My Uncle Oswald Read online

  'Not in the neck,' I said.

  'Stop trying to be funny, Oswald.' She sat there looking glum. A. R. Woresley said nothing.

  'If you have a month's holiday now,' I said, 'will you come to America with me immediately after that?'

  'Yes, all right.'

  'You're going to enjoy Rudolph Valentino.'

  'I doubt it,' she said. 'I think my romping days are over.'

  'Never!' I cried. 'You might as well be dead!'

  'Romping isn't everything.'

  'Jesus, Yasmin. You're talking like Bernard Shaw!'

  'Maybe I'll become a nun.'

  'But you will come to America first?'

  'I've already told you I would,' she said.

  A. R. Woresley took his pipe out of his mouth and said, 'We've got a remarkable collection, Cornelius, truly remarkable. When do we start selling?'

  'We mustn't hurry it,' I said. 'My feeling is that we should not put any man's sperm up for sale until after he's dead.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'Great men are more interesting dead than alive. They become legends when they're dead.'

  'Maybe you're right,' Woresley said.

  'We've got plenty of ancient ones on the list,' I said. 'Most of them aren't going to last very long. I'll bet you fifty per cent of the whole lot will be gone in five or ten years.'

  'Who's going to do the selling when the time comes?' Woresley asked.

  'I am,' I said.

  'You think you can manage it?'

  'Look,' I said. 'At the tender age of seventeen I had no trouble whatsoever in selling red pills to the French Foreign Minister, to a dozen Ambassadors and to just about every big shot in Paris. And just recently I have successfully sold Lady Victoria Nottingham to all the crowned heads of Europe bar one.'

  'I did that,' Yasmin said. 'Not you.'

  'Oh no you didn't,' I said. 'King George's letter did the selling and that was my idea. So you don't seriously think I'm going to have any trouble selling the seeds of genius to a bunch of rich females, do you?'

  'Perhaps not,' Woresley said.

  'And by the way,' I said, 'if I'm the one who does all the selling, I think I ought to be entitled to a bigger cut of the profits.'

  'Hey!' Yasmin cried. 'Now you just stop that, Oswald!'

  'The agreement was equal shares all round,' Woresley said, looking hostile.

  'Calm down,' I said. 'I was only joking.'

  'I should damn well hope so,' Yasmin said.

  'As a matter of fact, I think Arthur should have the major share because he invented the whole process,' I said.

  'Well, I must say that's very generous of you, Cornelius,' Woresley said, beaming.

  'Forty per cent to the inventor and thirty per cent each to Yasmin and me,' I said. 'Would you agree to that, Yasmin?'

  'I'm not sure I would,' she said. 'I've worked damn hard on this. I want my one-third.'

  What neither of them knew was that I had long since decided that I myself was the one who would take the major share in the end. Yasmin, after all, would never need very much. She liked to dress well and to eat good food but that was about as far as it went. As for old Woresley, I doubted whether he'd know what to do with a large sum of money even if he had it. Pipe tobacco was about the only luxury he ever permitted himself. But I was different. The style of living to which I aspired made it absolutely necessary that I have a fortune at my fingertips. It was impossible for me to tolerate indifferent champagne or mild discomfort of any sort. The way I looked at it, the best, and by that I mean only the very best, was not nearly good enough for me.

  I figured that if I gave them ten per cent each and took eighty for myself, then they ought to be happy. They would scream blue murder at first, but when they realized there was nothing they could do about it, they would soon settle down and be grateful for small mercies. Now there was of course only one way in which I could put myself in the position of being able to dictate terms to the other two. I must get possession of The Semen's Home and all the treasures it contained. Then I must move it to a safe and secret place where neither of them could reach it. That would not be difficult. As soon as Yasmin and I had returned from America, I would hire a removal van and drive up to 'Dunroamin' when the place was empty and make off with the precious treasure chest.

  No problem.

  But a bit of a dirty trick, some of you may be thinking? A bit caddish?

  Rubbish, I say. You'll never get anywhere in this world unless you grab your opportunities. Charity has never begun at home. Not in my home anyway.

  'So when will you two be going to America?' A. R. Woresley asked us.

  I got out my diary. 'One month from now will be Saturday the fifteenth of May,' I said. 'How's that with you, Yasmin?'

