Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (66 page)

Disvan shook his head sadly.

‘No, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘to quote a classic Sex Pistols lyric: “the problem is
you!
”’

‘And the solution?’ I asked, languid and unconvinced.

‘History,’ snapped Disvan.

That took me aback. Such precision hadn’t been anticipated.

‘I don’t like history,’ I said, rallying quickly. ‘It’s all dead and gone, a “petty pace from day to day... all our yesterdays, lighting fools the way to dusty death”…’  Mr Jarman wasn’t the only one who’d ‘done’
Macbeth
for O Level.

Mr Disvan regarded me with the deepest suspicion, far more in fact than a bit of out-of-character erudition really merited.

‘I’m talking specific history here, Mr Oakley,’ he said, his face very grim. ‘The life and times of office furniture, mid to late twentieth century.’

‘Sounds terminally boring!’ I trumpeted. ‘Who the ---- wants to know about that? What wrong with sticking to real life... and passion... and poetry!’

‘Poetry?’ gaped Mr Disvan.

‘Yeah, why not? I’ve written a fair bit of it lately. Listen to this...’

Before anyone could stop me (and they looked as if they would if they could), I’d opened up the book of
pensées
that now accompanied me everywhere. There was a profound silence in the Argyll, the sort of horrified hush that immediately precedes an inevitable car smash.

‘This one’s called “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”,’
I announced.

‘Don’t do it to us, Oakley!’ said a desperate heckler (probably the landlord).

‘She undulates,’ I intoned, ‘like a juggernaut

in the canyons of my mind,

and the windmills of my soul

crush the seed of goodness

by order of her savage decrees.

Life is insupportable; impermissible,

a deep purple swoon assails me

as though of Courage Directors Bitter

I had drunk. Death, despair and Eternal night

are the surprises in my lunch-box.

And I, Oakley, have foresuffered all!’

‘That does it!’ said Mr Disvan, his face a cold mask. ‘Bad poetry! Grab him!’

*  *  *

‘I’ve lost half an evening’s trade, thanks to you,’ said the landlord. ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself.’

It was hard to feel proud being carried along, head almost scraping the pavement, like a giant, not very valued, teddy bear. Mr Bretwalda bore my weight, tucked under his ham-like arm, as though I wasn’t there. He felt sufficiently unstrained to be able to puff away at a cigar in his free hand.

‘Don’t feel too bad, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan who was walking alongside me.

‘But the blood’s all rushing to my head,’ I yelled, ‘and he’s trailed my face in some puddles. Of course I feel bad!’

‘I didn’t mean that sort of bad,’ said Disvan. ‘I meant bad about the landlord’s lost business. You can’t help it, you see. You’re just a bit under the weather, that’s all.’

‘And underarm, and underwater, and under pressure!’ I screamed.

‘That as well,’ agreed Disvan reasonably.

In other circumstances and at other angles, I might have felt quite honoured. It wasn’t every day I had thirty-odd outriders to escort me. The whole public bar clientele had turned out, some with better grace than others, and now formed a protective circle (or shambling mob) around me and my porter. On the minus side, I had a feeling—and it was a nasty feeling—that we were heading in the direction of my home like some English parody of the peasants’ march on Frankenstein’s castle.

As if by cue, Mr Disvan put me straight on this.

‘We’re heading for your house,’ he said, ‘but don’t be worried. The damage should be minimal.’

He mistook my upside down gape and gasp as affirmation by silence.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle except when it’s otherwise expedient. Even the gas board can get in nowadays if they’ve a mind to. And we’ve got better call than them.’

‘What! Why?’ I stuttered/shouted. ‘Bastards! Rabble!’

‘Well, there’s got to be a fair few of us,’ explained Disvan, the soul of sweet reason. ‘We need as many as possible to take the blast.’

This caused me to struggle with renewed vigour but unaltered lack of success. Exhausted at last, I slumped speechlessly back.

‘It’s all a matter of history, like I said before,’ he continued, oblivious to my frantic escape attempts. ‘I mean, did it ever occur to you to consider that desk’s antecedents?’

My look of pre-hysterical incredulity was answer enough.

‘I see not. Well, you should have. Everything has a history and it has to be taken into account. I partly blame myself. If I’d not gone for a cuppa, I’d not have let you buy the thing. And language like that won’t help the matter, Mr Oakley.’

After a minute or so, my Anglo-Saxon began to repeat itself and petered out in impotent fury.

‘Ponder the desk’s origin,’ Disvan continued as though nothing had happened. ‘Cut down in the vigour of its prime. Sawn, shaped and varnished into a new form—and for what? To sit in the same spot for half a century and minister to generation after generation of bureaucrats.’

‘Judging by Oakley’s state,’ interrupted Bridget Maccabi, leaning in from the outer circle, ‘I reckon it was in the accountancy department.’

‘Maybe so,’ Disvan nodded. ‘It’s certainly a bad case. But can you imagine it, Mr Oakley? All those different faces over the years, decent sorts in their way, but the same old work stored in and on you. All the petty office dramas you’d see, all the sordid politicking and gossip you’d be forced to overhear. And what about all the careers slowing down and dying, the slow growths of disillusionments and the relinquishing of dreams you’d be party to? All those fresh energies you’d see arrive and see get worn down with the dreariness of it all. Can you conceive of what it can be like to see fifty—fifty!—final account cycles—estimates, revised estimates, trial balances and verifications—come and go?’

