My Uncle Oswald Read online

  The girl called Gwendoline was staring at the Major with huge eyes. 'Quite honestly I don't see what all the fuss was about,' she said. 'One teeny weeny little beetle isn't going to hurt anyone.'

  'My dear child,' the Major said, 'when the Blister Beetle is dried and crushed the resulting powder is called cantharidin. That's its pharmaceutical name. The Sudanese variety is called cantharidin sudanii. And this cantharidin sudanii is absolutely deadly. The maximum safe dose for a human, if there is such a thing as a safe dose, is one minim. A minim is one-sixtieth of a fluid ounce. Assuming I had just swallowed one whole fully grown Blister Beetle, that meant I'd received God knows how many hundreds of times the maximum dose.'

  'Jesus,' we said. 'Jesus Christ.'

  'The throbbing was so tremendous now, it was shaking my whole body,' the Major said.

  'A headache, you mean?' Gwendoline said.

  'No,' the Major said.

  'What happened next?' we asked him.

  'My member,' the Major said, 'was now like a white-hot rod of iron burning into my body. I leapt up from my chair and rushed to my car and drove like a madman for the nearest hospital, which was in Khartoum. I got there in forty minutes flat. I was scared fartless.'

  'Now wait just a minute,' the Gwendoline creature said. 'I'm still not quite following you. Exactly why were you so frightened?'

  What a dreadful girl. I should never have invited her. The Major, to his great credit, ignored her completely this time.

  'I dashed into the hospital,' he went on, 'and found the casualty room where an English doctor was stitching up somebody's knife wound. "Look at this!" I cried, taking it out and waving it at him.'

  'Waving what at him, for heaven's sake?' the awful Gwendoline asked.

  'Shut up, Gwendoline,' I said.

  'Thank you,' the Major said. 'The doctor stopped stitching and regarded the object I was holding out to him with some alarm. I quickly told him my story. He looked glum. There was no antidote for Blister Beetle, he informed me. I was in grave trouble. But he would do his best. So they stomach-pumped me and put me to bed and packed ice all around my poor throbbing member.'

  'Who did?' someone asked. 'Who's they?'

  'A nurse,' the Major answered. 'A young Scottish nurse with dark hair. She brought the ice in small rubber bags and packed it round and kept the bags in place with a bandage.'

  'Didn't you get frostbite?'

  'You can't get frostbite on something that's practically red-hot,' the Major said.

  'What happened next?'

  'They kept changing the ice every three hours day and night.'

  'Who, the Scottish nurse?'

  'They took it in turns. Several nurses.'

  'Good God.'

  'It took two weeks to subside.'

  'Two weeks!' I said. 'Were you all right afterwards, sir? Are you all right now?'

  The Major smiled and took another sip of wine. 'I am deeply touched,' he said, 'by your concern. You are obviously a young man who knows what comes first in this world, and what comes second. I think you will go far.'

  'Thank you, sir,' I said. 'But what happened in the end?'

  'I was out of action for six months,' the Major said, smiling wanly, 'but that is no hardship in the Sudan. Yes, if you want to know, I'm all right now. I made a miraculous recovery.'

  That was the story Major Grout had told us at my little party on the eve of my departure for France. And it set me thinking. It set me thinking very deeply indeed. In fact, that night, as I lay in bed with my bags all packed on the floor, a tremendously daring plan began rapidly to evolve in my head. I say 'daring' because, by God, it damn well was daring when you consider I was only seventeen years old at the time. Looking back on it now, I take my hat off to myself for even contemplating that sort of action. But the following morning my mind was made up.

