The committee is seated. Your presence has been noted. Your absence would be preferable. Still, do sit. The charge is conduct unbecoming. This ought not take long. You glide into the parlour, all pomade and dapper, a trumpet in a prayer with the timing of a cadaver. You circulate, pontificate, luxuriate in sound, mistaking heads that turn away for heads that gather round. You pilfer every bon mot, filigree it, claim it as your own, then footnote its provenance long after laughter’s flown. At cricket you’re a critic, though you’ve never faced a ball; you place the silly point, quite confidently, halfway up the wall. With tea, you preach the pedigree of every leaf you’ve steeped, then drown it all in milk and leave the saucer ankle-deep. Your tailor has performed a minor miracle of architecture, but tailoring may flatter form. It cannot manufacture character. Pray lower the voice, sir. The chandelier has heard. You needn’t flog each syllable to have the final word. Conduct unbecoming. How exquisitely plain. You may dress conceit in velvet. Velvet only holds the stain. Conduct unbecoming. Do forgive the frank review. The most offensive thing you’re wearing, my dear, is you. Your genealogy’s a gallery of generals and peers whose portraits lean discreetly back whenever you draw near. A bloodline isn’t character, inheritance isn’t height; an ancestry’s a ladder, sir, but you must learn to climb. You cultivate obscurity through torrents of verbosity, confusing the mysterious with sheer pomposity. You interrupt, erupt, then dub the wreckage repartee, as though conversation means a room agreeing silently. You laugh a fraction early, then inquire what the jest meant; your timing claims omniscience, your countenance says absent. You brandish candour, hammer-handed, battering the air, then christen cruelty “honesty,” as if the name repairs. A savage in a smoking jacket’s savage after dark, and evening gloves don’t civilise the fist. They hide the mark. Do spare us the flourish. The peacock has retired. The clock has heard the anecdote and audibly expired. Conduct unbecoming. How exquisitely plain. You may dress conceit in velvet. Velvet only holds the stain. Conduct unbecoming. Do forgive the frank review. The most offensive thing you’re wearing, my dear, is you. Now then. A point of order. The record shows that I have held the floor for… Some time. That no one has objected. That the chair across from me has been empty since the soup. How dreadfully revealing. I polished every insult, silver-plated every slight, made malice sound like manners, made a blood sport sound polite. I decanted my contempt and called the venom savoir-faire, then toasted my restraint while I was poisoning the air. I came to teach you manners. What a mannered little lie. I came to make you smaller with my collar fastened high. Decorum is a garment. Mine is splitting at the seams. Now the gentleman beneath it isn’t quite the man he seems. The man he seems. The man beneath. The man. The… Conduct unbecoming. Let us take the phrase apart: first the manners, then the waistcoat, then the ornamental heart. Conduct unbecoming. Thread by thread and lie by lie. When the costumes are removed, sir, which of us has been on trial? Unbecoming. Un-becoming. Un… Becoming. Becoming. The committee finds… The committee finds… That will be all.
