After Brock (29 page)

‘I wouldn't have (indeed I hadn't) marked this man as some hot gospeller,' said Pete to himself, ‘but he's certainly speaking like one.' ‘How d'you mean?' he said, aloud.

‘How can a man be virtuous, Robin?' said Joe, rhetorically, ‘well, surely you can work that out for yourself?'

But Pete was too clogged with sleep to be able to phrase any reply which suggested he was capable of doing this.

‘Be kind to others. That's the golden rule, wouldn't you say? Be kind, be considerate of their rights and feelings. So the only way for a man to treat a woman is with the utmost gentleness and respect. And that means honouring the promises they've made to another. Unless, of course, that other person is really giving them grief. Which may not be the case at all.' He seemed, thought Pete, to be seeing scenes from his own life, or from a life he knew as well as his own – in addition to scanning the roadway itself, with the perpendicular, much-admired tower of Ludlow's St Laurence's rearing up in the near distance. ‘That's not what you've been doing, eh, Robin? Maybe you tried snatching somebody you fancied from a lad, who, in his own clumsy way properly loved her. And maybe she him; that's often the part hardest to take. Well, you can't blame the lad for lashing out at you, I think you're understanding that already. Take yesterday's wounds as elementary lessons, pal.'

It was obviously impossible for Pete to tell this bloke the (almost humiliating) truth: that he'd come nowhere near such a situation, that he was a virgin who had not even had a proper girlfriend, his relationship with Melanie being almost absurdly tepid and irregular in meetings. On the other hand he could see still more fully than on those approaches to Annwn that he'd done Sam a real wrong with his concealment. (And where was that stupid guy now? Probably about to tuck into a good country breakfast at the Parrys' house!)

But he had missed something his lift-to-Leominster was inquiring of him: ‘What do you make, man, of all the happenings in the Berwyns yesterday?'

Too tired not to be completely candid, Pete replied: ‘I'm afraid I don't know enough about them to make anything!'

‘You weren't in Llanrhaeadr yesterday evening then?'

‘Yes,' he stalled, ‘but…'

‘But were otherwise engaged, as they say. I get it, man, I get it…Well, me, I don't know now what we all did or didn't see. But I can tell you this, Robin – I think the whole show, the whole celestial display, if you like to put it like that, came to us as a warning, as a lecture from on high, if you get my meaning! A kind of drubbing-down in bright colours. From now on we have to be good, and it's up to us folk of the locality to start the ball rolling. Like Yours Truly. That's the message of whatever lights came flashing above our mountains or whatever men in black popped up over in Bala! Take it from me, my friend, because you're, I'd say, ten years younger than me, and so you've got an extra decade that you need not waste. And you will not waste it if you try your darnedest to be
good
.'

Pete was so astonished at this homily that all he could think to say back was, ‘I understand what you're saying.'

‘No good just understanding, pal. In the end only action counts.'

Pete could do nothing about the sequence of great yawns that followed.

‘Yes, I know, you're well and truly knackered, man, I can tell. Well, that's nothing I daresay a good morning's sleep won't put right. Wherever was it you eventually laid yourself down last night?'

All Pete could answer was, ‘Somewhere pretty rough and ready, but I did find some old tarpaulin.' Of the peace of the heights he would say nothing.

‘Well, I didn't have too good a night myself,' said Joe, ‘scarcely slept a wink, to tell the truth. Still I had this load of wares to take to a man I do a lot of work for in Leominster, and I hope to goodness it doesn't all smell too much of old Will Watkinson's bloody fish… Oh, we'll all be a heap better when this morning's over, I reckon.'

Pete knew the road from Ludlow to Leominster so intimately that he let himself slip into slumber once again. This must have lasted ten minutes, because, when he opened his heavy-lidded, furry-edged eyes, the houses and allotments better known to him than any of their kind anywhere on earth were presenting themselves before him, like the Kempseys' neighbour's tree always did through his bedroom window after a dream. And, not only this, but his driver, this Joe guy was digging him awake again with his elbow and asking him, ‘Where do you want dropping, pal?'

Pete thought: Well, not Etnam Street – there were always other residents about, who might pester him, if not now, then later, with censorious questions about his extraordinary appearance and how was it he was turning up to his home (when he should be off to his school in Hereford) in a fishmonger's van? He didn't think he should confront his parents just yet, and in this state, for how was he to explain where he'd been and how he'd got so beaten about? ‘Oh, as near the Priory Church as you can get,' he told the driver, ‘I live close by.'

