Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks Read online

  Tread on the wrong corn, and they’ll all be off next door again in unscalable dudgeon, on the blower to Geoffrey Howe and making plans to build an unpermitted heliport on the roof of the unpermitted Gothic butlerdome.

  Which brings me to the Saudis on the corner. Moved in last August when the hitherto resident shirt manufacturer retired to Marbella, but not a lot of social contact since, couple of curt nods in September, a brief smile in October, I think it was, when a cat got run over and everybody came out to wonder which of us ought to peel it off the road (guess who drew the short straw), but that was only with him. Nothing from his wife, if that’s what he keeps inside the black sheet I occasionally spot nipping in and out of his Mercedes. Just a pair of eyes over the veil, could be anybody in there, they might be gay for all I know.

  Anyway, we’ve asked them in for Boxing Day, too.

  How are they going to get on with the Paramounts? I suppose they’re all Muslim, so there’s an ice-breaker, but is that going to be enough, I ask myself? ‘Welcome, Mr and is it Mrs Ibn Ben Cornerhouse, I don’t think you know the four Paramounts, did you realize you’re all Muslims, there’s a turnup for the book, ha-ha-ha, what a small world, do you have sprouts with the turkey in your country to commemorate the birth of the Prophet, I’ve always wondered, haven’t I, darling, I don’t think you know Mrs Coren, by the way. No, Chief, just the one, ha-ha-ha . . .’

  The thing is, there are clearly different varieties of Mohammedan. Especially when it comes to wives. The Mrs Paramounts are all voluptuous, cheery, extrovert, whereas Mrs Ibn Ben Cornerhouse goes out in a shroud and avoids any eye-contact. There may even be half a dozen of her across the road, no way of telling, one length of black lagging is much like another, what do I do if six Mrs Ibn Ben Cornerhouses turn up and refuse to be distinguished, let alone introduced?

  I bet none of them eats prawn dip, either. We shall have to watch the dietary strictures, or there could well be bloodshed. You know Arabs, very short fuses, plus great store set by social protocols and host-incumbency, my house is your house, all that: we shall probably have to get in sheep’s eyes or something to pass round, and how can you tell if they’re any good or not, I’m not tasting them, that’s for sure, we shall just have to rely on the good name of Sainsbury’s, they couldn’t afford to put duff optics on their shelves, keeping the Arabs sweet is the only edge they’ve got over Marks and Sparks.

  It’s just occurred to me that Muslims don’t drink. I think. There can be no other excuse for mint tea. I bet the Paramounts knock it back, mind, I still remember that week-long summer party, they had people laid out three-deep on their gravel drive, you don’t get that way on Tizer, it’s definitely a different branch, I was right. I hope to God they’re not incompatible, I seem to recall something about Sunnis and Shi-ites, that’s all I need on Boxing Day, big Muslim punch-up in the front room and the Ibn Ben Cornerhouses sprinting home to start lobbing mortars on the house next door.

  I’ve just remembered dancing. Not that we plan it, it is simply that there is a gramophone, all right musicentre, we like to have a bit of background Albinoni to start off with, but after the first few bottles of Old Sporran have gone about their eviscerating business, someone or other of the regulars fishes out some warped Dixieland relic of my jeunesse d’Ory, lurches the pick-up arm onto it, and grabs someone else’s better, or occasionally worse, half in that desperate Yuletide bid for a seasonally-endorsed grope, until, before very long, those unpartnered may stand quietly by the window, tactfully ignoring the Saturnalia at their backs, and watch the tiles coming off the roof.

  I do not know how this will go down with Mrs Ibn Ben Cornerhouse.

  Yes I do.

  God knows how they order these things at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They probably have a book. In The Event Of A Dusky Husband Turning Up Mob-handed, The First Wife Receives A Cheese Football From The Host’s Elder Unmarried Son, The Second Wife Has The First Dance With The Hostess’s Youngest Brother From Lowestoft (Except During Ramadan), The Third Wife Is Shown The Host’s Collection Of Great British Beermats, The Fourth . . . They must be up to their eyes in small etiquettular print, no wonder they didn’t notice Galtieri’s lads trundling their boats out. Put an inadvertent hand on a shapely bum at the annual FO tea-dance and you could be looking down the wrong end of an oil embargo in less time than it takes to tell.

