Three Cheers for Base

Three Cheers For Base

  By

  Theodore Halliday

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Three Cheers For Base

  Copyright © 2012 by Anybook Ltd

  This is I’m sure, as good a place as any to thank my sister Melanie for her cheerful cover design, to thank Simon for arranging it just so, and to give Peter three cheers for doing a sterling job in the editing and proofing department.

  Duck’s Bill

  Though somewhat blurry, the shape of a duck’s bill could easily be made out, gleaming through the hazy morning sunlight.

  He stared at it for a moment, and then let his gaze shift up to its eyes.

  They stared back coldly.

  Drade squinted as he beheld bill and eyes on the handle of the Victorian backscratcher hanging on the wall in his bedroom.

  “Why the grin?” he mused.

  Of course, as an educated man, Drade didn’t need to be told that the ‘grin’ had more to do with the inflexible and broadly ossified nature of the duck’s bill than with any mirth the bird might be feeling or, for that matter, any quiet confidence he might have been expressing whilst facing down a hunter armed with an eagerly triggered twelve bore. But therein lay the whimsical and sometimes fiendish beauty of the limitless mind of Hamish de Buckton Drade; for whilst he knew of all of this, and much more besides, it would certainly appear to the casual observer, made acquainted with Drade’s train of thought, that he knew precisely none of this, and that the extent of these besides be open to doubt or at the very least be unhelpful in the general course of affairs.

  Drade continued to study duck. He had not got to where he was by simply asking the right questions. Far from it. As far as he was concerned the very mark of a man was to have that rare ability to ask the right questions and then to answer them. Thus - though it might take an age to do it – find the answer to this puzzler he would. And he would approach the matter logically, which was the other mark of a man. No point getting emotional. One had to be judicious, but not - repeat not - judgemental. So in this case:

  ‘Why the grin? Well, clearly that was some kind of a bonal disorder with which all ducks were afflicted. Simple,’ reflected Drade, ‘no great challenge. Case closed. And,’ he thought, briefly reopening the case, ‘If one wanted proof, careful observation of one duck squabbling with another over, say, the rights to a third, would reveal that, whilst the language used was invariably heated (obvious even if one didn’t know duck) and might have been accompanied by some jostling, nonetheless the lines of the participants’ bills changed not a jot. QED.’

  Drade twisted around in his bed to face the source of his considerations more fully. His silent partner continued to stare back, blissfully unaware that he had taken part in a joust which, though he may not have lost, the other party had certainly won. Drade, for his part, luxuriated in the knowledge that, whilst he had certainly won, the other party had most assuredly lost, and as he was in the throes of rewarding himself with a few minutes snoozing, another question crept into his inquisitive mind:

  ‘Why the duck? Why, of all things was the handle of the backscratcher shaped like a duck?’ A duck would have been the last animal he would have drafted in to sort out an inaccessible itch, and with its soft plumes and pallet-like bill there was a distinct danger that its intervention might actually make the situation worse. A woodpecker would have been better, or perhaps a rat, or burrowing-scratching animal of some kind…

  Drade’s inestimable intellect toyed with the matter for some moments more, but he decided at length that this was one question too many; one should not, as it were, overcook the duck. For Drade was a just man, as well as clever, and in the Creator’s choice of handle-dressing he sensed the Artist’s desire to perplex and to riddle. A puzzler this was meant to be, and a puzzler it should thus remain.

  In any case, Drade was just waking and found himself enveloped by a light fug. At that most gentle and considerate of time of day such nuts, if indeed they needed to be cracked, needed not to be cracked then.

  ‘Gaol-time was there for these problems,’ he reflected.

  By Gaol-time, Drade did not mean time spent in a dungeon, full of regret, with hairy arms clutching at bars and stubbly face glowering down upon the free world. Indeed not. For Drade Gaol meant those times which seemed to last forever, when one is caught in conversation, pinned down by someone enormously dull yet oddly difficult to detach oneself from. And although Drade was sympathetic to the warders’ right to be heard, he was a clever man as well as just, and try as he might to focus even for a moment on whatever they were saying, he invariably found his mind wandering hither and thither amongst musings more interesting.

  The warders did have one saving grace, however, which was that they did not seem to care whether or not one agreed or disagreed with them or even whether they were fully understood; what was important was that someone be there to receive their outpourings. Usually they were appeased with the occasional yes or no or perhaps a really?, or for those extreme cases, when one’s mind wandered so far from the other’s meandering trail that to find one’s way back would have taken a legion of beagles and beaters enough to wake the dead, Drade found that a coordinated head and shoulder movement coupled with a sympathetic sigh hit the mark and educed a knowing look or a slight pause from his keeper.

