The Flying Goat (6 page)

The Bronsons' bedroom was immediately above, and Bronson heard the crash and came downstairs. He switched on the electric light and saw Irma standing beside the box, in her nightgown. He had come down hurriedly, without a dressing-gown, and for a moment he was too embarrassed to speak. Irma stood trembling. Then just as he was going to speak he heard a door open upstairs, and he knew Mrs. Harris was coming down.

Something made him put out the light. In complete silence, he and the girl stood in the darkness, trying to deny each other's existence. They heard Mrs. Harris shuffle downstairs in her carpet slippers, and after about thirty seconds Bronson felt her hand stab at the light.

The words were ready on Mrs. Harris's lips, like bullets waiting to be fired. They exploded straight at Bronson, rapid-firing: ‘I got you. I caught you. I got you, I caught you.'

Neither Bronson nor Irma could speak. Mrs. Harris took silence for guilt. She swivelled round and fired a double shot upstairs:

‘Mrs. Bronson! Mrs. Bronson!'

Bronson stood white, tragically silent. He heard his wife's voice in reply and her movements as she came downstairs. He stood quiet, more nervous than Irma, still not saying anything, aware of his predicament and yet doing nothing, seeing himself only as the victim of some unhappy and apparently unchaste circumstance over which he had no control.

Mrs. Harris fired a fusillade of bitter triumph as Mrs. Bronson came and stood in the light of the doorway:

‘They ain't moved, they ain't said nothing. That's how I found 'em. In their nightgowns. That's how I found 'em. I knew it had been going on for a long time, but not like this, not like this!'

Irma began to cry. Bronson and his wife stood with a kind of paste-board rigidity, stiffened by some inherent aristocratic impulse not to give way before
people out of their class. They knew they had nothing to fear, yet they saw themselves confronted by the iron suspicion of Mrs. Harris as by a firing squad. In Mrs. Harris's small distracted grey eyes there was a touch of madness, inspired by triumph. She spoke with the rapid incoherence of someone sent slightly insane by a terrible discovery. ‘I don't know what you're going to do, but I know what I'm going to do. I know and I'm going to do it. If you're not ashamed, I am. I'm ashamed. I'm – '

At this moment Irma fainted.

‘No wonder! No wonder! Gettin' her down here in her nightgown, on the sly. Gettin' her down here – '

The insane dangerous stupidity of it all only struck the Bronsons into dead silence. And in silence, as never before, Mrs. Harris saw guilt.

The next afternoon the Bronsons moved to other quarters. Irma, shut up in her room, heard Lieutenant Bronson's large tin box go clanking out of the hall like a coffin.

In less than a month there was hardly a soldier left in the town. In the papers Irma read about the regiment going to the Dardanelles, and read Bronson's name, a little later, among the killed.

More than two years later she read how Mrs. Bronson too had been killed. In Mexico, where she had gone to clear up some of Bronson's affairs, she had been hit, while sitting in a café, by a stray bullet in a local revolution.

Irma envied Mr. and Mrs. Bronson, the dead. She began to feel that she was going about with a bullet in her own heart, and was only gradually beginning to understand, by the pain of longer silences between herself and her mother, who had fired it.

My Uncle Silas and my Uncle Cosmo belonged to different worlds; but they were men of identical kidney. Uncle Cosmo was a small man of dapper appearance with waxed moustaches who wore a gold ring on his right hand and a wine-coloured seal on his gold watchchain, and a green homburg hat. He carried a saucy silver-topped walking-stick and smoked cigars and looked exactly what he was: a masher. If Uncle Silas was the black sheep of one side of the family, Uncle Cosmo was the black sheep of the other. He habitually did an awful thing for which, I think, nobody ever forgave him: he spent his winters abroad. He sent us picture-postcards, then, of orange-trees in Mentone, the bay at Naples, Vesuvius, the gondolas of Venice, of himself in a straw hat on Christmas day at Pompeii, and wrote, airily: ‘On to Greece and Port Said to-morrow, before the final jaunt to Ceylon.' He was reputed, though nobody pretended so, to have a fancy lady in Nice, and there was something about a scandal in Colombo. Returning home in the spring of every
year, he brought us oranges fresh from the bough, Sicilian pottery, oriental cushions, shells from the South Seas, lumps of gold-starred quartz and the war axes of aboriginal chieftains, and advice on how to eat spaghetti. He twiddled his seal and told amazing stories of hot geysers on remote southern islands and bananas at twenty-a-penny and how he had almost fought a duel with a Prussian in Cairo. Cosmopolitan, debonair, a lady-killer, Uncle Cosmo was altogether very impressive.

