Kiss Kiss (17 page)

      
After a while, the first male detached himself from his
group and advanced gingerly towards the fence, his belly
close to the ground. He touched a wire and was immediately
electrocuted. The remaining eleven rats froze, motionless.
      
There followed a period of nine and a half minutes during
which neither side moved; but I noticed that while all the
males were now staring at the dead body of their colleague,
the females had eyes only for the males.
      
Then suddenly Miss Prattley with the short tail could stand
it no longer. She came bounding forward, hit the wire, and
dropped dead.
      
The males pressed their bodies closer to the ground and
gazed thoughtfully at the two corpses by the fence. The
females also seemed to be quite shaken, and there was another
wait, with neither side moving.
      
Now it was Miss Unwin who began to show signs of
impatience. She snorted audibly and twitched a pink mobile
nose-end from side to side, then suddenly she started jerking
her body quickly up and down as though she were doing
pushups. She glanced round at her remaining four companions,
raised her tail high in the air as much as to say, “Here I go,
girls,” and with that she advanced briskly to the wire, pushed
her head through it, and was killed.
      
Sixteen minutes later, Miss Foster made her first move. Miss
Foster was a woman in the village who bred cats, and recently
she had had the effrontery to put up a large sign outside her house in
the High Street, saying
FOSTER’S CATTERY
. Through
long association with the creatures she herself seemed to have
acquired all their most noxious characteristics, and whenever
she came near me in a room I could detect, even through the
smoke of her Russian cigarette, a faint but pungent aroma of
cat. She had never struck me as having much control over her
baser instincts, and it was with some satisfaction, therefore,
that I watched her now as she foolishly took her own life in a
last desperate plunge towards the masculine sex.
      
A Miss Montgomery-Smith came next, a small determined
woman who had once tried to make me believe that she had
been engaged to a bishop. She died trying to creep on her
belly under the lowest wire, and I must say I thought this a
very fair reflection upon the way in which she lived her life.
      
And still the five remaining males stayed motionless, waiting.
      
The fifth female to go was Miss Plumley. She was a devious
one who was continually slipping little messages addressed to
me into the collection bag. Only the Sunday before, I had
been in the vestry counting the money after morning service
and had come across one of them tucked inside a folded
ten-shilling note.
Your poor throat sounded hoarse today during
the sermon
, it said.
Let me bring you a bottle of my own
cherry pectoral to soothe it down. Most affectionately, Eunice
Plumley
.
      
Miss Plumley ambled slowly up to the wire, sniffed the
centre strand with the tip of her nose, came a fraction too
close, and received two hundred and forty volts of alternating
current through her body.
      
The five males stayed where they were, watching the
slaughter.
      
And now only Miss Elphinstone remained on the feminine
side.
      
For a full half-hour neither she nor any of the others made
a move. Finally one of the males stirred himself slightly, took
a step forward, hesitated, thought better of it, and slowly
sank back into a crouch on the floor.
      
This must have frustrated Miss Elphinstone beyond measure,
for suddenly, with eyes blazing, she rushed forward and took
a flying leap at the wire. It was a spectacular jump and she
nearly cleared it; but one of her hind legs grazed the top
strand, and thus she also perished with the rest of her sex.
      
I cannot tell you how much good it did me to watch this
simple and, though I say it myself, this rather ingenious
experiment. In one stroke I had laid open the incredibly lascivious,
stop-at-nothing nature of the female. My own sex was vindicated;
my own conscience was cleared. In a trice, all those
awkward little flashes of guilt from which I had continually
been suffering flew out of the window. I felt suddenly very
strong and serene in the knowledge of my own innocence.
      
For a few moments I toyed with the absurd idea of electrifying
the black iron railings that ran around the vicarage garden;
or perhaps just the gate would be enough. Then I would sit
back comfortably in a chair in the library and watch through
the window as the real Misses Elphinstone and Prattley and
Unwin came forward one after the other and paid the final
penalty for pestering an innocent male.
      
Such foolish thoughts!
      
