Kraven Images (15 page)

Kraven liked Donovan’s. He liked its appalling seediness, the dull khaki linoleum on the floor, pitted and rent, the soot-soiled peeling wallpaper, the gloom – above all, the gloom. Donovan never switched on his lights before what he called ‘lighting-up time’ in the late afternoon. As a consequence, the room’s only illumination was furnished by whatever daylight could fight its way through the top half of the grimy street windows. The lower half was masked by an emerald green curtain strung on a brass rail. Still, the daylight bounced gaily enough off the nicks and scars of the polished long bar, it winked and gleamed on the rows of bottles along the bar wall, it shone dully on Donovan’s bald pate. There was light and enough. The room exhaled a sour smell of stale beer, disinfectant and sawdust.

Stuck to the mirror above the bar a year-old poster advised that only two weeks remained in which to catch Dolly Divine and her Erotic Ensemble, a Smash-Hit, at Spinoza’s World-Famous Burlesque, ‘Come One, Come All!’ Kraven squinted at the photo of Dolly Divine on the poster.

He could not remember ever having seen anyone seated at one of the booths in the rear of the long room or at any of the little square tables scattered untidily about the floor. In fact, in all the years he had been coming to Donovan’s, admittedly infrequently and always of an afternoon, inevitably when the world pressed a trifle too heavily upon him, he could not recall another customer. Donovan himself was no genial mine-host-of-the-tavern. He served Kraven with surly reluctance, carefully moving the bowl of pretzels out of convenient reach. Street sounds barely penetrated Donovan’s, and then they lost all distinction, automobile horns, pneumatic drills, insane laughter or cries for help all reduced to a uniform ‘Bummm-m’.

Kraven took a sip of his drink, moved over to the next stool, and reached for a pretzel. Donovan rattled his pages angrily. What was to be done about Princip? Princip was an explosive mine that must be deactivated. He was a destroyer, a tearer-down, an avatar of unreason, who mocked with every action of his being the symbols of peace that he flaunted. What, Kraven wondered, would the Divine Sarah have had to say to a Princip? What had Art to say in the face of Chaos? Opa liked to quote an aphorism remembered from the days when he still read books: History is merely the record of satin slippers descending the stairs as hobnail boots go up. The Gabe Princips of the world were ascending, their victorious banners unfurled. A Kraven could hope to win only an occasional skirmish or remain in place on the staircase for no more than a very short while. Was he doomed meekly to give the vile Princip his Pass? There was that within him that whispered no. But how, how?

And what of Nimuë, whom he had innocently sought to help? He knew her now to be in league with that very Princip. No, it was not a matter of her having misconstrued his intentions. That was mere bluff. It was clear enough now
– one
had only to think of Princip’s phone call – that she had been a plant. By now she must have described to Princip the supposed lurid happenings on Opa’s great bed. Princip had his ammunition all right. He had already shot across Kraven’s bows; he stood ready now to hit him broadside. Could Kraven, his pinnace in direst jeopardy, do other than surrender?

It passed belief. To think of Nimuë coming out of his bedroom this afternoon waving – by God, actually waving! – her panties at Stella and him! To think of her actually stepping into those panties in Stella’s presence! What had happened to young womanhood in this dreadful age? Whither had fled discretion, the maidenly blush? There was no instinctive feeling among them that virginity was itself a virtue; or if indeed it was
not
, then that at least the
appearance
of innocence should be the face a young girl presented to the world. They did not scruple to share the shameful secrets of their most intimate activities with whoever would offer a willing ear. ‘When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly’ was a poem it was impossible to teach them nowadays. They simply couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. No wonder, then, that Nimuë had fallen in with Princip’s plan, the common moll of Princip and his gang of louts.

Another sip, another pretzel, another angry rattling of
Midstream
’s pages. Donovan listened in on Kraven’s privacy. Indeed, he looked at Kraven with deep suspicion.

And now C.U.T. Quimby, Cecil, the Rouged Roué of Clerihew. The image of that thin, stooped figure, lips pursed around the point of his acidic tongue, white hair hanging in greasy locks over his threadbare gown, fingertips drumming together as if in nervous prayer, was sharply etched in Kraven’s inner vision. Quimby posed a threat to peace beside which the practices of a Princip were little more than gnat bites. He could reveal all. Kraven sipped his drink and
peeped
furtively at Donovan. There might be a prison term for that.

