The Hippopotamus Page 6

  In the rush of air my forelock flapped in my face as I looked right and left, stinging my eyes. Simon, whose hair is unfashionably short, looked straight ahead, every concentrated sec­ond at the wheel sustaining him in something close to orgasm. I judged him seventeen and only newly licensed. He is the kind of boy who would take his driving test the morning of his birth­day and find excuses to drive twenty miles to buy a box of matches. Soda was wedged happily behind us, the tip of her tongue whipped back by the wind till it met the base of her ears.

  A silver gleam caught my attention in the distance, across a haze of fields whose crops were just on the turn from green to gold.

  “What’s that?” I bellowed.

  Simon cocked his head.

  I stabbed a finger and yelled. “There! Shiny thing, like a church.”

  “Oh, that. Silo.”

  “What?”

  “For grain. Cheaper to build that than reroof an old barn. Better storage.”

  “Ugly bugger.”

  I noticed too that the country seemed, Noël Coward jokes about Norfolk aside, flatter than I remembered it. This wasn’t possible, but there was no doubting the increase in width and depth of view. It was the hedgerows, of course, or rather the ab­sence of them. It must have been twenty years ago that they had started to pull them down, but my old man’s memory still expected them. In the same way, if Westminster council de­cided overnight to allow traffic in Piccadilly to flow in both di­rections I would probably never notice, because I always think of Piccadilly as a two-way street, for all that it must be decades since they buggered it up. Now, here in East Anglia, what with the denuded fields and those great giant’s bolsters encased in bin-liner that serve the office of straw-bales and these new and nasty aluminum silos, the landscape resembles something frankly American—you know those great wheat fields in Iowa where, line abreast, massed combine-harvesters roll over the horizon like Panzer divisions? I am a city pigeon, of course, needing hard paving-stones beneath my feet and air I can bite, but rural England, for all that, has its place in my heart and I don’t like the idea of hooligans arsing around with it.

  Simon was amused.

  “Got to think of the yield,” he shouted and then—the ag­gressive cry of despoiling landowners everywhere—“you want to eat, don’t you?”

  But hedges are still thickly planted, I noticed, around the approaches to Swafford Hall. There’s nothing quite so enliven­ing to an unregenerate snob such as myself as the sight from a car of flashing parkland trees half-obscuring and half-revealing the chimneys, windows and columns of a great house, like a stripper teasing with a veil. We ate up the lime avenue and the full vulgar glory of the place swung, as L. P. Hartley would say, into view, and then I saw with a stab of regret and self-reproach that there was a boy sitting half-way up the baroque steps that poured from the front portico like a thick stream of molten lava. He stood and shaded his eyes in our direction.

  I had deferred any thoughts of how I was going to shake off this wretched child. He had served his purpose by getting me invited here; the last thing I wanted was to trail about the place coping with pretentious adolescent drippery or, worse, being forced to listen to myself dole out my own dime-store apo­thegms. The answer, perhaps, would be to set him a task of some kind, to devise a devilish assignment that would keep him out of my hair. “Write me something extensive in terzarima,” I pictured myself saying. “If you’re going to be a poet, you must learn to master the forms.”

  Simon blew up a cloud of grit and gravel in a sharp and senseless sweeping handbrake turn in front of the house. David came down the steps blinking dust from his eyes.

  “Hello, Uncle Edward,” he said, smiling and blushing.

  He is a comely boy indeed. Never having had any relish for my own gender, such coltish charms increased my blood pres­sure by not a bar—indeed I consider his looks a little ridiculous in a male—but I can think of any number of writers and artists of my acquaintance who at the very sight of him would swoon and moan and clutch at a passing vodka for support. Simon is handsome in a colourless way, like an old photographic por­trait. He is respectably growing out of his spots and into a conventional English—or in his case, of course, half-English—manhood. David’s complexion, however, is quite astonishingly clear; in all my life I have not seen skin so wholly without blemish. There is something a little freakish there, I think. I as­sume you know him better than I do? At all events, his down­cast eyes and crimson cheeks speak of a virginal modesty rare in the young today. He bids fair to be fully the kind of prig his letters have threatened.

