Throwback Thursday: ‘The Case of the Cavalier’s Rapier’ by Mel Anastasiou

The bartender at the Old Bearded Lamb, a mile up the canal from the Seven Swans, leaned over and slammed a fizzy water down in front of me. It was my third, and fizzy water is served without charge in most pubs. It had hardly gone eleven o’clock of a sunny June morning, and the only other customers in the place were a couple of Guinness-breakfast-of-champions old fellows. I had the distinct feeling that if Byron, my dear friend and lifelong enemy, had not been ordering the latest in a parade of pricey fruited Pimm’s cups, the bartender would have taken me by one ear and frogmarched me out the pub door. 

“Sorry,” I muttered. “I can’t take the booze.”

“So? Why does my business have to suffer?” The publican looked from Byron to me. “Why don’t you take something else on the menu, then — nachos grande, or a pukka pie?”

“Most barmen are more sympathetic with the customers,” Byron said. “That’s just a little hint to help build your business. We’ll have crisps, then, and none of your smoked salmon or chili-flavoured rubbish crisps either.”

I said, “Salt and vinegar, please.”

“One pack.” Byron put his hand on his wallet pocket. I hoped that meant he was paying.

“Two packs,” snapped the barman. “For a start.”

Byron waved a hand. “Do your worst.”

The barman turned away.

“What an unlikeable fellow he is.” I peered into the shadowed corners of the room. 

“A marketing moment, if I’ve ever seen one.” Byron called out to the old boys, “Hoy!”

They looked up from the bottom of their Guinness flagons. 

“How’s the Guinness here, anyway?”

“It’s crap,” the nearer fellow said. Both in the spry zone of their eighties, the one who’d spoken was wide and strongly built. The other was thin, his shoulders rounded protectively about his pint.

The thin one said, “I timed the barman, didn’t I? The pour, I mean. Thirty seconds or I’m a Dutchman.”

“Too fast by half …  No, by …” Byron frowned. “By four and a half minutes, anyhow. It ought to be a five-minute pour, or I’m from Hertfordshire.”

“You, from Herts?” The old fellows cackled and sucked at their Guinness. 

“You see?” Byron said to me. “A thirty-second pour, and yet this bar has custom. If that cranky, fast-pouring bastard of a barman can do it, then so can you.”

“Your logic is flawed,” I answered.

“Unlikely. How so?”

Conscious that the Guinness drinkers were following our conversation, I answered softly, “Because, I would be a publican who doesn’t drink, can’t cook, and worst of all,” I added, “who doesn’t care. A man has to care about his job or he’ll be rubbish.”

“True.” Byron had been a banker, a ski pro, and a tennis court salesman, and was rubbish at all of them.  “But you’re trapped, aren’t you, by your ex-in-laws and your great love for your long-lost Holly, exactly like Dante. And like him, you’ve got to give it the old college try.”

“Here are those crisps,” the bartender said, setting two crackly bags on the counter in front of us. “Cheese and onion’s all we’ve got.”

Byron handed him his debit card. “I was telling my friend here that he should take your course in customer relations, to help him run the pub he’s reopening.”

The barman looked me up and down. “You? The teetotaller? What pub are you opening?”

I sipped my fizzy water and gestured in the general direction of the canal. 

Byron said, “The Seven Swans.”