Perfect Gallows (23 page)

“… all so dreadfully complicated,” Cousin Blue was saying. “Such a good thing dear Charles came back to us in time, and we needn't worry any more.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr Oyler. “It appears to have saved a great deal of trouble. Of course it would have saved yet more if Sir Arnold had lived long enough to clarify his wishes to me, but I have little doubt that it was to that end he sent for me at this juncture … Well, I think I have no need to read you the rest of this document, which concerns the detailed instructions for the establishment and running of the Wragge Foundation …”

He began to push back his chair, closing the meeting, but as he did so his face changed. A quick look of surprise, replaced at once by wariness, came over it. At the same instant there was a muttering from the servants. Andrew turned his head and saw Samuel standing and holding up his hand, palm forward, fingers spread, not asking for attention but commanding it.

Once in Chapel Miss Dandy, a quiet little spinster, had stood up just as the sermon was about to start and accused Mr Ruggles, the Minister, of breach of promise. Now in this other congregation Andrew felt much the same tangle of responses—embarrassment, shock, pity, inquisitiveness, relief from tedium and so on. You were aware of them before anything was said. It was the speaking-out-of-turn that aroused them—Miss Dandy, a woman, unmarried at that, and plain and poor too—Samuel, despite his long connection with the family still only a servant. Though he had been remembered in the will, the will wasn't for him. Andrew could sense that the other servants, Mrs Mkele included, felt the same social shock.

Ignoring them, Samuel spoke quietly but with complete confidence, in the Hampshire accent he normally used only below stairs.

“You haven't told us, sir, what and if this Mr Charles turns out to be not our Mr Charles after all.”

“Really! Samuel!” said Cousin Blue.

Mrs Mkele whispered and tugged at the hem of Samuel's jacket. He put down his hand and eased her fingers loose, then stood waiting.

“Ahem,” said Mr Oyler, waiting too and looking towards Charles, who simply shrugged his shoulders and half-spread his hands.

“I think it would be as well to clear the point up,” said Cousin Brown.

“Quite unnecessary,” said Cousin Blue. “We must offer Mr Oyler some tea before he goes.”

Mr Oyler turned helplessly to his clerk, who took the will from him, turned a couple of pages, pointed and whispered. Mr Oyler sighed and whispered back. Andrew cursed. If this was going to drag on he wouldn't have biked out far enough by the time he met Jean coming back. He wanted her to feel his eagerness, to be sure of him, trusting … At last the clerk prodded Mr Oyler back to his duty.

“The contingency in question,” he said, “… of course Miss Elspeth is right … I shall have to look into it … naturally it is not covered in the will itself … I may have to take further advice, but my impression—please note that it is only an impression—is that the only parties who could bring a case disputing the authenticity of a claimant are those whose interest is affected, and since the other provisions of the will would stand the only such parties are the Trustees of the proposed Wragge Foundation. Most unfortunately the original appointees have all deceased, and, ahem, for some reason fresh Trustees seem not to have been appointed …”

“You mean that I, or Andrew here, or even Samuel, could not bring such a case?” said Cousin Brown.

“I think not, Miss Elspeth. That is to say you would have to contest the whole will, not merely Mr Charles's right to inherit. Any such move would involve extremely protracted and costly litigation. Let us most sincerely hope it can be avoided.”

Again he pushed back his chair and half rose, but again he was stopped by a gesture from Samuel.

“It'd be something for the police, too, wouldn't it, sir?” he said.

This time Mr Oyler completed his movement and rose. He passed the will to the clerk, who folded it and tied its pink ribbon round it.

“I doubt if the police would be interested,” he said. “If the family recognize Mr Charles, which they appear to do, that would satisfy them. They are extremely busy these days. There is a war on, you know.”

The clerk tucked the will at last into Mr Oyler's briefcase and snapped and locked the clasp. Nothing for me, thought Andrew. Not a mention. Be free and fare thou well.

