‘You remember Mervyn at St Tropez,’ Duffy was saying. ‘And you remember his wife; you remember Meg.’
‘Ah, Meg!
Tell
me about Meg.’ Debby uttered these words much as if the normal function of language was unknown to her. They were used merely to intimate to anybody who cared to listen that the main emphasis of her own interests lay in an emotional rather than any strictly intellectual direction. This was achieved chiefly by huskiness, but what might be called a gluey quality was also at work. Cheel felt almost giddy. A more intimate inspection than was feasible in Burlington House, he felt, would surely discover her to be with Cupid’s amorous pinches black. But, meanwhile, he had to deal with Meg. If he was going to hang on to these absurd people long enough to get a little useful low-down on Wamba from Wutherspoon, he must deal with Meg firmly and now. He might manage to sustain for a little some imaginary sojourn in St Tropez on his own account. But he certainly couldn’t drag through such a fantasy an imaginary wife as well.
‘Ah, Meg,’ he said. ‘I must be quite frank with you. Old friends, eh?’ This clearly commended itself so highly to Duffy that Cheel took care to side-step smartly by way of avoiding another slamming on the back. ‘Meg and I have broken it up. It just didn’t do.’
‘Ditched your wife?’ It was Wutherspoon who snapped this out. ‘Quite right. Infernal nuisance. He travels the fastest who travels alone. One of the poets said that.’
‘We were greatly attached to each other,’ Cheel continued with dignity. ‘Debby and old Duffy’ – he got this out with difficulty yet with assurance – ‘must recall us as a devoted couple. But there was a certain – um – incompatibility.’
‘Rubbish!’ Wutherspoon said. ‘One woman’s no different from another. A rag and a bone and a hank of hair. Same poet. No offence to Debby, I hope.’
‘So the subject is naturally a painful one. I’d rather not talk about Meg at all.’ Cheel said this with the utmost firmness. He was thinking that he didn’t at all care for Wutherspoon. Indeed – it occurred to him – the total of people for whom he didn’t at all care had been mounting rapidly of late. On the whole, the Holme affair was introducing him to disagreeable characters all round. And disagreeable characters were his particular aversion. However – he reflected – it was undeniably in a good cause.
‘Drinks,’ Duffy reiterated cheerfully. ‘Drinks, drinks, drinks. All hands to the bar. Out – eh? – out.’
‘Not drinks. Eats. I’m famished.’ Debby said this – and so throatily that the effect was one of wild indecency. Oddly enough, it seemed to be at the leathery-yellow Wuggles that she looked as she spoke. Cheel felt his dislike of this demoted nigger-walloper increase.
‘Very well.’ Duffy made a sweeping movement towards the turnstiles. ‘Just a few rounds first, and then we’ll eat in a big way. Old Mervyn owes us a square meal. That snack at the Caprice was on us. And Mervyn won’t mind filling Wuggles’ trough too, eh? Away we go.’
Not unnaturally, Cheel even in his new-found prosperity had winced a little at this proposal. To make a lavish return for a luncheon wholly barmecidal and illusory went much against the grain. But, once more, the cause had to be remembered.
‘Most delightful,’ Cheel said – and with no more than an involuntary cackle that was just a shade harsh. ‘And I want to hear old Wuggles on Wamba. Nothing he doesn’t know about it, eh?’
‘Wamba?’ It was with an oppressive sombreness that Wutherspoon repeated the name. ‘All I can tell you about Wamba will go into three words. Some poet thought them up. Birth, copulation, death.’
‘Is that so?’ Cheel said stiffly. He was always quick to deprecate coarse language.
‘And particularly death. I’ve spent all my days in the place, and I know.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Cheel said. The party was now making its way down the broad staircase that leads to the outer vestibule of the Royal Academy. Cheel wondered whether he ought to make a bolt for it, after all. Debby had her attractions, but he saw very little probability of being in a position to set finger and thumb to them. Both the men were unbearable.
‘People do die, you know, from time to time,’ Wutherspoon continued. ‘I agree that the fact is kept pretty dark in this part of the world. Still, it does, I should imagine, leak out. It isn’t inconceivable that you’ll die yourself – although I doubt whether you’ve ever entertained the notion.’ Wutherspoon gave Cheel an unpleasant sideways glance. ‘But in Wamba everybody dies. Sooner or later, everybody born there dies. Can you imagine it? And what’s more, everybody is aware of the fact. I see I’ve shocked you.’
