The Marrying Game (5 page)

‘Sire, the night is darker now,’ sang Berry.

Actually, the night did seem to be getting darker. Berry slowed the BMW to a crawl, then halted. The only light showing for miles blazed from a Volvo, entirely blocking the narrow lane. Its two front doors stood open. Berry waited for a long moment, listening to the immensity of the surrounding silence. Nobody came. The deserted Volvo blazed on, like the
Mary Celeste
.

He switched off, pulled out the key, and got out of the car. The shock of the cold took his breath away. Shivering in his navy suit and thin city shoes, Berry advanced towards a tangle of spiked bare boughs, five
yards
or so from the side of the road. Behind this thorny screen the light from the Volvo was dimmed, and laced with shadows. Through the fog of his own breath Berry made out two figures, at the edge of what appeared to be a small pond.

A lifeless pheasant lay upon the frozen turf. One of the figures knelt beside it. In a wretched voice, he said, ‘I’ll never stop blaming myself. I made you take the short cut, and I destroyed this life. Everything I touch turns to ashes.’

Another voice said, ‘I’m freezing my bollocks off here. Bury it, or give it mouth-to-mouth, then we can go home.’

Sobs broke from the kneeling man. He turned his head towards Berry. The light made diamonds of the tears in his beautiful dark eyes.

They stared at each other. The meeting was so unexpected, it was beyond surprising.

‘Ran?’ Berry hazarded. ‘It is Ran Verrall, isn’t it? From school?’

Ran sprang up, dragging a sleeve across his face. ‘Shit, I don’t believe it – Hector Berowne.’

‘Well, hello,’ Berry said. ‘I was just wondering whose car –’

‘My leading man from
The Mikado
,’ Ran said, grinning suddenly. He gestured at the shadow-striped figure of the other man. ‘This is Roger.’

Berry and Roger exchanged uncertain smiles, not knowing whether to shake hands.

‘This is incredible,’ Ran said happily. ‘Berry and I were at school together, Rodge. I was Yum-Yum to his Nanki-Poo. I had to kiss him on the lips, and that’s not something you forget easily.’

Berry had made himself forget. He remembered now, and was glad he was too cold to blush. At the time, knowing he was the envy of half the school had almost disabled him with embarrassment.

‘He had a gorgeous voice,’ Ran went on, seemingly oblivious to the bitter cold. ‘I was only chosen because I looked sweet in a kimono. Well, well. How are you, you old Wandering Minstrel?’

‘Oh, absolutely fine,’ Berry said. ‘Er – could you possibly move your car? It’s blocking the lane rather.’

‘It must be ten years, at least,’ Ran said.

‘Yes.’ Berry had a general feeling of losing his grip on the conversation. ‘If you could let me through –’

‘Let the man through,’ said Roger. ‘I want to get home – Rose will be worried.’

‘I’ve got a daughter,’ Ran announced. ‘Her name’s Linnet. She’s five. Have you reproduced yet?’

‘Not yet. I’m getting married next summer.’ How absurd, Berry thought, to be having a cocktail-party conversation out here.

‘Have lots of children,’ Ran said. ‘They’re the only things that make any sense in this life.’ He looked down at the pheasant, cold on the cold ground. ‘My Linnet would have loved this bird. She has such an affinity with all living things. I’m giving her a guinea pig.’

‘Rose will go mad,’ Roger predicted. ‘Don’t be surprised if she cooks it.’

Mournfully, Ran contemplated the dead pheasant. Despite the cold, he seemed about to launch into a funeral oration.

‘We knocked it over. I made Roger stop, but there was nothing I could do. It was too late.’ A sob shook him.

Ran had been famous for this sort of thing at school.
Berry
remembered him being led out of exams and chapel services, in floods of tears. He watched helplessly, wishing he could get up the nerve to mention his car again. Polly would be waiting, and her dinners were the sort that spoiled.

‘His girlfriend left him,’ Roger explained.

‘Oh.’

‘Come on, St Francis. Let’s get back to Assisi.’

‘I have to follow his spirit,’ Ran said. ‘It’s still hovering.’

With horrible suddenness, the pheasant twitched back to life. In a great flap of wings, it rose from the ground and fluttered drunkenly into Berry’s face. His hand-stitched leather soles slithered on clods of frozen earth.

