Chapter 7

The affair of my mother’s ashes was not settled so easily as I had anticipated (I call her my mother still, because at this period I had no real evidence that my aunt was telling me the truth). No urn was awaiting me in the house when I returned from Brighton, and so I rang up Scotland Yard and asked for Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. I was put on without delay to a voice which was distinctly not Sparrow’s. It sounded very similar to that of a rear-admiral whom I had once had as a client. (I was very glad when he changed his account to the National Provincial Bank, for he treated my clerks like ordinary seamen and myself like a sub-lieutenant who had been court-marchialled for keeping the mess books improperly.)

“Can I speak to Detective-Sergeant Sparrow?” I asked.

“On what business?” whoever it was rapped back.

“I have not yet received my mother’s ashes,” I said.

“This is Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner’s Office, and not a crematorium,” the voice replied and rang off.

It took me a long while (because of engaged lines) to get the same gritty voice on the line again.

“I want Detective-Sergeant Sparrow,” I said.

“On what business?”

I was ready this time and prepared to be ruder than the voice could be.

“Police business of course,” I said. “What other business do you deal in?” It was almost as though my aunt were speaking through me.

“Detective-Sergeant Sparrow is out. You had better leave a message.”

“Ask him to ring Mr. Pulling, Mr. Henry Pulling.”

“What address? What telephone number?” he snapped as though he suspected me to be some unsavoury police informer.

“He knows them both. I am not going to repeat them unnecessarily. Tell him I am disappointed at his failure to keep a solemn promise.” I rang off before the other had time for a word in reply. Going out to the dahlias, I gave myself the rare award of a satisfied smile. I had never spoken to the rear-admiral like that.

My new cactus dahlias were doing well, and after my trip to Brighton their names gave me some of the pleasure of travel: Rotterdam, a deeper red than a pillar-box, and Dentelle de Venise, with spikes sparkling like hoar-frost. I thought that next year I would plant some Pride of Berlin to make a trio of cities. The telephone disturbed my happy ruminations. It was Sparrow.

I said to him firmly, “I hope you have a good excuse for failing to return the ashes.”

“I certainly have, sir. There’s more Cannabis than ashes in your urn.”

“I don’t believe you. How could my mother possibly…?”

“We can hardly suspect your mother, sir, can we? As I told you, I think the man Wordsworth took advantage of your call^[58]. Luckily for your story there are some human ashes in the urn, though Wordsworth must have dumped most of them down the sink to make room. Did you hear any sound of running water?”

“We were drinking whisky. He certainly filled a jug of water.”

“That must have been the moment^[59], sir”.

“In any case, I would like to have back the ashes that remain.”

“It isn’t practicable, sir. Human ashes have a kind of sticky quality. They adhere very closely to any substance, which in this case is pot. I am sending you back the urn by registered post. I suggest, sir, that you place it just where you intended and forget the unfortunate circumstances.”

“But the urn will be empty.”

“Memorials are often detached from the remains of the deceised. War memorials are an example.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose there’s nothing to be done. It won’t feel the same at all. I hope you don’t suspect my aunt had any hand in this^[60]?”

“An old lady like that? Oh no, sir. She was obviously deceived by her valet.”

“What valet?”

“Why, Wordsworth, sir – who else?” I thought it best not to enlighten him about their relationship.

“My aunt thinks Wordsworth may be in Paris.”

“Very likely, sir.”

“What will you do about it?”

“There’s nothing we can do. He hasn’t committed an extraditable offence. Of course, if he ever returns… He has a British passport.” There was a note of malicious longing in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s voice that made me feel, for a moment, a partisan of Wordsworth.

I said, “I sincerely hope he won’t.”

“You surprise and disappoint me, sir.”

“Why?”

“I hadn’t taken you for one of that kind.”

“What kind?”

“People who talk about there being no harm in pot.”

“Is there?”

“From our experience, sir, nearly all the cases hooked on hard drugs began with pot.”

