Kiss Kiss (15 page)

      
“
Don’t you touch her!
” the woman cried. She turned and
faced him, her eyes blazing, and she looked suddenly like
some kind of a little fighting bird with her neck arched over
towards him as though she were about to fly at his face and
peck his eyes out.
      
“Now wait a minute,” he said, retreating.
      
“You must be mad!” she cried.
      
“Now wait just one minute, Mabel, will you please, because
if you’re still thinking this stuff is dangerous . . . That
is
what
you’re thinking, isn’t it? All right, then. Listen carefully. I
shall now proceed to
prove
to you once and for all, Mabel,
that royal jelly is absolutely harmless to human beings,
even in enormous doses. For example—why do you think
we had only half the usual honey crop last summer? Tell me
that.”
      
His retreat, walking backwards, had taken him three or
four yards away from her, where he seemed to feel more
comfortable.
      
“The reason we had only half the usual crop last summer,”
he said slowly, lowering his voice, “was because I turned one
hundred of my hives over to the production of royal jelly.”
      
“You
what
”
      
“Ah,” he whispered. “I thought that might surprise you a bit.
And I’ve been making it ever since right under your very
nose.” His small eyes were glinting at her, and a slow sly smile
was creeping around the corners of his mouth.
      
“You’ll never guess the reason, either,” he said. “I’ve been
afraid to mention it up to now because I thought it might . . .
well . . . sort of embarrass you.”
      
There was a slight pause. He had his hands clasped high in
front of him, level with his chest, and he was rubbing one
palm against the other, making a soft scraping noise.
      
“You remember that bit I read you out of the magazine?
That bit about the rat? Let me see now, how does it go? ‘Still
and Burdett found that a male rat which hitherto had been
unable to breed . . .’ ” He hesitated, the grin widening,
showing his teeth.
      
“You get the message, Mabel?”
      
She stood quite still, facing him.
      
“The very first time I ever read that sentence, Mabel, I
jumped straight out of my chair and I said to myself if it’ll
work with a lousy rat, I said, then there’s no reason on earth
why it shouldn’t work with Albert Taylor.”
      
He paused again, craning his head forward and turning one
ear slightly in his wife’s direction, waiting for her to say
something. But she didn’t.
      
“And here’s another thing,” he went on. “It made me feel
so absolutely marvellous, Mabel, and so sort of completely
different to what I was before that I went right on taking it
even after you’d announced the joyful tidings.
Buckets
of it
I must have swallowed during the last twelve months.”
      
The big heavy haunted-looking eyes of the woman were
moving intently over the man’s face and neck. There was no
skin showing at all on the neck, not even at the sides below
the ears. The whole of it, to a point where it disappeared into
the collar of the shirt, was covered all the way around with
those shortish silky hairs, yellowy black.
      
“Mind you,” he said, turning away from her, gazing lovingly
now at the baby, “it’s going to work far better on a tiny infant
than on a fully developed man like me. You’ve only got to
look at her to see that, don’t you agree?”
      
The woman’s eyes travelled slowly downward and settled
on the baby. The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and
white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was
approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge
into the world complete with mandibles and wings.
      
“Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel?” he said. “We don’t
want our little queen to catch a cold.”

Without in any way wishing to blow my own trumpet, I
think that I can claim to being in most respects a moderately
well-matured and rounded individual. I have travelled a good
deal. I am adequately read. I speak Greek and Latin. I dabble
in science. I can tolerate a mildly liberal attitude in the politics
of others. I have compiled a volume of notes upon the evolution
of the madrigal in the fifteenth century. I have witnessed
the death of a large number of persons in their beds; and in
addition, I have influenced, at least I hope I have, the lives of
quite a few others by the spoken word delivered from the
pulpit.
      
Yet in spite of all this, I must confess that I have never in
my life—well, how shall I put it?—I have never really had
anything much to do with women.
      
To be perfectly honest, up until three weeks ago I had
never so much as laid a finger on one of them except perhaps
to help her over a stile or something like that when the occasion
demanded. And even then I always tried to ensure that
I touched only the shoulder or the waist or some other place
where the skin was covered, because the one thing I never
could stand was actual contact between my skin and theirs.
Skin touching skin, my skin, that is, touching the skin of a
female, whether it were leg, neck, face, hand, or merely finger,
was so repugnant to me that I invariably greeted a lady with
my hands clasped firmly behind my back to avoid the inevitable handshake.
      
I could go further than that and say that any sort of physical
contact with them, even when the skin wasn’t bare, would
disturb me considerably. If a woman stood close to me in
a queue so that our bodies touched, or if she squeezed in
beside me on a bus seat, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, my
cheeks would begin burning like mad and little prickles
of sweat would start coming out all over the crown of my
head.
      
This condition is all very well in a schoolboy who has just
reached the age of puberty. With him it is simply Dame
Nature’s way of putting on the brakes and holding the lad
back until he is old enough to behave himself like a gentleman.
I approve of that.
      
