Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

MRS. ERSKINE: You have the most exquisite frenulum I have ever seen.

MR. BRUISELAND: You are too kind, madam.

They combine savagely, then have tea .

MRS. ERSKINE: What a nice day to be ravished.

MR. BRUISELAND: Shall I put it in your ear next time?

‘Oh, my sainted aunt, Milly!’ said Tara, throwing down the script. ‘There’ll be no more of this. You’ll shock our guest.’

‘I ain’t easily shocked, darling,’ said Sinner, overconfident for the first time that evening.

‘Do you know all about sex, Mr Roach?’ said Millicent.

‘I know a bit about it.’

‘What’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever done?’

‘Sure you want to hear?’

‘I am no shrinking violet, Mr Roach.’

Before Tara could stop him, Sinner leaned over and whispered something in Millicent’s ear.

‘I’m not at all surprised,’ replied the twelve-year-old. ‘That is what Dr Karjalainen told me old-fashioned people used to do before they had the imagination to …’ and then whispered something to Sinner in return.

Sinner’s eyes widened. ‘No fucker has ever done that!’

‘Don’t listen, lad,’ said Tara. ‘She don’t know what a single one of them words means. Now, clear off, Milly, so Sinner can have his tea in peace.’

‘No!’ said Millicent.

Then Godwin sneezed. Tara looked up. He tried to cover his blunder by striding straight into the kitchen as if he had just been on his way there instead of hiding outside, but Tara still swore under her breath and hurried out through the other door. She had to squeeze past Battle, who had come to look for Godwin.

As soon as she saw Battle, Millicent snatched up a carving fork from the sideboard and started to stab him in the buttocks, humming a tune as she did so.

‘Please don’t do that, Miss Bruiseland,’ said Battle, concerned for his trousers.

While Battle was giving some instructions to Godwin, Millicent, reluctant to put down the fork, tentatively poked Sinner in the shoulder instead.

‘Careful, girl,’ said Godwin. ‘The lad isn’t the same as Battle. You’ll hurt him.’

‘I ain’t easily hurt, mate,’ said Sinner, overconfident for the second time that evening.

‘Aren’t you, Mr Roach?’ said Millicent.

‘Used to be my profession not to get hurt.’

‘Oh! Can we play a game?’

And so, after a few minutes’ cajoling, Sinner and Battle were standing side by side with their backs to the sideboard, on which Millicent herself stood holding a heavy copper frying pan with a rounders player’s two-handed grip.

‘Ready, Battle?’

‘Yes, miss.’

Millicent swung the frying pan as hard as she could into the back of Battle’s head. There was a loud clang, but Battle merely bent his knees slightly and coughed.

‘Ready, Mr Roach?’

Sinner, concluding that the girl was even punier than she looked, kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t bother to brace himself.

‘All right.’

Millicent swung.

When he awoke, Sinner found himself lying on the sideboard with a cold damp towel wrapped around his aching head. At the kitchen table sat Tara and her mistress.

‘And none of them said a word for the rest of the meal,’ said Evelyn. ‘They’re all such infants. We haven’t even got to the speeches yet — if world war isn’t declared before Friday we shall have made a lucky escape. Oh, look, the young pugilist has been roused. I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable, but we just weren’t quite sure what to do with you after your mazzatello. Now, Sinner — as Tara tells me you like to be called — you must promise me that you will never listen to another word that awful little girl says.’

‘I think you might have knocked me on the head once yourself.’

‘Yes, but I had a point to make.’

‘That butler. …’

‘Oh, butlers can’t feel anything.’

‘I’d best be off, miss,’ said Tara. ‘There’ll still be a fair bit to do upstairs.’

‘All right, Tara, I’ll see you in the morning.’ Evelyn gave Tara a goodnight kiss on the cheek and then Tara went out.

‘You’re nice and familiar with your girl,’ said Sinner.

‘Yes. I can tell from your infinitesimally elevated eyebrow what you’re trying to imply, and it’s nothing at all like that. We are great friends. I’ve known her since we were both quite young and she is the only person with any sense in this whole house. She tells me when I’m being a fool and she tells me when I’m being a coward. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to taking her off to London so she never has to see that ghastly slug ever again.’

‘Which one? Lot of slugs around here.’

‘Godwin. The footman. He’s been oozing after her ever since he got here. She sometimes finds him standing outside her room at night. My father once caught him menacing her in the library, and of course he got the wrong impression, and now he thinks they’re having a secret love affair when in fact she can’t stand to be near him. He talks about nothing else but coffins. Although, actually, I can’t admit this to Tara, but I did have one fascinating conversation with him. Do you know anything about waiting mortuaries?’

Sinner shook his head, so Evelyn explained them to him. ‘And naturally it’s supposed to be that the harmonium only plays a note if someone has woken up and is wiggling their toes,’ she finished. ‘But Godwin says a corpse will keep bloating and stiffening for days, so the wires will be yanked over and over again, and the harmonium will be sounding practically all the time. Can you imagine the music? Such unearthly dissonance. I should love to go there and transcribe it. And Godwin says that gas builds up in the corpse’s stomach and sometimes when the gas escapes through the mouth the corpse will groan almost as if it’s singing. Like a Webern lieder about putrefaction. I’ve tried to write down what I think it might sound like, but I can’t quite. … Why don’t I play it to you?’

There had once been a shabby upright piano in the servants’ dining room for carol-singing at Christmas, but soon after he bought the brass brain William Erskine had replaced it with an ondes Martenot which nobody knew how to play, so Evelyn and Sinner had to creep upstairs to the drawing room. The more he saw of the house, overflowing as it was with antiques and trinkets and tassels, not unlike Rabbi Berg’s but somehow with none of the same cosiness, the more Sinner understood why Erskine had wanted to keep his own flat so empty.

Evelyn sat down and played for a few minutes and then said, ‘What do you think?’

‘You ain’t much good at the piano,’ said Sinner, who sat on the floor beside her.

‘It’s supposed to sound like that. Didn’t you like it? That’s a shame — Brecht insists the working classes love avantgardism,’ she said, half-serious. ‘I’ll play it again.’

She did.

‘Sounds wrong.’

‘It sounds wrong! That’s exactly it — in a manner of speaking. You see, everyone says atonality is a perversion. Serial music is supposed to be foreign and sinister and subversive. All those fools think the tonal system is God’s law, so if you cast it aside you must be mad or bad. And they’re right that the tones pull towards triads and triads pull towards tonality, but the whole point of life is to resist whatever pulls on you — you must know that even better than I do.’ She played a few more bars. ‘Schoenberg says, “What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or less degree of comprehensibility.” But he’s wrong. Beethoven is no easier to understand than Berg. It’s not about beauty or comprehensibility. It’s about life. Dissonance is the sound of life in the twentieth century.’