Sauve Qui Peut: Stories Page 2

  “Why reversible?”

  “To catch the blood in.”

  “I see.”

  De Mandeville looked somewhat pale. Dovebasket slipped away to telephone to Bonzo in much the same terms and made his flesh creep at the thought that De Mandeville and his two bravos had decided to eliminate him. Which would get who first … that was the problem, if you understand me. How?

  Well then, let us turn to that fatal evening. You must picture us—a rather listless mob of strangely shaped men clad in brilliant but somewhat grubby reminiscences of Venice. Enormous trousers which our robust forefathers used I think to term “gallygaskins”: two hundred bolts of bombazine to every tuck. Then enamelled codpieces with dependent froggings and perhaps a calico fascinator or two. Moreover, we were all masked and wore upon our heads those strange hats which are apparently given away with every free D. Litt at Oxford. Lampshades, old man, snuffers, dreaming abat-jours of Oxenford.

  Well, there we all were, after some insipid chamber-music, when the wrath of the Lord was unleashed. Dove-basket suddenly, with no warning, unsheathed a serviceable-looking cutlass, gave a fearful growl like a mastiff, and launched a terrific slash at … I blush to say it … his innocent white-haired old Ambassador. “Answer for your sins, Mowbray” he yelled as he drove the weapon home. Well, not quite home. In matters of self-interest, Polk-Mowbray could show a turn of speed. It was the public interest which rendered him lethargic. He had been having a delicious evening, full of clean fun, and admired his costume which made him feel like the Bashaw of Hendon. Now suddenly this apparent maniac was on him nip and tuck. It is to his credit that his jump took him almost to the mantelpiece. Dovebasket wheeled about and addressed himself to the American Minister, who gave a wail of mortal terror and manfully unsheathed his own sword and fended off the lunatic, being driven swiftly back to the garden balustrade over which he fell into a flowerbed. He had hardly time to ask what in the name of flaming Jesus was going forward before disappearing into the void. Everyone was startled and drew their swords. Some started as a joke, but no sooner were they poked than they turned nasty. The women screamed and got under the piano. Pretty soon a general melee started and I decided that it was time for me to seek the only place of shelter on such evenings—the curtains. It is perhaps the Polonius in me, and I am not unmindful of his fate; nevertheless.… By now there was a dreadful noise of cold steel on steel, like some fearful knife-grinders’ agape. It is a mercy no one was actually killed. Perhaps the swords were from “property” or perhaps it is just that dip skins are inordinately thick. Anyway, apart from the Chaplain who was transfixed to the grand piano through his gaskins, no harm was done; people began to unmask and the panic to die down. Only, in the centre of the room, six figures still clashed away; I took it that they were Bonzo and De Mandeville with their respective bravos. This looked much more spirited and even promising. Pretty soon, one felt, there would be some figures lying Strangely Still upon the carpet, and one of them, Pray God, would be De Mandeville. But no. Heaven intervened in the shape of the butler, Drage, bible in hand. With his experienced eye he took in the scene; with his experienced hand he did the only thing. He stooped and pulled the carpets and the contestants, reeling, fell—their hats rolling off, their masks slipping. A singular sight was revealed. Bonzo had been fighting his own bravos. So had De Mandeville. It was a miracle that neither had been punctured. While they were still sitting on the floor comes this female Ambassador and in a voice of thunder, I mean the voice of a thrush, shouts, no, I mean warbles: “I order you to desist.” She tapped their lips and they were speechless. She ordered them to make it up and with a groan they fell into each other’s arms. So ended this fearful ordeal.

  Well, from then on things went a bit better and both men won their service medals; as for the lady, she afterwards went to Russia, they say, taking her culture with her, and there had quite a success. She liked the place, the people, and the system so much that she had herself nationalized and married a collective farm. Presumably there she is today. But in my view, old man, woman’s place has always been on the farm.

  3

  High Barbary

  What I very much enjoy on the second Saturday of the month (said Antrobus) is the little walk across to the Strand for a haircut and a spiritual revamping chez the good Fenner. Everything about the operation is reassuring, soothing. As you know, Fenner himself is clearly a mixture of Old Father Time and Dr Freud. The whole Office has, at one time or another, passed through his purposeful scissors. You know how fanatically faithful to tradition the FO is; well, Fenner is a tradition. Why, last week when Toby Featherblow’s wife, Constance, popped number four and the thing was found to be positively covered in hair, it was to Fenner that they rushed to have the features disinterred for the purposes of licensing and registration. Otherwise the registrar might have refused to accept what was, to all intents and purposes, an ape. Yes, you can count on old Fenner. He never flinches before reality.