  Thinking of which, it occurs to me that I do not know Ibn Ben Cornerhouse’s line of country, but it must, surely, be oil, too, in which case he and Paramount could well be at extremely nasty loggerheads. How do Saudi Arabia and Nigeria get on? Did they meet in the qualifying round of the World Cup, and if so, who won? Do they even recognize one another? Am I letting myself in for some fearful United Nations scene, all the wives snapping their reticules shut on a single prearranged signal, chucking their crisps in the air, and storming out en masse to draft Stern Notes to the premises across the road?

  Words cannot adequately encompass (I have tried Roget, but he obviously lived in a different street) the bleak apprehension with which I face the season of goodwill currently rumbling towards me. I don’t even have room left, fortunately, to tell you about the gown manufacturers, on the other side of us from the Paramounts, who think that Menachem Begin is an appeaser. They haven’t met the Ibn Ben Cornerhouses yet.

  They will on the 26th, though. I suppose there is nothing for it but to keep the fingers crossed and hope against hope for the best.

  It is, after all, Christmas.

  41

  Just a Gasp at Twilight

  Joseph Califano Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health, yesterday called for a global campaign to end cigarette smoking by the year 2015.

  Daily Telegraph

  It was December 31, 2014; and it was nearly time. My companion and I hobbled out onto the roof terrace, fetched up wheezing against the low balcony wall, and gazed silently out over winter-black London. A mile or so away, the trusty old face of Digital Ben read 11:36.

  ‘Twenty-four minutes,’ I said.

  ‘The fags are going out all over Europe,’ murmured Watson. He coughed for a while, and I watched the dislodged tiles detach themselves from the nearby roofs and slide into the chill darkness. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

  ‘True, old friend,’ I said.

  ‘There is a clean fresh wind blowing across the world,’ said Watson, ‘sod it.’

  I took out a kitchen-roll tube stuffed with Admiral’s Greasy Black Shag, and turned it lovingly in my ochre fingers. Watson stared at it for a minute or two, rocking back and forth on his frail heels as he struggled for breath.

  ‘What’s a nice chap like you doing with a joint like that?’ he said, at last.

  ‘Ah, the old jokes, Watson!’ I cried, with such atypical energy that I swear my lungs twanged. ‘When shall we look upon their like again?’ I hefted the giant fag, and the cold starlight caught the maker’s hand-set monogram. ‘It was the last one my little man underneath St James’s made for me before they took him away. It was his coup d’adieu, cobbled cunningly from ten thousand dog-ends, bonded with vintage dottle, the final defiant gesture of a genius, made even as the Health Police hobnails clattered on his cellar steps! I have been saving it for the big occasion. Have you a Vesta?’

  Watson reached into his waistcoat pocket, sweating from the effort.

  ‘It could kill us both,’ he said.

  ‘Something has to, old friend,’ I replied.

  ‘God knows, that’s true,’ nodded Watson. ‘It has long been my philosophy. I once gave up, you know; in 1988. For almost thirty-two minutes. And during all that time, the only thing I could think of was: Suppose I were to be knocked down by a bus? The sacrifice would have been utterly in vain. I am, I think, a connoisseur of irony.’

  ‘I, too,’ I said. ‘I have toyed with abstinence myself, and felt: Suppose a rabid fox were to fix his fangs in my shin?’

  ‘Suppose thermonuclear war were to break out?’

  ‘
Suppose some errant meteorite . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Watson.

  He lit up, and we choked for a while.

  ‘There aren’t many of us left, you know,’ hawked Watson, after a bit.

  ‘Tubby Stitchling’s wife went last week,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Emphysema.’

  ‘Ah. I’d only known her as Mrs Stitchling, I’m afraid. I had a sister-in-law called Pondicherry once, though.’

  I stared at him through the encircling fug. It was always possible that smoking induced brain-rot. Over the years, research had indicated that it induced everything, despite some intermittently heartening reports from various tobacco companies that it cured baldness, enhanced virility, prevented foot odour and made you taller.

