Dead Babies (9 page)

Quentin had once set up, for example, a polyethylene-covered loudspeaker outside the Tuckle front window, through which he relayed at glass-shattering, eardrum-puncturing volume such sounds as road crashes, cannon salutes, airplane takeoffs, advancing mobs, heavy breathing, tank battles, ambulance sirens, elephant charges, shouts, screams, obscenities. When this gave no clear reward Quentin transmitted
a high-pitched sonic hum for three days and three nights; on the fourth day Mr. Tuckle was seen groggily repadding the windows with blood trickling from his left ear, at which point Quentin good-humoredly gave in to domestic pressure and discontinued his broadcasts. Andy's ruses tended on the whole to be more atavistic in conception. He once peed through the keyhole and then, to Quentin's roars of laughter, defecated down the chimney onto the Tuckle hearth. In similar moods he had playfully blocked up their sewage outlet, cut off their heat and water over the Christmas weekend, fused their electricity circuit, and restricted their comings and goings by, variously, camping outside with an ax, blacking up their windows with hardboard (so they didn't dare come out), and training the pressurized garden hose on their door for ninety-six hours. Although it was at their peril that the Tuckles staggered out of the back gate to visit the shop—liable to be menaced, spat on, jostled—Quentin and Andy were of course far too cavalier to mount a systematic campaign. Indeed, we suspect that if the old pair ever did move on Quentin and Andy would miss them sorely.

Whitehead rapped on the toytown front door. He rapped again and backed off a few paces. "Come
on,"
he said. "It's Keith Whitehead."

Suddenly the letterbox creaked for a split second. There followed the sound of bolts, many and elaborate, being thrown back. The door opened slowly. Mr. and Mrs. Tuckle edged out into the strange sunlight.

"Mr. Whitehead! Thank God!" Mr. Tuckle swayed so wholeheartedly on his feet that Keith reached out and balanced him against his wife. "I beg your pardon for the delay, sir," Tuckle pursued, "but Mr. Villiers must have seen you when you came down here on the Tuesday—because he stood outside the door here yesterday and called up that he was you and everyone else was out. We could have sworn it was you, sir. We could have
sworn
it was you. He said it just in the way you say it, sir. Why, I opened the door without really thinking. And there was Mr. Villiers, with the dark-haired one standing beside him with a dustbin. He hurled it—he hurled it at us and we flew back into the house. Mrs. Tuckle took the lid on her neck. He would have charged in here on top of us, sir, but Mr. Villiers held him back.”

:
"It was your own bloody stupid fault for not looking first," said Keith.

"You're right, of course, sir, it was. Very rash."

"Well, what the hell do you expect me to do about it?"

For the first time Mr. Tuckle's voice showed real agitation. "No, sir, please. We don't expect you to control them. You can see they don't know what they're doing themselves half the time. We're grateful for what you do do, sir. Deeply grateful." Mrs. Tuckle confirmed this, her eyes damp with trust. Mr. Tuckle swallowed. "And could you tell Mr. Coldstream that we're deeply grateful for his gift."

"If I remember to," said Keith. (On hearing of the Tuckle plight Giles had asked Whitehead to take along a liter of gin the next time he went to see them, which Keith had done that Tuesday, adjudging the present too fattening to intercept.) "About shopping. And by the way, Mrs. Tuckle, it's no bloody use asking me to get Beenies at the mini-market. You know bloody well they don't stock them there."

"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't—"

"Anyway, you can do it yourselves today for once. Some guests of mine have arrived and I've decided to take everyone out for a picnic. It should be clear from one till at least three."

"Thank you, sir, thank you."

"Yes, and in future when I knock I'd better say 'White-head.' I won't say 'Keith' or 'Mr.' Then you'll know it's me. 'Whitehead.'"

Whitehead didn't seem as pleased by this innovation as he thought he was going to be, but when the Tuckles started to say "Thank you, sir, thank you—" again, Keith was off, striding back over the lawn, feeling far too flash to say good-bye.

13: a sort
OF D
aydream

"Away from the drill!"

"What? I say, Giles, are you all right?"

Giles had been lying on his bed, bent double with psychosomatic toothache, His strangled shout had been a semi-

delerious reply to Quentin's courtly knock. By 12:30, Giles had consumed five Gin Rickeys, four gin and tonics, three gin and its, two gin and bitters, and one gin.

"Oh, hello, Quentin," said Giles when he had unlocked the door. "I'm sorry I cried out at you like that, actually. I was just having a sort of daydream."

"Sorry to disturb you. Only we're all off on a picnic and I've come to get you."

"Literally 'all'?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so."

"Ah." Giles didn't want to go anywhere, but he knew that being alone in the house was something he would never be able even to contemplate. "I see. Well, I think I'd better come then."

From behind his back Quentin produced two vast cardboard boxes. "Celia has prepared lots of food," he said. "We'll need some drink, however."

Giles expressionlessly accepted the two boxes and turned to open his teak cupboard. He knelt. "Hang on. Mostly red or mostly white?"

"Let's see," said Quentin. "We've got beef, steak sandwiches, chick—"

"Stop! . . . Uh, sorry. But actually—could you just say the
wines,
actually. Okay?"

"Of course, Giles. Mostly red, please. Why not half a dozen St. Emilion '74 and half a dozen Chateauneuf-du-Pape "77," Quentin said simply. "Oh, and some Pouilly-Fume for the girls."

"There . . . we . . . are," said Giles some minutes later. "Now . . ." He took a liter of Napolean brandy from the lowest shelf and (after a silent consultation with Quentin)
two of
Glenfyddich Irish from the one above. Finally, having gone over to the desk to establish that his bottle of gin was at least half finished, Giles included a fresh Gordon's. "That ought to do it," he said to himself.

