Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  ‘Nothing easier, sir; my accomplice, a witty soubrette who lives among the cinders, dedicated as she is to the young lady’s happiness, will personally strew a large number of dead and dying rats she has herself collected about the bedroom of the said ingénue’s duenna, and, most particularly, that of the said ingénue herself. This to be done tomorrow morning, as soon as Sir Pantaloon rides out to fetch his rents. By good fortune, down in the square, plying for hire, a rat-catcher! Since our hag cannot abide either a rat or a cat, it falls to milady to escort the rat-catcher, none other than yourself, sir, and his intrepid hunter, myself, to the site of the infestation.

  ‘Once you’re in her bedroom, sir, if you don’t know what to do, then I can’t help you.’

  ‘Keep your foul thoughts to yourself, Puss.’

  Some things, I see, are sacrosanct from humour.

  Sure enough, prompt at five in the bleak next morning, I observe with my own eyes the lovely lady’s lubberly husband hump off on his horse like a sack of potatoes to rake in his dues. We’re ready with our sign: SIGNOR FURIOSO, THE LIVING DEATH OF RATS; and in the leathers he’s borrowed from the porter, I hardly recognise him myself, not with the false moustache. He coaxes the chambermaid with a few kisses – poor, deceived girl! love knows no shame – and so we install ourselves under a certain shuttered window with the great pile of traps she’s lent us, the sign of our profession, Puss perched atop them bearing the humble yet determined look of a sworn enemy of vermin.

  We’ve not waited more than fifteen minutes – and just as well, as many rat-plagued Bergamots approach us already and are not easily dissuaded from employing us – when the front door flies open on a lusty scream. The hag, aghast, flings her arms round flinching Furioso; how fortuitous to find him! But, at the whiff of me, she’s sneezing so valiantly, her eyes awash, the vertical gutters of her nostrils aswill with snot, she barely can depict the scenes inside, rattus domesticus dead in her bed and all; and worse! in the Missus’ room.

  So Signor Furioso and his questing Puss are ushered into the very sanctuary of the goddess, our presence announced by a fanfare from her keeper on the nose harp. Attishhoooo!!!

  Sweet and pleasant in a morning gown of loose linen, our ingénue jumps at the tattoo of my boot heels but recovers instantly and the wheezing, hawking hag is in no state to sniffle more than: ‘Ain’t I seen that cat before?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ says my master. ‘Why, he’s come but yesterday with me from Milano.’

  So she has to make do with that.

  My Tabs has lined the very stairs with rats; she’s made a morgue of the hag’s room but something more lively of the lady’s. For some of her prey she’s very cleverly not killed but crippled; a big black beastie weaves its way towards us over the turkey carpet, Puss, pounce! Between screaming and sneezing, the hag’s in a fine state, I can tell you, though milady exhibits a most praiseworthy and collected presence of mind, being, I guess, a young woman of no small grasp so, perhaps, she has a sniff of the plot already.

  My master goes down on hands and knees under the bed.

  ‘My god!’ he cries. ‘There’s the biggest hole, here in the wainscoting, I ever saw in all my professional career! And there’s an army of black rats gathering behind it, ready to storm through! To arms!’

  But, for all her terror, the hag’s loath to leave the Master and me alone to deal with the rats; she casts her eye on a silver-backed hairbrush, a coral rosary, twitters, hovers, screeches, mutters until milady assures her, amidst scenes of rising pandemonium:

  ‘I shall stay here myself and see that Signor Furioso doesn’t make off with my trinkets. You go and recover yourself with an infusion of friar’s balsam and don’t come back until I call.’

  The hag departs; quick as a flash, la belle turns the key in the door on her and softly laughs; the naughty one.

  Dusting the slut-fluff from his knees, Signor Furioso now stands slowly upright; swiftly, he removes his false moustache, for no element of the farcical must mar this first, delirious encounter of these lovers, must it. (Poor soul, how his hands tremble!)