For there was always, it occurred to him, Oliver Merchant's house in Church Street, and he would be able to confide at least something of the night past to him as he could not to Mum and Dad. And – best thing of all right now – Ol had a most luxurious bathroom. ‘Thanks, Joe, for all your help.'

The man gave a little nod, a little laugh. ‘My name's not Joe, that cop of yours got it wrong. But it'll do as well as any other for this morning. Another little lesson in humility for me.'

‘Well, thanks, anyway!' Really their leave-taking was as laid-back and run-of-the-mill as if Pete hadn't been delivered from a Welsh mountain town with a legend of an otherworldly realm at its back, as if there had been no involvement of any kind whatever with UFOs which now looked like warnings against sinful conduct.

Yes, better to wake up Oliver than Dad and Mum. So Pete stumbled up to the front door of his godfather's elegant, mellowed brick house, the one with the fanlight above a maroon-painted front door. Lights (still well needed at this hour of a winter's morning) were already on in the beautifully proportioned, high-ceilinged front room on its right-hand side. This acted as both studio for the Sunbeam Press and reception-room for Ol's many friends and visitors. From the doorstep Pete fancied he could smell the logs he could see burning away in the fireplace – cherry and apple, those were the woods Ol favoured most. Security might be dull after his protracted taste of time-transcending Annwn, and sadly this would probably irk him again sooner or later, but just for now, it was welcome.

He gave the door a vigorous thumping with its brass, dolphin-shaped knocker.

Ol himself came to answer him. Why, whatever was up with the bloke? He was looking quite aghast at Pete, an incongruously wild look in his – bloodshot – eyes, wholly inconsistent with his usual bearing. ‘Dear boy, where have you been? Where on earth have you been?' He leaned forward and shook his godson as if to prove he was still flesh-and-blood.

Pete knew straightaway that this shaking – a common enough expression of anger – was in this case no form of rebuke whatever for his night's roaming.

‘Do you know, dear Peter?' Ol seemed at one and the same time to be shouting these words and merely mouthing them, ‘have you heard? We've been desperately trying to find you.'

‘Heard what?' he asked.

But maybe he knew already.

‘Dead!' Oliver Merchant told him, ‘killed! Your whole beautiful, wonderful, lovable family… Well, not Julian. He's in a severely critical condition in hospital, though, and we can't know yet whether he'll pull through or not. But the rest – gone, Peter, all gone. And I loved all of them so much. What are we two going to do? How can we possibly bear to live without them?'

   

Nat averts his gaze from his dad's face consumed by inner devastation. Where or when did he last see him wear such an expression? Then he knows.

It's an August afternoon in Kensington Gardens, just over six years back. The undulating lawns, after so much protracted dry weather, look like stretches of raked-out Shredded Wheat. Sprinklers are making no proper impact. The waters of the Serpentine are low, still, opaque, and a little rank-smelling. Even its boats appear sluggish in their movements; in fact the whole cityscape – Knightsbridge Barracks, the Row, the distant towers of Park Lane – is burdened from above by the low white-grey depression of clouds that create haze but will bring no rain. Dad normally likes watching boats – his suggesting an afternoon trip to the park came as no surprise – but today he quite obviously has no attention to give them.

‘I'm leaving London, Nat,' he says, ‘I'm leaving you and your mother. I hope this doesn't come as too big a shock.'

Nat doesn't know whether to tell him, No, actually it doesn't. Mum, eyes moist, upper lip quivering, informed him yesterday but said, ‘Dad will want to give you the news himself, in his own way. It's really for the best, including for you…' etc, etc.

Dad is now providing plenty of etc, each sentence adding to the burden of the heavy loaded air through which the two of them are dispiritedly moving to the brim of the lake. Afterwards Nat will wonder if Pete ever said what his head has retained from the conversation. ‘I bore your mother, you know, Nat. It's best for her not to live with a man who bores her… I suppose I've always tended to bore people, Uncle Ol apart, ever since I was a swollen-headed schoolboy.'

‘You don't bore me, Dad!' But maybe Nat never gives his father this assurance.

What he does come out with, to his own astonishment, is: ‘Don't you love Mum and me then?'

A moment's silence, a moment's speechlessness, then Pete shows his son just such a ghastly face as he has now, at the climax of his tale. But can't manage an answer, any more than Nat now can manage an adequate comment to what he's just heard.

