‘Cecil!’ called Mrs Askern sharply. Joe followed her gaze to the back of a man who was standing in a small group around Onions. He ignored the call until it was repeated. Then, with what to Joe’s horrified amazement looked like a friendly farewell pat on Onions’s left buttock, he turned and came towards them.
Joe would have doubted a second earlier whether anything could have ousted from his mind this nauseating vision of physical familiarity with Onions. But it disappeared as rapidly as it had flashed into awful life and was replaced by a realization just as shocking.
The man coming towards them was the man in the two-tone Consul, the one who had mistaken him for a private detective.
‘Cecil,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘This is Mr Askern, Michael’s English teacher. Mr Askern, I’d like you to meet my husband.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ he said with a broad grin, shaking Joe’s hand with considerable pressure. ‘It’s grand for me meeting all you people. I never had much education, did I, Mother? So it’s nice to meet you people who know what’s good for us. You do know what’s good for us, don’t you, Mr Askern? And what’s good for yourself?’
He eyed Joe significantly, increasing the pressure on his hand which he was still shaking.
‘Oh yes,’ said Joe. ‘I hope so.’
‘So do I.’
Carter let go of his hand and looked at his own palm.
‘I think I’ve raised a blister, Mother. I gave that tank back there a friendly slap on the haunches and struck metal. Did you get her on a free transfer from Wakefield Trinity, Mr Askern?’
His voice was unselfconsciously loud and Joe glanced across at Onions, fearing to be included in her disapproval at the same time as he enjoyed Carter’s comments. Perhaps there was something to be said for the man after all.
‘Talking of slaps, Mr Askern, I believe you gave our Mickey a clout today. Unprovoked, he says.’
‘Yes, you see, well no,’ began Joe.
‘He’d deserve it likely,’ said Mrs Carter looking with stolid contempt at her husband. ‘If Mr Askern judges a clout might help, then he can clout away, and welcome.’
‘Aye. You’re probably right, Mother,’ said Carter cordially. ‘But think on, Teacher. I didn’t learn much, but something I learnt was, never start owt what you can’t finish.’
This was spoken most friendly, with a smile and a cheerful tap with the forefinger on Joe’s arm. Nevertheless Joe felt himself menaced.
‘Not to worry though,’ Carter went on. ‘Mickey likes you, I think. He’s looking forward to going on Saturday. Really looking forward to it.’
He nodded regally as though he had just bestowed some accolade upon Joe.
Joe’s heart sank. One of the few consolations about his Averingerett trips was that the trouble-makers usually had better things to do and didn’t turn up. It doubled his special surveillance problems. Which was more important—to prevent Mickey from helping himself to whatever objets d’art he could get his thieving fingers on, or to make sure Maisie wasn’t semaphoring for help with her legs in the Great Orchard?
His abstraction was noted by Mr Askern.
‘Come along, Cecil,’ she said. ‘It’s getting late and I wanted a word with the careers master.’
‘Over there,’ said Joe helpfully, pointing to a milling crowd in a distant corner. ‘Good night, Mrs Carter. Mr Carter.’
‘Good night,’ said Mrs Carter. ‘And thank you.’
‘Watch how you go now,’ said Carter. ‘There’s some wild men on the roads these days.’
He waved cheerfully and set off after his wife, pausing only to administer a plainly audible slap to Onions’s backside as he passed. Strangely, she didn’t seem to mind, even though he turned comically towards Joe and held up his arm with the hand dangling loosely, as if broken, from the wrist.
Joe savagely ripped his badge off just as another anxious pair approached.
‘Mr Askern?’ the woman said doubtfully.
‘Over there.’ Joe pointed vaguely towards the furthermost corner of the room. ‘You can’t miss him. He’s the one who looks worried.’
And not without cause, he thought, as he shouldered his way past Solstice, who unobserved had filtered right across from the other side of the room and had obviously just heard this exchange.
‘Mr Askern.’ He heard his voice piping behind him but he kept on going till he was safely through the door. As he stepped from the brightly-lit corridor into the deliciously cool evening, a figure came hurrying out of the shadows and almost collided with him.
