Chapter 11 Snakes Alive #3
“Gentlemen, good of you to join us,” Dangerfield said sarcastically when Evans and Flynn entered the office tardily after lunch.
“Punctuality is one of the bedrocks of civilization. I doubt that the Romans could have conquered the known world if they had turned up late for the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.”
“The Roman army was wiped out at Teutoburg,” Maud Ogilvie said with a helpful smile. Dangerfield ignored her.
He spent some time talking at them about national stocktaking and the need to defend our heritage and to recapture something of the sense of the greatness of Great Britain, along with some other quite meaningless verbiage.
Despite his assertive air, he was all bluff and bluster, Flynn thought.
The House of Commons would be a perfect home for his kind of sound and fury. It signified nothing.
None of them, not even the deferential Denholm (smiling placidly to himself), paid much attention to anything Dangerfield was saying.
He was not the first to come down from Upstairs in an attempt to brace them and undoubtedly he wouldn’t be the last. How irritating Dangerfield must find the general loucheness of the Festival, let alone the unhappy few who were standing before him at present.
Flynn tried to avoid thinking about the details of the unholy coupling of Dangerfield and Mitzi Blinkhorn, which might have produced the hybrid that was Cynthia Blinkhorn.
Archie Blinkhorn and Giles Dangerfield—fellow travellers in the British Fascist Union.
And Mitzi, who admired Diana’s style tremendously.
Did Dangerfield know her when she was still the notorious Ada Clegg?
He couldn’t help but laugh at the idea, and Dangerfield fixed him with a long look, the jade narrowing to gimlets. “It’s Flynn, isn’t it?”
Flynn felt himself being marked down again. They also serve who only stand and wait. “He’s rather saturnine, don’t you think?” Maud Ogilvie whispered in Flynn’s ear. “Women are drawn to him. It’s those eyes—wasted on a man, in my opinion.”
“Jade,” Flynn murmured.
“I would have said gooseberries—less romantic, perhaps. He seems like a man of substance, but really he’s just an empty vessel that people can pour their hopes and fears into.” She laughed, and Dangerfield, querulous now, said, “Do you have something you want to share?”
“Yes, actually. We need more paper clips, not trumpet calls,” Maud Ogilvie said crisply to Dangerfield.
“And we hardly have cause for triumphalism.” Their employment was temporary and would end with the Festival; it gave them all a certain licence to mutiny, although, out of all of them, she was the one most inclined to speak truth to power.
“And you haven’t mentioned the colonies, Mr. Dangerfield,” she carried on relentlessly.
“Didn’t we expose them to our ‘peaceful, democratic ideals,’ and yet they are barely represented at the Festival.
We plundered the Empire without receipt and yet it’s almost as if we have forgotten it happened. ”
Flynn heard Denholm groaning quietly, “Oh, God, I knew it—she is a Marxist.”
She hadn’t finished. “The lives and society of our Commonwealth brethren are represented by a ‘steel-pan band.’ Wonderful though that is, it is hardly representative. Should there not be more recognition of the Empire’s contribution to our prosperity?”
Dangerfield, unused to dissension in the ranks, was growing tetchy now.
His face, handsomely patrician in repose, took on an ugly caste when he was moved to anger, so they were all grateful when he was distracted by the approach of a cheerful, albeit tuneless, whistling that heralded the return of the puckish Boy.
He was carrying a luridly pink stick of rock, sausaged in shiny cellophane.
“Mr. Dangerfield,” the Boy said, tipping an imaginary cap when he entered the room. Dangerfield regarded both him and the rock with distaste, but the interruption seemed to signal his loss of interest in all of them.
“Well, anyway, keep up the good work, noses to the grindstone and so on,” he said. “We must deliver something splendid. Something truly English.”
“British,” Denholm said, following obediently on Dangerfield’s heels.
“Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir,” Evans muttered, snapping a surprisingly smart naval salute once Dangerfield was out of the door.
The Boy laughed, and said to Flynn, “Said Mr. Dangerfield was an arse, didn’t I?”
“A cunty fuck of an arse,” Evans corrected him.
“Mr. Evans!”
—
Badger returned and said, “Did I miss anything?”
“Only Dangerfield trying to give us a pep-talk,” Flynn told him.
“I take it he’s slithered back to his dark cave.”
“He has.”
“But look what I’ve got, Mr. Badger,” the Boy said eagerly. “Festival Rock—like at the seaside. Have you been to Ramsgate, Mr. Badger?” A day trip to Ramsgate last year had been the highlight of the Boy’s existence so far.
“I’m afraid to say that I haven’t.”
“You should, it’s got everything. It’s the best place I’ve ever been.
So, see this rock—instead of having ‘Ramsgate’ written all the way through it, it says ‘Festival Rock.’ It’s going to be made on the site and then sold from a stall on the Fairway.
Let’s try it. I could break it on the edge of your desk, Mr. Evans. ”
“I could break it on your head,” Evans offered.
“I have something much more fit for the purpose,” Maud Ogilvie said, reaching beneath her desk for her bag and producing a small toffee hammer.
“I find it very useful in all sorts of situations.” Flynn tried to imagine a situation in which he would find a toffee hammer useful.
You could kill a bird or a mouse with a tap on the head.
Or a snake. He had eaten snake in Burma.
It had been a skinny thing, shared between five men and eaten raw.
Something like that could be the difference between living and dying.
Certainly for the snake. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the French adders, plucked from some warm pleasant lair in Provence to be displayed in “acrylic plastic,” whatever that was.
The Boy set about gleefully smashing the pink rock, before unpeeling the cellophane and handing round the sticky shards and splinters.
“No, thanks,” Evans said. “I won’t risk my dentures.”
“You should be careful,” Flynn said to Maud Ogilvie when she delicately picked out a small piece. “You know, with your diabetes.”
“Oh, no need to worry about me, Mr. Flynn. I should worry about yourself, if I were you.” (What did she mean by that?)
“Gets in your teeth, doesn’t it?” Denholm said.
“Terence,” Maud Ogilvie said to the Boy, “when you’ve finished your rock, would you care to escort me to the Royal Docks? I expect you know the docks quite well.”
“Certainly do, Miss. Why are we going to the docks?”
“We are meeting a banana boat called the San Matteo that sailed from Port of Spain. That’s in Trinidad, in the West Indies.” The only thing the Boy recognized from this entire sentence was “banana.”
“We’re picking up bananas?” The Boy’s face lit up. “They’re still on the ration, my ma says.”
“No, something even better—we’re going to help greet a steel band off the boat. Or, to give them their full title, the Trinidad All-Steel Pan Percussion Orchestra.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“Their instruments are oil drums.”
“Oil drums?” The Boy frowned, trying to imagine how to get a tune out of an oil drum.
“I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“But no bananas? I’ve never had one.”
“Wash your hands first, dear, they look rather sticky.”