My Uncle Oswald(65)

“Great time,” she said. “Really marvellous. I wish they were all like him.”

“Good.”

“He was so jolly,” she said. “Lots of laughs. And he sang me a bit from the new opera he’s doing.”

“Did he say what he’s calling it?”

“Turio,” she said. “Turidot. Something like that.”

“No trouble from the wife upstairs?”

“Not a peep,” she said. “But it was so funny because even when we were plunged in passion on the sofa, he had to keep reaching out every now and again to bang the piano. Just to let her know he was working hard and not banging some woman.”

“A great man, you think?”

“Terrific,” Yasmin said. “Stupendous. Find me another like him.”





22





FROM LUCCA we headed north for Vienna, and on the way we called on Sergei Rachmaninoff in his lovely house on Lake Lucerne.

“It’s a funny thing,” Yasmin said to me when she came back to the car after what had obviously been a fairly energetic session with the great musician, “it’s a funny thing, but there’s an amazing resemblance between Mr. Rachmaninoff and Mr. Stravinsky.”

“You mean facially?”

“I mean everything,” she said. “They’ve both got small bodies and great big lumpy faces. Enormous strawberry noses. Beautiful hands. Tiny feet. Thin legs. And great equipment.”

“Is it your experience so far,” I asked her, “that geniuses have larger pizzles than ordinary men?”

“Definitely,” she said. “Much larger.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“And they make better use of them,” she said, rubbing it in. “Their swordsmanship is superb.”

“Rubbish.”

“It’s not rubbish, Oswald. I ought to know.”

“Aren’t you forgetting they’ve all had the Beetle?”

“The Beetle helps,” she said. “Of course it helps. But there’s no comparison between the way a great creative genius handles his sword and the way an ordinary fellow does it. That’s why I’m having such a nice time.”

“Am I an ordinary fellow?”

“Don’t be grumpy,” she said. “We can’t all be Rachmaninoff or Puccini.”

I was deeply wounded. Yasmin had pricked me in my most sensitive area. I sulked all the way to Vienna, but the sight of that noble city soon restored my humour.

In Vienna, Yasmin had a hilarious encounter with Dr. Sigmund Freud in his consulting room at Berggasse 19, and I think this visit merits a brief description.

First of all, she made a proper application for an appointment with the famous man, stating that she was in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. She was told there would be four days to wait. So I arranged for her to fill in the time by calling first upon the august Mr. Richard Strauss. Mr. Strauss had just been appointed co-director of the Vienna State Opera and he was, according to Yasmin, rather pompous. But he was easy meat and I got fifty excellent straws from him.

Then it was Dr. Freud’s turn. I regarded the celebrated psychiatrist as being in the semi-joker class and saw no reason why we shouldn’t have a bit of fun with him. Yasmin agreed. So the two of us cooked up an interesting psychiatric malady for her to be suffering from, and in she went to the big greystone house on Berggasse at two thirty on a cool, sunny October afternoon. Here is her own description of the encounter as she told it to me later that day over a bottle of Krug after I had frozen the straws.

“He’s a goosey old bird,” she said. “Very severe looking and correctly dressed, like a banker or something.”

“Did he speak English?”

“Quite good English, but with that dreadful German accent. He sat me down on the other side of his desk and right away I offered him a chocolate. He took it like a lamb. Isn’t it odd, Oswald, how every one of them takes the chocolate without any argument?”

“I don’t think it’s odd,” I said. “It’s the natural thing to do. If a pretty girl offered me a chocolate, I’d take it.”

“He was a hairy sort of fellow,” Yasmin said. “He had a moustache and a thick pointed beard which looked as though it had been trimmed very carefully in front of a mirror with scissors. Whitish-grey it was. But the hair had been cut well back from his mouth above and below so that the bristles made a sort of frame for his lips. That’s what I noticed above everything else, his lips. Very striking, those lips of his, and very thick. They looked like a pair of false lips made out of rubber which had been stuck on over the real ones.