Cheel said no more for the moment. Quite as many rounds of drinks as Duffy seemed to envisage, he thought, would be necessary if sitting down at table with these people were to be conceivable. He was even resigned to paying for whole bottles of gin himself. But at least he might as well give them all the works. And now, when they were out in the courtyard, he had the opportunity to make a start.
‘If you care to hop into my car,’ he said casually, ‘we’ll go wherever Debby has a fancy for.’
Duffy, like most corpulent men, ate a great deal. Wuggles, like most cadaverous men, ate a great deal too. As the dinner went on, and Cheel mentally totted up the lengthening bill, he reflected that Debby represented the only break in the gloom. In spite of having announced herself as famished, Debby ate very little, and could only have been described as
distraite
. She glanced at her watch much more frequently than was civil in the presence of a host; the look in her eye was far-away; she no longer appeared to take any more interest in Wuggles than she did in Cheel himself. It came suddenly to Cheel that she had remembered something – and that it was something that made her discontented with her present company.
But Cheel’s serious business did not lie in speculations like these. During the past weeks he had attempted in various ways to equip himself as a modest authority on Wamba and its people and institutions. But reliable information was hard to come by. Often one ostensible authority blankly contradicted another. In some ways this was all to the good. The more confused the record, the less likely was anybody effectively to question the story he had himself told Braunkopf, and which Braunkopf would have to pass on in a hush-hush manner to whatever customers came forward for the supposedly recovered – but actually so marvellously re-created! – Sebastian Holmes.
Nevertheless Cheel ought to pick up whatever news out of Wamba he could come upon. And here Wutherspoon was very much his man. Indeed if Wamba-Wamba Diary was to be believed, Wutherspoon was the top authority one could find.
‘Tell me, Wuggles,’ Cheel said casually, ‘what is the food like out in Wamba?’ The specific topic was not one upon which he felt any curiosity, but it seemed an apposite opening with a man who – at great expense to oneself – was stuffing sixteen to the dozen.
‘The food?’ It was with an increased moroseness that Wutherspoon repeated the word – much as if here was a subject in all circumstances totally revolting to him. ‘There is no food in Wamba.’ He appeared to weigh this statement carefully. ‘Or virtually none.’
‘No food!’ Duffy, who had been silent for some time over what he doubtless thought of as his trough, was roused to dismay. ‘Dash it all, the chaps must eat something.’
‘Occasionally there is a sparse crop of ground-nuts, and in good seasons there may be a little wild cabbage. The swampy territories are a shade better off. A frog or lizard can be bagged from time to time. Of course, the chiefs and their families do not do too badly. They have
boko-boko
.’
‘Most interesting,’ Cheel said.
‘Quite possibly’ – Wutherspoon pursued contemptuously – ‘you have never eaten
boko-boko
. It’s a great delicacy: a species of rather bitter carrot, which has been pre-masticated by the sacred baboons.’ Wutherspoon ingested a further supply of quail in aspic. ‘There is something very palatable about
boko-boko
.’
This was the first occasion, Cheel reflected, in which Wutherspoon had uttered in what might be termed a commendatory sense. Perhaps he was mellowing, if so, now was the moment for cautiously pressing forward.
‘The country seems to have been making remarkable strides politically,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve been a close friend of the present Prime Minister, Professor Ushirombo?’
‘A damned scoundrel!’ Wuggles was suddenly explosive; it was even possible to imagine that his complexion had become faintly tinged with red. ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us. Some poet fellow puts it very well. Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat. I
made
the MADS, you know. I positively created them as a political voice. The Syndicalists were right out on a limb, I can tell you. Literally, many of them. Too scared to come down from the trees. But I negotiated a
concordat
with the Moderate Advanced Democrats. That did the trick at once. Ushirombo was able to come out of hiding (he’d been peddling bicycles, or some such thing) and seize power. Well’ – Wutherspoon savagely speared his last fragment of quail – ‘the first thing he did was to run me out of the country. That’s why I’m here now – and facing penury into the bargain. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. Shakespeare.’
