Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (29 page)

As he swung his boots over a stile and jumped a mud patch, he was sorry that Mrs. Ali could not see him now, decked out as a hunter-gatherer. Kipling would have dressed in much the same manner, he thought, to hunt big game with Cecil Rhodes. He could almost see them, waiting ahead for him to catch up so they might gauge his opinion on Cecil’s most recent difficulties in organising a new nation.

The Major immediately scolded himself for this momentary fancy. The age of great men, when a single mind of intelligence and vision might change the destiny of the world, was long gone. He had been born into a much smaller age, and no amount of daydreaming would change the facts. Neither would a pair of fine guns make anyone a bigger man, he reminded himself, resolving to remain humble all day despite the compliments he was bound to receive.

On the edge of what remained of the manor house parkland, he entered a short allee of elms, fuzzy with tangled branches, which constituted the truncated remains of what had once been a mile-long ride. It was clear they had not seen the services of an arborist in a decade. Underfoot, the grass was worn from sheep hooves and smelled of dung and moss. Between the trees, crude wire cages and a plastic contraption attached to a small generator bore evidence of the gamekeeper’s duck-raising. The cages were empty now. They would be refilled with hand-raised eggs and chicks in the spring. The gamekeeper, who was also a general maintenance man for the house and grounds, was not to be seen. The Major was disappointed. He had hoped for a discussion about the state of this year’s flock and the layout of the line today. He had entertained a mild thought that after such a talk, he might approach the main gravel courtyard with the gamekeeper in tow and so show the London types immediately that he was a local expert. A rustle in an overgrown wall of rhododendron revived his hopes, but as he assembled a smile and appropriate words of casual greeting, a small pale boy popped out of the hedge and stood staring transfixed at the Major’s guns.

“Hullo, who are you then?” said the Major. He tried not to look pained by the boy’s sloppy school uniform, which featured a frayed shirt collar, stringy tie, and a sweatshirt instead of a proper jumper or blazer. The boy looked about five or six and the Major remembered arguing with Nancy about sending Roger away to school at eleven. She would have had much to say, he thought, about this school and its tiny pupils. He spoke carefully to the boy. “Not a good idea to be playing hide and seek when there’s a shoot about to happen,” he said. “Are you lost?”

The boy screamed. It was a scream like a power saw through corrugated iron. The Major almost dropped his guns in fright.

“I say, there’s no call to go on so,” he said. The boy could not hear him over the roiling of his own howls. The Major stepped back but could not seem to get himself to walk away. The screaming boy seemed to skewer him on sound waves. Overhead, a cloud of ducks flew up like a feathered elevator straight into the sky. The pond was close and the boy’s scream had launched the entire duck brigade aloft.

“Quiet, now,” said the Major, trying for a raised tone of calm authority. “Let’s not frighten the ducks.” The boy’s face began to turn purple. The Major wondered whether he should make a run for the house but he feared the boy would follow.

“What’s going on?” asked a familiar female voice from the other side of the hedge. After some rustling, Alice Pierce pushed her way through, a few twigs catching at the knobby orange and purple yarn flowers that made up an enormous woolly poncho. Alice’s hair was partly controlled by a rolled scarf of brilliant green, and beneath the poncho the Major caught a glimpse of wide green trousers over scuffed black sheepskin boots. “What are you doing here, Thomas?” she asked the boy as she took him gently by the arm. The boy clapped shut his mouth and pointed at the Major. Alice frowned.

“Thank goodness you’re here, Alice,” said the Major. “He just started screaming for no reason.”

“You don’t think a strange man with a pair of huge shotguns might constitute a reason, then?” She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise, hugging the boy hard to her ample poncho. The boy whimpered under his breath and the Major hoped he was being comforted rather than suffocated. The Major was not about to argue with Alice. “Why aren’t you on the bus, Thomas?” she asked, and stroked his hair.

“I’m so very sorry, young man,” said the Major. “I had no intention of frightening you.”

“I didn’t know you’d be here, Major,” said Alice. She looked worried.

“You mean shooting?” asked the Major. “I expect you don’t approve?” Alice said nothing. She just frowned as if thinking something through.

“What are you doing here?” asked the Major. “Are you chaperoning the children?”

