A Disturbing Influence (22 page)

So it was perverse of God or Death or the Spirit of Evolution or whatever nonsense you choose to believe in, I really can’t bring myself to care, to let him die in that humiliating way, and then be buried as though he was just anyone else. He was a silly bloody fool, and he didn’t know what was going on, but when his blood was up it stayed up, and it was real blood, not the sort of plastic substitute
you get when you knife—well, never mind who, but you can guess the sort of people I mean, the sort that think it’s clever to shout ‘Shoot the wogs’. Hobson was incapable of that kind of witless vulgarity. He would have thought of them as wogs, certainly, and he would have been completely convinced of his own superiority to them, but he would never have had the bad manners or been so purblind as to shout anyone’s slogans.

So it was a bloody shame that he had to go and die because his blood was up over some ridiculous Teddy boys, who didn’t and could never understand that a man like him was a real human being under all that bombast, unlike themselves, who were merely worms with long hair and Edwardian coats and indecently tight trousers. Always supposing that it really was Teddy boys he was sitting up for, which no one has ever proved, the police here being about as astute as those chickens you can hypnotize with a chalk line. But let’s suppose it
was
Teddy boys, because then you can see what I mean: they couldn’t wear Edwardian clothes, the genuine article, I mean, if they tried for a million years, they’d simply look like a lot of worms with long hair on a fancy dress parade. But Hobson could, metaphorically speaking, and if you follow me, wear them without looking ridiculous for one millionth of a second. And though I am no defender of Edward the Seventh, or the Eighth, come to that, I do respect genuineness when I see it, which is rare enough these days.

So it was an outrage against his whole nature that he should die because he insisted on sitting up in a duck-decoying outfit half the night trying to get a crack at worms. Because they weren’t worth it, and he should have found some more dignified way of popping off. He deserved an adversary of his own quality, someone who would bring out the full measure of the man. And it made me furious that his own stupidity should be responsible for such an inglorious end. England’s a bloody enough country, and Cartersfield’s a bloody enough town, without having to turn an honourable man into a mockery. Sometimes I really wonder how people like
Hobson and I survive at all, and perhaps we shouldn’t. But
whichever
way you choose to look at it, it was a bloody shame he couldn’t have found someone to have a real battle with before he let himself be lowered into the hard earth of the graveyard, with that idiot Nelson to shovel the dirt on top of him and with those appalling people sniffling around. And I really felt for a day or two that I was the only man who’d ever appreciated him.