But there was no reason on God’s earth why I, at the ripe
old age of thirty-one, should continue to suffer a similar
embarrassment. I was well trained to resist temptation, and
I was certainly not given to vulgar passions.
      
Had I been even the slightest bit ashamed of my own
personal appearance, then that might possibly have explained
the whole thing. But I was not. On the contrary, and though
I say it myself, the fates had been rather kind to me in that
regard. I stood exactly five and a half feet tall in my stockinged
feet, and my shoulders, though they sloped downward a little
from the neck, were nicely in balance with my small neat
frame. (Personally, I’ve always thought that a little slope on
the shoulder lends a subtle and faintly aesthetic air to a man
who is not overly tall, don’t you agree?) My features were
regular, my teeth were in excellent condition (protruding
only a smallish amount from the upper jaw), and my hair,
which was an unusually brilliant ginger-red, grew thickly all
over my scalp. Good heavens above, I had seen men who were
perfect shrimps in comparison with me displaying an astonishing
aplomb in their dealings with the fairer sex. And oh, how
I envied them! How I longed to do likewise—to be able to
share in a few of those pleasant little rituals of contact that I
observed continually taking place between men and women—the
touching of hands, the peck on the cheek, the linking of
arms, the pressure of knee against knee or foot against foot
under the dining-table, and most of all, the full-blown violent
embrace that comes when two of them join together on the
floor—for a dance.
      
But such things were not for me. Alas, I had to spend my
time avoiding them instead. And this, my friends, was easier
said than done, even for a humble curate in a small country
region far from the fleshpots of the metropolis.
      
My flock, you understand, contained an inordinate number
of ladies. There were scores of them in the parish, and the
unfortunate thing about it was that at least sixty per cent of
them were spinsters, completely untamed by the benevolent
influence of holy matrimony.
      
I tell you I was jumpy as a squirrel.
      
One would have thought that with all the careful training
my mother had given me as a child, I should have been capable
of taking this sort of thing well in my stride; and no doubt I
would have done if only she had lived long enough to complete
my education. But alas, she was killed when I was still
quite young.
      
She was a wonderful woman, my mother. She used to wear
huge bracelets on her wrists, five or six-of them at a time,
with all sorts of things hanging from them and tinkling against
each other as she moved. It didn’t matter where she was, you
could always find her by listening for the noise of those
bracelets. It was better than a cowbell. And in the evenings
she used to sit on the sofa in her black trousers with her feet
tucked up underneath her, smoking endless cigarettes from a
long black holder. And I’d be crouching on the floor, watching
her.
      
“You want to taste my martini, George?” she used to ask.
      
“Now stop it, Clare,” my father would say. “If you’re not
careful you’ll stunt the boy’s growth.”
      
“Go on,” she said. “Don’t be frightened of it. Drink it.”
      
I always did everything my mother told me.
      
“That’s enough,” my father said. “He only has to know what
it tastes like.”
      
“Please don’t interfere, Boris. This is
very
important.”
      
My mother had a theory that nothing in the world should
be kept secret from a child. Show him everything. Make him
experience
it.
      
“I’m not going to have any boy of mine going around
whispering dirty secrets with other children and having to
guess about this thing and that simply because no one will tell
him.”
      
Tell him everything. Make him listen.
      
“Come over here, George, and I’ll tell you what there is to
know about God.”
      
She never read stories to me at night before I went to bed;
she just “told” me things instead. And every evening it was
something different.
      
“Come over here, George, because now I’m going to tell
you about Mohammed.”
      
She would be sitting on the sofa in her black trousers with
her legs crossed and her feet tucked up underneath her, and
she’d beckon to me in a queer languorous manner with the
hand that held the long black cigarette-holder, and the bangles
would start jingling all the way up her arm.
      
“If you must have a religion I suppose Mohammedanism is
as good as any of them. It’s all based on keeping healthy. You
have lots of wives, and you mustn’t ever smoke or drink.”
      
“Why mustn’t you smoke or drink, Mummy?”
      
“Because if you’ve got lots of wives you have to keep
healthy and virile.”
      
“What is virile?”
      
“I’ll go into that tomorrow, my pet. Let’s deal with one
subject at a time. Another thing about the Mohammedan is
that he never never gets constipated.”
      
“Now, Clare,” my father would say, looking up from his
book. “Stick to the facts.”
      
“My dear Boris, you don’t know anything about it. Now
if only
you
would try bending forward and touching the
ground with your forehead morning, noon, and night every
day, facing Mecca, you might have a bit less trouble in that
direction yourself.”
      
I used to love listening to her, even though I could only
understand about half of what she was saying. She really
was telling me secrets, and there wasn’t anything more
exciting than that.
      
“Come over here, George, and I’ll tell you precisely how
your father makes his money.”
      
“Now, Clare, that’s quite enough.”
      
“Nonsense, darling. Why make a
secret
out of it with the
child? He’ll only imagine something much much worse.”
      
