Crook's Tour

I met my aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral. My mother was approaching 86 when she died, and my aunt was some 11 or 12 years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons, I found myself agreeably excited by my mother's funeral.

Not many people attended the service, which took place at a famous crematorium, but there was that slight stirring of excited expectation that is never experienced at a graveside. Will the oven doors open? Will the coffin stick on the way to the flames? I heard a voice behind me saying in very clear old accents, "I was present once at a premature cremation."

It was, as I recognized with some difficulty from a photograph in the family album, my Aunt Augusta, who had arrived late, dressed rather as the late Queen Mary of beloved memory might have dressed if she had still been with us and had adapted herself a little bit to the present mode. I was surprised by her brilliant red hair, monumentally piled, and her two big front teeth, which gave her a vital Neanderthal air. Somebody said, "Hush," and a clergyman began a prayer that I believe he must have composed himself. At any rate, I have never heard it at any other funeral service of any denomination, and I have attended a great number in my time. A bank manager is expected to pay his last respects to any old client who is not, as we say, "in the red"; and, in any case, I have a weakness for funerals. People are generally seen at their best on these occasions, serious and sober and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

The funeral of my mother went without a hitch. The flowers were removed economically from the coffin, which, at the touch of a button, slid away from us out of sight. Afterward, in the troubled sunlight, I shook hands with a number of nephews and nieces and cousins whom I hadn't seen for years and could not identify. It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes, and wait I did, while the chimney of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.

"You must be Henry," Aunt Augusta said, gazing reflectively at me with her sea-deep blue eyes.

"Yes," I said, "and you must be Aunt Augusta."

"It's a very long time since I saw anything of your mother," Aunt Augusta told me. "I hope that her death was an easy one."

"Oh, yes, you know, at her time of life --her heart just stopped. She died of old age."

"Old age? She was only ten years older than I am," Aunt Augusta said accusingly.

We took a little walk together in the garden of the crematorium. A crematorium garden resembles a real garden about as much as a golf links resembles a genuine landscape. The lawns are too well cultivated and the trees too stiffly on parade: The urns resemble the little boxes containing sand, where one tees up. "Tell me," Aunt Augusta said, "are you still at the bank?"

"No, I retired two years ago."

"Retired? A young man like you! For heaven's sake, what do you do with your time?"

"I cultivate dahlias, Aunt Augusta." She gave a regal rightabout swing of a phantom bustle that resembled Queen Mary's.

"Dahlias! Whatever for?"

By the time we had finished our walk, the ashes were ready for me. I had chosen a very classical urn in black steel, and I would have liked to assure myself that there had been no error, but they presented me with a package very neatly done up in brown paper, with red-paper seals, which reminded me of a Christmas gift. "What are you going to do with it?" Aunt Augusta said.

"I thought of making a little throne for it among my dahlias."

"It will look a little bleak in winter."

"I hadn't considered that. I could always bring it indoors at that season."

"Backward and forward. My sister seems hardly likely to rest in peace."

"I'll think over it again."

"You are not married, are you?"

"No."

"Any children?"

"Of course not."

"There is always the question to whom you will bequeath my sister. I am likely to predecease you."

"One cannot think of everything at once."

"You could have left it here," Aunt Augusta said.

"I thought it would look well among the dahlias," I replied obstinately, for I had spent all the previous evening designing a simple plinth in good taste.

"A chacun son gout," my aunt said with a surprisingly good French accent. I had never considered our family very cosmopolitan.

"Well, Aunt Augusta," I said at the gates of the crematorium (I was preparing to leave, for my garden called), "it's been many years since we saw each other.... I hope. ..." I had left the lawn mower outside, uncovered, and there was a hint of rain in the quick gray clouds overhead. "I would like it very much if one day you would take a cup of tea with me in Southwood."

"At the moment, I would prefer something stronger and more tranquilizing. It is not every day one sees a sister confined to the flames. Like the Pucelle."

"I don't quite--"

"Joan of Arc."

"I have some sherry at home, but it's rather a long ride, and perhaps--"

"My apartment is, at any rate, north of the river," Aunt Augusta said firmly, "and I have everything we require." Without asking my assent, she hailed a taxi. It was the first and, perhaps, when I think back on it now, the most memorable of the journeys we were to take together.

• • •

The Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style. Through the windows, I could see men with exaggerated mustaches in tweed coats, which were split horsily behind, gathered round a girl in jodhpurs. They were not the type to whom I would have extended much credit, and I doubted whether any of them, except the girl, had ever ridden a horse. They were all drinking bitter, and I had the impression that any spare cash they might have put aside went on tailors and hairdressers, rather than equitation. A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whiskey drinker to a well-dressed beer drinker.

We went in by a side door. My aunt's apartment was on the second floor, and on the first floor there was a small sofa, which I learned later had been bought by my aunt so that she could take a little rest on the way up. It was typical of her generous nature that she had bought a sofa, which could barely be squeezed onto the landing, and not a chair for one. "I always take a little rest at this point. Come and sit down, too, Henry. The stairs are steep, though perhaps they don't seem so at your age." She looked at me critically. "You have certainly changed a lot since I saw you last, though you haven't got much more hair."

"I've had it, but I've lost it," I explained.

"I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it." She added surprisingly, "'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.' Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat."

"Aren't you disturbed by the noise from the bar?"

"Oh, no. And the bar is very convenient, if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth down."

"Who is Wordsworth?"

"I call him Wordsworth because I can't bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations--after Zachary Macaulay, who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop, not the poet."

"He's your valet?"

"Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don't let him ask you for a C.T.C. He receives quite enough from me."

"What is a C.T.C?"

"That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone, when he was a boy during the War. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo cigarettes, which all the sailors handed out generously."

My aunt's conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged Negro wearing a striped butcher's apron, who opened the door when my aunt rang. "Why, Wordsworth," she said with a touch of coquetry, "you've been washing up breakfast without waiting for me." He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a C.T.C. before he would let me pass.

"This is my nephew, Wordsworth," my aunt said.

"You be telling me whole truth, woman?"

"Of course I am. Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth!" she added with tender banter.

He let us in. The lights were on in the living room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments that flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove, there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl, on which pink roses and green ivy grew. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier that might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale-blue, pink and yellow blossoms.

"Venice once meant a lot to me," my aunt said rather unnecessarily.

I don't pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.

"Such wonderful craftsmanship," my aunt said. "Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskeys. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony." She spoke to him as though he were a child--or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.

"Everything go OK?" Wordsworth asked. "No bad medicine?"

"There was no contretemps," my aunt said. "Oh, gracious, Henry, you haven't forgotten your parcel?"

