Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Mr. Alice’s Jag drew up at the curb and I walked over to it and got in the back. It’s a good car, a couple of years old. Classy, but not something you’d look twice at.

The chauffeur and Mr. Alice sat in the front. Sitting in the backseat with me was a pudgy man with a crew cut and a loud check suit. He made me think of the frustrated fiance in a fifties film; the one who gets dumped for Rock Hudson in the final reel. I nodded at him. He extended his hand, and then, when I didn’t seem to notice, he put it away.

Mr. Alice did not introduce us, which was fine by me, as I knew exactly who the man was. I’d found him, and reeled him in, in fact, although he’d never know that. He was a professor of ancient languages at a North Carolina university. He thought he was on loan to British Intelligence from the U.S. State Department. He thought this, because this was what he had been told by someone at the U.S. State Department. The professor had told his wife that he was presenting a paper to a conference on Hittite studies in London. And there was such a conference. I’d organized it myself.

“Why do you take the bloody tube?” asked Mr. Alice. “It can’t be to save money.”

“I would have thought the fact I’ve been standing on that corner waiting for you for the last twenty minutes demonstrates exactly why I didn’t drive,” I told him. He likes it that I don’t just roll over and wag my tail. I’m a dog with spirit. “The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of Central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour. If the tubes are running, I’ll take the tube, thanks.”

“You don’t drive in London?” asked the professor in the loud suit. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. Let’s call him Macleod.

“I’ll drive at night, when the roads are empty,” I told him. “After midnight. I like driving at night.”

Mr. Alice wound down the window and lit a small cigar. I could not help noticing that his hands were trembling. With anticipation, I guessed.

And we drove through Earls Court, past a hundred tall red-brick houses that claimed to be hotels, a hundred tattier buildings that housed guest-houses and bed-and-breakfasts, down good streets and bad. Sometimes Earls Court reminds me of one of those old women you meet from time to time who’s painfully proper and prissy and prim until she’s got a few drinks into her, when she starts dancing on the tables and telling everybody within earshot about her days as a pretty young thing, sucking cock for money in Australia or Kenya or somewhere.

Actually, that makes it sound like I like the place and, frankly, I don’t. It’s too transient. Things come and go and people come and go too damn fast. I’m not a romantic man, but give me South of the River, or the East End, any day. The East End is a proper place: it’s where things begin, good and bad. It’s the cunt and the arsehole of London; they’re always close together. Whereas Earls Court is-I don’t know what. The body analogy breaks down completely when you get out to there. I think that’s because London is mad. Multiple personality problems. All these little towns and villages that grew and crashed into each other to make one big city, but never forget their old borders.

So the chauffeur pulled up in a road like any other, in front of a high, terraced house that might have been a hotel at one time. A couple of the windows were boarded over. “That’s the house,” said the chauffeur.

“Right,” said Mr. Alice.

The chauffeur walked around the car and opened the door for Mr. Alice. Professor Macleod and I got out on our own. I looked up and down the pavement. Nothing to worry about.

I knocked on the door, and we waited. I nodded and smiled at the spyhole in the door. Mr. Alice’s cheeks were flushed, and he held his hands folded in front of his crotch, to avoid embarrassing himself. Horny old bugger.

Well, I’ve been there, too. We all have. Only Mr. Alice, he can afford to indulge himself.

The way I look at it, some people need love, and some people don’t. I think Mr. Alice is really a bit of a don’t, all things considered. I’m a don’t as well. You learn to recognize the type.

And Mr. Alice is, first and foremost, a connoisseur.

There was a bang from the door, as a bolt was drawn back, and the door was opened by an old woman of what they used to describe as “repulsive aspect.” She was dressed in a baggy black one-piece robe. Her face was wrinkled and pouched. I’ll tell you what she looked like. Did you ever see a picture of one of those cinnamon buns they said looked like Mother Teresa? She looked like that, like a cinnamon roll, with two brown raisin eyes peering out of her cinnamon roll face.