Read Online Clubbed to Death by Ruth Dudley Edwards - Free Book Online Page A

collection, and I can’t imagine the opportunity is likely to arise again. I haven’t quite grasped what the acquisitions policy is here. Ffeatherstonehaugh’s does not have a librarian. Mr Fishbane, he whom no woman should approach before he has had his breakfast, is the driving force behind the library committee. He is not a man of esoteric tastes: his seem to accord with those one would associate with a long-distance lorry driver: lots of straight girlie magazines, only the more common perversions, e.g., mild S&M. If my deductions are correct, Fishbane has been in charge of buying only for about three years, because for the previous three the magazines being ordered were very rum indeed. I can’t quite imagine where they were getting them from. Job lots from Amsterdam by the look of them. They’re what you might call a very catholic collection: flagellation, paedophilia, coprophilia (sorry, I forget you’re not an aficionado – the sexual dimension of shit — J. Joyce had leanings that way), along with the usual nuns-and-donkeys sort of stuff. In fact, a police raid on ffeatherstonehaugh’s would lead to a great deal of embarrassment. However, that buying policy seems to have existed for only a very short period and to have been an aberration, as indeed is Fishbane’s reign. For up to then, even if the old buggers in the club were lewd, they had a certain style. The erotic material they bought in had literary pretensions. Indeed, the club’s collection of erotica is very fine indeed. Probably the most extensive in this country outside the British Library.
    ‘I’m zapping through old classics from de Sade and Fanny Hill right through to William Burroughs and Henry Miller – all the dirty books one has heard of but never read. Though most of them are to my boring straight tastes profoundly unerotic, the process is interesting none the less and I have a new hero: the Earl of Rochester. Have you come across him? A seventeenth-century libertine who wrote excellent satirical verse (he’s the author of the famous epigram about Charles II: “God bless our good and gracious king/Whose promise none relies on;/Who never said a foolish thing,/Nor ever did a wise one” – one of the reasons I like him so much is that allegedly he recited it extempore to the king) and some great, great poems about sex. How about this?
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire;
With arms, legs, lips, close clinging in embrace,
She clings me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
The nimble tongue (Love’s lesser lightning) played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
    ‘Good, eh? That’s one of the polite ones. Lots of them are seriously lewd. I must learn some to shock Ellis with.
    ‘What does amuse me is that although all the erotica and pornography are readily available, hypocrisy triumphs in the way they are stored. The pornographic magazines are all in narrow drawers in the library, the erotic classics are in grave bindings, and the drawings are never put on display. Indeed the magazine tables proffer The Economist , the Spectator and a clutch of literary magazines, although I’ve never seen any of them being read. If what you want is to peruse a publication like Big Women , you’ll find it in a discreet magazine rack in a corner of the Smoking Room. Oh, and before I leave the matter of ffeatherstonehaugh’s and pass on to more general issues, I’ve at last cracked the surname problem. You will remember that when we last spoke you said the Ramsbum, Gooseneck business was impossible, and that was even before I had met my colleague Blitherdick, the wine waiter who had been on holiday when I arrived. It was at that stage that I too decided that it was beyond any rational explanation. I happened to find myself