Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell (22 page)

“And the vicar said, ‘I, myself, Mrs Darlinghurst, will tell the bishop about your selfless dedication to the organ fund'. He has no need to say it, of course but I thought it was most Christian of him, don't you?”

“Oh, yes… yes… Most, er, perceptive of him.”

“That's what I thought. So I said to him, ‘Vicar,' I said, ‘I'm only a humble widow…' ”

What other secrets of her private life she had vouchsafed to the vicar I was never to learn, because from behind me came an earsplitting scream of recognition.

“Darling!
Darling
, I'm here,” came Ursula's voice.

I turned round, and only just in time for Ursula flung herself into my arms and fastened her mouth on mine with the avidity of a starving bumble bee sighting the first clover flower of the season. When I finally managed to extricate myself from Ursula's octopus-like embrace I looked round for Mrs Darlinghurst, only to find her retreating along the platform, backwards, with a look on her face of one, who having led a sheltered life, is suddenly confronted with the more unsavoury aspects of a Roman orgy. I smiled feebly at her, waved good-bye, and then taking Ursula firmly by the arm steered her out of the station while endeavouring to remove what felt like several pounds of lipstick from my mouth.

Ursula was dressed in a very smart blue outfit that highlighted her unfairly enormous eyes, and she wore elegant white lace gloves. Over her arm she carried a curious basket like a miniature hamper with a large handle, which presumably contained sufficient cosmetics to withstand a siege of several years.

“Darling,” she said, peering raptly into my face, “I
am
going to enjoy this. Such a lovely day! Lunch alone with you, and then the concert… Uuummm!
Paradise
!”

A number of men in the ticket hall, on hearing her invest the word “paradise” with a sort of moaning lechery that had to be heard to be believed, looked at me enviously, and I began to feel better.

“I've booked a table… I began.

“Darling,” interrupted Ursula, “I simply
must
go to the loo. There wasn't one on the train. Buy me a newspaper so I can go.”

Several people stopped and stared.

“Hush!” I said hurriedly, “Not so loud. What do you want a newspaper for? They have paper in the loos.”

“Yes, but it's so
thin
, darling. I like a nice thick layer on the seat,” she explained, in a clear voice that carried like a chime of bells on a frosty night.

“On the seat?” I asked.

“Yes. I
never
sit on the seat,” she said. “Because I knew a girl once who sat on a loo seat and got acme.”

“Don't you mean acne?” I asked, confused.

“No, no!” she said impatiently. “Acme. You come out all over in the most hideous red spots. Do hurry and buy me a newspaper, darling. I'm simply
dying
.

So I bought her a paper and watched her disappear into the ladies, flourishing it as a deterrent to germs, and I wondered if any one of her numerous boyfriends had ever described her as the acne of perfection.

She emerged, several minutes later, smiling and apparently germ-free, and I bundled her into a taxi and drove her to the restaurant where I'd booked a table. When we got to the restaurant and had established ourselves the waiter unfurled two enormous menus in front of us. Remembering my friend's advice I removed the menu deftly from Ursula's hands.

“I'll choose for you,” I said. “I'm a gourmet.”

“Are you really?” said Ursula. “But you're not Indian, are you?”

“What has that got to do with it?” I inquired.

“Well, I thought they came from India,” she said.

“What? Gourmets?” I asked, puzzled.

“Yes,” she said. “Aren't they those people that spend all their time looking at their tummy?”

“No, no. You're thinking of something quite different,” I said. “Anyway, be quiet and let me order.”

I ordered a modest but substantial lunch and a bottle of wine to go with it. Ursula chattered on endlessly. She had an enormous variety of friends, all of whom she expected you to know, and whose every concern was of interest to her. From the stories that she told it was obvious that she spent the greater part of her life trying to re-organise the lives of her friends, whether they wanted her to or not. She babbled on like a brook and I listened entranced.

“I'm very worried about Toby,” she confided to me, over the prawn cocktail. “I'm very worried about him indeed. I think he's got a secret passion for someone and it's just eating him away. But Daddy doesn't agree with me. Daddy says he's well on the way to being an incoherent.”

“An incoherent?”

