Earthly Powers Read Online Free PDF

Tommy Toomey. With a name like that he had been destined to set up as a professional comedian, and he had done well enough, especially on the British radio in the 1930s. But the cough had become increasingly a hindrance to his sharp bright somewhat high-pitched delivery. Comedians of the old demotic school, like George Formby, Sr., had been able to make comic capital out of audibly dying ("Coughing better today, lads" and so on), but Tom's way had been one of rapid wit. His specialty had been the surrealist reshaping of English history, and this had presupposed an audience of some education. Such an audience was ceasing to exist when Tom's onstage or in-studio coughing began to be uncontrollable. He had had the best of his time when he came to die, and he knew it. He died in the faith in a hospital near Hendon, having tried to joke some few hours before about a special niche in Purgatory for British Catholic comedians. He died clutching something—rosary beads, probably. I put Ali's gift in my trouser pocket. I supposed that Tom might find it easier to get out of Purgatory—if the now much impaired eschatology of fat Carlo's Church still admitted its existence if he had a saint more or less in the family, or should I say more precisely had a saint as brother to his sister's husband. Then, having doused my life-shortener, I savoured an old man's doze.
     
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    The residence of the British Council representative was in a quieter and perhaps more patrician part of Lija than my own. Geoffrey, sitting tied and jacketed next to Ali, who was driving, pointed this out, adding however that the whole bloody island was bloody terrible and he bloody hated it. Having arrived, we told Ali to come back in two hours, and then Geoffrey rang the doorbell, composing his sullen face, now unadorned by twin mirrors, to a twinkling vacuity. The British Council representative appeared, together with his wife. Mrs Ovington was a big fair woman in a long candy-striped dress, her face bronzed and wrinkled. The bronze and, to some extent, the wrinkles were a badge of long service in the sunnier and duller stations of the world. They had had Warsaw for a couple of years, and there had once been talk of their being sent to Paris, but it had usually been places like Beirut and Baghdad. The wrinkles could also be accounted for by the long professional habit of insincere smiling. Ovington, who had a sun-and-tobacco-bleached stallion forelock falling onto his forehead, was also a smiler, but only with his teeth, which were of various shapes and colours and usually, as now, had a hearty Dunhill pipe stuck between them. They greeted me with laughs and shouts of "Got here, then?" and "Jolly good" but no happy returns. They were no strangers to me. They had presided over the Writers' Week that I had been asked to inaugurate, all of twelve years back, in Sydney. Sydney was regarded as a great British Council plum, but Ovington had not got on with the Aussies. They had also come to see me when I had been settling in here in Malta, with "Jolly good" and a jar of homemade cognac-flavoured orange and lemon marmalade. It was good marmalade and I had not yet quite finished it. They were good people.
           Ann Ovington dramatically stopped wrinkling and dragged me out into the forecourt. "Rather unfortunate," she said rapidly. "But you'll understand, and he won't. Sciberras, the Maltese poet, I mean. We had to have him along to meet Dawson, and he took the wrong turning out of the loo and barged into the kitchen, and there he saw the damned cake. Then he said how thoughtful and kind and the rest of it. Apparently it's his birthday today as well as yours, and he doesn't know it's yours, happy birthday by the way, and—well, you see the awkwardness of it. I've already primed everybody else—well, not your Geoffrey yet of course, but I will, no good leaving it to Ralph, he'd take all night explaining anyway. I know you'll see it as, well, you know,