“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nobody quite knows.”
“Doesn’t he practice the noble art?”
“No,” I said. “He’s not interested in sex. He appears to be a sort of capon.”
“Oh hell.”
“He’s a lanky, garrulous old capon with an overwhelming conceit.”
“Are you suggesting his machinery is out of order?” Yasmin asked.
“I’m not sure. He’s sixty-three. He married at forty-two, a marriage of companionship and convenience. No sex.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t. But that’s the general opinion. He himself has stated that ‘I had no adventures of a sexual kind until I was twenty-nine.’”
“A bit retarded.”
“I doubt he’s had any at all,” I said. “Many famous women have pursued him without success. Mrs. Pat Campbell, gorgeous actress, said, ‘He’s all hen and no cock.’”
“I like that.”
“His diet,” I said, “is deliberately aimed at mental efficiency. ‘I flatly declare,’ he once wrote, ‘that a man fed on whiskey and dead bodies cannot possibly do good work.’”
“As opposed to whiskey and live bodies, I suppose.”
Pretty quick our Yasmin was. “He’s a Marxist Socialist,” I added. “He thinks the State should run everything.”
“Then he’s an even bigger ass than I thought,” Yasmin said. “I can’t wait to see his face when the old Beetle strikes.”
On the way through London, we bought a bunch of superb hothouse muscatel grapes from Jackson’s in Piccadilly. They were very costly, very pale yellowish-green, and very large. North of London, we stopped on the side of the road and got out the tin of Blister Beetle powder.
“Shall we give him a double shot?” I asked.
“Triple,” Yasmin said.
“D’you think that’s safe?”
“If what you say about him is true, he’s going to need half the tin.”
“Very well, then,” I said. “Triple it is.”
We chose the grape that was hanging at the lowest point of the bunch and carefully made a nick in its skin with a knife. I scooped out a little of the inside and then inserted a triple dose of powder, pushing the stuff well into the grape with a pin. Then we continued on to Ayot St. Lawrence.
“You do realize,” I said, “that this will be the first time anyone’s had a triple dose?”
“I’m not worried,” Yasmin said. “The man’s obviously wildly undersexed. I wonder if he’s a eunuch. Does he have a high voice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bloody writers,” Yasmin said. She settled herself deeper into the seat and kept a grumpy silence for the rest of the trip.
The house, known as Shaw’s Corner, was a large, unremarkable brick pile with a good garden. The time, as I pulled up outside, was four twenty in the afternoon.
“What do I do?” Yasmin asked.
“You walk round to the back of the house and all the way down to the bottom of the garden,” I said. “There, you will find a small wooden shed with a sloping roof. That’s where he works. He’s certain to be in it now. Just barge in and give him the usual patter.”
“What if the wife sees me?”
“That’s a chance you’ll have to take,” I said. “You’ll probably make it. And tell him that you’re a vegetarian. He’ll like that.”
“What are the names of his plays?”
“Man and Superman,” I said. “The Doctor’s Dilemma, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles and the Lion, Pygmalion.”
“He’ll ask me which I like best.”
“Say Pygmalion.”
“All right, I’ll say Pygmalion.”
“Flatter him. Tell him he is not only the greatest playwright but also the greatest music critic that ever lived. You don’t have to worry. He’ll do the talking.”
Yasmin stepped out of the car and walked with a firm step through the gate into Shaw’s garden. I watched her until she had disappeared around the back of the house, then I drove up the road and booked a room in a pub called The Waggon and Horses. Up in the room, I laid out my equipment and got everything ready for the rapid conversion of Shaw’s semen into frozen straws. An hour later, I returned to Shaw’s Corner to wait for Yasmin. I didn’t wait long, but I am not going to tell you what happened next until you have heard what happened first. Such things are better in their right order.