The next few seconds unfolded as if in slow motion. Berry had one moment of still, isolated despair, before he toppled forward. Very fast, but in minute detail, he saw the black pond rushing to meet him. He crashed through a layer of ice, into two feet of freezing water. Knife-blades of iciness sliced through his clothes. The thunderclap of cold silenced Berry’s scream of anguish. Cold bit into his belly, and sent his testicles into the Retreat from Moscow.

The reeking embarrassment added to the horror. Berry struggled upright, trailing glutinous strands of weed. He managed to grab Roger’s outstretched hand, and staggered back to the bank. His glasses were speckled with mud. Gasping for breath, he took them off, and automatically groped in his wet pockets for a handkerchief.

‘Here.’ Roger handed him a tissue.

‘Th-thanks –’

‘You all right?’

‘Think so –’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ Ran said jubilantly. He pointed to the pheasant, scuttling away into the bushes. ‘There is no blood on my hands.’

It was at this moment Berry realized, with the bottom falling out of his stomach, that he was no longer holding his car keys.

‘I dropped my keys!’ he croaked. ‘Oh, God in heaven!’

Not that he was in any way scared of Polly, but she would kill him for this. And – God! God! – the number of the farmhouse was locked in the boot! Until he could get into his car, he could not telephone Polly, to let her know he was not dead.

He stood groaning on the bank, in an ecstasy of shivers. Roger rolled up his sleeves, lay down on the ground, and began feeling about in the congealing water. Ran shrugged off his donkey jacket, draped it round Berry’s shoulders, and lay down beside him. The two of them splashed and swore. Roger cut his finger on a broken beer bottle. Berry fought a deadening sensation of creeping unreality. How on earth had he got himself into this ghastly situation?

Another car was coming along the lane. They heard it braking sharply behind the Volvo. There was an irritable blast of horn.

‘Great,’ muttered Roger.

A car door slammed. A tall man stepped into the silver glare of the headlights. He saw Ran, and snapped, ‘I might have known. What’s going on?’

He was very handsome, in a wrathful, bearded Old Testament fashion. He listened, in silence, to the garbled explanations. Ran introduced him as Edward
Reculver
. He frowned when he took Berry’s hand.

‘You’re perished,’ he said. ‘Where’s your house?’

‘I don’t know – about twenty miles –’

‘We’d better take you to Melismate.’

‘I c-can’t leave my—’

‘Don’t worry about the car. I’ll come back with a net, and drag the pond properly. It’s not deep.’

Through his St Vitus’s dance of shivers, Berry was aware of Reculver introducing some good sense into this nightmare. The door of the BMW was unlocked. Reculver got in, released the handbrake, and ordered Ran and Roger to push it off the road.

‘We can’t take him in the Volvo, I’m afraid,’ Roger said. ‘The back’s full of logs.’

Reculver asked, ‘Are you short of fuel? You should have told me. I’ll take Berowne.’ He had got Berry’s name already.

Berry had lost all power of movement. Reculver had to almost lift him into the passenger seat of his Land Rover. It was deliciously warm. The warmth made his hands hurt. His ears felt as if they had been nailed to the sides of his head. Reculver waved off the Volvo, containing Roger and Ran. He climbed into the Land Rover, and they roared off down the lane.

Berry glanced aside, at his implacable, righteous profile. Reculver was a younger-looking man than he had assumed at first. ‘This is really good of you.’

‘Not at all,’ Reculver said.

‘Wh-where did you say you were taking me?’

‘Melismate. The old manor, where Roger lives. Just a couple of miles away.’

Hugging his hands under his armpits, Berry began to feel a little less ghastly. Polly would not be too angry, if
he
eventually rang her from a real manor house. He could borrow some clothes, and the rational Mr Reculver would reunite him with his stranded BMW. Then he could escape from bonkers Ran Verrall, and not see him again for another ten years.

‘God knows what they’ll think of me,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe I’ve got myself into this ludicrous mess.’

‘Yes,’ Reculver said. ‘Randolph often has that effect.’

‘I know. I should have remembered, from school.’

‘Ah, so that’s how you were dragged into his orbit. Well, don’t worry. I can tell you’re basically normal. You didn’t choose to get entangled again.’