  ‘I think it must have been a joke of her father’s,’ continued Watson, after his fit had subsided. ‘He was in the FCO, you know. He was a smoker’s smoker. Put in for a posting to India solely on account of the stogies.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘They were the world’s most advanced smoke. Dark green, as I recall. If you left them out in the sun too long, they could blow your hand off. He was dead in six months.’

  ‘Lungs, eh?’

  Watson shook his head.

  ‘Dizzy spell. Got up one morning, lit his first of the day, inhaled, and fell on his borzoi.’

  ‘They’re sensitive animals,’ I said. ‘Easily startled.’

  ‘Had his throat out in a trice,’ said Watson. ‘A fearfully messy business.’

  ‘I can well imagine,’ I said.

  ‘There was tar everywhere.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Smoking tragedies always dogged Tubby’s family,’ gasped Watson. He watched fallen ash burn through his dickie, waving a thin hand feebly at the spreading char. ‘D’you suppose it was some kind of ancient curse?’

  ‘What else could explain it?’ I said. I stared into the empty night, and my eyes filled with tears. It was good shag, all right. ‘So many dead. Do you remember the night old Bob Crondall bought it?’

  ‘As if it were yesterday, old man. A chap with his experience, an eighty-a-day wallah, you wouldn’t have thought he’d have been caught out like that, would you? Pottering down the M4, lights up, fag drops in lap, old Bob gropes frantically at the incinerating crotch, next thing you know he’s jumped the reservation and swatted himself against an oncoming juggernaut. They found him in the glove compartment, you know.’

  ‘Fate,’ I said. ‘If it’s got your number on it, old man, there’s no point trying to duck.’

  ‘Just a matter of luck,’ nodded Watson. ‘My wife died peacefully in bed. Went to sleep, never woke up.’

  ‘Wincyette nightie, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Right. Went up in a flash. Roman bloody candle.’ He laughed, a short wry laugh, and went into spasm. When he’d recovered, he said: ‘The ironic thing was, she was trying to give up at the time. She was using one of those filter jobs designed to wean you off the weed. The holder was still clenched between her teeth when they found her. It took three morticians to prise it loose.’

  I blew a thick grey doughnut, and watched it dissolve.

  ‘The risks in giving up are enormous.’ I said. ‘I don’t think you ever knew Maurice Arbuckle?’

  ‘Only by reputation,’ said Watson.

  ‘He used to get through a hundred a day. Gave up just like that, one morning, and was dead an hour later. Choked to death on a Polo.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Tried to inhale.’

  We fell relatively silent; only the faint crepitations beneath our vests, like the sound of distant mopeds, disturbed the night. The far clock said 11:50.

  ‘They never tried to ban Polos,’ muttered Watson bitterly, at last. ‘You never hear the figures for tooth cancer.’

  ‘Conspiracies,’ I said. ‘Big business interests, powerful dental lobby, all that.’

  Watson sighed; then, faintly, smiled.

  ‘I wonder if old Sam Wellbeloved is looking down and laughing, now,’ he murmured.

  ‘Bound to be. Anyone who takes a pinch of snuff and blows himself through a plate glass window on the 8.14 has to be able to see the funny side of things.’

  Watson sighed again, a sort of low sad rattle, and leaned over the balcony.

  ‘It was all such fun, old chap,’ I said, sensing his mood, ‘wasn’t it? The cheery smoke-filled parties, the first deep drag of the new dawn, those happy post-coital puffs in the days when we still had the wind? The new brands, the bright ads, the racing-cars and free-fall parachute teams, the vouchers, the gifts? And what shall we do now, old friend?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Watson?’ I said.

  And then, far off, the great clock struck midnight. I reached out, and prised the smouldering stub from my old companion’s rigidifying fingers, and took my final drag. It was what he would have wanted. In my place, he would have done the same.

  Sentiment is sentiment; but waste is waste.

  42

  For Fear of Finding Something Worse

  Eccentric, yes, emotionally repressed, possibly, yet courageous, resilient, cunning, ruthless and tender by turns, both passionate and aloof, fiercely loyal, sometimes funny, sometimes maudlin, religious, the English nanny did more to forge the influential men of England than any other single factor. It will be a generation before we truly discover exactly what we have lost with her passing.

  The Lady

  My first nanny was just Nanny. I never knew her real name. Perhaps none of us did.

