Chapter Two
That night, Enid lay, as was her custom, in bed. She felt as though she were a stained glass window, having been ignored in stately, unregarded dust for centuries, only to have been lately shattered into uncomprehending shards by a stone thrown by some wretched, apostate boy. She searched the unlit ceiling of her room for Pluck’s countenance, and sought to relive, in the antiseptic confines of her thoughts, all they had experienced together.
Bartoff, in his bed, swooned in admiration, whilst suffering in penance for his role in his friend’s undoing. Pluck, he realised now, was a man who had made his own rules; who pursued his goals through methods of his own impromptu devising; to whom the concept of censoring one’s speech, let alone thoughts, was alien. What would a life along those lines entail?, Bartoff asked himself. With what self-sprouting ankle-wings might a man traverse the chasm separating Pluck’s outlook from his? Bartoff was half-minded, even now, even now, to rise up from his comfortable bed and attempt to take flight—only, considering how foolish he might appear, if not to a human witness, of which there was none, then at least to God, he refrained.
Sri Gangakanta, resting on his bed, breathing deeply, at one with the room, saw both Pluck’s life and his passing as a pointless waste; further, this life was too short, and the undeniable presence of far greater mysteries of the universe too salient, to spend one’s waking minutes contemplating that idiot of an inspector. And yet. . .yes, yes, and yet. . .might this gnarled weed dip down through its root into an underground lake of insight, which would have otherwise gone undiscovered?
Marcel Lapin-Défunt, lying beside his wife’s cold, unresponsive form, neither thought about Pluck nor cared; his thoughts centred, rather, around the profound, near-erotic ecstasy he’d beheld on the face of Deirdre as she’d attacked Pluck so viciously. He turned on his side so that Petunia wouldn’t notice his erection.
Petunia Lapin-Défunt didn’t notice, or care about, her husband’s erection. About Pluck, she felt sad, but she was used to sadness, shackled to the husband she’d been given. Sadness was life; the only alternatives, she pondered now, were the mental defective’s ill-reasoned and empirically unsupportable euphoria, or death.
Mifkin lay in bed, aching for company, for a strong hand to seize hold of his penis and do what it was decreed should be done to it. As for Pluck: it was a sense of good riddance, and relief.
Voot, having moments before masturbated, found his mind wiped clear of all erotic thought, but, as he lay in his bed, eyeing disconsolately the lugubrious strings of semen, gleaming in the moonlight, which garlanded his chest hair, he shared, albeit unwittingly, Mifkin’s sense of good riddance, and relief.
Poor Larry, lying contortedly on the little cot which had been provided him in a corner of a storage room, in lieu of a room of his own, was sad—despite his own participation in the tragedy—because, he felt, it was sad that any creature should die, even if the specific creature that had been Pluck had been so beastly to him. Why did we have to live in a world which was, minute to minute and hour to hour, shadowed by death, anyway?, he wondered. This he pondered; and, just at the moment he felt the last knot in the sutra was about to unravel, and the revelation be confessed, he fell asleep.
Aloysius smirked as he thought about Pluck, shrugged to himself—physically moved his shoulders up and down, in bed, as if to communicate his insouciance to the world—then sought to draw from the event a sort of moral: a good lesson, he thought, in what can happen if you reach too far beyond your abilities and your allocated station. Then, satisfied, he slept.
Curtis’s mind was filled with a zoetrope of random images, none of which referenced Pluck. And yet, the idea suddenly seized him that it would be nice to change his name to “Thaddeus”. He rolled over and frotted himself against his pillow, imagining it to be Enid’s denuded buttocks.
Frau Hühnerbeinstein couldn’t bring herself to think of Pluck’s passing. He was, she was sure, the Devil, or some pathetic approximation thereof. Though it was warm in her room, she pulled the covers closer up to her chin.
Arthur Drig thought on Pluck, and the more he did so, the more he admired the man for following his own path; even if, in this case, the path led him to an early and degrading death. It just goes to show, Drig thought, that you never know where your path will lead. He slowly turned his head, audibly creasing his pillow, to look over at his wife, who lay on her back, eyes closed. He desired her; even after all these years, he desired her. What he would really crave, he admitted to himself, was to take possession of his wife in front of a respectable crowd; not excessively large, of course—an opera house-sized spectatorship would, necessarily, inhibit his ability to perform—but a modest number of thoughtful observers capable of appreciating the scene in an aesthetic sense, rather than with a chorus of catcalls, hoots and hollers more reminiscent of, say, a music hall.
Charlotte Drig, lying next to him, was not imagining a public exhibition of the discharge of her marital duties with her husband. Rather, she was regretting not having saved Inspector Pluck from the mob and running off with him; someplace, maybe, warm all year round.
Danny Drig, in a room with his siblings, pondered with pleasure the destruction of the man who’d insulted his daddy.
Charlie Drig dreamt of cricket.
Doobie Drig dreamt of destroying his despised schoolmaster.
Eric Drig dreamt of the end of the world, and shortly woke up whimpering.
Betsy couldn’t sleep. She was missing Pluck’s silliness, as a counterpoint to the tragic earnestness with which it had been replaced.
Bo dreamt he was an angel in a Heaven filled with sweets.