  Accustomed as I am to the splendid, feline nakedness of my kind, that offers no concealment of that soul made manifest in the flesh of lovers, I am always a little moved by the poignant reticence with which humanity shyly hesitates to divest itself of its clutter of concealing rags in the presence of desire. So, first, these two smile, a little, as if to say ‘How strange to meet you here!’ uncertain of a loving welcome, still. And do I deceive myself, or do I see a tear a-twinkle in the corner of his eye? But who is it steps towards the other first? Why, she; women, I think, are, of the two sexes, the more keenly tuned to the sweet music of their bodies. (A penny for my foul thoughts, indeed! Does she, that wise, grave personage in the negligee, think you’ve staged this grand charade merely in order to kiss her hand?) But, then – oh, what a pretty blush! steps back; now it’s his turn to take two steps forward in the saraband of Eros.

  I could wish, though, they’d dance a little faster; the hag will soon recover from her spasms and shall she find them in flagrante?

  His hand, then, trembling, upon her bosom; hers, initially more hesitant, sequentially more purposeful, upon his breeches. Then their strange trance breaks; that sentimental havering done, I never saw two fall to it with such appetite. As if the whirlwind got into their fingers, they strip each other bare in a twinkling and she falls back on the bed, shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo! Never can that old bed have shook with such a storm before. And their sweet choked mutterings, poor things: ‘I never . . . ’ ‘My darling . . . ’ ‘More . . . And etc. etc. Enough to melt the thorniest heart.

  He rises up on his elbows once and gasps at me: ‘Mimic the murder of the rats, Puss! Mask the music of Venus with that clamour of Diana!’

  A-hunting we shall go! Loyal to the last, I play catch as catch can with Tab’s dead rats, giving the dying the coup de grâce and baying with resonant vigour to drown the extravagant screeches that break forth from that (who would have suspected?) more passionate young woman as she comes off in fine style. (Full marks, Master.)

  At that, the old hag comes battering at the door. What’s going on? Whyfor the racket? And the door rattles on its hinges.

  ‘Peace!’ cries Signor Furioso. ‘Haven’t I just now blocked the great hole?’

  But milady’s in no hurry to don her smock again, she takes her lovely time about it; so full of pleasure gratified her languorous limbs you’d think her very navel smiled. She pecks my master prettily thank-you on the cheek, wets the gum on his false moustache with the tip of her strawberry tongue and sticks it back on his upper lip for him, then lets her wardress into the scene of the faux carnage with the most modest and irreproachable air in the world.

  ‘See! Puss has slaughtered all the rats.’

  I rush, purring proud, to greet the hag; instantly, her eyes o’erflow.

  ‘Why the bedclothes so disordered?’ she squeaks, not quite blinded yet, by phlegm and chose for her post from all the other applications on account of her suspicious mind, even (oh, dutiful) when in grande peur des rats.

  ‘Puss had a mighty battle with the biggest beast you ever saw upon this very bed; can’t you see the bloodstains on the sheets? And now, what do we owe you, Signor Furioso, for this singular service?’

  ‘A hundred ducats,’ says I, quick as a flash, for I know my master, left to himself, would like an honourable fool, take nothing.

  ‘That’s the entire household expenses for a month!’ wails avarice’s well-chosen accomplice.

  ‘And worth every penny! For those rats would have eaten us out of house and home.’ I see the glimmerings of sturdy backbone in this little lady. ‘Go, pay them from your private savings that I know of, that you’ve skimmed off the housekeeping.’

  Muttering and moaning but nothing for it except to do as she is bid; and the furious Sir and I take off a laundry basket full of dead rats as souvenir – we drop
it, plop! in the nearest sewer. And sit down to one dinner honestly paid for, for a wonder.

  But the young fool is off his feed again. Pushes his plate aside, laughs, weeps, buries his head in his hands and, time and time and time again, goes to the window to stare at the shutters behind which his sweetheart scrubs the blood away and my dear Tabs rests from her supreme exertions. He sits, for a while, and scribbles; rips the page in four, hurls it aside. I spear a falling fragment with a claw. Dear God, he’s took to writing poetry.

  ‘I must and will have her for ever,’ he exclaims.

  I see my plan has come to nothing. Satisfaction has not satisfied him; that soul they both saw in one another’s bodies has such insatiable hunger no single meal could ever appease it. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.

  ‘How can I live without her?’

  You did so for twenty-seven years, sir, and never missed her for a moment.

  ‘I’m burning with the fever of love!’

  Then we’re spared the expense of fires.

  ‘I shall steal her away from her husband to live with me.’

  ‘What do you propse to live on, sir?’