  “Davey, you young hound, well met,” said I, heaving my corse from the car.

  What is nowadays almost universally called, with mock in­verted snobbery, a “real live butler” was standing at the threshold.

  “Ah, Podmore, is it not?” I flapped a hand in his direction after a moment’s concentrated hesitation, a hesitation designed to show me sifting my memory, recalling and discarding the names of at least twenty other butlers with whom I was on fa­miliar terms. Comes easily to you, my dear, but we Bohemians have got to strive for the effect of insouciance.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Wallace. Nice to see you again, sir.” Not that he was fooled for a minute, I dare say.

  David had taken my suitcase from the boot of the Austin with a proprietorial air that told the world that I was, certainly as far as he was concerned, his guest. Simon waved over his shoulder and launched the car, with a crunching spin of the back wheels, away on some other errand.

  Well, well. Here I was. How long I would stay depended, I supposed, on the kind of reception Michael gave me. Your idea of telling him that I would like to write a biography is all very well, but.

  The fact is, and I didn’t tell you this earlier, Jane, but I know for certain that at least two fairly prestigious hacks have tried before now to biograph Michael Logan with little success. Swafford Hall is known in journalistic circles as the Writs Hotel.

  I’m not saying it won’t work—after all Michael trusts me, trusts me rather as Guy Burgess was trusted, in the belief that anyone of such naked indiscretion and unreliability must be loyal and true—but I feel you should know that some other ap­proach may prove necessary in the end. Nous verrons ce que nous verrons.

  David had reached the top of the steps, the weight of the case listing his slight frame.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Podmore,” he said. “I’ll show Uncle Ed­ward his room.” Mister Podmore? Disquietingly bourgeois.

  “Had I better punch in with the parentals before we go any further?” I wondered, sensing the prospect of the long terrace tea that melts seamlessly into veranda cocktails, on which I had set my heart, recede into the distance.

  “Mummy’s shopping in Norwich this afternoon,” came the happy reply. “And Daddy’s in London. This way.”

  I forbore to ask when Michael was expected back. The trick of being a good guest is never to ask any questions about the composition of the household. Hosts, even the grandest, are nervous creatures and interpret curiosity as evidence of dissat­isfaction.

  “Perfect,” I said, lumbering up the steps.

  David had, at least, in bagging the Landseer Room for me, swung me first-class accommodation. Have you ever stayed there? The room is huge, comfortably bedded, well supplied with Chippendale and Hepplewhite and generous of view. Of particular interest to me, for I am a man who loves his tub, there is a connecting bathroom stuffed to a level of Babylonian profligacy with costly oils and unguents and whose shower and bath are equipped with taps which can be operated from a con­sole beside the bed. Only Michael Logan could be potty enough to employ servants who have nothing better to do than fill baths and then go to the expense of fitting machinery which can do their job for them. The curtains at least are operated manually, which is a great blessing, there being few pleasures in life higher than that of waking to the sound of a
housemaid swishing in the daylight.

