The Flaxborough Crab

Miss Teatime beamed.

“I wonder if I might come in for a few moments, Mr Grope. A small matter of administrational routine has arisen and I believe you could help us to clear it up.”

“It’s not about the tablets, is it?”

Grope sounded as vague as he looked. He had made no move to admit her.

“Tablets?” she repeated, encouragingly.

“The doctor said he was having to stop them.”

“Would that be Dr Meadow, by any chance?”

“He’s been on to you people about it, has he?”

“Ah, not directly, no...”

Mr Grope absent-mindedly fingered his Order of Vassily (Second Class).

“Perhaps you’d better come through into the room.”

He half-turned, making space for her to pass him, then closed the door.

Miss Teatime paused by the first doorway she came to.

“That’s right—in there,” called Mr Grope. She noticed, not unthankfully, that he had neglected to replace the bolt.

The room contained a great deal of furniture, including two pianos, a carved mahogany cupboard the size of a modest bus shelter, an oval dining table draped in port wine-coloured plush, a pedestal gramophone, and a number of formidable sundries that eluded immediate identification.

Miss Teatime picked her way between a piano stool and what she suspected to be a commode, and perched as gracefully as she could upon the arm of a bloated, tapestry-covered settee.

“Yes, these tablets,” she resumed briskly. “What was it that Dr Meadow told you about them? The fact is that some of our prescription records appear to have gone astray. The question of your tablets might well have a bearing.”

Mr Grope, who had entered the furniture labyrinth by another channel, stared gloomily at her over a bamboo plant stand.

“Doing without them is very wearing,” he declared.

“I am sure it must be, Mr Grope. But what did Dr Meadow say?”

“He didn’t hold out any hope. Not when I called on Wednesday.”

Miss Teatime was by no means the first person to have discovered that having conversation with Walter Grope produced a curious sense of being bombarded with echoes. Was it the pianos? she wondered. Reverberations, perhaps.

“Hope of more tablets, do you mean?”

“Of course. They...” He paused, made several silent lip movements as if trying out words, then brightened and announced in a rush: “They-ran-out-on-Tuesday-at-eleven-fifteen.”

“That,” observed Miss Teatime, having grasped the reason for the echo effect, “does not scan.”

“Not really,” Mr Grope agreed.

“But it is very stimulating, if I may say so, to meet someone with so natural a flair for poetry.”

The nearest approximation to a smile of which Mr Grope was capable stirred momentarily in the feather-bed of his cheek.

“Do you compose much verse, Mr Grope?” Miss Teatime inquired, sensible of the perils of the question, but eager to please still further.

“A fair bit. It doesn’t come so easy now, though. Not since I finished at the pictures.”

“You were an artist?”

“I was a commissionaire.” Mr Grope flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his splendid sleeve. “It’s an occupation that leaves the mind free for a lot of the time. I used to think up most of my In-Memoriams while I was keeping an eye on the queue at the Rialto.”

“Did you, indeed.”

“For the paper, you know. There was one used to go: Of all the mothers she was the best— She’s gone to where she can get a good rest.”

“Lovely,” murmured Miss Teatime.

“Then there was: A dear one’s passed, but though we’re sad—We know it now is heaven for Dad. I remember the week I made that one up. It was Gold Diggers of 1933.”

“Films like that will not come our way again, Mr Grope.”

She sighed, then looked at the little silver dress watch that she wore.

“Dear me! The Ministry does not employ me to chatter about old times, I fear. I really must complete these little inquiries of mine and return to the office. Now then, do you by happy chance know the name of the medicine that Dr Meadow had been prescribing for you?”

She took a thin silver propelling pencil from her handbag.