After Brock (17 page)

‘Don Parry, yup. And he's a good deal more than just a bloke working for Price's Menswear. Anyway, to continue! I can't be fucked around with or sold short. And now I've put myself on the line for you, I expect you to come up with the goods!'

What is all this talk of investment and selling and goods, thought Pete, when all we're dealing with is my special fucking subject on a BBC show? He applied himself to his cup of tea, which tasted stewed, like what you were served in cheapo cafes.

Sam may have perceived he had gone, for the present at any rate, far enough. He changed the subject, rather well, so that afterwards, looking back on this tea-time, Pete found it hard to recall just how offensive and bullying he'd been. Or whether even he'd been these things at all. ‘I'm the world's greatest fan of the Grateful Dead and Genesis,' he was now saying, ‘but I like other kinds of music besides, stuff that Jerry García and Phil Lesh would approve of, though: Yannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage. Know them?' As in so many other areas, it was only the names Pete knew (and not all of those!).

   

Sam saw Pete to the front door. Those panelled double doors into Mr and Mrs Price's antiques-stuffed sitting room, lit by gas fire and TV screen, were open sufficiently wide for Pete to have a good view not only of Sam's doll-like, blue-rinsed mother, now in a doze, but of his red-faced, hefty father seated in a winged armchair, a-gape at a Western, at the usual Stetson-hatted men galloping past the usual cacti and rocks. It was hard to imagine either of the pair having even a rudimentary flicker of interest in Boulez or Genesis. Sam saw Pete's appraisal of his parents, and Pete saw that he saw, and the beams of their eyes met in possibly their first sincere exchange of the day, even if non-verbal. Then Sam said: ‘I'm so fucking lonely here, Pete.'

Pete surprised himself by answering: ‘I can see that, Sam!' It was maybe a rude thing to say, considering Mr and Mrs Price had provided his tea, but Sam looked relieved that his admission had been understood, and more, accepted. Pete had understood that he'd behaved as he had this afternoon precisely because of this loneliness.

Then, ‘Car is due to arrive on Wednesday. Second of Jan,' Sam told him as he undid the door-latch, ‘the Old Man is generous to me in that sort of way, I have to grant him that! Doesn't spare expenses on me. I passed my driving test in November, first go, and straightaway he was talking about rewarding me, and how my own vehicle would help me in my new life at the crammer's. Once term's started, I can give you lifts into Hereford in the mornings if the times suit.' It was clear to Pete that Sam had already decided on this.

‘Good idea!' said Pete. But he was not sure it was.

Certainly it was a real relief to be out of The Tall House, with the bite of the cold early evening on him rather than the Prices' heating turned on too high, and no longer under the control of Sam's mercurial, watchful, often assertive personality – and possibly too to be free of the discomfiting, experimental sound-world of Pierre Boulez. Pete decided not to make his way home directly, but via alleyways and paths which could give him a view of his native town at dusk. His feet knew for themselves the way to look-out points. He loved the position of Leominster – surrounded by farmland but with hills for all its far boundaries. Ordinarily visible from where he was now walking, these were – to the south, the long trapezoid form of the Black Mountains massif ending in the sharp slope of Hay Bluff; to the west, the austere, mostly bare uplands of Radnor Forest; to the north the conical rise of Titterstone Clee which has such dominion over Leominster's oldest rival, Shropshire's Ludlow. But so thickly did freezing fog lie across the land tonight, such a dearth was there, thanks to the PM, of street-lighting or road-lamps, that none of these familiar shapes could be seen. You couldn't so much as guess at their existence. If someone came up to you tonight and proclaimed: ‘No, Leominster's situation isn't what you think, it's surrounded by a plain which goes on and on for miles and miles, like the Hungarian puszta,' you might be stumped for an answer. How could you convince the tiresome stranger otherwise?

From this thought, difficult to deal with for someone as whole-heartedly devoted to facts as Pete Kempsey, it was only a small jump – and his pulse beat the faster as he made it – to another.

