Complete Short Stories (11 page)

It is one of the beauties of Majorcan story-telling that the point is never laboured.
Don Pedro counted on my knowledge of local affairs to supply the details which he omitted. The gunmen, being newcomers to the district, were unaware that in the ruined Moorish Tower on the rock pinnacle high above the coast road, lives a Hermit, who just before dawn every morning – Sundays and important feasts excepted – locks his great nail-studded Hermitage door, scrambles through the evergreen
oak glades and olive groves, crosses the road close to the
mirador
and climbs down by the smugglers’ track to his boat-house at the bottom. There he says his matins, attends to his lobster pots in season, collects driftwood and sometimes gathers samphire from the cliff face, or caper buds for pickling, and goes fishing with rod and line. He is a very tall, strong, quick-tempered man, formerly
a sailor, and disdains to wear shoes or sandals. Pilgrims visit his Hermitage often, to leave little gifts when they know he will be at home. They kiss the rope that girds his rough brown habit and sometimes consult him about difficult matters with which they do not wish to trouble the parish priest who, they say, is a good man but inexperienced in the ways of the world.

‘Come, friend Pedro,’
I said. ‘You have recovered from your lameness. Up with you to the
mirador
! Lean right over and you will be able to tell Doctor Guasp from what a fall you were saved. Here is my arm.’

‘A thousand thanks, friend. If you will pardon me, I can dispense with help.’

He went leisurely up the steps to the
mirador
and leaned over the parapet with bowed head, humbly making his peace with the energetic
Saint whom he had insulted.

I WAS MORE
amused than shocked when I first realized that I was a matchbox and pencil pocketer: it seemed a harmless enough form of absent-mindedness. Why matchbox and pencil pocketers – the aberrancy is quite a common one – should not also take cigarette lighters and fountain pens, no psychologist has been able to explain; but in practice they never do. Another odd thing about them
is that, however slow and stupid on other occasions, they are quick as lightning and as cunning as weasels when they go into action.

‘Sign, please!’ the errand boy would call at the door of my flat in Hammersmith Mall, and when I came out, fumbling half-heartedly in my pockets for a pencil, he would offer me his. Then, after scribbling my name on the chit, I would perform some ingenious sleight-of-hand
– but exactly how and what must remain unknown, because I never caught myself at it. All I can say is that he went off whistling, convinced that the pencil was back behind his ear, while I retired indoors with a clear conscience; and that, when I emptied my pockets before going to bed, the nasty chewed stub of indelible was there, large as life, along with other more handsome trophies.
As for matches: I would stop a stranger in the street, politely ask for a light, strike a match on the box he offered and, after hypnotizing him (and myself) into the belief that I had returned it, thank him and stroll slowly off. I often wonder what a film-take of the incident would have shown.

Pencils are cheap, matches are cheaper still. My friends remained seemingly unaware of my depredations,
or at any rate never accused me of them, until one Easter I went to stay at Kirtlington near Oxford with one F.C.C. Borley, a Wadham don who lectured on moral philosophy and was an expert on French literature and wine.

Borley was youngish, with an unwholesome complexion, lank hair, and so disagreeable a voice and manner that he literally had not a friend in the world – unless one counted me,
and neither of us really liked the other. His fellow-dons couldn’t stand him, though he had a well-stored and accurate mind, praiseworthy loyalty to the College, and no obvious vices – except to dress like a stage-Frenchman and always to be in the right. He
gave them the creeps, they said, and agreed that his election had been a major disaster. I had met him by chance on a walking tour in Andalusia,
where I nursed him through an illness because nobody else was about; and now I was helping him with the typescript of a book he had written on drinking-clubs at the English Universities. I never pretended to compete with him in vintage scholarship or to share his rhetorical raptures over such and such a glorious port-wine year – Borley always chose to call it ‘port wine’ – or the peculiar and
Elysian bouquet of this or that little known
Château.
And never let on that, in fact, I considered port primarily an invalid’s drink and preferred an honest Spanish red wine or brandy to the most cultivated French. The only subject on which I claimed to be knowledgeable was sherry, a wine singled out for praise in the Fellows’ grace at Wadham, and therefore not to be lightly disregarded by Borley,
even though it meant nothing to his palate.

