Chapter 10 © Michael Kelly

PART THREE

THE VENICE OF THE NORTH

10: CHEZ FORBES

  First, though, they went to Forbes' parents' house.
  "Are you sure we'll be welcome?" said Kevin on the train.
  "Of course," said Forbes.
  "You left a rather nasty message on the answering machine."
  Forbes frowned. "Did I? When?"
  "When you were drunk the night of the date."
  "Did I really?" Forbes seemed surprised. "No matter. None of them can work the answering machine anyway. They only have it to save themselves the trauma of answering calls from the outside world."
  They disembarked at a station somewhere in the heart of Oxfordshire, caught a bus into a small village some distance away, and finally walked for a mile or so down a twisting country lane. Presently they arrived at a big old house with ivy climbing up its somewhat crumbling facade. There was a large front garden with an arbour near the stone wall in which hung a swing with a seat.
  "Yonder is the bower where I used to sit and swing as a little shaver," said Forbes fondly as he opened the gate. "I was an angelic child with a mass of golden blond curls and a divine pair of chubby dimpled knees. A kindly old gentleman who lived down the lane often used to stop by the wall and offer me sweets in return for being allowed to pat my head. I took whatever I could get. One day he took me home to see his rabbits. While I was stroking the rabbits, he started to...well, suffice it to say that whenever I see a rabbit nowadays it has a most unusual effect on me."
  They had reached the front door. Forbes rang the bell.
  "Incidentally," he said, "your name is Godwin Jessup."
  "What?"
  "I'll explain later."
  The door was opened by a woman of pallid, fragile blonde beauty with a somewhat ethereal, otherworldly look about her.
  "Forbes!" she cried in delight. "How lovely!"
  "Hello, Mother," said Forbes, giving her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. "You remember Godwin, Godwin Jessup from school. I ran into him in the village."
  "Godwin! Of course! How lovely to see you!"
  Kevin smiled uncertainly. They stepped inside into a quite elaborate replica of a hallway from a 1950s house. The phone, on a stand by the stairs, was an especially convincing piece of period detail, although the answering machine connected to it dated from two decades later, a huge piece of machinery with bulky tape reels like a computer off The Avengers.
  "You're looking well, Godwin," said Forbes' mother. "What are you doing these days?"
  "He's a librarian, Mother."
  "How nice! Well, you're just in time for dinner. Godwin will eat with us, won't he?"
  "Yes, and I was rather hoping he could stay the night here,"
  "But of course! Show Godwin into the drawing room. Grandma Palfrey's in there. I must go and tell Agnes we have a guest." She turned and ran up the stairs calling, "Agnes! Oh, Agnes!"
  "Agnes!" yelled Forbes upwards. "A gentleman caller!" He threw his head back and roared with laughter. "You poor bastard," he said to Kevin.
  Forbes took Kevin through into a drawing room from the set of a Terence Rattigan play. Sitting in a chintz-covered armchair was a wizened old woman who beamed amiably at Kevin. Forbes opened a drinks cabinet, poured two large glasses of sherry, and handed one to Kevin.
  "This is my grandmother," he said. "Do not under any circumstances attempt to talk to her."
  Forbes left the room.
  The old woman beamed at Kevin. Kevin smiled somewhat nervously back.
  "Have you come about the drains?" she asked.
  "No, I'm a friend of Forbes. We met at the holiday camp."
  "Yes," she said, "and have you noticed how tall he's getting? He puts me in mind of my brother Donald. Donald was bald, though. He read a lot of books, you see."
  Kevin nodded.
  "He had long legs, Donald. Well he had to, he played cricket. Do you play cricket?"
  "No."
  "You should do. You'd look well in cricket whites. Shows a man's legs off. I expect you go to a lot of dances?"
  "Now and again."
  "I don't blame you. If I was fifty years younger you couldn't keep me out of these jazz halls. There was none of that in my day. You were lucky if you met a man before you married him. If I was fifty years younger I could just go for a young man like you."
  Kevin gave a rather sickly grin.
  "My, you've got a cheeky grin," said Forbes' grandmother. "You put me in mind of a young Arthur Askey. My, he was a cheeky so-and-so."
  Kevin grinned. Grandma Palfrey beamed. After a while she stopped beaming and started frowning.
  "Have you come about the drains?" she asked.
  "Yes," said Kevin.
  There was a lengthy silence broken only by the sound of Kevin quickly drinking his sherry. Presently Forbes' mother came in leading or dragging a young woman by the hand.
  "This is Agnes," said Forbes' mother. "Agnes, this is Godwin."
  "Pleased to meet you," said Kevin.
  Agnes was Kevin's age or slightly older. She resembled her mother but with an even more otherworldly look. She was wearing a long white dress of a kind a Barbara Cartland heroine might have worn and had her hair tied in ribbons. She carried a rag doll. By way of reply to Kevin's greeting she gazed towards the floor and gave a secretive smile.