"No, no, I have it here."

"I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator."

"Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. (continued on page 192)Crook's tour(continued from page 116) Ashes don't deteriorate."

"No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen, just the same. We don't want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now, let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there."

She had, indeed. Her dressing table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder jars and ashtrays and bowls for safety pins. "They brighten the darkest day," she said. There was a very large double bed as curlicued as the glass. "I am especially attached to Venice," she explained, "because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It's a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed."

"Age strikes us all before we know it," I said.

"Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don't look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now, because he's studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth's snuggery," and she opened the door from an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse--all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

"From Venice, too," my aunt said, "clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man's room."

"Does he like them?"

"He spends very little time there," my aunt said, "what with his studies and everything else...."

"I wouldn't like to wake up to them," I said.

"He seldom does."

My aunt led me back to the sitting room, where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a jug of water with colors mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner jacket at a fancy-dress party, a comparison that came at once to my mind, because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

Wordsworth said, "The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral."

"It's so convenient when one can tell the truth," my aunt said. "Was there no message?"

"Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. I say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick."

My aunt poured out larger portions of whiskey than I am accustomed to.

"A little more water, please, Aunt Augusta."

"I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral--the wife of a famous man of letters, who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great War had ended, I was living in Brighton and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians. I had learned about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail--if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel--trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length--he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass."

"No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough."

"Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed and, at that very moment, in walked the whole grand party, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Dr. Havelock Ellis, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and the widower, while the clergyman--nondenominational, of course--came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, 'Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?' But there was no coffin."

"Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?"

"I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief; but you know, I don't think anyone--except, I suppose, the clergyman, and he kept dumb about it--noticed that the coffin wasn't there. The widower certainly didn't; but then, he hadn't noticed his wife for some years. Dr. Havelock Ellis made a very moving address--or so it seemed to me then: I hadn't finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink--about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse, too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble."

I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whiskey. I didn't know what to say. "How sad" seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed, I was to realize that my aunt's stories were always basically true--only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, "We must allays go careful careful at a funeral." He added, "In Mendeland--ma first wife, she was Mende--they go open deceased person's back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and left the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife's pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people, they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma, they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don want to be mocked by the neighbors."

"There must be a great many witches in Mendeland," my aunt said.

"Ya'as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many."

I said, "I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can't keep my mind off the mowing machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain."

"Will you miss your mother, Henry?"

"Oh, yes ... yes," I said. I hadn't really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager, with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in north London. It is difficult, too, for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.

"I am afraid I didn't share your mother's taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid, on condition she takes everything--everything."

"You will come one day and see my dahlias, won't you? They are in full bloom."

"Of course, Henry, now that I have found you again, I shan't easily let you go. Do you enjoy travel?"

"I've never had the opportunity."

"With Wordsworth so occupied, we might make a little trip or two together."

"Gladly, Aunt Augusta." It never occurred to me that she meant farther than the seaside.

"I will telephone you," my aunt said.

Wordsworth showed me to the door, and it was only outside, when I passed the Crown and Anchor, that I remembered I had left behind my little package. I wouldn't have remembered at all if the girl in the jodhpurs had not said angrily, as I pushed past the open window, "Peter can talk about nothing but cricket. All the summer it went on. Nothing but the fucking ashes."

I don't like to hear such adjectives on the lips of an attractive young girl, but her words reminded me sharply that I had left all that remained of my mother in Aunt Augusta's kitchen. I went back to the street door. There was a row of bells with a kind of microphone above each of them. I touched the right one and heard Wordsworth's voice. "Who be there?"

I said, "It's Henry Pulling."

"Don know anyone called that name."

"I've only just left you. I'm Aunt Augusta's nephew."

"Oh, that guy," the voice said.

"I left a parcel with you in the kitchen."

"You wan it back?"

"Please, if it's not too much trouble...."

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life, we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

"A brown-paper parcel?" Wordsworth's voice asked.

"Yes."

"You wan me bring it down right away?"

"Yes, if it's not too much--"

"It's a bloody lot of trouble," Wordsworth said. "Stay there."

I was prepared to be very cold to him when he brought the parcel, but he opened the street door wearing a friendly grin.

"Thank you," I said with as much coldness as I could muster, "for the great trouble you have taken."

I noticed that the parcel was no longer sealed. "Has somebody opened this?"

"Ar jus wan to see what you got there."

"You might have asked me."

"Why, man," he said, "you not offended at Wordsworth?"

"I didn't like the way you spoke just now."

"Man, it's jus that little mike there. Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street, where no one see it's only old Wordsworth. It's a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when He spoke to old Moses. One day it was the parson come from St. George's in the square. An he says, in a very cream-in-your-tea sort of voice, 'I wonder, Miss Bertram, if I could come up and have a little chat about our bazaar.' 'Sure, man,' ar say, 'you wearing your dog collar?' 'Why, yes,' he say, 'of course, who is that?' 'Man,' ar say, 'you better put on a muzzle, too, before you go come up here.' "

"What did he say?"

"He wen away and never come back. Your auntie laugh like hell when ar told her. But ar didn't mean him harm. It was jus old Wordsworth tempted by that little old mike."

"Are you really studying for the London School of Economics?" I asked.

"Oh, tha's a joke your auntie makes.

Ar now workin' at the Granada Palace.

Ar got a uniform. Jus lak a general. She lak ma uniform. She stop an say, 'Are you the Emperor Jones?' 'No, ma'am,' ar say, 'ar'm only old Wordsworth.' 'Oh,' she say, 'thou child of joy, shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy.' 'You write that down for me, ar say. It sound good. Ar like it.' Ar say it over and over. Ar know it now good, lak a hymn."

I was a little confused by his garrulity. "Well, Wordsworth," I said, "thank you for all your trouble and I hope one day I shall see you again."

"This here mighty important parcel?"

"Yes. I suppose it is."

"Then ar think you owe a dash to old Wordsworth," he said.

"A dash?"

"A C.T.C."

Remembering what my aunt had told me, I went quickly away.

Just as I had expected, my new lawn mower was wet all over: I dried it carefully and oiled the blades before I did anything else. Then I boiled myself two eggs and made a cup of tea for lunch.

• • •

I was weeding the dahlias, the Polar Beauties and the Golden Leaders and the Requiems, when my telephone began to ring. Being unused to the sound that shattered all the peace of my little garden, I assumed that it was a wrong number. I had very few friends, although before my retirement, I boasted a great many acquaintances. There were clients who had stayed with me for 20 years, who had known me in the same branch as clerk, cashier and manager, and yet they remained acquaintances. The bank was then my whole life, and now there were my dahlias.

