The Hippopotamus Read online

  “This is one of the most revolting rooms I’ve ever stood in all my life. It is exactly as hideous as I expected, and exactly as hideous as ten thousand rooms within pissing distance of here. It’s an insult to the eye and fully as degrading a cocktail of overpriced cliché as can be found outside Beverly Hills. I would no more park my arse on that sofa with its artfully clashing and vibrantly assorted cushions than I would eat a dog-turd. Congratulations on wasting an expensive edu­cation, a bankload of money and your whole sad life. Goodbye.”

  That’s what I would have said with just two more fingers of whisky inside me. Instead, I managed a broken, “My God, Jane . . .”

  “You like?”

  “Like isn’t the word . . . it’s, it’s . . .”

  “They tell me I have an eye,” she conceded. “Homes and Interiors were here last week, photographing.”

  “I’m sure they were,” I said.

  “You should have seen the place when I moved in!”

  “Such a sense of light and space.” I sighed. Always utterly safe.

  “Men don’t usually appreciate such things,” she said with ap­proval, moving to the drinks table.

  “Fuck off, you mad, sad bitch,” I said inside, while “Even a man couldn’t fail to be knocked out by this skilful, tasteful blend of the ethnic and the domestic,” said my cowardly outspread arms.

  “It was Macallan, I noticed,” she was saying. “There is Laphroaig if you’d rather.”

  “N-no, the Macallan does.”

  She brought them over, folded a leg under herself and sank down on an ottoman, which was moronically tricked out in a design which would turn out, I supposed, to be taken from some Mayan funeral shroud or mystic Balinese menstrual cloth. The grand idea behind such a squalid episode of cultural rape and the other equally feeble, equally impertinent conceits that littered this appalling room, I sup­posed, was that Jane would dispose herself there, surrounded by friends, the diversity of whose drinking habits would justify the ludi­crous range of unopened liqueur, aperitif and spirit bottles on dis­play, while gentle yet probing conversational topics were flicked like shuttlecocks about the room. Instead she sat, still trembling like an adolescent, with nothing more for company than a raddled has-been who once knew her parents. And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.

  She swirled the drink in its tumbler.

  “The first thing you have to know,” she said at last, “is that I am dying.”

  Oh, marvellous. Ideal. Simply perfect.

  “Jane . . .”

  “I’m sorry.” She lit a cigarette with jerky movements. “That was crass, actually.”

  Damned right. Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who is about to die, not the poor bugger who has to take the news. She’d come to the right shop, though. I’ve known enough death not to be nice about the forms of it.

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “The doctors are unanimous. Leukaemia. I’ve run out of remis­sions.”

  “That’s a smeller, Jane. I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Scared?”

  “Not any more.”

  “I suppose it’s hard to tell when the axe might fall?”

  “Soon, they tell me . . . within three months.”

  “Well, my darling. If you’ve made peace with your enemies and said goodbye to your friends, you shouldn’t be too sorry to leave the party early. It’s a grotty world and a grotty age and we’ll all be joining you soon enough.”

  She smiled a thin smile. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “The only way.”

  Now that I knew, of course, I could see it in her. It was there in the brightness of the eye and the tightness and pallor of the skin. The boniness of body that I had read as neurotic rich girl’s pseudo-anorexia, that too might in justice be attributed to sickness.

  She leaned back, and breathed out. Just showing off now, I thought. The exhalation seemed to me to be designed to demonstrate how mature and wise her death sentence had made her, how it had “put things in perspective” and set her curiously free.

  “I told you that I wasn’t scared,” she said, “and I’m not. But at first I was. Simply hysterical. Tell me . . .”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I don’t really know where to begin. What do you think . . . what do you think of priests?”

  I sat down. Here we go, I thought. Here we ruddy go. The laying-on of hands. If not priests, essential oils; if not essential oils, needles; if not needles, herbs; if not herbs, lumps of translucent rock and etheric sheaths.

  “Priests . . .” I said. “Are we speaking of the Romish or the Angli­can kind?”

  “I don’t know. I take it you’re an atheist?”

  “I sometimes slip, but broadly speaking, yes. I try not to think about it. The cassocked buzzards have been wheeling in the air above you, have they? Fighting for scavenging rights to your soul?”

  “No, no . . . it’s not that. Oh dear . . .”

  She got up and paced about, while I sat, gripped my whisky and waited. I thought about life as a restaurant critic, wondered if there were the seeds of any late-flowering poetry in me and reflected, with the intolerance of the healthy, that leukaemia was an affliction that I would be perfectly capable of snapping out of. Brace up and walk it off, woman, I said to myself. If you can’t tell a few white corpuscles to piss off out of it, what are you?

  At last she turned, a decision arrived at.

  “The point is,” she said, “that a strange thing has happened. In my family. I don’t understand it, but I think it might interest you. As a writer.”

  “Oh ah?” Whenever people say, “as a writer, you’ll find this very fascinating,” I prepare myself for thunderous boredom and numbing banality. Besides, what kind of writer was I anyway? She was trying to flatter me into attention.

