Vintage Stuff by Tom Sharpe

Author:Tom Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous Stories, England, Preparatory schools, France, Satire, British, Fiction, Boys, General, Fiction:Humour, Modern fiction, Preparatory school teachers
ISBN: 9780099435549
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1982-07-01T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

For the next hour the occupants of the Château Carmagnac were subjected to some of the horrors of Peregrine's literary education. The fact that they were a strange mixture, of British holidaymakers who had answered advertisements in the Lady offering a quiet holiday au Château and a small group of self-styled International Thinkers sponsored by intensely nationalistic governments to attend a symposium on 'Detente or Destruction', added to the consequent misunderstanding. The Countess's absence didn't help either.

'Haven't the foggiest, old chap,' said Mr Hodgson, a scrap-iron merchant from Huddersfield whom Peregrine had caught in the corridor trying to find the lightswitch. 'You wouldn't happen to know where the loo is, would you?'

Peregrine jabbed him in the paunch with his revolver. 'I'm not asking again. Where's the Countess?'

'Look, old chap. If I knew I'd tell you. As I don't, I can't. All I'm interested in now is having a slash.'

Peregrine gave him one and stepping over his body went in search of someone more informative. He found Dimitri Abnekov.

'No capitalist. No roubles. No nothing,' he said taking hurriedly to broken English instead of his normally fluent American in the hope that this would identify him more readily on the side of whatever oppressed masses Peregrine's anti-social action might be said to express. In his pyjamas he felt particularly vulnerable.

'I want the Countess,' said Peregrine.

'Countess? Countess? I know nothing. Countess aristocratic scum. Should be abolished like in my country. Yes?'

'No,' said Peregrine. 'You're going to tell me where...'

Dr Abnekov wasn't. He broke into a spate of Russian and was rewarded by one of Major Fetherington's Specials which left him unable to say anything. Peregrine switched out the light and hurried from the room. Outside he encountered Signor Badiglioni, a Catholic Euro-Communist, who knew enough about terrorism to have the good sense to hurl himself through the nearest door and lock it behind him. That it happened to be the door to the room of Dr Hildegard Keister, a Danish expert on surgical therapy for sexual offenders, and that she was cutting her toenails with a pair of scissors and exposing a good deal of thigh in the process, rendered Signor Badiglioni totally incoherent.

'You want me? Yes?' asked the doctor in Danish, advancing on him with a Scandinavian broadmindedness Signor Badiglioni entirely misinterpreted. Babbling frantic apologies, he tried to unlock the door but the good doctor was already upon him.

'Terrorist outside,' he squealed.

'The reciprocated sensuality is natural,' said the doctor and dragged him back to the bed.

Further down the corridor, Peregrine was engaged in an attempted dialogue with Pastor Laudenbach, the German who had been through the Battle of the Kursk Salient and whose pacifism was consequently sufficiently earnest for him to refuse to give in to Peregrine's threat to blow his head off if he didn't stop saying his prayers and tell him where the Countess was. In the end, the Pastor's convictions prevailed and Peregrine left him unscathed.

He was even less successful with his next victim. Professor Zukacs, an economist

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