The Magic Kingdom (20 page)

“Over the years probably more than a hundred quid.”

“I’m afraid you made a bad investment, Mary.”

“Hey!
Watch that. Just who the bloody hell do you fucking think you are?”

“Jesus! Bloody hell is right. You’ve gone and spilled Colin’s sherry all over the place. It looks like a massacre in here.”

“That’s not on. That’s not
on,
I said!” Mary Cottle said, and stormed out of Eddy Bale’s room.

Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Everything. Wars, earthquakes, and the self-contained individual disasters of men. Courage as well as cowardice. Generous acts out of left field and the conviction that one is put upon. Everything. Man’s fallen condition and birth defect too, those San Andreas and Anatolian, Altyn Tagh, and Great Glen faults of the heart, of the ova and genes. They’re working on it, working on all of it: theologians in their gloomy studies where the muted light falls distantly on their antique, closely printed texts, as distant as God (which, God’s exorbitant aphelion, outpost, and mileage—the boondocks of God—also has a perfectly reasonable explanation); scientists in their bright laboratories where the light seems a kind of white and stunning grease.

Everything
has a reasonable explanation.

So Charles Mudd-Gaddis in Bale’s and Colin’s, Lydia Conscience in the nanny’s and Mary’s, and Tony Word in Mr. Moorhead’s room, meet in each other’s sleep.

They gather on a Sunday afternoon in one of the public rooms in the Contemporary Resort Hotel, which Mudd-Gaddis believes to be a nursing home where he has been stashed by his family. By what, that is, Mudd-Gaddis guesses, is not the remains
of,
so much as in a certain sense accounts
for,
what is his family now, his family informed by time and evolution, an increment of new additional relation which, try as he may, as he
does,
he can’t keep straight. Though he’s certain it’s all been explained to him, and repeatedly too, and probably even patiently—they are not unkind here; stashed or no, this is no Dickensian charnel house and the doctors and staff are as pleasant as they are efficient; he’s no complaints on
that
score, or on the other either, for that matter—the stashed business, he means; he’s a man of the world, or anyway
was;
in their shoes he’d have done the same, because what
can
you do, what can you actually
do
when people get so old they can’t take care of themselves any longer? When they get
so
old (talk about your second childhoods) they become incontinent and piss their pants and shit their sheets and move about (though it isn’t as if they actually could—move about, that is—they can’t, and have to be pushed in wheelchairs, lifted in and out of them like, like—what?—socks in a drawer, laundry in a hamper) under some stink of the personal, the inclement intimate? So old they can’t cut meat or butter bread. Of
course
you stash and warehouse them, though he knows it’s a waste of breath, of time and money. It’s a joke, really. A joke and at the same time a tribute to the basic decency of people that they even
bother
to explain. All right, so they slow their normal speech patterns and maybe raise their voices. He can understand that too. Because what the devil would you expect? Would you expect otherwise? Would you talk Great Ideas with an infant? And if you did, if you could, but it was this hard-of-hearing infant, this
deaf
infant, wouldn’t
you
raise
your
voice? It’s a wonder to him how they find the patience. It’s a wonder to him they don’t go all shirty every once in a while and send up the old fart. “I’m Jim and that’s Bill. You remember Bill, don’t you, Dad? He was your fireman on your postmistress’s side. I’m your dustman on your papal nuncio’s, nuncle.”

Which is not to say he doesn’t have it coming. The deference. The weekly visits. However uncomfortable they make him feel, whatever trouble they put him to. Well, all that fuss and bother. Having to endure the shave, the indignity of the double nappies if he shits where he shouldn’t. All of it: the fresh shirt and starched collar (which gives him a rash like a bedsore; and
that’s
another thing, having to sit before them in his wheelchair perched on his sheepskin as if his arsehole might take the cold), the ordeal of the tie which, even though it’s no charnel house here and even though they’re gentle, is still no protection from the orderly’s breath which, even if it isn’t bad, could still carry the germ—so close they get when they do your tie—which could give him pneumonia. All of it. Though he’s the one who insists on this: the damn-fool mummery of the scents and talcums which, since his nose seems to be going along with everything else, he probably puts on, or rather that orderly puts on for him, too liberally. Which, face it, is maybe the one plus—he doesn’t count having to be diapered—in the whole business, sensitized and able as he is to respond to the pats and tickles of flesh on flesh even though those pats and tickles are administered by a poof male orderly and even though, unless they hang old men, he’ll never be tumescent again?