  She joined our household in that soft autumn of 1939, when I was scarce fifteen months old, an engaging toddler, I am told, much given to projectile vomiting and opening frogs with a rusty hacksaw blade to get at their hopping mechanism, a practice from which nanny very soon weaned me by the cunning little trick of batting me with a fence-post whenever the gin was on her.

  My parents never interfered. My father was just Father. I never knew his real name. All I knew was that he was something in the City. Every morning he would go off in his silk top hat, his astrakhan coat, his high button boots, and the white stick he had purchased as a hedge against conscription. My mother, the younger daughter of the Earl – he was just Earl, I never knew his real name – would then, having thrown his pyjamas after him and slammed the door, retire to her boudoir and address herself to the needlepoint which was her passion. I hardly ever saw her, but from time to time, during the day, one would catch sight of the little embroidered toiles she would slide under the boudoir door, showing men in various stages of amputation.

  My early upbringing was left to Nanny. Nanny doted on me. She had, I later learned, like so many of her generation lost her only true love in the Great War, a nursing sister who had run off at Mons with a Prussian dragoon who had broken into her tent in search of something to wipe his bayonet on. After the Armistice, they opened a delicatessen in Bremen, from where, every Christmas, Nanny would receive a small ochre knackwurst, tied with a pink ribbon, but no message. With the outbreak of World War Two, this tendresse not unnaturally ceased, and Nanny’s first Christmas with us was, in consequence, a very dark time. She drank heavily, and brought home the worst kind of waitress from a number of ABCs.

  Doubtless, it was from her that I caught my deep and abiding hatred of the Hun. Every morning, for example, as she walked my perambulator in Hyde Park, she would suddenly jam on the brake and hurl herself into the ack-ack gunpits, laying about her with a small yet weighty cosh and frequently rendering several gunners senseless, on the grounds that they had shot nothing down the previous night. The Military Police never pressed charges, however, preferring to incorporate Nanny’s forays into the Royal Artillery’s training schedules, since there was no greater test of the men’s alertness. Eventually, the battery was compelled to set up a Lewis gun beneath the Achilles statue, in the hope of bringing Nanny down before she crossed Park Lane, but she could jink faster than a wing three-quarter and the closest
they ever came was to blow off my rear wheel and put three rounds into Panda.

  By now it was the spring of 1941, and we were unhappily forced to leave London, partly because of the Blitz (our house was struck on three consecutive nights by shells from Hyde Park), but mainly because the military authorities had grown suspicious of my father’s disability since, whenever a siren sounded, he would take off at top speed, dragging his unfortunate guide-dog behind him, and threshing his way to the head of the shelter-queue with his luminous cane. So, in early May, with my father now in a ginger beard and his two legs enclosed in lengths of guttering which he would tap fiercely with his pipe, crying, ‘My God, I’d teach those Nazi swine a thing or two if only I had my pins!’, we left for the peace of rural Hampshire.

  Nanny did not accompany us, preferring to bivouack on Hampstead Heath with a pitchfork in earnest hope of a German invasion, so, at the age of three, I was introduced to Nanny Phipps.

  Nanny Phipps was what I believe is termed ‘the salt of the earth’, a bucolic Catholic fundamentalist who considered Pius XIII a Lutheran bolshevik. It was she who inculcated me into religion by waiting for me in dark corners of our rambling rented parsonage and sandbagging me with a four-pound crucifix. She would then drag me to the bathroom and baptize me by total immersion in a tub of fresh blood, recounting as she did so, in an undulating Wessex chant, the parting noises of some of the more mutilated martyrs. This took place every night during our first three months of residence, only coming to an abrupt end when two inspectors from the Ministry of Food, spotting the mound of slaughtered lambs which by this time had risen above the encircling privet, called at the house on suspicion of black marketeering.

  Unfortunately, upon hearing the bell and spotting the official van through the lancet of his attic bolt-hole, my father, fearing the press-gang, panicked, knotted his sheets together, abseiled down the rear face of the house, and set off on his rigid gutter-pipes across the fields in a terrible clanking lurch. I watched him go from the wall opposite my nursery window on which Nanny Phipps had hung me by my wrists for mortification, powerless to help or follow. Crows rose, cawing, as he hurtled jerkily across the dwindling furrows. I never saw him again.