Kraven Images (16 page)

‘Hey, Dolly!’ Donovan actually smiled. He folded his copy of
Midstream
and placed it beneath the bar. Leaning towards her, he closed his eyes and puckered his lips.

‘Hey, yourself!’ Taller than Donovan, she bent forward and kissed him on his forehead, leaving there a mark in vivid carmine.

‘So how’d it go?’

‘Looking good, Donovan, looking good.’

‘You mean the old guy came through, you got your angel?’

‘Could just be.’

‘No kidding!’

‘Europe, here I come. Whee-ee!’

Donovan glanced at Kraven and frowned. He and Dolly put their heads together and continued their conversation in whispers.

Kraven took another sip of his drink. He glanced again at the poster, and then as recognition dawned, at the woman talking to Donovan. Of course, Dolly Divine! She was
heavily
and carefully made up, a most attractive eyeful. Her pert bottom merely kissed the barstool as she leaned forward in conversation. If only… But present problems overwhelmed libidinous fantasies. Kraven sank once more into his thoughts.

* * *

AND SO MARKO HAD GONE TO LONDON UNIVERSITY, specifically to Clerihew College, just off St Giles Circus. From the day of his admission until the day of his doctorate almost fourteen years would elapse. But then, Marko was in no hurry. To his surprise he discovered that university life agreed with him, he rather liked it – not the academic side, of course, but most assuredly the social. The university provided him with a seemingly endless stream of girls, all submitting sooner or later, usually sooner, to his blandishments. Although lacking his late father’s good looks and elegance, he had managed somehow to master the paternal technique.

From time to time a girl would persuade him to move into digs with her, but Marko usually tried to avoid even limited cohabitation. He found it poisonous to an affair. It was a nuisance to be asked about his comings and goings; it was disgusting to find evidence of female necessities and feminine weaknesses all over the place. Bickering led to full-scale arguments, arguments to tears, and tears to Marko’s departure. He would drift back to the house in Hampstead and reoccupy his old room. Another girl, he knew, was waiting in the wings, eager for him to beckon her on to centre stage.

But Marko also enjoyed, after his fashion, the intellectual ambience of the university, the knowing talk of politics and the arts, the all-night drinking sessions with his fellows. Over the years he picked up a smattering of quotations, of
quips
, of positions and issues, of ideational attitudes, all that his father Koko had mocked as ‘boonk’.
Kultur
came to him as a scattering of petals on a vast expanse of rough gravel. Sometimes, alas, a petal would blow away before he had noted its beauty. Here a petal might be ground underfoot, there another might wither and die. But by and large he was able to maintain among the roaring boys the reputation of a wit. He knew better than to allow himself to be drawn into a sustained debate.

Then, too, the university gave him leisure. There was seldom any need actually to
do
anything. He was attending university, and that, in his and the world’s view, was doing quite enough. The very fact of his attendance was in itself elevating, or at any rate distinguishing, tending to dissolve the rigid class and ethnic barriers that in those years would otherwise have limited his social mobility. He moved with ease among all manner of men and women. He developed an indefinable
ton
. He belonged.

Nicko, meanwhile, had left school at the end of his fifth-form year. He began work as a stockboy in Dindan Frères, a French firm of cloth wholesalers with offices just off Regent Street. When his employers discovered that he possessed an excellent command of German and an adequate ability in French, he was promoted to a very junior clerkship in what the firm called its Foreign Office. Victoria had been proud of his rapid preferment.

During the years in which Marko with halting steps pursued his several degrees, Nicko advanced through various clerkships to the exalted post of Foreign Office Chief. He despised his work, but he knew no other. Indeed, he had become almost a recluse, spending most of his leisure hours alone, either in the Library at the British Museum, in the balcony at Covent Garden, or at home with his books and his gramophone. He had few friends, none close. His relationships with women were sporadic and unsatisfactory. He
was
awkward and shy with them. An anachronistic, romantic gallantry masked his wretched sense of inadequacy.

‘It’s no use, Marko. I never seem to meet anyone I can really talk to, there’s the rub. Where could I find her? The women I meet know nothing of anything that interests me. There’s no hope of a halfway decent conversation.’

‘Decent conversation, you silly sod? Good lord, what’s that got to do with fucking?’