  As for the Emporium—with its potted palms, painted mirrors, its pictures of Eights Week in the ’nineties, its dominating portrait of Gladstone staring out through (or perhaps round?) a Fenner hairdo—what is one to say? It radiates calm and the soothing smell of bay rum or Fenner’s Scalp Syrup and Follicle Food combined. Nor does one overhear any low conversation there—just a few choice anecdotes about the Dutch Royal Family, carefully phrased. Fenner is strict: once I remember that two military attaches were expelled from their stools for trying to exchange betting slips. Fenner’s scorn was so withering that one of them cried.

  But all this one learns to value truly only when one has served abroad—for not the least of the hazards the poor dip has to face is that of foreign barbary. My dear chap, as you walk in, you can scan the row of seated clients and tell at a glance where some of them have been serving. The singular bottlebrush effect of a Siamese haircut, for example, will take ages to grow out and is quite unmistakeable. Fenner will shake his head commiseratingly and say, “Bangkok, I take it, sir?” The poor chap will sit with trembling lip and nod sadly. “We will see what can be done to save you, sir” says Fenner and releases a faintly flocculent blast from a pressurized syringe, which at once brings back the flush of health to the raped scalp. You have experienced it. You will know what I mean.

  It varies, too, with every country, as do the habits of the various artists. In Italy your barber is apt to sing—a dangerous habit and excruciating for the tone-deaf; moreover he may add gestures to his little aria of a sudden and lop off an earlobe with a fine air of effortless self-distinction. Personally, I would rather have the stuff grow all the way down my back and into my chair than trust an Italian when overcome with emotion and garlic. I have seen it happen. A cousin of Polk-Mowbray still bears a cropped right ear; indeed, he is lucky to have as much of it left as he has—only a wild swerve prevented its total disappearance. Talk about living dangerously!

  In places like Germany, for example, one is lucky to be able to get away without a severed carotid. As for the Balkans, they, too, have their fearsome methods, and I have known cases where people took to beards and shingles rather than face up to reality. Of course, the moment they get leave they fly back to Fenner, who cuts back all the undergrowth and serenely removes whatever may have been picked up by the static electricty. At least that was the excuse that Munnings-Mather gave for all the hairpins and Gramophone needles Fenner found in his beard.

  As for the French—they leave me speechless, positively beating the air. They will either do you a style pompier, piling the muck up on the top of your head and pressure-greasing it until you leave marks on the ceiling of every lift you enter, or else they treat you to a razor cut of such topiary ferocity that you come out feeling sculpted. They cut into the stuff as if it were cheese. No. No. You can have Paris. Let me keep my modest tonsure and my Short-Back-and-Sides Outlook. The Style Fenner (vintage 1904) is my sort of thing.

  Why, in Vulgaria, once, things got so bad that Polk-Mowbray was driven, positiv
ely driven, to Take Steps—and you know how much he hated the naked thrust of Action. It was during the Civil War when the country was Communist all the week and Royalist at the weekends. Every Saturday morning the Royalist troops came down from the hills and took the Praesidium; every Monday morning they were driven back with heavy losses. Monday was payday for the Communist forces, Saturday that of the Royalist army. This had a strange effect on the hairdressing business, for during the week you only found heavily nationalized barbers at work, while at the weekend you could borrow the five Royal barbers from the other side. The Communists used an unpretentious pudding-basin cut which had been worked out in terms of the dialectic, lightly driving a harrow across the scalp and then weeding with finger and thumb. They were short of instruments because the Five-Year Plan hadn’t started to work due to lack of foreign capital. Anyway, during the week you were in the hands of some horny peasant, while if you waited till Sunday you could get a sort of Viennese pomadour which fanned away into wings at the back like a tail coat and carried sideburns of a corkscrew pattern which once made Polk-Mowbray look so like Elizabeth Barrett Browning that the British Council man, Gool, suggested … but that is another story.