  "Do you like her dress?" asked Forbes' mother.
  "Yes, it's lovely."
  "She made it herself."
  "It's very nice."
  Agnes gave a brief soft titter then started to chew a thumbnail.
  "Agnes, why don't you take Godwin through to the dining room and show him his place?"
  Still gazing towards the floor in an unfocussed way, Agnes shook her head and mumbled something inaudible.
  "Honestly, Agnes!"
  Agnes fled the room.
  "You mustn't mind her, Godwin," said Forbes' mother, "she's just a bit shy around boys. Well, we may as well go and sit down, dinner will be ready in two shakes."
  She led the way into a spacious, poorly-lit dining room with a long mahogany table set for dinner. As Kevin was taking his seat a tall and very well-groomed man walked in silently and sat down at the head of the table. He had an ascetic, bony face of refined cruelty, like a Sherlock Holmes gone to the bad, albeit tinged with a long-standing melancholy.
  "Have you met Forbes' father?" said Forbes' mother. "Henry, this is Godwin Jessup, a friend of Forbes' from schooldays."
  Forbes' father stared impersonally at Kevin for some seconds.
  "Is it," he said flatly. "Is it. Now there's a thing. Godwin Jessup dining with us. How very remarkable." He poured himself a large glass of wine and then stared at Kevin while caressing the glass with a set of long and very elegant fingers which Kevin nevertheless thought would have been better suited to caressing a skull. "You're looking very well, Godwin Jessup," he intoned sepulchrally, getting a great deal of play out of the four syllables of Kevin's adopted name, "...all things considered," he concluded as though he had just seen some X-rays that suggested otherwise.
  "Godwin's a librarian now," said Forbes' mother brightly.
  "Is he. Well, it could be worse. He could be dead, for example." Forbes' father gave Kevin a feline smile. Kevin responded with the same queasy grin he'd given Grandma Palfrey when she'd told him she'd jump his bones if she was eight thousand years younger.
  Agnes came and sat down. She had abandoned the doll but was carrying a small wicker basket containing several mewling kittens. She put it down next to her, picked a kitten out of it, and started to rub it against her cheek. She glanced slyly at Kevin and then looked away startled when he met her gaze. Grandma Palfrey had already shuffled into place. "Where has Forbes got to?" muttered his mother as she brought a large soup tureen out of the kitchen. "Ah, here he is."
  Forbes had changed for dinner. He had discarded the tweed jacket and baggy corduroys he had worn at the camp. He now wore a pair of jeans ripped copiously about the arse and knees, Doc Marten boots, a Sex Pistols 'God Save The Queen' T-shirt, and a pair of improbable studded leather wristbands. He also wore an ear-ring in one ear and a large amount of mascara and had gelled his hair up into a kind of cockatoo crest.
  His mother gave no sign of noticing the transformation and merely smiled at him with a vague pleasantness. His father, however, winced visibly and squirmed slightly in his chair as if at some acute pain in his bowels.
  "Hello, Father," smiled Forbes as he sat down.
  Forbes' father merely grunted and drained his wine glass and poured himself some more.
  "Can we have some of that?" said Forbes.
  "No you may not," said Forbes' father.
  As if by some tradition there was absolute silence during the soup course. There was, at least, no conversation. There were, on the other hand, a series of horrendous sucking noises from both Grandma Palfrey and Agnes. After a time it became rather like a duet, or a duel to see who could produce the most repulsive sound. Forbes' father shuddered at each one. Often his spoon would pause en route to his mouth as he waited for the next salvo; the silences in between clearly acted on him like a form of Chinese water torture. Eventually he gave up eating altogether and drank more wine instead. The knuckles of his elongate fingers whitened around the stem of his glass as Agnes and Grandma Palfrey simultaneously finished their soup in a horrible slurping climax.
  Talk resumed with the main course, veal in some sort of sauce with potato scallops and various legumes.
  "How are things in the holiday camp business?" asked Forbes' mother.
  "I left rather under a cloud," replied Forbes carelessly. "The details may appear in the newspapers."
  "And where are you going now?" asked his father.
  "Godwin and I have planned a continental excursion," said Forbes. "However, it is all contingent upon whether we can get the necessary wherewithal together. I may have to linger around here until we do, if that's all right with you."
  "Of course, dear," said his mother. "And where on the continent were you planning to go?"
  "Amsterdam, we rather thought."
  A slight frown of puzzlement clouded his mother's placid brow.
  "Why Amsterdam in particular?"
  "The tulips, Mother."
  "Ah." This answer appeared to satisfy her.
