Sauve Qui Peut: Stories by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-06-11T21:00:00+00:00

6

Taking the Consequences

I have never (said Antrobus) ceased to preach against paper games in the leisure hours of the service; either for entertainment of friends or for the killing of time. I have several times found them a Grave Danger. Nor do I make any exception—though perhaps the game called “Consequences” is the worst in this respect. To my regret Polk-Mowbray could never be got round to this view; for him no dinner party was complete without a vapid hand of Pontoon, or Mimsy or Bellweather. AJ1 the pencils were co-opted from Chancery, and all the expensive minute-paper. Down we would sit to wrestle with some inane problem, feeling like a human fritter; nor could we say him nay. He ordered us to play. It was inhuman, and at times I got so indignant that I thought I should get circles under my prose or lose my vibrato or both. But Nemesis was waiting in the podgy person of the Baron Blenkinhoorn, the newly arrived correspondent of the Deutsches Sauerkraut news agency, a powerful organ of West German opinion. He was a very serious man. His notepaper had a crown and garter gules. He wore heavy spectacles and beard brushed back against the wind like Epping Forest. Whatever you told him he wrote down instantly in a huge pad and telegraphed to his organ. He lived in the Vulgaria Hotel and was rumoured to sleep with a pistol under his pillow. Nor did his seriousness make him endearing, no. Once De Mandeville persuaded him to publish Polk-Mowbray’s obituary by uttering a false press release. For a man as superstitious as our Ambassador this gave him quite a fright and the Baron had some trouble exculpating himself. Quite a huff grew up between them and it was only rarely that the Baron came into the Chancery for a brief untainted bit of info. On some such visit he must have managed to break down the morale of Dovebasket and make a hireling of him, for his despatches were now full of Inside Info, things he would never have known had he not had an accomplice. For instance that Toby Imhof was even then working on bottled cat’s breath to put down mouseholes and had already patented the perfected version of Snarlex, jujube for the tired parent. Where could he have found out I mean? Even the little day-to-day accidents which any normal Embassy has to endure without telling the press. The Baron knew them all and sent them to his organ which duly printed. Nothing appeared to be sacred. It was the year that Angela was sent down for writing Just Married on the back of a police car; Dovebasket, who was mad about her and had been jilted revenged himself by meddling with the taps on the blue room bidet—to such good effect that the wretched girl found herself pinned to the ceiling by a water-jet and had to be got down with ladders. You see what I mean? He finally had us looking over our shoulders.

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