  Even though he had become an expert in dealing with the soliloquist rampant, still a sure method of avoiding entanglement in the first place eluded him. Often, as he made his escapes, he wondered whether there might be some tiny clue, some inkling, a pointer which ought to have alerted him to give that type of fellow a wide berth in the first place: a hopeful glint in their eyes towards people who appeared to be running low on conversation, the whisper of a smile in one’s direction for no reason, a tripping on a shoelace or a small spilling of a drink, followed by an enormous (though unmerited) gwafour serving as an icebreaker of such naïve innocence that it were impossible to turn away. ‘…and suddenly boom!, you were impaled by someone who was so sincere about …Oh something, whatever, who cares…’

  Drade rested his great mind a few moments more before opening his eyes again.

  Being a Tuesday morning of no special importance, this ability simply to wake up later was a luxury afforded to few. But Drade’s circumstances were such that he had really never had need to muck in with the common herd, till the fields, or even toe the line. He had always felt that this had given him great independence of thought: the rare ability to see things another - and usually a better - way. Of course, being part of the leisured classes, he had never been called upon to put his ability to work; but, as he frequently assured himself, if ever he were, he would shine like a new pair of shoes. In the matters of the common herd and the tilling of the fields he would immediately have suggested acquiring some sort of tractor or mechanised device; and as for toeing the line, might he suggest towing it?

  The sun had moved a little round his room and its piercing shards were beginning to cut into the darkness of the headboard. Drade knew the moment to arise was approaching and began to martial his thoughts that he might dispose of the day’s challenges.

  This was a trick he had picked up at school, and it had served him well. His geography master, an old trooper himself, lived by the golden rule of three: Evaluate, Revaluate and Pounce. Thus, one would Evaluate a day, considering all that it might bring; one would Revaluate it, to make sure that nothing had been omitted; and then one would jump out of bed and, as it were, Pounce upon it.

  ‘So simple,’ reflected Drade as he strode into the bathroom and flicked the shower tap to full. The cold water shot out of the shower-head and into the enamel bathtub below.

  ‘If only there was a way of pa
ssing on these gems of wisdom to the general populous without seeming overbearing.’

  He sighed and tested the water with his hand. It was cold – very cold. He coaxed the lever some way into the red, hung his dressing gown upon its hook and, sensing that the boiler had not yet got up to speed, and turned towards the mirror.

  ‘Not billy bad,’ he murmured, eyeing himself up. Good hairline, well proportioned ears, nicely pointed eyebrows over piercing blue eyes, balanced by generous lips and determined jaw. A trustworthy face, he decided, handsome but with just enough harshness in it to put off undesirable advances:

  ‘Not bad at all!’

  The only complaint he might have had was that he looked rather similar the day before, and whilst that in itself was not a problem, Drade liked the element of surprise.

  ‘Surprise is to Hamish, as a good water repellent coat is to a submarine,’ Drade had said once to one of his young cousins. ‘Very important,’ he had added, lest there be any doubt.

  He remembered how surprised he had been to learn that the Chelsea Physic Garden was simply a herb garden and not some kind of gymnasium; or that the British Legion was utterly different to the Foreign Legion. In common with the best sorts of people, he preferred surprises which surprised pleasantly, like discovering that there was an extra pint of milk in the fridge rather than discovering that Father Christmas did not in fact exist (which, at the time, had been a bit of a blow).

  He stood under the shower and had just begun to apply his favourite eau-de-cologne-scented soap when the telephone rang. He ignored it. He knew this trap: he would stagger out of the bathroom, drenching the floor and towel with a soapy mixture only for the ringing to stop the moment he reached the.

  ‘If it’s important, they’ll ring back,’ he thought and continued to lather himself.

  The telephone did continue its ringing, but though Drade paused momentarily, he did not rise to the bait. In fact, the more the telephone rang, the more deliberate the ease became with which Drade went about his business, until, that is, he could bear it no longer, and, swaddled in a soggy towel he stumbled out of the bathroom and lunged at the source of his distress.

  It stopped chirruping the instant he laid a hand upon it.

  ‘Bugger,’ thought Drade, who turned and began to waddle back towards the bathroom.

  The telephone rang again and Drade grabbed it. It was Belter calling a meeting at Base for late lunch and possible early supper.