  Kevin became uncomfortably aware that Agnes was staring at him again, no longer furtively but with a manic fixity. She was so intent on him that she kept missing her mouth with her fork and dropping food down the front of her dress. He smiled at her nervously. After a slight delay she gave her secretive, dreamy, inward sort of smile, as if responding to a private joke rather than him; simultaneously her eyes became glassy and unfocussed and she started to hum some strange, indefinably disturbing little tune.
  Grandma Palfrey was also staring at him, with a frank hostility.
  "You're a fine one, aren't you?" she said to him eventually with an accusing bitterness. "You never had to feed plumbers their dinner in my day. I blame the socialists."
  "Oh God," groaned Forbes' father, and drained his wine glass again.
  His wife smiled vaguely and trained an errant wisp of hair back behind one ear.
  "It's a pity you missed the village fete this year, dear," she said to Forbes. "The morris dancers excelled themselves."
  "Lovely," murmured Forbes.
  "The Women's Guild Players triumphed again. Mrs. Ponsonby was a highly effective Coriolanus."
  "I'm sorry I missed it."
  "There was a rather controversial decision in the marrow-growing competition."
  "Good, good."
  After dinner Forbes said, "Godwin and I will do the dishes."
  "What's all this Godwin Jessup shit?" said Kevin in the kitchen, which dated from the early 1960s.
  "A necessary deception," said Forbes after upending a bottle of cooking brandy into his throat and passing it on to Kevin. "I am forbidden to bring any of my friends from work to the house. The last such guest I brought here made a number of unfortunate faux pas. He was a very large, drug-taking brickie by the name of Beastman. He had a phenomenal arse-cleft, I recall. On sober reflection, I never should have introduced him to my parents. Can't think what possessed me. He wasn't even a suitable candidate for Agnes, I shouldn't think. He was quite urbane to start off with. 'Call me Beastman,' he said, extending a hand for my mother to shake. Unfortunately, it had a spliff in it. Still, at least he did offer her a toke. He grew steadily less civilized as the night wore on, however, culminating in his placing the fondue set, a cherished family heirloom, on his head and pretending to be a Martian. He also left a distressing amount of fecal matter in the bidet. Since then I have been specifically interdicted from bringing any of my interesting new acquaintances home with me."
  The kitchen sink was half full of fetid water and clogged up with nameless gunk. Kevin found a plunger and started to pump at the plughole.
  Grandma Palfrey came in.
  "About time too," she said to Kevin. "Earn your keep, you scoundrel."
  She took a mildewed bottle of Milk of Magnesia from a cupboard, drank half of it, smacked her lips, belched, said, "Keep an eye on him, Donald," to Forbes, and fucked off again.
  Forbes snatched up the brandy bottle once more.
  When they had finished the dishes they went through to the drawing room to find the rest of the family gathered round. Forbes' father was sitting reading the paper and Forbes' mother was sitting working on a bit of embroidery and Agnes was sitting rubbing a kitten against her cheek and Grandma Palfrey was just sitting. She turned and glared at Kevin as he and Forbes sat.
  "Look at him," she said, "making himself at home now. That's the Trade Unions for you."
  A small whimper was heard from behind Forbes' father's paper.
  Agnes glanced furtively at Kevin and her mother smiled tranquilly at him.
  "Perhaps Godwin would like the television on?" the latter suggested. "I know you youngsters can't get enough of it."
  "It's hardly worth it, is it?" said Forbes.
  "No, go on, let's put it on. Perhaps that programme about the hit parade will be on. Top of the Discs, is it?"
  Forbes reluctantly got up and pushed a large wooden cabinet mounted on wheels from a corner into the centre of the room. He opened up a pair of doors to reveal an extremely ancient television set, possibly John Logie Baird's original prototype or a very close relative. He plugged it in, fiddled with a nob, and sat back down again. Everyone stared at the screen expectantly. At first all that happened was that a succession of alarming steam-engine-like chugging noises emerged from the back of the set. After several minutes there was a high-pitched whistle and the screen slowly brightened to a milky whiteness. For a time the whiteness was all that could be seen. After several more minutes sinister inky blots began to flit around mysteriously within the white. Gradually the resolution improved until the picture had the quality of a Japanese shadow puppet play performed within a tank of milk. There was still no sound as yet.
  At this point Grandma Palfrey, who had fallen into a light doze, woke up suddenly and leaned forward to squint eagerly at the television.
  "Ooh," she said excitedly, "is Gilbert Harding coming on?"
  "Gilbert Harding will not be broadcasting tonight," said Forbes' father with icy self-control.
  "Well when's he coming back on? I like him."
  "Oh for Christ's sake," snarled Forbes' father, folding up his paper and storming from the room.
  A few moments later Forbes got up and left too. Kevin, not anxious to be left alone with the women, murmured, "Excuse me," and followed.
  Kevin followed Forbes across the hall and through another door. He found himself in some sort of study furnished with numerous books and objets d'art. Forbes' father was sitting at a desk in a leather armchair with a large glass of brandy before him.
