Clubbed to Death (7 page)

‘Which is he?’ she asked.

‘His appearance is a trifle anachronistic. Rather dandyish. He sports Edwardian sideburns and wears embroidered waistcoats during the day and in the evening always a black tie.’ Elsa looked completely confused. ‘Sorry, Elsa. I mean by that a tuxedo, as I think you will probably know it. Should he call you over to him, Elsa, I advise you to stay as far away from him as possible, and at all costs, never turn your back. Unless, that is, you enjoy being pinched. Mr Fishbane is obsessed with sex and while I imagine he can’t do a great deal about it any more, poor old boy, until he’s finished his breakfast he’s almost out of control if he spies an attractive girl.’

Elsa directed at Amiss a look of desperation. He shrugged and together they went into the dining-room. One by one, the aged tottered in, each one seemingly more decrepit than the one before. Amiss made a mental note to find out what the average age of members was. To judge by his observation so far, it was somewhere in the region of eighty-seven.

Their charges proved pretty uniform in their habits. They each came in and looked expectantly at Gooseneck, who showed them to a table with great ceremony and handed them a newspaper. Amiss was not surprised to see that all the members – even the residents – had separate tables. The members of this club might be odd, but they were English: the notion of socialising at breakfast would be anathema. They sat behind their newspapers. To his surprise, very few of them took the quality papers: middle-of-the-range tabloids were the norm. Fishbane was one interesting exception. He took both the
Telegraph
and the
Sun
. Indeed, as Amiss saw with fascination, his first act on sitting down to breakfast was to open the tabloid at page three, fold it and prop it against the sugar bowl in such a way that the topless pin-up of the day was there to be looked at every time he got bored with the
Telegraph
.

Having taken the orders and observed the quality of the breakfast on offer to members, Amiss was relieved that Colonel Fagg had been allocated to Elsa rather than to him. A man who could decree that the waiters should be given a disgusting breakfast prior to serving their masters with cold ham, kedgeree, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, grilled wild mushrooms, devilled kidneys and much, much more, was a man who deserved to have his teapot emptied over his scrofulous head. It was while he was bringing a second helping of kedgeree to Fishbane that the row broke out a few tables away.

‘I asked is the haddock finnan?’ said a querulous voice.

‘I am sorry,’ said Elsa. ‘I do not understand. Could you please repeat it again?’

‘Finnan. Surely you know about finnan haddock. What’s this club coming to when a fellow can’t get a straightforward answer to a straightforward question.’

‘Girl sounds like a bloody Kraut,’ said Fagg, joining in. ‘Are you a Kraut, girl, eh? Come on, come on. Tell the truth. Are you a Kraut?’

‘A what, sir?’

‘Kraut,’ roared Fagg. ‘Boche, Hun, bloody German. Are you a bloody German?’

‘I am Swiss,’ said Elsa, backing away nervously and turning and fleeing to Gooseneck. Amiss hurriedly joined them.

‘It’s all right, Elsa,’ Gooseneck was saying. ‘Old Mauleverer is obsessed with food. I should have warned you that regularly as clockwork, whenever he stays in this club, he checks if the haddock is finnan, if the skin around the black pudding is made of hog’s intestines and so on. For your information, finnan is merely a superior variety of smoked haddock.’

‘Yes,’ said Elsa, sobbing. ‘But why does that horrible old man shout at me?’

‘I warned you,’ said Gooseneck. ‘Colonel Fagg has never quite come to terms with the end of the Second World War, I’m afraid, Elsa. He has ruled that the club should not employ anyone from a nation which fought against us. We ignore the rule and deceive him. Now dry your eyes and get back to work.’

‘And try to look Swiss,’ said Amiss encouragingly. ‘It’s eight-thirty, Mr Gooseneck.’

‘Ah, yes. Now listen carefully, Robert. Have you come across Mr Glastonbury yet?’

‘Yes,’ said Amiss cautiously. ‘I’ve seen him asleep and I’ve seen him waking up. That’s about it.’

‘Ah, then you probably have the general picture,’ said Gooseneck. ‘Now go into the kitchen and take the tray which you’ll find waiting on the table on the left and take it up to room five on the third floor.’

‘Can I go in the lift?’

‘May you, ’ corrected Gooseneck absentmindedly. ‘No. I fear you may not go in the lift.’

