Kyril Bonfiglioli - All the Tea in China

“You” was out, scrubbed and shining, and I had almost finished scraping the varnish and paint off the bottom of the second pot when Lord Windermere arrived in his Clarence. The Clarence was, I thought, a sign that he was in a buying mood, for it is a roomy rather than a dashing vehicle.

“Well now, what’s all this, what’s all this, burst me? Can’t a man enjoy his whore and his bottle of port without being summoned like a footman by every Jew hawker in London?”

He was not being rude; in those days when an Englishman wished to make it clear that you were accepted he called you terrible names, it meant that he thought you were British enough to take British jokes. They were quite mad. Now they are still mad but more polite; I think I liked them better when they were mad and rude. I truly believe that Lord Windermere thought Holland a possession of Great Britain; they teach them Horace and Virgil at school, scarcely any of them knows that the Dutch Navy once smashed its way up the Thames Valley to London and then sailed out again unscathed. The only Britishers with a sense of history are the Irish, but with them it is a disease.

I laid out the “Lange Lyzen” on the gleaming mahogany counter. He looked at them hungrily.

“These,” I said, “are one thousand and one hundred and ten pounds. To you, that is, of course.”

He gaped.

“Are you out of your senses?” he said at last. “Curse me, you said you’d rob me one day but you’re coming on too fast, too fast; they’d be dear at seven hundred and you know it.”

I showed him one of the bottoms. He gaped again, then roared with delight and laughter. “Done!” he bellowed, “done! Rot me, you knew I’d have to have ’em, you sod.”

He gave me a draft on Mr Coutts’s excellent bank and I showed him how to scrape with the piece of lead. We spent a happy evening, drinking three bottles of Madeira between us and scraping, scraping; hooting with pleasure as each lubricious scene became manifest.

“Smash me!” he cried at one point, “oh I say smash my eyes, d’you see this feller’s rump-splitter? Demme, it’s a good thing I’m a bachelor, couldn’t keep all these nudgers and fannies if there was a Lady Windermere about the house, could I?”

When all five of the vases’ bottoms were clean — if that is an appropriate word — and blazing in all their wonderful filthiness, Lord Windermere clapped me on the shoulder in the friendliest fashion, said that he’d never done a better day’s work in his life and vowed to send me a dozen of his prime Sercial as a “sweetener”, first thing in the morning.

After he had left I called for paper and pens and wrote to my mother like a good son. “This London is a fine place,” I wrote, “and I think I shall do good business here. Please send more pots so that I may make all our fortunes. Tell my father that I read the Josephus whenever I am not too tired with my incessant labour.”

Then I went to bed, replete with virtuous feelings and contentment.

I lay awake for quite an hour, for my head was buzzing with half-formed plans, plans only indirectly concerned with pottery and porcelain.

I did not have a reply from my Mama until eight days later for the posts in those days were bad and slow: sometimes a letter posted in the afternoon just to another part of London would not be delivered until the next morning; it was disgraceful.

Her letter was loving but crisp. She hoped I was well and that I was not conversing with bad girls from whom I might catch a disease. She was ready to send me more Delft and Chinese wares so soon as I remitted the money for the first lot. My father, she said, sent his love. She, for her part, sent me hers and hoped that I was eating properly, eschewing the notorious English puddings and pies.

I considered this letter carefully for many an hour. Honesty and filial affection ruled my actions in the end: I went to Coutts’s excellent bank and arranged for two hundred and three pounds and fifteen shillings to be sent to my mother: she would, I knew be delighted. It shewed her a handsome profit on the wares for I knew her buying habits well.

Then I went to find my good Mr Jorrocks.

“Vy!” he cried “’Ow delighted I am to see you! Binjamin! I say Binjamin you young warmint! Fetch a pair of bottles of the strong stout from under the sideboard and two clean rummers, mind, clean not viped with the tail of your shirt, for I knows your ’abits! Now, my dear young friend, ’ow can I serve you? Delighted to do anything in my power. The Surrey Subscription ’Unt meets at Croydon tomorrow, perhaps you’d care for a day with the ’ounds? Would do you a power of good, for you looks a little peaked — not quite the plump currant — ’opes it’s only dewotion to business,” he added, looking at me keenly, “and not wicious living? ‘Mens sane in Corporal saner ’ as my illustrious friend Nimrod says.”

I reassured him; vowed that I was in bed by ten each night (which was, in fact, true, so lustful I was in those days) and swallowed the strong, nourishing stout with many an appreciative smack of the lips, for this was his way of drinking and it seemed civil to emulate him.

“Compliments you on your tog, Mr Dutch,” he said, wiping the froth from his upper lip, “looks quite the thing, werry gentlemanlike.” (My coat, you may recall, was modelled upon his.) “But I feels the kickseys — for trowsers I shall not call them — is somewhat below your station in life — have a kind of groomish look. Pantaloons is the harticle; pantaloons and boots. Marks you out as a sportsman of quality.”

“Yes,” I said humbly.

“Now, ’ow can I serve you?”

“Mr J., I have been thinking about your edifying remarks on the opium trade and your statement that, had you been free to do so, you would have had a venture in it yourself.”

“True, true. But it’s werry risky.”

“I understand that, but, if you will forgive me, I am still a young man and the riskishness appeals to me; moreover, it seems to me that on such a voyage I would have the opportunity of buying superior Chinese porcelains of a kind for which there seems to be a brisk demand in London Town and which I cannot obtain in sufficient quantity either here or, indeed, in Holland.”

“My dear young Sir, the hopium-carrying trade is almost hentirely in the hands of a most reputable firm vich we calls Jardine Matheson (although Dent & Co. is bursting into the market), because the Hon. East India Co itself does not vish to sully its hands with so noxious a trade except for growing the poppies and taking the profits. Also, I understands that warious American colonial upstarts is carving themselves a knotch of the loaf and coming back with it buttered. But there is also wot they calls the country-trade, vich does not much frequent the treaty-ports, choosing rather to range up and down the Hokken Coast, running the goods in where they can and obtaining higher prices, despite the depperedations of pirates and wenal mandarins, then running back to the River to lay out the bar-silver on the new teas and bolts of silk.”

I thought about this as best I could, because I was not, in those days, clever, only avaricious.

“Mr Jorrocks,” I said at last, “could you introduce me to a person engaged in the country-trade part of this commerce, in order that I might buy a share in such a venture?”

He shifted his bottom uneasily in the capacious chair.

“I am not asking you to guarantee my credit,” I said, perhaps a little stiffly. He raised both hands protestingly.

“Nothink was further from my mind, Mr Dutch, pray do not for a hinstant think that my mind was dwelling on anything of the kind. Wot consarned me was the thought of a innocent young cock like you inwesting your tin in so werry perilous a wenture.”