  There is a price to pay for everything, however, and in the case of the Landseer Room the reckoning comes in the form of the preposterous painting that hangs over the fireplace. This disgraceful quarter-acre waste of canvas depicts a spaniel of some kind straining alert and proud on a high castle rampart which gives over a vast Speyside strath or glen or whatever they call valleys in Scotland these days. The work is entitled, if you have a bucket handy, Lord of All He Surveys. There are other bedrooms, I know, which offer more acceptable art, including a passable Deatbwish of the Cumaean Sybil and a more or less juicy Zeus Ravishing Europa with Dryad and Nymph Standing By in Antic Pose, but none has the style and comfort of this room, so I am prepared to let the spaniel pass for the sake of the fragrant bathing and amiable views. One of the things I shall have to ask Michael is whether he buys his art by the hundredweight or whether he uses his eye. I am at least denied the unspeakable horrors of the Hobhouse Room, whose dread For Found Is the Lamb that Once Was Lost can provoke nightmares and bucking hysteria in all but the most iron-willed. You ever met Oliver Mills? An old crony of your father and me. Screechingest of screeching queens, a depriested director of films and televi­sion—you must know Oliver. Anyway, he was once found skit­tering up and down the corridor outside the Hobhouse Room wrapped in an eiderdown and wailing, “Lead me to a garret, a servant’s hovel, a kennel, a Forte hotel, anything!” Naturally, Muggins had to swap rooms with him.

  But the lordly spaniel surveying his domain (or should that be demesne?) I can take, especially since the other lordly span­iel, David, had sweetly taken a lot of trouble to cater for my every whim.

  “Ah!” I said, sighting the drinks table. “Everything is as it should be.”

  David followed my eye to the tall, green, glittering forest set in its twinkling crystal sea. “It is whisky you like, isn’t it, Uncle Edward?”

  “Before we go any further, old darling,” I said, “shall we dis­pense with the Uncle? Ted will do, just plain Ted.”

  “Right,” said David. “Ted. As in Heath.”

  “A boy your age has heard of Ted Heath?”

  David was startled. “He was the Prime Minister, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, that Ted Heath. Thought you meant the band leader.”

  “Band leader?”

  Christ, I abominate children. And Christ, I abominate my receding memory.

  “Well, Davey,” I said, “think I’ll . . . ah . . . take a bath and conceivably a short nap.”

  “Oh . . . right.” He hid his disappointment well. “Absolutely. You know where everything is?”

  “Rather.”

  He backed to the door. “I’ll . . . when you come down . . . there’s the South Lawn which is . . .” he pointed to the wall behind the bed, “. . . that way. I’ll probably be hanging about round there if you want to . . . you know. Chat.”

  I felt a bit of a swine.

  “Davey,” I said, looking at him straight. “It’s simply won­derful to be here. We’re going to have a splendid time. Thank you for asking me.”

  His face lit up. “Thank you for coming. There is so much . . .” He paused, shook his head and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Sleek and soft from patchouli oil and glowing with good malt, I sat an hour later, a sheet of Swafford Hall writing-paper in front of me and the view across the lawns and parkland beyond. I would concentrate on the drudgery of writing this letter to you later, but for the moment there was no reason not to tickle the Muse’s tits and see if she mightn’t start to express. It was unlikely a poem would come in such peaceful circum­stances, but you certainly won’t get if you don’t ask. I listed, as is my custom, such few words as my mood and the scene sug­gested.

  I examined this list for some quarter of an hour. The rare words often annoy the punter, but they never think, they never stop to think about a poet’s life. A painter has oils, acrylics and pastels, turpentine, linseed, canvas, sable and hog’s hair. When did you last employ such things routinely? To oil a cricket bat or mascara an eyelid, perhaps. Come to think of it, you’ve probably never oiled a cricket bat in your life, but you know what I mean. And musicians: a musician has entire machines of wood, brass, gut and carbon fibre; he has augmented sevenths, accidentals, Dorian modes and twelve-note rows. When did you ever use an augmented seventh as a way of getting back at your boyfriend or a bassoon obbligato to order pizza? Never. Never, never, never. The poet, though. Oh, yes, the poor poet: pity the poor bloody poet. The poet has no reserved materials, no unique modes. He has nothing but words, the same tools that the whole cursed world uses to ask the way to the nearest lavatory, or with which they patter out excuses for the clumsy betrayals and shiftless evasions of their ordinary lives; the poet has nothing but the same, self-same, words that daily in a mil­lion shapes and phrases curse, pray, abuse, flatter and mislead. The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse. Is it any wonder that, from time to time, we take refuge in “gellies” and “ataractic” and “watchet”? Innocent words, virgin words, words uncontaminated and unviolated, the very mastery of which an­nounces us to possess a relationship with language akin to that of the sculptor with his marble or the composer with his staves. Not that anyone is ever impressed, of course. They only moan about the “impenetrability” or congratulate themselves for being hep to the ellipsis, opacity and allusion that they believe deepens and enriches the work. It’s a bastard profession, be­lieve me.

