The Smell of Telescopes (14 page)

“You think the gun is married to someone else?”

“Imagine a keelhauling in the sky! And what length of chain for an aerial anchor? Mind your skull, boy.”

The advice was strange but sincere. The cook remembered it, though his powers of recall were up to nasty tricks. Already, as they embarked for the palisadoes of Fort Chagre, the adventure seemed to have gone on for years. Cloud descended over the river and his mind. Did others feel the same as he? They did: ’Ceti no longer knew which dialect he thought in, though his vocabulary was large. This concerned him more, and less, as the oddity endured in time, but faded from memory. Safe in the fort, Morgan shared the loot, cheating the French rovers who had sworn fealty to him. Welsh ethic, spun like sugar.

No more than 200 pieces of eight for any rough who sniffed brandy. When this created strife, the captain made ready to leave, removing all cannon to his flagship, and setting two things: the palisadoes on fire, and sail. Let those follow him who chose. Three barques came after; the French gave chase, chewing their dastardly moustaches. But the wind was with Morgan, who lightened his vessel by blasting rocks at his pursuers and dancing so that his heavy boots were partly off the deck. The cook baked a crumble, to represent the resolve of the hunting pack: fragile, lacking iron, rife with cooling fats.

In Jamaica, the men parted, supposedly for good, or bad, depending on what business they next adopted. Morgan gave the bulk of the silver, emeralds and tobacco to himself. The cook planned to stay in touch only with the barber, who still had many of his utensils, and the navigator, who was inestimable. ’Ceti left for Pirano, ’Phagia for Smarje, but his own return to Europe was unsettled. He tried to remain at sea, broiling for an eccentric smuggler by the name of Marlow Nullity, but the dishes he was expected to serve were so protean and implausible that he jumped galley in a hurricane off the Azores.

He was washed up on a Terceira reef and dried by a sunset, so that his fortune resembled a plate. From this volcanic isle, he worked brief passage to Lisbon, always alert for a looming of his double, and thence overland to a mountain republic, the isolated city of Chaud-Mellé. Here thrived villains the equal of Morgan; he might roast for them. He hoped to avoid the mistake of turning honest. Wiping clean a cauldron, but no slate, was for him a necessity of survival. He applied for a job in the Café Worm, where threadbare landlords and swindlers clad in yellow were in the habit of bartering deceptions.

Faces in a pot of soup always alarmed him. He avoided peering over the rim into the reflective depths. The kitchens were open to view, and the patrons often berated him for his timidity. He expected to meet his doppelganger every time the doors creaked. He felt relatively secure in such ignoble chaos, an urban environment where no street was wider than a puff of breath to cool a flan, but if he could negotiate the maze, so might his distended shadow. Cats frolicked in his cupboards; he offered them curds and fern wine. Generous to a fault, but jealous of salt. And how many sayers will spoil the sooth?

The final time he had hugged ’Ceti, he had given the barber a sack of dumb vegetables as a practical memento. Now he regretted his impulse and wrung his forks, for Chaud-Mellé’s gardens, mounted on roofs, could nurture only withered plants, and his salads were the balk of the town. The lower burghers subsisted mainly on cheese; the elite on pastries, a discipline in which he dared not compete. The Guilds had cakes sewn up, with threads of liquorice, and his Malagasy icings were most unwelcome. Banter with his customers mollified him, though they often regarded him as a steward rather than a craftsman.

“Flagon of hot wormwood, ’Vado, for my comrade!”

“What do you mean to do with it, Wynkyn de Rackrent? Melt parmesan over the ribcage of Beerbohm Soames?”

“Aye, for absinthe makes the heart grow fondue.”

The Café Worm was the perfect venue for criminals and bohemians to meet and learn each other’s ploys. The cook, whose own underworlds were wholly geological, and already undertaken, was gradually drawn into the conspiracies of the latter set; the orchid sniffers, demi-monde and men with boneless wrists. They spoke Theatre, a patois with trapdoor vowels and backstage grammar. Encouraged by their programmes, which made steam swirl more effectively than any Chinese fan, he agreed to attend a show in the company of poets and sculptors, refusing only to doff his chef’s hat, under which his oracles nestled.