‘God, no,’ Berry said, thinking wistfully of Polly and her warm farmhouse.

‘Ran used to be married to one of the girls at Melismate,’ Reculver said. ‘I really ought to warn you about the house. It’s a dreadful mess. They’re about to sell up. They haven’t a penny.’ He frowned at the ribbon of Catseyes in front of him. ‘This will be their first Christmas without their father. He died last June.’

‘Oh,’ Berry said, ‘how awful.’

‘It was,’ Reculver said. ‘None of us have come to terms with it yet, whatever that means. He made a terrific thing of Christmas. They must miss him cruelly.’ He slid a speculative glance at Berry. ‘I know I do. I grew up with him. And I’ve known the girls since they were babies. He would have expected me to look out for them.’

‘You’re fond of them,’ Berry observed.

‘Yes,’ Reculver said. ‘Are you thawing?’

‘A bit.’

‘We’ll get some tea down you, and a slug of brandy.’

Berry found that he was comforted. Reculver must
have
sensed that talking about death was making him colder. He fastened his imagination to the proposed tea and alcohol. His teeth had stopped rattling, and he was desperately tired.

He did not realize he had dropped into a doze, until he woke. The car had stopped, and Reculver was gently shaking his shoulder.

‘Out you get. We’re here.’

Impressions loomed at Berry out of the darkness, like the disjointed fragments of some crazed dream. There was a great doorway, with words carved in stone above it, and a weatherworn coat of arms.

‘Be nice to them,’ Reculver said. ‘They’re all more or less dotty. But they have an excuse. They’ll do anything to avoid the truth about their father.’ He helped Berry out of the car. ‘The fact is, he blew his brains out – sprayed them all over the downstairs sitting room. Do bear that in mind, if they start spouting nonsense at you.’

Chapter Four

RUFA SHOWED THE
shivering stranger into the only working bathroom: a dank and echoing tunnel on the first floor. Berry, when he entered, visibly struggled to contain his horror. Rufa was ashamed. The bathroom was a slum. For some reason she could not now remember, it was full of old bicycles. The huge, cast-iron tub had a greenish patch breaking through at one end, where generations of bottoms had worn away the enamel. The geyser, which clung to the wall like a malevolent insect, yielded a stingy trickle of tepid water.

It was evident to Rufa that Berry was not used to thinking of hot water as a luxury. He said nothing, but behaved as if he had arrived in a shanty town and was too riven with compassion to dream of criticizing. Avoiding his stunned, innocent brown eyes, Rufa presented him with a towel – hard and bald, but clean. Both she and Berry studiously ignored the degraded heap of dry clothes unearthed by Roger.

On her way downstairs, Rufa imagined Berry’s bathroom – tropically warm, thickly carpeted, with heaps of fluffy towels in tasteful colours. Perhaps tall jars of coloured soaps, like you saw in magazines. She yearned for such a bathroom, though she knew the Man would have laughed at her. Why was it so wrong?

Edward met her at the bottom of the stairs. He was still in his outdoor clothes, and carrying a ragged fishing net. ‘Look what I’ve found. Just the thing.’

‘You’re not going straight out again?’

He laughed. ‘Roger and I have to trawl for that poor chap’s car keys. And like Captain Oates, we may be some time.’

‘It’s awfully good of you.’ Rufa felt this was not said to Edward often enough. His goodness was shamefully taken for granted.

‘I don’t mind,’ Edward said dismissively. ‘He seems like a nice boy.’

‘Well, don’t die of exposure.’

‘Wait a minute –’ He put a hand on her arm, to stop her going into the kitchen. ‘I never get a chance to talk to you alone. Are you – all right?’

‘Me? Of course I am. I’m fine.’

‘You look exhausted. Everywhere I go these days, I’m confronted by your jars of mincemeat.’

‘I hope you’ve bought some.’

He was serious, and would not let her lighten the tone. ‘You’ve been working like a slave. It won’t do, Rufa. You shouldn’t be spending your days flogging mincemeat.’

Rufa sighed. She dearly loved poetry, but Edward’s plain prose could be very comforting, like dry bread after tons of chocolate mousse. ‘The hardest part wasn’t the work,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind raising a few blisters. The hardest part was persuading them all to pay the electricity bill, instead of buying gin.’