  Yes, the Balkan barber, conditioned by the hirsute nature of his client, has developed a truly distressing style of action—suited to the nature of the terrain, I don’t doubt, but nonetheless frightful to those who have been decently brought up. They positively plunge into one’s nostrils, hacking and snipping as if they were clearing a path in the jungle; then before one can say “moustache cup” they crawl into one’s ears, remorselessly pruning at what (to judge by the sound) must be something as intractable as a forest of holm oak. I shall spare you. You know.

  But I think you had left before Polk-Mowbray entered his Do-It-Yourself phase; the state of Vulgarian barbary must have touched him off. He saw an advertisement for an instrument called, I think, The Gents Super Hair Regulator, which from the brochure appeared to be an ingenious comb and razor blade in one; you trimmed as you combed, so to speak. Nothing simpler, nothing more calculated to please. Polk-Mowbray, deeply moved by the discovery, ordered a dozen, one for each member of the Chancery. He was beside himself with pride and joy. Speaking from a full heart, he said: “From today our troubles are over. I want each one of you from now on to use his little Regulator and so boycott these heathen barbers of Vulgaria.” Well, I don’t know if you know the Regulator? No? Be warned then. It is not a toy for frolicking amateurs. The keenest professional skill is needed to work it. Otherwise, it takes huge lumps out of your hair in the most awkward places, leaving gaunt patches of white scalp glimmering through. By lunchtime on that fatal day, the whole Chancery looked as if it had been mowed down by ringworm or mange. Worse still, De Mandeville contracted a sort of scalp-rot which turned his whole skull green. A sort of deathly verdigris set in. He had to keep his hair in a green baize bag for over a week while Fenner’s Follicle Food did its healing work—lucky I had brought a bottle with me. But, of course, the sight nearly drove Polk-Mowbray berserk, especially as at that time the two were at daggers drawn. De Mandeville had sworn to try and drive his chief mad by a sort of verbal Chinese torture. To every remark made to him, he would only reply “Charmed,—I’m sure,” with a kind of snakelike sibilance. It doesn’t sound much, but I assure you that after a few days of endless repetition of this phrase (accompanied by the fearful sight of the green baize bag on his head), Polk-Mowbray was practically beaten to his knees.

  But probably the most horrifying instance of mass barbary that I recall was what befell the little party of guileless Finns who submitted themselves to a Vulgarian perm in preparation for the National Lepers’ Day Ball. That could not be bettered as an illustration of the Things One Is Up Against in the Service. Five of them, including the Ambassadress, were partially electrocuted owing to a faulty fuse. How is it, I ask myself, that they did not know that the light and power arrangements of Vulgaria were so capricious? Yet, they did not. Polk-Mowbray, who was wooing the Communists, had given the Minister for Interior an electric razor which, whenever it was plugged in, fused the lights of the capital. Something of this order must have happened to the innocent Finns. With their crowning glories tied into those sort of pressurized domes attached to the ceiling by a live wire, they were suddenly aware that everything was turning red-hot and beginning to smoke fearfully; the atmosphere was rapidly beginning to resemble that of a Turkish bath that has got out of control. But the Finns are normally an unemotional race and not much given to fruitless ratiocination. It was not until sparks an inch long began to sprout from their fingers that they began to wonder dimly if all was well. By then it was too late.

  They were far too hot to hold. The barbers who manfully tried to disengage them retired hastily with burns and shock. In fact they might have been there to this day, fried to a crisp, had not the Diplomatic Corps been passing at that moment in full tenue. We were winding our way across the town to lay a rather limp wreath on the Leper Memorial when we saw the smoke and heard the shrill ululations of the feckless barbers. It was more than lucky, too, that Dovebasket should have a pair of rubberized pliers in his uniform pocket. He darted into the smoke-filled cavern and brought his mechanical genius to bear on the situation, snipping the live wires which attached our poor colleagues to the roof. The Finns rolled moaning to the floor in their golden domes, looking like so much science fiction. “Give them air” we all cried shrilly, and willing hands carried them out and laid them in a row upon the pavements. All this had the superficial air of being a mass burial, and I personally believe that had it been anyone but the Finns, that would indeed have been the case. But the Finns can take anything with equanimity. Water was carefully poured over them from plastic buckets. They smoked, they smelled like chops frying, but at last they came to their senses.

  We did not see them again until the ball that night which closed Leper Week. My dear chap, you have never imagined such hair. It was positively psychoanalytic. Golden wigs of such hellish, blinding, metallic brilliance. The demon barbers had certainly done their work.… Ah! But I see that Fenner is free at last. More of this anon.