   

‘The newspapers have already been pleased to tell the great British public some of all this these last few days,' Pete is saying, now out of breath and trying, for his part, to look not at his audience but at the bright sky above the Market Square outside the window, ‘so you both knew how my story was going to end. Were waiting for it, I guess, though you couldn't know from what angle I was going to come at it. Anyway the whole appalling thing's in the Herefordshire archives, for any researchers worth their salt to read, to use against me now.

‘Regional papers in 1974 went fucking wild over the story. Can't you imagine? “Father and mother of three and their ten-year-old son killed on the A49 at 12.50 am on the morning of January 24. Lorry skidded and jackknifed into the Kempsey family's Rover. Lorry-driver – working overtime for Bulmers' of Hereford – not killed. Will face prosecution.” As the wretched bloke did. Not that I was there when he faced the Law, or cared much about the justice of his sentence, I have to say. In fact Oliver Merchant kept me from a hell of a lot of unpleasantness. That's almost the biggest of my many, many debts to the man.'

‘Uncle Ol,' says Nat to himself, seeing in a flash of clarity that pink-faced, white-haired, flabby elderly man to whom his dad had been so devoted. And yet who had frequently made him edgy, impatient. Incongruously Nat can hear, the faintest whisper on the morning air, the old man singing to him.

‘Ol was my protector in more ways than I can even begin to name,' Pete continues, his eyes, to his own annoyance, watering, ‘starting with what we should tell the world about myself and where I was that fatal night. It might be widely thought I had quite a bit of explaining to do.'

Luke is quick off the mark here. He's not an ambitious journo for nothing. ‘12.50 am!' he goes, ‘when the accident happened, you were halfway up the side of Pistyll Rhaeadr?'

‘Yes. I was.'

‘Had your folks gone out to look for you, do you think? To find you and bring you back from wherever they thought you were?'

‘It's one obvious explanation, isn't it? Though it was a fucking odd hour to be doing that. The car crash happened about four miles to the north of Leominster, direction of Ludlow. It doesn't tell you a solitary thing about where they were bound. Even though they were actually headed north, how could they possibly – possibly know about my being in the Berwyns? News of the UFO sightings hadn't even percolated through the media to the outer world then.'

‘But,' says Luke, ‘there was a survivor? Your brother Julian.'

‘Yup, Nat's uncle,' and he gives a quick smile at his son as if to confirm a likeness between the two of them, which doesn't perceptibly exist, ‘his uncle whom he has now met, as I know from his own journal. Julian had pretty grave head injuries, poor fellow. Was on the danger list for four nightmare days. Then the worries changed from whether he would live to whether he would be per-manently mentally impaired… Oh, it was a sojourn in Hell and a half, I can tell you. But, when he came fully to, Jules could remember nothing of what had happened to him, nothing. Doctors tried, police tried, Ol tried. But with no result. His blankness bewildered Julian himself as much as it did everybody else.'

‘Wasn't that a bit of a relief for you, Pete? In the circumstances?' Luke asks. Impertinent of the guy really, but – maybe through his seriously mounting weariness – Pete isn't as offended by it as you might think. There's a little kernel of truth in his question after all, as he's had to admit to himself over the years. Not that he was going to do so now…

‘If it's a relief to think you might have brain-damaged your nearest brother as well as killed both your parents and your youngest brother, then I guess you could say so, yeah…' But it comes out sad rather than sarcastic. ‘Oliver was adamant what I should say and do from the very first. He was my parents', and therefore my own official next-of-kin, even though no sort of blood relative, and so had been contacted pretty soon after the bodies were discovered in the wreckage and identified… “For the time being, Peter,” he said to me, “I don't want to learn a single thing more about your activities last night. You've told me more than's good for me to hear as it is. There's all the time in the world for me to hear the rest. If I want to. What most people here will think is that you were out on the town and only emerged from your pleasures in time for a late breakfast. Typical lad of eighteen, in other words! You've got all the right scars to show it too. And we're going to keep to that. It will make people sympathetic towards you rather than otherwise. There's hardly a person in the world who hasn't a similar story to his credit – or discredit. And I should doubt that Sam's going to talk. He's going to learn the dreadful truth pretty soon – all Leominster will be gossiping about it. I hardly think he's going to add to the drama by revealing he chucked you out of his car onto a lonely mountain road in Wales. But just to make sure of things, I will pay a call on Price's Menswear later on in the morning.”