  'The fifteenth of May,' she said, taking her own diary from her purse. 'That seems all right. I'll meet you here on the fifteenth. In four weeks' time.'

  'And I'll book cabins on the Mauretania for as soon as possible after that.'

  'Fine,' she said, writing the date in her diary.

  'Then we'll collar old Henry Ford and Mr Marconi and Rudolph Valentino and all the other Yanks.'

  'Don't forget Alexander Graham Bell,' Woresley said.

  'We'll get the lot,' I said. 'After a month's rest, the old girl will be roaring to go again, you see if she isn't.'

  'Hope so,' Yasmin said. 'But I do need a rest, honestly I do.'

  'Where will you go?'

  'Up to Scotland to stay with an uncle.'

  'Nice uncle?'

  'Very,' she said. 'My father's brother. He fishes for salmon.'

  'When are you leaving?'

  'Right now,' she said. 'My train goes in about an hour. Will you take me to the station?'

  'Of course I will,' I said. 'I I myself am off to London.'

  I drove Yasmin to the station and helped her into the waiting-room with her bags. 'See you in exactly a month,' I said. 'At "Dunroamin".'

  'I'll be there,' she said.

  'Have good hols.'

  'Same to you, Oswald.'

  I kissed her farewell and drove down to London. I went straight to my house in Kensington Square. I was feeling good. The great scheme was actually coming to pass. I could see myself in about five years' time sitting with some silly rich female and her saying to me, 'I rather fancy Renoir, Mr Cornelius. I do so adore his pictures. How much does he cost?'

  'Renoir is seventy-five thousand, madam.'

  'And how much is a king?'

  'That depends which one.'

  'This one here. The dark good-looking one - King Alfonso of Spain.'

  'King Alfonso is forty thousand dollars, madam.'

  'You mean he's less than Renoir?'

  'Renoir was a greater man, madam. His sperm is exceedingly rare.'

  'What happens if it doesn't work, Mr Cornelius? I mean if I don't become pregnant.'

  'You get a free go.'

  'And who would actually perform the insemination?'

  'A senior gynaecologist, madam. It would all be most carefully planned.'

  'And my husband would never find out?'

  'How could he? He'd think he'd done it himself.'

  'I suppose he would, wouldn't he?' She giggles.

  'Bound to, madam.'

  'It would be rather nice to have a child by the King of Spain, wouldn't it?'

  'Have you considered Bulgaria, madam. Bulgaria is a bargain at twenty thousand.'

  'I don't want a Bulgar brat, Mr Cornelius, even if he is royal.'

  'I quite understand, madam.'

  'And then of course there's Mr Puccini. La Boheme is absolutely my favourite opera. How much is Mr Puccini?'

  'Giacomo Puccini is sixty-seven thousand five hundred, madam. He is strongly recommended. The child would almost certainly be a musical genius.'

  'I play the piano a bit myself.'

  'That would help the baby's chances enormously.'

  'I expect it would, wouldn't it?'

 
'Confidentially, madam, I can tell you that a certain lady in Dallas, Texas had a Puccini boy three years ago and the child has already composed his first opera.'

  'You don't say.'

  'Thrilling, isn't it?'

  I was going to have a lot of fun once the selling started. But right now I had before me one whole month in which to do nothing except enjoy myself. I decided to remain in London. I'd have a real fling. I deserved it. Throughout most of the winter I'd been chasing after kings all over Europe and the time had come for some serious wenching.

  And what wenching it was. I went on a proper bender. For three weeks out of the four I had a glorious time (see Vol. III). Then suddenly, at the beginning of the fourth and final week of my vacation when I was really in full flood and churning the ladies of London to such purpose you could hear the bones rattling all over Mayfair, a devilish incident occurred that put an immediate stopper on all my activities. Terrible it was. Diabolical. Even to think about it at this distance causes me sharp physical pain. None the less, I feel I ought to describe this sordid episode in the hope that it may save a few other sportsmen from a similar catastrophe.