The Theatre de l’Orotund was a disappointment in terms of interior design, which was lunatic, and current production, which was an unfunny routine by a comedian named Caspar Nefandous. This buffoon was assisted by a woman who bounded across the stage as if on springs—even higher than Morgan! He walked out in the middle and returned to work. But some months later, he decided to give the thespian arts a second chance. The comedian had taken to writing opera. Alone in the stalls, the cook blinked at The Morgan Wheel, a farce based on the sack of Panama, acted as if the affair was ancient history!

Had his sense of time been wounded so badly in the assault? During the interval, he stepped into the cloakroom for a lungful of fresh air, a rare commodity in Chaud-Mellé, unavailable in the street. Three capes hanging there recalled his double, who was close; he felt it. Rather than go back and wait for the début of the actor who took his role, he fled. Outside, he glimpsed a ship in the sky, a canoe with spiral vanes for oars! Perched on a seat under the machine was the ghoul. So Morgan had not lied about boats aloft! This one was flying south west, but whether into or out of the metropolis could not be assessed.

Learning is strength. The next day, he visited the city library to consult a bestiary on the topic of doppelgangers. He was given a volume bound in the marbled skin of an ineffable worm. The entries were listed alphabetically, but in Enochian script, which is unpronounceable. There were no words on the relevant page, simply a mirror sewn into the paper which amplified his image. He slammed away his reflected leer and swore an oath never to be browbeaten by himself. What precautions he ought to take were still a mystery; he would discover them in due course.

In the Café Worm, while he was disputing with Soames and de Rackrent, a new customer wove between the tables to the kitchen. His tortured eyes were sunk in hypogene sockets; he wore a beard forked triple. He ordered a cup of chocolate and coffee, sipped a mouthful and spat it on the boards. In a Dutch accent, he mocked the mocha. But this was only the trick of a salesman; he was a merchant with plantations in Java, and he was blustering for orders. Having brought enough coffee from Panama to last a hundred millennia, the cook was unimpressed, until the merchant suddenly vaulted into a pot.

It emerged, when he did likewise, that he was hiding from a fellow who had just entered, another virgin patron. The newcomer was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chaud-Mellé, who cared not for coffee or even absinthe, but only to investigate the establishment as the site of a recent meteor shower. The violent eruption of a casserole dish the previous week had generated this rumour. The cook ushered the Professor upstairs, to a brothel where all collisions were catered for. An honest mistake, but no, the Dutchman claimed they were the same person! Coffee trader, stargazer; percolated as one.

The cook frowned. How could a doppelganger be so dissimilar to the original model? The merchant winked uneasily. Same man, parallel pasts, or rather divergent presents. One version had chosen a scientific route through life, the other a commercial. And the trader, a physical giant, was frightened of the scrawny academic! So it was possible that he, the cook, was not the inferior segment of the bald ghoul, but vice versa. A joyous concept! The ghoul was wealthy enough to own a flying ship: must he become as successful, as rich, to compete? If so, he should exercise his single skill to its basted limit.

His big chance came with the Chiliad Festival, a carnival of food, to which he was formally invited. This took place in the coldest season of the city’s annals, in Hauser Park. For the occasion, he risked death by preparing pastry without a Guild license. He erected a stove, a tent to envelop it, a welcoming sign in the flap. Nobody came; he was forced to knot a lasso with a liquorice cord. He cast at a passing rascal in a tricorne hat, whose bad teeth were evidence of an affection for sweets. The lasso snapped. No good; his destiny had its own agenda. At least he might read it before it was executed.

