Chapter Two
Somewhat depleted, Pluck descended the stately stairs, buttoning his fly. The lobby was shivering with activity, as families and couples and lonely soloists arrived for the beginnings of their holiday. Casting imperious glances to the left and the right, as nonchalantly as a reaper swishing his scythe from side to side amidst the ingenuous wheat, Pluck waded through them on his way to the calmer environs of the tearoom. There, the final glow the sky would have to offer before evening dribbled, a bit reticently, through the high windows, cascading onto the marble floor, pooling on the glass of the tables, bubbling across the prim brown hairpin of a lady, and coagulating on the shoulders of a stout man in a suit sitting with her.
Entirely unbidden, Pluck sat down on the third seat of their table. “Good afternoon, madame and monsieur.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
“I’m sorry?” he asked, looking to them for an explanation.
The lady looked to the man, who, naturally enough, looked back. The man, then, as the space left by Pluck’s question seemed to demand some sort of answer, turned back to him and explained, “We wished you a good afternoon, as well.”
“Ah! That’s very kind of you both, I must say.”
Properly civilised as they were, the lady and the gentleman sought to hide the most obvious exterior signs of their boredom with their new guest, and sipped their tea, as one.
Referring to that beverage—that very one—Pluck inquired, “What are you drinking?”
“Tea,” explained the man.
“I was inquiring of the lady,” Pluck informed him, a little haughtily.
“I’m drinking tea as well,” she answered, this time for herself.
“Charming, charming! A charming choice!” he congratulated her, and turned round to wave to the waiter, who, more out of duty than predilection, came over.
“Yes, monsieur?”
“I’d like to order.”
“Yes, monsieur?”
“A drink.”
“Which drink, monsieur?”
“Do you have tea?”
“We do, monsieur.”
“Fresh?”
“I’ve just made it, monsieur.”
Pluck, who up till now had not bothered to turn the full force of his face toward the waiter, and whose suspicion was now evidently pricked by something the waiter had said, raised his thin visage, with its unblemished, moonlight-bright skin and inkpot eyes, to him and said:
“Boy, you said you just made it.”
“That’s right, monsieur.”
“The tea.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Whatever do you mean by that?”
There was a moment without dialogue; the narrative—this narrative—skidded to a halt; as the waiter considered how the question could sensibly be answered.
“The tea is fresh,” threw in the lady, as if it were any business of hers.
“I did not ask you—silence, if you please,” Pluck commanded her out of the side of his mouth, and then, still addressing the waiter: “How am I supposed to know what you meant by ‘just’?”
“Mere moments ago, monsieur,” explained the waiter, at which Pluck slowly closed his eyes and shook his head.
“But your perception, small boy, of a ‘mere moment’ would be, I’m guessing, entirely different to mine, or to this lady’s here, or even to that of this gentleman—if it should come to that.”
The waiter—who had to have been at least twenty—blinked. “I’m sorry, monsieur?”
“Do not be crass, cretin—just bring me a cup of your stale tea and be done with it,” Pluck whined, devastatingly, then turned back to smile at his new friends.
The waiter, whose name, I might as well tell you, was Aloysius, turned with matchless discretion to get the tea. In his thoughts, however, if we were granted the power to peer into them—well, let’s grant ourselves that power, shall we?—his thoughts, I say, ran more along the lines of strangling Pluck’s scrawny, bow-tied neck and smashing his head against the table until such point as both head and table should shatter.
“Now, dear”—Pluck was addressing the lady—“where were we?”
“We were explaining that we were drinking tea in the tearoom,” she reiterated. Her back was straight, her suit ordered, her face round. Pluck’s gaze thus flitted from one part of her to the next, aggravating her and her companion exceedingly.
“I detect that you are a botanist, madame.”
“Not at all.”
“And that your name is ‘Marjorie’.”
“‘Enid’, actually.”
“Hm.” He looked at her, for a long while, even whilst the waiter deposited his tea, inquired if monsieur would like cream or sugar, paused in wait for an answer, and departed when none was forthcoming. Pluck pushed the teacup and saucer away from him without deigning to inspect them, and stared at Enid still. “. . .No, no, I think ‘Marjorie’ is more likely. With a surname that is slightly—Irish?”
“My family is Polish, monsieur.”
“As I thought—Polish, or some other, similarly barbaric, people from the east. And you, sir!” he suddenly thundered, to the extent that his rather feeble, high-registered voice could thunder, towards the man. “You are retired from the navy, I think?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You are in the navy still, then?”
“You couldn’t be further from the truth.” The man threw back his broad shoulders in an attempt to appear good-humoured; his face, wide and redolent of a just-ripe apricot, with a sharp chin which really didn’t belong to the rest of the squishy, somewhat too-spaced-out components, jiggled about under these unnatural demands for forbearance. “Might I ask you your business, monsieur?”