  I do not usually sit in the bathtub at the wrong end with my back to the taps. Few people do. But on this particular afternoon, the other end, the comfortable slopy end, was occupied by a saucy little imp who possessed hyperactive carnal proclivities. That's why she was there.The fact that she happened also to be an English duchess is not entirely beside the point either. Had I been a few years older I would have known what to expect from a female of high rank, and I'd have been a good deal less careless. Most of these women have acquired their titles by ensnaring some poor benighted peer or duke, and it takes a very special kind of mendacity and guile to succeed at that game. To become a duchess you must be a prime manipulator of men. I have tangled with a fair number of them in my time and they're all alike. Marchionesses and countesses are not quite so ghoulish but they run the duchesses a close second. Dally with them by all means. It is a piquant experience. But for heaven's sake keep your wits about you while you're at it. You never know, you positively never can tell when they're going to turn and bite the hand that strokes them. Watch out, I say, for the female with a grand title.

  Anyway, this duchess and I had been jouncing for an hour or so in the bathtub, and now that she had had enough she threw the soap at my face and stepped out of the water. The large slimy missile caught me on the mouth, but as none of my teeth were dislodged or even loosened I ignored the incident. In point of fact, she had done it simply to quieten me down and to give her a chance to get away, which it did.

  'Come back in,' I said, wanting a second helping.

  'I've got to go,' she answered. She was keeping her distance as she dried her trim little body with one of my huge towels.

  'It's only half-time,' I pleaded.

  'The trouble with you, Oswald, is you don't know when to stop,' she said. 'One day someone's going to lose patience with you.'

  'Frigid bitch,' I said. It was a silly thing to say and quite untrue, but I said it.

  She went into the next room to get dressed. I remained sitting in the bath, silent and feeling thwarted. I didn't like it when others called the tune.

  'Goodbye, darling,' she said coming back into the bathroom. She was wearing a short-sleeved silk dress, dark green.

  'Go home, then,' I said. 'Go back to your ridiculous duke.'

  'Don't be so grumpy,' she said. She walked over to me and bent down and began to massage my back under the water. Then her hand slid around to other areas, caressing and teasing gently. I sat still, enjoying it all and wondering whether she wasn't perhaps going to start melting all over again.

  Now you won't believe this, but all the time the little vixen was pretending to play around with me, what she was actually doing was surreptitiously and with consummate stealth removing the plug from the plughole in the bottom of the bathtub. As you know, when the plug is withdrawn from a bath that is brimful of water, the suction down the plughole is immensely powerful. And when a man is sitting astride that plughole as I was at that moment, then it is inevitable that the two most tender and valuable objects in his possession are going to be sucked very suddenly into that dreadful hole. There was a dull plop as my scrotum took the full force of the suction and flew into the neck of the hole. I let out a scream that must have been heard clear across Kensington Square.

  'Goodbye, darling,' said the duchess, sweeping out of the bathroom.

  In the excruciating moments that followed I learned exactly what it must feel like to fall into the hands of those Bedouin women who delight in depriving a traveller of his masculinity with blunt knives. 'Help!' I screamed. 'Save me!' I was impaled. I was glued to the tub. I was clutched in the claws of a mighty crab.

  It seemed like hours but I don't suppose I was actually stuck in that position for more than ten or fifteen minutes. It was quite long enough though. I don't even know how I eventually managed to prise myself free all in one piece. But the damage was done. Powerful suction is a terrible thing and those two precious jewels of mine which were normally no bigger than a couple of greengages had suddenly assumed the size of cantaloupe melons. I think it was old Geoffrey Chaucer way back in the fourteenth century who wrote:

  Ladies with titles

  Will go for your vitals

  and those immortal words, believe me, are now engraved upon my heart. For three days I was on crutches and for God knows how long after that I walked about like a man who was harbouring a porcupine between his thighs.

  It was in this crippled condition that I made my way up to Cambridge on May 15th to keep my appointment with Yasmin at 'Dunroamin'. As I got out of the car and hobbled towards the front-door, my marbles were still on fire and throbbing like the devil's drum. Yasmin, of course, would be wanting to know what had happened to me. So would Woresley. Should I tell them the truth? If I did, Yasmin would fall all over the room laughing, and I could already hear Woresley in his silly pompous way saying, 'You are altogether too carnal, my dear Cornelius. No man can debauch himself the way you do without paying a heavy price.'

  I didn't think I could stand that sort of thing right then so I decided to tell them I had strained a ligament in my thigh. I had done it while helping an old lady after she had stumbled and taken a heavy fall on the pavement outside my house. I had carried her indoors and looked after her until the ambulance came, but it had all been a bit too much for me, etc., etc. That would do it.