‘Vernon,’ he said, surprised. ‘I thought you were long gone.’
‘No such bloody luck. I went down to the lab to collect some stuff. The sods have been back again. They’ve taken everything, including the bloody wall-clock. I’ll have to tell old Sol.’
‘Let me get out first,’ begged Joe. ‘Onions’ll probably have the staff searched before she lets them go.’
Vernon didn’t answer but pressed on towards the hall, looking worried. This was the third time the school had been broken into that year and it was always the labs that were worst hit. After school hours the security of the place obviously had nothing to do with Vernon, but this didn’t stop the Pair from making him feel responsible. Thank God I’ve nothing but books in my care, thought Joe as he climbed into his little black VW beetle. And who the hell wants to steal books? None of our lot anyway!
The police’ll play hell, he thought. He had met Sergeant Prince who had come to look around after the last break-in. ‘Useless!’ he had said savagely indicating the type of window-catch used throughout the school. ‘Like paper knickers on a whore.’ His hair was prematurely white, a condition, he assured Joe and Vernon, brought about by having to deal with silly twats like Solstice and the school caretaker. (It had only taken him two minutes to sum up their own high regard for these two.)
The catches had been replaced since then, it was true. But by a type almost identical. An open invitation. Still, it was a cheek getting into the place when the hall only a few yards away was full of staff and parents. Anyone could have caught them at it.
He found he had stopped automatically outside the Bell. He glanced at his watch, uncertain whether to go in or not. This was a pub he very rarely used at night. Its main lunchtime attraction was that it was closer to the school than any other. It was unlikely he would know any of the evening drinkers and Vernon would be lucky to get away by closing time. Still, some of the others might have dropped in on their way home.
He pushed open the door marked ‘Saloon.’ Not that it mattered. The internal wall which had once separated the pub into two rooms had been knocked down some five years earlier, shortly after Joe had started teaching at the school, and if he had entered the door marked ‘Public’ he would still have found himself in the same room. But old habits had died hard among the regulars and there was a distinct difference in atmosphere between one end of the long room and the other, although the drink cost just the same. Joe took up a position in the no-man’s-land in the middle and tried to attract the barmaid’s notice. At lunch-time she was always good for a chat and a bit of genteel innuendo, but now she hardly seemed to recognize him. He caught her eye but she gave him an in-a-minute nod and returned her attention to a large-scotch-and-soda in a checked waistcoat who seemed to be the acknowledged leader of the saloon end.
Joe groaned impatiently and rolled his eyes, but there was no one to complain to. Something struck him violently just below the neck.
‘Well, hello again! It’s Sir, isn’t it? We’re seeing a lot of each other, you and me, Sir, aren’t we?’
He recognized the voice instantly, even felt he recognized the grip of the hand which dug tightly into his shoulder.
‘Good evening, Mr Carter,’ he said, trying to stop himself smiling ingratiatingly.
‘Good evening to you too, Sir,’ said the man arching his thin ginger eyebrows to an acute angle. ‘Waiting for a drink, are you? Hey, Monica!’
The b
armaid turned instantly, leaving the scotch-and-soda in mid-syllable.
‘Hello, Cess. Same again, love?’
‘That’s right. And a large scotch for my friend, Sir, here.’
‘Oh no, a half of …’
But no one was listening, Joe realized. It was worse than trying to teach at half-past three on a Friday afternoon.
He found himself swept along into the depths of the public end where Cess (an apt name, thought Joe) produced a chair for him from under the rump of an uncomplaining old lady and sat him at a small round table awash with beer suds, crowded ash-trays and empty glasses. There was only one woman there among three or four men. Joe recognized her at once.
‘Cynthia,’ said Cess. ‘Here’s Sir. You remember Sir, don’t you?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said peering so closely at him he felt in some danger from her long artificial eyelashes. ‘You was watching, weren’t you? In the car-park.’
She laughed and ran her tongue round her already shining red lips. Seeing her close up, dressed in a black and gold cocktail dress whose scanty material was precariously divided between top and bottom so that additional coverage for one region could only be obtained at the cost of complete indecency in the other, Joe recognized why Carter had felt it necessary to take two hands to her at the traffic lights.
