A Void (37 page)

prodding a soft runny gorgonzola and so accord that instant

mortality that I was looking for!

But I thought of our six offspring, not any of whom I was

blaming for my loss (how could I?), six squalling infants still

squirming in bloody umbilical cords and probably running a risk

of strangulation or asphyxiation.

I took pity on what was now my family. Infant by infant, I

cut off that cord uniting my brood to a now arid womb that had

brought it forth; and I did what I could to wash it, making all

six snug and warm in my aircraft.

Now I had to fix its admission circuit, an arduous, frustrating

job, for, try as I might, it would always light up too soon, without

waiting for any propulsion of gas in its induction piping. Nor

would honing its pivot joint do it on its own. I had to adjust it

all, point by point, joystick and bolts, piping and pads, stuffing-

box and pistons.

It took four days working on it nonstop till I got it functional

again. And, taking off, I struck out for Agadir, hoping finally, in

civilisation, to grant my brood that constant monitoring of which

it was now so badly in want.

Whilst flying, though, what should pop into my mind but that

warning that you and I had had in our childhood from our doctor

saviour. And I thought about it, I thought about it long and

hard, during my flight, arriving at last at this conclusion: if our

family had drawn up so many codicils vis-a-vis its patrimony and

its distribution, it was that it had a tradition of giving birth to

too many offspring, a history of bi-, tri- or on occasion quadri-

parturitions.

Thus that man who was pursuing us, who was trying to kill

us, that man, our own papa, who had sworn to satisfy his thirst

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for our blood by first doing away with our sons, was no doubt

particularly on watch for any hospital announcing a birth of an

abnormal amount of infants.

If I took my six offspring to a clinic in Agadir, I could hardly

stop it from making such a miraculous fact public. Nor could I

stop my infanticidal antagonist from grasping his opportunity at

last!

I was conscious, in fact, that what I couldn't do on any account

was insist on raising my brood as a family. My only way of

assuring that it wouldn't fall victim to this madman, this fanatic,

was, cuckoo-fashion, to put my sons, all my sons, up for

adoption . . .

"I'm with you now," murmurs Amaury, blanching, "I know

how it's all coming out. Taking 'Tryphiodorus' as an alias, you

put on a grubby smock, of a sort that a tramp might sport, and

you had Augustus adopt Haig, Vowl adopt Anton . . ."

"That's right. But you still don't know it all. For think of this:

Hassan Ibn Abbou was also my son, whom I had to abandon

as soon as I got to Agadir.

Parking my aircraft in a vacant hangar, and wishing to guard

my offspring from any risk of association with our family, what

I did first was to scratch off, with a crypto-coagulating nib, that

tiny but singular wrist mark that, for any child, was damning

proof of his background.

And, picking a baby out at random, according to an old song

I'd known in my own childhood:

1 Potato, 2 Potato

3 Potato, 4

5 Potato, 6 Potato
, and so on,

I took it to a hospital in Agadir. It was night. Groping along

corridors by just as much light as a match would afford, I finally

caught sight of a woman who had just had a stillborn child and

who, visibly, was also not long for this world. It was an opportu-

nity I couldn't miss. I insist that this poor woman was dying -

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by finding a wad of cottonwool on a tray and soaking it in

chloroform, I simply brought it all forward by a day or so. Placing

this woman's baby in an adjoining cot, I had my own stand in

for it.

At that point, scrawling what I thought was a suitably Arabic-

sounding alias, Ibn Abbou (an alias which from that day forward

would cling to my son), on a plastic tag and attaching it to his

wrist, I took flight from Morocco, my goal that of finding vacant

lots, if I may put it that way, for all of my offspring. You know

now that Douglas was put into Augustus's hands at Arras; and

that in Dublin, as Tryphiodorus, I thought to farm Anton out

to Lady d'Antrim, who had as husband Lord Horatio Vowl, an

Irish tobacco baron.

This Lord Vowl was famous for making for Dunhill, incorpor-

ating Latakia and Virginia tobacco in a combination known only

to him, for it got its miraculously insinuating flavour not from

its individual parts but from his cunning proportioning of such

parts - was famous, I say, for making Balkan Sobrani, a brand

familiar to all tobacco aficionados and which Davidoff would call

a classic.

Alas! Within just thirty-six months, Lord Horatio, mounting

a foal that was probably a bit too frisky for a man of his bulk,

had a bad fall, so bad a fall, in fact, that it would instandy knock

him out and put him in a fatal coma. With his last, dying gasp,

Vowl was said to murmur to his assistant a formula, a formula

as famous and also as unknown as Coca-Gala's, for manufacturing

his tobacco, but its list of instructions would turn out so hard to

follow that nobody, posthumously, so to say, has found a way

of producing a tobacco with all its original purity and subtility

of aroma. Which is why, nowadays, you'll find no such thing as

good Balkan Sobrani; and which is also why a low-quality brand

is now sold by tobacconists as a poor imitation, Squadron Four,

which, combining a fairly uninspiring if not totally banal kind of

Latakia with an insipid Virginia, a Virginia that's obviously not

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a product of sunny Arlington, Fairfax, Richmond, Portsmouth,

Chatham, Norfolk or any truly Virginian plantation, has a flavour

that, candidly, you could only call so-so.

But if, thus, you know how I put half of my offspring out to

adoption, you know nothing, if I'm not wrong, of my surviving

trio.

First, I should say that it was my aim to bring up two out of

six on my own. So, having a last infant to part with - it wasn't

a boy but a girl, my only girl - I took a train for Davos . . .

"Davos?" said Amaury with curiosity.

"That's right. And you'll find out in your turn how I found

out why any notion of salvation on my part was simply wishful

thinking, why our family's Damnation was going to track us

down till our dying day. For — oh, it was just damn bad luck! —

in Davos, to part with that last child, I took it in my mind to go

to a sanatorium."

