“He was a good preacher?”
“It was music to hear him,” she said with happy regret, and we began to walk back towards the front; we could hear the shingle turning over from a long way away. “He was not exclusive,” my aunt said. “For him dogs were like the House of Israel, but he was an apostle also to the Gentiles – and the Gentiles, to Curran, included sparrows and parrots and white mice – not cats, cats he always regarded as Pharisees. Of course no cat dared come into the church with all those dogs around, but there was one who used to sit in the window of a house opposite and sneer when the congregation came out. Curran excluded fish too – it would be too shocking to eat something with a soul, he said. Elephants he had a very great feeling for, which was generous of him considering Hannibal had trodden on his toe. Let’s sit down here, Henry. I always find Guinness a little tiring.”
We sat down in a shelter. The lights ran out to sea along the Palace Pier and the edge of the water was white with phosphorescence. The waves were continually pulled up along the beach and pulled back as though someone were making a bed and couldn’t get the sheet to lie properly. A bit of pop music came from the dance hall standing there like a blockade ship a hundred yards out. This trip was quite an adventure, I thought to myself, little knowing how small a one it would seem in retrospect.
“I found a lovely piece about elephants once in Saint Francis de Sales,” Aunt Augusta said, “and Curran used it in his last sermon after all that business with the girls had upset me. I really think what he wanted was to tell me it was me he loved, but I was a hard young woman in those days and I wouldn’t listen. I’ve always kept the piece though in my purse and, when I read it, it’s not the elephant that I see now, it’s Curran. He was a fine big fellow – not as big as Wordsworth but a good deal more sensitive.”
She fumbled in her bag and found her purse. “You read it to me, dear, I can’t see properly in this light.”
I held the rather yellowed creased paper at an angle to catch one of the lights of the front. It wasn’t easy to read, though my aunt’s handwriting was young and bold, because of the creases. “‘The elephant,’” I read, “‘is only a huge animal, but he is the most worthy of beasts that lives on the earth, and the most intelligent. I will give you an example of his excellence; he…’” The writing ran along a crease and I couldn’t read it, but my aunt chimed gently in. “‘He never changes his mate and he tenderly loves the one of his choice.’ Go on, dear.”
“‘With whom,’” I read, “‘nevertheless he mates but every third year, and then for five days only and so secretly that he has never been seen to do so.’”
“He was trying to explain,” my aunt said, “I am sure of it now, that if he had been a little slack in his attentions[57], it was only because of the girls – he didn’t love me less.”
“‘But he is to be seen again on the sixth day, on which day, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river wherein he bathes his whole body, for he has no desire to return to the herd until he has purified himself.’”
“Curran was always a clean man,” my aunt said. “Thank you, dear, you read it very well.”
“It doesn’t seem very applicable to dogs,” I said.
“He turned it so beautifully that no one noticed, and it was really directed at me. I remember he had a special dogs’ shampoo which had been blessed at the altar on sale outside the church door that Sunday.”
“What became of Curran?”
“I’ve no idea,” Aunt Augusta said. “He must have left his church, for he couldn’t have carried on without me. Hatty hadn’t the right touch for a deaconess. I dream of him sometimes – but he would be ninety years old now, and I find it hard to picture him as an old man. Well, Henry, I think it is time for us both to sleep.”
All the same, I found sleep difficult to attain, even in my comfortable bed at the Royal Albion. The lights of the Palace Pier sparkled on the ceiling, and round and round in my head went the figures of Wordsworth and Curran, the elephant and the dogs of Hove, the mystery of my birth, the ashes of my mother who was not my mother, and my father asleep in the bath. This was not the simple life which I had known at the bank, where I could judge a client’s character by his credits and debits. I had a sense of fear and exhilaration too, as the music pounded from the Pier and the phosphorescence rolled up the beach.
Chapter 7
The affair of my mother’s ashes was not settled so easily as I had anticipated (I call her my mother still, because at this period I had no real evidence that my aunt was telling me the truth). No urn was awaiting me in the house when I returned from Brighton, and so I rang up Scotland Yard and asked for Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. I was put on without delay to a voice which was distinctly not Sparrow’s. It sounded very similar to that of a rear-admiral whom I had once had as a client. (I was very glad when he changed his account to the National Provincial Bank, for he treated my clerks like ordinary seamen and myself like a sub-lieutenant who had been court-marchialled for keeping the mess books improperly.)
“Can I speak to Detective-Sergeant Sparrow?” I asked.
“On what business?” whoever it was rapped back.
“I have not yet received my mother’s ashes,” I said.
“This is Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner’s Office, and not a crematorium,” the voice replied and rang off.
It took me a long while (because of engaged lines) to get the same gritty voice on the line again.
“I want Detective-Sergeant Sparrow,” I said.
“On what business?”
I was ready this time and prepared to be ruder than the voice could be.
“Police business of course,” I said. “What other business do you deal in?” It was almost as though my aunt were speaking through me.
“Detective-Sergeant Sparrow is out. You had better leave a message.”
“Ask him to ring Mr. Pulling, Mr. Henry Pulling.”
“What address? What telephone number?” he snapped as though he suspected me to be some unsavoury police informer.
“He knows them both. I am not going to repeat them unnecessarily. Tell him I am disappointed at his failure to keep a solemn promise.” I rang off before the other had time for a word in reply. Going out to the dahlias, I gave myself the rare award of a satisfied smile. I had never spoken to the rear-admiral like that.
My new cactus dahlias were doing well, and after my trip to Brighton their names gave me some of the pleasure of travel: Rotterdam, a deeper red than a pillar-box, and Dentelle de Venise, with spikes sparkling like hoar-frost. I thought that next year I would plant some Pride of Berlin to make a trio of cities. The telephone disturbed my happy ruminations. It was Sparrow.
I said to him firmly, “I hope you have a good excuse for failing to return the ashes.”
“I certainly have, sir. There’s more Cannabis than ashes in your urn.”
“I don’t believe you. How could my mother possibly…?”
“We can hardly suspect your mother, sir, can we? As I told you, I think the man Wordsworth took advantage of your call