Thursday, February the 3rd, 2005

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Claude

Serpentine Claude had been in a gale. I asked him what sort of gale it was. I've got a lot of time for Serpentine Claude. Howling, he said. My my, a howling gale, was the nubbin of my reply. Was there a snap? Claude, who is a plutocrat with a thing about Mary Pickford, said there was a snap, and it was cold. I was beginning to picture Serpentine Claude in a howling gale during a cold snap, but I was hungry for further details. Claude misinterpreted my expression and handed me a pie. He is serpentine but generous, as well as plutocratic. It was a very tasty pie, and I ate it at once. It was a puff pastry pie with a filling of filberts and beeborage. While I chewed, Claude told me that the gale during the snap was accompanied by rain. I did not want to speak with my mouth full of pie, and before I could ask Claude to describe the nature of the rain, he rushed away, along that old canal towpath hectic with foxgloves, to a festival of Mary Pickford films being shown at the ship-shaped cinema in Tantarabim.

I swallowed the last of the pie, hoisted my binoculars, and took careful note of a swallow perched on the bough of a sycamore over to the west. Or it may have been a finch. I am always getting them mixed up, ever since the railway accident. I had a psychic premonition of it, just like the hundreds of people who foresaw in their dreams the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. There is a good book by George Behe which catalogues them. One day I may find out if anyone else shared my premonition of the railway accident and I, too, might collect them into a book.

Years later I received a letter from Serpentine Claude. This is what he wrote:

Dear Istvan, It has long been on my conscience, through all the years that I ensnared the world in my plutocratic web, that I may have mistaken your look of fixated curiosity about the gale during the snap for one of simple hunger. That is why I gave you the last of my puff pastry filbert and beeborage pies. But I was wrong, wasn't I? I think I knew I was wrong within minutes of stalking off along that foxglove-strewn towpath, but to my shame I did not turn back to rectify my error. I was so hot for Mary Pickford that I gave you nary another thought. Please accept my apologies, and let me at long last tell you what your heart has burned to know through all the succeeding years, through the reigns on earth of a fair few Pontiffs. In the howling gale during the cold snap, the rain was torrential. It fell in torrents. Yours faithfully, Serpentine Claude.