She ground a tooth or two. At least, it looked as if that was what she was doing.
‘It was nothing of the kind. He was harsh and bitter, and he has been like that for a long time. I noticed it first at Brinkley. One morning we had walked in the meadows and the grass was all covered with little wreaths of mist, and I said Didn’t he sometimes feel that they were the elves’ bridal veils, and he said sharply, “No, never,” adding that he had never heard such a silly idea in his life.’
Well, of course, he was perfectly correct, but it was no good pointing that out to a girl like Madeline Bassett.
‘And that evening we were watching the sunset, and I said sunsets always made me think of the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, and he said “Who?” and I said “The Blessed Damozel,” and he said, “Never heard of her”. And he said that sunsets made him sick and so did the Blessed Damozel and he had a pain in his inside.’
I saw that the time had come to be a raisonneur.
‘This was at Brinkley?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. After you had made him become a vegetarian. Are you sure,’ I said, raisonneuring like nobody’s business, ‘that you were altogether wise in confining him to spinach and what not? Many a proud spirit
rebels when warned off the proteins. And I don’t know if you know it, but medical research has established that the ideal diet is one in which animal and vegetable foods are balanced. It’s something to do with the something acids required by the body.’
I won’t say she actually snorted, but the sound she uttered was certainly on the borderline of the snort.
‘What nonsense!’
‘It’s what doctors say.’
‘Which doctors?’
‘Well-known Harley Street physicians.’
‘I don’t believe it. Thousands of people are vegetarians and enjoy perfect health.’
‘Bodily health, yes,’ I said, cleverly seizing on the debating point. ‘But what of the soul? If you suddenly steer a fellow off the steaks and chops, it does something to his soul. My Aunt Agatha once made my Uncle Percy be a vegetarian, and his whole nature became soured. Not,’ I was forced to admit, ‘that it wasn’t fairly soured already, as anyone’s would be who was in constant contact with my Aunt Agatha. I bet you’ll find that that’s all that’s wrong with Gussie. He simply wants a mutton chop or two under his belt.’
‘Well, he’s not going to have them. And if he continues to behave like a sulky child, I shall know what to do about it.’
I remember Stinker Pinker telling me once that toward the end of his time at Oxford he was down in Bethnal Green spreading the light, and a costermonger kicked him in the stomach. He said it gave him a strange, confused, dreamlike feeling, and that’s what these ominous words of M. Bassett’s gave me now. She had spoken them from between teeth which, if not actually clenched, were the next thing to it, and it was as if the substantial boot of a vendor of blood oranges and bananas had caught me squarely in the solar plexus.
‘Er – what will you do about it?’
‘Never mind.’
I put out a cautious feeler.
‘Suppose . . . not that it’s likely to happen, of course . . . but suppose Gussie, maddened by abstinence, were to go off and tuck into . . . well, to take an instance at random, cold steak and kidney pie, what would be the upshot?’
I had never supposed that she had it in her to give anyone a piercing look, but that is what she gave me now. I don’t think even Aunt Agatha’s eyes have bored more deeply into me.
‘Are you telling me, Bertie, that Augustus has been eating steak and kidney pie?’
‘Good heavens, no. It was just a thingummy.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘What do they call questions that aren’t really questions? Begins with an h. Hypothetical, that’s the word. It was just a hypothetical question.’
‘Oh? Well, the answer to it is that if I found that Augustus had been eating the flesh of animals slain in anger, I would have nothing more to do with him,’ she said, and she biffed off, leaving me a spent force and a mere shell of my former self.