Monday, August the 23rd, 2004
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A WEEK OR SO after the young rapscallion had set off on his travels, I was astonished one morning to receive a letter from my Uncle Nobby. Like the rest of the family, I had assumed he was dead. Twenty years ago, weighed down by life's travails, he had stowed away on the steamship Corrugated Cardboard, bound for Tantarabim. Engulfed by storms, the ship went down ten miles off the coast of Sprague, with—according to the newspapers—no survivors. We had held a little memorial service for him, and donated his few possessions to the St Odo Rest Home for the Bewildered and the Fraught.
Yet there could be no mistaking the authorship of the letter: it was in Uncle Nobby's curiously ham-fisted handwriting, and the paper gave off the trademark reek of spam and hair-oil which made my uncle such a trying fellow to be within ten feet of.
Dear Agamemnon, it read, I have returned to the land of my birth after two decades of quite preposterous escapades. I am staying in the Bodger's Spinney Hotel, and would very much like you to join me for breakfast on Thursday the sixteenth. Come on horseback, for I will want to purchase your steed, and will pay you well. All the best, Uncle Nobby.
I decided not to alert any other members of my family to this intriguing happenstance. Nor did I inform milady: in any case, she was so far gone in her bafflement that she would not have known what I was talking about. I was rather worried about her two sisters, who would doubtless insist on a detailed explanation for my absence, but as chance would have it they were drowned in the duckpond on the very day the letter arrived.
That was the ninth: I had a week to prepare myself to confront Uncle Nobby. This at least gave me time to nip off to the village to buy a horse, and to take some riding-lessons. I am afraid that I was a rather clumsy pupil, despite the best efforts of Hengist Grudge, my instructor, and I must have cut an ungainly figure clopping along the woodland paths to Bodger's Spinney on the evening of the fifteenth. I put up at an inn overnight, a lewd and boisterous place, where my dignified bearing, metal skull-plate, and whimsical chit-chat met with ridicule from the assembled topers, gamblers, swindlers and ruffians, so that by the time I had given my horse his suppertime oat-tub and retired to my horrible room, I had a black eye, a fractured rib, and a nasty cut on my upper lip, not to mention innumerable bruises, aches, pains and abrasions, plus an impromptu tattoo—the name Enid in blood-bruised italics, set in an arrow-spliced heart—on my left forearm. Enid?
In the middle of the night, I awoke to find a maniac carousing at the foot of my bed. Convinced that it was an hallucination, I turned over and went back to sleep.
At dawn, I awoke in a state of rancour and disgust. Limping downstairs, I was presented with breakfast. Mercifully, the riotous ne'er-do-wells of the previous night were still abed, and I had only the landlord's smirking contempt to deal with. He placed before me a dish of tongue, pig's liver and saveloys, swimming in grease, and a rusty tankard filled to the half-way mark with watered-down milk and cabbage broth. My manners deserted me. I sent both dish and tankard clattering to the floor with a single sweep of my arm, picked up a hefty club, and bashed the landlord thrice about the midriff. Then, without paying my bill, I lurched off to the stables, mounted my horse, and rode away.
This was a mistake. I had gone only a few hundred yards when, looking behind me, I saw that I was being pursued by the landlord and a posse of cut-throats. That they meant me harm was not in doubt. I spurred on my horse, but he was aged and weak, and no match for the powerful stallions ridden by my pursuers. The distance between us was closing with every second, and I was so terrified at the thought of my imminent doom that I am afraid I piddled in my pantaloons.
Then, out of nowhere, a motorbike and sidecar came hurtling towards me, screeching to a halt just as the landlord and his crew were about to draw level. The horses—including mine—reared up, frightened, but rather than stampeding away, they seemed transfixed, snorting and whinnying pitifully, as if in thrall of some nameless and intangible menace. The motorcyclist dismounted, took from his pannier a pair of folding crutches, skipped lightly round to the sidecar, and helped his passenger to clamber out of it, manoeuvering him skilfully onto the crutches. When the motorcyclist removed the safety helmet from the lame man's head, we all let out gasps of astonishment. It was Father Ninian Gumbeetle SJ, the world-famous withered Jesuit!
The landlord and his cronies at once leapt down from their horses and prostrated themselves at the misshapen feet of the priest. I was about to do likewise, but he held up his tiny, twisted hand to stop me.
