Educating Caesar

I have never been a member of a gentleman’s club or had any aspirations to wander in such a direction. However, I have always, perhaps fancifully, imagined that, amongst all the talk therein of stocks and shares, aristocratic marriages, cricket and what our jolly chaps are doing overseas in all those territories “we damned well used to own”, there may lie a rich seam of tales and legends which bears witness to there being some purpose for our upper classes… namely that of entertainment.

The following story was revealed to me by a work colleague over a steamy trouser press at what was then a dry cleaner’s opposite Leadenhall Market. He had been indulging in the modern trend of trying to trace his family’s roots and had discovered an indirect connection to a First World War Rear Admiral and blackballed member of the Lombardy Club on Great Faulkener Street, from the annals of which he retrieved this anecdote.

It is, I will grant you, a rather tenuous tale, but had I myself been confronted with an obituary of a distant relative containing the line “whose son was poisoned by a blue Persian female”, I might also have been tempted to venture further along the path of genealogical research.

It begins, from all accounts, at one of Lady Patterson-Cruickshank’s dinner parties, which were regularly attended by a tight-knit coterie of well-heeled individuals, all of whom knew the right people in the right places. Indeed the hostess’s ruthless vetting procedures rendered access to such events virtually impossible, her suspicion of newcomers being not dissimilar to that of a band of criminals unable to shake off the impression of a potential recruit operating as an undercover journalist.

It was therefore with some consternation that the name Conrad Fettinghall appeared on the guest list, sparking rumours that Lady Patterson-Cruickshank had perhaps had more than just a passing acquaintance with his esteemed father, the Rear Admiral.

Conrad Fettinghall never really made it into “society”. At the tender age of twenty-one he had committed the inexcusable faux-pas of taking his fiancée Tatiana Brockett to see an experimental theatre version, as my colleague put it, of “either "Kinky Angel" down the Elephant, or "Kinky Elephant" up the Angel”. Irrespective of its location north or south of the river, it was not the most salubrious of playhouses, and one was more likely to be struck by an empty beer bottle from the audience than from anything that was being performed on stage.

Apart from concussion, Tatiana Brockett suffered irreparable post-dramatic stress, in addition to certain religious and zoological phobias requiring significant outlay on the part of her outraged parents. The Rear Admiral duly compensated them for all therapy expenses and promised to punish his son accordingly, by making him a member of the board of a tin mining corporation permanently stationed in Malaya.

And as far as most of London society was concerned, Conrad simply vanished for a couple of decades.

He did, however, appear to live on in the mind of the delectable but now highly unstable Tatiana, who reported from the veranda of her rehabilitation clinic in Virginia Water that she had received several postcards from a jungle man claiming to study the speech patterns of wild animals, but as these cards had essentially contained photos of Malayan elephants, she had eaten them.

Had it not been for the events of 28 October 1914, when Lieutenant Commander Karl von Muller, of the German East Asia Squadron, disguised his lone vessel as a British cruiser, sailed into George Town harbour, and began attacking the living daylights out of the place, Conrad would no doubt have ended his days in a remote corner of the Empire. On hearing news of the devastating attack in Malaya, the Rear Admiral’s wife persuaded her husband to send out a search party for their son and have him “returned pronto to Blighty”.

Stigmatised with eternal blame for the hallucinations and acute paranoia of an otherwise perfectly marriageable viscount’s daughter, it was considered appropriate to post Conrad to an equally inhospitable but rather less remote British domain. A region we now know as Strathclyde.

The re-emergence of Conrad’s name did not go unnoticed in the cocktail parties of West London, where rumours abounded as to his having become assimilated to the locals north of the border and the construction of a secret laboratory in which he was conducting experiments on animals.

Many years later, the death of the Rear Admiral gave rise to a commemorative week-end gathering organised by Lady Patterson-Cruickshank whose recent efforts at finding novelty and entertainment for her dinner guests appeared to have stalled at an acrobatic hedgehog and a one-armed Argentine polo player. It was therefore with some pride that she introduced Conrad one afternoon to the expectant but somewhat nervous assembled party and announced:

“I have it on good authority that he has taught a cat to speak English.”

The general gasp of astonishment which greeted this statement was largely triggered by the fact that, whilst many knew of cases in which animals could be encouraged to communicate in the human tongue, no-one had yet encountered any attempts to induce a creature to express itself specifically in English. Sir Hugo Mountford recalled a professor in the Balkans who had worked for many years on a particularly obtuse Polynesian cormorant, which had ultimately pecked its tutor to death when confounded by the subjunctive in Serbo-Croat.

Henry Bloomstone looked askance at the bearded figure before him and said:

“I trust Mr. Fettinghall, we are talking of words of no more than one syllable.”