What I must actually do now, I told myself, was to weave
around me a sort of invisible electric fence constructed
entirely out of my own personal moral fibre. Behind this I
would sit in perfect safety while the enemy, one after another,
flung themselves against the wire.
      
I would begin by cultivating a brusque manner. I would
speak crisply to all women, and refrain from smiling at them.
I would no longer step back a pace when one of them
advanced upon me. I would stand my ground and glare at her,
and if she said something that I considered suggestive, I would
make a sharp retort.
      
It was in this mood that I set off the very next day to attend
Lady Birdwell’s tennis party.
      
I was not a player myself, but her ladyship had graciously
invited me to drop in and mingle with the guests when play
was over at six o’clock. I believe she thought that it lent a
certain tone to a gathering to have a clergyman present, and
she was probably hoping to persuade me to repeat the performance
I gave the last time I was there, when I sat at the
piano for a full hour and a quarter after supper and entertained
the guests with a detailed description of the evolution of the
madrigal through the centuries.
      
I arrived at the gates on my cycle promptly at six o’clock
and pedalled up the long drive towards the house. This was
the first week of June, and the rhododendrons were massed
in great banks of pink and purple all the way along on either
side. I was feeling unusually blithe and dauntless. The previous
day’s experiment with the rats had made it impossible now for
anyone to take me by surprise. I knew exactly what to expect and
I was armed accordingly. All around me the little fence was up.
      
“Ah, good evening, Vicar,” Lady Birdwell cried, advancing
upon me with both arms outstretched.
      
I stood my ground and looked her straight in the eye. “How’s
Birdwell?” I said. “Still up in the city?”
      
I doubt whether she had ever before in her life heard Lord
Birdwell referred to thus by someone who had never even
met him. It stopped her dead in her tracks. She looked at me
queerly and didn’t seem to know how to answer.
      
“I’ll take a seat if I may,” I said, and walked past her towards
the terrace where a group of nine or ten guests were settled
comfortably in cane chairs, sipping their drinks. They were
mostly women, the usual crowd, all of them dressed in white
tennis clothes, and as I strode in among them, my own sober
black suiting seemed to give me, I thought, just the right
amount of separateness for the occasion.
      
The ladies greeted me with smiles. I nodded to them and sat
down in a vacant chair, but I didn’t smile back.
      
“I think perhaps I’d better finish my story another time,”
Miss Elphinstone was saying. “I don’t believe the vicar would
approve.” She giggled and gave me an arch look. I knew she
was waiting for me to come out with my usual little nervous
laugh and to say my usual little sentence about how broad-minded
I was; but I did nothing of the sort. I simply raised
one side of my upper lip until it shaped itself into a tiny curl
of contempt (I had practised in the mirror that morning), and then I said
sharply, in a loud voice, “
Mens sana in corpore sano
.”
      
“What’s that?” she cried. “Come again, Vicar.”
      
“A clean mind in a healthy body,” I answered. “It’s a family
motto.”
      
There was an odd kind of silence for quite a long time
after this. I could see the women exchanging glances with one
another, frowning, shaking their heads.
      
“The vicar’s in the dumps,” Miss Foster announced. She was
the one who bred cats. “I think the vicar needs a drink.”
      
“Thank you,” I said, “but I never imbibe. You know that.”
      
“Then do let me fetch you a nice cooling glass of fruit cup?”
      
This last sentence came softly and rather suddenly from
someone just behind me, to my right, and there was a note
of such genuine concern in the speaker’s voice that I turned
round.
      
I saw a lady of singular beauty whom I had met only once
before, about a month ago. Her name was Miss Roach, and I
remembered that she had struck me then as being a person far
out of the usual run. I had been particularly impressed by her
gentle and reticent nature; and the fact that I had felt comfortable
in her presence proved beyond doubt that she was
not the sort of person who would try to impinge herself upon
me in any way.
      
“I’m sure you must be tired after cycling all that distance,”
she was saying now.
      
I swivelled right round in my chair and looked at her carefully.
She was certainly a striking person—unusually muscular
for a woman, with broad shoulders and powerful arms and a
huge calf bulging on each leg. The flush of the afternoon’s
exertions was still upon her, and her face glowed with a
healthy red sheen.
      