The only person not impressed by Cosmo was my Uncle Silas.

‘You bin a long way, Cosmo,' he would say, ‘but you ain't done much.'

‘Who hasn't? I've travelled over half the globe, Silas, while you sit here and grow prize gooseberries.'

‘I daresay,' Silas said, ‘I daresay. But we only got your word for it. For all we know you might stop the winter in a boardin' house at Brighton.'

‘Silas,' Uncle Cosmo said, ‘I could tell you stories of places between here and Adelaide that would make your liver turn green. Places – '

‘Well, tell us then. Nobody's stoppin' you.'

‘I'm telling you. Here's just one thing. There's a
desert in Assyria that's never been trodden by the foot of man and that's so far across it would take you three years to cross it on a camel. Now, one day – '

‘You ever bin across this desert?'

‘No, but – '

‘Then how the hell d'ye know it takes three years to cross?'

‘Well, it's – '

‘What I thought,' Silas said. ‘Just what I thought. You
hear
these things, Cosmo, you hear a lot, and you've bin a long way, but you ain't done much. Now, take women.'

‘Ah!'

‘What about this fancy affair in Nice?'

‘I haven't got a fancy affair in Nice!'

‘There you are. Just what I thought. Big talk and nothing doing.'

‘She lives in Monte Carlo!'

‘Well, that ain't so wonderful.'

His pride wounded, Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath, drank a mouthful of my Uncle Silas's wine as though it were rat poison, pulled his mouth into shape again and said: ‘You don't seem to grasp it. It's not only one woman, Silas, in Monte Carlo.
There's another in Mentone and another in Marseilles and two in Venice. I've got another who lives in an old palace in Naples, two I can do what I like with in Rome, a Grecian girl in Athens and two little Syrians in Port Said. They all eat out of my hand. Then, there's a niece of a Viscount in Colombo and a Norwegian girl in Singapore, and I forget whether its four or five French girls in Shanghai. Then of course in Japan – '

‘Wait a minute,' Silas said. ‘I thought you went abroad for your health?'

‘Then in Hong Kong there's a Russian girl who's got a tortoise tattooed on her – '

‘Well, there ain't nothing wonderful in that, either. Down at The Swan in Harlington there used to be a barmaid with a cuckoo or something tattooed on – '

‘Yes, it was a cuckoo,' Uncle Cosmo said. ‘I know, because I got her to have it done. She liked me. Yes, it was a cuckoo. And that's why they always used to say you could see the cuckoo earlier in Harlington than anywhere else in England.'

My Uncle Silas was not impressed. He took large sardonic mouthfuls of wine, cocked his bloodshot eye at the ceiling and looked consistently sceptical,
wicked and unaffected. When Uncle Cosmo then proceeded to relate the adventure of the two nuns in Bologna, my Uncle Silas capped it with the adventure of the three Seventh Day Adventists in a bathing hut at Skegness. When Uncle Cosmo told the story of how, in his shirt, he had been held up at the point of a pistol by a French husband in Biarritz, my Uncle Silas brought out the chestnut of how a gamekeeper had blown his hat off with a double-barrelled gun in Bedfordshire. The higher my Uncle Cosmo flew, the better my Uncle Silas liked it. ‘Did I ever tell you,' Uncle Cosmo said, ‘of the three weeks I spent in a château in Arles with the wife of a French count?'

‘No,' Silas said. ‘But did I ever tell you of the month I spent with the duchess's daughter in Stoke Castle? The Hon. Lady Susannah. You can remember her?'

‘Well, I – how long ago was this?'

‘This was the winter of 'ninety-three. You ought to remember her. She used to ride down to Harlington twice a week, with a groom in a dog cart. Used to wear a black cloak with a splashed red lining.'

‘Dark girl?'

‘That's her. Black. Long black hair and black eyes and long black eyelashes. A dazzler.'

‘Well, Silas, now you come to say, I – '

‘Now wait a minute, Cosmo. You know what they used to say about this girl?'