* * *

AFTER KOKO HAD FALLEN VICTIM, just short of Goodge Street, to anti-Kraven forces, it was discovered to everyone’s surprise that that ordinarily improvident charmer had possessed a life insurance policy. His beneficiaries, naturally, were his children, Tillie and Marko. But Tillie, taking only her manicure kit and a small bag of needments, had eloped immediately after VE Day with an American soldier, a Corporal Minelli, and disappeared into the vastnesses of the New World, another Kraven pioneer to have felt the
Drang nach Westen
. Inquiries undertaken by the insurance company produced shocking news. Not three months into her adventure and driving with neither licence nor skill, she had got the worst of an encounter with a steel pillar on the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. The car had sustained little damage, the pillar none at all. But Tillie had broken her neck and died on the instant, another Kraven victim. As a result, Marko, then a boy of fourteen, became the sole beneficiary of his father’s surprising foresight.

Victoria Kraven, Nicko’s mother, was Marko’s legal guardian. She needed advice. Opa, much enfeebled with age and accumulated traumata, had by now tuned out the mundane. And so she turned of necessity to her own father, Grandpa Blum, who told her whom to see and what to do. Marko suddenly had great expectations.

Meanwhile, he continued at grammar school, one year ahead of Nicko, who at age twelve was already in the second form. Marko, alas, was not a good student. Moreover, he was always in trouble. He was caught puncturing the tyres of his Latin master’s bicycle; he was caught stealing gooseberries
from
the school’s Victory Garden, a wartime holdover; he was frequently caught smoking; and, worst, he was caught peeking through a hole he had scratched in the black paint coating the window of the girls’ lavatory. For this last offence Victoria Kraven was summoned to the school. ‘He’s a refugee boy who has lost both parents and his sister in tragic circumstances. Surely he deserves another chance.’ Marko got it, and another, and another. Frequent canings served only to increase his cunning: he was caught less and less. In the fifth form he took up with one Monica Scrod, a plain, overgrown girl with a bovine face and irregular teeth, who nevertheless enjoyed a certain popularity among the boys for her willingness to pull down her knickers: ‘Thruppence for a look, a tanner for a feel.’ Marko, it was said, received one-third from every transaction.

At the end of that year Marko was to take the General Schools Certificate Examination, in his view a waste of time since he planned to leave school anyway.

‘But surely you’ll go on and complete sixth form, Marko,’ said Victoria. ‘If you matriculate, you can go on to university.’

Marko shrugged. ‘It’s no use, Aunt Victoria, my mind’s made up. No more bloody school. It’s the grown-up world for me.’

In fact, he
was
quite grown up, almost six feet tall, already shaving, his razor regularly bloodying a severe case of acne. For hours on end he would stand before the bathroom mirror squeezing pustules and spurting their contents on to the glass. The concentration involved in such close work eventually caused him to become slightly cross-eyed. This, curiously, was an attractive feature, for it gave him an aloof, quizzical expression. His square teeth, like his fingers, were already badly stained with nicotine.

But Victoria still had a card to play.

‘If you
were
to go to university, I should see to it that you
began
to receive your annuity then and there. You wouldn’t have to wait until you’re twenty-one. But, of course, it’s the GSC and the sixth form first.’

Victoria had found the sole chink in Marko’s armour of happy-go-lucky ignorance. Now, at the eleventh hour, he began to study, enlisting Nicko as his tutor.

‘It’s not fair, Mummy, I’ve got my own homework to do.’

‘Try to find time for both. We must help Marko if we can. He’s only got us and Uncle Ferri in the whole wide world.’

Marko passed his GSC – barely, to be sure, but he passed. His surprise was exceeded only by that of his masters. Yes, he was on his way to his annuity.

But the early enthusiasm that had carried him out of the fifth form was quite gone by the time he entered the sixth. He had discovered poker, at which he was soon adept, and this entertainment, along with pornography – he was already a familiar figure in the sleazier emporia of Soho – became a passion. Yet the school year continued with unperturbed pace along its course.

One day Marko came upon his cousin bent over his books at the kitchen table.

‘I’ll not matriculate, nipper.’

‘Not at this rate, you won’t.’

‘It’ll be such a disappointment for poor old Aunt Vic, that’s what bothers me. Hurting your mum, I mean.’ Marko looked woeful.

‘Start studying now, then. You pulled it off last time.’