Vanessa Tautphoeus lay beside the nigh-tangible form of Guilt, who—metaphorically, now—winked knowingly out of his peeling, scarecrow-like head and cuddled her a little closer. Madame Tautphoeus, who had devoted her life to passing lightly through the world, posing no hindrance to any man’s or woman’s destiny, inflicting no pain on any creature fortunate enough to have been endowed with the breath of life, and remaining unentangled in any romantic adventures, had yielded blindly to a dam-burst of bloodlust when she had helped to kill Pluck. As despicable an entity as he had been, she had let herself degenerate far lower. All her sensitivities, now, were numbed. In the blackness at the back of her wardrobe; in the doorway to her sitting room; in the mirror; on the inside of her eyelids; everywhere, she saw his mangled, half-dead form crying out to her for help. The thought of leaving her room, now, or of any communication with another instance of humanity, made her ill. Whilst she was thinking these things, Guilt inched closer and sought to stick his tongue in her mouth; disgusted, she turned on her side. Disappointed, Guilt harrumphed, turned on his side, and fell asleep. He dreamt of polar bears racing majestically across the arctic—a scene which had nothing obvious to do with the concept of guilt, but which pleased him nevertheless.
In the second between wakefulness and the welcome nullity of sleep, Deirdre thought on Pluck: she envied his obliteration, but couldn’t have cared less for the man. Then she slept, and dreamt of Hell.
Glen Stoupes, tossing about in his sheets, felt bad for Pluck. Surely the idiot deserved a punishment somewhere lower down the spectrum from torture and execution? They might have just chopped off his penis and been done with it; that way, they could have enjoyed the pain and disgrace which would have been visible on his face for the rest of the holiday. At the same time, the phrase which presented itself to his mind went something along the lines of, There but for the grace of God went Glen.
Genevra Bergamaschi, eyes closed, pictured the mutilation of Pluck on the canvas of her mind. It was fascinating, from an artistic point of view. When she awoke the next morning, she resolved, she would begin work on a huge mural, across the ceiling of their bedroom, of a naked Pluck being tortured and sexually humiliated by his fellow guests. She would have to wheedle people to pose for her for that purpose, but she was confident of her success.
Next to her, her cheek on Genevra’s bosom, Rosella didn’t think about Pluck at all. She was remembering her girlhood, and pondering the long path which had led her here.
Alan Brigeiboit Sanns, hairless head sunk into his pillow, drifting off, decided that, in retrospect, he missed Pluck’s clownish spirit. He aimed to keep a little of that irreverence alive in the world, if he could.
Marie-Adélaïde, Duchess of Loon, had known little of Pluck, but, reverting to a time-honed ideology under which she had been smothered, daily since girlhood, by books and priests, regretted the unnecessary passing of any person. Her attention was soon diverted by the erotic urge amassing in the region of her crotch; she wondered what her footman was up to, just now. She set her jaw against the unexpressed glare of contempt which would no doubt smoulder in his eye, and rang for him.
Sniggly, her footman, heard the bell, but buried his head beneath his pillow. What new humiliation had she in mind for him now? He as much as wished he’d volunteered as Pluck’s valet, to be smuggled to safety back in Greece, where, the footman felt sure, he would enjoy indolent afternoons drowsing on the beach. While Pluck had still been alive, Sniggly had half-wished the inspector would have stumbled, of his own accord, on his mistress’s dissolute ways and arrested her—though what Sniggly would have done then on the pecuniary front, he had no idea.
Kivi Brotherus fantasied about having even half the heap of scorn dumped upon him which had been dumped upon Pluck. His penis swelled, and his anus contracted, at the thought.
Modeste Cranat hadn’t, at first, given Pluck’s passing a passing thought, preoccupied by the ever-onrolling business of her bowels as she was, but now, splayed upon her soiled mattress, she came to regret the loss of a man she remembered as embodying infinite kindness, and who had acted as her champion.
Annette Godefroi, creaking on her miserable cot in her draughty mousehole of a room, reflected on Pluck as a particularly incompetent symbol of patriarchal society, and approved of his downfall. He was to be, she vowed, merely the first.
Philip La Paiva regretted Pluck’s death, having thought him a friend for his perceived thrashing of his father. He’d been the sort of fellow Phil could have seen himself going about with, taking lunch, maybe visiting museums and attending the odd lecture, before concluding the evening at one of the finer brothels he was wont to frequent. Alas, it was evidently not to be.
His father, Eli La Paiva, had initially blessed Pluck, as it had been the inspector’s clumsiness which resulted in La Paiva’s present omniscience. But now, after these several days of terrifying understanding, he cursed him for it.
Coronel Eyague Feosalma shivered under his sheet in intense regret, and determined to redevote his life to el magnifico’s splendid memory.
Enid, again, having trawled through the episodes of her shared hours with Pluck, still lay dazed on her bed, but with a newfound inspiration: when she reached in her reminiscences Pluck’s final, wretched minutes, she opined to herself that with Pluck’s death, it was as if a refreshing, merciful wind had finally blown away an unbudgeable cloud bank; as if the ceiling had collapsed in a church, and the true heavens above finally could be gazed upon; and she vowed, then and there, to live her life without a single thought spared for propriety, or for consequence, or for rationality—as had he.