Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Page B

started to laugh. But nobody else laughed. Hillier was playing from the wrong score.
    â€˜Where’s your father?’ cried Mr Theodorescu. ‘If I were your father I would take you over my knee and spank you hard and then make you apologise to this gentleman. Abjectly.’
    â€˜He’s over there,’ said Alan. ‘He wouldn’t do anything.’ At a table just by the Fitzroy Street entrance a dim swollen man was being adjured, by a frizz-haired woman much his junior, to down that and have another.
    â€˜Well, then,’ said Mr Theodorescu, veering round massively as by silent hydraulic machinery, ‘let me apologise on the boy’s behalf.’ He shone his great lamps on Hillier. ‘We know him, you see. You, I think, have just joined us. In a sense, he is all our responsibility. I believe he is sincerely sorry, Mr –’
    â€˜Jagger.’
    â€˜Mr Jagger. Theodorescu myself, though I am not Rumanian. This is Miss Devi, my secretary.’
    â€˜I regret to say,’ said Hillier, ‘that we have already met. It was very unfortunate. I feel like apologising, but it was not really my fault.’ It had not been Actaeon’s fault.
    â€˜I always forget about the locking of bathroom doors,’ said Miss Devi. ‘It comes of having my own private suite on land. But we are surely above these foolish taboos.’
    â€˜I hope so,’ said Hillier.
    â€˜Typewriters, typewriters,’ crooned Theodorescu. ‘I have always felt that our house should have a distinctive typeface, very large, a sort of variant of the old black-letter. Would it be possible to write in Roman and Arabic letters on the one instrument?’ he asked Hillier.
    â€˜The difficulty there would be to arrange things so that one could type from both left to right and right to left. Not insuperable. It would be cheaper to use two typewriters, though.’
    â€˜Very interesting,’ said Theodorescu, searching Hillier’s face, it seemed, with one eye, two eyes not being necessary. Alan Walters was now standing alone at the bar, sulking over a new tomato-juice which Hillier this time hoped contained vodka, a large one.
    â€˜He knows nothing about it,’ he mumbled. It was recognised that he had been a rude boy; the grown-ups had turned their backson him. ‘Yost and Soule,’ he muttered to his red glass. ‘He knows nothing about them. Silly old Jagger is a Yost Soule, a lost soul, ha ha ha.’ Hillier didn’t like the sound of that. But Theodorescu was large enough to be able to be kind to the lad, saying: ‘We have not yet seen your beautiful sister this evening. Is she still in her cabin?’
    â€˜She’s a Yost Soule, like Jagger here. She reads about sex all the time, but she knows nothing about it. Just like Jagger.’
    â€˜You may have tested Mr Jagger on the history of the typewriter,’ said Theodorescu urbanely, ‘but you have not tested him on sex. Nor,’ he added hurriedly, seeing Alan open his mouth on a deep breath, ‘are you going to.’
    â€˜Jagger is a sexless spy,’ said the boy. Hillier reminded himself that he was not here to be a gentleman, above such matters as impertinent and precocious brats. He went close to the not over-clean left ear of Alan and said to it, ‘Look. Any more nonsense from you, you bloody young horror, and I’ll repeatedly jam a very pointed shoe up your arse.’
    â€˜Up my arse, eh?’ said Alan very clearly. There were conventionally shocked looks at Hillier. At that moment a white-coated steward, evidently Goanese, entered with a carillon tuned to a minor arpeggio. He walked through the Soho pub like a visitor from a neighbouring TV stageset, striking briskly the opening right-hand bars of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata.
    â€˜Ah, dinner,’ said Theodorescu with relief. ‘I’m starving.’
    â€˜You had a large tea,’ said Miss