Puckoon (14 page)
Before this monster
stood Brent Lodge.
The wind was blowing flakes of paint from its lintels
and pediments. Occasionally a refined old face would part the heavy, long,
faded velveteen curtains,
then
slowly recede into the
oblivion of the great house.
The two tall, double-fronted,
mahogany wood doors with their unpolished brass handles were reached by twelve
gently ascending marble steps, flanked by Venetian balustrades; on top,
supported by two slender columns, was a portico surmounted by a Greek frieze.
On the doorstep stood a half-pint bottle of grade 2 milk.
A
thick veiny but refined hand withdrew it into the hall.
The youngest member of this ageing
community was ex-variety artiste, Patrick L. Balls. Fifty-nine now, he spent
out his remaining years pulling a rope lift and bottling fruit. He had once
whistled Ave Maria for Queen Victoria. She wasn't present at the time, but
nevertheless that's who he was whistling it for.
Today would be very busy. No
whistling for him. Today was the Concert. Once a year the scouts came and 'did
a concert of talking'. Tonight they would perform in the Hydro Hall a
drastically cut version of ' The Immortal Bard', Julius Caesar.
The indoor plunge bath in the Hydro
was boarded over, and the great French windows were folded back to make way for
the temporary stage that backed on to the garden. Behind this, jacked up on its
back axle was the 1909 de Dion, whose yellow wheels drove the power for the
footlights. Slowly now, the hall was filling with the spectre-like audience.
The sisters, Agnes and Millicent Grope, walked mincingly down the aisle on
Minny Mouse legs, fox furs around their long, thin white necks.
' It's
Julius
Caesar again then,' said Agnes, taking her seat.
' It
was
Julius Caesar last year, Agnes.'
'Oh? I suppose this is an encore,'
smiled Agnes, opening her programme. Preparing themselves in the orchestra pit
were the Patrick Furg 'Refined' Trio.
A doddering trinity of
febrile musicians, led by a bent, thin violinist.
The piano keyboard
lay
staring up at Mrs Auraulum Murphy, a short, tubby,
middle-aged lady with amber beads and a dropped womb. She clipped her music to
the stand with clothes pegs, a present from a musical laundry man. Behind her,
supporting herself on a 'cello was Madame Elsie Mooney, who ran her resin
listlessly across the hairs of her bow; her long stringy neck and pendulous
jowls gave her the appearance of a plucked turkey. She was dressed carefully in
a sea of brown Majorca lace; brittle white hair escaped in all directions from
its prison of hairpins; she turned her lizard-like gaze at the stage. A small,
hastily made-up, roseate face appeared from the wings.
'
Psssstt
, ready in two minutes,' it said and disappeared. Madame Mooney
prodded Patrick's stern with her bow.
'Don't do that Madame Mooney!' he
said. 'It pleasures me not any more.'
' They'll
be
ready in two minutes, Patrick.'
'Oh.' Patrick checked his music. 'Did
you hear that, Miss Murphy?'
She nodded her head.
'A tuning A
please.'
He plucked the sagging strings to order, then in a jocular
mood, drew the bow fiercely across the bridge with all the fire of decay.
' How's
that!' he said.
' Out
!'
shouted an old cricket fan in the audience.
Miss Murphy tittered at him. He had
proposed to her thirty-seven times in ten years and been refused. Last week she
had proposed to him, and he was now considering it.
Both conversation and the house
lights went down; a few exhibition coughers voiced their bronchial ego; the
silence that followed was shattered by two loud thumps of Patrick Furg's boots,
and the refined trio launched shakily into several bars of obscure music.
' Good
God!' said a music lover finally, ' It's - it's
William Tell.'
Slowly the front curtain rose
rapidly, stuck and crashed down again. It rose rapidly. Got stuck and stayed
stuck rapidly. It revealed a forest of anonymous legs.
Two
embarrassed
Scoutmasters with overcoats hastily donned over togas, shuffled on the stage.
With sticks and whispered orders, the obstinate curtain was raised. Fronting
four and twenty Roman spearsmen were three steps covered in army blankets;
flanking this stood two canvas and lath Doric columns painted on brown paper.
The programme note: Rome.
