Fitzhenry

“Nah, you’re just a greedy old bugger, Fitzhenry,” his companion at the bar said. “Sure, I don’t believe you paid fifty two old pounds for that thing fifty years ago.”

“Sure and I did,” Fitzhenry said indignantly. “And that there ‘expert’ said it was worth no more than £400 today.” He grumbled into his pint of stout for a moment before raising his head again. “£400! That’s terrible.” He shook his head at his pint glass.

“It serves you right for thinking it would be worth more,” his companion said equably.

“Tell us some more about your day, Fitzhenry,” a voice said from a bench near the window.

Fitzhenry turned around to address his audience of men from the village. Mary Smith tutted as she walked past him with a clutch of dirty glasses at her bosom.

“I went up to the old house,” Fitzhenry began in his sonorous story-telling voice.

His companion clapped him on the back, tears of laughter beginning to appear in his eyes.

“Sure, Fitzhenry, he didn’t ask you to start from the beginning again.”

The old man gave his companion a look. It was intended to wither the man in his seat, but he wasn’t looking at Fitzhenry. He was absorbed in his fifth whiskey of the day.

“I went,” Fitzhenry began again, slowly and self-importantly, with his gaze cast from the corner of his eye at his disrespectful companion, “up to the old house.”

His companion snorted and raised his whiskey to his lips. He drained the glass and nodded at the bar man for another.

“I’d packed the thing carefully into my brother’s car, God rest his soul, and driven there as early as I knew how. When I got to the big house, there was already a queue at the gate. People of all sorts, carrying objects in their arms, standing as though they had nothing on them but a smile for the morning. I parked in the field around the back of the house and a young chap in a violent orange jerkin told me to join that there queue and wait until there was someone to tell what it was I’d brought with me.”

He paused to take a mouthful of stout, wetting his whistle so that he might continue. The room was silent and all eyes but those of his companion were on him. The old man was enjoying being a minor celebrity, even though he didn’t realise it was for the wrong sort of reason.

He was old enough to be dead by now, but he refused to allow death a look in. He drove his late brother’s unlicensed car, ignored by the local constable. He lived in relative squalor, in a house filled with knick-knacks that was no more than two rooms downstairs and two rooms up. His brother and his brother’s wife had given in to death more than twenty years ago, as was the given way according to both nature and the Bible, and since that time he had rented out the house next door to his whiskey-soaked companion at the bar. Fitzhenry didn’t know much about the man, but he seemed to be a Dubliner, which would explain the whiskey.

Fitzhenry had joined the queue as instructed, which had grown in the time it had taken him to park the car and walk back to the main gate.

When he reached the head of the queue and was called forward to a table, it reminded him of the Troubles, when the army would regularly bring them all in and ask if they had any weapons they wished to declare.

“Have you a photograph of the object?” the youth sitting at the table asked him.

“I haven’t,” Fitzhenry had replied.

“Can you describe it for me, then?”

“I can. It’s a mahogany chest for use on a ship. It’s for a gentleman to perform his ablutions,” he said grandly and with pride, as though he were the sort of gentleman to take regular trips on a ship with his own portable wash-stand.

The youth made some comments on the sheet of paper in front of him. He had not once looked at Fitzhenry. If he had, he might have noted the slight glint of madness in the old man’s eye and changed his mind about passing on the information to the expert.

“Here,” said the youth, still not looking at Fitzhenry as he handed him a slip of paper. “Give this to a porter and accompany him to your vehicle. He’ll arrange for your object to be brought to the grounds and show you where to wait.”

Fitzhenry took the slip of paper. The youth pushed a clipboard towards him.

“Sign this, please.”

Fitzhenry hadn’t brought his glasses. “What is it?” he asked, peering at the sheet of paper on the clipboard.

“It’s a form you need to sign to give us permission to film your conversation with the expert and broadcast it in the programme.”

Fitzhenry took the pen that the youth was holding out to him and signed without reading.

“If I had only read it,” he told his audience in the pub, “I would not have signed it.”