Removing his hat, he spread the sibylline vegetables. All but one, a coco-de-mer, did he sacrifice. The cabbage said:
all rovers will fail in honesty
. The carrot:
relationships are geometrical
. The swede:
steer a cauldron with a rudder
. The potato, squash and yam:
memories can grow fuller than rooms, mirrors which run slow are obscurer than squonks, an octant is a sextant in man’s britches
. Turnip:
Chaud-Mellé will soon be destroyed
. Sprout:
one of these groceries is a liar
. It was time to leave the city, in the opposite direction to that of the aerial ghoul, afore the metropolis mimicked Panama.

Naturally, it was feasible the turnip was the fake prophet. He did not, or could not, consider the logical consequences of a false sprout. That was a paradox unstirred. No, the city had the feel of expiry about it, a rotting ambience which could only degenerate. He escaped with his largest pot, rolling it north east into Austria and then Bavaria. As he trundled onward, he stopped in taverns and collected tankards of pewter which he hammered onto his vessel with his fists. Bigger is better, and it soon became the deepest, widest skillet in Europe. What supper might be boiled in this? Curry for cyclops.

When it grew too heavy for him to turn, he paused. The sleepy town of Trostberg became his new home. He set a fire under the cauldron, and passed the time waiting for it to heat up by baking cakes. Interest was minimal, despite his vast experience. He attempted to recreate the myth of Morgan’s childhood: a blueberry pie as barbed as a harpoon. Failure, deflation, charred edges. The alternative was to cook virtuous desserts for moral gourmets, but the cabbage’s advice must not be ignored. Where were the bandits of Trostberg?

One morning, a postman came to deliver a message in a bottle from the barber.

“Old ’Ceti Whiskers wanted you to read this. A request for help. I think his stomach is in big trouble.”

“Are you evil? Will you take breakfast here?”

“No, but if I was, south I would go, to a Mediterranean isle. That is where the fashionable felons eat.”

The cook cradled his sable head in his oven gloves. He had a rival whose soups were cooled by sea breezes! Was it his double? He shattered the bottle and read the letter. Then he hooked his thumbs in the fringe of the coco-de-mer and travelled to Pirano. At the door of the barber’s shop, he met the carpenter, who had received a similar request. Forcing entry, they found the razors coated in dust. A single vegetable bubbled in a pan—his prophetic yam! He had given the wrong grocery to ’Ceti. Did it matter? Difficult to be sure. But the coco-de-mer would tell the barber how best to shave future days.

When they departed, ’Lin took a hat from a peg, pieces of a mirror stitched around the brim. The sailmaker had asked him for a reflection. He passed it to the cook, to send on to ’Phagia—who alone knew where all pirates lived. He did so, and when he reached Trostberg, the pot of ages was ready. A meeting with his doppelganger, a bite of fates, could be delayed no longer. There was only one meal startling enough to entice the bald ghoul into his premises. Peeling the onion on his shoulder, crying once without regret, he climbed into the pot. Hot oil lapped his ankles, his thighs, nipples and unrefined lashes.

The coconut remained unopened, on the barber’s chair. But it never could have assisted ’Ceti anyway. Inside, it simply foretold that Morgan would journey to Trostberg and claim the cook’s cauldron for a ship. By which time the contents had evaporated and clouds of steam billowed over the landscape, momentarily forming the silhouette of a gigantic man, a trio of capes lifting like wings before dispersing in the wake of an aerial craft, a terrible barque in the Gemini bight, heading for the Dog Star, shedding tears. But Morgan was Welsh and had nothing to match this, not even an eye moist enough to reflect flavours.

A Person Not In the Story

It was the year the Eisteddfod came to Lladloh. Anyone who has ventured into the lost corners of West Wales knows the fungal people with which it is infected—the dank little inhabitants, usually in the unfriendly style, dressed in patchwork coats. For me they have always had a strong repulsion: with their ghastly haunts, the sunken houses and constipated streets, the nameless taverns. In this respect, Lladloh seems to fester more horribly than its fellows. The village is an eruption on the flesh of the land; it is pleasing that the sore was lanced by a man who bears the name of his achievement—Doctor Pin. 