I neglected the telephone, feeling so sure that it was a wrong number, but when the ringing persisted, I left my dahlias and went in.

The telephone stood on the filing cabinet, where I keep my accounts and all the correspondence that my mother's death caused. I had not received as many letters as I was receiving now, since I ceased to be manager: the solicitor's letters, letters from the undertaker, from the Inland Revenue, the crematorium fees, the doctor's bills, National Health forms, even a few letters of condolence. I could almost believe myself a businessman again.

My aunt's voice said, "You are very slow to answer."

"I was busy in the garden."

"I have an extraordinary story to tell you," my aunt said. "I have been raided by the police."

"Raided ... by the police?"

"Yes, you must listen carefully, for they may call on you."

"What on earth for?"

"You still have your mother's ashes?"

"Of course."

"Because they want to see them. They may even want to analyze them."

"But, Aunt Augusta ... you must tell me exactly what happened."

"I am trying to, but you continually interrupt with unhelpful exclamations. It was midnight and Wordsworth and I had gone to bed. Luckily, I was wearing my best nightdress. They rang the bell down below and told us through the microphone that they were police officers and had a warrant to search the flat. 'What for?' I asked. Do you know, for a moment, I thought it might be something racial. There are so many rules now for races and against races that you don't know where you stand."

"Are you sure they were police officers?"

"Of course, I asked to see their warrant, but do you know what a warrant looks like? For all I know, it might have been a reader's ticket to the British Museum library. I let them in, though, because they were polite and one of them, the one in uniform, was tall and good-looking. They were rather surprised by Wordsworth--or perhaps it was the color of his pajamas. They said, 'Is this your husband, ma'am?' I said, 'No, this is Wordsworth.' The name seemed to ring a bell with one of them--the young man in uniform--who kept on glancing at him surreptitiously, as though he were trying to remember."

"But what were they looking for?"

"They said they had reliable information that drugs were kept on the premises."

"Oh, Aunt Augusta, you don't think Wordsworth--"

"Of course not. They took away all the fluff from the seams of his pockets, and then the truth came out. They asked him what was in the brown-paper package that he was seen handing to a man who had been loitering in the street. Poor Wordsworth said he didn't know, so I chipped in and said it was my sister's ashes. I don't know why, but they became suspicious of me at once. The elder, who was in plain clothes, said, 'Please don't be flippant, ma'am. It doesn't exactly help.' I said, 'As far as my sense of humor goes, there is nothing whatever flippant in my dead sister's ashes.' 'A sort of powder, ma'am?' the younger policeman asked--he was the sharper of the two, the one who thought he knew the name Wordsworth. 'You can call it that, if you like,' I said, 'gray powder, human powder,' and they looked as though they had won a point. 'And who was the man who received this powder?' the man in plain clothes asked. 'My nephew,' I said. 'My sister's son.' Then they asked for your address and I gave it to them. The sharp one said, 'Was the powder for his private use?' 'He wants to put it among his dahlias,' I said. They made a very thorough search, especially in Wordsworth's room, and they took away samples of all the cigarettes they could find and some aspirins I had left in a cachet box. Then they said, 'Good night, ma'am,' very politely, and left. Wordsworth had to go downstairs and open the door for them, and just before he left, the sharp one said to him, 'What's your first name?' 'Zachary,' Wordsworth told him, and he went out looking puzzled."

"What a very strange thing to have happened," I said.

"They even read some letters and asked who Abdul was."

"Who was he?"

"Someone I knew a very long time ago. Luckily, I had kept the envelope and it was marked Tunis, February 1924. Otherwise, they would have read all sorts of things into it about the present."

"I am sorry, Aunt Augusta. It must have been a terrifying experience."

"It was amusing, in a way. But it did give me a guilty feeling ..."

There was a ring from the front door and I said, "Hold on a moment, Aunt Augusta." I looked through the dining-room window and saw a policeman's helmet. I returned and said, "Your friends are here."

"Already?"

"I'll ring you back when they've gone."

It was the first time I had ever been called on by the police. There was a short middle-aged man in a soft hat, with a rough but kindly face and a broken nose, and the tall good-looking young man in uniform. "Mr. Pulling?" the detective asked.

"Yes."

"May we come in for a few moments?"

"Have you a warrant?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no, it hasn't come to that. We just want to have a word or two with you." I wanted to say something about the Gestapo, but I thought it wiser not. I led them into the dining room, but I didn't ask them to sit down. The detective showed me an identity card and I read on it that he was Detective Sergeant Sparrow, John.

"You know a man called Wordsworth, Mr. Pulling?"

"Yes, he's a friend of my aunt's."

"Did you receive a package from him in the street yesterday?"

"I certainly did."

"Would you have any objection to our examining the package, Mr. Pulling?"

"I most certainly would."

"You know, sir, we could easily have obtained a search warrant, but we wanted to do things delicately. Have you known this man Wordsworth a longtime?"

"I met him for the first time yesterday."

"Perhaps, sir, he asked you as a favor to deliver that package, and you seeing no harm at all in that, and him being an employee of your aunt...."

"I don't know what you are talking about. The package is mine. I had accidentally left it in the kitchen."

"The package is yours, sir? You admit that?"

"You know very well what's in the package. My aunt told you. It's an urn with my mother's ashes."

"Your aunt has been in communication with you, has she?"

"Yes, she has. What do you expect? Waking up an old lady in the middle of the night."

"It had only just gone twelve, sir. And so those ashes ... they are Mrs. Pulling's?"

"There they are. You can see for yourself. On the bookcase."

I had put the urn there, above a complete set of Sir Walter Scott, which I had inherited from my father. In his lazy way, my father had been a great reader, though not an adventurous one. He had been satisfied with possessing a very few favorite authors. By the time he had read the set of Scott through, he had forgotten the earlier volumes and was content to begin again with Guy Mannering. He had a complete set, too, of Marion Crawford, and he had a love of 19th Century poetry, which I have inherited--Tennyson and Wordsworth and Browning and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

"Do you mind if I take a look?" the detective asked, but naturally, he couldn't open the urn. "It's sealed," he said. "With Scotch tape."

"Naturally. Even a tin of biscuits--"

"I would like to take a sample for analysis."

I was becoming rather cross by this time. I said, "If you think I am going to let you play around with my poor mother in a police laboratory--"

"I can understand how you feel, sir," he said, "but we have rather serious evidence to go on. We took some fluff from the man Wordsworth's pockets and, when analyzed, it contained pot."

"Pot?"

"Marijuana to you, sir. Likewise, Cannabis."

"Wordsworth's fluff has got nothing to do with my mother."

