The Act of Roger Murgatroyd by Gilbert Adair Read Free Book Online

a lid that opens and closes – there it is, perched on the arm of the sofa. Well, when Raymond claimed to admire it and Farrar confessed that the one problem he had with it was winkling out the pile of cigarette butts at the end of the day, he actually shuddered and said, ‘Oh, I do,
do
sympathise! How
atrocious
that must be!’ Now I ask you. Atrocious? Removing a tangle of cigarette ends from an ashtray? You never knew if he was serious or not.
    Oh, and he had this word.
Penetrating
. Tagore’s poems were
penetrating.
Spengler’s philosophy was
penetrating
. A
sole aux ortolans
at the Eiffel Tower was
penetrating
. And, incidentally, when I say the Eiffel Tower, I mean the restaurant in London, not the monument in Paris, a gaffe Mary made and for which she paid dearly. She also confused
The
Rite of Spring
with
The Rustle of Spring
, a mistake anyone could have made, but did she suffer for it! Oh, he was wrong, wrong, wrong! Just not one of us, you know. I can’t put it any other way.
    Well, Trubshawe, I leave it to you to guess how frayed our tempers had got well before the evening was at an end. It was, though, the following day, yesterday, Christmas Day, that they started to rip apart. And since there’d been a deep snowfall overnight, Roger couldn’t simply kick Raymond out, ordering him to drive straight back to Town in his blasted Hispano-Suiza, something we all knew he was dying to do, Selina’s feelings notwithstanding.
    He didn’t come down to breakfast at all, which was unpardonably impolite of him, but it did at least give Selina an opportunity to offer belated amends and apologies all round for his conduct. If it hadn’t been Christmas, I do believe there’d have been an unpleasant scene between her and her father. But, in the spirit of the season, the Coloneldecided, and suggested we all decide likewise, to make the best of a difficult situation.
    Then, when he actually did surface, still unshaven, still wearing his dressing-gown, at ten forty-five, and found that the breakfast things had been cleared away, he at once went down to the kitchen and insisted that Mrs Varley – she’s the cook – he insisted that she prepare him some bacon and eggs, which he proceeded to wolf down, his plate sitting on his knees, the aroma wafting round the drawing-room, while the rest of us were trying to have a game of Canasta. Even after he’d finished, he continued to prattle on unapologetically through the game – I can’t tell you how distracting that was – and chain-smoke his stinky mauve fags – Sobranies, I think they’re called – and take revoltingly gurgly swigs from his hip flask.
    And then, very gradually throughout the afternoon, that nasty tongue of his turned positively viperish.
    Examples? It’s hard to remember, for there were just too many of them. Oh yes – wait. When Madge, looking out of the french window at the snow that was still swirling about the house, mentioned how queer it made her feel, since no more than a couple of months had gone by since she’d been swimming in Greece, Raymond remarked, all innocence, that the phrase she used reminded him of Mrs Varley’s cooking. When she asked him why, his answer was that his bacon and eggs, too, had been ‘swimming in grease’!
    Well, tee hee. And yes, you might think that all very drolland delightful, except that, when you come right down to it, it was also, for our hosts, beastly and gratuitous. And, needless to say, simply not true. But, you see, he just couldn’t resist being funny at other people’s expense. He genuinely enjoyed hurting their feelings. Because he had, I’m certain, what Dr Freud calls an Inferiority Complex, he just couldn’t help dragging everybody else down to his own abject level.
    When Cynthia Wattis praised Garbo’s acting in
Queen Christina
, which had made her weep buckets, and politely asked Raymond for his opinion, he instantly dismissed it –
not
impromptu, if I’m any judge – as ‘Greta