The steps of the
How the old place had changed. Standing on this noble pile, the figure of an
eight-year-old Cassius was speaking; proud and erect he stood in his white
bed-sheet and cardboard laurel leaves, in his pocket a complete set of great
footballer cigarette cards. To the refined ear, trained for euphony,
Shakespeare rings most comforting; to a Roman spearsman named Shamus Ford it
brought a mental remark, ' What the hell's this all
about ?'
To his left Lenny was thinking that he didn't look too bad as a Roman soldier.
Cassius raised his hands to silence the mob. The great curtain crashed to the
stage. This time the Patrick Furg
trio were
ready.
'Emergency One,' said Patrick to his
trio. Off they went
,
reducing in three minutes a
reputation Rossini had taken one hundred years to establish. After further
sticks, pushes and shouts the curtain rose again.
The same
scene plus, at no additional cost, happily smoking Centurion.
Shamus
snatched the cigarette from Lenny's mouth.
From back stage there was a metallic
clang.... The silencer had fallen from the generator car and the ensuing noise
of the open exhaust forced the young actors to shout, causing one Roman's nose
to bleed.
A change of wind was now blowing
smoke from the long carbonized car engine, up through the cracks in the stage;
the cast were now reduced to shouting and coughing. 'Beware the Ides of March,'
said the soothsayer, losing his beard in a fit of coughing. The smoke obscured
the players who all moved forward to the footlights. Unaffected, the Furg trio
were playing the Hall of the Mountain Kings, with a difference; the rising
warmth of the thermal waters below them was gradually lowering the pitch of
their instruments; gradually the Hall of the Mountain Kings slid chromatically
from C Major down to B Flat Minor.
' Crazy
,
man,' whispered Patrick.
The smoke had caused a disturbed deaf
member of the audience to phone the fire brigade.' Come quick, Brent Lodge is
in flames, thousands are trapped!' was the simple message.
In the front row was guest of honour,
Inspector Tomelty. For ten minutes he had been wrestling with the face of a
certain Roman soldier. Suddenly he clicked his fingers.
'Shamus
Ford!
Excuse me,' he said, pushing along a row of creaking arthritic
legs. Soon
two Black Marias
thundered in the night,
during which time the audience were treated to the spectacle of six men in
brass helmets dashing on a smoke-filled stage with hoses; they immediately set
about the floor with hatchets and with the first stroke three toes came off.
Smoke now obscured the cast from the audience. Groping forward, a fat Julius
Caesar tripped and fell on to the piano; eighteen stone of Julian flesh was all
it needed to send the instrument crashing through the floor beneath; with a
splintering groan the Patrick Furg Trio, all playing valiantly, slid
majestically into the warm waters of the hydro pool below. A chain reaction
followed as the temporary floor broke into sections, everywhere were floating rafts
bearing the trapped, shouting, aged audience. The De Dion had fallen off its
blocks and ripped the backcloth away, revealing twenty scouts in various stages
of undress. Hoses were starting to douse the last remaining actors. Police
whistles announced new arrivals.
Shouts of help came from the marooned
audience.
'Let's beat it,' said Shamus pulling
Lenny with him.
They reached the first floor with the
police at their heels. The lift!
A gift from above! Slamming the
gates, Shamus gave the ancient rope the pull of its rotting life. It snapped.
The ancient lift hurtled down the shaft, hit the rubber buffers in the basement
and hurtled up again. It hovered at the third floor 'twixt momentum and
gravity, just long enough for an unsuspecting chambermaid to step in and hurtle
down again.
'Have we got the electric on?' she
smiled at the terrified occupants.
Patrick Balls not wanting to spend
his remaining years yo-yoing in a lift, grabbed at the end of the frayed rope
as it came within reach and was left hanging as the lift hurtled down again.
Rocketing up, Shamus and Lenny judged
the pause and leaped out at the second floor.
Cries of ' Send help!' came from the
plummeting gentlefolk.
Colonel Carrington-Thurk r.a.,
Retd.,
awoke from his slumbers, heard the cacophony, and
leapt from his bed; sabre in hand he opened the door and fell over a fire hose.
