Mr Vogel Read online

  I have already digressed. I meant to tell you about Mr Vogel’s vestiges of poverty, which led to many accusations of meanness, and sly comments about extinct moths falling from his wallet whenever he opened it. Well, as a regular barman at the Blue Angel I can attest that he never bought ‘rounds’, and he always had the exact money warm in his misshapen little hand when he paid. It is my experience as a barman that people who proffer the right amount of money every time they buy a drink are either very poor or very rich; Mr Vogel had been both, and he still showed all the characteristics of a man habitually short of spondoolics, since he was careful to give me the right money even when rich, and he often changed notes for pound coins before he left, for the gas and electricity meters. He frequently paraded ‘new’ clothes bought at charity shops (he was as pleased as Punch if he’d haggled down the prices) and he still did his meagre shopping at the cheapest shops in town. You get to know people quite well when you work behind a bar. You hear snatches of conversations. You see people in the raw – this is where they come like wildebeest to drink and dull their sorrows, and nearly always they want to tell you about their sorrows. Sometimes they get abusive and say nasty (but true) things about their fellow drinkers.

  A word or two about the Blue Angel, my home and muse.

  The doors are low and wide, in the Georgian fashion, and the walls are a yard thick, made of granite boulders with earth and rubble infill. The floors are of heavy slate flags, worn down in the main passageways, and there is a great fireplace which roars in winter and sends sparks showering towards Polaris, the great north star which is visible at night through the large square aperture of the chimney mouth.

  The main bar is approached through a long, low corridor which has many paintings on either side: prints of lateen-rigged schooners, sloops, corvettes, yawls, luggers and clippers, all of which perished on the reefs which puncture the sea around us; in the porch there is a huge brown bristle-mat for foot-wiping, and an oak hat-stand which has held one solitary green hat, with a black band and a shiny brim, since the day I entered the place, and no-one knows who owns it, nor when it arrived, and from a strange superstition Jack the landlord will not remove it. Slotted into this dusty hat-stand there is a black umbrella with a wooden duck-head handle. It is as old, crumpled and wizened as the hat, and it has been there, by all appearances, since the umbrella was first invented.

  The main bar is a large, square, low-beamed room with a bay window and a massive mahogany bar which resembles a church organ, behind which I pipe up my requiems and fugues for the dibbers, topers and frothblowers who treat this place as their port of call. On either side of the fireplace there are two heavy brass lanterns with red and green lights for port and starboard, salvaged from one of the offshore wrecks, and there is a single painting (with many holes in it) which shows one of the great auks which live in a small colony on our western cliffs; you will be delighted to know that this species was not hunted to extinction by mankind in the nineteenth century as many suppose – so you may disregard a report claiming that the last auk was tried by jury and found guilty of witchcraft, then stoned to death by an angry mob following a severe storm on St Kilda in the Scottish Hebrides in 1844, or another saying that the very last pair of auks were clubbed to death on the island of Eldey off Iceland on June 3, 1844, by three men hired by an Icelandic bird collector called Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens.

  The great auk is alive and well! These happy little tales of survival against all odds are so uplifting, are they not.

  Which brings me to Humboldt the parrot, who lives with me in the Blue Angel – and who occasionally attacks the painting of the great auk, in an explosion of feathers (Humboldt is responsible for those holes in the painting). My parrot arrived here with a scientist and explorer called Alexander von Humboldt, who had found him in an Indian settlement in Venezuela. The natives who had once owned the parrot had fled to an island in the Orinoco, pursued by another tribe, but unhappily they had all perished. Thus the parrot became the world’s only speaker of the Atures language. Furthermore, on his travels the parrot had picked up bits of other languages from all over the world, which speckled his original tongue. Humboldt the explorer left him with me on the sole condition that the parrot be named after him, so that the German would be remembered somewhere in the world if he perished on his travels.

  Finally, to complete the picture, the Blue Angel – my little kingdom – has simple tables and chairs, some stools, and I have decorated the windowsills with red geraniums because I love the smell of the plant and its warm dry soil in the summer heat; it reminds me of childhood.