Because everything has a reasonable explanation and his visitors mustn’t get wind of his old man’s stench.

So he has these visits coming no matter that it’s a basinful for all concerned, no matter that they banjaxed each other or that all of them—he doesn’t exclude himself—usually just spend the afternoon sitting around and talking through the back of their necks.

It was quite a predicament. Being so old. So suspicious. Because maybe the real reason it’s no charnel house, maybe the real reason they’re so gentle and kind in this well-appointed palace of pensioners, is that they don’t want to cross him, that with all his other functions and faculties deserting him, he still retains the power of the purse, can write them out of his will—what’s left of his will?—with one stroke of the legal. Obviously they still believe him to be
compos.
Which may be the real reason he’s so polite to
them,
so gracious and agreeable, which may even be the real reason why he consents to see them every Sunday.

Because how could it possibly be love?

On any of their parts?

My God, he doesn’t even remember them from one week to the next!

And for their part, for their part, what was left of him to love? A nappied, sheepskin-assed old man who stank on top of perfume flowers that never grew in nature, and of the compost which never grew them underneath.

Lydia Conscience begins.

“How are you today, Charles?”

And old Mudd-Gaddis thinking: So that’s how it stands. Not Pop, not Granddad or Great-granddad either. So old. Not Uncle or Cousin-German. Charles. (Not
friends,
too young to be friends, never
friends.)
Relation reduced to the watered technicalities of lineage. So old.
So
old.

Tony Word sees the old boy’s rheumy eyes inspect him.

“Yeah, Charles, how are you keeping?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mudd-Gaddis tells them politely. “And yourself? Yourselves?”

Lydia Conscience rests her engagement and wedding rings across her belly. “Very well, thank you, Charles.”

“No morning sickness?” he inquires alertly.

“My goodness no,” she tells him gratefully. “That passes in about two months. I’m long into my awkward phase by now. My ankles are ever so swollen. I tell my friends I feel like a cow and must look like the full moon.”

“No, of course not,” he hastens to reassure her. “She looks…”—he tries to think of the word—
“radiant,
positively
radiant,”
he tells Tony Word.

Who nods noncommittally.

“And how are
you
feeling?”

“Me? No complaints, no letters to the
Times,”
Tony Word says. “As long as I stick to my diet.”

Now Mudd-Gaddis, who has no idea what the little stick figure can possibly be talking about and who was just about to offer him some sweets out of the box he keeps for his Sunday visitors, nods and, covering his ass, adds, “Good, good. That’s very important.”

(Because with great age comes paranoia—so old,
so
old—and he knows he’s already made one mistake when he asked his stupid question about morning sickness, not his finest hour, because he’s given them something to jump on and maybe they think he can’t remember his own wife’s pregnancies, which he can’t, or if he ever even had one, and he’s on the verge of making another, a lulu, and it’s all he can do to keep from making it because what he really wants to know, what he really wants to
do
is cut the crap altogether and demand of them straight out, “Just who in hell
are
you people?” They look like kids, for Christ’s sake. Though to him, of course, everyone does these days. So old,
so
old. And why does the woman keep flashing those damned rings?
So
old. Still, he thinks, in the common dream the three of them share, it isn’t as if I were a
complete
twit. It’s plain enough she’s trying to remind me of something. My responsibilities, probably. I wish I’d better eyesight, though. From here the rings look like toys from the Cracker Jacks.)

“Oh, what lovely candy!” Lydia Conscience says.

“I’m sorry. Would you care for some?”

She takes two jaggery toffees and a chocolate caramel.

“It’s positively shameless,” Lydia Conscience says. “I’m eating for two now.”

Though when she puts one of the sweets into her mouth she chews it without interest.

Mudd-Gaddis moves the box almost imperceptibly toward Tony Word. “How about you, old man? Unless the diet prevents, of course.”