“Yes. You know, he drinks too much.”

So rich is the English language, I reflected, that this word could, in fact, with all fairness, be used to describe a drunk.

“He ought to join Incoherents Anonymous,” I said without thinking.

“What are they?” asked Ursula, wide-eyed.

“Well, they're a sort of secret society of… of… um… incoherents, who try and help each other to… well, to give it up and become… um… become…”

“Become coherents!” said Ursula with a squeak of delight.

I must confess this end result had escaped me.

Later on, over her
filet mignon
, she leant forward and fixed me with her blue, intense stare.

“Do you know about Susan?” she hissed. Her hiss was more clearly audible than her normal voice.

“Er… no,” I confessed.

“Well, she became pregnant. She was going to have an
illiterate
baby.”

I pondered this news.

“With modem methods of education…” I began.

“Don't be silly! She didn't use
anything
,” hissed Ursula. “That's what's so
stupid
, and her father, naturally, said he wasn't going to have a lot of illiterates darkening
his
hearth.”

“Naturally,” I said. “It would turn it into a sort of Do-the-girls Hall.”

“Exactly!” she said. “So her father said she must have an ablution.”

“To wash away sin?” I inquired.

“No, silly! To get rid of the baby.”

“And did she have it?” I asked.

“Yes. He sent her up to London. It cost an awful lot of money and the poor dear came back looking terrible. I do think her father was unfair.”

By this time most of the other tables in the restaurant were listening to our conversation with bated breath.

Over coffee Ursula was telling me a long and very involved story about some friend of hers, who was in dire distress, that she had wanted to help. I hadn't listened with any great attention until she suddenly said,

“Well, I couldn't do anything about it
then
, because Mummy was in bed with a cold and Daddy wanted me to cook him an early lunch because he was taking the bull to the vet to have him castigated… And so…”

“Your father was doing
what
?” I asked.

“Taking the bull to the vet to have him castigated. He was getting terribly fierce and dangerous.”

How, I wondered, enraptured by the thought, did one castigate a fierce and dangerous bull? But I was too wise to ask Ursula.

“Look, hurry up and finish your coffee,” I said. “Otherwise we'll be late for the concert.”

“Oooo, yes,” she said. “We mustn't be late.”

She gulped down her coffee and I paid the bill and ushered her out of the restaurant. We walked through what are laughingly called the Pleasure Gardens of Bournemouth among the faded rhododendrons and the paddling pool and came eventually to the Pavilion.

As we made our way to our seats Ursula insisted on taking her miniature hamper with her.

“Why don't you leave it in the cloakroom?” I asked, for it was a fairly bulky object.

“I don't trust cloakrooms,” said Ursula darkly. “They do strange things in cloakrooms.”

In order to save embarrassment I didn't inquire what strange things they did in cloakrooms, and we got into our seats and wedged the hamper between our legs.

Gradually the Pavilion filled with the normal crowd of earnest music lovers that attended the concerts. When the leader of the orchestra appeared, Ursula joined in the clapping with great vigour. Then she leaned across to me and said,

“I think he's such a handsome conductor, don't you?”

I didn't feel that at that moment I should correct her. Presently the conductor came on and again Ursula threw herself into the applause with great enthusiasm and settled back with a deep sigh. She glanced at me and gave me a ravishing smile.

“I
am
going to enjoy this, darling,” she said.

The concert was a hotch-potch of Mozart, a composer that I am very fond of. I soon discovered what my friends had meant about Ursula's distressing effect upon music. Should there be the slightest pause for one brief second in the music, Ursula's hands were up and clapping. Soon, after people had been hissing and shushing us, I became quite adroit at catching her hands as they came up to clap in the middle of a piece. Each time she would turn anguished eyes on me and say,

“Darling, I'm
sorry
. I thought he'd finished.”

It was, I think, after the fourth piece when I felt the basket move. At first I thought I was mistaken but I pressed my leg against it, and, sure enough, it was vibrating. I looked at Ursula who had her eyes closed and was waving her forefinger in the air in time to the music.

“Ursula!” I whispered.

“Yes, darling,” she said, without opening her eyes.