“Why’s that, Fitzhenry?” one of the gathered crowd asked, trying not to laugh.

“Well, if you’ll understand, it was a contract.” The old man paused to allow the legality of this important word to sink into the brains of his listeners. “As I discovered later in the day, it was a binding contract from which I could not freed.”

He left the significance of the contract at that, partly because he believed it lent more gravitas to his tale, partly because he did not understand what it was he had signed well enough to explain it in public.

The contract, as the BBC assistant producer had explained to him when he continued to grumble at the expert long after his shameful valuation had been given and long, long after the cameras had stopped rolling, meant that he had no right to tell the BBC that he did not want the clip to be televised.

“You signed the contract,” she kept saying. “It’s a binding agreement.”

Fitzhenry was doubly insulted. First the expert from the programme had told him that the object he had bought was worth nothing more, and probably slightly less in today’s super inflated money, than what he had paid for it fifty years ago, and now this woman was telling him that he had no right to say that they could not broadcast his shame to the nation.

Someone in the bar failed to stifle a laugh.

“You may laugh,” Fitzhenry said, holding a finger aloft and pointing it around the room, “but if you’ll understand, as I told the expert from the television, I bought that wash-stand from Dalgeity & Son, which is an auction house, and so it was not cheap.”

When the expert had told him, in front of a crowd of people and on camera, that the wash-stand, as lovely a thing as it was, would only fetch no more than £400 in a specialist auction, Fitzhenry had almost spat out his teeth.

The entire village had of course watched the programme when it was on many weeks later. Fitzhenry had been strangely silent on the subject of his adventures at the old house on his return, but rumours crept their way down to the village, building up the expectations of Fitzhenry’s neighbours, and when they watched the programme it was said that the concentrated whoop of laughter at Fitzhenry’s response could be heard as far away as Newtownards, or even McCulley’s Rock.

“Sure, and it’s something I’ve kept for more than fifty years,” Fitzhenry said indignantly as his audience relived their joy at seeing the old fool’s response on the tv. “I shan’t be doing that again.”

His companion at the bar turned around on his stool, his eyes filled with laughter and tears, and clapped Fitzhenry on the back.

“Take a drink, man. Sure you won’t live out another fifty years. Not unless you have a secret we’d all like to know about.” He handed his ancient landlord his pint of stout and placed a hand on his shoulder. The weight of his hand encouraged Fitzhenry to sit back onto his own bar stool.

“No more than £400,” Fitzhenry sighed into his stout. “It’s enough to make a man want to die.”

“But you won’t, Fitzhenry. Not just yet, you greedy old bugger,” his companion said. “You’ll keep on living just long enough to prove that expert wrong, eh?”

His voice was gentle. In spite of the amusement he gained from Fitzhenry’s very public ridicule, along with the rest of the village he was sorry that it had happened.

“That’s right, Fitzhenry,” someone else said from the crowd by the door. “You’ll get your chance to prove that toffee nosed fop was wrong!”

Fitzhenry smiled weakly at his audience.

“Aye,” he said. “Maybe you’re right about that.”

The room was silent for a while, then gradually everyone fell back to murmuring conversation about this and about that, but not about Fitzhenry.

The old man turned himself round on his stool so that he was facing the bar. He and his companion were hunched over the counter, Fitzhenry with his pint glass, his companion with his short glass.

“And will you stop in for a spot of supper later?” he asked the younger man.

His companion did not answer for a moment. He was lost in thought, sorting through words inside his head, making them into sentences. The wealth of words that surrounded him in this place was dizzying at times, and he knew it was likely that he would never leave. Not while there were people like his landlord to keep him fed with inspiration.

“What’s that, Fitzhenry?” he asked when he realised that the old man was waiting for some sort of response from him.

“I asked if you’d like to stop by for something to eat when we get back,” said Fitzhenry.

“Yes,” said the writer, placing his huge hand gently on the old man’s frail back. “I’d like that very much indeed.”

© J R Hargreaves May 2007