  Sitting on his stool the drinker will often gaze at nothingness, revealing his sordid and pitiful life, whilst averting his eyes from the dismal world behind him. Me, I watch and listen. I must reveal to you that I have a collection of leather-bound volumes hidden among the shelves behind the bar, and since I am virtually chained to my post, and unable myself to see the wide world encircling this region, I read copiously about travellers and explorers, and the strange and wonderful countries they have discovered. I also have books on imaginary and perfect lands, such as Utopia, Arcadia, New Atlantis, and The Island of Pines.

  Mr Vogel reads these books with me at the corner of the bar; he is fond of fantastical stories, and knows them off by heart – he will often pierce a conversation with ridiculous comments, hoping to impress people. For instance, only yesterday, when someone mentioned that he’d seen a tramp sidling through the docks, looking for somewhere to sleep, Mr Vogel had commented airily:

  ‘There are few beds more comfortable than a dry ditch in June. Incidentally, the law stipulates that no-one, not even a king, can sleep within fifteen yards of the crown of a road. Real tramps put fresh dock leaves in their socks every morning to avoid blisters. Was this man you saw a proper tramp, with a blue spotted handkerchief round his neck? Was he wearing a silver ring, and were his nails dirty?’

  This mangled gem came from one of my books, called The Happy Traveller: A Book for Poor Men; Mr Vogel was quite happy to pillage my library and pass off other people’s experiences as his own.

  But I must tell you about Mr Vogel’s good fortune. Quite simply, he was elevated from a state of penury to great wealth in one single minute. The facts are well-documented and have not, as far as I know, been disputed by anyone.

  In the town there lived a wealthy man, with white hair and a huge walrus moustache, named Doctor Robert. He had retired to a large mansion on the outskirts – the one that used to be a hospital for injured soldiers during the war. This house was screened from the long flat road into the town centre by a high phalanx of trees which only brave or naughty children ventured beyond; within the old man’s little kingdom they encountered marvellous sights, though they were far too young to appreciate what they saw.

  I will quote here from the local amateur historian John Parker of Sweeney Hall.

  Parker, who later became a priest, wrote a romantic and highly ornate version of the Vogel story. His prose is far too flowery and sentimental for my tastes, and he is prone to wander away on obtuse tangents, but he is a valuable source and he gets his facts right more often than not. Here is part of his introduction:

  I heard about Vogel’s good fortune on my sister Angelicas birthday – I remember the occasion well, since I had been forced to hurry home from the railway station in a taxi so that I could present her with my gift before she went to church. I had ordered a fine and expensive oriental mantle – in blue silk with a silver moon and stars – from one of the travelling merchants who supply the old families of the town. As the town’s only experienced art connoisseur and architectural historian I have an eye for the beautiful and the genuine, which brings me once again to the silk mantle I conveyed to my sister that latent spring morning. I was perhaps a little flushed from the journey, which had been ghastly; mistaking my high colour for excitement, she clapped her hands together girlishly and said to me: ‘I see you’ve heard the news John! Isn’t it ama
zing! That strange little cripple has won the house and the pagoda. Who’d have thought it possible!’

  I ushered her into the drawing room and, forgetting briefly about the mantle, listened to the first intimation of Vogel’s news. As I pondered the report my sister delivered a panegyric to the beauty of the silk, and my exquisite taste, whilst fastening a scarf and prettifying herself in a mirror. Then she disappeared, wraithlike, into the white cloud of dust raised by the fleeing taxi.

