Kiss Kiss (21 page)

      
“
Edward!
”
      
“Oh, for God’s sake, woman, sit down and keep calm.
There’s nothing to get worked up about. Louisa! Louisa,
sit down!
”

Once upon a time, in the City of New York, a beautiful baby
boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named
him Lexington.
      
No sooner had the mother returned home from the hospital
carrying Lexington in her arms than she said to her husband,
“Darling, now you must take me out to a most marvellous
restaurant for dinner so that we can celebrate the arrival of
our son and heir.”
      
Her husband embraced her tenderly and told her that any
woman who could produce such a beautiful child as Lexington
deserved to go absolutely anywhere she wanted. But was she
strong enough yet, he enquired, to start running around the
city late at night?
      
“No,” she said, she wasn’t. But what the hell.
      
So that evening they both dressed themselves up in fancy
clothes, and leaving little Lexington in care of a trained
infant’s nurse who was costing them twenty dollars a day and
was Scottish into the bargain, they went out to the finest and
most expensive restaurant in town. There they each ate a
giant lobster and drank a bottle of champagne between them,
and after that, they went on to a nightclub, where they drank
another bottle of champagne and then sat holding hands for
several hours while they recalled and discussed and admired
each individual physical feature of their lovely newborn son.
      
They arrived back at their house on the East Side of Manhattan
at around two o’clock in the morning and the husband
paid off the taxi driver and then began feeling in his pockets
for the key to the front door. After a while, he announced
that he must have left it in the pocket of his other suit, and he
suggested they ring the bell and get the nurse to come down
and let them in. An infant’s nurse at twenty dollars a day must
expect to be hauled out of bed occasionally in the night, the
husband said.
      
So he rang the bell. They waited. Nothing happened. He
rang it again, long and loud. They waited another minute.
Then they both stepped back on to the street and shouted the
nurse’s name (McPottle) up at the nursery windows on the
third floor, but there was still no response. The house was
dark and silent. The wife began to grow apprehensive. Her
baby was imprisoned in this place, she told herself. Alone with
McPottle. And who was McPottle? They had known her for
two days, that was all, and she had a thin mouth, a small
disapproving eye, and a starchy bosom, and quite clearly she was
in the habit of sleeping too soundly for safety. If she couldn’t
hear the front-door bell, then how on earth did she expect to
hear a baby crying? Why, this very second the poor thing
might be swallowing its tongue or suffocating on its pillow.
      
“He doesn’t use a pillow,” the husband said. “You are not to
worry. But I’ll get you in if that’s what you want.” He was
feeling rather superb after all the champagne, and now he
bent down and undid the laces of one of his black patent-leather
shoes, and took it off. Then, holding it by the toe, he
flung it hard and straight right through the dining-room
window on the ground floor.
      
“There you are,” he said, grinning. “We’ll deduct it from
McPottle’s wages.”
      
He stepped forward and very carefully put a hand through
the hole in the glass and released the catch. Then he raised the
window.
      
“I shall lift you in first, little mother,” he said, and he took
his wife around the waist and lifted her off the ground. This
brought her big red mouth up level with his own, and very
close, so he started kissing her. He knew from experience that
women like very much to be kissed in this position, with their
bodies held tight and their legs dangling in the air, so he went
on doing it for quite a long time, and she wiggled her feet,
and made loud gulping noises down in her throat. Finally, the
husband turned her round and began easing her gently through
the open window into the dining-room. At this point, a police
patrol car came nosing silently along the street towards them.
It stopped about thirty yards away, and three cops of Irish
extraction leaped out of the car and started running in the
direction of the husband and wife, brandishing revolvers.
      
“Stick ’em up!” the cops shouted. “Stick ’em up!” But it was
impossible for the husband to obey this order without letting
go of his wife, and had he done this she would either have
fallen to the ground or would have been left dangling half in
and half out of the house, which is a terribly uncomfortable
position for a woman; so he continued gallantly to push her
upward and inward through the window. The cops, all of
whom had received medals before for killing robbers, opened
fire immediately, and although they were still running, and
although the wife in particular was presenting them with a
very small target indeed, they succeeded in scoring several
direct hits on each body—sufficient anyway to prove fatal in
both cases.
      
