Infernal Revolutions Read online

  ‘Like to keep my rear defended, Mr Oysterman, and the enemy in view,’ he explained of his position as he rose to greet me. ‘And I’m not referring to Jeremy. But come, sit down. I’m starving and I can’t wait any longer. I haven’t eaten since midday.’

  I didn’t bother telling him I hadn’t eaten since last night, three mouthfuls of veal pie excepted, for whining didn’t seem appropriate in the presence of this man.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Mr Axelrod, how old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen. Now stop acting like some little schoolgirl and get eating.’

  Abashed, I took my chair and did as I was told.

  We started off sweetly with crumpets and blackcurrant jam, wash down with a glass of Madeira in my case, three glasses in Mr Axelrod’s. Then, perceiving there was no particular method in Mr Axelrod’s eating itinerary, I followed suit and took from the abundant table whatever took my fancy, regardless of slavish fashion. So I followed up the crumpets with two bananas, nice and ripe, then turned to the salmon in fennel sauce accompanied by kidney beans, peas, lemon pickle and soy. At intervals throughout the meal I kept looking up at my host to check I was not contravening some obscure cornetman’s etiquette, but as I was always greeted by the sight of Mr Axelrod’s crown, or, occasionally, the bottom of his wine glass, I assumed I was not. Left to my own devices I continued with a slice of hot pigeon pie impregnated with hardboiled eggs, then deemed the main course over. Although I was bloated and gasping slightly by this stage, I couldn’t resist taking a piece of cooked pudding – made of currants, orange peel, egg and suet – and smothering it with the hot brandy sauce provided on request by the ever-smirking Jeremy. Finishing off with a plateful of gooseberries in cream, I drained my second glass of Madeira and slumped back in my chair. As I did so I noticed that we were being watched by about twenty dirty faces pressed to the windows, all examining me curiously as if to deduce the effect the food was having on me. At a loss to know what to do, I was thankful when Mr Axelrod looked up, saw me watching them, and leaned forward from his protected enclave to do likewise. Whether it was the expression on his face or their knowledge of his temper I didn’t know, but something made them disperse with unsettling rapidity, leaving only smeared glass and evaporating breathmist as evidence of their presence.

  ‘Rabble,’ he commented. ‘You can’t have a piss in a pint pot these days without being gawped at by the lower orders.’

  Aware that anything I said now would sound effeminate in comparison, I nodded and began to sip the coffee that had appeared, shyly watching Mr Axelrod as he resumed his gargantuan feasting. I drank two more cups while Mr Axelrod ate on, and then began to think about returning home to ponder further My Dilemma. Somehow, though, seated here with Mr Axelrod after an episode of high drama, the twin ogres of Philpott Hall and Grub Street did not seem so terrifying. On the contrary, as I looked out at the fishing nets, the gulls and the glinting Channel, I felt very mellow and reflective. All sort of things began to seem possible, with the taking of Philpott Hall being just one of them. I was still lost in Visions when a hellish clatter finally signalled the end of Mr Axelrod’s gorging. Having finished his gooseberries, he had apparently leaned back in his chair and tossed his spoon back into his dish across the intervening four feet.

  ‘Excellent,’ he pronounced. ‘Infinitely better than the muck they serve you at barracks.’ His eyes searched round the table, alighted on the wine bottle, scrutinized its emptiness, then flickered over to the bar.

  ‘Jeremy!’ he roared. ‘More wine!’

  I was somewhat surprised by this request, thinking that the drinking had come to a natural end, but I reflected stoically that one more bottle could do no harm; indeed, it would probably assist the gastric juices in assimilating the food.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed the meal, Mr Oysterman.’

  ‘Wonderful. Thank you.’

  ‘Better than a common trader’s pie, I’ll wager.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What the deuce made you go to him in the first place? Couldn’t you see you were asking for trouble? You are evidently a man of means, and have no need to resort to such low dining.’

  ‘Twas an impulse,’ I shrugged. ‘I’d been alone in the house all day, thinking, when I heard the pieman’s call. Nothing appealled to me more than a big meaty veal pie.’