Was this not how disbelievers in UFOs conducted their argu-ments? Because the phenomena couldn't immediately be seen or touched or heard, because they couldn't (or wouldn't) reveal themselves at others' command, the cynical consigned them to non-existence. But all those saucer-like vehicles, those flashing lights, those moving boxes, witnessed by perfectly intelligent persons (Sam, for instance?) might they not well have (according to the rules of their own being) as firm a reality as, say, the Clee Hills, which he knew to be just over there though he couldn't see them tonight?

Accepting this as, for the present, unanswerable, Pete experienced a moment of inspiration which caused him – literally – to jump for joy, on top of a puddle covered by a film of ice, which cracked so that muddy water spurted out over his boots. ‘Well, it can't be
apples
again on January 31, your special subject, can it?' he heard again Sam Price jeering, ‘Any ideas of what you're going to choose? Given it any proper thought yet?' Well, now he knew. His next special subject would be UFOs.

UFOs would have enormous audience appeal and would be the greatest fun to research. And they constituted an important and challenging objective field of study. Sam – whose whole tendency was to look down on other people for the limitations of their concerns – would undoubtedly approve of Pete's sudden but definite decision. It'd be exactly the return for his ‘investment' he was looking for, maybe expecting. For if Sam hadn't made his confession on the night of December 23, thus reminding Pete of his own boyhood interest, then Pete's decision tonight might never have been arrived at. For two pins he felt like making an about-turn to The Tall House and telling Sam in person.

But he did not.

   

Back at Woodgarth the first person he ran into was his mother. ‘Rather later home than you gave me to understand,' she said in the flat voice that denoted her resigned disapproval where her eldest son was concerned. (Where was the high-spirited, cavort-ing Katisha now?)

‘Does it matter all that much?'

‘Only that we're having Gregory Pringle round.'

‘Gregory Pringle? Who's he when he's out?'

Mum contracted her mouth in tight irritation. ‘Do you take in nothing that isn't to do with yourself, Peter?' she asked, ‘Gregory Pringle is only the man who's been teaching Julian the violin these past eighteen months, and told us J was a young musician of real promise. And because they do everything together, and because he's already become quite familiar with his brother's instrument (
that
you've noticed, Peter, I know, because I heard you grumbling at him in your usual charming way), little Robin would like to start violin lessons now. That pleases Greg Pringle who's very caught up in this Kodály method which believes in teaching children instruments no matter how young. So we're giving Greg supper, as I surely
already
told you, so he can hear them both play.'

‘Won't that be rather coals to Newcastle for him? Or, even worse, a busman's holiday? Here's the poor guy thinking he's coming round for delicious Saturday night fish-pie – I can smell it – and he's going to have to earn it by hearing the Brats making noises like those he hears every day of his working life.' In fact Julian played things like Boccherini's Minuet very sweetly, and Pete had little doubt his nearest brother was more musical than Sam, for all the latter's avant-garde knowledge.

His mother gave not a ghost of a grin at these sallies. ‘Had a nice time at the Prices?' she inquired.

‘Not bad, thanks!'

‘Trevor Price talk about
The Mikado
? We should know our net profits by now, so Oliver said. Our box office takings, I understand, were better than expected for these dire financial times.'

‘Old Man Price didn't demean himself to say hullo to me. Too busy, slumped like a pig in his chair, watching
Gunfight at the
Okay Corral
alongside his funny wife who looks as if he's recently been beating her up.'

‘I get daily more appalled by the sort of callous things you like saying, Peter, for the sake of being, as you think, funny. So it was just you and – that Sam?'

‘That's right. “That Sam” and I sat around in his room, and had a bit of a chat.'

‘
A bit?
– you were there for two and a half hours.'

‘Well then, we had two-and-a-half-hours'-worth of chat. Time passed so quickly I didn't notice. We both had such a lot to say.'

‘You surprise me! I mean, the end of the world would really be nigh if Peter Kempsey was at a loss for words: I don't know about the Price boy, of course, but as far as I can tell, he's another one with an over-ready tongue. Talk about women nattering; none of the girls I teach are half as loquacious as you and your pals… Oliver Merchant said Sam has given the Prices a lot of trouble. Apparently he has terrible rages, had one once when Oliver himself was visiting The Tall House. Ol said he'd never seen anything like it before. Trevor himself didn't know what to do with the boy.'