"We could get a warrant, sir, easily enough; but seeing how you may be an innocent dupe, I would rather take the urn away temporarily with your permission. It would sound much better that way in court."

"You can check with the crematorium. The funeral was only yesterday."

"We have already, sir, but you see, it's quite possible--don't think I'm presuming to suggest your line of defense, that's a matter entirely for your counsel--that the man Wordsworth took out the ashes and substituted pot. He may have known he was being watched. Now, wouldn't it be much better, sir, from all points of view, to know for certain that these are your mother's ashes? You wouldn't want to see that urn every day and wonder, are those really the ashes of the dear departed, or are they an illegal supply of marijuana?"

He had a very sympathetic manner, and I really began to see his point.

"We'd only take out a tiny pinch, sir, less than a teaspoonful. We'd treat the rest with all due reverence."

"All right," I said, "take your pinch. I suppose you are only doing your duty."

The young policeman had been making notes all the time. The detective said, "Take a note that Mr. Pulling behaved most helpfully and that he voluntarily surrendered the urn. That will sound well in court, sir, if the worst happens."

"When will I get the urn back?"

"Not later than tomorrow--if all is as it should be." He shook hands quite cordially, as if he believed in my innocence, but perhaps that was just his professional manner.

Of course, I hastened to telephone my aunt. "They've taken away the urn," I said. "They think my mother's ashes are marijuana. Where's Wordsworth?"

"He went out after breakfast and hasn't come back."

"They found marijuana dust in the fluff of his suit."

"Oh, dear, how careless of the poor boy. I thought he was a little disturbed. And he asked for a C. T. C. before he went out."

"Did you give him one?"

"Well, you know, I'm really very fond of him, and he said it was his birthday. He never had a birthday last year, so I gave him twenty pounds."

"Twenty pounds! I never keep as much as that in the house."

"It will get him as far as Paris. He left in time for the Golden Arrow, now I come to think of it, and he always carries his passport to prove he's not an illegal immigrant. Do you know, Henry, I've a great desire for a little sea air myself."

"You'll never find him in Paris."

"I wasn't thinking of Paris. I was thinking of Istanbul."

"Istanbul is not on the sea."

"I think you are wrong. There's something called the Sea of Marmara."

"Why Istanbul?"

"I was reminded of it by that letter from Abdul the police found. A strange coincidence. First that letter and then this morning in the post, another--the first for a very long time."

• • •

The affair of my mother's ashes was not settled so easily as I had anticipated. After several days, no urn had arrived at the house, and so I rang up Scotland Yard and asked for Detective Sergeant Sparrow. I was put on without delay to a voice that was distinctly not Sparrow's. It sounded very similar to that of a rear admiral whom I had once had as a client. (I was very glad when he changed his account to the National Provincial Bank, for he treated my clerks like ordinary seamen and myself like a sublieutenant who had been court-martialed for keeping the mess books improperly.)

"Can I speak to Detective Sergeant Sparrow?" I asked.

"On what business?" whoever it was rapped back.

"I have not yet received my mother's ashes," I said.

"This is Scotland Yard, assistant commissioner's office, and not a crematorium," the voice replied and rang off.

It took me a long while (because of engaged lines) to get the same gritty voice on the line again.

"I want Detective Sergeant Sparrow," I said.

"On what business?"

I was ready this time and prepared to be ruder than the voice could be.

"Police business, of course," I said."

"What other business do you deal in?" It was almost as though my aunt were speaking through me.

"Detective Sergeant Sparrow is out. You had better leave a message."

"Ask him to ring Mr. Pulling, Mr. Henry Pulling."

"What address? What telephone number?" he snapped, as though he suspected me to be some unsavory police informer.

"He knows them both. I am not going to repeat them unnecessarily. Tell him I am disappointed in his failure to keep a solemn promise." I rang off before the other had time for a word in reply. Going out to the dahlias, I gave myself the rare reward of a satisfied smile. I had never spoken to the rear admiral like that.

My new cactus dahlias were doing well and their names gave me some of the pleasure of travel: Rotterdam, a deeper red than a pillar box, and Dentelle de Venise, with spikes sparkling like hoarfrost. I thought that next year I would plant some Pride of Berlin, to make a trio of cities. The telephone disturbed my happy ruminations. It was Sparrow.

I said to him firmly, "I hope you have a good excuse for failing to return the ashes."

"I certainly have, sir. There's more Cannabis than ashes in your urn."

"I don't believe you. How could my mother possibly ...?"

"We can hardly suspect your mother, sir, can we? As I told you, I think the man Wordsworth took advantage of your call. Luckily for your story, there are some human ashes in the urn, though Wordsworth must have dumped most of them down the sink to make room. Did you hear any sound of running water?"

"We were drinking whiskey. He certainly filled a jug of water."

"That must have been the moment, sir."

"In any case, I would like to have back the ashes that remain."

"It isn't practicable, sir. Human ashes have a kind of sticky quality. They adhere very closely to any substance, which, in this case, is pot. I am sending you back the urn by registered post. I suggest, sir, that you place it just where you intended and forget the unfortunate circumstaces."

"But the urn will be empty."

"Memorials are often detached from the remains of the deceased. War memorials are an example."

"Well," I said, "I suppose there's nothing to be done. It won't feel the same at all. I hope you don't suspect my aunt had any hand in this?"

"An old lady like that? Oh, no, sir. She was obviously deceived by her valet."

"What valet?"

"Why, Wordsworth, sir--who else?" I thought it best not to enlighten him about their relationship.

"My aunt thinks Wordsworth may be in Paris."

"Very likely, sir."

"What will you do about it?"

"There's nothing we can do. He hasn't committed an extraditable offense. Of course, if he ever returns.... He has a British passport." There was a note of malicious longing in Detective Sergeant Sparrow's voice that made me feel, for a moment, a partisan of Wordsworth.

I said, "I sincerely hope he won't."

"You surprise and disappoint me, sir."

"Why?"

"I hadn't taken you for one of that kind."

"What kind?"

"People who talk about there being no harm in pot."

"Is there?"

"From our experience, sir, nearly all the cases hooked on hard drugs began with pot."

"And from my experience, Sparrow, all or nearly all the alcoholics I know have started with a small whiskey or a glass of wine. I even had a client who was first hooked, as you call it, on mild and bitter. In the end, because of his frequent absences on a cure, he had to give his wife a power of attorney." I rang off. It occurred to me with a certain pleasure that I had sowed a little confusion in Detective Sergeant Sparrow's mind--not so much confusion on the subject of Cannabis but confusion about my character, the character of a retired bank manager. I discovered for the first time in myself a streak of anarchy. Was it possibly my aunt's influence (and yet I was not a man easily influenced), or some bacteria in the Pulling blood?

