After Brock (30 page)

‘When he got there, Ol found Trevor Price stunned by the news, but under the distinct impression that his son had had a rotten night out, was now feeling a bit poorly, and wouldn't be going into the tutorial college that morning. “Them that ask no questions get told no lies, eh, Ol?” Sam recovered enough, apparently, to go to London a few days later, because it was from there I received his condolence card. It said: “So sorry about your sad news! Pity we haven't seen each other these last weeks! My life's about to take a curious turn; I'm going back to Darnton. Forgive and forget's their motto they say, and I think it's a wise one. Yours, Sam.” That was telling me in fairly clear terms what line I had to follow, wasn't it? Would you not agree?

‘Unlike his parents Sam didn't show up at the big funeral – which was put off and put off until the police were satisfied with everything. It was a big occasion, in the Priory, both my parents were well respected, even popular, and of course the whole accident – with its unsolved mystery (i.e. why
had
they gone out at that hour?) – had mesmerised the entire county. I recall – stupid, blind young bastard, that I was – looking round repeatedly during the ghastly, interminable service, thinking, even hoping Sam might have come on his own to show support. But no. Of
course
he didn't show up. In the end, some time in early March – I remember the daffodils were just showing in all the gardens, and they made me think how happy the sight of them always made my mother – I did get a postcard from Darnton, that famous old public school of his (it was of the Old Quadrangle and Chapel), to prove, I suppose, that he really was there. Sam had written to me, “Good to be back at the old dump, whatever its faults! Hope all is going better for you, with good wishes, Sam.”

‘“Hope all is going better for you.” Like fuck it was! I was desperately trying, every hour of those weeks, to understand the un-understandable: that I would never, never see Mum, Dad and Robin again, never be able to tell them that, appearances often to the contrary, I'd been fond of them. Hadn't ever imagined existing without them. And I was feeling… well, like Judas Iscariot himself, as it seemed to me. And we know what
he
went and did… And nobody mourned him! Instead they passed his story on down through centuries of history as a byword for ingratitude and wickedness.'

Both Luke and Nat want badly to dissipate the mood that this last sentence – urgent with dark past self-conviction – threatens to establish. But it is Nat who provides the means of doing so: ‘And Julian – my uncle Julian. What about him?'

If, he thinks, I hadn't, that first afternoon of freedom from exams, arrived at Josh's house at the time I did, I never would have known I had a flesh-and-blood uncle, let alone one I can actually like. In the same way, if I hadn't followed an unremarkable-looking path up the mountainside, for no obvious reason, I never would have had my own great Berwyn experience.

   

Julian was in intensive care for several days in Hereford County Hospital, and then transferred for another two weeks to a priority two-bed ward in the same institution. Slashed and swollen and pale almost beyond recognition, his journey from unconsciousness to semi-consciousness didn't alleviate the distress the onlookers felt at his condition. Rather it taunted them with new proof of the fragility of human communication. Jules might as well, Pete would think, be dead like Robin for all I get through to him. Perhaps it'd be better – for his own sake – to perish right now, and join the others, rather than survive as this cruel travesty of a living being and a banished member of his firmly bonded family. Yet even as he silently articulated this thought, Pete knew he didn't subscribe to it, that he wanted his only remaining sibling to survive. As he did – and indeed there turned out to be no lasting damage to the brain, though it was possible he'd suffer throughout his life from acute headaches.

Pete travelled into Hereford by train several times a week to see Julian. Hearing him mouth his not always consistent grasp of what had happened, and of whom he'd lost was not the least anguishing experience of that near-insupportable period. (Pete would replay scenes from it for years afterwards.) No details of the car crash itself had lodged in his head…The injustice of their (related) different fates made Pete, sitting beside the hospital bed, exclaim: ‘It's not fair, Jules, is it? I was there up on the Heights in Wales, and they took care of me after my accident. But you – well, you got away, unlike the others, but – trapped in the car and now trapped in bed!' It hardly bore looking at, let alone thinking about.