  4

  Seraglios and Imbroglios

  If you were to surmise (said Antrobus) that all our problems in the Vulgarian Mission were political ones you would be Gravely In Error. The dip’s life is never as clear cut as the Wars of the Roses; in fact its sheer variety is equalled only by its inanity—as Poincaré once nearly said. Perhaps that is why we enjoy such a range of topics for conversation—no facet of experience has left us unmarked. That is why your hardened dip is not the man to be unnerved merely by the patter of rain on a brushed bowler. He has seen deeply into the secrets of nature. Well, my boy, these reflections—graver than is my wont—have been pooped off by today’s Times which announces that old Sammy is finishing his memoirs. Poor old Sam—he was once described admiringly by Eisenhower as a supramundane lush. I expect he is going to get his own back in print somehow; he can just read and write—Eton, of course. But it’s slow work and it must have taken him years to amount to a book. And then, of course, he’s getting on and his career was often dappled with shadow. I mean, he started out with a regulation hip-flask and ended by drinking unrefined embrocation from a hip-bath. Or so they say in the Bag Room where the actual hip-bath may still be viewed for a small douceur. No-one was really surprised when he took refuge in the Church. For years now we’ve had vague reports of him stumping round some sodden Suffolk parish clad in a strip of roofing felt. At Xmas time … but why go on? The man has suffered; he is trying to atone by a little mild beadling. In the long unheated nights he sits and writes. What does he write? Well may you ask what old Sam is writing. It is not The Schoolgirls’ Wonderbook of Booze and Sex—no. It is a volume of DIPLOMATIC MEMOIRS. Its title is Seraglios and Imbroglios or Glimpses Behind the Bead Curtain of Diplomacy by One Who Was There and Suffered For It. Has a sinister sort of ring, no? God knows I hope—everyone hopes—he will be discreet.


  My misgivings have increased of late after a talk to Gormley who claims to have spoken to Sam recently on the phone. Apparently Sam said it was all about diplomacy from the religious angle. Now that puzzled me. The only religious chap we had was the chaplain and he left under a cloud, all hushed up. And yet … I wonder. There were strange aspects of our lives out there which I suppose one could call religious—if one strained the Official Secrets Act until it creaked. Morris-dancing on the lawn—wouldn’t that qualify? With De Mandeville and his chauffeur all cross-gartered and with gipsy earrings. But there was nothing religious about Polk-Mowbray’s outburst when he saw them.…

  Then I remember little Carter—if that was the name. Americans are notoriously Romance Prone. He went off to Egypt on leave with the ALEXANDRIA QUARTET under his arm. Next thing we knew, he had become a Moslem—bang! just like that. Gone over to them bodily. He came back from leave looking pale but jaunty in a ghastly sort of way and towing a string of little new black wives. Real ones. “Durrell’s right” he is alleged to have announced to his Chief with an airy wave. “Down there almost everything goes.” Well, of course, he went too; but he had brought us a headache. Things like this can be very catching in the Corps. He had Raised a Precedent. Yet technically he was quite within his rights. There was no religious bar in the State Department nor in the F.O. They had the devil’s own job to post him: there was no excuse—being American he was efficient. Nothing left but to upgrade him and send him to UNO where he would be lost in the dusky spectrum. I met Schwartz their Councillor looking pale and fagged out; I knew why. It was this damned business, all the telegrams flying about.

  “It was such a quiet mission” he wailed, “before This. What did he want to do it for?” Schwartz played bridge every day of the week and the thing was gumming up his concentration. Through the open window we could see Carter taking his wives for an airing on the Embassy lawn; since they could not speak each other’s language, he was playing leap-frog with them. The staff stared down through the windows, their faces working. Schwartz stifled an oath. “Antrobus” he said, “you know and I know that technically speaking there is nothing in the regulations to prevent King Solomon strolling into the State Department and asking for a posting—even if he were to jerk his thumb (here Schwartz jerked his thumb) and say ‘These ladies here, by the way, are my wife; kindly put her on K rations.’” I felt for him. Yes, Carter cost us a great deal of extra legislation. After all, what was to prevent the whole State Department filling up one night with Mormons? Well, the waters closed over little Carter. I was sorry for him. Two of the wives were quite pretty, they said, with well-placed Advantages. But it was useless crying over spilt milk. We reformed our ranks and marched on, ever on.