“Thank you so much, Miss Roach,” I said, “but I never touch
alcohol in any form. Maybe a small glass of lemon squash . . .”
      
“The fruit cup is only made of fruit, Padre.”
      
How I loved a person who called me “Padre.” The word
has a military ring about it that conjures up visions of stern
discipline and officer rank.
      
“Fruit cup?” Miss Elphinstone said. “It’s harmless.”
      
“My dear man, it’s nothing but vitamin C,” Miss Foster said.
      
“Much better for you than fizzy lemonade,” Lady Birdwell
said. “Carbon dioxide attacks the lining of the stomach.”
      
“I’ll get you some,” Miss Roach said, smiling at me pleasantly.
It was a good open smile, and there wasn’t a trace of guile or
mischief from one corner of the mouth to the other.
      
She stood up and walked over to the drink table. I saw her slicing an orange,
then an apple, then a cucumber, then a grape, and dropping the pieces into a
glass. Then she poured in a large quantity of liquid from a bottle whose
label I couldn’t quite read without my spectacles, but I fancied that I
saw the name
JIM
on it, or
TIM
, or
PIM
, or some such word.
      
“I hope there’s enough left,” Lady Birdwell called out.
“Those greedy children of mine do love it so.”
      
“Plenty,” Miss Roach answered, and she brought the drink
to me and set it on the table.
      
Even without tasting it I could easily understand why
children adored it. The liquid itself was dark amber-red and
there were great hunks of fruit floating around among the ice
cubes; and on top of it all, Miss Roach had placed a sprig of
mint. I guessed that the mint had been put there specially for
me, to take some of the sweetness away and to lend a touch of
grown-upness to a concoction that was otherwise so obviously
for youngsters.
      
“Too sticky for you, Padre?”
      
“It’s delectable,” I said, sipping it. “Quite perfect.”
      
It seemed a pity to gulp it down quickly after all the trouble
Miss Roach had taken to make it, but it was so refreshing I
couldn’t resist.
      
“Do let me make you another?”
      
I liked the way she waited until I had set the glass on the
table, instead of trying to take it out of my hand.
      
“I wouldn’t eat the mint if I were you,” Miss Elphinstone
said.
      
“I’d better get another bottle from the house,” Lady Birdwell
called out. “You’re going to need it, Mildred.”
      
“Do that,” Miss Roach replied. “I drink gallons of the stuff
myself,” she went on, speaking to me. “And I don’t think you’d
say that I’m exactly what you might call emaciated.”
      
“No indeed,” I answered fervently. I was watching her again
as she mixed me another brew, noticing how the muscles
rippled under the skin of the arm that raised the bottle. Her
neck also was uncommonly fine when seen from behind; not
thin and stringy like the necks of a lot of these so-called
modern beauties, but thick and strong with a slight ridge
running down either side where the sinews bulged. It wasn’t
easy to guess the age of a person like this, but I doubted
whether she could have been more than forty-eight or nine.
      
I had just finished my second big glass of fruit cup when
I began to experience a most peculiar sensation. I seemed to be
floating up out of my chair, and hundreds of little warm waves
came washing in under me, lifting me higher and higher. I felt
as buoyant as a bubble, and everything around me seemed to
be bobbing up and down and swirling gently from side to
side. It was all very pleasant, and I was overcome by an almost
irresistible desire to break into song.
      
“Feeling happy?” Miss Roach’s voice sounded miles and
miles away, and when I turned to look at her, I was astonished
to see how near to me she really was. She, also, was bobbing
up and down.
      
“Terrific,” I answered. “I’m feeling absolutely terrific.”
      
Her face was large and pink, and it was so close to me now
that I could see the pale carpet of fuzz covering both her
cheeks, and the way the sunlight caught each tiny separate
hair and made it shine like gold. All of a sudden I found myself
wanting to put out a hand and stroke those cheeks of hers
with my fingers. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have objected in
the least if she had tried to do the same to me.