The mood stayed with him as he pumped up the drive, past the camp gate. A convoy of empty lorries was jolting across towards the wood. He could see men waiting in paraded lines beneath the trees. Some smaller trucks, closed and not canvas-topped, were parked near Sergeant Stephens's store shed, having their camouflage touched up it looked like, but then something on one of them slipped and a whole square of cloth flopped down, revealing a large white circle with a red cross on it. Of course, you don't let the heroes notice the ambulances, not on their way to the war. For once the notion didn't fill him with dread. The confidence, the sense of power and invulnerability that had welled up in him as he gazed down on Uncle Vole's dead body was strong enough to make him feel that when the time came somehow the same power would be there to rescue him from between the closing talons. And meanwhile there was Jean.

Twenty minutes later he crossed a crest and saw her already started down the opposite slope. He put on a spurt till the wind whined round his ears, and when he had made up ground he freewheeled, timing his descent so that they came swooping effortlessly down to meet in the valley bottom.

“Now you've got to climb the whole way back up,” she said. “You should've waited for me at the top.”

“Couldn't.”

SEVEN

She had begun to sob, a gentle watery sound that blended with all the other noises of the evening, the bubbling call of a dove below, the crackle of the camp tannoy, and the drumming of lorry after lorry crossing the park loaded with soldiers. There had been thousands of them in the camp two nights back. Tonight all but a hundred or two would be gone. Tomorrow they would be across the Channel, fighting their way on to the beaches, and you and you and you would be dead.

Andrew lay on his back listening, with his hands beneath his head and the peeling dome above him. The canvas of the old cart-cover rasped on his naked shoulder-blades. Under the eiderdown, borrowed from Florrie's linen-room, Jean's fingers drifted over his rib-cage.

“You shouldn't've. You shouldn't've,” she whispered.

All his choice then? No will of her own? So wholly in his power? Anyway, her fingers said she was lying.

The painted fingers on the ceiling were saying something too as they reached for the dove. There were yellowish lines to their left, loose curves. Hair. And the foot—that thing it was standing on was a scallop shell. Instantly all the other fragments of paint came into their context, spoke. There were three fingers of the other hand, covering a breast. An edge of floating gauze. A wave-crest. Venus, landing from the sea, new-naked. And there would have been satyrs in the niches, or nymphs. A bed, here, where the cart-cover was, against the blanked-off window—no wonder you weren't meant to see in from the house! The old goat!

He almost laughed aloud, but stopped himself. Mustn't spoil the mood. Her sobs were satisfying to both of them in different ways. And it wasn't the sort of joke she'd enjoy.

Perhaps it had been a young goat, though. Long before Uncle Vole, two hundred years ago, living in the house Uncle Vole had pulled down to build his new one, plonking this extravagant top-knot on to the squat old dovecote so that he'd have somewhere to bring his milkmaids to. No, not milkmaids, actresses lured down from London. They'd know what the room was—a private theatre, a wooden O, for a play by a cast of two who were their own and only audience. Now Andrew had staged it again, after all these years.

The discovery was immensely exhilarating. It wasn't a fluke. He had felt it the moment he'd first climbed through the hatch, had understood the essence of it in his bones, had refused other chances—the night she had slept in the Ivory Room, or last Sunday night, kissing good-bye at midnight through Mrs Oliphant's window—because he had recognized what this place was and known that the play must be staged here. The room was sacred to the act, built for this ritual, this triumph, wrought by his sole power, his Art. To savour the moment more he let Adrian slip free, turn and look down, cool and benign, on the tableau, the yellow satin eiderdown, Andrew full face and smiling at the ceiling, Jean's ginger head in profile on his bare left arm.

“My brave spirit!”

The murmur set Jean off again.

“Oh, you shouldn't've!”

Rot. She had bought her own ticket for the performance. She had stood at the bottom of the ladder on the floor they had swept together, softly calling his name. He had raised the trapdoor.

“Come down.”

He had shaken his head. She had climbed slowly up the ladder, looking into his face, seeing in his eyes what was going to happen, knowing it must because she wanted it too. That was important. It always would be. The triumph didn't lie in persuading them to pay for their tickets, but in causing them to experience all the exhilaration of the event, to be swept up, rapt, made into something more than themselves for as long as the performance lasted, and then to go home changed. All that he had done for her.