Dextrously ignoring that pointless query, and speaking to them both, now, Pluck announced: “I detect that the two of you met in Nice, flirted in Rome, wed in Brussels and finally consummated your disreputable desires in Greece.”
“That is not so.”
“And although you, sir, reaped satisfaction on your wedding night, madame decidedly did not.”
“That remark is as offensive as it is idiotic.”
“Strong words, monsieur—strong words.” Pluck ended this parry with a knowing smirk. “I always find that when an adversary is forced to lose his temper, he reveals more about himself than he intends. I detect from your accent that you are Canadian—more specifically—no, no, don’t tell me, quiet now—more specifically, somewhere Yukonese way, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You are mistaken, as I hail from Arkansas.”
“Well—I do not wish to be rude, sir, but I might as well come out and tell you to your face that I don’t believe you.”
“That is your prerogative—as, I’d obviously been under the false impression, my right to enjoy a tea alone with a lady was mine.”
Pluck, refusing to surrender the throttle his stare had seized on his foe, reached for his teacup in front of him—failing to find it there, and unwilling to look down, his fingers having floundered upon the table for a few seconds, he calmly rested his palms on the linen.
“The fact is, that you are a Yukonese native who is now, for reasons, reasons of your own but reasons which we shall nevertheless soon uncover for ourselves, assuming the role of an Arkansian.”
“‘Arkansawyer’.”
“Whatever. I vow to tear off your garment of lies and expose the small-phallused person beneath to the appreciative gaze of our fellow guests.”
“He clearly has a southern American accent,” the lady, much to Pluck’s annoyance, put in. “Even I can tell that.”
“Are you aware, madame, that the penalty for abetting a spy is death?”
“Are you accusing me of espionage, sir?” asked the gentleman, fists describing wonky circles upon the tablecloth.
Pluck rose, with passion, from his seat and spat: “I accuse you of far worse than that, monsieur! I accuse you of neglecting your wife’s most elementary erotic needs, and of pandering her to the highest bidder!”
The gentleman jumped up as well. “I am not married, monsieur!”
Pluck clapped together his hands, the resulting burst drawing the attention of the waiter, in triumph at the vindication of his charge. “Do you not see, madame? He has not even the decency to admit your existence!”
“I am not his wife, monsieur.”
“No?”
“No. I am not married.”
Pluck stared at her dubiously. “Forgive me, madame, but I hardly think you recapture the moral high ground by admitting that the two of you indulge your licentiousness out of wedlock.”
“We never met before this afternoon, you idiot!” the man seethed. “The lady was enjoying her tea, and I merely asked to sit down and join her in conversation.”
“Is this so, madame?”
“It’s so, monsieur.”
Pluck eyed the man with a passionate, almost lecherous, hatred, then slowly lowered himself to his seat. The man did likewise. Pluck blindly, once again, waved his hands before him in a failing endeavour to locate his tea, then folded one upon the other. In a calmer tone, he resumed: “. . .I must ask myself why two otherwise ordinary-looking persons might wish to cloak their true identities from well-meaning strangers they encounter in a winter resort.”
“No one is cloaking anything, monsieur,” spoke the lady. She looked to the gentleman. “It is quite true that I never met Mister Stoupes before today.”
“‘Mister Stoupes’?!” Pluck enunciated the name with some repugnance.
“I think we might all pay each other the compliment of recomposing and introducing ourselves like civilised human beings.” She patted Pluck’s hand, visibly unsettling him. “I’ll go first. My name is Enid Trojczakowski. As I’ve said, my family is Polish, although I was born and live in England. I am a schoolmistress. Unmarried, and unattached.”
Pluck shook his head. “Preposterous,” he muttered.
“Nonetheless, true. I’m a spinster, if you want to use the word that was made for it.”
Pluck scoffed. “At your age, madame? I hardly think the word yet applies.”
“Then I can see that you are either too gentlemanly to allude to a lady’s middle-agedness, or too incompetent to gauge one’s age.”
“The former, obviously,” he sniffed.
“And this gentleman,” Miss Trojczakowski went on, “whom you were so quick to take up as an enemy, is, as you’ve heard, Mister Stoupes—I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your Christian name.”
“Glen,” he said with a smile.
“Mister Glen Stoupes, then, from Arkansas,” she finished.
Pluck’s eyelashes folded down. He played with the end of his unopened napkin on the table—not the most interesting of games, it has to be said. “You two have certainly learnt your stories with a singular dedication,” he mumbled. He pushed back his chair and slowly stood up. “Excuse me—I have some important people to see.” He would not look at them. “Thank you for your conversation.”
“Not at all,” sighed Mister Stoupes.
“Fuck you,” spat back Pluck, and he was gone.