Best not to look interested here. ‘Well, he didn't have any rages with me, I can assure you. We spoke of…' he was on the point of saying: ‘What my next special subject should be', but mercifully stopped himself in time. Like grabbing hold of a runaway sledge before it hurtled riderless down a precipitous slope. But he blushed, as Mum saw, though doubtless she tumbled to the conclusion that the two youths had been talking sex. To disabuse her, but speaking with the other forbidden topic still unpleasantly and tauntingly in the outer layers of his mind, he said, ‘Sam is very interested in the Wellerman-Kreutz methods.'

He could have hardly hit on a worse topic. As he should surely have known by now. ‘Was he now?' said Mum, ‘as if there aren't more worthwhile subjects to be interested by!'

Pete thought: my mum is a nice-looking, in fact a young-looking woman, always tastefully dressed – a black frock tonight which showed to advantage her slim figure – and so capable, so efficient, at everything she chooses to do. And a great many different people like her very much. Why then do the two of us not get on? Why are we always sparring?

Maybe he'd been stimulated by the sharp evening air outside because he dared to ask her (as he would for years recall): ‘Why do you get irritated with me so often, Mum? What is it about me? Especially when I mention Wellerman-Kreutz…'

In the brief ensuing pause Pete wondered if he'd managed a breakthrough (or, at any rate, a mini one). Wrong! His mother now quite literally turned her back on him and, making for the kitchen, said: ‘I've really no time for such idiocies, Peter. Why don't you go upstairs and do a bit of long overdue revision, and I'll give you a shout after Greg Pringle has arrived…'

The syllables of the German-Americans' unforgettable names went on ringing for at least two minutes in Pete's ears after he'd, boldly and unwisely, spoken them, like the chimes of the doorbell at The Tall House. Wellerman-Kreutz, Wellerman-Kreutz.

  

On Monday December 31 Leominster's public library was open just for the morning, and there Pete took himself to embark on reading up for his exciting special subject. Whatever the tests meant, he knew his capacity for virtually instantaneous docketing of information inside his brain to be extra-ordinary (in that spelling!). Pete could positively
feel
his chosen facts (and many he hadn't consciously chosen) sliding, as if lubricated, into easy-to-find grooves within his head. He patiently worked his way through a large number of not always reader-friendly reference books. But he soon found himself on an enticingly long if steep and tortuous trail with new knowledge at every turn, every increase in gradient. And he was back in the library when it reopened (again for just the morning) on January 2.

Before long he appreciated that UFO sightings started with the onset – or, rather, the
perceived
onset – of the Cold War, with the coming down of the Iron Curtain. With these uncanny appearances was mankind being warned that it must not start off a Third World War? Though the term ‘Unidentified Flying Objects' dated from 1952, what they referred to, mysterious ‘astronomical' visitations, had been reported as early as summer 1946 when a high-speed wingless missile, cigar-like in shape, was reported from Sweden. Then a year later, in June 1947, Kenneth Allott, a serious-minded business man in Boise, Idaho, with 9,000 hours of aircraft flying behind him, mostly on Search and Rescue missions, saw
nine
brilliant objects flying over the Cascade Ride, and thence across the face of Mount Rainier, Washington State, US. He took photographs of some of these, ‘flat like a pie-pan', though one had a rear end shaped like a double crescent. They were ‘flying as a saucer would', and in describing them so, Allott gave the world a new phrase, a new image, a new obsession.

In next to no time, flying saucers were, it would appear, whizzing earthwards just about everywhere. Even in the UK. In October 1950, the Ministry of Defence's Chief Scientific Adviser took the step of setting up a Flying Saucer Working Party. No case however made such an impact on Pete, as he sat there researching, as that of Lieutenant Thomas F. Mantell in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

This occurred on January 7 1948, and told the public that temporary celebrity was, tragically, not the only consequence of a sighting. Pete's heart increased its beat as he took in the date, for January 7 was his own birthday, he'd be eighteen in just a few days time, as he'd told Sam over their spliff.