  “I thought, as you aren’t . . . ah . . . occupied at the moment, that you might be able to help me. Something needs investigating.”

  “Well, my dear, I don’t know exactly what you had in mind. I’m not what you might call an investigative journalist. I’m not actually any kind of journalist at all. I can’t really imagine what a failed poet, failed novelist, failed theatre critic and only marginally successful failure could possibly offer.”

  “Well, you know the people concerned, you see, and . . .”

  “Woah!” I held up a hand. “Jane. My darling. Angel. Poppet. In sappier happier days, your mother and I used to stick it away. That’s all. I haven’t seen her in a coon’s age. She said goodbye to me twenty-odd years ago in a blizzard of flung christening cake and savage abuse.”

  “I’m not talking about Mummy, I’m talking about her brother.”

  “Logan? You’re talking about Logan? Jesus suffering fuck, wo­man . . .” I tried to say more, but the Cough had come upon me, as it does these days. It starts as the smallest tickle in the throat and can build, though I say so myself as shouldn’t, into a not unimpressive display. Something between a vomiting donkey and an explosion at a custard factory. Jane watched without sympathy as I choked and wheezed myself to relative calm.

  “You knew him,” she repeated, “you knew him better than most. And you are, don’t forget, David’s godfather.”

  “Well,” I panted, wiping away the tears from my cheeks, “as it happens I haven’t forgotten. Sent him a confirmation present only the other week. Got a cutely pi response.”

  “Cutie pie?”

  “Pi, as in . . . oh, never mind.”

  Nobody can speak English any more.

  “So you knew about David’s confirmation, but not about mine.”

  Lord, what a whining old sow.

  “I told you,” I explained patiently, �
��your mother won’t have any­thing to do with me. I saw her three or four years ago at Swafford and I could see then that she still hadn’t forgiven me. Your Uncle Mi­chael, on the other hand, has a large nature.”

  “And an even larger bank balance.”

  This was not worthy of a reply. It was true that I valued Michael’s friendship highly and his sister Rebecca’s not a whit, but I liked to think that there was more to it than money. But then, I liked to think that the world venerated poets and that one day wars would end and television personalities be wiped out by a fatal virus. Between what I liked to think and the cold veridical state of things fell one hell of a shadow.

  “I would want you to think of this as a commission. I’m not an es­pecially rich woman . . .”

  No, of course you aren’t, are you? You’ve pissed it all away on Lalique flacons, Peruvian birthing-blankets and Namibian labia-jewellery, you senseless cow.

  “. . . but I could offer you a hundred thousand now and the rest . . . either later or left to you in my will.”

  “A hundred thousand?” I caught sight of myself in the artfully, fartfully tarnished mirror above the mantelpiece. I saw a red mullet, gaping, pop-eyed, purple and very, very greedy.

  “A quarter of a million all told.”

  “A quarter of a million?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t lire, is it? I mean, you are talking about pounds sterling?”

  She nodded gravely.

  “I don’t . . . Jane . . . a quarter of a million is a lot of money and is, I won’t attempt to deny it, quite monstrously appealing to me. But I don’t know if I have it in me to do anything for anyone which, in any kind of honesty, is worth a tenth of that sum.”

  “You will have to work hard,” Jane said.

  I could see from the set of her mouth that nothing I could say was going to make much difference to her. Her mind, like her face, was fully made up.

  “And you will have to work fast. Whatever you uncover I need to know before I die. That is if I do.”

  “Er . . . if you do what?”

  “If I do die.”

  “If you do die?”

  “If I do die.”

  We were beginning to sound like a couple of pissed Nigerians.

  “But you said . . .”

  “No, the doctors said, the doctors said that I was going to die. I don’t believe I am. That is the point.”

  Well, there it was. If she did get around to giving me a cheque, it would in all likelihood be signed “Jessica Rabbit” or “L. Ron Hub­bard.”

  “I believe that I have been saved, you see.”

  “Ah. Right. Saved. Yes. Lovely.”

  She rose and went over to a lacquered bureau, smiling the se­raphic smile of the irretrievably crazed.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but it isn’t like that. You’ll see.” She took a cheque-book from the bureau and began to write. “There!” She tore off a cheque and waved it in the air, a pennant of good faith drying in the breeze.

  “Look . . .” I managed. “Jane. In all honour, or such tatters of it as I have remaining, I shouldn’t take your money. I don’t understand what it is that you want me to do, I doubt that I have the capacity to do it and it is, to put it nicely, a racing certainty that you are not in your right mind. You should see a . . . a chap.”

  What I meant by “a chap” I wasn’t sure. Doctor, psychiatrist or priest, I suppose. Frothing hypocrisy on the part of a man who doesn’t believe in such ordure, but what the hell else is one supposed to say?

  “I want you to go to Swafford. I want you to tell the family that you are writing Uncle Michael’s biography,” she said, handing me the cheque. “You are probably the only person alive he would allow to do such a thing.”

  A properly signed and dated cheque for one hundred thousand pounds lay on my lap in front of me. My bank had a branch near South Ken tube station. I could be out of the house and filling in a deposit slip in ten minutes.