“Flee,” he croaked, “Go now, while you can. I will deal with these worms. I sense that you are squeamish, and what I am about to do would turn your stomach. It is best that you begone.”
Balancing himself carefully, he clapped his hands to shoo my horse on its way. I dared not look back. I do not know what unutterable retribution Father Gumbeetle visited upon the heads of my pursuers, but even now I often lie awake at night, deprived of sleep, turning over in my mind the hideous possibilities.
An hour later I tied up my horse outside the Bodger's Spinney Hotel and passed through creaking oaken doors into the lobby. I was peering around in my dreamy, myopic way, when a uniformed man accosted me.
“Yes?” he shouted.
“I’m looking for the breakfast room,” I said, after doing a startled little jump.
“Why?” he yelled.
“I have an appointment,” I explained, “With one of the guests.”
“And?” screeched my interrogator.
And what?, I thought.
“And?” he insisted, even louder.
“And, um, I’d like you to show me where I might find him,” I tried.
“And?” It was blood-curdling by now. I quaked.
“And, and … look, would you like a tip?”
Now a second person appeared. He was older, dressed in an expensive suit, had double pneumonia, and wore some sort of chain of office. The uniformed man gave a little display of bows and scrapes to indicate that this man was his superior.
“What's going on here?” asked the latter.
“This man says he's got an appointment, sir.”
“An appointment?”
“In the breakfast room.”
“An appointment in the breakfast room?”
“With one of the guests.”
“An appointment in the breakfast room with one of the guests?”
He turned to me.
“Let me get this clear,” he said evenly, weighing his words, “You're saying that you have an appointment in the breakfast room with one of the guests?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Twinge,” he said, turning to the uniformed man, “Get Captain Freakpit down here right away. You,” he said to me, “had better wait in the dimly-lit room at the end of the corridor. No—don't protest! We'll get this sorted out without a hint of delay. Come with me.”
I followed him to a dimly-lit room at the end of the corridor. We sat facing each other in complete silence. After a while he seemed to grow restive, and reached over to a little cabinet, from which he took a flag. Draping it over his knees, he rummaged in his pockets, produced a sewing kit, and began to darn the flag, looking up at me from time to time as if to check that I was still there. Eager as I was to break the silence, I couldn't think of anything to say.
Then we heard urgent footsteps approaching along the corridor, and after an unnecessary knocking at the door, Twinge entered the room. He looked shaken.
“It's Captain Freakpit, sir,” he said, “He's hanged himself.”
Throwing the flag aside, the superior jumped out of his chair and dashed out of the room, making strangulated noises as if he were a seagull regurgitating food for its young. Twinge hared after him. Blinking, I decided to follow them, down the corridor, through the lobby, up a staircase, along a passage, through a connecting-room, up another staircase, along another corridor, up a step-ladder, through a hatch, into a storeroom, through a door, up yet another staircase, across a landing, up another ladder, into an attic, and there, swinging gently from the rafters, suspended by a length of Italian hemp, I saw, bug-eyed and purple, and quite, quite dead, not “Captain Freakpit”, but my Uncle Nobby.
[Scrimgeour henceforth devotes several dozen pages to a mawkish valediction, of no interest whatsoever. Things liven up a bit when he pieces together his uncle's final days, hiding out in the hotel posing as Freakpit —a man he had murdered a fortnight earlier—and growing increasingly desperate as his many and various enemies close in. The author then spends an unwarrantable amount of time in fruitless conjecture as to why he, Scrimgeour, had been summoned to the hotel. Did his uncle have an important message for him? Had he left anything in his room which could shed light on the mystery? Just how much had he been intending to pay for the horse? This sort of drivel goes on for so long that one has to physically restrain oneself from plunging the book into a vat of boiling tar. Eventually, however, it perks up again when Scrimgeour rides off on his horse, heading for home…]
By mid-afternoon, my horse was growing tired, and I was ravenously hungry, and I veered off the path and made for the tiny hamlet of Mustard Parva. I hoped there to find a tavern more hospitable than the iniquitous den of the previous night. I halted outside a pretty little inn called The Rhinoceros & Buttercup, and, fixing a nosebag onto the horse, stepped warily inside. It was a vision of wonderment, a pocket of heaven on earth. My heart burst with bliss as I sat down at a dainty table. Beautiful women and handsome men thronged about me, humming angelic melodies, caressing me gently, and dabbing at last night's gashes and bruises with pads of cotton wool soaked in ointments, unguents and lotions. Plates piled high with ambrosial foodstuffs were set before me, and wherever I turned I was proferred gleaming goblets of sweet and delightful drinks. A dozen shimmering, winged creatures plucked on harps, creating an unearthly music. The place was festooned with exotic flowers, in pots and vases and hanging baskets, their rare and delicate perfumes combining to create a heady fragrance. I felt that by some strange accident I had entered upon paradise.