  Just the very words now made me want to puke copiously, so, brow sweating, I shakily poured myself more coffee.

  ‘You must have a mighty problem on your mind to spend all day thinking about it. Especially all of a fine summer’s day like this. Either that or you’re another philosopher, like Mr Hume.’

  ‘We’re all philosophers to some extent, Mr Axelrod.’

  A puzzled look crossed his face, indicating I’d stumbled across an exception. He received a fresh bottle of Madeira from Jeremy and refilled both our glasses.

  ‘Perhaps, but I can’t say I’ve spend even one hour thinking about a particular problem. What’s the point? All you end up doing is enfeebling your will and tying yourself up in metaphysical knots. If I’d wasted time thinking about rescuing you today instead of actually doing it, you would probably have grown wings by now. Act, Mr Oysterman, act. Whatever the problem is stop thinking about it and act. If things turn out badly then act again to try and remedy them. Otherwise before you know it you’ll be on your deathbed full of the most hellish remorse for a wasted life. You’re let loose for an infinitesimal fraction of eternity, and what do you do? You ponder problems you could just as well ponder from what I call the ethereal state. Where’s the sense in that?’

  I spluttered in my coffee. How mistaken I’d been to label Mr Axelrod a brainless rake! Rake he might be, but a rake with a credo. How simple it all was, for surely his argument was irrefutable. With my own Predicament in mind I sought to clarify the process.

  ‘So when you have a problem that needs acting on, how do you decide which course to take?’

  ‘I briefly consider the facts before me – briefly mind – and I always find that one particular course of action strongly suggests itself to me as being the right one, though of course I would be unable to postulate scientifically this intuition. A fuzzy picture appears of the result of the projected events, accompanied by a nice warm flutter of my heart, and then I know I am on the right track provided everything goes successfully. It does not always go successfully, of course, but I lay the blame for that on myself rather than my intuition.’

  ‘Do morals ever come into the process?’

  ‘Never. I am true to myself, and believe everyone else should be too.’

  I was beginning to feel uneasy at the drift the conversation was taking; ‘twas clear I was conversing with an outlaw.

  ‘So you’d have no qualms about murdering someone, for example?’

  ‘None at all.’

  The answer was no surprise. Beneath the Philip Sidney Young-Man-Of-Adventure look was sometimes discernable a criminal glimmer in the eye. I could easily imagine him as an adroit deliverer of a flashing blade in the kidneys, or a gunpowder blast in the face.

  ‘Morals,’ he went on, ‘are implanted in man to serve as a kind of abatis for the weak to hide behind. They want to break out and live life, but they daren’t, they have not the courage or the honesty. I, and a few others, have.’

  These were the sort of glib words highwaymen used to romanticize their exploits; honesty in this case meaning true to basic instincts, however loathsome, destructive or anti-social.

  Mr Axelrod started laughing.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Mr Oysterman. I’ve just had my dinner. I’m not going to eat you.’

  There was no doubt who had the upper hand in our relationship, and I did not like it. Indeed, my initial love for him was being eroded by acid shafts of unworthy jealousy. Despite being two years younger than me, he was already more confident and more experienced than I would be at fifty. Worse, he was better looking than me and he could quite
clearly outdrink, outeat, outfight and – obviously, since I was a virgin – outroger me. Added to this was a nagging internal dispute: one side of me saying I should ignore his call to worldly hence frivolous actions; another side saying I was just as good as him, and should compete manfully for my share of pleasure and excitement. Confused, there was nothing for it but to drain off another glass of wine.

  ‘That’s right. Drink, drink. It can’t hurt you, and I’ll bet…’ he leaned forward to place his elbow on the table and wag a forefinger at me, ‘…I’ll bet your thinking won’t be half so gloomy when you leave here.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said carelessly, lightening a little as the alcohol started working beneficially again. Indeed, Mr Axelrod seemed to be experiencing the same internal sensations, for he suddenly became very loquacious, and began to divulge all of the things I had been too scared to ask about.