“What have you got in your basket?” I asked. She opened her eyes, startled, and looked at me.

“What do you mean?” she said defensively.

“There is something moving in your basket,” I said.

“Hush!” came a chorus of angry voices around us.

“But it can't be,” she said, “unless the pill's worn off.”

“
What
have you got in your basket?” I asked.

“Oh, it's nothing. It's just a present for somebody,” she said. She leant down and fumbled at the lid, raised it, and then lifted out of it a minute, snow-white pekinese, with enormous black eyes.

To say I was shocked would be putting it mildly. After all, the concert-goers in Bournemouth took their music very seriously, and the last thing that they wanted or, indeed, would have allowed, was a dog in the sacred precincts of the Pavilion.

“Oh, damn!” said Ursula, looking at the pekinese's rather charming little snub nose. “The pill's worn off.”

“Look, put him back in the basket!” I hissed.

“Hush!” said everybody around us.

Ursula bent down to put the puppy back into the basket. He yawned voluptuously into her face and then gave a sudden and unexpected wiggle. She dropped him.

“Oooo!” she squeaked. “I dropped him! I dropped him!”

“Shut up!” I said.

“Hush!” said everyone around us.

I reached down to try and find the puppy but, obviously exhilarated by the fact that he had been released from his prison, he had trotted down the row through the forest of legs.

“What are we going to
do
?” said Ursula.

“Look, just shut up! Shut up and leave it to me,” I said.

“Hush!” said everybody around us.

We hushed for a minute while I thought frantically. How could I possibly find a pekinese puppy in amongst all those seats and legs without disrupting the entire concert?

“We'll have to leave it,” I said. “I'll look for him after everybody's gone, after the concert.”

“You can't!” said Ursula. “You simply can't leave him, poor little thing. He might get trodden on and hurt.”

“Well, how do you expect me to find him?” I said.

“Hush!” said everybody around us.

“He's got all tangled up in the seats and the legs and things,” I said.

“But darling, you
must
find him. He'll get terribly, terribly lonely,” she said.

There must have been all of seven hundred people in the hall.

“All right,” I said. “I'll pretend I'm going to the loo.”

“What a good idea,” said Ursula, beaming. “I think he went down that way.”

I got to my feet and ran the gauntlet of outraged faces and mumbled profanity as I worked my way down the row and out into the aisle. There, I saw, just ahead of me, the pekinese puppy, squatting down as dog puppies do before they've learnt to cock their leg, and decorating the red carpet with a little sign of his own. I went forward cautiously and grabbed at him. I caught him, but as I lifted him up he uttered a loud and piercing scream that was clearly audible even above the rather exuberant piece of music that the orchestra was playing. There was a great rustle as people turned round indignantly to look in my direction. The puppy continued his screams. I stuffed him unceremoniously under my coat, and, almost at a run, I left the concert hall.

I went to the cloakroom where, fortunately, I knew the girl in charge.

“Hallo,” she said. “You leaving already? Don't you like the concert?”

“No… it's… it's a question of force of circumstances,” I said. I pulled the puppy out from my jacket and held it up in front of her.

“Would you look after this for me?” I asked.

“Oh, isn't he sweet!” she said. “But you didn't have him in there, did you? Dogs are not allowed you know.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “He just got in by mistake. He belongs to a friend of mine. Would you look after him till after the concert?”

“Of
course
I will,” she said. “Isn't he sweet?”

“He's not terribly sweet when he's in a concert hall,” I said.

I handed the puppy over to her tender care and went back and stood quietly in the shadows until the orchestra had finished the piece that they were playing. Then I made my way back to Ursula.

“Have you got him, darling?” she asked.

“No, I haven't,” I said. “I put him in charge of the cloakroom attendant. She's a friend of mine.”

“Are you sure he'll be all right?” she said, obviously with dark thoughts about what they did in cloakrooms to pekinese puppies.

“He'll be perfectly all right,” I said. “He'll be loved and cherished until after the concert. I can't think what induced you to bring a dog to a concert.”

“But, darling,” she said. “I meant him as a present for a friend of mine. I… I meant to tell you only you talked so much that I couldn't get a word in edgeways. I want to take him after the concert.”