  I stood under the little porch outside the front door of 'Dunroamin' and fished for my key. As I was doing this, I noticed there was an envelope pinned to the door. Someone had fixed it on firmly with a drawing-pin. Damn silly thing to do. I couldn't get the pin out so I ripped the envelope away. There was no name on it so I opened it. Foolish not to put a name on the envelope. Was it for me? Yes, it was.

  Dear Oswald,

  Arthur and I got married last week...

  Arthur? Who the hell was Arthur?

  We have gone far away and I hope you won't mind too much but we've taken the Semen's Home with us, at least all of it except Proust...

  Jesus Christ! Arthur must be Woresley! Arthur Woresley!

  Yes, we have left you Proust. I never did like the little bugger anyway. All fifty of his straws are safely stored in the travelling container in the basement and the Proust letter is in the desk. We have all the other letters with us safe and sound...

  I was reeling. I couldn't read on. I unlocked the door and staggered inside and found a bottle of whiskey. I sloshed some into a glass and gulped it down.

  If you stop and think about it, Oswald, I'm sure you'll agree we're not really doing the dirty on you and I'll tell you why. Arthur says...

  I didn't give a damn what Arthur said. They'd stolen the precious sperm. It was worth millions. I was willing to bet it was that little sod Woresley who'd put Yasmin up to it.

  Arthur says that after all it was him who invented the process, wasn't it? And it was me who did all
the hard work of collecting it. Arthur sends you his best wishes.

  Toodle-oo

  Yasmin Woresley

  A real snorter, that. Right below the belt. It had me gasping.

  I roared round the house in a wild fury. My stomach was boiling and I'm sure steam was spurting out of my nostrils. Had there been a dog in the place I'd have kicked it to death. I kicked the furniture instead. I smashed a lot of nice big things and then I set about picking up all the smaller objects, including a Baccarat paperweight and an Etruscan bowl, and flinging them through the windows, yelling bloody murder and watching the window-panes shatter.

  But after an hour or so, I began to simmer down, and finally I collapsed into an armchair with a large glass of malt whiskey in my hand.

  I am, as you may have gathered, a fairly resilient fellow. I explode when provoked, but I never brood about it afterwards. I scrub it out. There's always another day. What's more, nothing stimulates my mind so much as a whopping disaster. In the aftermath, in that period of deadly calm and absolute silence that follows the tempest, my brain becomes exceedingly active. As I sat drinking my whiskey during that terrible evening amidst the ruins of 'Dunroamin', I was already beginning to ponder and plan my future all over again.

  So that's that, I told myself. I've been diddled. It's all over. Need a new start. I still have Proust and in years to come I shall do well with those fifty straws (and don't think I didn't), but that isn't going to make me a millionaire. So what next?

  It was at this point that the great and wonderful answer began trickling into my head. I sat quite still, allowing the idea to take root and grow. It was inspired. It was beautiful in its simplicity. It couldn't fail. It would make me millions. Why hadn't I thought of it before?

  I promised at the beginning of this diary to tell you how I became a wealthy man. I have taken a long time so far in telling you how I did not succeed. Let me therefore make up for lost time and describe to you in no more than a few paragraphs how I did in the end become a real multi-millionaire. The great idea that came to me so suddenly in 'Dunroamin' was as follows:

  I would go back at once to the Sudan. I would negotiate with a corrupt government official for a lease of that precious tract of land where the hashab tree grows and the Blister Beetle flourishes. I would obtain sole rights to all beetle-hunting. I would gather the native beetle-hunters together and form them into an organized unit. I would pay them generously, far more than they were getting at present by flogging their Beetles in the open market. They would work exclusively for me. Poachers would be ruthlessly eliminated. I would, in fact, corner the market in Sudanese Blister Beetles. When all this was arranged and I was assured of a large and regular supply of Beetles, I would build a little factory in Khartoum and there I would process my Beetles and manufacture in quantity Professor Yousoupoff's famous Potency Pills. I would package the pills in the factory. I would then set up a small secret underground sales unit with offices in Paris, London, NewYork, Amsterdam and other cities throughout the world. I told myself that if a callow seventeen-year-old youth had been able to earn himself a hundred thousand pounds in one year in Paris all by himself, just think what I could do now on a world-wide basis.