“Not at all,” replied Conrad, “the wee chap’s got a fair command o’ the lingo, even if he does say so himself.”

There were naturally immediate calls for the feline wonder to be brought forth for inspection, upon which Henry Bloomstone was sent to retrieve the creature from the billiard room where it was sleeping. Henry returned promptly but catless. He confirmed the truth of the story, however, adding that he had found Conrad’s little treasure snoozing on the green baize, asked him politely to accompany him to the dining room, and been told in no uncertain terms that he would “come when he bloody well liked, since anyone who thought he would cut short a nap just to entertain a bunch o’ snotty-nosed English bastards was hugely mistaken”.

These were comforting words to Lady Patterson-Cruickshank who had been having second thoughts about the whole rather risky idea, since during the entire week Conrad and his pet had been staying with her, the cat had not uttered a single word.

When he eventually wandered into the room, and padded his way unconcernedly across the plush carpet and onto the dining room table, a hush befell his apprehensive audience.

“Will you have some milk, little chap?” Lady Spermshaw suggested rather tentatively.

“Ma name is Seeza. And if thass all y’got to offer, I will,” came the indifferent retort. Such was the amazement of the eager listeners that Lady Spermshaw apologised to him for having spilt half the milk over the carpet.

“Doon’t apologise to me, hen. It’s nae my bloody shagpile,” said the cat, eyeing the contents of the saucer with some disdain.

There was another uncertain silence amongst the guests before Amanda Wetherington plucked up the courage to ask:

“Tell me Caesar, what is your view of human intelligence?”

The cat pawed away a few drops of milk from its whiskers and replied:

“Do ya mean human intelligence in general or jush you in particular? Because in the case o’ yusself, darlin’, you were nae exactly first on the list for this week-end’s festivities. Only this morning I heard Sir Hugo tellin' Mr. Appleton over a game o’ billiards how dozy ya must be not to have noticed that y’husband’s spent the last three years screwin’ ‘is secretary in your holiday cottage on the banks of Lake Geneva.”

Eyebrows were raised. Cheeks became flushed.

“Well, I didn’t quite put it-,” ventured Sir Hugo, before the cat interrupted him again.

“You may be interested to know, Sir, that all those prime shares in that land in Singapore Mr. Bloomstone has just sold you are worth nothin’, pal, since the toxins from the nearby dye factory he omitted to mention render it agriculturally unusable. He and Lady Spermshaw were chuckling about it at breakfast over their poached eggs and kippers. None of which were left for me, incidentally.”

As Henry Bloomstone and Lady Spermshaw protested their innocence, the nervousness of the assembled party was now beginning to turn to anger, and Lady Patterson-Cruickshank squirmed uneasily in her chair as she became aware of this hitherto unforeseen risk.

Major Troskett, whose sanity had departed at some point during the Third Anglo-Afghan War, decided to go on the offensive:

“What about your sordid little goings-on with Lady Patterson-Cruickshank’s Fifi. I’ve seen you behind the clematis near the croquet lawn.”

“I dunnae need ma sex life bein’ criticised by some ol’ hypocrite who, by his own admission, only ever turns up here fa the free food,” responded the cat sternly.

“Do something, please, Conrad,” shouted Lady Patterson-Cruickshank. “Can’t you control this thing.”

Conrad insisted that his cat had never behaved in this fashion before, picked him up sharply just as he was attempting to claw Major Troskett’s monocle from its socket, and dragged him out of the room, screaming and shouting that he was “fed up wi’ the lot o’ yus” and largely blaming Conrad for having subjected him to a “right bunch of humiliating losers”.

And thus the party and Conrad’s brief return to London society ended. The guests departed with a certain amount of unease, leaving Lady Patterson-Cruickshank and her butler to discuss matters further. Matters which appeared to have been resolved by the gardener, who was seen the following morning with a large spade in one hand and a cat-sized black bag in the other, the contents of which were tossed on to a small bonfire in the furthest corner of the estate.

“Conrad will leave at the week-end,” Lady Patterson-Cruickshank told her butler. “I can only hope that that little creature of his did not pass on any bad habits to my Fifi.”

And with that she retired for the evening. The butler took one last look around the dining room, switched off the lights and closed the door.

At the other end of the room, the bottom of the long curtains covering the French windows twitched, and from under them emerged the longhaired profile of Fifi, Lady Patterson-Cruickshank’s pedigree blue Persian.

She looked around momentarily, strode purposefully across the shagpile on to one of the high-backed mahogany chairs and curled into a ball. And before her eyelids finally drooped, she muttered the almost inaudible words:

“It ain’t your lucky day, darlin’. I’m pregnant.”