  Drade had known Belter almost all his life, having been deposited at the same out-of-town school at the tender age of four by parents stuck out in some ex-colony or other. On his first day, when Drade had closed his newly occupied locker, Belter had appeared, standing on the other side. Belter had been observing the newbie for some moments, trying to work out if he be friend or foe. Drade had jumped back at the sight of Belter’s physical proximity, ruddy face and podgy features; immediately Belter had known this one to be a friend. Drade had, on the other hand, not been so speedily convinced and, in fact, it took three rescues from the most perilous situations and a great deal of help with his prep finally to win him over. Then, until the age of nineteen, the two were almost inseparable. After school they had parted ways, with Belter going to the Reading to study Law and Drade going to Durham to read history. They had kept in touch of course, and had many mutual friends and the like, but almost ten years had passed until they saw one another.

  ‘Oh, but he was a smart one, that Belter,’ thought Drade, with a rueful smile, as if he had somehow been cheated out of the smartness gene by a bad hand of cards.

  ‘First, he gets himself a law degree and then gets nicely ensconced with a good firm of lawyers.’

  Unluckily for Belter, at that point his stepfather – to whom he had been much attached - died of a heart attack. The man had made the same series of mistakes as Belter’s real father had, in first marrying his mother and then turning to drink in order to cope with her. He too had died young of a broken heart. And for the second time in a generation Belter had inherited a huge pile of money, decided to give up the lawyer’s life and instead to lead the life of general bon viveur, with a little armchair investing on the side.

  Swaddled in towelling, his bare feet caressed by the course strands of an Afghan, Drade gazed thoughtfully out of the sitting room window of his Cadogan apartment. Living on the seventh floor, he could just peak over the roofs of the buildings opposite and in the distance make out Victoria Station, Big Ben and the London Eye. The apartment itself was on a corner of a much larger mansion, so if he chose to look out of the other window, he would have been able to make out The Albert Memorial, The Trellick Tower and the new Wembley Stadium up there on the hills overlooking London. Drade rarely choose to do this, however, the path to the other window being almost always blocked by boxes of books and papers left to him by his maternal grandfather – a professor of Biology at a college just down the road – which for the last ten years, at least, Drade had been telling himself he was ‘going through’.

  Unfortunately, ‘going through’ had generally consisted of his picking out the first item that was to hand and whisking through it. If it did not interest him – and it usually did not – it would be put to one side until a final determination as to its future might be made at some point. If it did, he might read a few lines or paragraphs, before he drifting away away into something perhaps vaguely connected, but, in fact, not really connected at all. A few days earlier, for example, he had come across an article his grandfather had found interesting about the stagnation of the Thames at Henley due to pollution. Drade had got as far as page two when he had started to imagine how bizarre it would be to hold The Regatta in stagnant waters; he had pictured two stranded boats filled with rowers, scooping great oar-fulls of sludge in their wake, which was only a notional wake of course, as they were not actually moving. Very quickly his rowers would find themselves perched upon oar-high pillars of mud in the middle of the Henley Marsh and they would need stilts to get to terra firma. So the boat race would become the stilt race and the rowers would no longer need to be tall, muscular types with square jaws, but instead small, lithe fellows who were good at balancing. Which would mean that Oxford and Cambridge would no longer be filled with lanky, romantic intellectuals, but small, cunning circus-types, who would then go on to work for the BBC to schedule programmes about fighting dirty and trampish survival skills, instead of documentaries about obscure Ottoman artists or nasty popes. So the peoples of Britain would become versed in devious tricks rather than the higher things in life. And that would surely never happen and so it was that the books never moved and Drade rarely got to see the view out of the other window.

  Having found himself a new dry towel, Drade patted himself down, warpped the towel around his waist, and strolled into his bedroom closet. He had not had a chance to assess the weather, but he did recall an impression of sunlight earlier on. On the other hand, with it being spring and the weather so changeable...

  ‘Better not risk it,’ he thought, as he picked up a simple pair of chinos and a tattersall shirt and turned his great mind to more practical matters.

