Something Wholesale by Eric Newby Page A

at me quizzically, making me feel as if I had taken her on personally for immoral purposes – something that I had been longing to do for some time – and went on to tell me how, when he was a young man, he had been left alone on a sofa with something of a similar kind in the front parlour of a house in Battersea.
    ‘About four o’clock in the afternoon when we had the gas turned down the mother rushed in and began to tell me how happy she was that I was going to marry her daughter. I took one look at the mother – the husband hadn’t even the courage to appear, he was squinting through the back of the door between the hinges – and I noticed that she had a small black moustache. I looked at Sophie, that was the daughter’s name, and I saw that in a few years’ time she would have one too. I remember thinking it strange that I hadn’t noticed it before. So I picked up my hat and cane – always a good thing to have them handy,’ he added, parenthetically, ‘and said “Madam, I think you are misinformed” and left. But it was a close thing.’
    ‘I should take some exercise,’ he went on with seeming irrelevance. ‘A good long trot, then a rub down and a cold bath … Pity she’s got such a miserable voice. Sounds like two pennorth of peas.’
    There was a moment of silence. ‘I remember the road well,’ he said, ‘It was called Sabine Road.’
    For the first time in my life I followed his advice and took up cross-country running. To my surprise I discovered that I had an aptitude for this lunatic sport, but as a moral purifier it was useless. As I toiled through the mud and slush in Epping Forest Lola’s buttocks rose up before me through a haze of fatigue as just one more obstacle contrived by the organisers.
    The wretched girl was everywhere; not only in the abundance of my imagination but in the flesh. She was even in the cellars, of course only by chance, when I went below to fetch up another supply of velour for Miss Webb, strategically situated in the narrowest part between the two main transepts, like a great sexual blockship. ‘I’ll breathe in to let you pass,’ she said, emitting an insane giggle. ‘You’ll have to breathe out,’ I said, idiotically. I was trembling like a leaf. ‘If you breathe in I’ll never get by.’
    ‘I get so mixed up I don’t know what I’m doing,’ Lola said, narrowing the gap. ‘Look, I’ve got an idea. You put your hand on my chest and I’ll breathe in and out and then you’ll know when you can get past won’t you?’
    ‘You know you’re driving me crazy,’ I said some minutes later. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the velour – or anything else. It was like handling a great warm blancmange. ‘Lola I must go to bed with you. Do you understand?’
    ‘Ooh,’ said Lola, ‘Aren’t you silly!’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sir No More
    It was not only Lola who was responsible for my physical discomfort. As a life-long sufferer from hay fever I soon discovered that I was violently allergic to wool. Hemmed in on every side by the stuff, which gave off clouds of toxic dust whenever it was disturbed, just like Mrs Smithers with the elevenses I wheezed my way up the staircase from the cellars loaded with velour. Sometimes I used to slip out of the front door, the bell announcing my departure to Miss Gatling who used to come out into the hall and say ‘’ERE! Where you going?’, and gulp in the air of the city, but this seemed stale and tainted after the sinister fragrance of the forests of Middle Europe. The bones of London had been laid bare and the dust from the open bomb sites rose on the autumn wind. It swirled in the streets, old and acrid. Gasping on the threshold of the place where I was to find my feet I wondered whether I would live long enough to do so.
    But I was uprooted from Lane and Newby’s sooner than I expected. Ascending St James’s Street after a visit to my father’s tailor who had been blown up by a bomb when passing through the