Complete Short Stories (16 page)

‘I am willing to pay two thousand guineas,’ she answered, ‘for a full length.’

‘It is not the money…’ he protested.

‘But Fulton will tell you all about dear Alison,’ pleaded Mrs Mucklehose-Kerr, weeping unrestrainedly. ‘Miss Alison was a beautiful girl, Fulton, was she not?’

‘Sweetly pretty,’ Fulton agreed with fervour. ‘Pretty as a picture, madam.’

‘I
know
you will consent, Mr Nicholson, and
of course I will choose one of her own dresses for her to wear. The one I liked best.’

There was nothing for it but to consent.

The Kid took Fulton to the Café Royal that evening and plied him with whisky and questions.

‘Blue eyes?’ – ‘Bluish, sir, and a bit watery. But sweetly pretty.’

‘Hair?’ – ‘Mousy, sir, like her nature, and worn in a bun.’

‘Figure?’ – ‘So, so, Mr Nicholson, so, so!
But she was a very sweet young lady, was Miss Alison.’

‘Any physical peculiarities?’ – ‘None, sir, that leaped to the eye. But I fear I am not a good hand at descriptions.’

‘Had she no friends who could sketch her from memory?’ – ‘None, Mr Nicholson. She lived a most retired life.’

So the Kid drew a blank with Fulton, and his parlour trick did not help at all because he lacked the complementary
faculty (with which Mrs Mucklehose-Kerr credited him, but which, in his own phrase, was a different pair of socks altogether) of conjuring up a person from a signature. The next day, in despair, he consulted his brother-in-law, the painter James Pryde. ‘Jimmy, what on earth am I to do now?’

Jimmy thought awhile and then, being a practical Scot, answered: ‘Why not find out from Fulton whether
the girl ever went to a dentist?’

Sir Rockaway Timms happened to be a fellow-member of the Savile, and the Kid hurried to Wimpole Street to consult him.

‘Rocks, old boy, I’m in a fearful hole.’

‘Not for the first time, Kid.’

‘It’s about a girl of eighteen called Alison Mucklehose-Kerr, one of your patients.’

‘You should leave ’em alone until they reach the age of discretion. Oh, you artists!’

‘I never set eyes on her. And now, it seems, she’s dead.’

‘Bad, bad! By her own hand?’

‘I want to know what you know about her.’

‘I can only show you the map of her mouth, if that’s any morbid satisfaction to you. I have it in this cabinet. Wait a moment. M… Mu… Muck… Here you are! Crowded incisors; one heavily and clumsily stopped rear molar; one ditto lightly and neatly stopped by me; malformed
canines; wisdom teeth not yet through.’

‘For Heaven’s sake, Rocks, what did she
look
like? It’s life or death to me.’

Sir Rockaway glanced at the Kid quizzically. ‘What do I get out of this?’ he asked.

‘An enormous box of liqueur chocolates swathed in pink ribbon.’

‘Accepted, on behalf of Edith. Well, this Alison whom you betrayed in the dark forest was a sallow, lumpish, frightened Scots
lassie with a slight cast in the off eye – but, for all that, the spitting image of Lillian Gish!’

The Kid wrung Sir Rockaway’s hand as violently as Mrs Mucklehose-Kerr had wrung his own at parting. Then he rushed out to his waiting taxi.

‘Driver,’ he shouted. ‘
The Birth of a Nation
, wherever it’s showing, as fast as your wheels will carry us!’

Mrs Mucklehose-Kerr, summoned to Appletree Yard
a week later, uttered a moan of delight the moment she entered the studio. ‘It is Alison, it is my Alison to the life, Mr Nicholson!’ she babbled. ‘I knew your genius would not fail me. But oh! how well and happy she is looking since she passed over!… Fulton, Fulton, tell Mr Nicholson how wonderful he is!’

‘You have caught Miss Alison’s expression, sir, to the dot!’ pronounced Fulton, visibly
impressed.

Mrs Mucklehose-Kerr insisted on buying two of the bounced and unworthy early Nicholsons which happened to be lying face-up on the floor. The Kid had been on the point of painting them over; and his obvious reluctance to sell made her offer twelve hundred guineas for the pair.

He weakly accepted; forgetting what a terrible retribution the Inland Revenue people would visit on him next
year.