  Being leisured, Drade did not divide time into weeks, months or years, but rather into seasons, and he did not therefore keep a calendar as such but rather organised his life around three lists. The first list contained his formals, so called on account of the good form shown by one’s attendance. They were usually annual or seasonal family gatherings held in different parts of the country to celebrate some achievement or to commemorate an anniversary or some such. This summer, for example, cousin Claire would be celebrating her graduation and this was a formal as indicated by its being held in the family home just outside Bristol, so Drade would attend. He himself had no siblings, probably because both his parents – themselves first cousins – had had an extraordinary number of them, and thus did he have abundance of relatives of all persuasions. Added to which, through the sanity of intermarriage, there were some o
f more than one persuasion. And not to mention, through the fallibility of human nature, a few of no persuasion at all. Uncles and Aunts, as cannons of the clan, held this loose confederation together and tendered the forked whip of guilt and fear liberally upon anyone impertinent enough to forget a formal, or worse still disrespect it by offering a poor excuse for non-attendance. That being said, it was generally reckoned that one could miss a formal on account of something unexpected, which in Drade’s case was the name of his second list.

  Events on his unexpecteds list were, as its name suggested, events which could not reasonably be foreseen: untimely deaths, sudden marriages, windfalls, bankruptcies, and the like. A precision was applied to the interpretation of the word unexpected which would have surprised one not familiar with Drade’s social circle. For an event to be unexpected it needed to be a bolt from an at least bluish sky. The death of aunt Helena at a 103, after a long illness, could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as unexpected. However, excluding her son from her will was unexpected, and thus the marriage of her grandson had to be unexpectedly called off, which meant that he got a pass from going to an autumn formal held by his uncle Harry, ostensibly to kick off the hunting season, but really to celebrate his nephew’s wedding.

  ‘Unexpecteds really are the spice of life,’ mused Drade, smoothing down the placket around his shirt’s top button, ‘a bit like surprises.’ In fact, now that he came to think about it, he could not really imagine a surprise not being unexpected, or for that matter, something unexpected not being a surprise. Perhaps he should change the name of his unexpecteds list to his surprises list. Certainly something to dwell upon, or at least to put to the top of his mundanes list.

  On the mundanes list were all those little bureaucratic trivialities such as paying bills, having a check-up, grocery shopping, calling in a tradesman and, it seemed, list-naming. These were the things which he really needed someone else to organise for him, if only he had more of them to do. But alas, on account of the way his life was structured, this list tended to be rather short. Most of his shopping, washing, ironing and housework were attended to by his cleaning lady Olive. The condominium company looked after the building in which he lived, and his finances and affairs of a legal nature were left squarely in the hands of his accountants and lawyers. So for Drade, public holidays, festivals and TGIFs were the sorts of irrelevancy which only the non-leisured needed to worry about.

  Not that Drade would ever have described himself as ‘leisured’. The very idea! As far as Drade was concerned, the lists ‘a’solutely’ dominated his life and stretched out like the endless trans-Siberian whatchamacallit, offering no pause for a fellow to catch his breath, and continually replenishing themselves. With the mundanes list, for example, as soon as one had had, say, a hair-cut, the clock was reset, the countdown started again, and the list grew no shorter. The same thing happened with bills.

  ‘One should be allowed to pay his bills every ten years,’ thought Drade, ‘and there ought to be one central place where one pays them, a sort of bills office where one goes once a decade, hands the dosh over some trusted official who then goes about distributing it to all who are owed - obvious really.’

  Drade was astonished at how the simplest solutions sometimes evaded discovery by the cleverest of people. Of course, it would not work with all mundane; check-ups and the like had to be done regularly, otherwise there would be no point in doing them. No point going to Dentist only to find that, if you had come nine years earlier, all would have been well; whereas because you did not, a tooth or two would need to be extracted.

  ‘Definitely not,’ thought Drade, ‘a line between mundanes that could be done on a regular basis and those that could be bunched together needed to be drawn up. Perhaps even new sub-lists containing, say, monthly, annual, and things-that-need-to-be-done-once-every-few-years.’

  Drade wondered how such sub-lists would affect the formals; for not only did they invariably repeat themselves, but one tended to spawn another. Two years earlier, for example, cousin Havery’s long-time girlfriend had keeled over and died from an embolism at her parents a forty-year wedding anniversary. The funeral was well attended, as one might imagine, and it was there that Drade met members of the Yorkshire branch of the family, of whom he had heard much, but with whom he had had little to do. Not that there was anything amiss about them, he had always assured himself, but he had always felt that the YB were happiest lurking in the shadier parts of the family tree. A friendly bunch notwithstanding, they had immediately invited him to a curious local dinner affair which had a name he could not remember, up in a place called Driffield or Draffield or Drateeled or thereabouts, and to which it seemed everyone and anybody within at least a hundred mile radius had been invited, and all of whom were, he had been assured, the closest of blood relatives.