  He was a boxer, a foxhunter, a gentleman of intrigue and a gambler, and had already notched up an impressive number of conquests and kills. He was a member of several London clubs, including the Hell Fire Club and the Roaring Boys Club, but he was thinking of letting his memberships lapse because none of them provided him with the level of danger and excitement he craved. As proof of his sincerity on this matter, he told me that he did not expect to see his thirtieth birthday. However, if through bad luck or excessive prudence he did, he was determined to make amends by putting a pistol to his head and blowing his brains out at midnight on the fifth of April, 1787, whatever the size of the cake his friends had baked for him.

  He had, it seemed, already been to Oxford and Middle Temple, confirming my earlier assumption that money had played a large part in the moulding of his carefree character; but law, naturally enough, had soon bored him, and his parents had bought him a commission in the King’s Dragoon Guards (a cornet, I was freely told without detecting any signs of patronization, being a standard bearer, and hence a sure participant in any action that was going). So far his regiment had been training at a camp near Hove, but they were due to set sail for America at the end of the month, to fight the uprising colonists there. His duties to date mainly consisted of throwing lavish dinner parties for the other commissioned officers, one of whom was a fifteen-year-old boy nicknamed Pubescent Pete. When I expressed surprise at this, Mr Axelrod said a wealthy dog could buy himself a commission in the army, so rotten was it, and this was either disgraceful or funny, depending on your own particular attitude to life. It didn’t seem to bother Mr Axelrod much, for he said the incompetent ones would soon be found out anyway, and as long as you won what did it matter? Warming to his theme, he then went on to describe the great victories of the British Army, banging his fists on the table to underscore such glorious names as Blenheim, Malplaquet, Dettingen, Culloden, Plassey and Quebec. I knew about these as well, of course, being a keen follower of world events, but I could not muster up the same passion for them as Mr Axelrod. Being a strategist rather than a tactician, I regarded them as increasing evidence of Britain’s pervasive influence in the world, and thought little of all the blood that must have been spilt to win them. Mr Axelrod, on the other hand, thought of nothing else but the blood. There was a passing interest in battle tactics, for these directly affected the amount of blood on offer, but what really animated him was the grunting, screaming and groaning of actual combat. Without regard for other diners, he would act out vivid cameos, such as Frenchman Being Disembowelled, or Scotchman Spitted To Cottage Door, though how he knew about all these horrors was another matter, unless the Middle Temple was a completely different establishment to what I’d imagined. All in all, I gained the impression that the Hove barracks represented to him a prolonged Christmas Eve, a time of anticipatory torment before the wonderful day dawned when at last he would set foot on American soil, and begin the greatest, bloodiest foxhunt known to man.

  While all this wish-fulfilment was going on, I had been draining glass after glass of wine, until I too became infected by the stirring descriptions and blood-curdling cries. Whilst not being keen to face Mr Axelrod even with my blood up, I wouldn’t have minded slaying a pieman or two. I almost began to envy his imminent departure to America, where no doubt the whole colonist rabble were nothing better than piemen, if the newspaper reports I’d read were true. I must admit that about the time of his fifth lurid description of a gargling throat-slashed Frenchman, I fell into a reverie of my own, in which I enlisted in the army, sailed to America, proved my manhood beyond all doubt with astonishing bravery and keen military intelligence, won the heart and admiration of a beautiful local girl, and finally brought her back to live in Sussex ever happily and ever after. The alcohol, in its keenness to outline the grand plan, had left out niggling little details like Amanda Philpott and my dream of becoming a famous poet, but the mere fact that such baggage could be jettisoned so easily made me suddenly laugh out loud.

  ‘Good lad, good lad,’ roared Mr Axelrod. ‘That’s the spirit. There’s nothing like it, is there?’

  With effort I focused on his head, and gushingly agreed with him. Nothing finer, nothing finer. And off I went babbling, telling him of my wasted, cocooned life, my ambitions as a poet, and my problems with Amanda Philpott. This latter item particularly interested him, for it seemed to strike a chord, and he consoled me with an elegant soliloquy on the wiles and pettiness of women, and of female society in general.