‘Well – '

‘Never looked at a man in her life,' my Uncle Silas said. ‘Never wanted to. Cold as a frog. Nobody couldn't touch her. Chaps had been after her from everywhere – London, all over the place. Never made no difference, Cosmo. She just sat in the castle and looked out of the window and painted pictures. See?'

‘Well, I – '

‘You know the castle at Stoke? Stands down by the river.'

‘Oh, yes, Silas. Very well, very well.'

‘The grounds run right down to the river,' Silas said. ‘Well, that winter I'd been doing a little river-poaching down there – eel lines and jack-snaring. You know? And about six o'clock one morning I was coming along under the castle wall with about thirty eels in a basket when she copped me.'

‘Who?'

‘Her. The gal. She was sitting in a gateway in the wall with her easel, painting. It was just
gettin' light and she told me afterwards she was painting the dawn over the river. “You been poaching,” she said. Well, what could I say? I was done. She had me red-handed and she knew it.'

‘What did she do?'

‘Well, Cosmo, she done a funny thing. She says, “I won't say nothing about this business if you'll come up to the castle and let me paint your picture just as you are. Old clothes and eels and everything.” So I says, “It's a go,” and we went up to the castle and she began to paint the picture straight away that morning. “The whole family's away abroad for the winter, and I'm all alone here except for the groom and butler,” she says. “And after to-day you come along every morning and catch your eels and then come up to the castle and let me paint you.”'

And my Uncle Silas went on to relate, between wry mouthfuls of wine, how for more than a week he had done as she said, trapping the eels in the early morning and going up to the castle and slipping in by a side door and letting the girl paint him in her room. Until at last something happened. It rained torrentially for a whole day and the succeeding night and when he went down to the river on
the following morning he found the floods up and the small stone cattle bridge leading over to the castle smashed by water. It meant a detour of six miles and it was almost eight o'clock by the time he reached the castle. He slipped in by the side door as usual and went upstairs and into the girl's room, and there standing before a cheval mirror, the girl was painting a picture of herself in the nude.

‘And that just about finished it?' Cosmo said.

‘No, Cosmo, that just about began it.'

‘Well,' Cosmo said, ‘what did she do?'

‘A funny thing, Cosmo,' my Uncle Silas said, ‘a funny thing. She just went on painting. “I thought you weren't coming,” she says, “so I got on with this picture of myself. You like it?” Well, I was standing so as I could see the back of her in the flesh, the sideways of her in the picture and the front of her in the mirror, and I was flummoxed. “Well,” she says, “perhaps you don't like it because it isn't finished? Let me put my clothes on and let's have some fried eels and you tell me what you think of it.”'

So my Uncle Silas went on to say they had fried eels and talked about the picture and he said something about not being able to judge the picture on such short acquaintance with the model. ‘You'll
see me again to-morrow,' she said, and so it went on: she painting herself in the nude, Silas watching, until at last, as Silas himself said, a month had gone by and he'd caught almost every eel in the river.

‘You heard me say she was cold?' he said. ‘Never looked at a man and never wanted one? That's a fairy tale, Cosmo. Don't you believe it. It's true she never looked at men. But she looked at one man. And you know who that was.'

‘And what stopped it?' Cosmo said.

‘What stopped it? A funny thing, Cosmo, a funny thing. There were twenty bedrooms in the castle, and we slept in every one of 'em. Then, one night, I was a little fuzzled and I must have gone into the wrong room. As soon as I got in I saw her in bed with another man. She gave one shout. “My husband!” she says, and I ran like greased lightning and down the drainpipe. The funny thing is she wasn't married, and never was, and I never did find out who the chappie was.'

‘You never found out,' Uncle Cosmo said.

‘No,' Silas said. ‘I never did find out.'

‘Well,' Cosmo said, ‘it's been a long time ago and I daresay it wouldn't break my heart to tell you. I happen to know, Silas, who that man was.'

‘You do?'

‘I do.'

‘Well,' Silas said, ‘who was it?'

Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath and twiddled his waxed moustaches and tried to look at once repentant and triumphant. ‘Silas,' he said, ‘I hate to say it. I hate it. But it was me.'

For about a minute my Uncle Silas did not speak. He cocked his eye and looked out of the window; he looked down at the wine in his glass; and then finally he looked across at Uncle Cosmo himself.