It was with these muddled and unaccustomed ideas in my mind that I awaited the arrival of my aunt for dinner. As soon as she arrived, I told her about Sergeant Sparrow, but she treated my story with surprising indifference, saying only that Wordsworth should have been "more careful." Then I took her out and showed her my dahlias.

"I have always preferred cut flowers," she said, and I had a sudden vision of strange Continental gentlemen offering her bouquets of roses and maidenhair fern bound up in tissue paper.

I had dialed Chicken and the dinner arrived exactly as ordered, the main course only needing to be put into the oven for a few minutes, while we ate the smoked salmon. Living alone, I had been a regular customer whenever there was a client to entertain or my mother on her weekly visit. Now, for months, I had neglected Chicken, for there were no longer any clients and my mother, during her last illness, had been too ill to make the journey from Golders Green.

We drank sherry with the smoked salmon and I had bought a bottle of burgundy, Chambertin 1959, to go with the chicken à la king. When the wine had spread a pleasant glow through with our minds, my aunt reverted to my conversation with Sergeant Sparrow.

"He is determined," she said, "that Wordsworth is the guilty party; yet it might equally well be one of us. I don't think the sergeant is a racialist, but he is class conscious; and though the smoking of pot depends on no class barrier, he prefers to think otherwise and to put the blame on poor Wordsworth."

"You and I can give each other an alibi," I said, "and Wordsworth did run away."

"We could have been in collusion and Wordsworth might be taking his annual holiday. No," she went on, "the mind of a policeman is set firmly in a groove. I remember once when I was in Tunis, a traveling company was there that was playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude, the Player King was really killed--or, rather, not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear--by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasn't empty and was hot to the touch. Oh, no, they knew Shakespeare's play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlet's uncle."

"What a lot of traveling you have done in your day, Aunt Augusta."

"I haven't reached nightfall yet," she said. "If I had a companion, I would be off tomorrow, but I can no longer lift a heavy suitcase and there is a distressing lack of porters nowadays."

"We might one day," I said, "consider seaside excursions. I remember many years ago visiting Weymouth. There was a very pleasant green statue of George the Third on the front."

"I have booked two couchettes a week from today on the Orient Express."

I looked at her in amazement. "Where to?" I asked.

"Istanbul, of course."

"But it takes days--"

"Three nights, to be exact."

"If you want to go to Istanbul, surely it would be easier and less expensive to fly?"

"I only take a plane," my aunt said, "when there is no alternative means of travel."

"It's really quite safe."

"It is a matter of choice, not nerves," Aunt Augusta said. "I knew Wilbur Wright very well, indeed, at one time. He took me for several trips. I always felt quite secure in his contraptions. But I cannot bear being spoken to all the time by irrelevant loud-speakers. One is not badgered at a railway station. An airport always reminds me of a Butlin's Camp."

"If you are thinking of me as a companion--"

"Of course I am, Henry."

"I'm sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank manager's pension is not a generous one."

"I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. It's excellent."

"I'm not really accustomed to foreign travel. You'd find me--"

"You will take to it quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travelers. There was your uncle--"

"I didn't know I had an uncle."

"He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young."

"He was a great traveler?"

"It took an odd form," my aunt said, "in the end." I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully, like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen toward it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze that has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse's knee in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

"Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo," Aunt Augusta said. "A very fat man. I don't know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, like men, fall in love with physical beauty. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man. Perhaps traveling with me, you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession."

"I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman," I said jokingly.

"You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express, we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more, his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard Honest Jo Pulling, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by traveling, he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash; but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long."

"Is that why you have traveled so much, Aunt Augusta?"

"At first, I traveled for my living," Aunt Augusta replied. "That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone; and, in any case, I never got on very well with Angelica. The two A's, we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister's name fitted her. A saint she may well have been, but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic."

One of the few marks of age that I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page 20 to page 98 and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star and even quite a different fiction from the one so abruptly interrupted.

"The question of names," my aunt said, "is an interesting one. Your own Christian name is safe and colorless. It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which has to be lived up to. I once knew a girl called Comfort and her life was a very sad one. Unhappy men were constantly attracted to her simply by reason of her name, when all the time, poor dear, it was really she who needed the comfort from them. She fell unhappily in love with a man called Courage, who was desperately afraid of mice; but in the end, she married a man called Payne and killed herself--in what Americans call a comfort station. I would have thought it a funny story, if I hadn't known her."

"You were telling me about my uncle Jo," I said.

"I know that. I was saying that he wanted to make life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the world--there were no currency restrictions in those days--and he began his tour, curiously enough, with the Simplon Orient, the train we are traveling by next week. From Turkey, he planned to go to Persia, Russia, India, Malaya, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, U.S.A., South America, Australia, New Zealand, perhaps--somewhere he intended to take a boat home. Unfortunately, he was carried off the train at Venice right at the start, on a stretcher, after a stroke."

"How very sad."

"It didn't alter at all his desire for a long life. I was working in Venice at the time and I went to see him. He had decided that if he couldn't travel physically, he would travel mentally. He asked me if I could find him a house of three hundred and sixty-five rooms, so that he could live for a day and a night in each. In that way, he thought life would seem almost interminable. The fact that he had probably not long to live had only heightened his passion to extend what was left of it. I told him that, short of the Royal Palace at Naples, I doubted whether such a house existed. Even the Palace in Rome probably contained fewer rooms."

"He could have changed rooms less frequently in a smaller house."

"He said that then he would notice the pattern. It would be no more than he was already accustomed to, traveling between Newmarket, Epsom, Goodwood and Brighton. He wanted time to forget the room that he had left before he returned to it again, and there must be opportunity, too, to redecorate it in a few essentials. You know, there was a brothel in Paris in the Rue de Provence between the last two wars--oh, I forgot. There have been many wars since, haven't there, but they don't seem to belong to us like those two do. This brothel had rooms decorated in various styles--the Far West, China, India, that kind of thing. Your uncle had much the same idea for his house."

"But surely he never found one," I exclaimed.

"In the end, he was forced to compromise. I was afraid for a time that the best we could do would be twelve bedrooms--one room a month--but a short while afterward, through one of my clients in Milan--"

"I thought you were working in Venice," I interrupted with some suspicion.

"The business I was in," my aunt said, "was peripatetic. We moved around--a fortnight's season in Venice, the same in Milan, Florence and Rome, then back to Venice. It was known as la quindicina."

"You were in a theater company?" I asked.

"The description will serve," my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. "You must remember, I was very young in those days."

"Acting needs no excuse."