“I’d love to, ta very much. It’s just that it would kill me.”

“Of course.”

“Though they look delicious.”

“Yes, I’m told they’re quite good,” Mudd-Gaddis says. “I always try to have some on hand for my guests.”

Tony Word nods, Lydia Conscience does.

“You have
many
guests then?”

The baggage! The little preggers baggage! Because suddenly he understands what this is all about.

How rich he must be!

And if it’s not a charnel house here then it’s because he, Mudd-Gaddis, must make it well worth their while for it not to be.

How rich he must be!

For all these poor relations to come trotting out here every Sunday—he feels himself in the country, Sussex, the Cotswolds—in their beat-up old Anglias and Ford Cortinas. And the ring business too, he understands the ring business. Which doesn’t have damn all to do with reminding him of his responsibilities. It’s semaphore, is all. Why the little light o’ love is only signaling. The fat baggage was just making her manners. She was telling him that the contraband she carries in her breadbasket was legal now, that she and the little wimp—surely he can’t be the father—were all conjugaled and properly wedlocked. She was only publishing the banns with those rings across her belly. And that question about his guests! So of
course
he understands what it’s all about. It’s a competition. To them he’s just the goddamn pools!

Still, you can’t be too careful. He doesn’t know what claims they have on him, though he’s certain they can’t be great. Charles. Not Pop, Granddad, Great-granddad, Uncle, or Cousin. But
still
you can’t be too careful. He sees he will have to continue to be rational,
compos,
polite, continue to chat them up, continue to endure them. So old,
so
old! They have some farfetched stake of relationship, but it’s a sure thing that however tenuous it may turn out to be it’s enough to get him committed—because you don’t get to be as wealthy as he is without knowing at least
something
about the law; a judge, one psychiatrist, and a neighbor’s kid could probably do it—and if they’re
that
greedy it won’t be any well-appointed palace of pensioners next time but the true and genuine charnel house itself. And something else. If he’s stashed, it was never any family did it to him. He has no family, only this attenuated bond of cousins, thinner than cheap paint. God knows why, but he’s stashed himself. He’s certain of it. He’s self and voluntarily stashed!

Old. So old, so old, so old, so old. (Sold, sold, sold.)

“I say, do you have many guests then, Charles?”

“Oh. Beg pardon, dear, the hearing isn’t what it used to be,” Mudd-Gaddis tells her. (Because they can’t commit you for deafness. He’s thrown them a bone. It’s the
compos
thing to do. And because he’s canny now whom great age, subtracting faculties piecemeal, has managed to add only this, his almost volitionless cunning, to a character that always before had been strong enough to despise cunning. Just as, when he’d offered what’s-his-name a confection, he’d taken none himself and automatically implied his dentures. Let them have deafness, let them have dentures. Let them see how far
those
will get them in Her Majesty’s Courts!)

“I say, do you have many visitors?” repeats Lydia Conscience, raising her voice.

“Now and then. The odd male, the odd female.”

“Benny Maxine?”

“Benny?”

“Maxine. The lumpy-faced Jewish boy.”

He
does
recall a lad with a puffy face and thinks he recollects the voice, persistent, wheedling. He acknowledges Maxine’s visits. But Jewish? Has he Jewish cousins?

“Janet Order?”

“Ye-es, I think so,” Mudd-Gaddis says. “Dark girl.”

“Dark?”
Tony Word chimes in. “She’s all over blue as a bruise.”

“Well, my eyes,” says Mudd-Gaddis, anteing his vision, throwing that in with his ears and his teeth.

“Does Noah Cloth come? Does Rena Morgan?”

“Noah’s this finger amputee,” Tony Word reminds. “Has a digit missing on his left hand. And Rena’s nose runs. She’s this phlegm faucet.”

“My goodness,” Mudd-Gaddis says and wonders about his time-informed, incremented, evolutionated family. A lump-faced Jew, a female bruise, a hand-gimp, and a Niagara nose. Plus these two. A wimp, a wimp’s trollop. (And remembers now, has them sorted out. By their afflictions. And canny or no, believes he understands the real reason he keeps the box of sweets for them. It may be for no better reason than to please them.)