“Not really,” said Alice, with an obvious vagueness. “That is to say, I had better get Thomas back to Matron right away.”

There was a further rustling in the hedge and Lord Dagenham and the keeper popped out.

“What the hell was all the racket?” asked Dagenham.

“The Major here frightened Thomas with his guns,” said Alice. “But it’s all right now – we’ve made friends, haven’t we, Thomas?” The boy peeked at the Major from under Alice’s arm and stuck out his tongue.

“They were all supposed to be on the bus ten minutes ago,” said Dagenham. “My guests are arriving now.”

“No harm done,” offered the Major.

“I’m sure it’s not as easy as all that,” said Alice, drawing herself up. “The children are all understandably upset this morning.”

“Good God, I’m giving them a trip to the bowling alley and an ice cream party on the pier,” said Dagenham. “What on earth do they have to be upset about?” Alice narrowed her eyes in a way the Major recognised as being dangerous.

“They know about the ducks,” she whispered, leading the boy away. He went with her but the whimpering started again. “They’re young, but they’re not stupid, you know,” she added in a louder voice.

“There’ll be duck soup for dinner,” said Dagenham under his breath. Alice gave him a look of pure poison as she and the boy disappeared through the hedge again. “Thank God it was only you, Major. Could have been rather embarrassing otherwise.”

“Glad to have headed them off, then,” said the Major, deciding to take Dagenham’s remark as a compliment.

“Thought it might be protesters from the damn ‘Save Our Village’ picket line, down the road,” said Dagenham. “Height of bad manners, throwing themselves in front of my guests’ cars like that. I was afraid they were infiltrating the grounds.”

“I hope no one is getting hurt,” said the Major.

“Oh, no, quite a solid front grill on those limousines,” said Dagenham. “Hardly a scratch.”

“Glad to hear it,” said the Major absently as he worried about whether Alice had been ‘infiltrating’ and what else she might be up to.

“Shall we get along up to the house?” said Dagenham. “I’m hoping Morris’s wife has it all aired out by now.” The gamekeeper, Morris, nodded his head.

“We started opening windows about five A.M.,” he said. “Matron weren’t too pleased but I told her, no one was never ‘armed by a bit of fresh air.”

As they strode up toward the house, Dagenham added, “I had no idea that fee-paying pupils would smell bad. I really thought the school would be preferable to a nursing home, but I was wrong.” He sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “At least with the old dears you can keep them all sedated and no one cares. The kids are so awake. That art teacher is the worst. She encourages them. Always sticking up their pictures in the hallways. Sticky tape and drawing-pin holes all over the plaster. I told the Matron they ought to be learning something useful like Greek or Latin. I don’t care if they’re only five or six, it’s never too early.” He paused and straightened his shoulders to take a deep breath of chill morning air. The Major felt queasy, thinking that he ought to say something in Alice’s defence – at least to let it be known that she was a friend and neighbour. However, he could not think how to do this without offending Lord Dagenham. So he said nothing.

∗

As the three men emerged into the courtyard of the mellow stone Georgian manor house, the Major realised he had obtained his wish. There was a small group of men, drinking coffee and munching on plates of food, and the last of the luxury cars were pulling in at the driveway just in time to see him arriving with both the keeper and the master of the house. The moment would have been perfect, but for two incongruities. One was the old green bus pulling away through the same gates, the windows filled with the glass-squashed faces of small, angry children. Alice Pierce strode along behind them, waving as she went. The other was the sight of Roger, emerging from someone’s car dressed in a stiff new shooting jacket with a small tag still swinging from the hem. Roger did not appear to see his own father but busied himself greeting a second car full of guests. The Major gratefully decided not to see Roger, either; he had a vague hope that in the next half hour Roger’s coat and moleskin breeches might at least develop a few respectable creases around the elbows and knees.

“Good morning, Major. You will step in and get a cup of tea and a bacon roll before we start, won’t you?” The Major found Dagenham’s niece at his elbow, looking slightly anxious. “I’m afraid I rather overdid the light breakfast.” She pulled him into the lofty entrance hall, where a fire burning in the white marble fireplace could only lay an illusion of heat over the cold that rose from the black-and-white stone floor and travelled unimpeded in and out of the old thin panes of the vast windows. The room was empty of furniture save two immense carved wooden chairs, too heavy, or maybe just too tastelessly overwrought, to bother removing.