  Miffed that she had barely thanked me for my present, I delivered some highly sarcastic remarks to the mirror which she had used to make herself as alluring as humanly possible to a god who could have chosen from countless generations of stunningly beautiful and searingly intelligent women but was content, apparently, to waste away forlornly for the best part of two thousand years in a completely unremarkable little church waiting for Angelica. My poor sister had fallen in love with the muscular Adonis draped romantically over a cross above her misty young eyes. Unbeknownst to her this Christ-figure had spent a night in the Blue Angel after Edwin, the town carpenter, en route from his workshop to the church after repairing a split in the cross, caused by excessive heat, had himself fallen victim to excessive heat, stopped for a refreshing drink at the Blue Angel, fallen into a paralytic state of inebriation, and left Christ to sleep off the effects in one of the window seats. The following morning one of the labourers on his way to work had espied Christ, who had kept a lone vigil throughout the night in the Blue Angel, and notified the authorities, as small-minded bigots do. Edwin was incarcerated and there was talk of a trial for blasphemy, but it all blew over; Christ was reinstated soberly in the church and was thereafter called the Blue Christ. Some believe, quite wrongly, that the Blue Angel got its name from this incident.

  Edwin became the butt of many jokes but was too nice a man to be punished in this life.

  By now I was intrigued by the news that poor, twisted Mr Vogel had won a crackpot competition dreamt up by a strange old man, and was so overcome with curiosity that I summoned our old nursemaid, Agnes, and questioned her about Angelicas announcement. Yes, Agnes confirmed, Mr Vogel had indeed won the competition and the result had been announced from the steps of the town hall that very morning.

  A full ceremony, with all due pomp and ceremony, would follow shortly.

  Stop! You can halt right there, Mr Parker. You’re a windbag, a gasbag. You talk more drivel than Humboldt. At least Humboldt’s interesting. Yesterday he came out with a new word – zogno. After many hours of delving in dictionaries I found the meaning: in the Boro language of India it’s the slurping sound made by mud and water when you put your hand in a crab’s hidey-hole and try to drag it out. It’s also the sound made by Mr John ‘Nosey’ Parker when he’s trying to be posh. With his blue eyes and his floppy, flaxen hair he looks (speaking frankly) like a sissy. Locals call him The Professor. He likes to write about gardens and churches. He’s a different sort to us, but you have to concede, he knows his stuff – he seems to know more than anyone else about the region and its history, and although he can be extremely irritating, with his gentlemanly manners and his pernickety way with words, he’s the first one up the mountains in a storm, when the rest of us are running for shelter. Respect where respect is due, I say. We must endure a little more of his elegant writing, so please take a deep breath and prepare yourself for another purple passage, another dose of his yackety-yak:

  What Angelica didn’t know, when she gabbled the news to me so triumphantly, was that I knew quite a lot about old Dr Robert and his pagoda. As has been mentioned elsewhere he guarded his privacy jealously, and few people were allowed to visit him. We sometimes saw him driving around the town in a large car with two huge dogs bouncing about in the back seat, barking at everyone they passed. Tradesmen were met at the front gate by a manservant, called the Factotum, himself aged and stooped, who took the deliveries indoors. There was a handful of friends but they were equally reclusive and removed from the town’s business, which gave them an air of mystery, heightened by the fact that they all dressed in black and still wore hats. Uncle Hugh always said that social disintegration started when hats went out of fashion.

  As I say, I knew more about the pagoda than Angelica dreamt, for the very simple reason that I, also, have been young, and once played with the other children in the parks and thoroughfares of our noble town.

  On one public holiday our childish menagerie, wandering aimlessly, as usual, from pleasure to pleasure, found itself in the street outside the old man’s home, a gentleman’s residence built of light red brick with yellow teething around the windows and doors. Architectural historians may like to know that both these types of brick were fired by Dalton & Sons at their plant on the Morda Road, and are notable for having the relief of a spread-eagled frog stamped within the frog, presumably one of Dalton senior’s little jokes – he was noted for his dry sense of humour.

  With a child’s nose for mischief Jack, the leader of our gang by merit of his strength and daringness, challenged us all to enter the old man’s hitherto ‘secret’ garden through a small chink of light we had discerned in the encircling privet hedge, which had appeared unbreachable until that day. We had created our own mythology about the old man’s garden, since the only part of the pagoda which was visible to passers-by, the red and black japanned roof and the last few tiers, high above the garden and topping a group of sombre weeping willows, gave the place a foreign, mystical quality.