"Splendid. I'll get Skip up in a minute to lend a hand. No, you haven't met everyone yet, have you?"

Giles did not react to this question. But then, all of a sudden, as he was being led from the room he whipped around and clutched Quentin's jean jacket. "Mrs. Fry's not down there, is she?" he asked wildly.

"No, she's gone. Why? Why does she bother you. She's

a good soul, really, a treasure."

Once again Giles glazed over. "She's got . . . it's just her . . ." Giles was going to say "false teeth." He had been
:
present when Mrs. Fry sneezed out her dentures onto the draining board and laboriously reinserted them; since then he was subject to dizzy spells and retching fits whenever he saw her.

"Come on, Giles," said Quentin. "My friends have brought something that'll make you feel better. Everything will soon be all right. Come."

Giles looked around as if for the last time at his empty room, sniffed, gave Quentin a zestless smile, and moved with awkward caution out of the door.

14:
OUT
Here somewhere

"We can't go in there," he said.

"Why not?" asked Diana.

"Just look at that." Giles pointed to a large sign which stuck out at an angle from the barbed-wire fence. The sign had this to say:

FUCK OFF

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

"What about it?"

"It says," Giles explained, as if Diana might only recently have learned to read, " 'trespassers will be prosecuted.'"

"So?"

"Relax, Giles," said Quentin. "I know the man who owns this spread. Oofie Worthington. He said I could use it any time."

"Really, darling?" said Celia. "I didn't know you—"

"What about that barbed wire, then?" said Giles, abruptly taking a step backward and fastening a hand over his mouth.

"No problem," said Skip. The three Americans had loomed up on them. "I just hold it ... right here, and—hey, man, handle the other thing, okay?" Stamping their boots on the lower wire, Skip and Marvell elevated the upper one with their hands. Marvell grunted and winced a good deal while he was doing this but Skip's small, boyish face remained blank, almost dead. "Okay," he droned at last.

(Unnecessarily—buckling his body, the hamper in his
arms) Whitehead went first. One by one the girls followed. Quentin and Andy steered the twitchy Giles through, ferried the alcohol across, then hoisted Skip and Marvell over.

Quentin Villiers hastened to help unfurl the blankets with his wife. They kissed fleetingly and crouched to open the hamper.

"Is everyone going to eat now?" asked Giles vaguely, raising the gin bottle to his lips. "Because I think I shall just drink a lot instead, in fact."

At this juncture Skip paced up to Giles and grasped his free hand. "Hi, Giles," he said in his monotone bass. "I'm Skip."

Skip was showered with a spray of high-octane saliva as Giles gurgingly removed the gin bottle and tottered backward, arms lifted to protect his face. "Careful! Uh, sorry . . . Skip? I just didn't see you coming. My name's—" Giles sank to his knees. "Actually . . ." he said.

Now, in a complicated semi-embrace, Quentin, Celia, Marvell, and Roxeanne moved away from the picnic site the better to admire its surrounds. "I like it," said Marvell, attaching tufted hands to either hip. He let his eyes scan the curved field with the kneeling willow in the middle of it, the sturdier file of birches that lined the distant fence, the far hill, the sky. "I like this planet."

"Beautiful," said Roxeanne. "Beautiful, Quentin, truly."

"When we married," said Quentin, "I said that we should have to live out here somewhere." He turned to his wife, "Somewhere where there was still some England."

"Yeah," said Marvell.

"It's not a question of rapport with nature—what a horrid idea that is!—rather, a question of solidifying one's sense of oneself. I'm an Englishman. This is England. There's nothing English about London any more."

Celia and Roxeanne gazed up at Quentin with joy and wonder respectively. Indeed, Villiers' extraterrestrial good looks were very much in evidence that day. His frostily faded jeans and revealing denim shirt contrived to make him appear at once rugged and civilized; his damp-sand complexion contrasted favorably with the etiolated pallor of his housemates and the rather coarse suntans of the Americans; the gusty breeze curled but did not tousle the strands of his silvery blond hair.

:
"You shun your spirit," he murmured, "every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace."

"Right," said Marvell. "You feel like a cog, a sort of robot that's got to—"

"Hey, you lot," called Diana, "stop talking piss and come and help me with this fucking hamper."

Andy was urinating noisily against a nearby tree and Giles had curled up with the gin bottle. The fact was that little Keith had been lending catering assistance to Diana, who happened to object both to his revoltingly pudgy fingers occasionally skimming her own and also to being bracketed implicitly with the least attractive person present.

"For Christ's sake, let's break out some of that Irish," said Andy.

"Yes," said Quentin, "and let's take in some of this sun."

Marvell and Roxeanne arranged themselves on and around Skip's outstretched form—an arm here, a leg there. It didn't look self-conscious, somehow or other.

"Now," said Marvell. "I want you all to give this drug thing some genuine thought. I don't want to get too mechanistic about it but I've done this sort of project before, in controlled conditions, and I have some sort of article or possibly a pamphlet in view. Names changed; conjectural in idiom." Marvell yawned, and nestled further into the nook composed by Skip's chest and Roxeanne's shoulder. He looked like an unwholesome potentate, propped up against his friends' long bodies, his face shadowed and beady under its trellis of hair. "I don't know about you guys," he went on,
"but
I'm pretty fucked and I don't want to be flashing all night on this thing. We take off around seven, should be right. Think it over and give me your specifications when we get back. I'll be interested to see what you people choose."