My Uncle Oswald

12

THE NEXT MORNING, carrying the rubbery thing and the signed letter in my pocket, I went looking for A. R. Woresley. They told me in the Science Building that he had not shown up that morning. So I drove out to his house and rang the bell. The diabolic sister came to the door.

“Arthur’s a bit under the weather,” she said. “What happened?”

“He fell off his bike.”

“Oh dear.”

“He was cycling home in the dark and he collided with a pillar-box.”

“I am sorry. Is he much hurt?”

“He’s bruised all over,” she said.

“Nothing broken, I hope?”

“Well,” she said, and there was an edge of bitterness to her voice, “not bones.”

Oh God, I thought. Oh, Yasmin. What have you done to him?

“Please offer him my sincere condolences,” I said. Then I left.

The following day, a very fragile A. R. WToresley reported for duty.

I waited until I had him alone in the lab, then I placed before him the sheet of chemistry department notepaper containing the legend I had typed out over his own signature. I also dumped about a thousand million of his very own spermatozoa (by now dead) on the bench and said, “I’ve won my bet.”

He stared at the obscene rubbery thing. He read the letter and recognized his signature.

“You bounder!” he cried. “You tricked me!”

“You assaulted a lady.”

“Who typed this?”

“I did.”

He stood there taking it all in.

“All right,” he said. “But what happened to me? I went absolutely crazy. What in God’s name did you do?”

“You had a double dose of Cantharis vesicatoria sudanii,” I said. “The old Blister Beetle. Powerful stuff that.”

He stared at me, comprehension dawning on his face. “So that’s what it was,” he said. “Inside the bloody chocolate, I suppose.”

“Naturally. And if you swallowed it, then so will the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales and Mr. Joseph Conrad and all the rest of them.”

He started pacing up and down the lab, albeit a trifle gingerly. “I told you once before, Cornelius,” he said, “that you are a totally unscrupulous fellow.”

“Absolutely,” I said, grinning.

“Do you know what that woman did to me?”

“I can make a pretty good guess.”

“She’s a witch! She’s a—a vampire! She’s disgusting!”

“you seemed to like her well enough,” I said, pointing to the thing on the bench.

“I was drugged!”

“You raped her. You raped her like an animal. you were the disgusting one.”

“That was the Blister Beetle.”

“Of course it was,” I said. “But when Mr. Marcel Proust rapes her like an animal, or King Alfonso of Spain, will they know they’ve had the Blister Beetle?”

He didn’t answer me.

“They most certainly will not,” I said. “They may well wonder what the hell came over them, just as you did. But they’ll never know the answer, and in the end they’ll simply have to put it down to the incredible attractiveness of the girl. That’s all they can put it down to. Right?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“They will be embarrassed at having raped her, just as you are. They will be very contrite, just as you are. They will want to hush the whole thing up, just as you do. In other words, they will give us no more trouble. We skidaddle with the signed notepaper and the precious sperm and that will be the end of it.”

“You are a rapscallion of the first water, Cornelius. You are an unmitigated scoundrel.”

“I know,” I said, grinning again. But the logic of my argument was irrefutable. The plan was watertight. A. R. Woresley, who was certainly no fool, was beginning to realize this. I could see him weakening.

“What about that girl?” he said. “Who was she?”

“She’s the third member of our organization. She’s our official teaser.”

“Some teaser,” he said.

“That’s why I chose her.”

“I shall be embarrassed, Cornelius, if I have to meet her again.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “She’s a great girl. You’ll like her very much. She happens to like you, too.”

“Rubbish. What makes you think that?”

“She said you were absolutely and positively the greatest. She said that from now on she wants all her men to be like you.”

“She said that? Did she actually say that, Cornelius?”

“Word for word.”

A. R. Woresley beamed.

“She said you made all other men look like eunuchs,” I said, ramming it home.

A. R. Woresley’s whole face began to glow with pleasure. “You are not pulling my leg, are you, Cornelius?”

“Ask her yourself when you see her.”

“Well well well,” he said, beaming away and preening his horrible moustache lightly with the back of his fingers.

“Well well well,” he said again. “And may I ask what her name is, this remarkable young lady?”

“Yasmin Howcomely. She’s half Persian.”

“How interesting.”

“You must have been terrific,” I said.

“I have my moments, Cornelius,” he said. “Ah yes indeed, I certainly have my moments.” He seemed to have forgotten about the Blister Beetle. He wanted all the credit himself now and I let him have it.

“She can’t wait to meet you again.”

“Splendid,” he said, rubbing his hands. “And she’s going to be a part of our little organization, you say?”

“Absolutely. You’ll be seeing a lot of her from now on.”

“Good,” he said. “Goody good.”

And thus A. R. Woresley joined the firm. It was as easy as that. What’s more, he was a man of his word.

He agreed to withhold publication of his discovery. He agreed to assist Yasmin and me in every possible way.

He agreed to construct for us a portable container for liquid nitrogen which we could take with us on our travels.

He agreed to instruct me in the exact procedure for diluting the collected semen and measuring it out into straws for freezing.

Yasmin and I would be the travellers and the collectors.

A. R. Woresley would remain at his post in Cambridge but would establish at the same time in a convenient and secret place a large central freezer, The Semen’s Home.

From time to time, the travellers, Yasmin and I, would return with our spoils and transfer them from the portable suitcase freezer to The Semen’s Home.

I would provide ample funds for everything. I would pay all travelling expenses, hotels, etc., while Yasmin and I were on the road. I would give Yasmin a generous dress allowance so that she might buy herself a superb wardrobe.

It was all straightforward and simple.

I resigned from the university and so did Yasmin.

I found and bought a house not far from where A. R. Woresley lived. It was a plain red-brick affair with four bedrooms and two fairly large living-rooms. Some retired empire builder in years gone by had christened it, of all things, Dunroamin. Dunroamin would be the headquarters of the Home. It would be where Yasmin and I lived during the preparatory period, and it would also be a secret laboratory for A. R. Woresley. I spent a lot of money equipping that lab with apparatus for making liquid nitrogen, with mixers, microscopes, and everything else we needed. I furnished the house. Yasmin and I moved in. But from then on, ours was a business relationship only.

Within a month, A. R. Woresley had constructed our portable liquid nitrogen container. It had double vacuum walls of aluminium and all manner of neat little trays and other contraptions to hold the tiny straws of sperm. It was the size of a large suitcase and what’s more it looked like a suitcase because the outside was sheathed in leather.

A second smaller travelling case contained compartments for ice and a hand-mill and bottles for carrying glycerol, egg yolk, and skimmed milk. Also a microscope for testing the potency of newly collected sperm in the field. Everything was got ready with meticulous care.

Finally, A. R. Woresley set about building The Semen’s Home in the cellar of the house.