‘Oh, shit!’ said Amiss under his breath, beginning to turn towards the kitchen.

‘Not so fast, my fine fellow,’ said Gooseneck. ‘There’s more. When you get to room five you knock loudly and shout “Good morning, Master Boy. Here comes Nanny with your breakfast.” ’ Their eyes met: there was a brief silence. ‘“Master Boy”,’ said Amiss. ‘“Master Boy”,’ said Gooseneck.

‘“Nanny”.’

‘“Nanny”. Now perhaps you understand why it helps to have the occasional English person working here. Try explaining that to a Greek.’

‘What happens then?’ asked Amiss apprehensively.

‘All plain sailing after that,’ said Gooseneck. ‘He will call, “I’m awake, Nanny”. If he doesn’t, you go through the drill again until he does. Then you go in and by the time you’ve arrived at his bedside, he will have acquired a dim grasp of where he is. You then revert to the norm and say, “Good morning, sir”. It’s perfectly simple, really.’

As Amiss placed the tray on the table beside Glastonbury’s bed, he quickly sized up the room. Window wide open, no curtains and a narrow iron bedstead that looked no more comfortable than the one he had himself. Otherwise, the room was quite pleasant. An armchair, desk, a couple of straight chairs and other bedroom furniture were all Victorian. On the wall there were a few decent water-colours of the English countryside and in the far corner, several framed group photographs. Glastonbury was clearly not a scholar. Out of the corner of his eye Amiss could see that the single bookshelf seemed to contain mainly school stories and adventure yarns. Poor old devil, thought Amiss, as he fussed around the old man, removing dish-covers, undoing the napkin, helping him settle himself upright. His compassion intensified when he saw the other inhabitant of the bed – a small, shabby teddy-bear.

‘Thank you,’ said Glastonbury. ‘Thank you. Now you’re new, aren’t you? Aren’t you? I haven’t seen you before, I don’t think. Who are you?’

‘Robert, sir.’

‘Ah! English chap then. Jolly good, jolly good. Don’t get many of them any more. Can’t think why.’

‘Would there be anything else, sir?’

‘No, no. Thank you.’ Glastonbury gave him a vague smile of great sweetness and then fell upon the vast mound of ham and eggs. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

Amiss was stunned by the courtesy and curiously uplifted to find that not everyone in this establishment was like Colonel Fagg. He returned to his dining-room duties in a state bordering on good humour.

8

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‘Sometimes I think I’m becoming institutionalised,’ wrote Amiss to Rachel a week later. ‘I’m forming habits and staking claims to little pieces of territory. Sunil has shown me places in the club where the members rarely go and where, therefore, it’s safe to read or write or sleep as long as you wear your uniform and can pretend to be doing something vaguely official if someone comes in.

‘I wait at breakfast every morning, including weekends, when only the long-term residents get fed. I’ve graduated to serving at lunch-time also: some even newer employee has been put in charge of the bar. In the afternoon I attend to the needs of the inhabitants of the Smoking Room and the gallery. Three or four nights a week I also wait at dinner. I’m known to be keen to earn extra money on overtime, so I volunteer for everything and I get most of it because – wait for it – I am prized! I am good-humoured, adaptable and I can understand instructions. I am therefore bliss for poor old Gooseneck, who this week has already suffered five losses. Elsa departed because she couldn’t take Fagg’s oft-repeated loud muttering of “Swiss maybe, but Swiss-Kraut certainly”; two male Chinese took umbrage when he denounced them as Nips; an observing Hindu became revolted when Mauleverer, an occasional resident, subjected him to intense cross-questioning about whether the liver was from a Dutch calf and was being served sufficiently rare; and a delicious-looking Filipino, who strayed too close to Fishbane at breakfast, received a pinch which made her hysterical. Never a dull moment in this establishment. Despite my many and varied duties I have quite a lot of free time and this is where the ritual sets in. Nine-thirty to ten-thirty, stroll in St James’s Park, having, I hasten to say, changed out of my uniform. I may not suffer much from
amour propre
, but I’m fucked if I’m prepared to run the risk of running into people from my past life while clad as a bellhop. Return and change into uniform. Ten-thirty to eleven-thirty, read in the Card Room, and then off to staff lunch and work.