“I suppose you’ll be getting away pretty soon, now you’ve been made redundant, Doctor?” said a personable
Signor
to the eccentric Professor of Engineering. Pin was something of an old woman—he baked puddings in his bedroom—but he was dauntless and sincere in his confections, and a maverick deserving of the highest respect.

“Yes,” he said; “my friends have been making fun of me this term. I mean either to redeem my reputation or kill myself. My train departs for Lladloh (I dare say you don’t know it) in an hour.”

“Oh, Pin,” said another neighbour at the farewell feast, “if you’re going to Wales, I wish you would look at the site of the Garden Festival and let me know if you think it would be good to have a dig there in the Winter.” This came, as you might suppose, from an Horticulture graduate. With his fork, he irrigated his curry.

“Certainly not,” replied rude Dr Pin; “the show you allude to takes place in Builth Wells and Lladloh is ninety shepherds further on. All of you should know that this expedition of mine will be undertaken with the object of tracing something in connection with the antique steam turbine locked away in the basement of my Department.”

At this point, Pin went carefully over ground with which we are not at all familiar. “Nobody knows quite how it ended up here, in St James’s College. I reason it was stolen by one of our roving antiquarians before the feelings of rightful owners were taken into account. It’s an amazing device; scarcely larger than a grapefruit, yet capable of doing the work of a thousand well-paid porters. Its exact workings remain the secret of its designer, the legendary Kingdom Noisette.”

“There has always been much gossip about that fellow,” observed the Italian scholar who, like minestrone soup, appears only in the prologue. “Yet efforts to research his history have hitherto failed. Do you expect to succeed in Wales? Do you suppose the Chancellor will reinstate you if you manage to document Noisette’s origins?”

“Well, it is rather hard to say exactly what I do suppose,” was the frank answer; “but I’m hoping for more than a biography from my pains. A fresh insight into a radical new form of mechanics is my ultimate aim. I want to make porters obsolete within a generation. I predict a time when our swan-cutlets will be served by automation!”

The small group of friends digested this notion under the impassive gaze of a serving-boy. The refectory was old, cluttered and imprecise in layout: the furnishings were little better than what might be found in a Sadducee’s tent. Ugly brass coronae hung from the roof; the iron cutlery was as ill-matched as a divorced couple’s tongues.

“Such talk was the cause of your downfall,” said the Gardener after a pause; “your proposed device to mark examination papers in the absence of the Chancellor proved a dismal failure on two counts. It was a source of annoyance to the worthy in question; secondly, it would have drenched his office in ink.
Gravis ira regum est semper
!”

“You’ve been listening to Somerton again! How I mistrust Latinists! But remember:
audentes fortuna juvat
. When I solve the enigma of Kingdom Noisette’s engines, I shall return in triumph to overthrow the doddering fool who is currently head of St James’s.”

“Steady on,” cried a certain Professor Axl Persson, a Nordic savant who was naturally of a taciturn disposition; “although I sympathise with your plight, I am still an employee of this institution. Criticism of Mr Parkins must be limited to mild insults.”

“Oh, you are a reactionary!” blurted Dr Pin. In essence, this was a fair appraisal. Since his arrival from Jutland on an exchange programme, Professor Persson had joined the Conservative Party and was intending to stand for Parliament in a Nottingham seat. His Danish nationality had so far excited little comment among the electorate.

“But why have you chosen Lladloh to begin your quest?” inquired the Italian; “from my knowledge of etymology, Kingdom Noisette does not seem a Welsh name. It has an Anglo-French lilt.”

“That sounds logical,” cried Pin; “but I believe it to be a cunning pseudonym, a play on words. My skill with puddings has helped me here: a noisette is a nut-like sweet. A nut is a colloquial lunatic. Lladloh has a habit of declaring itself independent and crowning locals as monarchs. In other words, it’s a kingdom of nutters!”