He had a Savoyard chef called Plessis whose remarkable ragouts and crêmes and soufflés these elegant wines served well enough to wash down. Out of respect for Plessis I never contradicted Borley or listened with anything but close attention to his endless dissertations on food, wine, the French classics and eighteenth-century drinking habits. In exchange,
he accepted my suggested amendments to his book readily enough wherever style, not fact, was in question; but that was because I had left him his affectations and perverse punctuation and everything else that gave the book its unpleasant, personal flavour, and concentrated merely on cutting out irrelevancies and repetitions and taking him up on the finer points of grammar.

Over coffee and brandy
one evening, when our work on the book was all but finished, he suddenly unmasked his batteries. ‘Fellow-drinker,’ he said – he had a nauseating habit of calling people ‘fellow-drinker’ at table and ‘fellow-gamester’ at cards – ‘I have a crow to pluck with you, and what could be a more suitable time than this?’

‘Produce your bird,’ I answered, and then in a pretty good imitation of Borley himself:
‘When we’ve plucked, singed and gutted it like good scullions, and set aside the tail-feathers for pipe-cleaners, we’ll summon Plessis from his cabinet and leave him to the fulfilment of his genius. I have no doubt but he’ll stuff the carrion with prunes soaked in rose-water, chopped artichoke hearts, paprika, and grated celeriac – then stew gently in a swaddling of cabbage-leaves and serve
with hot
mousseron
sauce… What wine shall we say, fellow-drinker?
Maître Corbeau
, 1921? Or something with even more body?’

But Borley was not to be side-tracked. ‘Frankly,’ he continued, jutting out his pointed chin with its silly black imperial, ‘it goes against my conscience as a host to make the disclosure, but
in vino veritas,
you know: you’re a damned thief!’

I flushed. ‘Go and count your
German-silver teaspoons, check your
forged fore-edge paintings, send Mme Plessis upstairs to go through my linen in search of your absurd Sulka neck-ties. There’s not an object in this house that I’d accept as a gift, except some of your sherry – though not all of that. Your taste in furnishings and
objets d’art is
almost as bad as your manners, or your English grammar.’

He was prepared for some
such come-back and met it calmly. ‘Yesterday, friend Reginald Massie,’ he said pompously, ‘you stole every match I possessed. Today I sent to the grocer for another packet of a dozen boxes. Tonight there’s only a single box left, that one on the mantelpiece… Just Heavens, and now that too has disappeared! It was there two minutes ago, I’d stake my reputation – and I never saw you leave your chair!
However, nobody’s come in, so pray hand it over!’

He was trembling with passion. Caught on the wrong foot, I began emptying my trouser-pockets, and out came the matchboxes; but, I was glad to see, no more than seven of them.

‘There,’ I said, ‘count! You lie; I did not take the whole dozen. Where are the other five? I believe you’re a match-pocketer yourself.’

‘You were courteous enough to change
for dinner,’ he reminded me. ‘The rest of the loot will be found in your tennis trousers. And now for the pencils!’

I felt in my breast-pocket and pulled out eight or nine. ‘The perquisite of my profession,’ I explained lightly. ‘Think of the trouble I’ve taken in correcting your illiterate English, not to mention your more than sketchy Spanish. I needed a whole fistful of pencils. You’d probably
have had them all back before I left.’

‘Tell me, how often in your life have you either returned a borrowed pencil or bought a new one?’

‘I can’t say off-hand. But once, at a Paddington book-stall, I remember…’

‘Yes, felonious Massie, I can well picture the scene. Just before the train started you asked the attendant to show you an assortment of propelling-pencils, drew your purse, made a couple
of passes and, hey presto, levanted with the whole tray.’

‘I have never in my life pocketed a propelling-pencil. That would be theft. You insult me.’

‘It’s about time someone did, fellow-drinker! What a pettifogging rogue you are, to be sure. Convinced that nobody’s going to haul you into Court for the sake of a penny pencil or a ha’penny matchbox, you lose all sense of decency and filch wholesale.
Now, if you were to set your covetous eyes on something only a little larger and more valuable, such as, as – let us say this corkscrew –’

‘I wouldn’t be found dead with that late-Victorian monstrosity!’