  ‘Kisses,’ he said distractedly. ‘Embraces.’

  ‘Well, you won’t grow fat on that, sir; though she will. And then, more mouths to feed.’

  ‘I’m sick and tired of your foul-mouthed barbs, Puss,’ he snaps. And yet my heart is moved, for now he speaks the plain, clear, foolish rhetoric of love and who is there cunning enough to help him to happiness but I? Scheme, loyal Puss, scheme!

  My wash completed, I step out across the square to visit that charming she who’s wormed her way directly into my own hitherto-untrammelled heart with her sharp wits and her pretty ways. She exhibits warm emotion to see me; and, oh! what news she has to tell me! News of a rapt and personal nature, that turns my mind to thoughts of the future, and, yes, domestic plans of most familial nature. She’s saved me a pig’s trotter, a whole entire pig’s trotter the Missus smuggled to her with a wink. A feast! Masticating, I muse.

  ‘Recapitulate,’ I suggest, ‘the daily motions of Sir Pantaloon when he’s at home.’

  They set the cathedral clock by him, so rigid and so regular his habits. Up at the crack, he meagrely breakfasts off yesterday’s crusts and a cup of cold water, to spare the expense of heating it up. Down to his counting-house, counting out his money, until a bowl of well-watered gruel at midday. The afternoon he devotes to usury, bankrupting, here, a small tradesman, there, a weeping widow, for fun and profit. Dinner’s luxurious, at four; soup, with a bit of rancid beef or a tough bird in it – he’s an arrangement with the butcher, takes unsold stock off his hands in return for a shut mouth about a pie that had a finger in it. From four-thirty until five-thirty, he unlocks the shutters and lets his wife look out, oh, don’t I know! while hag sits beside her to make sure she doesn’t smile. (Oh, that blessed flux, those precious loose minutes that set the game in motion!)

  And while she breathes the air of evening, why, he checks up on his chest of gems, his bales of silk, all those treasures he loves too much to share with daylight and if he wastes a candle when he so indulges himself, why, any man is entitled to one little extravagance. Another draught of Adam’s ale healthfully concludes the day; up he tucks besides Missus and, since she is his prize possession, consents to finger her a little. He palpitates her hide and slaps her flanks: ‘What a good bargain!’ Alack, can do no more, not wishing to profligate his natural essence. And so drifts off to sinless slumber amid the prospects of tomorrow’s gold.

  ‘How rich is he?’

  ‘Croesus.’

  ‘Enough to keep two loving couples?’

  ‘Sumptuous.’

  Early in the uncandled morning, groping to the privy bleared with sleep, were the old man to place his foot upon the subfusc yet volatile fur of a shadow-camouflaged young tabby cat –

  ‘You read my thoughts, my love.’

  I say to my master: ‘Now, you get yourself a doctor’s gown, impedimenta all complete or I’m done with you.’

  ‘What’s this, Puss?’

  ‘Do as I say and never mind the reason! The less you know of why, the better.’

  So he expends a few of the hag’s ducats on a black gown with a white collar and his skull cap and his black bag and, under my direction, makes himself another sign that announces, with all due pomposity, how he is II Famed Dottore: Aches cured, pains prevented, bones set, graduate of Bologna, physician extraordinary. He demands to know, is she to play the invalid to give him further access to her bedroom?

  ‘I’ll clasp her in my arms and jump out of the window; we too shall both perform the triple somersault of love.’

  ‘You just mind your own business, sir, and let me mind it for you after my own fashion.’

  Another raw and misty morning! Here in the hills, will the weather ever change? So bleak it is, and dreary; but there he stands, grave as a sermon in his black gown and half the market people come with coughs and boils and broken heads and I dispense the plasters and the vials of coloured water I’d forethoughtfully stowed in his bag, he too agitato to sell for himself. (And, who knows, might we not have stumbled on a profitable profession for future pursuit, if my present plans miscarry?)

  Until dawn shoots his little yet how flaming arrow past the cathedral on which the clock strikes six. At the last stroke, that famous door flies open once again and – eeeeeeeeeeeeech! the hag lets rip.

  ‘Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor, come quick as you can; our good man’s taken a sorry tumble!’

  And weeping fit to float a smack, she is, so doesn’t see the doctor’s apprentice is most colourfully and completely furred and whiskered.

