SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (20 page)

‘Oh
dear,’ I said.

‘Now
our top money people have looked at the figures for this merger from top to
bottom and they say they can’t see any way at all that it won’t be total and
absolute financial suicide but all the leading futurologist watchers say that
pan global corporatisation is the coming thing, so we can’t afford to be left
behind. Hillary, Hillary, I assure you, you will not notice the difference.
There will be absolutely no changes … except that the publishing department
will be moving to Hounslow, authors’ editors will be drawn from a poo1 rather
than assigned individually and our poetry list will be slimmed down
considerably. On the upside you do get reduced-price travel on West German and
Danish ferries.’

‘Oh
dear,’ I said again. ‘You know that I’ve been with Caspari and Millipede since
the mid Fifties, your father signed me to the firm. I’m bewildered that he’s
gone along with all this.’

‘I
know, remarkable isn’t it? But be assured that Dad-dad agrees with me one
hundred and fifty-seven per cent.’

Indeed
remarkable, since, apart from any other considerations, Paul Caspari had been
torpedoed in the North Atlantic during the convoy war and when he amongst the
survivors had bobbed to the freezing surface they had been machine-gunned by the
lurking German submarine. What I couldn’t be aware of at the time was that Paul
Caspari was, with good reason, extremely frightened of his son. Not expecting
any opposition, Blink had simply told his father that the firm, which he had
founded, would be taken over by the DSC. Blink was shocked when the father had
for once objected and said that maybe they should think about it. The son had
had to roll on the floor spitting and screaming and tearing great chunks of
foam Out of the furniture with his teeth to try and get his own way, and when
even that hadn’t worked he’d run at his father and punched him hard on the
nose, blood and bone flying everywhere. Apparently everybody else at the board
meeting had been terribly embarrassed.

When
you know all this, it makes it a lot less surprising that Blink was murdered by
his own adopted son a few years later, clubbed to death with a hammer.

You can’t stroll down to
the shops here in the country like you can in a town. Everybody in Lyttleton
Strachey, apart that is from me, likes to do their shopping once a month in one
of the out of town superstores that encircle nearby Banbury like Visigoth
encampments. On coming home with the carrier bags in the boot of the hatchback
they cram their elephant-coffin-sized freezers with ready meals to be defused
later in the microwave. The extra time they save by doing all their shopping in
one place at one time is used, as far as I can tell, to argue about money with
their wives, download child porn from the internet or simply to drool spittle
onto the dining-room table.

Briefly
a deluded couple with a dangerous dream came down from London and opened a shop
in the village offering for sale fresh local produce and poultry from nearby
farms, daily deliveries of fish and organic stone-ground bread, all of it
beautifully presented with elegant hand-written little notes. The inhabitants
of Lyttleton Strachey could hardly contain their horror at the abomination that
was come into their midst and all, again apart from myself, boycotted the place
with a rare unanimity and determination of purpose. The shop soon went broke
and closed down. The husband hanged himself from the oak tree on the village
green, which many reckoned was no more than he deserved for trying to make them
eat notfrozen peas.

Sam the
farmer went one better than the other villagers and did all his shopping in
Northern France at a huge discount warehouse called Mutantsave somewhere
outside of Arras. This was not an easy option for him to take: Sam did not
speak any French and refused to learn, so in the French discount warehouse he
often had no idea what he was buying. Sam only knew there was a lot of it and
it was cheap. He had once had a violent fist fight with an Algerian over the
one remaining gigantic drum of something called ‘Akkaspekki’ priced at a
dazzling FF 28. Sam still had no idea what the stuff was for, nevertheless he
knew the answer would come to him one day, he just hoped it would be before
September 2009 when the akkaspekki had to be ‘à consommer’ by. Even when he was
fairly certain that what he had bought was food, Sam and Mrs Sam had only the
vaguest notion what the ‘Conseils de Preparation’ were. Dinners at the Sams had
often consisted of raw Paella Royale avec Volaille et fruits de mer or boiled
pheasant until they had begun inviting me to dinner so that I could translate
cooking instructions. It was a measure of my loneliness that I went.