A buffet table to one side held a tray, which overflowed with pyramids of bacon rolls. A large oval platter of sausages and a basket of tumescent American-style muffins rounded out the ‘light’ fare. A huge tea samovar and several thermos jugs of coffee were arrayed as if waiting a crowd several times the size of the gathering party, which looked to number about twenty in all. The smell of damp tweed mingled with the not quite vanished smells of institutional cabbage and bleach. “My uncle seems to think it’s a bit lavish, given that there’ll be a full breakfast after the shooting,” said Gertrude.

“They seem to be tucking in,” said the Major. Indeed, the remaining London bankers were filling up their plates as if they had not eaten in recent days. The Major wondered how they intended to swing a heavy gun barrel on such a full stomach; he accepted only a cup of tea and the smallest bacon roll he could find. As he savored his roll, a cream-coloured Bentley pulled up at the open door and disgorged Ferguson, the American.

The Major ceased to chew as he took in the sight of Ferguson shaking hands with some people on the steps. The American was dressed in a shooting jacket of a tartan with which the Major was unfamiliar. Blinding puce, crossed with lines of green and orange, the wool fabric itself was of a thickness more akin to an army blanket than to single tweed. With this the American wore reddish breeches and cream stockings tucked into shiny new boots. He wore a flat shooting cap in too bright a green and a yellow cravat tucked into a cream silk shirt. He resembled a circus barker, thought the Major, or a down-at-heel actor playing a country squire in a summer stock revival of an Oscar Wilde play. He was shadowed by a pale young chap in impeccably rumpled clothes but overly shiny boots who wore a fedora instead of a cap. There was a momentary hush as they swept into the room; even the bankers paused in their foraging to stare. Ferguson took off his cap and gave a general wave.

“Good morning, all,” he said. He spotted Dagenham and shook the cap at him like a dog showing off with a rabbit. “I say, Double D, I hope that wasn’t our ducks I just saw taking off over the Downs toward France?” There was a general murmur of laughter around the room as the assembled men seemed to make a group decision to ignore Ferguson’s outlandish get-up. There was a palpable easing of tension and a deliberate turning away, back into small groups of conversation. Dagenham was slightly slower than the rest to wipe the look of astonishment from his face as he shook Ferguson’s hand and was loudly introduced to the young associate, a Mr. Sterling. The Major took this to be a sign that good breeding still ran in Lord Dagenham’s veins.

“So how d’you like the new duds?” Ferguson gave a half turn to allow a better view of his outfit. “I’m reviving the old family tartan.”

“Very sporting,” said Dagenham. He had the grace to look a little sick.

“I know it’s a bit much for a day of blasting duck in the south, but I wanted to check out the feel. I’m thinking of starting a whole line of technical shooting clothes.” He raised his arms to show stretchy green side panels that resembled a medical corset; the Major swallowed his tea the wrong way and began to choke.

“Ah, there’s the Major,” said Ferguson, taking two large strides and sticking out his hand. The Major was forced to control his coughing, move the bacon roll to his saucer, and shake hands all in one move. “You’re old school, Major. Say, how do you like my neoprene sweat panels?” He smacked the Major on the back with his free hand.

“Do those assist one in swimming after the ducks, perhaps?” asked the Major.

“That’s what I love about this guy, Sterling,” said Ferguson. “His dry sense of humor. Major, you’re an original.”

“Thank you,” said the Major, who could not help but be aware that there were many ears tuned in to the conversation. He felt himself being sized up and there was a vibration of approval in the room. He noticed Roger frowning at an inquiry from an older man. He hoped his son was being asked about the very distinguished gentleman who was laughing with Dagenham and Ferguson.

“Speaking of originals, how about giving me a look at those Churchills of yours?” said Ferguson.

“Oh, yes, we’re all dying to get a look at the famous Pettigrew Churchills – gift of the grateful Maharajah,” said Dagenham. “Shall we get started, gentlemen?”

The Major, who had dreamed of such a moment for years, found himself surrounded by the small crowd following him out to the temporary rack where they had left their guns. He was offered many hands to shake, not that he had any hope of distinguishing one waxcoated banker from the next, and at one point found himself shaking hands with his own son.