“What?” we said, all speaking at once.

“A large Blister Beetle, taking an evening stroll on the roof, had ventured too close to the edge and had fallen off.”

“Right into your glass of whiskey!” we cried.

“Precisely,” the Major said. “And I, thirsting like mad in the heat, had gulped him down without looking.”

The girl called Gwendoline was staring at the Major with huge eyes. “Quite honestly I don’t see what all the fuss was about,” she said. “One teeny weeny little beetle isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

“My dear child,” the Major said, “when the Blister Beetle is dried and crushed, the resulting powder is called cantharidin. That’s its pharmaceutical name. The Sudanese variety is called cantharidin sudanii. And this cantharidin sudanii is absolutely deadly. The maximum safe dose for a human, if there is such a thing as a safe dose, is one minim. A minim is one four-hundred-eightieth of a fluid ounce. Assuming I had just swallowed one whole fully grown Blister Beetle, that meant I’d received God knows how many hundreds of times the maximum dose.”

“Jesus,” we said. “Jesus Christ.”

“The throbbing was so tremendous now, it was shaking my whole body,” the Major said.

“A headache, you mean?” Gwendoline said.

“No,” the Major said.

“What happened next?” we asked him.

“My member,” the Major said, “was now like a whitehot rod of iron burning into my body. I leaped up from my chair and rushed to my car and drove like a madman for the nearest hospital, which was in Khartoum. I got there in forty minutes flat. I was scared fartless.”

“Now wait just a minute,” the Gwendoline creature said. “I’m still not quite following you. Exactly why were you so frightened?”

Boy, what a dreadful girl. I should never have invited her. The Major, to his great credit, ignored her completely this time.

“I dashed into the hospital,” he went on, “and found the casualty room where an English doctor was stitching up somebody’s knife wound. ‘Look at this!’ I cried, taking it out and waving it at him.”

“Waving what at him, for heaven’s sake?” the awful Gwendoline asked.

“Shut up, Gwendoline,” I said.

“Thank you,” the Major said. “The doctor stopped stitching and regarded the object I was holding out to him with some alarm. I quickly told him my story. He looked glum. There was no antidote for Blister Beetle, he informed me. I was in grave trouble. But he would do his best. So they stomach-pumped me and put me to bed and packed ice all around my poor throbbing member.”

“Who did?” someone asked. “Who’s they?”

“A nurse,” the Major answered. “A young Scottish nurse with dark hair. She brought the ice in small rubber bags and packed it round and kept the bags in place with a bandage.”

“Didn’t you get frostbite?”

“You can’t get frostbite on something that’s practically red hot,” the Major said.

“What happened next?”

“They kept changing the ice every three hours day and night.”

“Who, the Scottish nurse?”

“They took it in turns. Several nurses.”

“Good God.”

“It took two weeks to subside.”

“Two weeks!” I said. “Were you all right afterwards, sir? Are you all right now?”

The Major smiled and took another sip of wine. “I am deeply touched,” he said, “by your concern. You are obviously a young man who knows what comes first in this world, and what comes second. I think you will go far.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “But what happened in the end?”

“I was out of action for six months,” the Major said, smiling wanly. “But that is no hardship in the Sudan. Yes, if you want to know, I’m all right now. I made a miraduious recovery.”

That was the story Major Grout had told us at my little party on the eve of my departure for France. And it set me thinking. It set me thinking very deeply indeed. In fact, that night, as I lay in bed with my bags all packed on the floor, a tremendously daring plan began rapidly to evolve in my head. I say “daring” because by God it damn well was daring when you consider I was only seventeen years old at the time. Looking back on it now, I take my hat off to myself for even contemplating that sort of action. But by the following morning, my mind was made up.

2

I BADE FAREWELL to my parents on the platform at Victoria Station and boarded the boat train for Paris. I arrived that afternoon and checked in at the house where my father had arranged for me to board. It was on the avenue Marceau, and the family, who were called Boisvain, took paying guests. Monsieur Boisvain was a civil servant of sorts and as unremarkable as the rest of his breed. His wife, a pale woman with short fingers and a flaccid rump, was in much the same mould as her husband, and I guessed that neither of them would give me any trouble. They had two daughters—Jeanette, aged fifteen, and Nicole, who was nineteen. Mademoiselle Nicole was some kind of a freak, for while the rest of the family were typically small and neat and French, this girl was of Amazonian proportions. She looked to me like a sort of female gladiator. She could not possibly have stood less than six feet three in her bare feet, but she was nonetheless a well-made young gladiator with long, nicely turned legs and a pair of dark eyes that seemed to hold a number of secrets. It was the first time since puberty that I had encountered a woman who was not only tremendously tall but also attractive, and I was much impressed by what I saw. Since then, over the years, I have naturally sampled many a lofty wench and I must say that I rate them higher, on the whole, than their more diminutive sisters. When a woman is very tall, there is greater power and greater traction in her limbs for one thing, and of course there is also a good deal more substance to tangle with.

In other words, I do enjoy a tall woman. And why shouldn’t I? There’s nothing freakish about that. But what is pretty freakish, in my opinion, is the extraordinary fact that women in general, and by that I mean all women everywhere, go absolutely dotty about tiny men. Let me explain at once that by “tiny men” I don’t mean ordinary tiny men like horse-jockeys and chimney-sweeps. I mean genuine dwarfs, those minuscule bow-legged characters you see running around in circus arenas wearing pantaloons. Believe it or not, any one of these little fellows can, if he puts his mind to it, drive even the most frigid woman to distraction. Protest all you like, you lady readers. Tell me I’m crazy, misguided, ill-informed. But before you do that, I suggest you go away and talk to a female who has actually been worked over by one of these little men. She will confirm my findings. She will say yes yes yes, it’s true, I’m afraid it’s true. She will tell you they are repulsive but irresistible. An exceedingly ugly middle-aged circus dwarf who stood no more than three feet six inches tall once told me that he could always have his pick of any woman in any room at any time. Very odd I find that.

But to go back to Mademoiselle Nicole, the Amazonian daughter. She interested me at once, and as we shook hands, I applied a touch of extra pressure to her knuckles and watched her face. Her lips parted and I saw the tip of her tongue push out suddenly between her teeth. Very well, young lady, I told myself. You shall be number one in Paris.

In case this sounds a bit brash coming from a seventeenyear-old stripling like me, I think you should know that even at that tender age, fortune had endowed me with far more than my share of good looks. Going back now over the family photographs of the time, I can see that I was a youth of quite piercing beauty. This is no more than a simple fact and it would be silly to pretend it wasn’t true. Certainly, it had made things easy for me in London, and I could honestly say that up to then I had not received a single snub. But I had not, of course, been playing the game for very long, and no more than fifty or sixty young birds had come into my sights.