Home life
Dogged by misfortune
Alice Thomas Ellis Poor Alfie had a rough time recently. He was minding a house while its owners were away and it turned against him in the way of a child left in the care of a stranger. First the phone rang, so he flew upstairs and sat in a chair to answer it. 'The Whatnot residence. . .' he began elegantly in the best of his selection of telephone manners — and the chair collapsed be- neath him. It is difficult to be elegant lying flat on your back amidst the debris of another person's chair. The combined sensations of shock, wrath, indignity and guilt make coherence impossible.
When he'd recovered sufficiently he went downstairs to feed the dogs and the dog bowl slipped from his nerveless fingers and broke in half. 'What sort of dogs?' I asked inconsequentially. 'The embarras- sing sort,' said Alfie gloomily. 'The sort that when you take them out for a walk people look at them, and then they look at you.' He had more trouble with the dogs. They fell out over dinner and fought 'Sorry, chaps, we're eliminating short and medium-range archers.' ferociously round his ankles and now he says he won't just have to brush them, he'll have to wash them to get the blood out of their fur. He asked whether I thought he should hoover through the house, or whether that might seem a little pointed, an implicit criticism of the state of the place, and I advised against it. The way his luck was running the Hoover might have accidentally swallowed the dogs.
The curse followed him here. I had bought a pair of earrings for a friend and left them on the kitchen table roughly wrapped in that plastic film with bubbles in it which children like to pop. After Alfie had tidied the table I couldn't find them. I asked the daughter if she'd pinched the plastic to play with and she denied it — she is 14 and I had to admit her bubble- popping days were past. I concluded that Alfie must have mistaken the package for rubbish and slung it away in a black bag.
The next step, of course, was to ferret through the black bags and see if it was there. I spent Sunday doing that. I emptied all three of the bags on to the newspaper on the kitchen floor and surveyed the detritus of the recent past • spread before my eyes. Most unpleasant, but something of a revelation. Hair combings, fag ends, tea bags, potato peelings, and the outside leaves of lettuce formed, as it were, the mulch. Then there were old milk cartons, cat food tins and a surprising number of empty bottles. There were piles of old newspapers damp with deliquescence, dozens of crumpled tissues and discarded wrappers from biscuit packets, sausages etc, hundreds of plastic carrier bags, which surprised me as I have hundreds more waiting in a cupboard to come in useful (who throws them away?), and a perfectly ghastly corpse bag containing the heads, skin and bones of two salmon trout.
There was also a bundle of kitchen paper, but I don't think I'll tell you what was in that. Or perhaps I'd better in case you think it was even worse than it was. The cat had been sick, you see. Oh God. Something in this exercise led me to meditate on sin. I thought of the soul of the recently dead person being emptied on to the floor of heaven so the angels could riffle through it (holding their noses) to see if there was anything good in it. I didn't find the earrings, which was dispiriting, and while the experience undoubtedly had its salutary aspects it left me feeling melan- choly and in immediate need of a good bath, followed by a rush to confession.
I forgave Alfie for throwing away this expensive gift because he really couldn't be blamed, and then I found it tucked away between the jugs on a shelf in the back kitchen. I didn't put it there, and he says he didn't, and it wasn't there when I first looked so I don't know what happened. I put it down to the angels.
Jeffrey Bernard will be back next week (see Charles Moore's Diary, p.7).
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