Marko shook his head. ‘Never, not a chance.’ He sat down at the table and reached for Nicko’s ruler, with an end of which he began to scratch musingly at his pustules. Suddenly, he slammed the ruler on to the table. ‘Good lord, I’ve just had a super idea! What if you sat for me?’

‘You must be barmy, I’m not a cheat. Sit for you? It’d be no better than lying.’

‘Lying’s easy,’ said Marko. He spoke as one who, having reflected on the experiences of a long and varied life, was prepared upon request to formulate a philosophy, a guide for the perplexed. ‘You’ve got to say the first thing that comes into your head. Right out, I mean. It’s no use stopping to think. Grammar school was useful for something. I can make anyone believe whatever I want. ’Course, it takes practice.’

‘God, what an unutterable swine you are! Besides, I’d get caught.’

‘No you wouldn’t. There’s hundreds sitting for the exam, maybe thousands. All you’d have to do is fill in my name. That’s not even lying. I’m Marcus Nicholas, you’re Nicholas Marcus. It’s the same thing, really, only you’re back to front. Besides, we’d be doing it for your mum, remember. It’d be our secret.’

Nicko shook him off. ‘Well, I’m not going to. If you fail, it’s your own bloody lookout.’

Marko sighed sorrowfully. ‘And you call yourself a son. Don’t blame me if it kills her.’ He sat down again. ‘How’d
you
like to go to university?’

‘Fat chance. We’re not all stinking rich.’

‘Ah, well, you see, that’s why you’re lucky you’ve got me. If I could get into university, I’d come into my annuity. Then all I’d have to do would be to push some of it your way – and Aunt Victoria’s, too, of course. But if you’re not interested … well, I think it’s a bloody shame.’

Nicko stared at him in amazement. ‘You’d never do that, not really.’

‘’Course I would. Good lord, we’re cousins, aren’t we?’

Nicko felt a wild elation. He sprang to his feet and thrust out his hand. ‘I’ll do it!’

The cousins shook hands gravely.

So Nicko prepared for both examinations. He went with little sleep, was reluctant to leave his books even for meals,
developed
headaches, grew pale, his eyes dark ringed. He had a perpetual cold. Marko played poker, palpated breasts and squeezed pustules. In the event, Marcus Nicholas Kraven was matriculated with distinction; Nicholas Marcus Kraven passed his GSC with a score sufficiently high to exempt him from next year’s matriculation examination.

Victoria was jubilant. ‘How marvellous! How wonderful! Two such brilliant boys!’

Next morning the cousins were playing cricket at the bottom of the garden. The wicket was chalked on the door of the potting shed. Marko was batting and Nicko bowling. After a while Marko called a halt and paced with a heavy step towards his cousin, his pitted face lugubrious in the extreme. Nicko dropped the ball and put out his hand for the bat. But Marko’s expression had nothing to do with giving up his favoured place at the potting-shed door. The older boy placed a comforting hand on the shoulder of the younger.

‘I’ve got bad news for you, chum.’ Marko retained the cricket bat and used the knob at the top of the handle to scratch at a pustule on his chin. ‘The fact is, cobber, I’m not going to be able to send you to university after all.’

Nicko recoiled from his cousin’s grasp. ‘You absolute rotter! You beastly liar! You never intended to help me, not ever!’

‘Steady on, old chap, I most certainly did. But the case is altered, you see. Last night your mum told me the details of the bequest. The annuity’s not as much as I’d supposed, and I can’t lay my hands on the capital before I’m twenty-one. There’s only enough for me.’

‘But you promised, you took a solemn oath, we shook hands on it! You stinking bastard!’

‘I’d watch who I was calling a bastard if I were you.’

‘You … you … bugger! You sod!’ Nicko bit hard on his lower lip, but he would not cry in front of Marko. He turned
abruptly
on his heel and ran into the house. Upstairs, slamming the door of his attic room behind him, he threw himself upon the bed.

* * *

THE DOOR TO DONOVAN’S OPENED. Startled, Kraven turned round. In the doorway he saw the shapely silhouette of a woman, her head surmounted by an Afro that the street’s backlight presented as a halo of massed blonde curls. She closed the door behind her and took a few paces into the room, where she stood in the dimness for a moment as if dazzled by popping flashbulbs, smiling, looking about in response to the silent applause of an invisible multitude. To Donovan she blew a kiss. Then she shrugged, smoothed her dress about her hips, tossed her curls, and bumped and ground her way to Donovan’s end of the bar.