  On that occasion he had naturally exhibited a form most excellent (as he did on every occasion), arriving at Bortery Watch at precisely the allotted time and in exactly the correct attire. Drade had shunted his Volvo into a sort of cedar-covered cove, its wheels accommodating themselves well amidst its exposed roots. He had alighted absolutely, the man about town, out of town, and yet with something of the country about him. With a neat flick of his wrist he had flipped the car door back into its rightful place, and casually cradling a present from London City in his left arm, he turned with certain expectancy towards the house only to find it unlit, silent and quite obviously abandoned. He had paused and taken stock of the situation in that very measured way which was his habit, before tentatively padding towards the front door at the end of a cavernous porch much overrun with ivies and other creeping greeneries. The bell had clanged urgently but nothing had stirred from within, and it was at this point, his eyes having become accustomed to the darkness, that he had noticed the front door was ajar. He had paused and weighed up the idea of simply going in yahoo style – which he felt sure would be readily forgiven, as he had after all tried the doorbell and he was a blood relative, not to mention someone known far and wide for his good form – when he had become aware of a deep, bellowing, growling roar seeming to emanate from outside, under the ground, and round the back of the building.

  The groaning and grunting had grown as had he circled the house, and Drade then had spied flame-light and flickering shadows sparring together some fifty yards or so into a small nearby wood. He had advanced towards them, not knowing what to expect, when at once the land beneath his feet had seemed to fall away into a hidden hollow, in which was set a folly of granite crowded with people at a long narrow oaken table. Drade’s senses had been flooded by the glow of a thousand candles, the scents of cookings and roastings which had gusted towards him, the din and clatter of eatings, and chatter which had bombarded his ears and the warmth of innumerable handshakes and embraces as he had been tugged and pushed and pressed and prodded towards the centre of the swarming multitude.

  ‘A rum lot indeed,’ reflected Drade, as he had extracted himself from the rugged embrace of a fellow guest who, the moment of his arrival, had singled him out as the very best of fellows. And there had been many others, who likewise, had appeared to know him intimately and at the same time had been all perfect strangers to him.

  The atmosphere round the table had been raucous that night and Drade had recalled feeling exceedingly self-conscious, being the only person who did not literally wash his food down with gallons of some local brew, to which all had seemed very much attached. The feasting en masse had been accompanied by much belching and self-excusing, singing and laughing, shouting and argument, and some tears too, and after many hours the throng had given way, as these things do, to a small cluster of hardened drinkers discussing matters of only mild importance in the gravest of manners. It had been at this time, that the patriarch of the group – a certain Donald Ramsey Drade – had lent over in Hamish’s direction and started to refill his glass with whisky by way of introduction.

&nb
sp; He had been a large man with a big white beard, a fine mane of white hair, swept back and which, as a result of some unsuccessful dabbling with hair dye, had had the slightest tint of blue at the edges. He had had a curious double aspect to his face on account of a childhood accident which had robbed him of his sight in one eye and contorted that side of his face with deep red scars.

  ‘I knew your father,’ he had begun in a deep gravelly voice, appraising Drade with his good eye.

  Ramsey Drade had turned away to find a clean glass, after managing to drop his original one, and, being a man of a certain size, had found himself ill-disposed to grub around under the table to find it.

  ‘That’s right,’ Drade had said. ‘Yes, he was your cousin, wasn’t he?’

  Janus, had spun round to refocus his attentions upon the youngster. ‘Your mother was my cousin,’ he had said.

  ‘They both were, weren’t they?’ Drade had said hesitantly.

  ‘We didn’t get on’ had said Ramsey Drade, ‘but he wasn’t all bad - at least that’s what people said.’

  Ramsey Drade had reached into his mouth and quite deliberately adjusted his denture.

  ‘But I have to say, I found him somewhat ill-mannered, especially were woman were concerned, What?’

  Drade had not especially agreed, but had nodded anyway and swilled the whisky around the bottom of his glass thoughtfully.

  ‘Ah, the formals...’ Drade refocused his attentions to the present and upon his attire.

  As he finished tightening the Windsor knot in his tie, he glanced at the reflection in the mirror of the duck’s bill backscratcher hanging on the wall behind him.

  ‘Funny, how he had decided to hang the backscratcher on the wall, whereas the two paintings he had acquired at an exhibition held by a friend of a friend had lain on the floor, propped up against a chest of draws for almost four years.’

