Something Wholesale. Eric Newby

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       CHAPTER FIVE Back to Normal

      Since no news had been received from the Adjutant about my future employment, within a week after my visit to Throttle and Fumble I was forced, with the utmost reluctance, to report for duty at Great Marlborough Street where, in the phrase that my parents were to employ with varying degrees of optimism in the succeeding months, I was to ‘learn the business’.

      ‘It’s only a temporary measure,’ they said, ‘until you find your feet.’ They had a touching and totally unfounded belief that I was destined for better things. It was a temporary measure that was to last ten years.

      As I pushed open the front door which was ornamented with a large knocker in the form of a ram’s head, a little bell made a pinging noise. This I learned later warned the occupants of the Counting House, who also performed the functions of what would now be called ‘The Reception’, that a visitor was on the way in. Before the war the staff had always used the side entrance, a nearly vertical flight of wooden steps which led to the cellars, when entering or leaving the building, but by 1946 such nuances of behaviour had ceased to be observed. As a result the Counting House was perpetually on the qui-vive – more often than not for no good reason at all. The cause of the bell ringing was most probably a junior from the workroom on the way out to expend one of her meagre supply of sweet coupons on a Mars Bar for the tea break.

      I went in and as the door closed behind me the sounds of traffic died away; the blasphemies of two vanmen who were unloading bolts of cloth from a pantechnicon and sliding them down a shiny plank into the bowels of the building faded; and I found myself in another, more tranquil world, almost in another century.

      The hall in which I stood had white panelling; the floor ran first downhill, then uphill, creating the impression that one was intoxicated. To the left was a magnificently carved staircase which led by easy stages to the upper floors. The house had been built in the first half of the eighteenth century. It had been occupied by the actress Sarah Siddons and subsequently by that sinister personality Thomas Wainewright who was not only art critic, forger of bonds and wholesale poisoner but one of the foremost exponents of erotic drawing of his day, an art that he practised with such derivative skill that his work is usually attributed to his contemporary, Henry Fuseli, Keeper of the Royal Academy, whose technique was superior and whose imagination was even more perverse. On one of the upper floors there had continued to exist, until fire put paid to it in 1944, a small stage on which the famous actress had entertained her friends. With these two colossal personalities as previous tenants it was not surprising that the house had its own peculiar atmosphere.

      My thoughts were brought back rudely to the present by the sounds of a telephone conversation that was taking place inside a minute booth under the staircase, so small that the unfortunate occupant had to choose between having a private conversation and asphyxiating in the process, or leaving the door ajar and delighting the staff of the Counting House as they pored over their ledgers.

      Whoever was inside at this comparatively early hour had chosen the way of dishonour rather than death and was already engaged in an exchange of hideous confidences.

      ‘No, Maureen! … No, dear!’ said the disembodied voice. ‘No, I don’t want to! … No … No … No, I don’t mind that. I think he’s ever such a nice colour … sort of bronze … I just don’t like the way he … Well, he said that the last time … No! … No! The other one’s worse than he is … I had to have it cleaned – And my leg it was all bruised. Mum was ever so cross!’

      As I listened fascinated to this recital a long, silky-looking leg slid sinuously round the door. Nylons were still in their infancy in Britain at that time or, in the jargon of the day, ‘in short supply’. The owner of this leg had obviously overcome these difficulties. Attached to it was a foot wanton enough, as Balzac wrote, to damn an archangel, partially enclosed in a sandal with a four-inch heel. Half-mesmerised, as a snake charmer who has allowed one of his charges to gain control of the situation, I watched the leg in which muscles rippled as sleek and powerful as a boa-constrictor’s. I could see nothing wrong with it. Either this was not the one that was ‘all bruised’ or else the scars of battle had already healed. I began to experience that morbid sensation known to psychoanalyists as The Death Wish. For the moment I could think of nothing more delectable than being crushed to pulp by this and its attendant member.

      Now the instep began to arch itself with infinite slowness, just like the head of a cobra when it is about to strike СКАЧАТЬ