But Nicko derived some pleasure from Marko’s years at the university. From first to last Nicko did all Marko’s written work for him. This was a mutually satisfying arrangement. For Nicko it meant direction and purpose in his reading and the challenge of professional criticism for his work; for Marko it meant increased leisure time and a halfway decent academic record. Because Nicko’s interests lay in English literature, Marko had elected to read in that discipline; as Nicko narrowed his focus to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Marko perforce did likewise; and when, towards the end of his cousin’s career, Nicko became interested in the parent-child relationship in Shakespearian drama,
The Parent-Child Relationship in Shakespearian Drama
became Marko’s doctoral dissertation.

One evening in late January 1964, Marko dropped in on his cousin at the Hampstead house. Opa was long since dead; Victoria Kraven had died in 1955, her last years, thanks to Nicko’s advancement, what she herself had called ‘comfortable’. For the past several months Marko had been living with Sybil Bowen, a graduate student in nutrition, in rather squalid rooms in Praed Street. Nicko had seen little of him. His arrival was announced by the slamming of the front door and a cry of ‘What ho, me old cock!’ Nicko, sitting reading by the living-room fire, shivered.

‘There you are! Good-o!’ Marko stood for a moment in the doorway and tugged at his forelock in mock servility. He was brimming with good cheer and excitement. The grinning
vigour
of his irruption had caused the gramophone needle to skip from its groove. ‘Not scratched, I trust.’

Nicko sighed. ‘Shut the door, can’t you. There’s a hell of a bloody draught.’

Marko made straight for the cabinet and poured a large whisky for himself. ‘Arses up! Ah, yes, that’s better.’

Nicko got up and closed the door. He turned off the gramophone. So much for the ‘
Porgi amor
’.

‘Thank God that screeching’s off.’ Marko went over to the fire and stood with his back to it, screening Nicko from the warmth.

‘Take off your coat if you’re staying.’

‘In a minute. I’m bloody frozen.’ Marko spread his coat tails around his buttocks. ‘That’s the ticket.’ He raised and lowered himself on his toes for a moment. ‘Notice anything about my face?’

‘You’re a bit yellowish.’

‘No, you twit, it’s the acne, it’s clearing up.’

‘Ah.’ This was an old story, and Nicko knew better than to protest. In fact, but for the occasional eruption of a tiny pustule or two, Marko’s acne had long since cleared up, leaving his face unscarred. But he was obsessed with what he regarded as his disfigurement. In the mirror he still saw the pitted and pimpled face of his adolescent self, and tried whatever remedies came his way, from vinegar baths and anchovy paste to hypnosis and faith healing.

‘It’s all thanks to Sybil. Took one look and told me my trouble was lack of vitamin A. The old body’s starving for it, simple as that. I’ve been pumping the stuff into the system ever since, carrots, pills, the lot. Rather like it, as a matter of fact. Made an enormous difference, as you can see.’

‘Good for Sybil.’

‘Mock on, old chap. But she’s the first one to be of any earthly use, apart from fucking, in all these years. Not that I’ve anything to complain of there.’

‘And so you dashed over here to tell me all about it?’

‘Er, no, not exactly.’ Marko looked momentarily crestfallen, but he swallowed a mouthful of whisky and rallied. ‘How’s our dissertation coming along, old son?’

‘
Our
dissertation is virtually complete.’

‘No need to twist the knife.’

‘I’m polishing up the last of the footnotes.’

‘Bang on!’ Marko was clearly on the verge of some great announcement. He took a steadying swallow of whisky, his yellow eyeballs gleaming, the hand around the tumbler trembling in his excitement. But he contrived a casual tone. ‘You remember, of course, I applied last November for a lectureship in America? I told you about that, didn’t I? No? Yes, there was an advert in the
TLS
. You never know, I thought. Nothing venture, nothing gain, that sort of rot. Posted off my credentials, had the Quim put in a good word for me. The thing is, old boy, I’ve got the job!’ Marko no longer strove to mask his elation. He pulled from his overcoat pocket a thin envelope edged in red, white and blue and waved it triumphantly aloft. ‘It arrived this morning. Trouble is, the appointment’s contingent upon the completion of the degree. I’ve got to arrive “degree in hand”. You’d think it was a bloody wanking contest. Anyway, it’s a relief to hear the dissertation’s done. No need to say how grateful I am, I suppose.’

‘Congratulations.’ Nicko, smiling, tried hard to swallow his envy. ‘What college?’

‘Mosholu. Odd name, what? Has a sort of Jewish flavour to it, pious offspring founding a college, that sort of thing: In Memory of Our Beloved Parents Moshe and Lou Katz.’ Marko rubbed his hands together in glee. ‘It’s in the Bronx, wherever that is. Somewhere near New York, I’m told.’