"I wasn't excusing myself," Aunt Augusta said sharply, "I was explaining. In a profession like that, age is a handicap. I was lucky enough to leave in good time. Thanks to Mr. Visconti."

"Who was Visconti?"

"We were talking about your Uncle Jo. I found an old house in the country that had once been a palazzo or a castello or something of the kind. It was almost in ruins and there were gypsies camping in some of the lower rooms and in the cellar--an enormous cellar that ran under the whole ground floor. It had been used for wine, and there was a great empty tun abandoned there, because it had cracked with age. Once there had been vineyards around the house, but an autostrada had been built right across the estate not a hundred yards from the house, and the cars ran by all day between Milan and Rome, and at night, the big lorries passed. A few knotted worn-out roots of old vines were all that remained. There was only one bathroom in the whole house--the water had been cut off long ago by the failure of the electric pump--and only one lavatory, on the top floor in a sort of tower, but, of course, there was no water there, either. You can imagine it wasn't the sort of house anyone could sell easily--it had been on the market for twenty years and the owner was a Mongol orphan in an asylum. The lawyers talked about historic values, but Mr. Visconti knew all about history, as you could guess from his name. Of course, he advised strongly against the purchase; but after all, poor Jo was unlikely to live long and he might as well be made happy. I had counted up the rooms, and if you divided the cellar into four with partitions and included the lavatory and bathroom and kitchen, you could bring the total up to fifty-two. When I told Jo, he was delighted. A room for every week in the year, he said. I had to put a bed in every one, even in the bathroom and kitchen. There wasn't room for a bed in the lavatory, but I bought a particularly comfortable chair with a footstool, and I thought he could always leave that room to the last--I didn't think Jo would survive long enough to reach it. He had a nurse who was to follow him from room to room, sleeping one week behind him, as it were. I was afraid he would insist on a different nurse at every stopping place, but he liked her well enough to keep her as a traveling companion."

"What an extraordinary arrangement."

"It worked very well. When Jo was in his fifteenth room, he told me--I was back that week in Milan on my tour and I went out to see him with Mr. Visconti on my day off--that it really seemed at least a year since he had moved in. He was going on next day to the sixteenth room on the floor above with a different view and his suitcases were all packed and ready--he insisted on everything being moved by suitcase, and I had found a secondhand one that was already decorated with labels from all kinds of famous hotels: the George V in Paris, the Quisisana in Capri, the Excelsior in Rome, Raffles in Singapore, Shepheard's in Cairo, the Pera Palace in Istanbul.

"Poor Jo! I've seldom seen a happier man. He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room; and if fifteen rooms had seemed like a year, then he had several years of travel still before him. The nurse told me that about the fourth day in each room, he would get a little restless with the wanderlust; and the first day in the new room, he would spend more than his usual time in sleep, tired after the journey. He began in the cellar and worked his way upward until at last he reached the top floor, and he was already beginning to talk of revisiting his old haunts. 'We'll take them in a different order this time,' he said, 'and come at them from a different direction.' He was content to leave the lavatory to the last. 'After all these luxury rooms,' he said, 'it would be fun to rough it a bit. Roughing it keeps one young. I don't want to be like one of those old codgers one sees in the Cunard traveling first-class and complaining of the caviar.' Then it was that in the fifty-first room he had his second stroke. It paralyzed him down one side and made speech difficult. I was in Venice at the time, but I got permission to leave the company for a couple of days and Mr. Visconti drove me to Jo's palazzo. They were having a lot of difficulty with him. He had spent seven days in the fifty-first room before the stroke knocked him out, but the doctor was insisting that he remain in the same bed without a move for at least another ten days. 'Any ordinary man,' the doctor said to me, 'would be content to lie still for a while.'

"'He wants to live as long as possible,' I told him.

"'In that case, he should stay where he is till the end. With any luck, he'll have two or three more years.'

"I told Jo what the doctor said, and he mouthed a reply. I thought I made out, 'Not enough.'

"He stayed quiet that night and all the next morning, and the nurse believed that he had resigned himself to staying where he was. She left him sleeping and came down to my room for a cup of tea. Mr. Visconti had bought some cream cakes in Milan at the good pastry cook's near the cathedral. Suddenly, from up the stairs, there came a strange grating noise. 'Mamma mia,' the nurse said, 'what's that?' It sounded as though someone were shifting the furniture. We ran upstairs and what do you think? Jo Pulling was out of bed. He had fixed an old club tie of his, the Froth-blowers or the Mustard Club or something of the kind, to the handle of the suitcase, because he had no strength in his legs, and he was crawling down the passage toward the lavatory tower, pulling the suitcase after him. I shouted to him to stop, but he paid me no attention. It was painful to look at him, he was going so slowly, with such an effort. It was a tiled passage and every tile he crossed cost him enormous exertion. He collapsed before we reached him and lay there panting, and the saddest thing of all to me was that he made a little pool of wee-wee on the tiles. We were afraid to move him before the doctor came. We brought a pillow and put it under his head and the nurse gave him one of his pills. 'Cattivo,' she said in Italian, which means, 'You bad old man,' and he grinned at the two of us and brought out the last sentence that he ever spoke, deformed a bit, but I could understand it very well. 'Seemed like a whole lifetime,' he said and he died before the doctor came. He was right, in his way, to make that last trip against the doctor's orders. The doctor had only promised him a few years."

"He died in the passage?" I asked.

"He died on his travels," my aunt said in a tone of reproof. "As he would have wished."

" 'Here he lies, where he longed to be,' " I quoted, in order to please my aunt, though I couldn't help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door.

" 'Home is the hunter, home from sea,' " my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, " 'And the sailor home from the hill.' "

We were silent for quite a while after that, as we finished the chicken à la king. It was a little like the three minutes silence on Armistice Day. I remembered that, when I was a boy, I used to wonder whether there was really a corpse buried there at the cenotaph, for governments are usually economical with sentiment and try to arouse it in the cheapest possible way. A brilliant advertising slogan doesn't need a body, a box of earth would do just as well, and now I began to wonder, too, about Uncle Jo. Was my aunt a little imaginative? Perhaps her stories were not entirely true.

Without breaking the silence, I took a reverend glass of Chambertin to Uncle Jo's memory, whether he existed or not. The unaccustomed wine sang irresponsibly in my head. What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. I betrayed myself with a hiccup while I changed our plates; and with the blue cheese, the sense of material problems returned.

"Uncle Jo," I said, "was lucky to have no currency restrictions. He couldn't have afforded to die like that on a tourist allowance."

"They were great days," Aunt Augusta said.

"How are we going to manage on ours?" I asked. "With fifty pounds each, we shall not be able to stay very long in Istanbul."