I SLIT OPEN the flimsy blue envelope and, pulling out an even flimsier typewritten slip, began to read without the least interest; but recoiled like the man in
Amos
who carelessly leans his hand on a wall and gets bitten by a serpent. The Spanish ran:

With regard to a matter that should prove of interest to your Honour: please be good enough to appear in person
at this Police Headquarters on any working day of the present month between the hours of 10 and 12. Business: to withdraw your Residence Permit.

God grant your Honour many years!

Signed:
Emilio Something-or-other.

Stamped in purple:
The Police
Headquarters, Palma de Mallorca.

For two or three minutes I sat grinning cynically at the nasty thing.
‘Para retirar la Autorización de Residencia
!’
Well, that was that!

Though often warned that in a totalitarian state anything might happen, without warning, without mercy, without sense, I had imagined it could never happen to me. I first came to Majorca, twenty-five years ago, during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship; and stayed on throughout the subsequent Republic. Then one fine summer’s day in 1936 small bombs, and leaflets threatening larger
bombs, began to fall on Palma; soldiers hauled down the Republican flag; unknown young men with rifles invaded our village of Binijiny and tried to shoot the Doctor by mistake for a Socialist politician; the boat service to Barcelona was suspended; coffee and sugar disappeared from the shops; all mail ceased; and one day the British Consul scrawled me a note:

Dear Robert,

This afternoon H.M.S.
Grenville
will evacuate British nationals: probably your last chance of leaving Spain in safety. Luggage limited to one handbag. Strongly advise your coming.

I hastily packed my handbag with manuscripts, underclothes and a Londonish suit.

An hour later Kenneth, two other friends and I were heading for the port in the taxi which the Consul had considerately sent out to us. Thus we became wretched
refugees, and wretched refugees we continued to be for ten years more until the Civil War had been fought to a bloody close, until the World War had broken out and run its long miserable course, and finally until the Franco Government, disencumbered of its obligations to the Axis, had found it possible to sanction our return. Reader, never become a refugee, if you can possibly avoid it, even
for the sake of that eventual happy homecoming in an air-taxi, with a whole line of bristly village chins awaiting your fraternal salute. Stay where you are, kiss the rod and, if very hungry, eat grass or the bark off the trees. To live in furnished rooms and travel about from country to country – England, Switzerland, England, France, the States, England again – homesick and disorientated, seeking
rest but finding none, is the Devil’s own fate.

This brings the story up to 1946. I came back to Binijiny, and thanks to the loyalty of the natives found my house very much as I had left it. Certain ten-year-old Kilner jars of homemade green tomato pickle had matured wonderfully, and so had a pile of
Economists
and
Times Literary Supplements.
‘Happily ever after,’ I promised myself. Then in 1947
Kenneth joined me again, and we resumed work together.

And now this! ‘
Para retirar la…
’

But why? I belong to no political organization, am not a
frémasón,
have always refused to write either against, or for, any particular form of Spanish Government, and if ever people ask me: ‘What is it like on your island?’ am careful to reply: ‘It is not mine; it is theirs.’ As a foreigner who must apply
every two years for a renewal of his residence permit, I try to be the perfect guest: quiet, sober, neutral, appreciative and punctilious in money matters. Then of what crime could I be accused? Had someone perhaps taken exception to a historical novel of mine about Spanish colonization under Philip II? Or to the rockets I release every July 24th, which happens to be my birthday as well as the anniversary
of the capture of Gibraltar? Had some cathedral canon denounced me for having acted as Spanish-English interpreter at a serio-comic meeting of solidarity between the corn-fed Protestant choir of the U.S. aircraft-carrier
Midway
and the bleak encatacombed Evangelical Church of Majorca? Where could I find out? The police would doubtless refuse an explanation. What means had I of forcing them to
say more than ‘Security Reasons’, which is about all that our own democratic Home Office ever concedes?

Nobody had invited me to settle in Majorca; almost anyone had a right to object to my continued presence there.

… So this was why they had brooded so long over my application for renewing the damned permit!

My wife probably wouldn’t much mind a change of house and food and climate. But how
could I break the news to Kenneth? Although I should be sunk without him, he could scarcely be expected to share my exile again; the poor fellow had hardly enjoyed a day’s happiness, I knew, during those ten long years. And what if our long association put him on the black list too? And just as he was buying that motor-cycle!

