THE old kitchen seemed the same but the brother had gone, and with him those stormy little scenes with Mr Collopy. I am sorry I cannot present an interesting record of the events and words of his actual departure. He had stressed with Annie the great importance of an early knock so as to make sure he would catch the morning mail boat from Kingstown to Holyhead. Annie did her duty but she found nobody in the brother’s bed nor any sign of his packed belongings. He had stolen away some time in the night, perhaps finishing his last Irish sleep in somebody else’s house or, perhaps again, marking his departure with a valedictory carousal with his cronies. I felt offended that I should have been included in his boycott for I felt I had something of the status of a fellow-conspirator, apart from being his brother, but his mysterious exit infuriated Mr Collopy. I never knew quite why, but I suspected that he had planned a magnanimous farewell, a prayer of God Speed and perhaps the present of one of his prize cut-throat razors. Mr Collopy was ever fond of an occasion, and with encouragement, alike from the company and his crock, he could attain great heights of eloquence. The showman in him had been slighted and he was very offended. He casually asked me whether the brother could be expected back on a visit for Christmas but I truthfully replied at the time that I had no idea. Annie seemed to take no notice whatsoever of this change in our house, even though it meant less work for her.
About three weeks after the brother’s flight, I received a letter from him. It was in a costly long envelope, in the top left-hand corner of which were intertwined the letters L.U.A. (I was amused afterwards to notice in an Irish dictionary that lua means ‘a kick’.) The notepaper inside was very thick and expensive, indeed it was noisy to unfold. The heading, in black, shining crusted letters was LONDON UNIVERSITY ACADEMY, 120 Tooley Street, London, S.W.2. Down along the left margin was a list of the matters in which the Academy offered tuition—Boxing, Foreign Languages, Botany, Poultry Farming, Journalism, Fretwork, Archaeology, Swimming, Elocution, Dietetics, Treatment of High Blood Pressure, Ju-Jutsu, Political Science, Hypnotism, Astronomy, Medicine in the Home, Woodwork, Acrobatics and Wire-Walking, Public Speaking, Music, Care of the Teeth, Egyptology, Slimming, Psychiatry, Oil Prospecting, Railway Engineering, A Cure for Cancer, Treatment of Baldness, La Grande Cuisine, Bridge and Card Games, Field Athletics, Prevention and Treatment of Boils, Laundry Management, Chess, The Vegetable Garden, Sheep Farming, Etching and Drypoint, Sausage Manufacture in the Home, The Ancient Classics, Thaumaturgy Explained, and several other subjects the nature of which I did not understand properly from their names. What corpus of study was alluded to, for instance, in The Three Balls? Or Panpendarism? Or The Cultivation of Sours?
Here was the letter:
‘Sorry I could not write before now but I was terribly busy not only settling in at Tooley Street and organizing the office but also meeting people and making contacts. I suppose everybody got a bit of a shock when they found the bird had flown that morning but I could not face a formal farewell with Collopy puling and puking in the background with tears of whiskey rolling down his cheeks and gaunt Father Fahrt giving me his blessings in lordly Latin and maybe Annie quietly crying into her prashkeen. You know how I dislike that sort of thing. It makes me nervous. I’m sorry all the same that I had to be a bit secretive with yourself but the plans I have been working on made it essential that Collopy would know nothing because he has a wonderful gift for making trouble and poking his nose in where it will deluge everything with a dirty sneeze. Did you know that he has a brother in the police at Henley, not far from here? If he knew my exact address—which in no circumstances should you reveal to the bugger—I am sure I would have the other fellow peering around here, and for all I know he may be worse than Collopy himself. Needless to say I did not use any of the addresses the Rev. Fahrt gave me, for Jesuits can be a far closer police force than the men in blue. When I get things more advanced you must come over and give me a hand because I know this industry I’m entering on is only in its infancy, that there’s bags of money in it if the business is properly run, and plenty to go round for everybody. It’s a better life here, too. The pubs are better, food is good and cheap, and the streets aren’t crawling with touchers like Dublin. Information and help can be got on any subject or person under the sun for a quid, and often for only a few drinks.