[Scrimgeor got a bit carried away with the adjectives in the above passage, but I thought you should get some idea of the awfulness of his prose, if only to appreciate how much I have spared you with my ruthless editing.]
Then the door crashed open, and a wretched, glowering man strode up to the bar and beat his fists upon it. The spell, if spell it was, was broken.
“I want a barrel of grog!” cried the man. Fear-struck, two of the handsome men immediately scurried down to the cellars to fetch what he wanted. He glared around at the company.
“Whose horse is that outside?” he yelled. I begged that he would not cast his eyes upon me, but my furious blushes gave me away. Coming close, thrusting his face into mine, foul-breathed, he roared, “It's yours, is it? Come on, you're going to help me!”
He let out a gurgling laugh and hoisted me to my feet. The barrel of grog was brought up from the cellars and he had it lashed to my poor horse's back.
“You lead the gee-gee,” he said, “and follow me.”
I had no choice but to obey, for he presented such a terrifying figure that I was sure any refusal would be met by inexplicable violence. In silence broken only by the pitiful clip-clop of my horse and by occasional belches from my tormentor, we headed away from Mustard Parva into the countryside. It began to rain.
An hour later, we came to a spinney, wherein a quartet of thin and demented outcasts were sprawled hopelessly upon a picnic-blanket, their hollow eyes fixed upon a hamper which had been heavily padlocked. They seemed oblivious to our arrival, until the ferocious-looking man shouted to them.
“Right, you scum, it's feeding time.”
He took from his pocket a gigantic bunch of keys; only then did I notice that the piteous crew wore fetters, from which he now proceeded to free them, before unlocking the hamper. They fell upon the food like beasts, while their keeper dragged the barrel of grog off my horse and rolled it towards a titanic larch. He sat down and drew off a flagon's worth of grog, downing it in one. Then, as if he had only just remembered my presence, he flung a coin at me, and bid me leave, using words which delicacy forbids me from setting down here.
Sadly reflecting upon the misery of life, I was about to mount my horse when, taking a last look at the bestial picnickers, I was astonished to see a young man who I could have sworn was milady's hypochondriac son.
[That is not the worst thing Scrimgeour has to say about me in his Memoirs, so I shall let it pass.]
I looked again: it was him! As he shovelled great chunks of black pudding into his mouth, his eyes met mine. Dulled by whatever hateful calamity had befallen him, he seemed not to recognise me. Then, perhaps because I was staring at him so intently, with such astonishment, something flickered in his soul, and he raised himself up, spat out the sausage of coagulated pig's blood, and allowed himself a hesitant “Ag, Ag, Agamomenon?”
“It is you!” I cried.
“Aga. Ag? Agamemnon?”
He got it right that time. Sense was sifting back into his brain. While we stood like a couple of splinterheads batting our befuddled greetings back and forth, the keeper—or coachman, as I was later to learn was his proper title—was sinking ever more inevitably into a stupor. The grog from the Rhinoceros & Buttercup was, it seemed, laced with powerful narcotics which, having lulled the drinker into a peaceable slumber, would rattle him awake in two hours' time, and subject him to agitation, fits, breathlessness, hallucinations and death.
[Scrimgeour and I did not witness the coachman's end, more's the pity. He has taken these details from a letter I received from Mat some months later. She and Nat made a rapid recovery from their bell-ringing torments, and settled in Mustard Magna, where they took over the running of a phosphorous-candle workshop. Bam had gone completely off his head, she wrote, but they were caring for him, and hoped that he would make an eventual recovery. I never did find out what became of them all, but given the number of years that have passed, I suspect that the three of them are dead now, Mat and Nat and Bam, dead and gone and in their graves.]
I hauled the poor lad up onto my shoulders and carried him home.
[The above sentence is an abridgement of—wait for it—two hundred and forty four pages of Scrimgeour's tome. You would not believe the brain-numbing detail he thinks necessary to describe such a simple matter. Basically, he put me on the horse and led me through woodland glades, and the odd marsh, until we turned up at the mansion in time for supper.]