Sam the
farmer had another reason for shopping in France apart from parsimony: it gave
him an excuse to go somewhere in his car. In the thirty years that I had lived
opposite him he had become rich. Since the hard working hairdressers and
photographers’ assistants of the European Community had started giving a slice
of their income to Sam he had more money than the Sultan of Brunei’s brother
Prince Jefrey would know what to do with, but coupled with a farmerly dislike
of ostentation. Luckily the motor industry had developed a type of car for the
likes of him. ‘Q’ cars the motor magazines called them after the disguised
German merchant ships that would sashay around neutral waters in a trollopy way
enticing allied warships to get too close then flipping back their sides to
reveal dangerous guns. ‘Q’ cars were ordinary family saloons but fitted with
powerful turbo-charged engines, sports suspensions and four-wheel drive; in
shades of pale colours they looked the same as plain motors yet screamed past
Porsches on the motorway. Sam’s first was a 4x4 Cosworth Sierra, then a Lotus
Carlton 3.6 litre twin turbo, now he had a Subaru Impreza Turbo P1, 280 bhp, 4
wheel drive, 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds. He would strap himself into his blue
racing harness and hurtle to France at four in the morning, blazing down the
Ml, M25, M20 onto the cheap-offer ferry. Off the other end, racing spoilers scraping
the ramp. Rumbling into the car park of Mutantsave as they opened, turbos
crackling and cooling, to fill up his boot with boxes and cartons and pallets
of cheap things.

When he came, he came in a
green Landrover van.

A few
days before, I had dinner with the Sams. As I sat down in their ‘clean as a
place where they make microchips’ living room Sam entered waving a bottle. ‘I
thought we might have this with dinner, Hillary, what do you say?’

I
studied the label.

‘Um …
I don’t think so, Sam, you see it’s a bottle of shampoo.’

‘But it
mentions berries,’ argued Sam, unable to face the fact that he’d wasted five
francs.

‘To add
lustre to our hair if it is dry or medium to dry.’

Eventually
he turned up a box of mixed Australian wines bought at a place called Booze
Bonkers, which was just outside Caen apparently.

‘Sam,
would you by any chance be going to France before Wednesday?’ I asked.

His
eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead and shiny bald pate at the prospect of
an adventure. Sam’s big yellow farming machines that went about doing his work
in the fields were connected to the house by global positioning satellite which
he could access from anywhere in the world on his laptop, so he would always be
able keep in touch with the damage he was doing, even on the RNl.

‘Well,
I wasn’t planning to … but I don’t see why I couldn’t.’ Sam was always ready
for a drive.

‘Please
don’t if you weren’t . .

‘No, no
a midnight drive is always agreeable and they say penicillin is much cheaper
over there so I was plannin’ to get some. Is there summink you wanted me to get
you then?’

‘Well,
erm … um … just some cakes, patisserie if you could … I seem to be having
a young man to tea on Thursday and it’s so hard to get any decent cakes round
here.’

‘A
young man?’ rumbled Mrs Sam who had entirely the wrong idea about me and young
men since I had had no female companionship in the thirty years they had known
me.

Sam’s
wife, known only as Mrs Sam, was a tall thin woman who kept their house very
clean and rarely spoke, but when she did it was in a surprisingly deep voice,
rather reminiscent of a Negro from the deep south of the United States. When
she addressed you at the dinner table it was as if you were being asked if you
would like another serving of mousseline de tête de grenouille by the famous
singer Mr Paul Robeson.

‘Yes,
he’s something called a Million Pound Poet. Whatever that is. He telephoned me
a little while back and said he admired my work and could he meet me for a
chat? So I invited him for tea. It’s such a long time since anybody’s got in
touch with me and well, you know, I did that a lot when I was young, it was
quite the done thing. Write to a poet or author you admired and they were often
frightfully good about inviting you round for tea, to talk about their work,
sort of help out the next generation. Powell, Forster, though 1 think he was a
little too interested in young men coming round; Ted Hughes of the more modem
persuasion of poet served a particularly fine sort of scone with currants in it
that you could only get at a little bakers in Names that meant nothing to the
Sams.

