Herr Hemmingway’s new fangled card tricks garnered whoops of ghoulish euphoria; cryptic brevity entranced the maidens in the downstairs parlour. Whip cracks of girlish giggle and pinch play pierced the dour scourge of curfew night. A carriage pulled up before the sombre granite Manse. A parcel was delivered in speedy silence.
Casaubon ate freely of the doctored truffles. Mary Ann rested back to wait the denouement, puffing gaily on her long clay pipe and petting Daniel Absconda, her Sicilian spaniel. All would be revealed next Monday in The Infidel if they were spared.
*
Silas Marner pitched up unexpected the following day, dressed in limpid russet homespun which reminded Willoughby Dunlop, the virile batman, oddly of withered futuristic inner tubes.
‘Your luculence become you Massa Silas’ Dunlop growled with syrupy menace. ‘Do you bear subversive notions for the mistress?
‘That I do, swarthy vassal of capricious empire, that I do’.
Willoughby scuttled away to disarm her, the sound of his chains echoing through the capacious lobby as he went. A smile of brute rapaciousness broke cross his ashen face.
*
The eagle dripped on Zion as Ezra piled up the faggots in Parousia, Tertullian gazed on amazed on the third day of the shining wall in the morning sky. Nereus took his leisure, replete in still dry oceans. What was in those truffles? Precious time had drifted away. Calypso’s suitors fed the fowl with pith and peel.
‘Nightshirt!’ demanded Funk.
‘I shall be with you shortly; in the fulness of time; post haste; forthwith…’
May Ann appeared at the door, dishevelled, her cheeks a roseate hue, panting.
‘There you are, my dearest. But why…’
‘A spot of bare Pilates for the circulation. Doctor Jasper’s orders.’
A boneshaker hustled over the gravelled drive.
‘Mice?’ suggested Casaubon, aroused.
*
‘So Dude, what’s your beef? I post a lot? I am a friggin writer, a communicator. It’s a subject to object relationship. Intercourse. God proposes: man disposes. That kinda set up. So quit your incessant carping, Buster. Just because my numbers turn out better than yours. Get a friggin life Godammit!’
‘Discouraging words from Herr Hemingway, Adolf. He gets so reckless when he’s on the saucel I’m sure he will come round in the end. We all have our eccentricities. Our peccadiloes and foibles.’
But Adolf was inconsolable.
The rest is
Off course
Is history.
*
Chesney reached inside his great coat pocket and took a slug from the vial in the brown paper bag. The liquor! Dammit the liquor. Huxtable was wrong. He took another swig. It was then she emerged though the Bourbon mist of the cold November carpark. Zelda Zuchenslooper. What a broad.
‘Who you screwing, Small Fry’, she chirruped from some distance, yet somehow audible over the hubbub of a not inconsiderable crowd. All eyes turned on Chesney. He cleared his throat. It was now or never, and he hollered.
‘You baby. Only you. You is the One of it’
Fin
Grimbeau 