SIMON TAPPERTIT
Dickens was a great help to Vera. Already back in school days Dickens had been a sociological text as well as Eng. Lit. The capitalist society was like this and still is. Going on a bit, the dogged desire to learn English. Worse than Russian, by a long way. As the Pope says, ‘we all understand Russian even if none of us speak it’. But English: damn it, why can’t we all talk Latin?
Going on a bit more, he’s so good. Hm, said Castang, who had tried. The thing about Dickens to his eyes was learning how to skip. Come to that, he felt quite sure that skipping is the secret of all Lit. And as for Sociology…
Dickens had his uses. Like Mr Jaggers, who washed criminal cases off his hands with ‘scented soap’: Castang’s habit of taking a shower when he got home was known as Having a Jaggers.
There was a noisy smell of fried fish. He liked loud fierce things to eat, and when he did the shopping brought vulgar stuff Vera did not much like, but ate uncomplainingly. His nose had been caught by ‘angry whitings’ – so called because they are traditionally cooked biting their own tails – just out of the pot and making their anger felt, said Vera, through the whole street. A vague idea that this would make cooking the supper less trouble. As often happens the opposite was the truth, since whiting are full of bones. He pulled them to pieces happily, added some leftover rice, grated carrots, and lots of sliced spring onion, which would make a delicious salad, he said, tasting and adding more vinegar.
"I’m not quite sure whether the child will enjoy this," said Vera, shuddering slightly. He got cross if she didn’t eat. It was a reflection on his cooking. She had several glasses of milk. He had a beer, sighed with satisfaction, looked at her plate and said, "If you’re not going to eat any more I’ll finish that," belching slightly.
"You seem pretty well organised," running cold water on the plate. "Would you think it awful if I went out again?"
"You mean work? No, I don’t mind, if it’ll help."
"I don’t know whether it will or not. This thing is all loose ends. That’s not quite right. Like old-fashioned knitting wool." Nowadays one buys knitting wool in nice softly-wound balls. Before, one got skeins, and had to wind the wool off, preferably with somebody else to hold the skein. If you got the right end it wound off quick and easily. Getting the wrong end of a tangled skein could be an infuriating performance. Especially if you were in a hurry. Vera saw perfectly. Because of her, he was in a hurry. And because of her he didn’t want to be in a hurry. But was getting hurried, by Colette Delavigne, and the Mayor, and a lot more tiresome people.
"I wouldn’t be late or anything."
"Day or night is alike to me. The tiny one sleeps, and when it wakes up it’s hungry. Then it falls asleep in the middle of its tit, and I fall asleep, and we all muddle happily along together." And you give it a clean nappy, and it loves that, and pisses in it instantly – this is all too like the wrong end of the skein. But women have patience.
"But unwind first," added Vera.
"No, I’m early. I’m not in a hurry. I’m going to have a cigar. And a cup of coffee. These people are a puzzle. I don’t know what to make of them. Like this idiotic Thierry." He enlightened her about a few of Thierry’s fantasies.
"Sounds all rather innocent. I mean, in a homicide."
"It is, and it isn’t."
"Rather like Simon Tappertit. You wouldn’t know him; he’s in an early Dickens book and frankly, most of it’s unreadable. But in the middle of a lot of bilge you tumble up against something good. He’s an apprentice, and quite ineffectual, a poor object, but of course he thinks himself wonderful. He sneaks out at night; he’s a locksmith so he can make keys to all the doors. When out he’s the chief of a ludicrous gang and swaggers about breathing fire but of course they never do anything at all. Until he meets up with some characters planning a riot, who intoxicate him with violent talk. And then, of course like all vain and ineffectual people he suddenly becomes dangerous."
"What sort of a riot?" asked Castang, curiously.
"A religious one. There’s a completely dotty person, a kind of gloomy fanatic, who mumbles on about Catholics gaining political power, and being generally a menace, and who excites the mob into believing there’s a conspiracy to overthrow the government. They racket about screaming ‘No Popery’. The English quite often did this. The writer Defoe says that anybody would yell No Popery at the top of their voice without knowing, he remarks drily, whether Popery was a man or a horse."
Castang laughed and said, "It still goes on. And what happened then?"
"I forget really. The mob starts breaking things and burns a few houses, and then hysteria sets in. They all get drunk and begin killing people, get quite out of hand, but then reaction sets in and it all collapses. It lasted I think about two days. It’s a historic event – I think he describes it all quite accurately but adds fictional glosses. Tappertit is the kind of grotesque comic figure he couldn’t resist. I think it’s exact; I mean riots always do attract pathological figures. One is the public hangman: the rest are just pathetic."
"And what happens to Simon Thing?"
"I don’t recall exactly. I think Dickens couldn’t bear for anything too horrible to befall him. He’s punished for his vanity by breaking his leg, or getting all his hair burned off. You seem interested."
