Ostrich Country. David Nobbs
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closed his eyes and tried to construct a half-dressed Paula in her suspenders. In vain. He tried to feel the old misery, the betrayal, the silent tears. Nothing.
He looked round the park, his oasis even in the rain. Here he was at dusk, drinking at his waterhole, leaving his Saxone hoof-prints in the wet grass. But this scene too aroused no emotion in him any more. He was cured. How sad life was.
He began to walk away, a little ashamed. You wouldn’t catch the Nawab of Pataudi hanging around a seat in Kensington Gardens.
He went into a pub and bought himself a pint of bitter. He didn’t feel like going back to Hampstead yet, if ever.
His flatlet was full of purple-sprouting broccoli. He had meant to devote the evening to it. He had bought three cookery books and had promised himself three hours’ practice a night.
His landlord, Mr Lal, had been furious. ‘What are all these good vegetables doing in my dustbins?’ he had said. ‘Don’t you know that in my country there is famine?’
So the next evening Pegasus had taken plate after plate of cooked vegetables to Mr Lal. Later that evening he had seen Mr Lal taking them to the dustbin.
He’d tried throwing them down the lavatory. It had blocked. The water had failed to run out properly after Miss Yarnold’s Thursday bath. Mr Waller had used the plunger on it, there had been a loud prolonged gurgle, and several pieces of diced parsnip had floated up into the bath. Miss Yarnold had looked embarrassed, as though she felt responsible for them. The plumber, coming to unblock the lavatory, and seeing all the vegetables, had said in surprise: ‘These haven’t hardly been digested at all.’ Mr Lal had gone steadily berserk.
It had all served to dampen Pegasus’s enthusiasm. He was beginning to fall behind. He would persist, but not tonight. He wouldn’t do his three hours tonight.
He took a large draught of beer, as if defying the world.
Simon was giving Paula dinner in his flat. He liked to give her dinner in his flat, after evensong.
‘I wish you’d let me cook for you,’ said Paula.
‘Plenty of time for that when we’re married,’ he said.
Four months. Four months before she was in his fine, manly, hairy arms. Simon knew that she wasn’t a virgin. He had forgiven her.
‘Lovely pâté, darling.’
‘A trifle coarse?’
‘I don’t think so.’
He didn’t like going to her flat and he didn’t like going out too often. Only occasionally did she manage to drag him to the pictures. He didn’t mind the films but he hated the intermissions. He was a merchant banker. Paula had rarely been to church before, but funnily enough she quite enjoyed it. Dark. Cool. Colour high up. Earl Grey Tea and Simon’s dark face bent over a sheet of paper. Small precise writing. Ink, of course.
‘Why Ogden Nash?’
‘Why not?’
‘Well I mean the whole point of Ogden Nash is the funny length of his lines. Isn’t all that lost when you put them in hexameters?’
‘But that’s the challenge. That’s the whole fun of it.’
‘I’m not criticizing. I’m just trying to get your point of view.’
‘Whatever the length of Nash’s lines I must turn each one into a hexameter. It’s a discipline. I’m not trying to reproduce his humour.’
‘No.’
‘I couldn’t, if I tried.’
‘No.’
‘Canon Mulgrave was on form tonight, I thought.’
‘Yes, very good. I wasn’t criticizing, Simon.’
‘I wouldn’t mind if you were.’
There were watercolours of hunting scenes on the walls. Simon hated hunting but liked watercolours of hunting scenes. A small thing, but irritating.
Pegasus drank on, thinking about the Goat and Thistle. She was an attractive woman. She had given him the job without references of any kind. He believed that this was because they had established an unspoken rapport. It looked a nice hotel. And he liked Suffolk. Though presumably she was married.
5
Pegasus arrived to find that he was staying not in the hotel but at Rose Lodge, a little early Victorian lodge cottage at the back of the village, on the entrance to Lord Noseby’s estate. In the car on the way over from the hotel Patsy explained that the staff quarters were full because there was Tonio, the assistant chef, living in and Bellamy the porter and Miss Coward the receptionist and part-time barmaid and also Patsy herself because her aunt had come to stay with them while her uncle was in hospital which looked likely to drag on for some time on account of his liver. Bill Gunter was Lord Noseby’s gamekeeper, but his wife Brenda was Patsy’s co-waitress, so it wouldn’t be like being with strangers.
Brenda Gunter greeted Pegasus warmly. She was a pretty woman with good sharp features, trim legs and a fine figure. She led him up the narrow stairs to his bedroom.
‘I hope this is all right,’ she said, embarrassed, turning red. ‘I was going to remove these books and toys, but I haven’t got round to it yet.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, Mrs Gunter.’
‘Brenda, please. The bathroom’s straight opposite. You’ll have breakfast here and your meals over at the hotel. Come down and have some tea when you’re cleaned up.’
‘Thank you.’
Left to himself, Pegasus examined his room. It was small, and there was just one window, looking out over a lawn surrounded by masses of roses. There were roses everywhere. The cottage was grasped in innumerable rosy hands, whose colours softened but could not hide its Victorian earnestness.
The ceiling sloped sharply to the right so that there were only about eighteen inches of headroom above the bed on the side nearest the wall. On the other side of the room, where the ceiling was higher, there was a bookcase and three boxes of toys. Pegasus could see a Monopoly set, Snakes and Ladders, stumps and a cricket bat, a lorry, a bus, a few pieces of rail. The bookcase contained Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, a large number of very worn Biggles books, and three copies of Mr Midshipman Easy.
He went across to the bathroom, apprehensive now. The hot tap was noisy. He had expected to be a part of the hotel, wrapped in its busy ordered life. Now in this cottage he seemed very unimportant, his degree counting for nothing. The late April sky was hostile and windy, with high grey clouds and patches of cold, hard blue. The silence was deafening. When a car went past it was a wound, and a plane was a hysterical gash. He hadn’t realized how much he had been looking forward to seeing the landlady, how much he dreaded meeting the husband she was bound to have.
Soap under the armpits never failed to revive him at least a little, and he felt better by the time he went downstairs for his tea, in the small kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-living-room. Brenda sat by the electric fire with her legs crossed, revealing a large amount of impersonal thigh, apparently unaware of this. Behind her was an ironing board on which stood a large pile of underclothes.
‘Bill isn’t back yet,’ she said. ‘I think the pheasants must be proving troublesome.’
‘I’m not turning a child out of his room, am I?’ said Pegasus, over his bread and jam and tea.
‘Oh no, that’s all right,’ said Brenda, reddening again, unevenly, blotchily. ‘No. You see, actually, I’m afraid our little boy was killed.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘Well it was three weeks ago. We’re over the worst now.’
‘Yes, but still … I mean, are you sure …’
‘That