  "All right, how much do you want this time?" he said.
  "Five hundred pounds ought to do it," said Forbes.
  Forbes' father hesitated and then took out a chequebook and a pen and started to write.
  "Try and stay away a bit longer this time," he said. "I don't suppose you'd consider taking Agnes with you?"
  "Not for a thousand," said Forbes. "Whose idea was it to let her have more kittens?"
  "I was overruled," said his father stiffly.
  "She drowned the last lot to spare them the horrors of adult life," Forbes explained to Kevin.
  Forbes' father glanced at Kevin. "Who is he, by the way? Not only is he as unlike Godwin Jessup as it is physically possible to be, but I happen to know that Godwin Jessup died in a motorcycle accident two years ago."
  "Ah," said Forbes.
  "The fact appears to have slipped your mother's mind for the moment, but I distinctly remember her attending the funeral and spending tearful hours on the phone consoling the relatives."
  "His name's Kevin," admitted Forbes, "but let's not hold that against him. He's quite harmless. I think he's been the very soul of urbanity."
  "Agnes seems quite taken with him, anyway. For his sake put him in a room with a lock on the door."
  "You think it's gone as far as that?" Forbes looked at Kevin with a nasty grin. "When Agnes's repressed passions erupt, they do so with Krakatoan force. Well, I think Mother would be pleased at the match. And perhaps Kevin is interested. How about it, you old heartbreaker? She isn't really mad or retarded, you know, according to the best medical opinion, merely strange."
  "His own inclinations wouldn't come into it." Forbes' father shuddered. "I can still see the look on the Bishop's face as I pulled her off him. If I hadn't come in just then...the consequences don't bear thinking about."
  "Perhaps you should have her neutered."
  "If I had a social conscience I would have had you both sterilized as soon as I realized what kind of people I'd joined my line to. There would still be the Dorset branch of the Palfreys, of course, but inbreeding will take care of them before too long. Speaking of which, you may be interested to know that cousin Sophie has reproduced again."
  "Really? How did this one turn out? Caul over its head? Seven fingers? I suppose another set of webbed feet is too much to hope for?"
  "Remarkably humanoid. The merest hint of a vestigial tail, but nothing it could swing from the trees with. There was the usual brief panic at birth when they couldn't find its heart, but it turned out to be skulking behind the pancreas masquerading as a liver." Forbes' father looked at Kevin sternly. "Are you interested in genetics at all, young man? You should be. There is no more pressing problem facing our country today than the elimination of reject stock such as my wife's strain from the gene pool."
  He handed Forbes the cheque and leaned back in his chair.
  "Amsterdam, is it? For the drugs, I suppose. I once toyed with the idea of becoming a heroin addict, you know," he said with a look of dreamy half-regret. "Shortly after I married your mother, in fact. Back in those days it still had a certain tone. Only available from a few sympathetic men in Harley Street. But I am squeamish about needles, and I believe it interferes with your drinking. One must choose one's poison and stick to it. Take what you want, says God, and pay for it." He gave a hollow bark of laughter. "Now get out," he said.
  Outside, Forbes waved the cheque in triumph. "I am, as you see, something of an old-fashioned remittance man," he said.
  He led the way upstairs.
  "Genetic destiny is a funny thing, isn't it?" he said. "You're probably wondering how I sprang forth from the loins of such cretins. I'm a throwback, of course. I thought I was a changeling or an alien until Great Uncle Reg turned up one day when I was ten. This would be Grandma Palfrey's nephew or cousin or something. A roaring hurricane of a man. A sailor, ex-pugilist, and sometime ore prospector. He staggered in unannounced one Christmas with a bottle of mescal, a tropical disease, and a toothless dockyard whore he'd picked up in Southampton. He tore the turkey apart with his bare hands and loafed the vicar for staring at his woman. Marvellous man. I inherited all my charm and vitality from his side of the family."
  They entered Forbes' bedroom, which contained hundreds of books and records and a blow-up sex doll in the corner. Kevin sat on the bed while Forbes started to brush his hair into a more normal configuration. Presently he came and sat on the bed next to Kevin and put his hand on Kevin's thigh.
  "You're not homosexual, are you?" he said.
  "No."
  "Me neither, really, apart from the obligatory dalliance at boarding school and with the man with the rabbits. Still, it might have helped to kill a few hours before bedtime. The funny thing is, I'm fairly certain my father is. Queer, I mean. From various unguarded allusions let slip by his contemporaries from time to time, it seems obvious to me that he married my mother as a beard, as a sop to the demands of convention and in order to satisfy a codicil in a relative's will. Take what you want and pay for it. Ironic." He exhaled and looked around the room. "Well, if you're really not queer, I suppose we'll just have to play Scrabble, then."
  "Scrabble would be best," said Kevin.



Chapter 11
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