He slid his arm from under her head, rose on his elbow and eased her on to her back so that he could gaze down at her. The only undesigned element was the lighting, not the gold summer dusk he had asked for but almost better, a storm buffeting the dirty panes, a heavy, drab light but still enough to let him see the tender-to-the-touch look under the freckled skin, and the wet half-open lips and the greenish eyes blurred with tears. He bent his head to lick as much as kiss the salty lashes, but she nuzzled her mouth upward, looking for his. The wind thumped against the glass. Further off, but still part of its roar, the lorries trundled another load of Americans away to the tempest on the beaches.

April 1986

D
o you keep count?”

“Of what?”

“How many of us?”

“I don't think about the past much.”

“You like reading your press cuttings.”

“That's different.”

“You're only awake on the stage? Everything else is dreams, the sort you can't remember?”

“In a manner of speaking. We are such stuff.”

Adrian was lounging in the corner of the sofa wearing a blue silk dressing-gown over shirt and slacks. The girl, in black jeans and black angora jersey, cuddled catlike at his side. It was after midnight. On the low table to his right lay the remains of the supper she had had ready for his return from the theatre—
raie au beurre noir
, a pear, a half bottle of Meursault, brandy. The fire murmured to itself. The attitudes of the couple had a composed look, not because there was any audience but because it was part of a deliberate exercise in relaxation after the tensions of a big performance. The girl's skill in conforming to the ritual was as important as her looks or her cooking. Perhaps Adrian's satisfaction, though he had not expressed it in words, had prompted the question.

“Do you want me to give you a list?”

“Course not. I'm not jealous, promise. Only sometimes, when you're not here, I'm sort of haunted. You know, when I was a little girl I used to sit in buses and things and wonder about all the people who'd sat in that seat before me, and it felt—I don't know how to say it—well, as if they'd left a sort of shimmer of themselves there, lives inside lives inside lives, like an onion, and me in the middle. Don't you feel that sometimes?”

“I am far too conscious of my own uniqueness. I have never given a moment's thought to any of your other lovers.”

“There've only been three!”

“You have a life before you.”

“I can't imagine anyone after you.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Body and soul?”

“If you want them.”

He did not answer, but with his free hand picked up a morsel of broken roll, mopped it round the congealed butter on his plate and chewed.

“Nice?”

“Excellent.”

“I've got veal in cream and calvados for tomorrow.”

“We're eating in town tomorrow. Will it keep?”

“Oh. Me too?”

“If you please. Benny is over.”

“Oh. All right.”

“You like Benny. He'll want to see you.”

“Of course I do.”

“I will instruct Robin to protect you from Louise.”

“You don't have to.”

“What is the matter? Tell me. Tell me.”

“I … You'll be angry.”

“Angrier still if you refuse.”

“Oh dear. It makes me feel so stupid when everyone else … I mean I know it's what you do, better than anyone else, and this time it's special, terrific, everyone says so …”

“You disagree?”

“Oh no no no! That isn't what … I mean, that's
why
, being so marvellous, and me sitting there, can't get out,
having
to look … Can I stop? Please, A.”

“You are sitting there watching my performance and wishing it were over. It is my performance, not the play itself?”

“It's just worse with this play. I feel so frightened.”

“Worse?”

“Please, A.”

“Go on.”

“Let me think … You see, it isn't
you
. It's something else up there.”

“Some
thing
? Not some one?”

“That's right. You're magical at the someones. I can see that. I can feel it. But … but … I mean, for instance, this time, when Polly goes out thinking she's won and you get up from the table, and then … then you make yourself bigger than you are … that's not someone. That's some
thing
. I have to stop myself screaming.”

“Some nights they do scream. You are lucky to have seen it. It is an instant which theatregoers will recall in their memoirs long after I am dead.”

“But that's not … I mean, when they scream, they're frightened for them. I'm frightened for you. Where does it come from, A.?”

“What?”

“The something?”