Yet why the hell should I take this lying down? After twenty-five years
– after all the sterling and dollars I had imported – and my four children almost more Majorcan than the Majorcans! I’d hire a car, drive to Palma at once, visit the Chief of Police and ask, very haughtily, who was responsible for what was either a tactless practical joke or a cruel
atropellada.
(
Atropellada,
in this sense, has no simple familiar English equivalent, because it means deliberately
running over someone in the street.) Afterwards I’d ring up the British Embassy at Madrid. And the Irish Embassy. And the American Embassy. And…

Here came the car. Poor Kenneth! Poor myself! Poor children! It would have to be England, I supposed. And London, I supposed, though in my previous refugee days I had always been plagued by abscesses and ulcers when I tried to live there. My wife loves
London, of course. But how could we find a house large enough and cheap enough for us all? And what about schools for the children? And a nurse for the baby? And who would care for our cats in Binijiny?

I had forgotten that, this being a total fiesta in honour of San Sebastián, the Patron Saint of Palma, all offices would be closed. Nothing doing until the next day; meanwhile church bells rang,
boot-blacks pestered me, Civil Guards sported their full-dress poached-egg head-dresses and stark white gloves, and the population drifted aimlessly about the streets in their Sunday best.

As I stood check-mated outside the Bar Fígaro, a dapper Spaniard greeted me and asked politely after my health, my family and my busy pen, remarking what a pity it was that so few of my books were available
in Spanish and French translation. I couldn’t place him. He was probably a shirtmaker, or a hotel receptionist, or a Tennis Club Committeeman, or a senior Post Office clerk, whom I would recognize at once in his proper setting. Awkward!

‘Come, Don Roberto, let us take a coffee together!’ I agreed miserably, suspecting that, like everyone else, he wanted to cross-examine me on contemporary English
literature. But, after all, why shouldn’t I continue to humour these gentle, simple, hospitable people? It was their island, not mine. And the Bar Fígaro has sentimental memories for me.

We sat down. I offered him my pouch of black tobacco and a packet of
Marfil
papers. He rolled cigarettes for us both, handed me mine to lick and stick, snapped his lighter for me, and said: ‘Well, distinguished
friend, may we expect your visit soon? I ventured to send you an official
reminder only yesterday. When will you find time to withdraw your Residence Permit –
“para retirar la Autorización de Residencia
” – from our files? It has been waiting there, duly signed, since late October.’

In my gratitude I gave Don Emilio an hour’s expert literary criticism of the works of such English
gran-novelistas
as Mohgum, Ootschley, Estrong and Oowohg, promising not only to visit him at the earliest opportunity with the necessary 1 peseta 55 céntimos stampage but to lend him a contraband Argentine edition of Lorca’s
Poems.

God grant him many years! What a sleepless night he saved me!

D
EAREST
A
UNT
M
AY
,

You will never guess what happened to me yesterday, which was Ascension Day, besides being my birthday! I met our new postman at the front door and collected your ‘Now you are 11’ birthday card – thanks awfully! He was a young man with very long hair, and wanted to know what the card meant. So I told him. Then he asked if I was acquainted with the foreign family
Esk. I said ‘No, but show me the letters, please!’ and they were all for Father, ten of them – ‘William Smith, Esq’ – the postman had had them for a week! So we were both very pleased. Then I mentioned that Señor Colom was taking me to the bullfight for a birthday treat, and his face lighted up like a Chinese lantern. I asked: ‘Are they brave bulls?’ and he said: ‘Daughter, they are an escandal!’
and I asked: ‘How an escandal?’ And he explained that Poblet, the senior matador, had written to his friend Don Ramón, who had a bull farm near Jerez and was supplying the six bulls for the fight, to send him under-weight ones, because he wasn’t feeling very well after grippe and neither were the two other matadors, Calvo and Broncito; and he’d pay Don Ramón well and arrange things quietly with
the Bull Ring Management. So everything was fixed; until the new Captain-General of Majorca, who’s President of the Ring and very correct, went to see the bulls as they came ashore. He took one look and said: ‘Weigh them!’ So they put them on the scales and they weighed about half a ton less than the proper weight. So he said: ‘Send them back at once and telephone for more.’ The second lot had
just arrived by steamer. The new postman told me that they were a disaster, and looked like very especial dangerous insects.