“And from my experience, Sparrow, all or nearly all the alcoholics I know have started with a small whisky or a glass of wine. I even had a client who was first hooked, as you call it, on mild and bitter. In the end, because of his frequent absences on a cure, he had to give his wife a power of attorney^[61]”. I rang off. It occurred to me with a certain pleasure that I had sowed a little confusion in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s mind – not so much confusion on the subject of Cannabis but confusion about my character, the character of a retired bank manager. I discovered for the first time in myself a streak of anarchy. Had it been perhaps the result of my visit to Brighton or was it possibly my aunt’s influence (and yet I was not a man easily influenced), or some bacteria in the Pulling blood? I found a buried affection for my father reviving in me. He had been a very patient as well as a very sleepy man, and yet there was about his patience something unaccountable: it might well have been absence of mind rather than patience – or even indifference. He might have been all the time, without our knowing it, elsewhere. I remembered the ambiguous reproaches launched against him by my mother. They seemed to confirm my aunt’s story, for they possessed the nagging qualities of an unsatisfied woman. Imprisoned by ambitions which she had never realized, my mother had never known freedom. Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful, and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

It was with these muddled and unaccustomed ideas in my mind that I awaited the arrival of my aunt for dinner. We had arranged the rendezvous^[62] before leaving the Brighton Belle at Victoria the day before. As soon as she arrived I told her about Sergeant Sparrow, but she treated my story with surprising indifference, saying only that Wordsworth should have been “more careful.” Then I took her out and showed her my dahlias.

“I have always preferred cut flowers,” she said, and I had a sudden vision of strange continental gentlemen offering her bouquets of roses and maidenhair fern bound up in tissue paper.

I pointed out to her the site where I had thought to put the urn in memory of my mother.

“Poor Angelica,” she said, “she never understood men,” and that was all. It was as though she had read my thoughts and commented on them.

I had dialled CHICKEN and the dinner arrived exactly as ordered, the main course only needing to be put into the oven for a few minutes while we ate the smoked salmon. Living alone, I had been a regular customer whenever there was a client to entertain or my mother on her weekly visit. Now for months I had neglected Chicken, for there were no longer any clients and my mother, during her last illness, had been too ill to make the journey from Golders Green.

We drank sherry with the smoked salmon, and as some small return for my aunt’s generosity to me in Brighton I had bought a bottle of burgundy, Chambertin 1959, Sir Arthur Keene’s favourite, to go with the chicken à la king. When the wine had spread a pleasant glow through both our minds my aunt reverted to my conversation with Sergeant Sparrow.

“He is determined,” she said, “that Wordsworth is the guilty party, yet it might equally well be one of us. I don’t think the sergeant is a racialist, but he is class-conscious, and though the smoking of pot depends on no class barrier, he prefers to think otherwise and to put the blame on poor Wordsworth.”

“You and I can give each other an alibi,” I said, “and Wordsworth did run away.”

“We could have been in collusion, and Wordsworth might be taking his annual holiday. No,” she went on, “the mind of a policeman is set firmly in a groove. I remember once when I was in Tunis a travelling company was there who were playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude the Player King was really killed – or rather not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear – by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasn’t empty and was hot to the touch. Oh no, they knew Shakespeare’s play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlet’s uncle.”

“What a lot of travelling you have done in your day, Aunt Augusta.”

“I haven’t reached nightfall yet^[63]”, she said. “If I had a companion I would be off tomorrow, but I can no longer lift a heavy suitcase, and there is a distressing lack of porters nowadays. As you noticed in Victoria.”

“We might one day,” I said, “continue our seaside excursions. I remember many years ago visiting Weymouth. There was a very pleasant green statue of George III^[64] on the front”.

“I have booked two couchettes^[65] a week from today on the Orient Express.”

I looked at her in amazement. “Where to?” I asked.

“Istanbul of course.”

“But it takes days…”

“Three nights to be exact.”

“If you want to go to Istanbul surely it would be easier and less expensive to fly?”

“I only take a plane,” my aunt said, “when there is no alternative means of travel.”

“It’s really quite safe.”

“It’s a matter of choice, not nerves,” Aunt Augusta said. “I knew Wilbur Wright^[66] very well indeed at one time. He took me for several trips. I always felt quite secure in his contraptions. But I cannot bear being spoken to all the timely irrelevant loud-speakers. One is not badgered at a railway station. An airport always reminds me of a Butlin’s Camp.”

“If you are thinking of me as a companion…”

“Of course I am, Henry.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank manager’s pension is not a generous one.”

“I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. It’s excellent.”

“I’m not really accustomed to foreign travel. You’d find me…”

“You will take to it^[67] quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travellers. I think I must have caught the infection through your father.”

“Surely not my father… He never travelled further than Central London.”

“He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, ‘The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago.’ And then there was your uncle…”

“I didn’t know I had an uncle.”

“He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young.”

“He was a great traveller?”

“It took an odd form,” my aunt said, “in the end.” I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

“Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,” Aunt Augusta said. “A very fat man. I don’t know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man.^[68] Perhaps travelling with me, you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.”

“I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,” I said jokingly.