  We pushed our way into the garden. I would say it was an hour before dusk and the Factotum was already pulling down the blinds in Doctor Robert’s mansion, so we had only a few minutes in the gloaming to glimpse the garden. We scurried along its borders like ghosts. Part of it had been laid out in a formal, Louis XIV style with low geometric hedges and borders, fanning around a white marble fountain modelled on Poussin’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, figuring four women dancing in a back-to-back ronde and with clear, cool water bubbling from their mouths. There was also a walled garden with sweet potatoes, strawberries, scented herbs and a long espalier of fruit trees. There was an orangery, a palm house, a camomile lawn and a wooded walk through a Gertrude Jekyll garden containing many wild flowers, and also a large glasshouse, with a hipped imperial roof, housing rare and exotic plants, some hundreds of years old, lying like drowsy hospital patients cat-napping after lunch on a warm summer’s afternoon. We tried the door but it was locked; instead we peered, through the condensation, at the hothouse interior, gloomy and as damply recessive as an Amazonian jungle.

  There was far too much for us to take in but we were all struck by the remarkable octagonal pagoda, standing high in the air, which we could now see in its full glory. We dared not climb up its steps lest we be seen, so we contented ourselves with a brief, animated inspection. I scurried to the back of the edifice and trumped the others by finding a plaque at head-height on the rear wall of the pagoda, which said, simply:

  ESMIE FALKIRK. REST IN PEACE.

  At this point a door to the side of the main house creaked open and the silhouette of the old man entered our twilight world. Hiding our faces, we ran to our bolt-hole. I doubt if he saw us as human forms; he certainly did not challenge or chastise us. Perhaps he thought we were archangels gathering at that fateful moment when he would be reunited with the mysterious Esmie. I was too young by thirty years to appreciate truly his achievement in creating that garden of dreams and remembrance; it had taken him years of reverie, countless thought-maps, doodles on scraps of paper, visits to specialist book shops and trips abroad to collect his chosen flora; now, still tended like the grave of a beloved child, it gleamed with memories in the faintly rising moonlight.

  Enough of your jabbering, Mr Parker! It’s like listening to a bee in a bottle.

  Parker’s picaresque version confirms common knowledge about the old man’s residence; we at the Blue Angel already knew about the plaque bearing Esmie’s name, since Edwin the carpenter had put it there and divulged its existence to us du
ring his drunken night with Christ. Speculation spread, like unseen filaments of mycelium, that Esmie was the old man’s wife and that she had died in childbirth. Rumour had it that the old man stood every night in the pagoda viewing his fine plants, conveyed to him from the furthest outposts of Peru and Indonesia; the rare Alpines in their spartan quarters, and the lush orchids in the sweltering glasshouse.

  ‘Like a bird sheltering in a tree, Doctor Robert viewed all this every dusk and sent off a cry of pain into the night,’ Parker rhapsodised. ‘He smelt the sadness of fronds and drooping blooms wafting on the breeze; viewed his terrible loneliness; looked downwards, from his vantage point, on the living mausoleum he had created in remembrance of Esmie and his child.’

  That was the myth. The truth was even more romantic.

  We discovered the real story in an obituary in the Daily Informer in which flesh was put on the bones of our suppositions. Doctor Robert had been a great medico, as Edwin had gathered from their brief interchanges, and the newspaper confirmed that he had been a brilliant surgeon who had saved many thousands of lives. The last paragraph revealed, as is normal in the Informer’s obituaries, his marital status. Here was a grand surprise: he had never married and had no heir. This threw us all into turmoil. Who, then, was Esmie? And who would inherit his estate? Rumours and counter-rumours swept through the town like insurgents and counter-insurgents fighting from house to house for a foothold on the truth.

  In reality, nobody knew. It was a legal document, his last will and testament, made public a few weeks after his death, which explained the riddle.

  Esmie had not been his wife – but she had been the only love of his life.

  The old man’s solicitor had issued a terse statement on the instructions of the deceased, who had insisted on erasing all legal jargon and had worded the text himself. It read:

  Following the death of Miss Esmie Falkirk, to whom I was betrothed, whilst serving during the First World War, I disperse my estate as follows –