‘I wish you’d shut up,’ I said bitterly. ‘You’re depressing the hell out of me.’

‘Exactly,’ snapped Disvan, as if he’d got me to concede some important point. ‘It doesn’t bear contemplation. All that negative psychic energy oozing into the pores and grain of the wood over the years, the atmosphere of unspoken desperation gradually seeping into the fabric of your being.’

‘A Luke 2:29 situation,’ contributed Mr Jarman, tilting his head upside down so as to grin at me properly.

‘Just so,’ agreed Disvan sagely. ‘”My eyes have seen too much, now let thy servant depart in peace.” Honestly, it can’t be too much fun, being a gently lapping, brimful basin of despair.’

On one level I could hardly dispute this. But, it being applied to a desk and me being upside down, I found the perversity to do so in no uncertain terms. Then Mr Bretwalda dipped my head into another villainously polluted puddle and shut me up

‘Suddenly,’ said Disvan, blithely continuing through my coughs and splutters, ‘the desk is removed from the source of spiritual venom. It’s sold to some unsuspecting bargain-seeker. The inflow of black thoughts stops and then slowly reverses. All the feelings and experiences it’s imbibed start to ebb outwards.’

Some pretty overweight pennies were starting to drop and the dawn of self-doubt across my inverted face did not escape Mr Disvan’s attention.

‘You mustn’t blame it, Mr Oakley,’ he said. ‘It’s not evil. Just tired, that’s all. It’s seizing the chance to spew out all those fleeting associations of unallieviated greyness—and you got in the way. Okay, so maybe there’s an element of revenge on mankind in dousing the new owner in despond...’

‘Self-defence, surely,’ suggested Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘How’s it to know Mr Oakley’s not just another man in a suit come to top up the tub of tedium?’

‘Precisely,’ agreed Disvan. ‘And anyway, we weren’t expecting things to get as bad as this. “He’ll have a few weeks of melancholy,” I said, “and then the desk will be drained. It’ll be a valuable spiritual exercise for him.” How could we guess you’d bought the most misery-sodden desk of all time?’

There’d been a subtle gear-change from ‘I’ to ‘we’ at the end of that and I pointed it out—tacked to a reference to my wishes for the future health of his eyes.

‘Well, there it is, Mr Oakley,’ said Mr Disvan unperturbed, signifying that’s how things were and I could love it or shove it. ‘And coincidentally enough, here we are. Kibbutz Oakley.’

I inclined my head and, to my horror, caught a brief topsy-turvy view of my house. The barbarians were before the gates.

‘Keys, please,’ said Mr Bretwalda pleasantly.

‘No!’ I howled.

And that was all the encouragement or excuse he needed. I was dumped in a bedraggled heap and Bretwalda was away up the drive like a red-faced, fleshly version of all five Thunderbirds.

‘Revenge is a dish best savoured cold,’ Mr Disvan advised me as I saw the Bretwalda boot meet my front door and sunder it into matchwood. ‘Count your blessings. It’s better he takes it out on your door than you.’

*  *  *

‘Well, I wouldn’t pay that much for a door,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr, stepping daintily over the wreckage, ‘carriage lamps or no carriage lamps.’

‘I could have got it for you cheaper, Mr O,’ added Mr Jarman, following up behind.

In fact, each of the passing Binscombe vigilantes had some
bon mot
to deliver as they entered, but they were quite safe in doing so as I was once again restrained by the mighty hand of Bretwalda. Pinned to the wall like a butterfly, I was obliged to witness the boarding of my house.

Like their Saxon forebears raiding a Roman villa, they spread out, poking and prying where the spirit took them. The odd comment concerning my taste in furniture and decoration reached my ears and increased my futile rage all the more.

‘You like tubular chairs and stripped pine, don’t you, Mr Oakley?’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘And everything else matt-black and chrome.’

‘It’s like being inside the mind of a Swedish chemist,’ said the landlord, looking about in shocked wonder.

My choice reply was pre-empted by Mr Jarman emerging from a detailed survey of my drinks cabinet.

‘I thought you said you didn’t have any calvados, Mr O?’ he said, accusingly holding the guilty bottle aloft.

Embarrassment hit home where all else hadn’t, and I was shamed into silence. Until, that is, Mr Patel and Mr Limbu came into sight on my stairs, hefting my desk between them, and gouging a groove in the staircase wallpaper as they went about it. Mr Disvan was following on, perusing a book purloined from my study.

‘This is interesting,’ he said to me when they’d blundered their way down. ‘
The Story of O
—a real classic of erotica, I’m told. Can I borrow it?’

‘No!’ I said with commendable control. ‘And also no to whatever you propose to do with my desk, you... you...’

The mob awaited my concluding epithet with interest but I couldn’t think of anything offensive enough.

Disvan placed my book on a shelf with, it seemed, genuine regret and then turned to face me.