'Take that, you Indian swine!' he
yelled, slicing through the pulsating canvas; a deluge of water from the hose
jack-knifed
him back into the dumb waiter which descended at
speed to the kitchen.
On the end of the ruptured hose,
Fireman Mortimer Wreggs suddenly held a lifeless bronze nozzle in his hand.
'Bugger!' he said, 'Oh bugger, bugger, bugger!' and lay face down on the floor
threshing his legs in temperamental spasms. This emotional outburst was of deep
Freudian significance; had not Adler, Freud and Jung all agreed that the seeds
of hereditary ambition are passed on through successive generations until
fulfilment? So was it with young Fireman Wreggs. His great-great-grandfather
had almost extinguished the greatest and most expensive fire in the history of
Ireland, but alas, in the best traditions of British services had arrived too
late!
That fearful conflagration was a
mighty story in the annals of the family Wreggs. The disintegration of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire hit many people, especially those who had disintegrated
with it. The Count Nuker-Frit-Kraphauser was one such notable.
In the hiatus that followed the
assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and the collapse of the Empire, he had
fled his native Hungary in the jade of a revolutionary night with nothing save
a small suitcase with three million pounds and some silly old crown jewels, but
this fortune meant nothing; his greatest loss was having to leave the great and
majestic family Easence. The greatest toilet in the western world and the only
consecrated one in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Count Fritz Von Krappenhauser had
fled to Northern Ireland, bought Callarry Castle, ten thousand acres, and a
small packet of figs. For years he brooded over the loss of the ancestral
abort.
Finally worn out by
indifferent,
and severe wood-seated Victorian commodes, he
decided to build a replica of the family's lost masterpiece here in the heart
of
rolling countryside. He employed the greatest baroque and Rococo architects and
craftsmen of the day, and every day after; seven years of intense labour, and
there it now stood, a great octagonal Easence. No ordinary palace was this;
from the early stone Easence of Bodiam Castle to the low silent suite at the
Dorchester is a long strain, but nothing equalled this, its gold leaf and lapis
lazuli settings gleaming in the morning sun, on the eight-sided walls great
ikons of straining ancestors, a warning to the unfit. Through a Moorish arch of
latticed stone, one entered the 'Throne Room'; above it, in Gothic capitals the
family motto, 'Abort in Luxus'.
From the centre rose a delicate
gilded metal and pink alabaster commode.
Six steps cut in black Cararra marble
engraved with royal mottoes led up to the mighty Easence; it was a riot of
carefully engraved figurines in the voluptuous Alexandrian style, depicting the
history of the family with myriad complex designs and sectionalized stomachs in
various stages of compression. The seat was covered in heavy wine damask
velvet, the family coat of arms sewn petit-point around the rim in fine gold
thread. Inside the pan were low relief sculptures of the family enemies,
staring white-faced in expectation.
Towering at the four
corners, holding a silk tasselled replica of the Bernini canopy, were four
royal beasts, their snarling jaws containing ashtrays and matches.
Bolted to the throne were ivory
straining bars carved with monkeys and cunningly set at convenient angles;
around the base ran a small bubbling perfumed brook whose water welled from an
ice-cool underground stream. Gushes of warm air passed up the trouser legs of
the sitter, the pressure controlled by a gilt handle. By pedalling hard with two
foot-levers the whole throne could be raised ten feet to allow the sitter a
long drop; and even greater delight, the whole Easence was mounted on
ball-bearings. A control valve shaped like the crown of Hungary would release
steam power that would revolve the commode.
There had been a time when the Count
had aborted revolving at sixty miles an hour and been given a medal by the
Pope.
White leather straps enabled him to
secure himself firmly during the body-shaking horrors of constipation. Close at
hand were three burnished hunting horns of varying lengths. Each one had a deep
significant meaning. The small one when blown told the waiting household all
was well, and the morning mission accomplished. The middle one of silver and
brass was blown to signify that there might be a delay. The third one, a great
Tibetan Hill Horn, was blown in dire emergency; it meant a failure and waiting
retainers would rush to the relief of the Count, with trays of steaming fresh
enemas ready to be plunged into action on their mission of mercy and relief.
With the coming of the jet age the noble Count had added to the abort throne an
ejector mechanism.