‘– I repeat, with this corkscrew, I’d have a trifle more respect for you. But you stick to your own mean lay. In the criminal world,
on dit
, William
Sikes, the master-burglar, looks down his
nose at the ignoble sneak-thief and tuppeny tapper. William’s scorn for you, O lower than Autolycus, would be an easterly blast to wither every flower in the summer’s garden of your self-esteem.’ He leaned back in his ornate chair, placed the tips of his fingers together and eyed me malevolently.

It is a fallacy that good wine makes one less drunk than bad. Borley would never have dared to talk
to me like that, if he hadn’t had a skinful of his special Pommard; and if I hadn’t been matching him glass for glass I should probably have kept my temper. I’d once heard him remark after a post-mortem at a North Oxford bridge-table: ‘…
And if
the King of Hearts had worn a brassière and pink bloomers, he’d have been a Queen! So what, fellow-gamesters?’ But there was no
And if
on this occasion.

Frowning, I poured myself another brandy, tossed it over his shirt front, and then tweaked his greasy nose until it bled. I ought to have remembered that he had a weak heart; but then, of course, so ought he.

Borley died, ten days later, after a series of heart-attacks. Nobody knew about the tweaked nose – it isn’t the sort of thing the victim boasts about – and though I think Plessis and his
wife guessed from the brandy on their master’s clothes that there had been a brawl, they did not bring the matter up. They benefited unexpectedly from the will: a legacy of a thousand pounds, free of death duties. To me, in spite of my disparagement of his wine, Borley left ‘the Worser Part’ of his Cellar – it was another of his affectations to capitalize almost every other word – while ‘the Better’
was to go to Wadham Senior Common Room. I had also been appointed his sole executor, which entailed a great deal of tiresome work: it fell to me to organize his funeral and act as chief mourner. The bulk of his estate went to a second cousin, a simple-minded Air Force officer at Banbury, who took one look at the Kirtlington house, pulled a comic face and took the next train back. The will, I should
mention, had been a last-minute scrawl, on the fly-leaf of a cookery book, which was grudgingly accepted for probate because the nurse and doctor had witnessed it and the intentions were clear enough.

I felt a bit guilty about Borley. Once or twice in the course of the next few weeks I had a novel twinge of conscience when I stowed away my day’s catch of pencils and matches in the bottom drawer
of my desk. Then one day a letter came from Dick and Alice Semphill reminding me that I was to spend a yachting holiday with them in August, and that
Psyche
would be found moored in Oulton Broad on the fifteenth, if that suited me. I wrote back that I’d be there without fail, accompanied by a dozen of Borley’s burgundies and clarets which, though the Worser Part of his Cellar, were well worth
drinking; and a bottle or two of my own Domecq
Fundador
brandy.

Psyche
is a comfortable craft, though rather slow, and the Semphills were glad to see me again. Both of them are mad on sailing. Dick’s an architect and Alice and I once nearly got married when we were both under age; we’re still a little more than friends. I think that’s all I need to say about them here.

The first night in the
saloon, just before supper, eight-year-old Bunny Semphill watched me produce a bottle of Beaujolais and offered to uncork it. But he found the job too stiff for him, so I had to finish it.

As I was twisting the cork from the corkscrew, I started as though I had been stung. ‘Bunny,’ I asked, ‘where the deuce did this come from?’

He stared at me. ‘I don’t know, Mr Massie. I took it from the rack
behind you.’

‘Dick,’ I called, trying not to sound scared, ‘where did you get this ivory-handled corkscrew?’

Dick, busy mixing the salad in the galley, called back: ‘I didn’t know we possessed such a thing. I always use the one on my pocket knife.’

‘Well, what’s this?’ And I showed it to him.

‘Never set eyes on it until now.’

Neither, it proved, had Alice Semphill or Captain Murdoch, an Irish
Guardsman who was the fifth member of the party.

‘You look as though you’d seen a ghost,’ said Alice. ‘What’s so extraordinary about the corkscrew, Reggie? Have you come across it before?’

‘Yes: it belonged to the chap who bequeathed me the wine. But the trouble is that it wasn’t part of the bequest. I can’t make out how it got here.’

‘You must have brought it along by mistake. Perhaps it got
stuck into one of the bottle-covers.’

‘I’d have seen it when I packed them.’