  “There are,” I said, “professional writers who will compile family histories for you at a fraction of that price. Vanity publishing, they call it.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “You won’t be writing a family history, you will be reporting a phenomena.”

  “Phenomenon,” I muttered irritably.

  “You will be witnessing a miracle.”

  “A miracle. I see. And what kind of miracle precisely?”

  She paused. “I want you to go to Swafford and make your reports,” she said. “Write to me constantly. I want to see if you notice any­thing. You think my mind has gone, but I know that if you go there, you will see for yourself what there is to be seen.”

  I left the house and rolled up the Brompton Road, reflecting as busily as a wet mirror on a sunny day. Jane was mad, certainly, but her cheque was crossed and endearingly sane. It was a question now of how to wangle an invitation to Swafford. It was a question of how much work I had to do for the money. It was a question of what kind of work I had to do for that money. I damned the woman for not telling me what to look out for. If she had given me the slightest indica­tion I could then have at least contrived to bolster her delusions by seeming to confirm them. But what were those delusions? My last visit to Swafford had been amusing enough but hardly revealing of miracles.

  Chapter 2

  I

  Lord Logan knelt down between his sons and pointed to the tower.

  David looked up. Through the night mist he saw the clock face, newly painted gold on blue.

  “Very smart, Dad,” Simon was saying. “Is that real gold?”

  Lord Logan laughed.

  “Gilt.”

  “It is gold in the drawing room though. You said.”

  “In the drawing room, yes.”

  “And in the Chinese Room, Dad, and the chapel.”

  “Gold leaf.”

  “Gold leaf,” Simon repeated with satisfaction. “The decorators showed me the book. Every single page was pure gold.”

  David was screwing up his eyes. The electric light spun the mist all around the clock into a yellow ball that suspended itself above the stable yard.

  “Now then,” said Lord Logan. “What’s the time?”

  “Uh oh,” said Simon, putting his hands over his ears.

  David looked too and saw that it was about half a minute to ten o’clock. He counted down the seconds in his head.

  Lord Logan hugged the boys to him and made a tick-tock noise with his tongue. He felt the warmth of David’s hand in his and the chill of Simon’s.

  David listened for the grinding whir that came before the chime. One of the big hunters was stamping in his stall and, farther away in the kennel block, David heard the whining of the beagle pups.

  No sound came from the clock. They were not standing directly in front of it so David supposed their angle made the hour hand look more advanced than it really was. He began a fresh count-down from ten. Simon had told him once that you could accurately count sec­onds if you put the word “alligator” between each number.

  “Ten alligator, nine alligator, eight alligator, seven alligator, six alligator . . .” David said to himself.

  Simon removed his hands from his ears.

  “Dad!” he said reproachfully. Only these holidays had he switched from Daddy to Dad and he liked to use the new word as much as possible.

  “You see?” Lord Logan jigged with pleasure.

  There was no doubt that, whatever their angle to the clock, it was now a clear minute past ten.

  “But I liked the bong,” said Simon.

  “Ah, but you don’t understand. There’s a control fitted. It still chimes during the day, but when it’s dark, it doesn’t.”

  “Brilliant! That’s brilliant, Dad!”

  “Something had to be done. The twins were b
eing woken up every hour, on the hour.”

  “I know, Dad,” said Simon. “My room’s just down the corridor, don’t forget.”

  “Ah well,” said Lord Logan, standing up and dusting his knees with the back of his hand. “That’s another thing. Come on, David, you’re not too big . . . hup!” David jumped on to his father’s shoulders and they made their way back to the house. “Now that you’re thir­teen, Simon, we ought to take you out of the nursery and give you a proper bedroom, don’t you think?”

  “Oh boy,” said Simon.

  “I mean, if you’re going to be joining the guns on Boxing Day.”

  “Daddy!” Simon kicked the gravel in excitement. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!”

  Lord Logan hitched David up further on to his shoulders.

  “Woof! I’m getting too old for this, Davey.”

  David knew, however, that although he would soon be twelve, he was small and light for his age and that his father could have carried him five miles without a murmur.

  A fortnight later David lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, just as he had the night before. The night before had been Christmas Eve when all children lie awake to surprise their fathers. Not that it would have been Lord Logan himself, Simon claimed.

  “He gets Podmore to dress up and dump them in our rooms.”

  “No, I bet it is Daddy. He’d enjoy it.”

  David had not managed to stay awake long enough to find out. Tonight he would certainly stay awake. He absolutely had to.

  The brand-new alarm clock, a Christmas present from Aunt Re­becca, ticked on his bedside table.

  Half past one.

  The most important thing was not to wake up the twins. They were more than a year old and, since the muffling of the stable clock, they had started, in Nanny’s words, to sleep through. But you never knew with the twins. They were always capable of creating an up­roar. So that they would be especially tired, David had spent an hour entertaining them in their cots earlier in the evening. He had drawn pictures for them with crayons and pulled faces, hummed tunes and danced stupidly around the room until it was time for the goodnight visit.