  2

  I bade farewell to my parents on the platform at Victoria Station and boarded the boat train for Paris. I arrived that afternoon and checked in at the house where my father had arranged for me to board. It was on the Avenue Marceau, and the family, who were called Boisvain, took paying guests. Monsieur Boisvain was a civil servant of sorts and as unremarkable as the rest of his breed. His wife, a pale woman with short fingers and a flaccid rump, was in much the same mould as her husband, and I guessed that neither of them would give me any trouble. They had two daughters: Jeanette, aged fifteen, and Nicole who was nineteen. Mademoiselle Nicole was some kind of a freak, for while the rest of the family were typically small and neat and French, this girl was of Amazonian proportions. She looked to me like a sort of female gladiator. She could not possibly have stood less than six foot three in her bare feet, but she was none the less a well-made young gladiator with long nicely-turned legs and a pair of dark eyes that seemed to hold a number of secrets. It was the first time since puberty that I had encountered a woman who was not only tremendously tall but also attractive, and I was much impressed by what I saw. Since then, over the years, I have naturally sampled many a lofty wench and I must say that I rate them higher, on the whole, than their more diminutive sisters. When a woman is very tall, there is greater power and greater traction in her limbs for one thing, and of course there is also a good deal more substance to tangle with.

  In other words, I do enjoy a tall woman. And why shouldn't I? There's nothing freakish about that. But what is pretty freakish, in my opinion, is the extraordinary fact that women in general, and by that I mean all women everywhere, go absolutely dotty about tiny men. Let me explain at once that by 'tiny men' I don't mean ordinary tiny men like horse-jockeys and chimneysweeps. I mean genuine dwarfs, those minuscule bowlegged characters you see running around in circus arenas wearing pantaloons. Believe it or not, any one of these little fellows can, if he puts his mind to it, drive even the most frigid woman to distraction. Protest all you like, you lady readers. Tell me I'm crazy, misguided, ill-informed. But before you do that, I suggest you go away and talk to a female who has actually been worked over by one of these little men. She will confirm my findings. She will say yes yes yes, it's true, I'm afraid it's true. She will tell you they are repulsive but irresistible. An exceedingly ugly middle-aged circus-dwarf who stood no more than three feet six inches tall once told me that he could always have his pick of any woman in any room at any time. Very odd I find that.

  But to go back to Mademoiselle Nicole, the Amazonian daughter. She interested me at once, and as we shook hands, I applied a touch of extra pressure to her knuckles and watched her face. Her lips parted and I saw the tip of her tongue push out suddenly between her teeth. Very well, young lady, I told myself. You shall be number one in Paris.

  In case this sounds a bit brash coming from a seventeen-year-old stripling like me, I think you should know that even at that tender age, fortune had endowed me with far more than my share of good looks. Going back now over the family photographs of the time, I can see that I was a youth of quite piercing beauty. This is no more than a simple fact and it would be silly to pretend it wasn't true. Certainly, it had made things easy for me in London and I could honestly say that up to then I had not received a single snub. But I had not, of course, been playing the game for very long and no more than fifty or sixty young birds had come into my sights.

  In order to carry out the plan which the good Major Grout had put into my head, I straight away announced to Madame Boisvain that I would be leaving first thing in the morning to stay with friends in the country. We were still standing in the hall and we had just completed the handshakes. 'But Monsieur Oswald, you have only this minute arrived!' the good lady cried.

  'I believe my father has paid you six months in advance,' I said. 'If I am not here, you will save money on food.'

  Arithmetic like that will mollify the heart of any landlady in France, and Madame Boisvain made no further protest. At seven p.m. we sat down to the evening meal. It was boiled tripe with onions. This I consider to be the second most repulsive dish in the entire world. The most repul
sive dish is something that is eaten with gusto by jackaroos on sheep-stations in Australia.

  These jackaroos - and I might as well tell you about it so that you can avoid it if ever you should go that way - these jackaroos or sheep cowboys invariably castrate their male lambs in the following barbaric manner: two of them hold the creature upside down by its fore and hind legs. A third fellow slits the scrotum and squeezes the testicles outside the sac. He then bends forward and takes the testicles in his mouth. He closes his teeth on them and jerks them free from the unfortunate animal and spits this nauseating mouthful into a basin. It's no good you telling me these things don't happen because they do. I saw it all last year with my own eyes on a station near Cowra in New South Wales. And these idiots went on to inform me with pride that three competent jackaroos could castrate sixty lambs in sixty minutes and go on doing it all day long. A little jaw-ache was all one got, they said, but it was well worth it because the rewards were great.

  'What rewards?'