‘Do not pay too much attention to the list of subjects in the margin, I don’t see why we shouldn’t deal with them and plenty more as well, e.g. Religious Vocations, but I am not yet publicly using this notepaper. You could regard the list in the margin as a manifesto, a statement of what we intend to do. We really aim at the mass-production of knowledge, human accomplishment and civilization. We plan the world of the future, a world of sophisticated and genial people, all well-to-do, impatient with snivellers, sneaks and politicians on the make; not really a Utopia but a society in which all unnecessary wrongs, failures, and misbehaviours are removed. The simplest way to attack this problem is to strike at the cause, which is ignorance and non-education, or miseducation Every day you meet people going around with two heads. They are completely puzzled by life, they understand practically nothing and are certain of only one thing—that they are going to die. I am not going to go so far as to contradict them in that but I believe I can suggest to them a few good ways of filling, up the interval. A week ago I met a nice class of a negro, apparently a seaman, in a pub in Tower Bridge Road. He was a gloomy character at first but in three meetings I taught him to play chess. Now he is delighted with himself and thinks he is a witch-doctor. I also had a night’s drinking with one of the thousands of ladies who flood the streets here. She wanted me to go with her but no fear. By her accent I knew she was Irish; so she was, Castleconnell on the Shannon. Same old story about a job as a maid, a tyrannical mistress and a young pup of a son that started pulling her about when she was making the beds. She came to the conclusion that if that sort of thing was the custom of the country, she might as well get paid for it. There is some logic in her argument but it is painfully clear that she knows next to nothing about business. I talked to her about her mother and the green hills of Erin and in no time I had her sniffling, though maybe it was the gin. Those girls are very fond of that stuff. But don’t get the impression that I’m a preacher saving souls every night by infesting the pubs. It’s only an odd night I do that, and when I’m on my own. I’m far too busy for that sort of gallivanting. The total staff in the office just now is four—a typist, a clerk and One Other. The One Other is my partner, who has put a decent share of spondulics into the venture. With his money and my brains, I do not see what there is to stop us. Better still, he has a well-to-do mother who lives in a grand house in Hampstead. He does not live with her or in fact get on with her too well, apparently because she made him spend two years at Oxford when he was younger. He says he was horrified by that place. He signs his name M. B. Barnes. When I looked for his Christian name—and you can’t have a partner in a new resounding enterprise without using his Christian name, even when reprimanding or insulting him—I found that his full name was Milton Byron Barnes. Maybe this got him jeered at by the Oxford ignoramuses and made him sour for life. He is a gloomy type but knows what work is; and he knows how to talk to people. He is not a poet, of course, but is convinced that his father, long dead, thought he was a poet and that he owed it to the masters of the past to commemorate their genius by saddling his unfortunate son with their names. At the moment we are nursing a slight difference between us. He feels one of the fields we must cover is advertising, newspaper and magazine and otherwise. He is convinced that this is the coming thing and keeps quoting High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim, FORCE is the food that raises him. He is right that there is big money to be made there but we have not got the captial to wade in—yet. I keep telling him more satisfaction and happiness can be achieved by teaching 10,000 Englishmen to play billiards properly at four guineas for four lessons than by grappling and grovelling in this underground of publicity but his answer is that he does not want to make anybody happy and certainly doesn’t want to be happy himself; he just wants to make a lot of money. I find that mentality a bit cynical, but I’m sure I’ll bring him round to my own sound views in good time. We had dinner with his old lady twice and I found her quite good and intelligent. I feel it will not be long until she becomes a patron of our Academy and help it along at important stages with infusions of the red blood of LSD. You know, that is why rich people were made and why we should never envy or insult them. They are people brought into the world armed with the weapons for helping others. Contrast them with Collopy, who spends all his time obstructing and annoying others, poking about to find bad things in order to make them worse, interfering, bickering, and fomenting ill will and fights among friends. More than once I have thought of getting; together a course entitled Your Own Business and the Minding of It. I would put Collopy down for free tuition. I’m in digs with another man, an elderly bachelor who owns a tobacco shop and spends his spare time reading Greek. How do I like such company? Very well, for I don’t have to buy cigarettes, and the landlady is so old that she occasionally forgets to ask for the rent.
‘Keep anything I’ve said in this note or any other I send under your hat, and don’t give anybody in Dublin the firm’s address. I’ll write soon again. Pass on to me any news that arises. Slip the enclosed pound note with my compliments to Annie. The best of luck.’
I sighed and put the letter in my pocket. There was not much in it really.