Thus, when he was no more than twelve days old, little
Lexington became an orphan.

The news of this killing, for which the three policemen
subsequently received citations, was eagerly conveyed to all
relatives of the deceased couple by newspaper reporters, and
the next morning, the closest of these relatives, as well as a
couple of undertakers, three lawyers, and a priest, climbed
into taxis and set out for the house with the broken window.
They assembled in the living-room, men and women both, and
they sat around in a circle on the sofas and armchairs, smoking
cigarettes and sipping sherry and debating what on earth
should be done now with the baby upstairs, the orphan
Lexington.
      
It soon became apparent that none of the relatives was
particularly keen to assume responsibility for the child, and
the discussions and arguments continued all through the day.
Everybody declared an enormous, almost an irresistible desire
to look after him, and would have done so with the greatest
of pleasure were it not for the fact that their apartment was
too small, or that they already had one baby and couldn’t
possibly afford another, or that they wouldn’t know what to
do with the poor little thing when they went abroad in the
summer, or that they were getting on in years, which surely
would be most unfair to the boy when he grew up, and so on
and so forth. They all knew, of course, that the father had
been heavily in debt for a long time and that the house was
mortgaged and that consequently there would be no money
at all to go with the child.
      
They were still arguing like mad at six in the evening when
suddenly, in the middle of it all, an old aunt of the deceased
father (her name was Glosspan) swept in from Virginia, and
without even removing her hat and coat, not even pausing to
sit down, ignoring all offers of a martini, a whisky, a sherry,
she announced firmly to the assembled relatives that she herself
intended to take sole charge of the infant boy from then on.
What was more, she said, she would assume full financial
responsibility on all counts, including education, and everyone
else could go back home where they belonged and give their
consciences a rest. So saying, she trotted upstairs to the
nursery and snatched Lexington from his cradle and swept
out of the house with the baby clutched tightly in her arms,
while the relatives simply sat and stared and smiled and looked
relieved, and McPottle the nurse stood stiff with disapproval
at the head of the stairs, her lips compressed, her arms folded
across her starchy bosom.
      
And thus it was that the infant Lexington, when he was
thirteen days old, left the City of New York and travelled
southward to live with his Great Aunt Glosspan in the State
of Virginia.

Aunt Glosspan was nearly seventy when she became
guardian to Lexington, but to look at her you would never
have guessed it for one minute. She was as sprightly as a
woman half her age, with a small, wrinkled, but still quite
beautiful face and two lovely brown eyes that sparkled at you
in the nicest way. She was also a spinster, though you would
never have guessed that either, for there was nothing spinsterish
about Aunt Glosspan. She was never bitter or gloomy or
irritable; she didn’t have a moustache; and she wasn’t in the
least bit jealous of other people, which in itself is something
you can seldom say about either a spinster or a virgin lady,
although of course it is not known for certain whether Aunt
Glosspan qualified on both counts.
      
But she was an eccentric old woman, there was no doubt
about that. For the past thirty years she had lived a strange
isolated life all by herself in a tiny cottage high up on the
slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, several miles from the
nearest village. She had five acres of pasture, a plot for growing
vegetables, a flower garden, three cows, a dozen hens, and
a fine cockerel.
      
And now she had little Lexington as well.
      
She was a strict vegetarian and regarded the consumption
of animal flesh as not only unhealthy and disgusting, but
horribly cruel. She lived upon lovely clean foods like milk,
butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, nuts, herbs, and fruit, and she
rejoiced in the conviction that no living creature would be
slaughtered on her account, not even a shrimp. Once, when a
brown hen of hers passed away in the prime of life from being
eggbound, Aunt Glosspan was so distressed that she nearly
gave up egg-eating altogether.
      
She knew not the first thing about babies, but that didn’t
worry her in the least. At the railway station in New York,
while waiting for the train that would take her and Lexington
back to Virginia, she bought six feeding-bottles, two dozen
diapers, a box of safety pins, a carton of milk for the journey,
and a small paper-covered book called
The Care of Infants
.
What more could anyone want? And when the train got
going, she fed the baby some milk, changed its nappies after a
fashion, and laid it down on the seat to sleep. Then she read
The Care of Infants
from cover to cover.
      