"Currency restrictions have never seriously bothered me," my aunt said. "There are ways and means."

"I hope you don't plan anything illegal."

"I have never planned anything illegal in my life," Aunt Augusta said. "How could I plan anything of the kind, when (continued on page 206)Crook's tour(continued from page 203) I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?"

• • •

It was my aunt herself who suggested that we should fly as far as Paris. I was a little surprised, after what she had just said, for there was certainly in this case an alternative means of travel. I pointed out the inconsistency. "There are reasons," Aunt Augusta said. "Cogent reasons. I know the ropes at Heathrow."

I was puzzled, too, at her insistence that we must go to the Kensington air terminal and take the airport bus. "It's so easy for me," I said, "to pick you up by car and drive you to Heathrow. You would find it much less tiring, Aunt Augusta."

"You would have to pay an exorbitant garage fee," she replied, and I found her sudden sense of economy unconvincing.

I arranged next day for the dahlias to be watered by my next-door neighbor, a brusque man called Major Charge. He had seen Detective Sergeant Sparrow come to the door with the policeman, and he was bitten by curiosity. I told him it was about a motoring offense and he became sympathetic immediately. "A child murdered every week," he said, "and all they can do is to pursue motorists." I don't like lies and I felt in my conscience that I ought to defend Sergeant Sparrow, who had been as good as his word and posted back the urn, registered and express.

"Sergeant Sparrow is not in homicide," I replied, "and motorists kill more people in a year than murderers."

"Only a lot of jaywalkers," Major Charge said. "Cannon fodder." However, he agreed to water the dahlias.

I picked up my aunt in the bar of the Crown and Anchor, where she was having a stirrup cup, and we drove by taxi to the Kensington terminal. I noticed that she had brought two suitcases, one very large, although, when I had asked her how long we were to stay in Istanbul, she had replied, "Twenty-four hours."

"It seems a short stay after such a long journey."

"The point is the journey," my aunt had replied. "I enjoy the traveling, not the sitting still."

Even Uncle Jo, I argued, had put up with each room in his house for a whole week.

"Jo was a sick man," she said, "while I am in the best of health."

Since we were traveling first-class (which seemed, again, an unnecessary luxury between London and Paris), we had no overweight, although the larger of her suitcases was unusually heavy. While we were sitting in the bus, I suggested to my aunt that the garage fee for my car would probably have been cheaper than the difference between first and tourist fares. "The difference," she said, "is nearly wiped out by the caviar and the smoked salmon; and surely, between us, we can probably put away half a bottle of vodka. Not to speak of the champagne and cognac. In any case, I have more important reasons for traveling by bus."

As we approached Heathrow, she put her mouth close to my ear. "The luggage," she said, "is in a trailer behind."

"I know."

"I have a green suitcase and a red suitcase. Here are the tickets."

I took them, not understanding.

"When the bus stops, please get out quickly and see whether the trailer is still attached. If it is still there, let me know at once and I'll give you further instructions."

Something in my aunt's manner made me nervous. I said, "Of course it will be there."

"I sincerely hope not," she said. "Otherwise, we shall not leave today."

I jumped out as soon as we arrived and, sure enough, the trailer wasn't there. "What do I do now?" I asked her.

"Nothing at all. Everything is quite in order. You may give me back the tickets and relax."

As we sat over two gin and tonics in the departure lounge, a loud-speaker announced, "Passengers on flight 378 to Nice will proceed to customs for customs inspection."

We were alone at our table and my aunt did not bother to lower her voice amid the din of passengers, glasses and loud-speakers. "That is what I wished to avoid," she said. "They have now taken to spot checks on passengers leaving the country. They whittle away our liberties one by one. When I was a girl, you could travel anywhere on the Continent except Russia without a passport and you took what you liked in the way of money. Until recently, they only asked what money you had; or, at the very worst, they wanted to see your wallet. If there's one thing I hate in any human being, it is mistrust."

"The way you speak," I said jokingly, "I suspect we are lucky that it is not your bags that are being searched."

I could well imagine my aunt stuffing a dozen five-pound notes into the toes of her bedroom slippers. Having been a bank manager, I am perhaps overscrupulous, though I must confess that I had brought an extra five-pound note folded up in my ticket pocket, but that was something I might genuinely have overlooked.

"Luck doesn't enter into my calculations," my aunt said. "Only a fool would trust to luck, and there is probably a fool now on the Nice flight who is regretting his folly. Whenever new restrictions are made, I make a very careful study of the arrangements for carrying them out." She gave a little sigh. "In the case of Heathrow, I owe a great deal to Wordsworth. For a time, he acted as a loader here. He left when there was some trouble about a gold consignment. Nothing was ever proved against him, but the whole affair had been too impromptu and disgusted him. He told me the story. A very large ingot was abstracted by a loader and the loss was discovered too soon, before the men went off duty. They knew, as a result, that they would be searched by the police on leaving, all taxis, too, and they had no idea what to do with the thing until Wordsworth suggested rolling it in tar and using it as a doorstop in the customs shed. So there it stayed for months. Every time they brought crates along to the shed, they could see their ingot propping open the door. Wordsworth said he got so maddened by the sight of it that he threw up the job. That was when he became a doorman at the Grenada Palace."

"What happened to the ingot?"

"I suppose the authorities lost interest when the diamond robberies started. Diamonds are money for jam, Henry. You see, they have special sealed sacks for valuable freight and these sacks are put into ordinary sacks, the idea being that the loaders can't spot them. The official mind is remarkably innocent. By the time you've been loading sacks a week or two, you can feel which sack contains another inside it. Then all you've got to do is to slit both coverings open and take potluck. Like a children's bran tub at Christmas. Nobody is going to discover the slit until the plane arrives at the other end. Wordsworth knew a man who struck lucky the first time and pulled out a box with fifty gem stones."

"Surely somebody's watching?"

"Only the other loaders, and they take a share. Of course, occasionally, a man has bad luck. Once, a friend of Wordsworth fished out a fat packet of notes, but they proved to be Pakistani. Worth about a thousand pounds, if you happened to live in Karachi, but who was going to change them for him here? The poor fellow used to haunt the tarmac whenever a plane was taking off to Karachi, but he never found a safe customer. Wordsworth said he got quite embittered."

"I had no idea such things went on at Heathrow."

"My dear Henry," Aunt Augusta said, "if you had been a young man, I would have advised you to become a loader. A loader's life is one of adventure, with far more chance of a fortune than you ever have in a branch bank. I can imagine nothing better for a young man with ambition except, perhaps, illicit diamond digging. That is best practiced in Sierra Leone, where Wordsworth comes from. The security guards are less sophisticated or less ruthless than in South Africa."

