‘Why?’
‘Have it your own way. I’ll tell you over lunch. You just lie back on the bed and we’ll eat.’ In a few minutes nuns with trays knocked and entered and began laying out the food on the huge sofa next to Henri. There was beef with German custard, a blancmange of signal crab with sugar lumps, fried chicken and a plate heaped high with the crispiest pork crackling dripping soft fat and foot-long doozle-dogs with tomato ketchup and yellow mustard sauce. There was caviar from Nigeria and champagne from the Ukraine. And then rosewater jellies mixed with curds to finish off.
While they ate, Cale took Vague Henri through the details of Picarbo’s manifesto.
When he’d finished asking questions Vague Henri was silent for a minute and then shook his head as if trying to shake something off.
‘And I thought Bosco was completely nafi. How can you be that mad and live?’
They both giggled, back to sharing their past again.
‘And the girls don’t know anything about this?’ said Vague Henri.
‘They think that we’ve been sent here to choose them as wives and that we really do have white horses and silver armour. No, really. They’re clever enough but they don’t know anything. All they’ve ever been taught is that men are like angels – brave and courageous and kind and noble and strong. Only now and then some men might get very angry because a devil makes them but that even if they hit them they have to be kind and say sorry and be nice and then the devil in them will go away and everything will be all right again.’
‘You didn’t try telling them the truth?’
‘I don’t know how. I thought you might have some ideas but you just listen to them and let them make you better first. You’ve never heard anything like the drivel they come out with. But they believe it – every word.’
‘I’m not going to do anything to them.’
‘They won’t mind.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Do what you want or don’t want. If they’re willing, why not? You could be dead in a few weeks and so could they if Bosco makes up his mind what to do with them. Live, eat and be happy for tomorrow we die – isn’t that what IdrisPukke said?’
‘Just because IdrisPukke said it doesn’t make it true.’
‘Have it your own way.’
So it was that Vague Henri was taken to the wet and dry room.
13
Windowless and lit by beeswax candles so that it did not smell or feel like the inside of an oven, the wet and dry room in the convent of the Sanctuary was lined with red cedar from Lebanon and on the floor with menge from no one knew where but prized for its resistance to water and soap. In the middle of the room were two wooden squares that looked like oiled butcher’s blocks. A curious Vague Henri, full of anticipation and worry, was led into the room by the two chosen girls. One introduced herself as Annunziata and the other as Judith.
‘What are your surnames?’
‘We only have one name,’ said Judith.
‘Are you,’ enquired a hopeful Annunziata, ‘feeling ill-tempered?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It would,’ said Judith, ‘be a help to us if you were to shout at us.’
‘And slam those doors to the cupboards.’
‘Why?’
‘We’d like to practise calming you down.’
‘Why?’
‘Men shout a lot, don’t they?’
Bewildered by what they wanted from him, Vague Henri had to concede that in his experience this was indeed true.
‘We asked Mr Cale to shout at us but he said it wasn’t a good idea.’
‘Probably that’s true.’
‘Will you? Oh please!’
They were so sweetly beseeching that awkward as he felt, Vague Henri thought it would be churlish to say no. Five minutes later he was sitting in the corner of the room weeping as if his heart would break while the girls, pale and bewildered themselves now, stared down at him, shaken by the storm of fury that had erupted from the sweet young man, sobbing uncontrollably in front of them.
After ten minutes the agony began to pass and the girls helped Vague Henri to his feet.
‘Sorry,’ he kept saying. ‘Sorry.’
‘There, there,’ replied Judith.
‘Yes,’ added Annunziata, ‘there, there.’
They led him over to one of the large blocks of wood, after stripping him of his shirt and trousers and socks. He vaguely resisted when they started to remove his loincloth but ‘We have to wash you,’ they said as if it was as immutable as the laws of God. He was too tired to resist. The girls sighed at the ancient scars and the new cuts and bruises from the beatings in Clink Number Two and asked him so gently how he had come by them that he almost started crying again.
‘I slipped on a bar of soap,’ he said, and laughed and so was able to control himself. Seeing he was unwilling to tell them the girls left him and went and fetched hot water and soap which they knew he had not slipped on because it was clear he had not seen soap for some time. Judith poured a bucket of hot water over him in a careful flow from head to foot and Annunziata began to work up a great frothy blanket of suds, so very careful not to press too hard on his cuts and bruises. Over the next hour they squeezed and rubbed and eased his aching body so gently and with such skill that he fell asleep and when they finished he did not wake even when they dried him carefully, like a baby, in every crease and fold and dusted him with fine talcum from the chalk farms of Meribah and scented him with oil of apricots. They covered him in towels and left him to sleep. He did not wake up until late in the evening when the girls returned, took him to the dining room and fed him all over again and questioned him about his life outside. There wasn’t any point he thought in telling them anything unpleasant; nor did he want to. So he told them about his life in Memphis as they gasped in amazement and delighted in every word about its dreaming spires, its frantic markets and its golden youth – its great men, its snow queen women (‘How?‘ they cried in horror, ‘Why?‘). Sitting there drinking and eating and wonderfully at ease with these two beautiful girls hanging on his every word he was aware even as he talked that this was something that might never come his way again. But the delight was not over. When their curiosity was satisfied, if only temporarily, the two girls had more in store for him. But about that it is not necessary to say anything.
14
‘Only God and those girls could love you for yourself,’ said Cale to Vague Henri after two weeks of being handed from one set of girls to the next as if he were a wonderful prize. ‘The poor things just don’t know any better.’
‘All the more reason to enjoy it while it lasts.’
And there was no arguing with that. One night one of the girls who had drunk more wine that she was capable of holding had blabbed to Vague Henri that he was by far the girls’ favourite of the two boys. Obviously delighted, Vague Henri had demanded to be told more and, despite the scolding of her partner, the loquacious girl had happily spilled all the pearls. ‘Your friend is always either sad or angry,’ she complained. ‘Nothing we do really delights him, not like you. He can be such hard work. You know what we call him, some of us?’
‘Can’t you keep your big mouth shut for once,’ scolded her friend.
‘Shut up, you! We call him – we call him Vinegar Tom.’
‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Vague Henri, a little maudlin because he too had taken too much wine. ‘He has a broken heart.’
‘Really?’ said the girl and fell asleep. But the other girl, Vincenza, was a clever thing and, as was her smart practice, having hardly touched a drop questioned the loose-tongued Vague Henri and got the whole story out of him.