  'Ah ha,' they said, 'you just wait!' And in the evening I had to stand and watch while they fried the spoils in a pan with mutton fat over a wood fire. This gastronomic miracle is, I can assure you, the most revolting, the toughest, the most nauseating dish it is possible to imagine. Boiled tripe comes second.

  I keep digressing. I must get on. We are still in the Boisvain household having boiled tripe for supper. Monsieur B went into ecstasies over the stuff, making loud sucking noises and smacking his lips and shouting 'Delicieux! Ravissant! Formidable! Merveilleux!' with every mouthful. And then, when he had finished-would horrors never cease? - he calmly removed his entire set of false teeth and rinsed them in his fingerbowl.

  At midnight, when Monsieur and Madame B were well asleep, I slipped along the corridor and entered the bedroom of Mademoiselle Nicole. She was tucked up in an enormous bed and there was a candle burning on the table beside her. She received me, oddly enough, with a formal French handshake, but I can assure you there was nothing formal about what followed after that. I do not intend to dwell upon this little episode. It has nothing at all to do with the main part of my story. Let me just say that every rumour I had ever heard about the girls of Paris was substantiated during those few hours I spent with Mademoiselle Nicole. She made the glacial London debutantes seem like so many slabs of petrified wood. She went for me like a mongoose for a cobra. She suddenly had ten pairs of hands and half a dozen mouths. She was a contortionist to boot, and more than once amidst the whirring of limbs, I caught a glimpse of her ankles locked around the back of her neck. The girl was putting me through the wringer. She was stretching me beyond the point of endurance. I was not really ready at my age for such a severe examination as this, and after an hour or so of unremitting activity, I began to hallucinate. I remember imagining that my entire body was one long well-lubricated piston sliding smoothly back and forth within a cylinder whose walls were made of the smoothest steel. God only knows how long it went on, but at the end of it all I was suddenly brought back to my senses, by the sound of a deep calm voice saying, 'Very well, monsieur, that will do for the first lesson. I think, though, that it will be a long time before you get out of the kindergarten.'

  I staggered back to my room, bruised and chastened, and fell asleep.

  The next morning, in order to carry out my plan, I said farewell to the Boisvains and took a train for Marseilles. I had on me the six months expense money my father had provided before I left London, two hundred pounds in French francs. That was a lot of money in the year 1912.

  At Marseilles, I booked a passage for Alexandria on a French steamship of nine thousand tons called L'Imperatrice Josephine, a pleasant little passenger boat that ran regularly between Marseilles, Naples, Palermo and Alexandria.

  The trip was without incident except that I encountered on the first day out yet another tall female. This time she was a Turk, a tall dark-skinned Turkish lady who was so smothered in jewellery of all sorts that she tinkled as she walked. My first thought was that she would have worked wonders on top of a cherry tree to keep the birds away. My second thought, which followed very soon after the first, was that she had an exceptional shape to her body. The undulations in the region of her chest were so magnificent that I felt, as I gazed at them across the boat-deck, like a traveller in Tibet who was seeing for the first time the highest peaks in the Himalayas. The woman returned my gaze, her chin high and arrogant, her eyes travelling slowly down my body from head to toe, then up again. A minute later, she calmly strolled across and invited me to her cabin for a glass of absinthe. I'd never heard of the stuff in my life, but I went willingly, and I stayed willingly and I did not emerge again from that cabin until we docked at Naples three days later. I may well, as Mademoiselle Nicole had said, have been in the kindergarten and Mademoiselle Nicole herself was perhaps in the sixth form, but if that was so then the tall Turkish lady was a university professor.

  Things were made more difficult for me during this encounter by the fact that all the way between Marseilles and Naples, the ship was battling against a terrible storm. It pitched and rolled in the most alarming manner and more than once I thought we were going to capsize. When at last we were safely anchored in the Bay of Naples, and I was leaving the cabin, I said, 'Well, by gosh, I'm glad we made it. That was some storm we went through.'

  'My dear boy,' she said, hanging another cluster of jewellery round her neck, 'the sea has been as calm as glass all the way.'

  'Oh no, madame,' I said. 'It was a tremendous storm.'

