Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

isn't easy," he said loudly to the children, who had been crumbling cake in what I took to be embarrassment. He was all of sixteen years my junior. "Everything's spat upon now. Everything." Then Geoffrey came in, ahead of Ovington, pale and with a big damp patch on his jacket where, I assumed, vomit had been hastily wiped off with a face flannel. Ovington was trying to steer him into the salon, saying something about coffee, but Geoffrey said: "Just in time for that thing, I see. Won't have any, though. Just a beaker of that shitty local raisin juice." And he went back to the place he had vacated at the time of the fish course.
           "Is that wise?" his hostess asked.
           "It will either settle the guts or effect a definitive ah purgation," said Geoffrey in what I took to be a parody of my voice. He helped himself. "How's my booful lil boy?" he leered at John Ovington. Then he swigged.
           "Stop that, Geoffrey," I said, very weary. But then something hit out at the weariness, something a man of my age ought not to have had, namely a twinge of toothache. It was the cake, of which I had tasted the smallest possible fragment. It seemed unfair somehow, injury to insult.
           Geoffrey said, "Yes dear of course dear. Behaved badly, haven't I? It's this bloody place, you know. Shitty nasty little bloody island. Still, it is your birthday, after all." Oh my God. "Should have behaved better on Grand Old Man's bloody birthday."
           Sciberras cut into the general shock with: "You make a mistake. It is my birthday. But I do not think you are able to get anything right. You have a mind very badly arranged."
           "Deranged you mean," Geoffrey said. "You're not the only bugger in the world or even on this shitheap of an island to have a birthday today. If you knew anything about anything you'd know whose birthday it primarily bloody well is." He raised a recharged glass. "Many happy returns, cher maitre, and all that shit," he leered at me. Sciberras had to be made to take all this as a very tasteless joke.
           "A tasteless joke," Wignall soothed a fellow poet, "but still a joke. It's your birthday," patting Sciberras blindly. "That's right, isn't it, Toomey? His and his only, isn't it?"
           I had given up many things in my time but had never yet had to deny the most basic fact of my life. "Certainly not mine," I said. I heard, thank God, what could only be our car coming back for us.
     
     

CHAPTER 7
     
    I was stupid not to go straight to bed, initiating the new regime of sleeping alone, instead of having it lengthily and dangerously out with Geoffrey. In the upper salon he sat at the untuned harpsichord, picking at ensoured harmonies while I tried to address him with calm, to treat him as some errant character of my own fiction. But my inner agitation was too strong to permit me to sit. I tottered up and down on the fur and marble, a weak nightcap whisky and water atremble in my claw.
           "It was deliberate, wasn't it? An attempt, highly successful, to make me look a fool. What I want to know is why. But I think I know why. This is my punishment for making you leave Tangier. A punishment for consulting your own interest and, indeed, safety. And, as far as that matter is concerned, you are very far from being out of the wood. But still I had to be punished."
           "Oh, bloody balls." And, as if this were opera buffa recitative, he struck a sort of chord. He had his mirror glasses back on, though the salon lights were dim enough. His stomach seemed to have settled, and his speech was unblurred.
           "Stop that. Stop that stupid noise."
           He twanged a foul fortissimo cadence and got up. Shambling over to the leather couch he said, before falling onto it, "Things just got a bit out of control, that's all." He lay glooming up at the dead chandelier. "Didn't care much for the atmosphere. Hostile. That stupid bloody poet too.