Cushing's Crusade Read Free Page A

impossible not to assault people in the tube. Fascinus was a classical god whose image was the erect male organ. Virgins celebrated his festival with ceremonies of public defloration; their implement was a suitably sized replica of the god. The useless verbal lumber in Derek’s head was extensive, and growing year by year; the thought did not displease him; words to replace dying brain cells. A losing battle but life was that anyway, little man against an unfathomable universe. Libraries and archives were arsenals for the battle against time, voices for the dead, and archivists pursued the noble cause of guarding the produce of brains long since decomposed. There were other ways to look at it, and Derek often looked at it in other ways. Libraries werevomitoriums, places for storing gobbets of half-digested matter for living men to feed upon, escapist palaces where past regurgitations could make the present palatable.
    Some distance from the tube station Derek could see a gradually increasing traffic jam. The cause of it seemed to be an untidily parked car not unlike the Cushing family saloon; inside it was a woman not unlike Mrs Cushing. The resemblance was too great for coincidence. Derek started to run towards the offending vehicle. Diana flung open the passenger-seat door and motioned him to get in. From the direction she drove off in, Derek assumed that they were on their way to the crowded chaos of Oxford Street.
    They had blundered through the semi-darkness of five boutiques before reaching the one where Diana spotted what she thought Derek could do with for the summer: a light cotton suit in a delicate pale-blue material, with a battledress-style jacket and breast pockets picked out with darker blue thread at the edges. Derek was so delighted with his wife’s apparent recovery that he did not feel able to suggest that brown, green or even mustard versions of the same would have looked less overtly homosexual. Struggling into the light blue hipster trousers behind a flimsy curtain, he found that their figure-hugging cut was such that if he wore them regularly, his testicles would be forced into his lower abdomen. Armed with this certainty he objected, making sure to look disappointed rather than relieved. In the end Diana chose him a blue-and-white-striped jacket and an innocuous pair of beige flared trousers.
    Before her recent malaise Diana had always decided what clothes he should buy, so Derek saw her resumption of this habit as a sign that all would now be well. Incredibly he appeared to have won a significant marital victory. He had never minded Diana’s desire to dress him up in clothes more suitable for men ten years younger, and today he minded still less. She had often told him that he was burnt-out and dull, so he had never resented her attempt to make him look more vital and alive. It was rather like the macabre habit of some undertakers who put rouge on the cheeks of corpses to make them more life-like, but there was nosense in getting worked up, even though he could not share the spurious sense of individuality experienced by many who bought fashionable clothes. But better to adopt off-the-peg fashion than off-the-peg ideas. Whatever indignities his acquiescence inflicted on his appearance, his mental clothing, he hoped, remained his own.
    *
    The sitting-room in the Cushings’ flat was a large room with a high ceiling and french windows leading out on to the narrow balcony. They had inherited half the furniture from the previous tenants, whose taste had been unusual. There was a terrible standard lamp with peculiar fluted swellings carved at intervals on the wooden column, a large reproduction Jacobean table and an equally dark and heavy-looking sideboard. Diana had tried to brighten up the flat by putting down a red carpet but this had merely emphasized the sombreness of the furniture. Two modern chairs, with metal frames and canvas seats, also tended to accentuate the bulk of the large Victorian sofa