‘Afternoon duty is quite pleasant: I can usually get quite a lot of reading done in the library because there’s little activity on the gallery after three o’clock. Glastonbury is usually asleep – in fact, apart from mealtimes, he seems to be rarely awake. Fagg and Blenkinsop gossip and doze, sometimes joined by Fishbane, and the occasional non-resident looks in for afternoon tea. I’m off duty at five and staff supper is at seven.

‘On the nights I’m on duty 1 work from seven-thirty to nine-thirty. I turn up for staff meals but I don’t really eat at them because young Pooley is so guilty about what he’s condemned me to that he keeps on having parcels of goodies delivered. I share the spoils with Sunil, to whom I’ve spoken vaguely about an eccentric rich friend.

We are waxing fat on a diet of Fortnum & Mason’s cold meats, game pies, smoked fish and cheese. It’s amazing the difference it makes. He even puts in the occasional bottle of claret. I have absolutely no conscience about taking this stuff from Ellis, who incidentally has shunted Plutarch off to a luxurious cattery and is still wrestling at getting the hairs out of the carpets. We’re meeting tomorrow. I’ve got a lot to tell him and Jim and by then they should have seen our chairman.

‘When I have evenings off, I tend to stay in the club lurking in the shadows reading: I am disinclined to meet friends. It’s too difficult to explain what I’m doing and I can’t face lying. Nor do I really want to go home. I only get depressed when I’m there, thinking that you should be there too. “Self-pity”, I hear you cry, all the way from New Delhi, so I won’t indulge in that any more. Oh yes. Speaking of not indulging, you’ll be pleased to hear that this place is conducive to staying off the ciggies. Lots of the old boys smoke and nobody objects, so I don’t get into my anti-anti-smoking mood.

‘There is another unexpected bonus with this job. I had decided when in Rome to do as the Romans or in this case, more appropriately, when in Babylon do as the Babylonians – no, I don’t mean I’m having orgies in the servants’ quarters, or letting Gooseneck have his way with me. What I’m doing is getting stuck into erotic literature and pornography: the club has a fascinating, not to say incredible, collection, and I can’t imagine the opportunity is likely to arise again. I haven’t quite grasped what the acquisitions policy is here. Ffeatherstonehaugh’s does not have a librarian. Mr Fishbane, he whom no woman should approach before he has had his breakfast, is the driving force behind the library committee. He is not a man of esoteric tastes: his seem to accord with those one would associate with a long-distance lorry driver: lots of straight girlie magazines, only the more common perversions, e.g., mild S&M. If my deductions are correct, Fishbane has been in charge of buying only for about three years, because for the previous three the magazines being ordered were very rum indeed. I can’t quite imagine where they were getting them from. Job lots from Amsterdam by the look of them. They’re what you might call a very catholic collection: flagellation, paedophilia, coprophilia (sorry, I forget you’re not an
aficionado
– the sexual dimension of shit — J. Joyce had leanings that way), along with the usual nuns-and-donkeys sort of stuff. In fact, a police raid on ffeatherstonehaugh’s would lead to a great deal of embarrassment. However, that buying policy seems to have existed for only a very short period and to have been an aberration, as indeed is Fishbane’s reign. For up to then, even if the old buggers in the club were lewd, they had a certain style. The erotic material they bought in had literary pretensions. Indeed, the club’s collection of erotica is very fine indeed. Probably the most extensive in this country outside the British Library.

‘I’m zapping through old classics from de Sade and Fanny Hill right through to William Burroughs and Henry Miller – all the dirty books one has heard of but never read. Though most of them are to my boring straight tastes profoundly unerotic, the process is interesting none the less and I have a new hero: the Earl of Rochester. Have you come across him? A seventeenth-century libertine who wrote excellent satirical verse (he’s the author of the famous epigram about Charles II: “God bless our good and gracious king/Whose promise none relies on;/Who never said a foolish thing,/Nor ever did a wise one” – one of the reasons I like him so much is that allegedly he recited it extempore to the king) and some great, great poems about sex. How about this?

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms;

Both equally inspired with eager fire,

Melting through kindness, flaming in desire;

With arms, legs, lips, close clinging in embrace,

She clings me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.

The nimble tongue (Love’s lesser lightning) played

Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed

Swift orders that I should prepare to throw