye that this is where things were going to get eggy. Davey had slid into the hallway during the latter part of the conversation and was beginning to darkle and glower dangerously. It looked as though he had de­cided to take against this spirited and charmingly high-breasted creature. He rightly guessed, I suppose, that I would rate her above him as a companion for a walk or boating trip. This is not how things were to be, however.

  “Er . . . and of course you must know David,” I said, bringing him forward.

  Her reaction was rather extraordinary, looking back. She moved forward and dropped to her knees . . . hardly necessary since she is only six inches taller than him at most.

  “David!” she said, gazing into his eyes. “I’m Patricia. We met, do you remember . . . ?”

  She went into her Mrs. Memory routine, while Davey fixed her with a liquid stare.

  “My God, but look at you now!” she cooed. “Will you . . . David . . . will you give me a kiss?”

  Well, I mean for heaven’s sake . . . as if he were a toddler or dribb
ling grandsire. He played up to it very well, I’ll give him that: a flirty look from under the lashes and a modestly pre­sented cheek. But stuff my arse with figs if she didn’t try and work the head round to a proper lip-to-lip snog . . .

  She’s your friend, Jane, and I’d give even unto half my col­lection of bow-ties to prong her where it counts, but I have to say that I’m not quite sure she’s balanced.

  We all moved into the morning room for coffee, Davey overcoming a marked inclination to simper, while we dis­cussed thoughts for the weekend. Simon trundled in politely: all he got from Patricia was a casual wave of the hand. Twig­ging to the drift of our conversation, he remarked that today was the last day of the East of England Show.

  “Really?” said Patricia in a slow drawl that betrayed such contemptuous indifference that Simon went red. She turned to Davey and asked him what he thought of David Mamet.

  “East of England Show, eh?” I said to Simon, who was standing there, polishing his toe-cap against his calf. “Sort of agricultural thing, is it?”

  “Well . . . oh well, you know . . . I’m sure it’s not very inter­esting to people who aren’t . . . very interested in that sort of thing.”

  “No?”

  “It’s very popular here, though. Round here, I mean. In Norfolk and so on.”

  “Oh ah. Sheep-dog trials and the like, I suppose?”

  “Um, not exactly . . . this is East Anglia, really. Not many sheep.”

  “Well, Norwich terrier trials perhaps. Cromer crab racing. Norfolk turkey knobbly-throat competitions.”

  “There’s rare breeds and there’s displays and stalls and some show-jumping and . . . but it’s . . . as I say, it’s not very interesting, I expect.”

  “You love it, Simon, you know you do,” his mother said. She and Michael had been in private conference in the corner. Bedroom and mealtime arrangements, I assume. She turned to me. “He’s absolutely potty about it, you know. Hasn’t missed a Show Thursday in years. I’m surprised you aren’t on your way there now, darling.”