Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

‘No offence, Signor Amadeo, but I think that sort of nonsense is half the trouble,’ said Aslet as the venison arrived. ‘Railways, motor cars, telephones, cinemas — “Everyone must learn to read, everyone must go to the shops!” — it’s too much. The great mass of humanity is now exhausted. Life is too frenzied now for anyone to really appreciate it. Overstimulation of the senses means mass degeneracy.’

‘Quite,’ said Bruiseland, once again glancing darkly at Evelyn.

‘Whoever uses machines receives a machine heart,’ said Kasimir Mowinckel. ‘The West today is a turbine filled with blood.’ Then there was a loud bang and everyone jumped in their seats. In panic, Erskine looked at his father. William Erskine’s face was white and a dark red stain was spreading across his chest. His fork dropped from his hand.

Only Amadeo seemed unperturbed. ‘There are not enough explosions in this country,’ he said, holding up a silver pocket-watch. ‘As you can see, this does not really tell the time, because there is a tiny pistol mechanism instead of the normal clockwork. Calibre only two millimetres. Popular among the Nazis, I hear, and it is very useful for when I am finding a conversation boring or retrogressive.’

There was a long silence. Battle helped Erskine’s father mop the spilled wine from his shirt, then went to prise the miniature bullet out of the wall with a pair of brass nutcrackers.

Erskine’s mother said, ‘I read in the newspaper today that now you can find out the time over the telephone. The Post Office seem very proud of it but I must say we’ve had that in this house for years.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Aslet.

The rest of the dinner was not a success, particularly when the women withdrew at the end to leave the men to drink their port and smoke their cigars in silence. Erskine was relieved to go to bed, declining the offer of a game of chess with Kasimir Mowinckel. He had hoped Sinner might already be asleep in the cot, but he wasn’t, and although Erskine lay awake for nearly three hours, listening to the soft crackling of the faulty electrical socket in the skirting board, Sinner still did not come upstairs. Erskine wondered if his mother had overruled his father and found Sinner a bed in the servants’ quarters, but when he woke up the next morning Sinner was there, asleep.

He stood over Sinner for a few minutes, watching his chest rise and fall, and gave himself a moment’s amusement thinking of how Amadeo had described the Jews: ‘abstract and homeless and slippery’. Sinner had been homeless, of course, when Erskine had found him at St Panteleimon’s, and the boy was slippery too, but he’d never met a human being less abstract. He dressed and went downstairs. Breakfast had not been laid out and the house seemed strangely quiet, as before a surprise party. He found the head butler in the hall.

‘What’s going on, Battle?’

‘I have some very disturbing news, sir. Mr Morton was found dead this morning.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘The younger Herr Mowinckel discovered his body in the pond, sir. He seems to have been badly beaten. The police have been called.’

Erskine walked stiffly to a bentwood chair and sat down. He imagined the pages of the third Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon swirling around Morton’s body, covering his eyes, sliding down his throat. How could this have happened? Quite a few of the guests at dinner had probably ended up hating Morton but none of them, with the possible exception of Amadeo, were Mussolini types — surely they wouldn’t murder a fellow fascist over a political disagreement? The most important question was, why had Sinner come to bed so late the previous night? Where had he been? And then Erskine remembered exactly what he’d said to Sinner that afternoon.

There were only really two things that Alex Godwin, the youngest of Claramore’s footmen, wanted out of life, and he saved every penny he could spare out of his paltry wages in the hope that one day he would be able to afford them both. The first was that Tara Southall, Evelyn Erskine’s maid, should become his wife and bear his children. The second was a top-class conjugal safety coffin.

As one of only nineteen remaining subscribers to Burial Reformer , the quarterly magazine of the London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial, Godwin was an expert in the technology of funerary prudence, and nothing was more repugnant to him than the German Leichenhausen or ‘waiting mortuaries’ that had been popular in the nineteenth century. For three days after a doctor had pronounced you dead, you and twenty or thirty companions would lie on wooden slabs, set out in rows like a school dormitory, decorated with bouquets of flowers to hide the smell. Wires would be tied to your fingers and toes, and the wires would run up along ceiling rails and down to the levers of a harmonium, so that a note would sound, and the attendants would hear, if your limbs began to twitch. Every night the attendant would be obliged to play a short waltz on the harmonium to prove that all the reeds were still functional. Members of the public could tour the mortuary for a small charge.

Perhaps that was all right in Germany or France, believed Godwin, but certainly not in England. If a man wasn’t responsible enough on his own behalf to make sure that he wasn’t accidentally buried alive, why should he expect the state to do it for him? That was socialism at its most childish. Godwin could look after himself, and consequently he planned to invest in a reliable safety coffin.

Before he met Tara, he would have been quite happy with one of the standard models. These came with an air tube up to the surface, a flask of water, and a string you could tug to let off a firework from the headstone. Quite enough for a bachelor. But what if, after Tara finally agreed to marry him, the two of them were stricken by the same cataleptic disease and buried simultaneously? How cruel if, separated by only a few inches of oak and soil, they couldn’t share an embrace as they waited to be rescued!

The solution, obviously, was two adjacent chambers with a collapsible shared wall. He often thought of the happy time they might spend there together — perhaps even choosing not to let off the firework straight away. And in the horrible event that Tara really was dead and only he was still alive, then at least he would have a proper chance to say his farewell. This seemed a perfectly obvious precaution, and yet, in the 144 years since Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick had invented the safety coffin, no one had published a plan for a conjugal model, so Godwin would have to have it designed and built himself at great expense. But it would be worth it, for the pain of separation was the greatest pain of all — a principle that came back to him as he stood in the darkened corridor outside the servants’ kitchen, squinting at Tara through the crack in the door as she served Sinner a plate of kidneys and mushrooms.

‘Miss Erskine says you ain’t really a valet,’ said Tara.

‘Oh, yeah?’ said Sinner.

‘Don’t need anyone else to tell me that, pet.’

‘What am I doing wrong, then?’

‘What are you doing wrong?’ Godwin loved the way Tara screwed up her big eyes so tightly when she giggled, as if momentarily blinded by a bright light. ‘Tell you what: next time I’ve got a few days’ holiday, I’ll sit down and make you a list.’

Then Millicent Bruiseland ran into the kitchen through the other door. ‘Will you act in my play, Mr Roach?’ She tried to pass a sheaf of typewritten pages to Sinner, but Tara snatched it out of her hands.

‘Let’s see,’ said Tara, and began to read.

Enter MR. BRUISELAND and MRS. ERSKINE .