When I arrived at the Café the next day, I had in my briefcase a notebook containing a peace offering. It was one of my lists. ‘Mr’ prefix, commercial enterprises. I showed it to Merle and Spilkin at once.
Spilkin’s eyes glittered. ‘Mr Bathroom, Mr Cupboard, Mr Juice … Mr Propshaft … Mr Spare Parts! Who are these people, Tearle? Friends of yours? Or family?’
‘Businesses. Culled from the telephone directories when I was employed by Posts and Telecommunications. I thought you might find the phenomenon interesting.’
‘I do.’
‘As I recall, the mania was started by a Mr X-haust, as they chose to spell it, back in the seventies. There was a logo too: a little man in overalls with a stethoscope around his neck for auscultating the Wankel engine.’ The eponym, skilfully inserted into the flow of the conversation, went unremarked. ‘Dr Exhaust, then, strictly speaking.’
‘Perhaps he was a surgeon.’
‘Mr X-haust,’ said Merle. ‘It’s quaintly polite. If he got into the newspapers these days, they’d call him plain old X-haust.’
‘Well, it struck me as odd at the time. As if the title alone rendered the enterprise reliable. Not Bertie X-haust, or X-haust and Co, but Mr X-haust. An exhaust man of the old school, someone you could trust to tinker with your manifold.’
‘It’s better than Uncle,’ said Spilkin.
‘You’ve got an uncle in the furniture business.’
‘Or “Oom”, which one also comes across.’
‘The extraordinary thing is how it caught on. The next year there were half a dozen copycats in the directory: Mr Frosty — an ice-cream maker — Mr Ladder, Mr Plastic, Mr Sweets. And more and more every year — a full column within five editions. Then a couple of Doctors, a brace of Sirs — Sir Juice and Sir Rubble — and even a Missus or two. I haven’t updated my list for a while, but it shouldn’t surprise me if they ran to a page by now.’
Eveready brought us the 1987 directory from behind the counter.
‘More than a page,’ Merle said. ‘They should form an organization.’
‘A union.’
‘A support group. Mr Furniture would be chairman.’
‘Chairperson,’ Spilkin corrected her. ‘And I propose Mr Cash and Carry for Treasurer.’
‘What about this Mr Spare Parts …’
‘He could do the catering.’
‘A resurrection man,’ I should have said, ‘or a muti murderer.’ One could joke about such things in those days, people saw the funny side of it, and understood that one meant no harm. But I just sat there with a mouth full of false teeth. Frosty ~ fugleman ~ fugle ~ fumigate. The wrong associations. Anyway, I could hardly have got a word in edgeways. They went at it hammer and tongs, just as I’d hoped they might, for a good twenty minutes. Unashamedly light-hearted fun. When Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, Spilkin dubbed her Mrs Tuning Fork and she was tickled. Then Merle said I was in the Book too, and pointed to Mr Crusty. A jest, but wounding nevertheless, given the unavoidable connotations of ‘dryness’. Crusty: irritable, curt, says the Concise. Also crust-like, hard — a veiled reference, perhaps, to my excrescences. It was then, in an attempt to crack off my crustiness with levity, that I suggested we boil the last half-hour’s shenanigans down into something for the Reader’s Digest, under the rubric of ‘Towards More Picturesque Speech’ or ‘Life’s Like That’. They pooh-poohed the idea (to be picturesque for a moment).
But when Merle went to the Ladies’ room, Spilkin leant over — Mrs Mavrokordatos had ouzoed him again, to judge by his liquorish, little-boy breath — and whispered in my ear, ‘You were made for each other: Mr and Mrs Dictionary.’
*
From that day forward, I vowed to adopt a more relaxed approach towards social intercourse and to take the whole idea of fun more seriously. And I sustained that effort, through thick and thin, in one way or another, until the curtain — and everything else — fell on the Goodbye Bash.
I initiated several games along the lines of ‘Wellington in plimsolls’. I tracked down cryptic clues for Spilkin in the papers and made up some of my own, most memorably the classics ‘Sautéd poet’ (8) and ‘female cannibal’ (3–5). Anecdotes of the more tasteful kind, which were occasionally to be found on the wireless, I transcribed into my notebook and brought out at opportune moments. I tried to be lighter, moister and less crusty, like a good soufflé. Once or twice, I ventured to clap along with Mevrouw Bonsma’s cheerier medleys.
In those golden days of the Café Europa, which were then beginning, I might have gone too far. My imagination was awakening from a long slumber, like some Rip van Winkel, and was bound to overreach as it stretched its limbs in a new world. (The comparison is unsuited in some ways, as my sleeping habits have always been perfectly normal, and I’ve never been married, much less henpecked, but it can stand.) Looking back, I would say that the handclapping was certainly a mistake. I also delivered a few witticisms that might have been better suppressed, although it was never my intention to wound, as some would claim afterwards. But my most immoderate indiscretion was a practical joke, a form of wit I had always considered the lowest, fathoms below sarcasm (which strikes me as perfectly acceptable in a red-blooded fray).
All four of us were at the table one afternoon when Spilkin started the crossword. He was milling around, struggling to find the first indispensable ‘spilkin’, as even the most proficient puzzlers sometimes do, and Merle said, ‘Need a hand there?’
‘It’s a tricky one. I’ll get it going in a minute.’
‘It can’t be that hard.’ Merle was not a crossword puzzler herself — she said the people who compiled them had all the fun — and she was just pulling his leg. But her teasing prodded some sense of fun in me, or perhaps it was a cunning streak that I mistook for that etiolated sense.
I said, ‘He exaggerates how difficult it is, to make you admire him. The Star’s crossword is laughably simple. The cryptic clues would pass for straight clues in any normally endowed society. Intellectually speaking.’
‘Bosh,’ said Spilkin, ‘it takes you hours.’
‘Because I stretch it out to prolong the pleasure. I could do it in ten minutes flat if I wanted to — but what’s the point of rushing?’
‘I’d like to see you get it out faster than me.’
‘Sounds like a challenge, Aubrey.’
‘Name your weapons.’
He waggled the Waterman. Perfect. Eveready brought my copy of the newspaper from behind the counter. I extracted the Tonight! section, turned to the puzzle and folded the straight clues under. Sharpened my pencil and poised it. Nodded to Merle to start the clock.
‘One across,’ I said. ‘Poetry serves badly.’ And paused for a finely judged second. ‘Verses.’ I spoke it out loud and wrote it in. Spilkin followed suit. ‘Two across: Safely wired near the dangerous part.’ One thousand and one, one thousand and two. ‘Earthed.’ Wrote that in. ‘One down: Muddled reports etc looking back. Retrospect.’
Now that I had the attention of the table I fell silent, except for making popping sounds with my lips and palatal clicks with the tip of my tongue. It was an extraordinary performance, even if I say so myself, for someone to whom the very notion of putting on a show was anathema. The timing was masterly. I let as much as twenty seconds slip by between certain clues and then, just when they thought I had stalled, rattled off three in as much time again. I had the whole thing out in six and a half minutes, including a magnanimous minute of grace allowing Spilkin — who had given up his own efforts to gaze at me, envious and amazed — a shot at the last clue.