He shrugged and sipped his brandy. Her explanation seemed to have appeased him. His left hand gentled the nape of her neck. He made his voice ironically portentous.

“It sleeps within its cave until I summon it forth. Thou earth, thou, speak!”

“Don't. I'm not joking. I really do get terrified. Like in nightmares. I sit there and look and look and I can't find you. Where've you gone?”

“I am there too, watching, invisible.”

“I wish I could see you.”

“And spoil my magic?”

“Not if it did that. That's the important thing.”

“The only thing.”

The calm of the ritual seemed to have been restored, intensified, after the brief rift. Perhaps her tribute to his power, by its very unwillingness, was the small sacrifice essential to the egotism of art. He put his glass down and lolled himself into the crook of the sofa so that she could lie with her head on his shoulder, her fingers teasing the braid of his dressing-gown.

“In one sense it is only a trick,” he said. “The eye chooses how it sees things. A man standing twenty yards away from you ought to appear only half the height of a man standing ten yards away from you, but the visual cortex makes the necessary adjustments. When I grow in that scene I do it by an alteration of posture which brings me an inch or two down stage without seeming to have moved, and the visual cortices of the audience are tricked into increasing my height. Of course there is more to it than that. Making the actual movements is not enough. Consciously or unconsciously the audience would perceive what I was doing and my height would not change. So I must by the force of my performance so obsess them with the stillness of the moment that they cannot believe that I have moved. The movement is the trick. The stillness is the art. As a matter of fact I learnt it by watching Samuel Mkele, though he himself was probably largely unaware of how he achieved his effects. His first entrance was a tour de force. He had been on stage all along, crouching among some seaweed-covered rocks and seeming to be one himself. His change from rock to creature took, oh, fifteen seconds. If you had stopped it halfway through he would have seemed to be still partly stone. He made it appear that in calling him forth I had by my power created him out of the rock.”

“And only just that once.”

“Just that once. Just that once. It was enough.”

“And then he was dead.”

“Yes.”

The syllable had a finality about it that seemed to have closed the conversation, but after a short pause Adrian picked the subject up.

“As a matter of fact I have been thinking about Samuel off and on throughout the last couple of weeks.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Know?”

“Well, sort of guessed. Only you'd said I mustn't ask.”

“That still applies.”

“I don't know if it counts, but just now, when you said ‘It was enough.' What did you mean? You don't have to tell me.”

“Have you ever heard of a man called Barrie Oakley?”

“I don't think … oh, sex-scandal? Before I was born?”

“He was killed in a drunken squabble in the mid-Fifties by his lover, a clever but lightweight actor called Jonny Price. Before the war he had been a successful and innovative producer, and during it he became a key figure in some of the official organizations which were supposed to keep the troops' morale up by staging plays and other performances around the world. My Cousin Elspeth arranged for Oakley and Price to come and watch my Prospero. Afterwards he was extremely encouraging. He wrote down the details of my call-up and said that he would arrange to have me transferred as soon as possible into one of his outfits. That indeed did happen. I spent three years technically in the army after my basic training and never heard a shot fired, and moreover I made a number of contacts that were invaluable to me when I was demobbed. So what I meant was that the one performance of
The Tempest
which we were able to stage before Samuel was killed …”

He froze. His error, his momentary loss of control (tiredness? the relaxation of guard in her company? subconscious need to have the thoughts that had been troubling him out into the open?) were so unusual that the girl froze beside him, waiting, tenser if anything than he was. He produced a casual light-comedy laugh, making it a meaningless sound out of his immense repertoire.

“Action is momentary—a word, a blow,

The motion of a muscle this way or that—

'Tis done, and in the after vacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.”

“You needn't tell me,” she said again.