  ‘Women, Harry, are for one thing, and one thing only – any honest man will admit that. The rest of your time with them is just putting up with their moods and waiting for their headaches to clear. Where’s the fun in that? Therefore you need to rotate your crops so as to maximize reaping and minimize sowing. Have as many wenches on the go as you can; that way one at least will always be in the mood for rogering, and you will have a safety net if one falls ill or pregnant, or gets swiped by another man. Tell them all you love them, of course, whatever you really think of them, because then they will work better for you in bed, and spend their time fretting over you when you are away. ‘Tis what most of them want anyway – just a man they can see occasionally for relief of their frustration, isolation and boredom.’

  I was still pondering this revolutionary advice – and getting over the shock of being called Harry – when Mr Axelrod came out with a non sequitur that disorientated me further.

  ‘You’re a brave and honest man, Harry. I am honoured to have made your acquaintance. A toast, Sir.’

  One final flush veneered my face as these words, from such a man, reached my heart. Solemnly and unsteadily we rose and drank a toast to each other. Then, spent, I sat down and let my eyes roll slowly over the debris in front of me. Apart from the dirty plates and piles of half-eaten food on the table, there was also much broken glass in evidence, perhaps as a result of the energetic battle demonstrations. I was staring at the various colours in the shards when I became aware that the heat in the place had risen tremendously; moments later I also became aware that within the hour I would be spraying out the contents of my stomach to the furthest corners of the dining room. Determined to get away before that happened, I sank into silence in the hope that Mr Axelrod, finding his new friend tired and uncommunicative, would realize the entertainment was over, and provide me with a carriage home. Instead, to my horror, Mr Axelrod called for more wine and a pack of cards.

  ‘Now to make enough money to pay for the meal,’ he confided, with a crafty wink. ‘With perhaps a little to spare for the ladies afterwards, eh, Harry?’

  I managed a weak and sickly smile, then watched wretchedly as a waiter, not Jeremy this time, appeared with the goods. He then cleared and wiped the table, and left the scene set for my continued misery.

  Brag was the game, and five other players were quickly roped in, though in my effort to keep my rolling head down all I saw of them were their hard, grimy hands on the table. I was invited to play but declined, even though Mr Axelrod was willing to loan me stake money.

  ‘Then I insist that he sits next to Mr
Axelrod,’ said a harsh voice. ‘We do not want him spying for his master.’

  A murmur of agreement went up, so I dutifully shifted round like a little lapdog. Everyone now satisfied, the game began, but though it may have progressed smoothly for others, the action all seemed mightily staccato to me. Episodic scenes flitted before my drooping eyes: the sixpenny stake being shoved out onto the table by the dealer at the start of every round; others betting or capitulating; Mr Axelrod’s funds quickly diminishing until he was down to his last sixpence; the faint hypnotic beat of a drum; the incredible number of braggers that started to appear in Mr Axelrod’s every hand; the disbelieving mutterings of his opponents; the swelling pile of bounty in front of beaming Mr Axelrod. ‘Twas just at this point, when tempers were becoming so ugly I was sure a fight would break out, that the drumbeat I thought ethereal became an insistent reality, and curiosity jolted me back into consciousness.

  Tdllutt, tdllutt, tdllutt – three awful dreary monotonous beats repeated over and over , coming from somewhere out on the Front. There was the sudden scraping of many chairs around the table. Hands were thrown in rapidly. Players stood up, scooped their winnings together and quickly departed without thanks or goodbyes. Then there seemed to be a lull in the proceedings, with just Mr Axelrod and myself remaining. The drumbeat got louder, then stopped. Thank God, I thought, it is all over, and I can sleep.

  But no. Soon three more pairs of hands sat down, and took up the cards. They exchanged greetings with Mr Axelrod, then began to discuss something. But they could talk all they liked, it was sleep I wanted. The trouble was, closing my eyes only made matters worse, and then it was that I knew a prodigious spew was not many minutes away. All that wine, all that food, all my problems with poetry and Amanda – ‘twas a dire combination, and now I was about to pay for my over-indulgence with my stomach lining.