"Sometimes you shock me, Aunt Augusta," I said, but the statement had already almost ceased to be true. "I have never had anything stolen from my suitcase and I don't even lock it."

"That is probably your safeguard. No one is going to bother about an unlocked suitcase. Wordsworth knew a loader who had keys to every kind of suitcase. There are not many varieties, though he was baffled once by a Russian one."

The loud-speaker announced our flight and we were told to proceed at once to gate 14 for immediate embarkation.

"For someone who doesn't like airports," I said, "you seem to know a great deal about Heathrow."

"I've always been interested in human nature," Aunt Augusta said. "Especially the more imaginative sides of it."

She ordered another two gin and tonics immediately we arrived on the plane. "There goes ten shillings toward the first-class fare," she said. "A friend of mine calculated once that on a long flight to Tahiti--it took, in those days, more than sixty-four hours--he recuperated nearly twenty pounds; but, of course, he was a hard drinker."

Again, I had the impression that I was turning the pages in an American magazine in search of a contribution that I had temporarily lost. "I still don't understand," I said, "about the luggage trailer and the suitcase. Why were you so anxious that the trailer should disappear?"

"I have an impression," my aunt said, "that you are really a little shocked by trivial illegalities. When you reach my age, you will be more tolerant. Years ago, Paris was regarded as the vice center of the world, as Buenos Aires was before that; but Madame de Gaulle altered things there. Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples survived a decade longer, but then the only cities left were Macao and Havana. Macao has been cleaned up by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Havana by Fidel Castro. For the moment, Heathrow is the Havana of England. It won't last very long, of course, but one must admit that at the present time, London airport has a glamor that certainly puts Britain first. Have you got a little vodka for the caviar?" she asked the hostess who brought our trays. "I prefer it to champagne."

"But, Aunt Augusta, you have still not told me about the trailer."

"It's very simple," my aunt said. "If the luggage is to be loaded direct onto the aircraft, the trailer is detached outside the Queen Elizabeth building--there are always traffic holdups at this point and nothing is noticed by the passengers. If, when the bus arrives at the B. E. A. or Air France entrance, you find the trailer is still attached, this means that the luggage is going to be sent to the customs. Personally, I have a rooted objection to unknown hands, which have fiddled about in all kinds of strange luggage, some not overclean, fiddling about in mine."

"What do you do then?"

"I reclaim my bags, saying that, after all, I don't require them on the voyage and wish to leave them in the cloakroom. Or I cancel my flight and try again another day." She finished her smoked salmon and went on to the caviar. "There is no such convenient system as that at Dover, or I would prefer to go by boat."

"Aunt Augusta," I said, "what are you carrying in your suitcases?"

"Only one is a little dangerous," she said, "the red. I always use the red for that purpose. Red for danger," she added with a smile.

"But what have you got in the red one?"

"A trifle," Aunt Augusta said, "something to help us in our travels. I can't really endure any longer these absurd travel allowances. Allowances! For grown people! When I was a child, I received a shilling a week pocket money. If you consider the value of the pound today, that is rather more than what we are allowed to travel with annually. You haven't eaten your portion of foie gras."

"It doesn't agree with me," I said.

"Then I will take it. Steward, another glass of champagne and another vodka."

"We are just descending, ma'am."

"The more reason for you to hurry, young man." She fastened her seat belt. "I'm glad that Wordsworth left Heathrow before I came to know him. He was in danger of being corrupted. Oh, I don't mean the thieving. A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation. The Spanish Empire would have decayed far more quickly if Sir Francis Drake had not kept a proportion of the Spanish gold in circulation. But there are other things. I have mentioned Havana, and you mustn't think me strait-laced. I am all for a little professional sex. You have probably read about the activities of Superman. And I am sure that the sight of him cured many a frigidity. Thank you, steward." She drained her vodka. "We have not done badly. I would say we have almost covered the difference between first-class and tourist, if you take into account a little overweight with my red suitcase. There was a brothel in Havana where the Emperor's Crown was admirably performed by three nice girls. These establishments save many a marriage from boredom. And then there was the Shanghai Theater in the Chinese quarter of Havana, with three blue films that were shown in the intervals of a nude revue, all for the price of one dollar, with a pornographic bookshop in the foyer thrown in. I was there once with a Mr. Fernandez, who had a cattle farm in Camagüey. I met him in Rome after Mr. Visconti had temporarily disappeared and he invited me to Cuba for a month's holiday. The place was ruined, though, long before the revolution. I am told that to compete with television, they put in a large screen. The films, of course, had all been shot on sixteen-millimeter and when they were enlarged practically to Cinerama size, it really needed an act of faith to distinguish any feature of the human body."

The plane banked steeply over Le Bourget.

"It was all very harmless," my aunt said, "and gave employment to a great many people. But the things that go on around Heathrow...."

The steward brought another vodka and my aunt tossed it down. She had a strong head--I had noticed that already--but her mind under the influence of alcohol ranged to and fro.

"We were talking of Heathrow," I reminded her, for my curiosity had been aroused. In my aunt's company, I found myself oddly ignorant about my own country.

"There are a number of big firms around Heathrow," my aunt said. "Electronics, engineering, film manufacturers. Glaxo, as one would expect, is quite untouched by the Heathrow influence. After office hours, some of the technicians give private parties; air crews are always welcome, as long as stewardesses are included in the party. Even loaders. Wordsworth was always invited, but only on condition he brought a girl and was willing to exchange her at the party for another. Pornographic films are shown first as an encouragement. Wordsworth was genuinely attached to his girl, but he had to surrender her in exchange for a technician's wife who was a homely woman of fifty called Ada. It seems to me that the old professional brothel system was far healthier than these exaggerated amateur distractions. But then, an amateur always goes too far. An amateur is never in proper control of his art. There was a discipline in the old-time brothels. The madam in many ways played a role similar to that of the headmistress of Roedean. A brothel, after all, is a kind of school, and not least a school of manners. I have known several madams of real distinction who would have been just as at home in Roedean and have lent distinction to any school."

"How on earth did you get to know them?" I asked, but the plane was bumping onto the Le Bourget field, and my aunt began to fuss about her luggage.

"I think it better," she said, "if we passed through customs and immigration separately. My red case is rather a heavy one and I would be glad if you would take that with you. Employ a porter. It is always easier to obtain a taxi with a porter's help. And show in your manner that the tip will be a good one before you arrive at the customs. There is often an understanding between a porter and a douanier. I will meet you outside. Here is the ticket for the red case."

This is Part I of "Crook's Tour," a selection from a new novel by Graham Greene. Part II will appear next month and the conclusion in the following issue.