Read In Pursuit of the English for Free Online

not to have fish in your room. This place is bad enough without fish as well.’
    ‘It was caught this morning,’ I said.
    ‘The whole building smells.’
    ‘I didn’t invite the fish.’
    ‘Is your friend a fisherman?’ Her soft English cheeks were a clear red, and her full brown eyes, that had no whites to them, were glazed with suspicious fascination.
    ‘He is a painter,’ I said. ‘He has won prizes in Paris, not to mention London.’
    ‘How interesting,’ she said.
    Next day Piet arrived in a severe black suit. He looked like a predicant. His face was a solemn yard long. He carried a very large picture of a nude girl. He lifted it past the miserable English girls on the steps with an air of criticaldetachment. He put down the nude, and said: ‘There, you see I can still paint. And what is more, this afternoon I have been furthering the cause of art in this continent. I am now, you must know, a leading representative of the Council for Art. I am very respectable. There is an exhibition on. It is by a homosexual poor boy. He wrote to me and asked for my encouragement and patronage. His pictures are all of male nudes and in very great detail. The arts teacher at the school here for nice English girls wrote to me and asked for my help and encouragement. So this afternoon I met this teacher, poor woman, at the door, wearing my beautiful black suit and an expression of cultural integrity. I lowered my voice to an official note. And I entered the hall followed by the teacher and a hundred and fifty pretty girls, all in search of artistic experience. And I escorted them around for an hour, all around those pictures on one subject only, pointing out the technique and the line and the quality of the paint. With severity. He is a bad painter. And not once did I smile. Not once did that poor English teacher smile. Not once did all those little girls smile. We were in the presence of art.’ He flung himself across my bed and laughed. The whole building shook.
    ‘For the Lord’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t shout.’
    ‘There, what did I tell you? Already you are asking me to lower my voice. The English will finish you, man. Ya.’
    ‘All the same, I wish you could hurry on that boat. I’ve been here six weeks, and I’m very unhappy. Apart from anything else, there’s an English couple across the passage and we have morning tea together all the time. And as soon as I say anything at all, about anything, they look very nervous and change the subject. It’s a bad augury for my life in England.’
    ‘Poor little one. Poor child. There, what did I tell you?’ He roared with delight. I heard a door open on to the passage.
    ‘ Piet. And there’s a woman called Mrs Barnes. She’s very bad-tempered.’
    ‘Poor woman,’ he said. He took two large soundless strides to the door, opened it with a jerk, and there was Mrs Barnes in the passage. She frowned. He smiled. Slowly,unwillingly, and hating every second of it, she smiled. Then, furious, she went dark plum colour, glared at us both, and went into her room, slamming the door hard.
    ‘It is a terrible thing,’ said Piet sentimentally, ‘A bad-tempered woman. It is all the fault of her husband. I suppose he’s English.’
    ‘Scottish.’
    ‘It is all the same thing. That reminds me …’ He told a story. By the time he had ended I was laughing too hard to ask him to lower his voice. He was rolling in an agony of laughter back and forth over the floor. The whole boarding house was hushed.
    ‘That reminds me,’ said Piet again. He talked, listening with delight to the silence of his invisible audience. Then he told his story about his visit to a brothel in Marseilles. Unfortunately it is too indecent to write down. It was not too indecent for him to shout at the top of his voice. The end of the story was: ‘Imagine me, in her room, in such a predicament, and the boat was leaving. It was giving out long, sad hoots of pain, to warn us all there was no time to