  The old booby’s flat out at the foot of the stair, his head at an acute angle that might turn chronic and a big bunch of keys, still, grinned in his right hand as if they were the keys to heaven marked: Wanted on voyage. And Missus, in her wrap, bends over him with a pretty air of concern.

  ‘A fall – ’ she begins when she sees the doctor but stops short when she sees your servant, Puss, looking as suitably down-in-the-mouth as his chronic smile will let him, humping his master’s stock-in-trade and hawing like a sawbones. ‘You, again,’ she says, and can’t forbear to giggle. But the dragon’s too blubbered to hear.

  My master puts his ear to the old man’s chest and shakes his head dolefully; then takes the mirror from his pocket and puts it to the old man’s mouth. Not a breath clouds it. Oh, sad! Oh, sorrowful!

  ‘Dead, is he?’ sobs the hag. ‘Broke his neck, has he?’

  And she slyly makes a little grab for the keys, in spite of her well-orchestrated distress; but Missus slaps her hand and she gives over.

  ‘Let’s get him to a softer bed,’ says Master.

  He ups the corpse, carries it aloft to the room we know full well, bumps Pantaloon down, twitches an eyelid, taps a kneecap, feels a pulse.

  ‘Dead as a doornail,’ he pronounces. ‘It’s not a doctor you want, it’s an undertaker.’

  Missus has a handkerchief very dutifully and correctly to her eyes.

  ‘You just run along and get one,’ she says to hag. ‘And then I’ll read the will. Because don’t think he’s forgotten you, thou faithful servant. Oh, my goodness, no.’

  So off goes hag; you never saw a woman of her accumulated Christmases spring so fast. As soon as they are left alone, no trifling, this time; they’re at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet since the bed is occupé. Up and down, up and down his arse; in and out, in and out her legs. Then she heaves him up and throws him on the back, her turn at the grind, now, and you’d think she’ll never stop.

  Toujours discret, Puss occupies himself in unfastening the shutters and throwing the windows open to the beautiful beginning of morning in whose lively yet fragrant air his sensitive nostrils catch the first and vernal hint of spring. In a few moments, my dear friend joins me. I notice already – or is it only my fon
d imagination? – a charming new portliness in her gait, hitherto so elastic, so spring-heeled. And there we sit upon the windowsill like the two genii and protectors of the house; ah, Puss, your rambling days are over. I shall become a hearthrug cat, a fat and cosy cushion cat, sing to the moon no more, settle at last amid the sedentary joys of a domesticity we two, she and I, have so richly earned.

  Their cries of rapture rouse me from this pleasant revery.

  The hag chooses, naturellement, this tender if outrageous moment to return with the undertaker in his chiffoned topper, plus a brace of mutes black as beetles, glum as bailiffs, bearing the elm box between them to take the corpse away in. But they cheer up something wonderful at the unexpected spectacle before them and he and she conclude their amorous interlude amidst roars of approbation and torrents of applause.

  But what a racket the hag makes! Police, murder, thieves! Until the Master chucks her purseful of gold back again, for a gratuity. (Mean-while, I note that sensible young woman, mother-naked as she is has yet the presence of mind to catch hold of her husband’s key ring and sharply tug it from his sere, cold grip. Once she’s got the keys secure, she’s in charge of all.)

  ‘Now, no more of your nonsense!’ she snaps to hag. ‘If I hereby give you the sack, you’ll get a handsome gift to go along with you for now’ – flourishing the keys – ‘I am a rich widow and here’ – indicating to all my bare yet blissful master – ‘is the young man who’ll be my second husband.’

  When the governess found Signor Panteleone had indeed remembered her in his will, left her a keepsake of the cup he drank his morning water from, she made not a squeak more, pocketed a fat sum with thanks and, sneezing, took herself off with no more cries of ‘murder’ neither. The old buffoon briskly bundled in his coffin and buried; Master comes into a great fortune and Missus rounding out already and they as happy as pigs in plunk.

  But my Tabs beat her to it, since cats don’t take much time about engendering; three fine, new-minted ginger kittens, all complete with snowy socks and shirtfronts, tumble in the cream and tangle Missus’s knitting and put a smile on every face, not just their mother’s and proud father’s for Tabs and I smile all day long and, these days, we put our hearts in it.