AFTERTHOUGHT
The Onlie Begetter
By ALAN BRIEN
Douglas had billeted himself, in a period of penury and despair, upon some married friends who lived in a lonely cottage in the wilds of Wales. He was not a great country-lover, except when he was in town, and it may be supposed that, through boredom and a need for re- assurance, he spent some part of the long, rain- sodden days practising his metropolitan charm upon the wife. Douglas denied any serious attempt at seduction, claiming only that he listened to her when she talked and occasionally wiped the dishes with a towel—two activities the taciturn husband thought unworthy of a Cold Comfort Farm male.
Douglas spent so much time building up fan- tasies around himself that he often failed to notice that odd things were happening to others. But it was gradually apparent. even to him, that the husband was staring for hours across the fireplace with a stony scowl. Then one Saturday morning. the husband suggested a shooting ex- pedition in search of rabbit and the two of them set out walking the hills in the mist. Douglas went ahead, wrapped in reverie, his city shoes sinking over the instep in soggy turf, his town suit clinging like frozen paper in the dank air. At last, on the crown of a small mountain, the sun burst through the clouds like a golden search- light and Douglas stopped to watch his own elongated shadow lying like a child's drawing across the glistening grass. He watched it with simple-minded pleasure for a while until he noticed there was another matchstick man out- line moving a little to one side. This fellow shadow also stopped, then raised something to its shoulder.
It was obvious to Douglas that the husband was pointing the shotgun at the back of his head. This was the moment in Douglas's short stories when the hero would throw himself upon the slippery ground, roll swiftly away and come up shooting from the hip. But he stood absolutely still and waited, with a kind of masochistic apathy, to be gunned down. There was a click, a bang, a tuft of wild flowers exploded a couple of yards from his toes, and a rabbit leapt in the air as if jerked on a string. Douglas and the husband returned to the cottage in silence. The rabbit was cooked that night and Douglas left by the first bus in the morning.
It was a dramatic little episode, as I well know, having retailed it a dozen times to friends for whom Douglas was only a name, and a character I was occasionally accused of inventing. The author of the thriller was Nina Bawden, wife of an old Oxford chum of mine. It was obvious that I was the link though neither she nor I remembered that anecdote in particular. For a giddy moment, Douglas considered suing for a share of the royalties, or at least a footnote acknowledging him as the source. But the pleasure of being, even vicariously, in print over- came his desire to make a small, unearned profit. He settled happily for the proud consciousness of being not only a writer himself but a source of copy for other writers.
Years later, as, New York correspondent of a London paper, I experienced a similar shock. One of the unexpected pleasures of moving to a new country, and starting to make a new circle of friends, is the discovery that you have a fresh and unwearied audience for all your old, boring tales. I was in the middle of the saga of my wartime Oxford landlady, with the laughs and gasps coming in all the right places, when I suddenly lost my listeners. They began looking down, catching each other's eyes in embarrassed glances, as if unsure who was to tell me my fly buttons were undone. A seasoned raconteur is alert to such failures of communication. I halted in mid-sentence and accused them of doubting my words. There was an awkward pause, then one of them produced from his bookshelf an ingenious and entertaining British detective story, still much in vogue among New York Anglo- philes and puzzle-fans, called Landscape with Dead Dons. In its pages, beyond any possibility of coincidence, was my landlady in one of her weird and improbable poses. It was written by Robert Robinson, another old Oxford chum, who later explained to me that he had been told about her by a mutual acquaintance of ours who had, characteristically, appropriated her as his own landlady.
Being a decent lot, with a high regard for an Englishman's word of honour, I think they be- lieved my claim to be the onlie begetter. But it was an awkward posture for a stranger to find himself in—especially as I had always claimed to Robinson to have read and enjoyed his book, though a youthful envy kept me from doing so in case it turned out to be very good. It was a depressing thought that here I was, a fount of lively narrative, unable or unwilling to bottle my own product, while more hard-working and ambitious contemporaries were winning trans- atlantic reputations. I began to fancy that the libraries were full of scraps of my autobiography embalmed in other men's hard covers. I even removed the story of Miss Lawson, and the strange happenings at 27 St John Street, from my repertoire fearing that other listeners might brand me as a plagiarist without giving me an opportunity to explain.
The irony was that the full, unvarnished version was so much richer and stranger than anything which had appeared in print. The house was a junk heap pressed into a geometrical shape by the addition of walls and floors. It was alive with all kinds of insects and creatures which now make me shudder to remember. Miss Lawson was a tiny spinster, dressed in old curtains, with a grimy tam-o'-shanter screwed down on the wrinkles of her shrunken head, and a lady-like pride in everything under her roof. 'I assure you, sir,' she boasted modestly, when I mentioned strange scuttlings and gnawings understairs, 'All our mice are perfectly clean.' Once she asked whether what one saw on these new-fangled tele- vision sets would largely consist of little men running about. One of us, thinking she must have glimpsed a football match, replied that this would be quite possible. But why did she ask? 'Oh, no• reason really, sir,' she explained. 'It's just all those little men running about in the cellar. I see now, they must have leaked through from the television set next door.'
The inhabitants were almost as eccentric as her midget visitors in the cellar. ('They've taken to leaving fairy gold there now,' she said a little later. 'Funny mites they are.') Wittgenstein was a lodger for a while, keeping us awake in the middle of the night, even though we never went to bed until 3 a.m., walking like a clockwork soldier round and round the deckchair that stood in the middle of his bare carpetless back room. We had no idea he might be famous. We used to bang on the ceiling and shout 'Pack it in, you old fool.'
Miss Lawson, however, deserves a chapter to herself. Some day I must write it—that is if it has not already been embodied in some other book by some other contemporary behind my back.
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