My Uncle Oswald Read online

  'I was rather pleased with it myself.'

  'It's the ultimate deception.'

  'Thank you, Oswald.'

  'There's just one thing I can't fathom,' I said.

  'What's that?'

  'When he came at you like a battering-ram, didn't he take aim.'

  'Only after a fashion.'

  'But he's a very experienced marksman.'

  'My dear old frump,' she said, 'you can't seem to get it into your head what a man's like when he's had a double dose.'

  I jolly well can, I told myself. I was behind the filing-cabinets when A. R. Woresley got his.

  'No,' I said. 'I can't. What is a man like when he's had a double dose?'

  'Berserk,' she said. 'He literally doesn't know what the other end of him's doing. I could have shoved it in a jar of pickled onions and he wouldn't have known the difference.'

  Over the years I have discovered a surprising but simple truth about young ladies and it is this: the more beautiful their faces, the less delicate their thoughts. Yasmin was no exception. There she sat now across the table from me in Maxims wearing a gorgeous Fortuny dress and looking for all the world like Queen Semiramis on the throne of Egypt, but she was talking vulgar. 'You're talking vulgar,' I said.

  'I'm a vulgar girl,' she said, grinning.

  The Volnay arrived and I tasted it. Wonderful wine. My father used to say never pass up a Volnay by a good shipper if you see one on the wine card. 'How did you get away so soon?' I asked her.

  'He was very rough,' she said. 'Rough and sort of spiky. It felt as though I had a gigantic lobster on my back.'

  'Beastly.'

  'It was horrid,' she said. 'He had a heavy gold watchchain across his waistcoat which kept grinding into my spine. And a big watch in the waistcoat pocket.'

  'Not good for the watch.'

  'No,' she said. 'It went crunch. I heard it.'

  'Yes, well...'

  'Terrific wine this, Oswald.'

  'I know. But how did you get away so quickly?'

  'That's bound to be a problem with the younger ones after they've had the Beetle,' she said. 'How old is this fellow?'

  'Forty-eight.'

  'In the prime of life,' she said. 'It's different when they're seventy-six. At that age, even with the Beetle, they soon grind to a halt.'

  'But not this chap?'

  'God no,' she said. 'Perpetual motion. A mechanical lobster.'

  'So what did you do?'

  'What could I do? It's either me or him I said. So as soon as he'd had his explosion and delivered the goods, I reached into my jacket pocket and got out the trusty hatpin.'

  'And you let him have it?'

  'Yes, but don't forget it had to be a backhander this time and that wasn't so easy. It's hard to get a good swing.'

  'I can see that.'

  'Luckily my backhand's always been my strongest point.'

  'At tennis you mean?'

  'Yes,' she said.

  'And you got him first time?'

  'Deep to the baseline,' she said. 'Deeper than the King of Spain. A winner.'

  'Did he protest?'

  'Oh my God,' she said, 'he squealed like a pig. And he danced round the room clutching himself and yelling, "Celeste! Celeste! Fetch a doctor! I have been stabbed!" The woman must have been looking through the keyhole because she came bursting in at once and rushed up to him crying. "Where? Where? Let me see!" And while she was examining his backside, I ripped the all-important rubbery thing off him and dashed out of the room pulling up my trousers as I went.'

  'Bravo,' I said. 'What a triumph.'

  'Bit of a lark actually,' she said. 'I enjoyed it.'

  'You always do.'

  'Lovely snails,' she said. 'Great big juicy ones.'

  'The snail farms put them on sawdust for two days before they sell them for eating,' I said.

  'Why?'

  'So the snails can purge themselves. When did you get the signed notepaper? Right at the beginning?'

  'At the beginning, yes. I always do.'

  'But why did it say Boulevard Haussmann on it, instead of Rue Laurent-Pichet?'

  'I asked him that myself,' she said. 'He told me that's where he used to live. He's only just moved.'

  'That's all right, then,' I said.

  They took the empty snail-shells away and soon afterwards they brought on the grouse. By grouse I mean red grouse. I do not mean black grouse (black cock and grey hen) or wood grouse (capercailye) or white grouse (ptarmigan). These others are good, especially the ptarmigan, but the red grouse is the king. And provided of course they are this year's birds, there is no meat more tender or more tasty in the entire world. Shooting starts on the twelfth of August, and every year I look forward to that date with even greater impatience than I do to the first of September when the oysters come in from Colchester and Whitstable. Like a fine sirloin, red grouse should be eaten rare with the blood just a shade darker than scarlet, and at Maxims they would not like you to order it any other way.

  We ate our grouse slowly, slicing off one thin sliver of breast at a time, allowing it to melt on the tongue and following each mouthful with a sip of fragrant Volnay.

  'Who's next on the list?' Yasmin asked me.

  I had been thinking about that myself, and now I said to her, 'It was going to be Mr James Joyce, but perhaps it would be nice if we took a short trip down to Switzerland for a change of scenery.'

  'I'd like that,' she said. 'Who's in Switzerland?'

  'Nijinski.'

  'I thought he was up here with that Diaghilev chap.'

  'I wish he was,' I said, 'but it seems he's gone a bit dotty. He thinks he's married to God, and he walks about with a big gold cross around his neck.'

  'What rotten luck,' Yasmin said. 'Does that mean his dancing days are over?'

  'Nobody knows,' I said. 'They say he was dancing at an hotel in St Moritz only a few weeks ago. But that was just for fun, to amuse the guests.'

  'Does he live in an hotel?'

  'No, he's got a villa above St Moritz.'

  'Alone?'

  'Unfortunately not,' I said. 'There's a wife and a child and a whole bunch of servants. He's a rich man. Fabulous sums he used to get. I know Diaghilev paid him twenty-five thousand francs for each performance.'

  'Good Lord. Did you ever see him dance?'

  'Only once,' I said. 'The year the war broke out, nineteen fourteen, at the old Palace Theatre in London. He did Les Sylphides. Stunning it was. He danced like a god.'

  'I'm crazy to meet him,' Yasmin said. 'When do we leave?'

  'Tomorrow,' I said. 'We have to keep moving.'

  19

  At this point in my narrative, just as I was about to describe our trip to Switzerland to find Nijinski, my pen suddenly came away from the paper and I found myself hesitating. Was I not perhaps getting into a rut? Becoming repetitious? Yasmin was going to be meeting an awful lot of fascinating people over the next twelve months, no doubt about that. But in nearly every case (there would of course be one or two exceptions) the action was going to be very much the same. There would be the giving of the Beetle powder, the ensuing cataclysm, the escape with the spoils, and all the rest of it, and that, however interesting the men themselves might be, was going to become pretty boring for the reader. Nothing would have been easier than for me to describe in great detail how the two of us met Nijinski on a path through the pinewoods below his villa, as indeed we did, and how we gave him a chocolate, and how we held him in conversation for nine minutes until the powder hit him, and how he chased Yasmin into the dark wood, leaping from boulder to boulder and rising so high in the air with each leap he seemed to be flying. But if I did that, then it would be fitting also to describe the James Joyce encounter, Joyce in Paris, Joyce in a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat, old tennis shoes on his feet, twirling an ashplant and talking obscenities. And after Joyce, it would be Mr Bonnard and Mr Braque and then a quick trip back to Cambridge to unload our precious spoils in the Semen's Hom