‘Are
you still writing your poems?’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t think you wuzz writin’ your
poems. I didn’t think you’d written any poems since you had come ere.’

Sam
would always be the one to say to a leper ‘Wo’s wrong with your nose then,
mate?’ In fact, he would be pleased with himself, he would think he was doing
the leper a favour by being so blunt and outspoken, and by not trying to ignore
the deformity but coming right out and mentioning it plain and simple.

‘Well,
as a matter of fact, as you’ve been kind enough to point out, I haven’t, hadn’t
written for thirty years but now suddenly I’ve, well I hardly dare say it …

I was
making the Sams uneasy with my giddy tone.

‘But I’ve
started again, only mapping it out at this point. It’s a long poem and erm …’
I was losing them now, but anyway I can feel it’s back, the power very
different but also the same. Would you like to know what it’s about?’

Sam
said, ‘No we wouldn’t, no. We’re very happy you’re writing again but that’s
about the limit of our interest really.’

‘Yes,
fair enough. I must say I’m rather sorry that he’s coming to see me, the
Million Pound Poet, because I can only write during the day for a few brief
hours, and even the prospect of somebody coming to see me stops me for days.
Still one has to be polite …’

Polite.
Politeness, my own affliction more disabling than arthritis. I do look on it as
an affliction, an inability to make clear my own feelings, to state my own
desires. I have always been that way. I imagine I was influenced by all the
poets and writers who infested our house in Old Church Street like termites
when I was a child, weeping and borrowing money that they never repaid,
molesting the staff and stealing the sugar bowls. It would have been good for
them to restrain their desires, even if only once a year. Would have kept them
out of the courts or the River Thames or the private clinic that everybody knew
about in Wimpole Street. But it never occurred to them even for a second.

Surprising then that from
when I was a child my only ambition had been to be a poet. At my prep school
there were several boys in my class who wanted to be poets, it was that kind of
school, others wanted to be fighter pilots, engine drivers and one boy wanted
to be a cow, but there was a fair crowd of us nine-year-old aesthetes.

My
father, Vyvyan Wheat, had returned from the First World War to become an editor
at Fabers. As a baby I had been sick over the first draft of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The
Waste Land’. With my father I had got the Number 14 bus from Chelsea to Red
Lion Square then walked past the British Museum to take tea with Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, a remote creepy woman whom I was afraid of. As a final
pilgrimage I had gone with my ailing father down to Southampton Docks to throw
lumps of coal at Auden and Isherwood as the two cowards had set sail for
America, just ahead of the Second World War.

I said to Blink, ‘I’m
sorry but I don’t feel I can stay with Caspari and Millipede under this new
ownership. I’m sure many other publishers would be glad to have me.

‘Of
course they would be, Hillary.’

But of
course they wouldn’t be, Hillary.

They
did a similar thing to Barbara Pym round about the same time. You can now buy
her books again all over the place but in the 1970s and 1980s it would have
been impossible. Back in the unswinging Fifties she was enormous, top-five
successful novelist, then more or less on one day something in the air changed:
the executives at her own publishing company and the critics on all the big
newspapers and magazines decided she wasn’t any good any more. Though she had
been good the day before, somehow now she wasn’t. I suppose these people have
to believe they have some special power, that they know ahead of time when an
artist is played out. So if they bring it about, they make it a self-fulfilling
prophecy. They are scientists who can affect the outcome of their experiments.
Poor Barbara kept writing books and her editor would be unenthusiastic and they
wouldn’t get published. And she thought it was her fault, but it wasn’t: it was
fashion’s fault, it was their fault, all the others. Nobody put her books out
till they decided to dig her up at the end of her life. Too late, too late.