  'That was no storm,' she said. 'It was me.'

  I was learning fast. I had learned above all - and I have confirmed this many times since - that to tangle with a Turk is like running fifty miles before breakfast. You have to be fit.

  I spent the rest of the voyage getting my wind back and by the time we docked at Alexandria four days later, I was feeling quite bouncy again. From Alexandria I took a train to Cairo. There I changed trains and went on to Khartoum.

  By God, it was hot in the Sudan. I was not dressed for the tropics but I refused to waste money on clothes that I would only be wearing for a day or two. In Khartoum, I got a room at a large hotel where the foyer was filled with Englishmen wearing khaki shorts and topees. They all had moustaches and magenta cheeks like Major Grout, and every one of them had a drink in his hand. There was a Sudanese hall-porter of sorts lounging by the entrance. He was a splendid handsome fellow in a white robe with a red tarbouche on his head, and I went up to him.

  'I wonder if you could help me?' I said, taking some French banknotes from my pocket and riffling them casually.

  He looked at the money and grinned.

  'Blister Beetles,' I said. 'You know about Blister Beetles?'

  Here it was, then. This was le moment critique. I had come all the way from Paris to Khartoum to ask that one question, and now I watched the man's face anxiously. It was certainly possible that Major Grout's story had been nothing more than an entertaining hoax.

  The Sudanese hall-porter's grin became wider still. 'Everyone knows about Blister Beetles, sahib,' he said. 'What you want?'

  'I want you to tell me where I can go out and catch one thousand of them.'

  He stopped grinning and stared at me as though I'd gone barmy. 'You mean live beetles?' he exclaimed. 'You want to go out and catch yourself one thousand live Blister Beetles?'

  'I do, yes.'

  'What you want live beetles for, sahib? They no good to you at all, those old live beetles.'

  Oh my God, I thought. The Major has been pulling our legs.

  The hall-porter moved closer to me and placed an almost jet black hand on my arm. 'You want jig-a-jig, right? You want stuff to make you go jig-a-jig?'

  'That's about it,' I said. 'More or less.'

  'Then you don't want to bother with them live beetles, sahib. All you want is powdered beetles.'

  'I had an idea I might take the beetles home and breed them,' I said. 'That way I'd have a permanent supply.'

  'In Engl
and?' he said.

  'England or France. Somewhere like that.'

  'No good,' he said, shaking his head. 'This little Blister Beetle he live only here in the Sudan. He needs very hot sun. Beetles will all die in your country. Why you not take the powder?'

  I could see I was going to have to make a slight adjustment in my plans. 'How much does the powder cost?' I asked him.

  'How much you want?'

  'A lot.'

  'You have to be very very careful with that powder, sahib. All you take is the littlest pinch otherwise you get into very serious trouble.'

  'I know that.'

  'Over here, we Sudanese men measure up one dose by pouring the powder over the head of a pin and what stays on the pinhead is one dose exactly. And that is not very much. So you better be careful, young sahib.'

  'I know all about that,' I said. 'Just tell me how I go about getting hold of a large quantity.'

  'What you mean by large quantity?'

  'Well, say about ten pounds in weight.'

  'Ten pounds!' he cried. 'That would take care of all the people in the whole of Africa put together!'

  'Five pounds then.'

  'What in the world you going to do with five pounds of Blister Beetle powder, sahib? Just a few ounces is a lifetime supply even for a big strong man like me.'

  'Never mind what I'm going to do with it,' I said. 'How much would it cost?'

  He laid his head on one side and considered this question carefully. 'We buy it in tiny packets,' he said. 'Quarter ounce each. Very expensive stuff.'

  'I want five pounds,' I said. 'In bulk.'

  'Are you staying here in the hotel?' he asked me.

  'Yes.'

  'Then I see you tomorrow with the answer. I must go around asking some questions.'

  I left it at that for the time being.

  The next morning the tall black hall-porter was in his usual place by the hotel entrance. 'What news of the powder?' I asked him.

  'I fix,' he said. 'I find a place where I can get you five pounds in weight of pure powder.'

  'How much will it cost?' I asked him.

  'You have English money?'