Your Auld Yang Syne

 

'Her eyes widened. She was the very picture of astonishment.'

'Pooh, what are you talking about?'

'At long last she was able to speak.'

'Who was?'

'"Oh, Torquil...is it really you? After all these years?".'

'What?'

'My new venture, Piglet. Romance. I'm writing a story to send to the outfit that does all those love sagas...you know, their eyes went crossed across a rheumy crowd and all that.'

'What, Mills and - '

'Wills and Whiffs, that's the one. All the world loves a lover, Piglet. So I bethought me that I'd betake me to pen and paper and becoin me a few extra bob.'

'So who's your hero?'

'Torquil Broadshoulder. Commissioned officer in India in the last days of Reg.'

'You mean the Raj.'

'No, Reg, his superior, about to retire.'

'Is that a name? Torquil?'

'Of course it is. Old French, you know. Ou le Wisdom Normand, as we initiatives say. Derives from tranquil, which just happens to be his key quality, and Torquay, which just happens to be where he embarked for India.'

'From Torquay?'

'Oh, picky picky...look, I'll chuck in a paragraph about chaotic sailing schedules.'

'Right. And the lady?'

'Lavinia Tempestheart. Youngest of three daughters, still living with her father at his rectory in the village of Soft Verges, a curlew's twitch from Aylesbury.'

'I see.'

'Dutiful, she is. Helping dad. Good works in the parish. But actually she's in an ecstasy of molten passion.'

'Funny sort of rectory.'

'In her secret world, Piglet!'

'Ah, I see...Tempestheart.'

'Pretty nifty, eh? A creative's name, that.'

'Creative what? That's an adjective.'

'Oh, Piglet, where have you been? All adjectives are nouns these days. And all verbs. The barriers are down.'

'I see.'

'Anyway, she and Torquil were childhood sweethearts, gazing hand-in-hand of a summer night upon a golden, rolling Vespa - till fate decreed.'

'Decreed what?'

'Again, Piglet, you're stuck in the starting-trap. Fate doesn't have to fossick about with the why and the warehouse. It just decrees.'

'Well I never.'

'Nor has Lavinia. Anyway, her one pleasure is an occasional trip to London. So there she is, Oxford Street, looking at all the swish shops and imagining a life that, with malevolent caprice, has been so cruelly denied her - when suddenly, she tingles at an intimation.'

'What, in broad daylight?'

'A sound, Piglet. A voice. She hasn't heard it for years but there's no mistaking...it thrills her to the phwoar.'

'Core.'

'You may well say "Cor". This is her moment, Piglet. La plus ca spare change. Her epiffle. Her apotheotheosis. She turns round. She says what I said at the start. Sorry, intones...all trembling, like.'

'And he says?'

'"Lavinia. My darling. I stand before you, your Auld Yang Syne. Yes, it is I it is me except after 'c' - here, cop hold of me troth".'

'I assume that her eyes have opalescent depths.'

'Oh, for pity's sake, Piglet, she's not a drinker.'

'But he needs something to gaze into.'

'Well, all right, he can gaze into his epaulettes.'

'How can you twist your head to gaze - '

'He's taken them off, Piglet! They were chafing him something rotten.'

'Right. And after that?'

'What do you mean, after that? That's it. That's what the readers have been waiting for. Honestly, I'm obviously casting pearls before - '

'Don't say that!'

'Ah...yes, sorry. Anyway...it's a winner, yes? My public will lap it up. Not a dry eye in the hearse.'

'Broadshoulder, eh?'

'Yes, particularly proud of that, I am.'

'So his other shoulder - narrow?'

'I knew I should have tried this out on Barbara Cartload.'