“There is no problem here,” she said, throwing the book out
of the window. “No problem at all.”
      
And curiously enough there wasn’t. Back home in the
cottage everything went just as smoothly as could be. Little
Lexington drank his milk and belched and yelled and slept
exactly as a good baby should, and Aunt Glosspan glowed
with joy whenever she looked at him, and showered him with
kisses all day long.

By the time he was six years old, young Lexington had
grown into a most beautiful boy with long golden hair and
deep blue eyes the colour of cornflowers. He was bright and
cheerful, and already he was learning to help his old aunt in
all sorts of different ways around the property, collecting the
eggs from the chicken house, turning the handle of the butter
churn, digging up potatoes in the vegetable garden, and searching
for wild herbs on the side of the mountain. Soon, Aunt
Glosspan told herself, she would have to start thinking about
his education.
      
But she couldn’t bear the thought of sending him away to
school. She loved him so much now that it would kill her to
be parted from him for any length of time. There was, of
course, that village school down in the valley, but it was a
dreadful-looking place, and if she sent him there she just knew
they would start forcing him to eat meat the very first day he
arrived.
      
“You know what, my darling?” she said to him one day
when he was sitting on a stool in the kitchen watching her
make cheese. “I don’t really see why I shouldn’t give you your
lessons myself.”
      
The boy looked up at her with his large blue eyes, and
gave her a lovely trusting smile. “That would be nice,” he said.
      
“And the very first thing I should do would be to teach you
how to cook.”
      
“I think I would like that, Aunt Glosspan.”
      
“Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to learn
some time,” she said. “Vegetarians like us don’t have nearly so
many foods to choose from as ordinary people, and therefore
they must learn to be doubly expert with what they have.”
      
“Aunt Glosspan,” the boy said, “what
do
ordinary people eat
that we don’t?”
      
“Animals,” she answered, tossing her head in disgust.
      
“You mean live animals?”
      
“No,” she said. “Dead ones.”
      
The boy considered this for a moment.
      
“You mean when they die they
eat
them instead of
burying
them?”
      
“They don’t wait for them to die, my pet. They kill them.”
      
“How do they kill them, Aunt Glosspan?”
      
“They usually slit their throats with a knife.”
      
“But what
kind
of animals?”
      
“Cows and pigs mostly, and sheep.”
      
“Cows!” the boy cried. “You mean like Daisy and Snowdrop
and Lily?”
      
“Exactly, my dear.”
      
“But
how
do they eat them, Aunt Glosspan?”
      
“They cut them up into bits and they cook the bits. They
like it best when it’s all red and bloody and sticking to the
bones. They love to eat lumps of cow’s flesh with the blood
oozing out of it.”
      
“Pigs too?”
      
“They adore pigs.”
      
“Lumps of bloody pig’s meat,” the boy said. “Imagine that.
What else do they eat, Aunt Glosspan?”
      
“Chickens.”
      
“Chickens!”
      
“Millions of them.”
      
“Feathers and all?”
      
“No, dear, not the feathers. Now run along outside and get
Aunt Glosspan a bunch of chives, will you, my darling?”
      
Shortly after that, the lessons began. They covered five
subjects, reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and cooking,
but the latter was by far the most popular with both teacher
and pupil. In fact, it very soon became apparent that young
Lexington possessed a truly remarkable talent in this direction.
He was a born cook. He was dextrous and quick. He could
handle his pans like a juggler. He could slice a single potato
into twenty paper-thin slivers in less time than it took his aunt
to peel it. His palate was exquisitely sensitive, and he could
taste a pot of strong onion soup and immediately detect the
presence of a single tiny leaf of sage. In so young a boy, all
this was a bit bewildering to Aunt Glosspan, and to tell the
truth she didn’t quite know what to make of it. But she was
proud as proud could be, all the same, and predicted a brilliant
future for the child.
      
“What a mercy it is,” she said, “that I have such a wonderful
little fellow to look after me in my dotage.” And a couple of
years later, she retired from the kitchen for good, leaving
Lexington in sole charge of all household cooking. The boy
was now ten years old, and Aunt Glosspan was nearly eighty.