At this, there was a general murmuring of appreciation for Dr Pin’s powers of ratiocination. Few conundrums were tortuous enough to conquer his intellect. He was also a solver of newspaper crosswords; before some adventures which we shall shortly divulge instilled in him a mortal fear of any material which flaps or flutters.

The Italian, a daring soul with a moustache, now asked why Parkins, the Chancellor, had always disliked Dr Pin. They were, in fact, the only two surviving staff members from the Golden Age of St James’s. With much of that naïvety often attributed to Mediterranean questions, he wondered whether a dark secret lurked in their past.

Pin flushed, with wine as well as shame, and replied that once they had been passable friends. In those days, Parkins was merely a Professor of Ontography; a fussy chap, destitute of the sense of humour. But after a holiday in Burnstow (the details of which were never revealed) Parkins became aggressive and morbid in outlook. He seemed to blame the engineer for an unspecified crisis which he’d endured.

“I honestly don’t know why he split with me,” Pin sighed; “but his other colleagues also found him intolerable. Rogers and Disney left the College, driven to ill-health by his bickering. Without rivals, he soon worked his way to the top of the academic ladder. I endured his insults and remained, for the sake of the facilities.”

The Gardener nodded sombrely, wielding his spoon like a spade. “Odd business, I agree. But speak more of your intended triumphal return. You shall be mounted atop a modern equivalent of a white charger, I take it? A locomotive powered by one of Noisette’s engines?”

“Capital idea, Bradley!” the Italian applauded; “though Dr Pin will undoubtedly find the current distractions of Lladloh a drain on his time and energy. I’m not talking about a golf-course but the Eisteddfod which has started there. I am considering whether it will constitute something in the nature of a hindrance to his work.”

“Perhaps,” said Pin, rather hastily; “but I suppose I can manage to rough it for the time I anticipate being there. Not that I call avoiding male-voice choirs roughing it. I booked a double-bedded room in the only open lodging-house. I must have a fairly large room for I am taking some cogs down as well as the ancient turbine.”

And with this pronouncement, the company fell silent until the last course was eaten and cleared away. Cigars and sherry put in a lugubrious appearance: with a funereal finality, no speeches were volunteered, only small-talk, which adopted a circular pattern; the same queries were made by every member of the party in turn. “I suppose you’ll be getting away pretty soon...” started A. Persson, Nottingham Tory, and Pin, knowing it was time to leave, pushed back his chair and stood, shaking hands with a grim smile and an engineer’s blistered fingers.

In relating the above dialogue, I have tried to give the impression which it made on me; that although something of an old woman, Pin was an exceedingly ambitious and capable one. He left the refectory and reached his rooms, where he collected his tools and cake-tins. Then he went down into the basement and picked up the miniature turbine. On the ascent, an evil impulse seized him—the urge to give the Chancellor a slice of his mind. He knocked on his door; no answer. So he turned the handle and was astonished when the study proved to be unlocked and deserted. The reason for this does not lack irony: Parkins was in his own cellar, ear pressed to a water-pipe. The plumbing of St James’s left much to be desired, and the Chancellor had discovered the acoustical properties of its conduits. Because of his suspicious and cruel mind, he was an habitual eavesdropper on the conversation of diners in the refectory.

Realising the propriety of returning to his office when Dr Pin left the dining-room, Parkins groped his way through the gloomy basement; but his foot caught, partly in an electric cable and partly in a large stack of banned magazines, and over he went. When he got up, vital minutes had been wasted. Pin was already scheming his break-in and embracing quite a different sort of pipe—a briar. Let us return to the engineer and view his indiscreet doings with grudging admiration.

Candle in hand and pipe in mouth, he moved around the room for some time, taking stock of the ornaments on display. The majority were of an ontographical nature; but on the mantelpiece lay something which bore a resemblance to a small sarcophagus of copper. The padlock which secured it was unfastened. Opening the lid, Pin lighted one match after another to help him see of what nature the box was, but the plot was too strong for them all. He introduced his hand and met with a cylindrical object resting on the floor of the moribund casket. He picked it up, naturally enough, and when he brought it into the light, he saw it was yet another kind of pipe—a metal tube four inches long.