‘Marko, have you pictured yourself behind the lectern? Do you honestly think you’re capable of teaching college students?’

‘They’re bloody Americans, you bloody sap. It’ll be bloody money for bloody jam. What the bloody hell do they know?’

* * *

THE DISSERTATION WAS ACCEPTED. Professor C.U.T. Quimby had found it a trifle eccentric, Marko reported. The great scholar had pursed his lips around the tip of his tongue. ‘Surely not
every
encounter between father and son, dear boy, reproduces the meeting of poor Laius and his burly offspring on the road to Thebes. You have quite succumbed, I fear, to the Hebrew melodies of your coreligionist, that naughty little doctor from Vienna.’ Still, he had admitted that the dissertation was cogently argued and adequately substantiated, possibly even commercially publishable. He had held out a thin cold hand. ‘So you’re off to the former colonies, eh? Perhaps our paths will cross there. Good luck, dear Marko.’ Quimby had turned his face away, a tear trickling down his rouged and hollow cheek. ‘Ah, Marko, Marko!’ The old man had been quite overcome.

Marko turned up in Hampstead again to make a selection of Kraven furniture for shipment to New York.

‘My God, Marko, you’re turning a frightful colour!’

‘Been using a sunlamp, actually.’

‘You should see a doctor.’

‘But I
am a
doctor, old chap.’

‘What does Sybil say?’

‘Sybil says, “Do it again, Marko! Don’t stop!” That’s what Sybil says.’ He winked and made pumping motions with his hips.

One month before Marko’s planned departure, Nicko flew to Paris to confer with his opposite number at the main branch of Dindan Frères. He was gone three days. Upon his return he was greeted by a phone call from the Compleat Mourner.

‘I’ve got tragic news, Nicko. You’d better brace yourself.’

‘What is it?’

‘Marko’s dead, run over in Oxford Street early yesterday evening.’ The Compleat Mourner had, through long practice, a manner of saying such things that somehow softened the meaning of the words. Nevertheless, this was a shock.

‘I can’t believe it!’

‘I know, I know. You two were very close. The funeral’s tomorrow, the usual place. I’ve made all the arrangements. It had to be delayed, you see, because of the rum circumstances. He was bright yellow. There’s been an autopsy, of course. I’ll pick you up in the car at nine-thirty.’

‘But you said he was run over.’

‘He was, after a fashion. It seems he collapsed in the path of a bus, a number 113. The driver swerved to avoid him, but he was too late. There were plenty of witnesses. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. Marko held up traffic for forty-five minutes, according to the wireless. Lucky it wasn’t rush hour. You see the pattern, don’t you, Nicko? There’ll be another inquest, just as there was for poor Koko.’

The coroner’s inquest in due course found that death had been caused by ‘carrot-juice addiction’. The court heard evidence that in the last ten days of his life, without regard to his earlier known habits, the late Marcus Nicholas Kraven, PhD, had taken eighty million units of vitamin A. In addition, he had drunk during that period about ten gallons of carrot juice. Dr Gerard Barker, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, testified that the effect of so vast an intake of vitamin A from carrots and tablets was virtually indistinguishable from alcoholic poisoning. ‘It produces the same result,’ he said. ‘Cirrhosis of the liver. The man was dead before the bus struck him.’

The funeral was sparsely attended. At the graveside, apart from Nicko, the Compleat Mourner and Aunt Cicely, stood Sibyl Bowen, Dr C.U.T. Quimby, and a brusque young
rabbi
, eager to get it over with. The wind blew strongly out of a low, smudged sky, whipping the pages of the rabbi’s prayer book and moulding to her body Sybil’s black dress. Undoubtedly pregnant, Sybil stared unseeingly through eyes red and swollen. Nicko took her by the arm to steady her; she seemed on the point of collapse.

They all stared down at the coffin, the Compleat Mourner with equanimity, Aunt Cicely sourly. A spattering of rain came and went. Quimby stood slightly apart from the other mourners, holding a large, dirty handkerchief to his nose, blowing, wiping, blowing. He seemed genuinely sorrowful and watched the young rabbi with hungry attention. Later, he shook hands with the family members. ‘Reft of my dearest pledge,’ he mumbled, and blew his nose. ‘Tragic, an inestimable loss.’ He turned to the rabbi. ‘Care for a lift back into town, dear boy? I’ve a comment or two on the ritual you might find interesting.’