Sentence The Fivehundredandninetysixth

 

"When I was in Cape Town," said Smiles to Jasmine, "I had a young handlanger, very precise in following instructions – other than a few trifling peccadilloes such as inserting an Afrikaans word instead of the English one I had dictated – well, we knew that a certain bunch of BOSS operatives were determined to target individuals they had traced to London; we were tapping the kapellmeister's phones, quite illegally, of course, and heard references to mafficking, by which I misunderstood them to be meaning Mafeking, in the Sudan; well, I dictated a wire to London but before it was sent I glanced at the young chap's draft: 'what's this?' I asked, pointing to it, particularly to a planned abduction in London! 'it's to be Mafeking!' the boy laughed and said 'no, no, sir, mafficking is a boisterous sort of action, but the target is in London, not Mafeking,' well, I can't tell you how grateful I was that he had spotted my mistake and indeed corrected it on his own initiative; so you can understand, dear Jasmine, how pleased I am to have you, with your skills and discretion at my disposal, as my Melrose Handlanger!" at which Jasmine blushed to her roots, and then admitted to

him that when he first used the word, she had thought it had some kind of sexual connotation; Sam chuckled, then speaking quietly, confidentially, confessed that he too, when told he was to be given a handlanger, had thought the same and was most embarrassed until the arrival of the young man whose first words to his new Senior were, "good morning, Mister Smiles, I am Willem, your new

handlanger, or I should say, in English, your aide, your assistant and interpreter, please forgive me if I occasionally say something in Afrikaans instead of English – I still think in my mother tongue and may now and again make an unconscious substitution,' well, I listened to him and thought of the assumption I had made and swore that I would never upbraid him for occasional errors, understanding in that moment the truth of the old saying: 'to err is human, to forgive divine,' and had demonstrated to me that I too am human and capable of errors myself!"