Click, went the kaleidoscope. The fragments slid apart and together. A stream of figures erupted from the interior, poured down the steps and dispersed. When the gap was uncovered the white man had gone.
IV
‘It’s like this, sir,’ Chubb had said rapidly. ‘Seeing that No. 1 isn’t a full-time place being there’s two of us, we been in the habit of helping out on a part-time basis elsewhere in the vicinity. Like, Mrs Chubb does an hour every other day for Mr Sheridan in the basement and I go to the Colonel’s – that’s Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort in the Place – for two hours of a Friday afternoon, and every other Sunday evening we baby-sit at 17 The Walk. And –’
‘Yes. I see,’ said Mr Whipplestone, stemming the tide.
‘You won’t find anything scamped or overlooked, sir,’ Mrs Chubb intervened. ‘We give satisfaction, sir, in all quarters, really we do. It’s just An Arrangement, like.’
‘And naturally, sir, the wages are adjusted. We wouldn’t expect anything else, sir, would we?’
They had stood side by side with round anxious faces, wide-open eyes and gabbling mouths. Mr Whipplestone had listened with his built-in air of attentive detachment and had finally agreed to the proposal that the Chubbs were all his for six mornings, breakfast, luncheon and dinner: that provided the house was well kept up they might attend upon Mr Sheridan or anybody else at their own and his convenience, that on Fridays Mr Whipplestone would lunch and dine at his club or elsewhere and that, as the Chubbs put it, the wages ‘was adjusted accordingly’.
‘Most of the residents,’ explained Chubb when they had completed these arrangements and got down to details, ‘has accounts at the Napoli, sir. You may prefer to deal elsewhere.’
‘And for the butchery,’ said Mrs Chubb, ‘there’s –’
They expounded upon the amenities in the Capricorns.
Mr Whipplestone said: ‘That all sounds quite satisfactory. Do you know, I think I’ll make a tour of inspection.’ And he did so.
The Napoli is one of the four little shops in Capricorn Mews. It is ‘shop’ reduced to its absolute minimum; a slit of a place where the customers stand in single file and then only eight at a squeeze. The proprietors are an Italian couple, he dark and anxious, she dark and buxom and jolly. Their assistant is a large and facetious cockney.
It is a nice shop. They cure their own bacon and hams. Mr Pirelli makes his own pâté and a particularly good terrine. The cheeses are excellent. Bottles of dry Orvieto are slung overhead and other Italian wines crowd together inside the door. There are numerous exotics in line on the shelves. The Capricornians like to tell each other that the Napoli is ‘a pocket Fortnum’s’. Dogs are not allowed but a row of hooks has been thoughtfully provided in the outside wall and on most mornings there is a convocation of mixed dogs attached to them.
Mr Whipplestone skirted the dogs, entered the shop and bought a promising piece of Camembert. The empurpled army man, always immaculately dressed and gloved, whom he had seen in the street was in the shop and was addressed by Mr Pirelli as ‘Colonel’. (Montfort? wondered Mr Whipplestone.) The Colonel’s lady was with him. An alarming lady, the fastidious Mr Whipplestone thought, with the face of a dissolute clown and wildly overdressed. They both wore an air of overdone circumspection that Mr Whipplestone associated with the hazards of a formidable hangover. The lady stood stock still and bolt-upright behind her husband but as Mr Whipplestone approached the counter, she side-stepped and barged into him, driving her pin heel into his instep.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried in pain and lifted his hat.
‘Not a bit,’ she said thickly and gave him what could only be described as a half-awakened leer.
Her husband turned and seemed to sense a need for conversation. ‘Not much room for manoeuvrin’,’ he shouted. ‘What?’
‘Quite,’ said Mr Whipplestone.
He opened an account, left the shop and continued his explorations.
He arrived at the scene of his encounter with the little black cat. A large van was backing into the garage. Out of the tail of his eye he thought he saw briefly a darting shadow and when the van stopped he could have fancied, almost, that he heard a faint, plaintive cry. But there was nothing to support these impressions and he hurried on, oddly perturbed.
At the far end of the Mews, by the entrance to the passageway is a strange little cavern, once a stable, which has been converted into a shop. Here, at this period, a baleful fat lady made images of pigs either as doorstops or with roses and daisies on their sides and a hole in their backs for cream or flowers as the fancy might take you. They varied in size but never in design. The kiln was at the back of the cavern and as Mr Whipplestone looked in the fat lady stared at him out of her shadows. Above the entrance was a notice: ‘X. & K. Sanskrit. Pigs.’
‘Commercial candour!’ thought Mr Whipplestone, cracking a little joke for himself. To what nationality he wondered could someone called Sanskrit possibly belong? Indian, he supposed, And ‘X’? Xavier perhaps. ‘To make a living,’ he wondered, ‘out of the endless reduplication of pottery pigs? And why on earth does this extraordinary name seem to ring a bell?’
Conscious that the fat lady in the shadows still looked at him, he moved on into Capricorn Place and made his way to a rosy brick wall at the far end. Through an opening in this wall one leaves the Capricorns and arrives at a narrow lane passing behind the Basilica precincts and an alleyway ending in the full grandeur of Palace Park Gardens. Here the Ng’ombwana Embassy rears its important front.
Mr Whipplestone contemplated the pink flag with its insignia of green spear and sun and mentally apostrophized it. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘there you are and for my part, long may you stay there.’ And he remembered that at some as yet unspecified time but, unless something awful intervened, in the near future, the Ambassador and all his minions would be in no end of a tig getting ready for the state visit of their dynamic President and spotting assassins behind every plane tree. The Special Branch would be raising their punctual plaint and at the FO, he thought, they’ll be dusting down their imperturbability. ‘I’m out of it all and (I’d better make up my mind to it) delighted to be so. I suppose,’ he added. Conscious of a slight pang, he made his way home.
Mr Whipplestone had been in residence for over a month. He was thoroughly settled, comfortable and contented and yet by no means lethargically so. On the contrary, he had been stimulated by his change of scene and felt lively. Already he was tuned in to life in the Capricorns. ‘Really,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s like a little village set down in the middle of London. One runs repeatedly into the same people in the shops. On warm evenings the inhabitants stroll about the streets. One may drop in at the Sun in Splendour where one finds, I’m happy to say, a very respectable, nay, quite a distinguished, white port.’
He had been in the habit of keeping a diary for some years. Until now it had confined itself to the dry relation of facts with occasionally a touch of the irony for which he had been slightly famous at the FO. Now, under the stimulus of his new environment, the journal expanded and became, at times, almost skittish.
The evening was very warm. His window was open and the curtains, too. An afterglow had suffused the plane trees and kindled the dome of the Basilica but now was faded. There was a smell of freshly-watered gardens in the air and the pleasant sound of footfalls mingling with quiet voices drifted in at the open window. The muted roar of Baronsgate seemed distant, a mere background to quietude.
After a time he laid down his pen, let fall his eyeglass and looked with pleasure at his room. Everything