  Well, well . . . I can make any number of excuses, but I sup­pose the real truth is that the energy has gone out of me, has been weeping from me for ten years. Too many appearances on “The Late Show” and Melvyn Bragg, too many easy offers to anthologise and edit, too much regard and petting, and lately, far too much of the old electric soup. I crossed out the list of words, scrawled “FUSTIAN!” in angry letters across the page and stored the sheet of paper in the desk. I would have screwed it up and tossed it away were it not that a deranged university in Texas has paid me for the rights to all my papers.

  “Papers?” I had asked when approached by their Professor of Modern Poetry. “What do you mean papers?”

  “Hell, you know . . . notebooks, drafts, correspondence . . . papers.”

  What kind of self-conscious and insufferably twee belle-lettriste ponce keeps notebooks? I asked myself. Utterly absurd, but the money was good, so I sat down one weekend and forged dozens of likely-looking rough drafts of my better-known poems. It was the greatest lark alive, scrawling indeci­pherable Greek in the margin, writing “but Skelton????,” “mild und leise wie er läcbelt,” “see Reitlinger’s Economics of Taste Vol. II, page 136” and “No, no, no, no, no, no! Close the field, close the field!!!” in different-coloured inks across the pages. At one point I wrote “posterity can suck my cock” in pencil and then erased it. It took less than four years for an American graduate to uncover this and write to me asking what I had meant by it. She came over to England three months later on a research fel­lowship and found out.

  Forgive me for rambling, my dear, but you’ve no idea what a relief it is to get all this off my chest. Besides, since you haven’t told me what to look for, I’ve nothing else to write about yet.

  Anyway, despairing of poetry, I was pouring myself another glass of scotch when the telephone next to my bed rang.

  “Ted, it’s Anne.”

  “My love!”

  “Quite. Settled comfortably in?”

  “Snugger than a bugger in a rugger scrum.”

  “Then come downstairs, I want to talk to you.”

  She was in one of the south-facing drawing rooms, looking out of the window. She turned at the sound of creaking floor­board a
nd favoured me with a welcoming smile.

  “Ted, it’s actually tremendous to see you.”

  I joined her at the window, kissing each cheek and then stepping back to examine her. A taking little creature she has always been; fair hair, good cheekbones, eyes as blue as et cet­era. I don’t know how much you know about her, she’s only your aunt by marriage, so I’ll fill in a little for you.

  She had met Logan while he and I were still clumping around in uniform. He hadn’t a button in those days and she was the daughter of a bust and useless earl. While engaged on some footling divisional exercise in the Thetford Chase area, Michael and I, as the only subalterns in our distinctly shabby regiment who didn’t say “pardon” or hold our knives like pen­cils, had been taken by the CO for dinner at Swafford Hall, then a mouldering heap so cold that your breath stood out in the drawing room and the women’s nipples peaked like bakelite studs. Anne was eleven years old at that time and had been pressed into the traditional child’s service of handing out olives and smiling sweetly at the guests before being packed off to bed. I hadn’t noticed her much, except to see that she had dog hairs on the back of a rather plain velvet dress.

  In the car on the way back, with the CO nuzzled against his shoulder in a rumbling stupor, Michael had turned to me.

  “Tedward,” he whispered, “someday I’m going to marry that girl and buy that house.”

  “Not before I’ve been made Poet Laureate,” I had said.

  “It’s a deal.”

  The driver turned round and winked. “And I’ll be leader of the Labour Party,” he said.