"I don’t know whether I am or not." He was looking out of the window. As often at the end of a turbulent day the wind had dropped and the sun had come out, and had gone down over the roofs on the other side of the canal with a big dramatic cloudscape lit still from the afterglow. Romantic scenery, such as fills the engravings of Gustave Doré, which Vera was fond of. There is bad good art, and there is also good bad art. Dickens was often both, and so was police work. He finished his cigar and put his gun belt back on. Vera was sewing placidly, mending a jacket of his that had had a pocket ripped out a month ago, arresting somebody. The arrest had been a bit of a brawl. It meant, for her, several hours of minute, difficult, totally unpaid work of much ingenuity to make an invisible mend. Most people would have thrown the jacket away, even though it was an expensive one, and nearly new.
The baby was asleep in a basket. He opened the window to air the room, and get the cigar-smoke out.
"Is there a villain?" he asked.
"There’s always a villain. Black melodramatic ones with sinister pale faces. There’s one in Little Dorrit so dreadful that everybody gets the shudders just looking at him. He’s French, of course."
"I thought Dickens liked us, rather."
"So he did. Lived here a lot, and goes on a good deal about how much better things are done here than in barbarous England. But for an English audience a really foul villain, painted extra black because in fact he’s singularly unconvincing, simply had to be French, you see.
"One of my troubles is that I can’t find any villain. I should have a sinister Englishman, but there aren’t any around."
Taking the step past ‘surveillance’ and building a watch around a person is not as simple as it seems on television. It is expensive; it is time-consuming; it needs a lot of personnel – all this means that it must be approved by higher authority, which takes quite a lot of convincing. To be any use at all it must also be quite ingenious. A population saturated with cheap cop-and-robber serials becomes fussy: that fellow who’s forever reading the morning paper in the lobby is going to be tapped on the shoulder and have a lollipop handed him. The mailman, the chap with the toolbag – they go on hanging about waiting to use the telephone and complaints will be made.
The commonest device used by real police is to pretend to be exactly what they are: cops. After all, the police do inquire into things. A cop who goes about opening other people’s cupboard doors, when asked what he thinks he’s playing at, can say ‘Looking for corpses’ and be found sufficiently convincing.
The classic ‘open watch’ is nothing but a variation on this technique, and consists of following someone in a heavy-handed way, to see what he will do. If he goes to trouble in order to shake you off, you let yourself get shaken: what he will do subsequently is evidently more interesting. It stands to reason that you have a more discreet follower in reserve. Castang, known to all the family as the officer investigating Marcel’s death, was the natural choice as decoy.
The flying-field ‘club-house’, however grandly named, was nothing more than a café like any other village pub; a low long building originally a cottage, with a sort of shed tacked on at one side, handily near the equally pompous ‘Air Traffic Control’ office. Facing the flying-field was a terrace sheltered by privet hedges, much haunted in fine weather by wives and girl-friends: part of this had been glassed-in, covered with a galvanised roof, and served for meetings or reunions as well as for playing cards and drinking beer when weather conditions were bad. It was a pleasant, unpretentious place with the typical atmosphere of amateurish enthusiasm, decorated with badges, banners, and the odd cup or medal won in competition. Aero clubs are the same whenever there is an old grass field long outdated for military or commercial use but proudly showing its origins in the heroic stick-and-string days. A little control tower and meteorological office, a group of hangars with service and maintenance areas, the local air-taxi and -charter firm. A helicopter or so for hire, a couple of old biplanes kept for stunting, and generally a few treasured wartime souvenirs, Spitfire, Focke-Wulf or Cobra kept carefully painted up and decorated with squadron markings. There is nothing from the jet age: ‘the field is too small. At other corners you will probably find the local glider enthusiasts, and almost always a biggish hangar for the storage and folding of parachutes.
You will find this set-up near any largish town. Secret societies of the Tappertit-type (his was called ‘The United Bulldogs’) abound there, each with its inner circle, private jargon, and special recognition signals. The balloon-freaks (the great status-symbol is to have been to Albuquerque) and the hang-glider fiends: high-jump and free-fall types who make artistic patterns in formation way up there in the blue. All perfectly charming, until the moment when they become grindingly boring.
The weather had been too uncertain these last days for any really serious work, and there was not too much of a crowd. Castang went up to the bar and ordered a beer. When he got it he flashed an official card with a show of slightly clumsy discretion.
"Robillard," he said portentously. "Inspection de Douanes."
"Huh?" said the barman. "Douane?"
"Not so loud you silly twit. Service de Suppression de Fraudes." Having just made it up he was quite pleased with the rotund cadence. He wasn’t certain it actually existed. Somewhere surely it must. Well, if it didn’t, it did now.