I was exactly ten years old when she started giving me
detailed lectures on the subject of sex. This was the biggest
secret of them all, and therefore the most enthralling.
      
“Come over here, George, because now I’m going to tell
you how you came into this world, right from the very
beginning.”
      
I saw my father glance up quietly, and open his mouth
wide the way he did when he was going to say something
vital, but my mother was already fixing him with those
brilliant shining eyes of hers, and he went slowly back to his
book without uttering a sound.
      
“Your poor father is embarrassed,” she said, and she gave
me her private smile, the one that she gave nobody else, only
to me—the one-sided smile where just one corner of her
mouth lifted slowly upward until it made a lovely long
wrinkle that stretched right up to the eye itself, and became
a sort of wink-smile instead.
      
“Embarrassment, my pet, is the one thing that I want you
never to feel. And don’t think for a moment that your father
is embarrassed only because of
you
.”
      
My father started wriggling about in his chair.
      
“My God, he’s even embarrassed about things like that when
he’s alone with me, his own wife.”
      
“About things like what?” I asked.
      
At that point my father got up and quietly left the room.
      
I think it must have been about a week after this that my
mother was killed. It may possibly have been a little later, ten
days or a fortnight, I can’t be sure. All I know is that we
were getting near the end of this particular series of “talks”
when it happened; and because I myself was personally
involved in the brief chain of events that led up to her death,
I can still remember every single detail of that curious night
just as clearly as if it were yesterday. I can switch it on in
my memory any time I like and run it through in front of
my eyes exactly as though it were the reel of a cinema film;
and it never varies. It always ends at precisely the same place,
no more and no less, and it always begins in the same
peculiarly sudden way, with the screen in darkness, and my
mother’s voice somewhere above me, calling my name:
      
“George! Wake up, George, wake up!”
      
And then there is a bright electric light dazzling in my
eyes, and right from the very centre of it, but far away, the
voice is still calling me:
      
“George, wake up and get out of bed and put your dressing-gown
on! Quickly! You’re coming downstairs. There’s something
I want you to see. Come on, child, come on! Hurry up!
And put your slippers on. We’re going outside.”
      
“Outside?”
      
“Don’t argue with me, George. Just do as you’re told.” I
am so sleepy I can hardly see to walk, but my mother takes
me firmly by the hand and leads me downstairs and out
through the front door into the night where the cold air is
like a sponge of water in my face, and I open my eyes wide
and see the lawn all sparkling with frost and the cedar tree
with its tremendous arms standing black against a thin small
moon. And overhead a great mass of stars is wheeling up into
the sky.
      
We hurry across the lawn, my mother and I, her bracelets
all jingling like mad and me having to trot to keep up with
her. Each step I take I can feel the crisp frosty grass crunching
softly underfoot.
      
“Josephine has just started having her babies,” my mother
says. “It’s a perfect opportunity. You shall watch the whole
process.”
      
There is a light burning in the garage when we get there,
and we go inside. My father isn’t there, nor is the car, and
the place seems huge and bare, and the concrete floor is
freezing cold through the soles of my bedroom slippers.
Josephine is reclining on a heap of straw inside the low wire
cage in one corner of the room—a large blue rabbit with
small pink eyes that watch us suspiciously as we go towards
her. The husband, whose name is Napoleon, is now in a
separate cage in the opposite corner, and I notice that he is
standing up on his hind legs scratching impatiently at the
netting.
      
“Look!” my mother cries. “She’s just having the first
one! It’s almost out!”
      
We both creep closer to Josephine, and I squat down beside
the cage with my face right up against the wire. I am
fascinated. Here is one rabbit coming out of another. It is
magical and rather splendid. It is also very quick.
      
“Look how it comes out all neatly wrapped up in its own
little cellophane bag!” my mother is saying.
      
“And just look how she’s taking care of it now! The poor
darling doesn’t have a face-flannel, and even if she did she
couldn’t hold it in her paws, so she’s washing it with her
tongue instead.”
      
The mother rabbit rolls her small pink eyes anxiously in
our direction, and then I see her shifting position in the straw
so that her body is between us and the young one.
      
“Come round the other side,” my mother says. “The silly
thing has moved. I do believe she’s trying to hide her baby
from us.”
      
We go round the other side of the cage. The rabbit follows
us with her eyes. A couple of yards away the buck is prancing
madly up and down, clawing at the wire.
      
“Why is Napoleon so excited?” I ask.
      
“I don’t know, dear. Don’t you bother about him. Watch
Josephine. I expect she’ll be having another one soon. Look
how carefully she’s washing that little baby! She’s treating
it just like a human mother treats hers! Isn’t it funny to think
that I did almost exactly the same sort of thing to you once?”
The big blue doe is still watching us, and now, again, she
pushes the baby away with her nose and rolls slowly over to
face the other way. Then she goes on with her licking and
cleaning.
      
“Isn’t it wonderful how a mother knows instinctively just
what she has to do?” my mother says. “Now you just imagine, my pet, that
that baby is