  He wondered why this was and glanced round the room. The traditional place for a painting was of course above the mantelpiece, but he already had one there – an oil painting of a hunting scene. His bedroom had three doors: one into the closet, one to his bathroom, and the third which lead into a corridor. These occupied a great deal of wall space. And because he disliked having anything above the headboard, in case it should fall during the night, the only real spaces left were a small one to the left of the closet door – which would look a bit odd – and the space where the backscratcher was.

  ‘Well, that’s that, I suppose,’ thought Drade. ‘On the other hand, why bother to have a back scratcher on the wall at all? Why had he decided to put it there?’ It was just a functional item, after all, like a pair of nail clippers or a shoe horn; and whilst there was definitely something decorative about its handle, it was otherwise rather bland and to the fleeting eye, might easily be mistaken for a riding crop or something similar. On the other hand again, he had noticed that people frequently hung the most mundane of items in the oddest of places, like plates or knives, and a few weeks ago, he had even caught sight of a rather ordinary looking tea bag strung up in someone’s entrance hall. Very odd – a teabag – he could have understood if he had found it in the kitchen, perhaps impaled on an old nail, as a result of being flung upwards by a tea drinker with burnt fingers – but in the hallway? On the other hand again (again) one should never underestimate the importance of the unexpected; for all he knew it might have been a famous teabag, an aristocrat perhaps, whose ancestors had been called upon to represent the general class of tea. Then again, perhaps it was an ordinary working class bag, being cured, like a ham, and quite innocent of finger burning.’

  These considerations occupied Drade’s great mind for a while longer, as he put the finishing touches to his appearance, such that, by the time he felt himself complete, he had weighed up so many different hands that it was a wonder he had come to any resolution at all. And yet, somehow, through it all, doubtless guided by pillars of fire and wondrous signs, decide he did.

  Secure in the knowledge that he had considered the matter from all angles, he approached the article. Then he paused. Had he really considered all possible hands? He half reached towards it as if intending to dismount it, but paused again. What about the hidden hands one reads so much about? After all, in a sense, this backscratcher was an historical artefact, a remnant of an age when people had time to scratch their backs, and thanks to this ingenious device, the means. Thinking the better of it, he turned and went into the hall, glancing down at the two paintings as he left.

  ‘They are a little garish for a bedroom,’ he thought. ‘Perhaps they would be better in the kitchen.’

  This was not a simple throwaway judgement. It was one made from the very highest point; for of all defining qualities which a man possessed, taste was absolutely the thing which, for Drade, set one man apart from another. To Drade, more than anything else, it determined what one did, where one lived, how one dressed, with whom one mixed, where one went, what one ate, drank, read, listened to and ignored. More than wealth, titles, education, manners, brains, and all the rest, taste was the very litmus of a man. And like a litmus, as far as Drade was concerned, one either had it or one did not and if one did not,

  ‘Well too jolly bad, sorry old chum. That’s life.’

  Taste could not be taught, picked up at school like a nursery rhyme, or learnt later in life as one would learn the names of all the capital cities of the world. Rather was it a birth mark, something one was born with like a lazy eye or unusually small feet; one might ignore it, overrule it, curse it or deny it, and yet was it always there, cheek by jowl upon a person.

  One might see lying on a park bench a vagrant, someone of no fixed abode, of little learning and no chattels, unshaven, unshorn, unloved, wrapped in the filthiest mixture of rags which could be clad upon a person, and yet might he sport shoes so shiny, fine and elegant that they would grace any Jermyn Street shoe shop.

  Drade had once spied a wild pig on his uncle’s farm in Northumberland. The poor fellow had somehow lost the use of one of his back legs and lacked a lug. Yet as he hobbled along, Drade could not help but notice a certain dignity in his gait, as though the pig were deliberating over every step and assaying the terroir; and whereas his peers would snout their way through anything their path, old Hopper would delicately peck at this and that, seeming to hold back for just an instant each time. The pig had looked up at that moment, perhaps startled by the sight of two young hunters huddled behind a bush, sensing perhaps the presence of a kindred spirit. And in that space Drade saw the majesty that only Taste could bestow and placed a trotter gently upon the barrel of his cousin’s gun, sparing Hopper’s life.

  It was Taste that made this possible. Intangible, un-buyable, indefinable and, ephemeral ‘Taste’; and Drade thanked the Good Lord Above for endowing him with it in such abundance.

  He plucked a light jacket from behind the door, picked up his bicycle clips and left, forgetting all about the paintings for another day.