“I think I had better. The floor of the dovecote was thick with bird-droppings. I climbed the ladder beside Samuel's body to see if there was anything I could do. I then realized that the soles of his feet—he always went barefoot in summer—were clean, and the rungs on which I was standing were clean too. Automatically I looked down and saw in the droppings on the floor the imprints of American army boots. It was just after sunrise, with the light striking sideways through the flight-holes. The marks would have been barely perceptible in any other light, and then only from directly above. Samuel had told me only a few weeks before that he had been attacked by two soldiers from the American camp in the park, and one of their sergeants had warned me of the same possibility. The camp was a transit-point for troops leaving for France. I had heard one of their regular convoys going off as I was walking towards the dovecote. You can imagine a group of wild young men, southern roughs, breaking out for this final hideous fling before going into action; if so, they would already be in France. There would have been enormous delays in finding them and bringing them to trial. At least it was clear to me that I must not allow myself to become an important witness. If that were to happen I might have to hang about indefinitely, and thus miss the chance that had opened for me with Oakley's offer of patronage. He was notoriously wayward and impulsive, not the type to maintain his interest over a period of months. My having found the body was already tiresome enough—I could not escape that. But in fact it all turned out better than I could have hoped. The official who interviewed me for my affidavit asked no questions about the footprints, nor about the door having been forced when Samuel had a key to the dovecote on his board. Of course I did not say anything, unasked, but if I had been I would have lied.”

“They hushed it up? And you could've …”

He shook his head.

“I wasn't at the inquest, but evidence was given that Samuel had been seriously depressed, which was true. Charles added that while they were changing for the play he had dismissed Samuel for gross impertinence. I imagine he gave them to understand that Samuel had attempted some kind of sexual assault on him …”

“He couldn't have!”

“I'm afraid he could. We'd all seen them come out of the hut, both extremely agitated and Charles only half dressed. The play started almost at once. I don't know whether evidence was given about Samuel's performance, which as I told you was remarkable and to the naïve spectator might have seemed an exhibition of pure frenzy. It was of course perfectly under control, but even I was surprised at times by its vehemence, and Elspeth told me that the coroner had seen fit to animadvert on the unwisdom of involving a man of primitive race, without the sophistication to distinguish between role and reality, in a part such as that of Caliban. Suicide certainly appeared a logical verdict.”

“You keep saying things like ‘appeared'.”

“Bed now, I think.”

He waited for her to rise and pull him two-handed to his feet. Deliberately she pulled too hard, using the momentum to bring him into her arms. Standing, they were of equal height, but she relaxed her joints to give him an inch of domination. He smiled, but as he bent to kiss her the movement froze. They stuck in their pose for an instant before he took his right arm from round her and pushed their bodies apart so that he could feel in the gap between them, first just above her diaphragm and then with spider-creeping fingers tracing a line up to her collarbone. She endured his touch but was clearly troubled as he slid his hand inside the soft roll of her jersey-collar and hauled out a loop of the white lace of a training-shoe. She bent her head to let him lift the lace clear. As he continued to haul, the object that had caught his attention, intruding its hardness between their bodies, moved visibly up under her jersey, like a cartoon mouse running under a carpet. He eased it free and held it in his palm.

It was the hand-carved butter mould that had attempted to portray his own boyhood face. She had knotted black thread round the neck and tied it to the shoelace. He stared at the object for a couple of seconds, then closed his fist, turned his wrist, gripped the lace with his other hand and snapped the thread. With a movement of utter rejection, not bothering to watch it fall, he tossed the image into the fire.

“Oh, no!” she shrieked, and rushed past him.

He grabbed at her arm but, used to her total compliance, was unprepared for the violence of her movement and lost his hold. She flung herself down on the hearth, plunged her hand into the embers and seized the already flaming head.

This time he picked her up bodily, hefted her to his chest and strode round the sofa and across the room.

“Ow!” she mewed. “Ow!”

He kneed the kitchen door open, lurched through, dumped her on her feet in front of the sink, turned the cold tap full on and pushed her still-clenched fist under the stream of water.

“Keep it there,” he snapped.

There was a plastic bowl in the sink, full of the pans in which she had cooked his supper. He lifted it out and tilted its contents splashing and clattering on to the floor, then set it beneath the tap. She was grey with pain, and crying. As the bowl filled he took her arm, more gently now, and eased it below the surface, leaving the tap running. She shouted as he forced her clenched fingers open.