It was of bronze and shaped very much after the manner of a modern referee’s whistle. In fact it was—yes, certainly it was—actually no more nor less than a whistle, but quite full of crushed seashells, as if it had been cast into the sea by a very brawny arm and washed up again. Pin blew tentatively, but the note inside was stuck, and would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a knife. Pin deemed it something dear to the Chancellor’s hidden heart and, still in his wicked phase, he pocketed it. A vague memory came back to him: had Parkins not mentioned a whistle after his Burnstow vacation? It was so long ago that Pin could hardly remember; and so much the worse for him. The object felt heavy in his possession, as if it were not a rudimentary musical apparatus of the sort favoured by boys, but a fully-grown man with shoes full of sand. As this was an absurd notion, Pin expelled it.

It has to be noted that the engineer felt little guilt at stealing. St James’s had a tradition of scholarly appropriation; a lack of concern in what a native’s views might be was considered essential. Changes have been wrought since then, I’m pleased to say: the institution compensates for its desecrations these days. But less of the moralising! It is more appropriate, at this juncture, to record Pin’s departure from St James’s and his arrival at the train station. As for Parkins: he gained his room in a poor condition, bruised the entire length of one knee, but saw in a moment what had occurred in his absence. He felt inside his box, and let loose an uneducated curse. Then he made a sudden decision, packed a few things into a carpet-bag and followed Pin.

How unpleasant it can be, alone in a second-class railway carriage, on a first day of a redundancy that might be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of Welsh country that is unhallowed, stalling at every haystack. The Lladloh express was late in leaving—Pin knew this was always the case, and that arriving at the station in time to catch it would simply ensure him a seat on an earlier one. But at last they pulled out; after rolling English fields, the train crossed the border into wilder terrain. With a map open on his knee, Pin picked out the villages that lay to the right and left by their church towers, and even spotted a few not designated. Soon he was in the depths of the country. I need not particularise, but if you divided the map of Wales into thirteen pieces, he would have been found in the one shaped like a harpy. 

When he had reached the edge of his map, and had nowhere to go, his mind attempted to divert him with memories and reflections. His life had been one of moderate success: he had taken a good degree, published work on fluid dynamics and magnetically-coupled circuits and even entertained his peers by seeking to combine branches of pure and applied mathematics in a single tutor. He was tolerated for his skill with Fourier Analysis and self-raising flour. Laplace Transforms were butter in his hands—or margarine on quasi-healthy days. In St James’s, he had been something of a misfit, never comfortable among those who lectured in Humanities. More than the others, Parkins had treated him kindly—and this fact made his later behaviour all the more incomprehensible.

What exactly happened to him in Burnstow? After his return why did he snub his former friends? Was there any truth in the rumour that since then, the Chancellor refused to sleep under sheets, but preferred to lie naked on top of a bare mattress? And what was the significance, if any, of the whistle? Before the fateful vacation, one of Parkins’s principal characteristics was pluck. After it, pluck was demoted to the status of a fresher, while squinting and an acid tongue attained a position of some prominence on his troubled face. His views on certain points altered so dramatically that standard topics of conversation at dinner—surplices hanging on doors or scarecrows in winter fields—had to be forfeited to prevent him swooning into the gravy. Exactly what explanation was cooked up for visiting academics I must confess I do not recollect. Parkins was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of hallucinogenic substances, and the college of the reputation of an opium den.

Unlike Rogers and Disney, Pin was determined not to be bullied when the transformed Professor of Ontography started to harass him. Parkins threw himself into his work, acquiring power as he did so: after gaining the position of Dean, he was able to set homework for the Professors, as if avenging himself for some unspoken injury. Rogers and Disney left, to be replaced by Bradley and Collodi. The Gardener and Italian were honest chaps, but neither was young, neat or precise in speech. Pin missed such qualities, possessed by the original Parkins.