But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly fee, “Oh. Well that’s all right then.”
When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you feel like that pretty often.
“Oh yes,” he said, “they come and see me. They sit right here. They sit right where you’re sitting.”
He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.
“They eat nachos which they say they can’t get where they come from. They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things.”
“Do they?” said Arthur. “Are they? So, er … when is this then? When do they come?”
He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over, but they couldn’t bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they’d been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland.
Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing patterns in it with her fingers.
“Weekends, mostly,” said Wonko the Sane, “on little scooters. They are great machines.” He smiled.
“I see,” said Arthur. “I see.”
A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked round at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in the sand of the two of them in the clouds. For a moment he thought she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that she was rebuking him. “Who are we,” she was saying, “to say he’s mad?”
His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like.
What it was like was this:
It was inside out.
Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.
Where it got really odd was the roof.
It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of this narrative’s purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.
Confusing.
The sign above the front door said, “Come Outside”, and so, nervously, they had.
Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.
And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.
“Hello,” said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.
Good, they thought to themselves, “Hello” is something we can cope with.
“Hello,” they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.
For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, “I forget …” whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly round the eccentricities of his house.
“It gives me pleasure,” he said, “in a curious kind of way, and does nobody any harm,” he continued, “that a competent optician couldn’t correct.”
They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed able to mock himself before anybody else did.