Ah Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  ‘But what’s the sun got to do with it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ he said, ‘so listen carefully. When an animal is standing on all fours like a cow, and when you face her head into the sun, then the sperm has also got to travel directly into the sun to reach the egg. Switch the cow around and they’ll be travelling away from the sun.’

  ‘So what you’re saying,’ I said, ‘is that the sun exerts a pull of some sort on the female sperm and makes them swim faster than the male sperm.’

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Rummins. ‘That’s exactly it! It exerts a pull! It drags them forward! That’s why they always win! And if you turn the cow round the other way, it’s pulling them backwards and the male sperm wins instead.’

  ‘It’s an interesting theory,’ I said. ‘But it hardly seems likely that the sun, which is millions of miles away, could exert a pull on a bunch of spermatozoa inside a cow.’

  ‘You’re talking rubbish!’ cried Rummins. ‘Absolute and utter rubbish! Don’t the moon exert a pull on the bloody tides of the ocean to make ’em high and low? Of course it does! So why shouldn’t the sun exert a pull on the female sperm?’

  ‘I see your point.’

  Suddenly Rummins seemed to have had enough. ‘You’ll have a heifer calf for sure,’ he said, turning away. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘Mr Rummins,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is there any reason why this shouldn’t work with humans as well?’

  ‘Of course it’ll work with humans,’ he said. ‘Just so long as you remember everything’s got to be pointed in the right direction. A cow ain’t lying down you know. It’s standing on all fours.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘And it ain’t no good doing it at night either,’ he said, ‘because the sun is shielded behind the earth and it can’t influence anything.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but have you any sort of proof it works with humans?’

  Rummins laid his head to one side and gave me another of his long sly broken-toothed grins. ‘I’ve got four boys of my own, ain’t I?’ he said.

  ‘So you have.’

  ‘Ruddy girls ain’t no use to me around here,’ he said. ‘Boys is what you want on a farm and I’ve got four of ’em, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘you’re absolutely right.’

  Parson’s Pleasure

  Mr Boggis was driving the car slowly, leaning back comfortably in the seat with one elbow resting on the sill of the open window. How beautiful the countryside, he thought; how pleasant to see a sign or two of summer once again. The primroses especially. And the hawthorn. The hawthorn was exploding white and pink and red along the hedges and the primroses were growing underneath in little clumps, and it was beautiful.

  He took one hand off the wheel and lit himself a cigarette. The best thing now, he told himself, would be to make for the top of Brill Hill. He could see it about half a mile ahead. And that must be the village of Brill, that cluster of cottages among the trees right on the very

  summit. Excellent. Not many of his Sunday sections had a nice elevation like that to work from.

  He drove up the hill and stopped the car just short of the summit on the outskirts of the village. Then he got out and looked around. Down below, the countryside was spread out before him like a huge green carpet. He could see for miles. It was perfect. He took a pad and pencil from his pocket, leaned against the back of the car, and allowed his practised eye to travel slowly over the landscape.

  He could see one medium farmhouse over on the right, back in the fields, with a track leading to it from the road. There was another larger one beyond it. There was a house surrounded by tall elms that looked as though it might be a Queen Anne, and there were two likely farms away over on the left. Five places in all. That was about the lot in this direction.

  Mr Boggis drew a rough sketch on his pad showing the position of each so that he’d be able to find them easily when he was down below, then he got back into the car and drove up through the village to the other side of the hill. From there he spotted six more possibles – five farms and one big white Georgian house. He studied the Georgian house through his binoculars. It had a clean prosperous look, and the garden was well ordered. That was a pity. He ruled it out immediately. There was no point in calling on the prosperous.

  In this square then, in this section, there were ten possibles in all. Ten was a nice number, Mr Boggis told himself. Just the right amount for a leisurely afternoon’s work. What time was it now? Twelve o’clock. He would have liked a pint of beer in the pub before he started, but on Sundays they didn’t open until one. Very well, he would have it later. He glanced at the notes on his pad. He decided to take the Queen Anne first, the house with the elms. It had looked nicely dilapidated through the binoculars. The people there could probably do with some money. He was always lucky with Queen Annes, anyway. Mr Boggis climbed back into the car, released the handbrake, and began cruising slowly down the hill without the engine.

  Apart from the fact that he was at this moment disguised in the uniform of a clergyman, there was nothing very sinister about Mr Cyril Boggis. By trade he was a dealer in antique furniture, with his own shop and showroom in the King’s Road, Chelsea. His premises were not large, and generally he didn’t do a great deal of business, but because he always bought cheap, very very cheap, and sold very very dear, he managed to make quite a tidy little income every year. He was a talented salesman, and when buying or selling a piece he could slide smoothly into whichever mood suited the client best. He could become grave and charming for the aged, obsequious for the rich, sober for the godly, masterful for the weak, mischievous for the widow, arch and saucy for the spinster. He was well aware of his gift, using it shamelessly on every possible occasion; and often, at the end of an unusually good performance, it was as much as he could do to prevent himself from turning aside and taking a bow or two as the thundering applause of the audience went rolling through the theatre.

  In spite of this rather clownish quality of his, Mr Boggis was not a fool. In fact, it was said of him by some that he probably knew as much about French, English, and Italian furniture as anyone else in London. He also had surprisingly good taste, and he was quick to recognise and reject an ungraceful design, however genuine the article might be. His real love, naturally, was for the work of the great eighteenth-century English designers, Ince, Mayhew, Chippendale, Robert Adam, Manwaring, Inigo Jones, Hepplewhite, Kent, Johnson, George Smith, Lock, Sheraton, and the rest of them, but even with these he occasionally drew the line. He refused, for example, to allow a single piece from Chippendale’s Chinese or Gothic period to come into his showroom, and the same was true of some of the heavier Italian designs of Robert Adam.

  During the past few years, Mr Boggis had achieved considerable fame among his friends in the trade by his ability to produce unusual and often quite rare items with astonishing regularity. Apparently the man had a source of supply that was almost inexhaustible, a sort of private warehouse, and it seemed that all he had to do was to drive out to it once a week and help himself. Whenever they asked him where he got the stuff, he would smile knowingly and wink and murmur something about a little secret.

  The idea behind Mr Boggis’s little secret was a simple one, and it had come to him as a result of something that had happened on a certain Sunday afternoon nearly nine years before, while he was driving in the country.

  He had gone out in the morning to visit his old mother, who lived in Sevenoaks, and on the way back the fan belt on his car had broken, causing the engine to overheat and the water to boil away. He had got out of the car and walked to the nearest house, a smallish farm building about fifty yards off the road, and had asked the women who answered the door if he could please have a jug of water.

  While he was waiting for her to fetch it, he happened to glance in through the door to the living-room, and there, not five yards from where he was standing, he spotted s