"A sanatorium!" said Amaury, almost in a cry.

"Uh huh. A sanatorium," I said, in a singsong as mournful as

an air-raid alarm, as a ship's foghorn in a storm, "right again, a

sanatorium. I got into it, as was my wont, by night, walking at

random along ill-lit corridors and at last, through a small, oblong

window, spotting a dark cot in which was lying -"

Amaury dramatically cut in. "Anastasia!"

"Yup, Anastasia, Hollywood's most luminous, most numinous

star. I saw, at my approach, that Anastasia, who now lay dying

of TB, having but a solitary functioning lung and that lung now

functioning so badly, so porous and spongy, so full of inflam-

mation, palpitation, granulation and catarrh, you could almost

wring it out, had brought into this world a baby as ugly as a

bug, a baby that was also visibly on its way out of it, so allowing

yours truly to act without that compunction, contrition and

attrition that usually accompany a killing - for it would go with

its mama into God's kingdom whilst I had a vacant cot for my

last child!"

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"What?" said Amaury. "So Douglas, Olga's husband . . ."

"And paramour!"

". . . was also Olga's sibling!"

"That's right."

"Oh calamity!" said Amaury, almost indistincdy; and, follow-

ing an instant without saying a word, "But what of your two

sons - you know, whom you brought up on your own?"

For sixty months or so it wasn't all that bad. But (I was now

living in Ajaccio, that's in Corsica, you know) a day was to dawn

on which I took my two infants out to play in a small public

suburban park not too far from a wood. Thirsty, and imagining

I wasn't running any risk, I found my way to a bar to drink a

cold soda pop, a 7-Up, I think. Just as I was savouring it, and

chatting away to a bosomy young barmaid, a horrifying cry was

to jolt us both.

I quickly put down my glass and ran out, to find that that park

that I'd thought so ordinary, so innocuous, was now in total

confusion, full of sobbing matrons, swooning maids and livid

municipal guards. What was going on? Alas, I soon found out,

picking it up through an orgy of sniffling, blubbing, moaning,

groaning and hanky-wringing.

What I was told was that a tall, skinny man sporting an

amorphous sort of cap, playing a jaunty air on what I think you

call a kazoo, and coming out of that adjoining wood, had with

his music drawn a crowd of infants around him, including my

pair, and gradually, insidiously, drawn it away with him back

into it. Following a hiatus during which nobody had any notion

what to do, a hunt was got up, chasing him and sniffing him

out, scouring scrubland and shrubland, patrolling, raking soil and

looking for footprints. All, though, in vain. In addition, it was

said that this was a wood that had its own gang of bandits,

cutthroats notorious for holding infants to ransom or robbing

adults, so that, not surprisingly, nobody was willing to go all

that far into it.

Concurring with this opinion, my initial assumption was that

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it was a strictly random affair, that this atrocity, striking down

all that's most virginal and incorrupt in our civilisation, had noth-

ing to do with that horror that was pursuing us.

But, within four days, I found out from my
Figaro
that your

firstborn son, Aignan, who was 20 and participating in a Martial

Cantaral Foundation symposium on pathovocalisation, a sym-

posium that (a fact by which I was also struck) had as its chairman

my own boss, Gadsby V. Wright, was, how shall I say, kaput.

And I thought it all too obvious that, at Ajaccio as at Oxford,

our Bushy Man was now moving into action . . .

Amaury abruptly cut in. "So you found out about Aignan and

his . . . his dying in that awful fashion?"

"I did."

"But why didn't you go to Oxford for his burial? For it was

your opportunity of making contact with your sibling, of our

talking, of my finding out at last that this lunatic was pursuing

us and possibly of our taking communal action against him."

"In fact, my original plan was instandy to fly to Britain. And,

with that in mind, I rang up Lord Wright who, or so I was told

by him, had caught sight of an unknown man accompanying

Aignan to his symposium, a day prior to his vanishing act - a

man, I should point out, with a bushy chin. I was conscious that,

if I was to turn up at his burial, that man would know what I

was doing in Oxford and so, obviously, who I was. As my incog-

nito was, I thought, vital, I didn't go, hoping soon to contact

you in privacy - probably by post."

For an instant I was struck by how unusually stiff Amaury was

growing. Finally, in an faindy ominous pitch, this is what was

said by him:

"You thought, you thought! You, you, always you! By not

going to Oxford, by not risking your own skin, you simply forgot

to pass on information about that shadow that was falling upon

us. For you it was unimportant, it was trifling, it was trivial, it

just wasn't worth talking about, that cross I had to carry! That

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son I had to carry - carry to his tomb! You had an opportunity

to inform your own kith and kin — but, oh no, not you! Knowing

all about it as you did, it didn't occur to you to say a word! Your

sin by omission is, in my opinion, as shocking a sin, as mortal a

sin, as our papa's sin by commission. But that blood that's flowing

by your sin, by your omission, is now, and by my own hand,

about to abandon your body, just as would a pack of rats from

a sinking ship!"

It was obvious that poor Amaury was raving, half out of his

mind, for I saw him pick up a thick black andiron and start

walking forward with a low animal growl.

In my turn I took a pick, hoping to ward off his attack with

it. But that attack didn't actually occur. For, during his approach,

it was as though Amaury was abrupdy drawn back by an almost

inhuman compulsion - an aura of physical might that was pulling

him down, down, down, into that gigantic basin of oil.

Giving out a bloodcurdling cry, slipping and falling, as though

no laws of gravity could apply to him now, Amaury spun around

and in a flash was out of sight. . .

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V I

A R T H U R W I L B U R G

SAVORGNAN

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