Wamba-Wamba Diary, it appeared, had been a shade out of date. Wuggles’ present political affiliation, however, was of very little interest. What Cheel wanted to get hold of was chiefly an authentic narrative of the last hours of the Wamba Palace Hotel. The truth was that he was still haunted by doubts. What had put it into Hedda Holme’s head that her husband’s pictures had been saved? It was, of course, all to the good that there should be some dark rumour of their preservation going around. But it would be disastrous if they
had
been preserved. So what if Sebastian Holme himself were not a reliable witness? At least it would be reassuring to get confirmation out of Wutherspoon.
‘I suppose,’ Cheel asked, ‘you were closely involved with events on the day of the revolution?’
‘Day of the revolution?’ Wuggles was puzzled. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. Revolutions were going on all the time.’
‘I mean the night the mob burnt down the Wamba Palace Hotel. I’m interested, you know, as a painter and as a critic of–’
‘You
a painter!’ It was Debby who had broken in with this.
‘You
can’t be a painter. I
adore
painters!’ She yawned, and looked at her watch again.
Unmannerly and offensive as this was, Cheel thought well to ignore it.
‘There was the talented young fellow Holme,’ he said. ‘I gather that he and his brother were in Wamba a good deal – and that a whole collection of his paintings was in fact destroyed in that hotel at the time when he was killed.’
‘Quite right!’ Pushing away an empty plate with a gesture more robust than refined, Duffy interrupted in his turn. ‘As a result, the fellow’s pictures are damned scarce. I got one, you know. As Debby’s just said, she and I are dead keen on pictures. The nineteen-fifties for Equities, my boy, and the nineteen-sixties for pictures. Take my tip.’
‘Ah, those two brothers,’ Wutherspoon said. ‘Up to all manner of mischief. May have been in with JUMBO, for all I know. The elder of them – name of Gregory, I fancy – got away. T’other one was killed. A painter, did you say? Never had any truck with them. Velvet collar-rolls. Moo and coo with womenfolk. One of the poets again.’
‘But you must take
some
interest. You and I, after all, have just met at Burlington House.’ Cheel was not only puzzled; he was, for some reason, faintly alarmed. ‘You went, I gather, to look at the designs of an atrociously bad painter called Rumbelow that have been commissioned for some place in Wamba.’ As he spoke, Cheel was aware of a movement beside him. Debby had risen and was wandering away. As both her husband and Wuggles remained ungallantly seated, Cheel did the same. The woman had gone, he supposed, to powder her nose. ‘So you can’t be all that uninterested,’ he went on. ‘Did you actually go and see that show of Holme’s at the Wamba Palace?’
For a moment Wutherspoon made no reply to this perfectly civil question. He was studying the menu. Indeed, Cheel could distinguish clearly that his eye was running down a column devoted to dishes of a particularly rich and costly order. If he had really been expelled from Wamba into penury, he was evidently well practised in making the most of a gastronomic windfall. So, for that matter, was Duffy – although Duffy was presumably deep in the buy. Cheel continued mountingly to dislike them both.
‘See the fellow’s pictures?’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Often dropped into the Wamba Palace of a morning for a peg. And in the evening for a sundowner. Yes, I remember noticing them, come to think of it.’
‘What’s happened to Debby?’ Duffy asked. ‘Oughtn’t to be spending all that time in the loo. Irritating habit. Got her better house-trained than that. And she’ll miss her kickshaw.’
For a moment the kickshaw distracted Cheel’s attention. The chef had been produced to prepare it; he was flanked on one side by the head waiter and on the other by the
sommelier
(grasping a bottle of Green Chartreuse); underlings in sinister profusion stood ranked behind. The dish was some sort of
flambé
affair that Cheel himself detested.
Mon argent est flambé
, he told himself in a mournful pun. But perhaps he would be able to flog one of the new Holmes quietly to Duffy to tuck away in his portfolio in place of another wad of Equities. There was comfort in that thought.
‘I suppose,’ Cheel said to Wutherspoon, ‘that they
were
undoubtedly all destroyed?’
‘All destroyed? Don’t know what you’re on about.’ Wutherspoon, who was concentrating upon the culinary process proceeding beside him – and in the particular interest, it seemed, that the
sommelier
did his stuff generously – glanced at Cheel with irritation. ‘I’d have him add a dash of their Champagne Cognac, if I were you. 409 on the list. And then a glass of it will go well with the coffee.’