Ah Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  ‘And might I ask how you propose to run this maggot-factory of yours?’ When he spoke the word maggot, it seemed as if he were spitting out a sour little pip from his mouth.

  ‘Easiest thing in the world to run a maggot-factory.’ Claud was gaining confidence now and warming to his subject. ‘All you need is a couple of old oil drums and a few lumps of rotten meat or a sheep’s head, and you put them in the oil drums and that’s all you do. The flies do the rest.’

  Had he been watching Mr Hoddy’s face he would probably have stopped there.

  ‘Of course, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. What you’ve got to do next is feed up your maggots with special diet. Bran and milk. And then when they get big and fat you put them in pint tins and post them off to your customers. Five shillings a pint they fetch. Five shillings a pint!’ he cried, slapping his knee. ‘You just imagine that, Mr Hoddy! And they say one bluebottle’ll lay twenty pints easy!’

  He paused again, but merely to marshal his thoughts, for there was no stopping him now.

  ‘And there’s another thing, Mr Hoddy. A good maggot-factory don’t just breed ordinary maggots, you know. Every fisherman’s got his own tastes. Maggots are commonest, but also there’s lug worms. Some

  fishermen won’t have nothing but lug worms. And of course there’s coloured maggots. Ordinary maggots are white, but you get them all sorts of different colours by feeding them special foods, see. Red ones and green ones and black ones and you can even get blue ones if you know what to feed them. The most difficult thing of all in a maggot-factory is a blue maggot, Mr Hoddy.’

  Claud stopped to catch his breath. He was having a vision now – the same vision that accompanied all his dreams of wealth – of an immense factory building with tall chimneys and hundreds of happy workers streaming in through the wide wrought-iron gates and Claud himself sitting in his luxurious office directing operations with a calm and splendid assurance.

  ‘There’s people with brains studying these things this very minute,’ he went on. ‘So you got to jump in quick unless you want to get left out in the cold. That’s the secret of big business, jumping in quick before all the others, Mr Hoddy.’

  Clarice, Ada, and the father sat absolutely still looking straight ahead. None of them moved or spoke. Only Claud rushed on.

  ‘Just so long as you make sure your maggots is alive when you post ’em. They’ve got to be wiggling, see. Maggots is no good unless they’re wiggling. And when we really get going when we’ve built up a little capital, then we’ll put up some glasshouses.’

  Another pause, and Claud stroked his chin. ‘Now I expect you’re all wondering why a person should want glasshouses in a maggot-factory. Well – I’ll tell you. It’s for the flies in the winter, see. Most important to take care of your flies in the winter.’

  ‘I think that’s enough, thank you, Cubbage,’ Mr Hoddy said suddenly.

  Claud looked up and for the first time he saw the expression on the man’s face. It stopped him cold.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Mr Hoddy said.

  ‘All I’m trying to do, Mr Hoddy,’ Claud cried, ‘is give your little girl everything she can possibly desire. That’s all I’m thinking of night and day, Mr Hoddy.’

  ‘Then all I hope is you’ll be able to do it without the help of maggots.’

  ‘Dad!’ Clarice cried, alarmed. ‘I simply won’t have you talking to Claud like that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him how I wish, thank you, miss.’

  ‘I think it’s time I was getting along,’ Claud said. ‘Good night.’

  Mr Feasey

  We were both up early when the big day came.

  I wandered into the kitchen for a shave but Claud got dressed right away and went outside to arrange about the straw. The kitchen was a front room and through the window I could see the sun just coming up behind the line of trees on top of the ridge the other side of the valley.

  Each time Claud came past the window with an armload of straw I noticed over the rim of the mirror the intent, breathless expression on his face, the great round bullet-head thrusting forward and the forehead wrinkled into deep corrugations right up to the hairline. I’d only seen this look on him once before and that was the evening he’d asked Clarice to marry him. Today he was so excited he even walked funny, treading softly as though the concrete around the filling-station were a shade too hot for the soles of his feet; and he kept packing more and more straw into the back of the van to make it comfortable for Jackie.

  Then he came into the kitchen to fix breakfast, and I watched him put the pot of soup on the stove and begin stirring it. He had a long metal spoon and he kept on stirring and stirring all the time it was coming to the boil, and about every half minute he leaned forward and stuck his nose into that sickly-sweet steam of cooking horseflesh. Then he started putting extras into it – three

  peeled onions, a few young carrots, a cupful of stinging-nettle tops, a teaspoon of Valentines Meatjuice, twelve drops of cod-liver oil – and everything he touched was handled very gently with the ends of his big fat fingers as though it might have been a little fragment of Venetian glass. He took some minced horsemeat from the icebox, measured one handful into Jackie’s bowl, three into the other, and when the soup was ready he shared it out between the two, pouring it over the meat.

  It was the same ceremony I’d seen performed each morning for the past five months, but never with such intense and breathless concentration as this. There was no talk, not even a glance my way, and when he turned and went out again to fetch the dogs, even the back of his neck and the shoulders seemed to be whispering, ‘Oh Jesus, don’t let anything go wrong, and especially don’t let me do anything wrong today.’

  I heard him talking softly to the dogs in the pen as he put the leashes on them, and when he brought them around into the kitchen, they came in prancing and pulling to get at the breakfast, treading up and down with their front feet and waving their enormous tails from side to side, like whips.

  ‘All right,’ Claud said, speaking at last. ‘Which is it?’ Most mornings he’s offer to bet me a pack of cigarettes, but there were bigger things at stake today and I knew all he wanted for the moment was a little extra reassurance.

  He watched me as I walked once around the two beautiful, identical, tall, velvety-black dogs, and he moved aside, holding the leashes at arms’ length to give me a better view.

  ‘Jackie!’ I said, trying the old trick that never worked. ‘Hey Jackie!’ Two identical heads with identical expressions flicked around to look at me, four bright, identical, deep-yellow eyes stared into mine. There’d been a time when I fancied the eyes of one were a slightly darker yellow than those of the other. There’d also been a time when I thought I could recognise Jackie because of a deeper brisket and a shade more muscle on the hindquarters. But it wasn’t so.

  ‘Come on,’ Claud said. He was hoping that today of all days I would make a bad guess.

  ‘This one,’ I said. ‘This is Jackie.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘This one on the left.’

  ‘There!’ he cried, his whole face suddenly beaming. ‘You’re wrong again!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re about as wrong as you could possibly be. And now listen, Gordon, and I’ll tell you something. All these last weeks, every morning while you’ve been trying to pick him out – you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping count. And the result is you haven’t been right even one-half the time! You’d have done better tossing a coin!’

  What he meant was that if I (who saw them every day and side by side) couldn’t do it, why the hell should we be frightened of Mr Feasey. Claud knew Mr Feasey was famous for spotting ringers, but he knew also that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between two dogs when there wasn’t any.

  He put the bowls of food on the floor, giving Jackie the one with the least meat because he was running t