And Julian opened his blue eyes, and gave him an inquiring, disquieting look, to haunt him for years. Which would haunt him maybe forever.

But their ways were to diverge. Oliver Merchant set about looking after the family he loved in their deaths and precarious fragmented survival as earnestly as he had attended them all in life.

   

Pete of course never took part in that special January 31 edition of
High Flyers
, never had to write any get-out letter to Bob Thurlow. Ol contacted him instead. On the programme Bob spoke to the world of ‘Peter Kempsey's unspeakable loss', and the audience broke out into an ovation of sympathy, probably louder than any they would have given his successful answers. Later Bob sent him a Complete Shakespeare as a keepsake.

Recovery wasn't so swift, and soon school became a problem too. Oliver fixed that he should sit his A Levels, not in summer, like most people, but in the winter, when the healing process, if only tentatively, should have begun. He himself – few widowers can have grieved for their loved one more than Ol for Marion Kemspey – proposed to move Sunbeam Press out of Leominster and back to London, the South London he had come from. He would take Pete with him.

Julian, once his recovery was established, was another matter. Pete at eighteen or nineteen would be going to college and entering independence, Julian was still a needy eleven year old. As Julian improved in mind as well as body, he turned for comfort to the music he had always excelled in making. It was Gregory Pringle himself who proposed that he and his wife Ros adopt the lad, as companion to their son, Dickon and their daughter, Amelia. It was a proposal that, insofar as anything could, made Julian happy, feel that a new and interesting life might stretch out before him. So he became (legally, and later emotionally) Julian Pringle – a Kempsey no longer, though he'd been the favourite of Jim Kempsey whose distinctive strawberry blond hair he alone of his children had inherited. Greg Pringle had just moved to a new house in the nearby Herefordshire town of Bromyard, and that is where Julian went to live.

When Pete reviews that strange first half of 1974, and his own state of being then, as gradually, improbably, it moved towards summer, it is whiteness that first comes to his mind – or rather blinding flashes of it. Scarcely a day went by that he did not suddenly see the void blazing in front of his eyes in the form of bursts of pure white fire, sometimes engulfing, sometimes systematically devouring objects or persons surrounding him. But other times the whiteness was visible as a distant, threatening, burning mass, advancing inexorably with cruel, colourless intensity. It's this that's behind the world, it announced; not dark – or blackness – because that's readily identifiable. Back up on the Berwyns, inside the tarpaulin, didn't you yourself, Pete (eventually) find the dark soothing as well as daunting, a perfectly right and proper element for rest? But with this whiteness you can know no rest. It dazzles, it torments, it destroys, it's the terror behind life which we so rarely deign or dare to acknowledge. It makes nonsense of any idea that rewards and celebrations, whether for doing well at school or for answering correctly the questions posed to you, have any importance whatsoever…

In May that year – and a more than usually beautiful and full-blossomy May it was – Pete received in the post a redirected envelope sent from Pebble Mill, the BBC's studios in Birmingham, visited that happy day when he became Midlands Champion. (His address now was Ol's house in Church Street; Woodgarth was already on the market, expected to fetch a fair price.) This was not the first letter he had had from this prove-nance. Since his very first appearance in Leominster's commandeered Junior School, quite a few fans had written to him, some asking for his photo, some wanting to be his friend, some plainly off their trolleys, and several more critical folk into the bargain; one writer informed him that Somerset, not Herefordshire, was England's greatest cider-apple county, another complained of his ‘common West Midlands accent which will have a deleterious effect on impressionable young listeners'. More recently had come, as a result of Bob Thurlow's explanation to his audience on January 31, letters of often truly affecting condolence. These would make him cry, as tributes from people he actually knew hadn't done… But today's letter had been written before that date, Pete saw at once; someone in the BBC office had just forgotten to forward it:

   

‘Dear Peter Kempsey,' it said,

‘Before you go on air again as competitor in
High Flyers
, as I see from the
Radio Times
you are shortly to do, I must ask you to spare us all your boasts about your high scores in the Wellerman-Kreutz tests. For a start, they will not do you yourself any favours. Such standing as Eugene Wellerman and Carl Kreutz once enjoyed well and truly slumped some four or five years ago, after it was found out that Dr Kreutz had used family members, whose talents he was naturally aware of, to prove his dubious theses. He has now been obliged to leave his academic post, and to set up as a private practitioner only. The reason that this did not create more stir – in fact was virtually ignored in UK media – is quite simple. Already their book written in tandem,
Psychometry: the Vital Statistics of Intelligence
had been consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history.

‘Its origins, as you may or may not know, lay in the one-time popular approach to foreign language teaching, long since exploded, which holds that the learner's most important task is to acquire as extensive a vocabulary as possible, since without names you can't converse or read, and which correspondingly ignores the structure of the language. I hope you can see, young though you are, the callowness of this mistaken thinking. Similarly the acquisition and retention of mere facts, taking no notice whatever of their context, of the wholes of which they form mere parts, are neither indications of a particularly competent or creative mind nor sensible guides for satisfactory living. This is not to say that yours is
not
a mind capable in due course of worthwhile things. But while you yourself rate it so highly for a fundamentally trivial and unimportant capability, you are not serving yourself well, nor setting a good example to others…'

   

Mum knew all this, was Pete's second reaction to this letter (his first was that visceral dismay that always follows being ‘found out' and then ‘told off'). Maybe she only suspected the American psychologists to begin with, but after a while her suspicion turned to rejection. Only she couldn't bring herself openly to confront either Dr Mary Smith (probably still a devotee of Psychometry etc) or his poor deluded young self. Though in the latter case, she did try… maybe a little too harshly at times.

   

‘It won't make me sound much of a person, I know,' goes Pete, ‘but then I'm likely not much of a one anyway, but, even set alongside all the other terrible events of the year, this letter, whose truth I didn't doubt, made me reel; it knocked the bottom completely from my world, and left me dangling. My individual identity was inseparable from my belief that mine was a quite remarkable intelligence, and here I was being told I was no different from some idiotic twat who knows the French for, let's say, ‘chimney pot' or ‘bellows' but can't form a single coherent or grammatically correct sentence… Of course I might not have reacted the way I did had the other… the other tragedies not occurred. But as they had, this was the last straw. I can honestly say I've never been the same since.'

And not even a wife and a son could change that for you, thinks Nat, almost self-reproachfully, for hasn't he somehow sensed something of the kind about his father?

Well, thinks Luke, there was a time when I thought that Wolverhampton Wanderers might spot my talent and snap me up young. The notion of Luke Fleming, Wolves' most famous striker, wasn't just confined to beach or bed-time fantasies either; I was even unwise enough to mention it to others. But reality – well, eventually – did set in, and now I'm all set to be a premier-league journalist! On the backs of exposure cases like this one conducted in a boy's bedroom hung with kites… trouble with me right now is I'm starting to identify with both father and son. Is that what a career journalist should do?

Nat's thinking: light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale) – these colours make up Berwyn mountainsides, and often up there I thought, those are the colours of existence itself, representing my own stubborn self trying to hold its own. When the light in the sky dims, then they start fading, and you realise that nothing but nothing can maintain itself for ever against the rules governing life. You think this even more strongly when the night wins, and the colours cease to be themselves, to such an extent that your inner eye can't even reproduce them so prevalent is the darkness. But when, many hours later, slowly, slowly the dawn begins, and you see in the sky all those, at first rather diffident shades, of green and orange and rose-pink, then you know the colours on the mountainside will blaze again. Dad left his sheepfold by Afon Disgynfa long before the sun came up; he never knew the wild land, superfi-cially barren but in truth heaving with different lives, asserting itself, telling you that, whatever its limitations, existence is something not just to cling to, but to relish and uphold…