Introductions of a kind were effected all round. The woman was called, according to Carter, Cynthia Hearth. One man, a squat, crinkly-haired, thick-lipped dwarf, was even more incredibly introduced as Lord Jim. None of the others was very remarkable. Joe tried to protest when he was introduced all round as ‘Sir’, but Cess just laughed with what was evidently meant to pass as good nature. The sound made Joe shudder, so he stopped protesting and concentrated on drinking up as quickly as possible. Fearful of causing offence by drinking and leaving, he offered to buy a round. The others, who seemed to have forgotten him, looked at him in surprise.
‘You’re thirsty, lad,’ said Cess. ‘Lord Jim, off you go and get Sir another.’
Joe began to protest.
‘No,’ said Cess, wagging his index finger in gentle remonstrance. ‘You’re my guest. You don’t pay.’
The disadvantages of this arrangement appeared when Joe after downing his second drink expressed a desire to be left out of the next full round and to leave.
‘No, Sir,’ said Cess, pushing him down in his chair. ‘When I drink, all my guests drink.’
After his third double, Joe sat meekly listening to the conversation. It seemed to be mostly about football and racing. Cynthia took little part in it, merely squirming voluptuously from time to time when Carter absently fondled her. The alcohol worked in Joe’s mind and he envisaged reaching a hand under the table and stroking the inside of one of those firm, round thighs. He got as far as trying to make contact with his knees but the only reaction he got was a sharp look from Lord Jim. He decided his directional sense was malfunctioning.
Suddenly Cess turned to him.
‘Howsta doing, Sir?’ he asked broadly. ‘What a thing it must be to have learning. What’s your line, anyway?’
‘English. And History. Both,’ said Joe, thinking the ‘sh’ in ‘English’ shouldn’t sound quite so ‘shushy’ as that.
‘History? You’re the one who’s fixed up this trip to the big house on Saturday?’
‘’Sright, Averingerett.’
The name of the house offered no difficulty. He could say it in his sleep. Just as he could practically walk round the place in his sleep.
‘It’s my specialty,’ he explained. ‘Special interest.’
Cynthia yawned pointedly but Cess ignored her.
‘Tell us about it,’ he said.
Joe had a double interest in Averingerett, northern home of the Trevigore family who had clung ferociously to their possessions despite descending into comparative insignificance a good two centuries before most of their peers.
First, it provided him with a very reasonable topic to fill in the odd period of bottom-stream history he got landed with term after term. A couple of visits a year kept him out of a whole entanglement of weekend sporting duties.
There was another more important reason. For over three years with a growing lack of interest he had been writing a PhD thesis on Shelley’s philosophy. One day Laidlaw, the head steward at Averingerett, who had become a good friend, offered to show him over the private part of the house. Particularly interesting had been the Book Room, a small, very pleasant relative of the Grand Library in the public sector. Idly Joe had plucked from the shelves a copy of Godwin’s Political Justice (an odd tome to find in such aristocratic surroundings) and had been struck to find its margins full of comments in an almost illegible hand. But his interest became feverish speculation when he turned to the fly-leaf and found no name but a rough sketch of a lake and boat, with mountains in the background. Leigh Hunt, Shelley’s friend and frequent companion, had somewhere noted the poet’s habit of ornamenting his own or borrowed books with just such doodlings. If the annotations were Shelley’s it was a tremendous find. And one he would certainly not be allowed to get his hands on.
He had told Jock Laidlaw in very general terms that some of the volumes in the Book Room would be a great help to him in his work and the steward had willingly agreed to take Joe along to the room whenever it was convenient. But he wouldn’t permit books to be taken away. This meant it was very slow work transcribing the marginalia even though he visited the house, both with and without school parties, as often as possible. But a little delay seemed a small price to pay for academic immortality.
Drunk though he was, he did not feel it would serve any purpose to explain all this to his present audience. Instead he gave them a version of his pre-visit pep talk.
‘A great house,’ he said. ‘Great. Great. But built on cruelty and greed, ruthless exploit… er … exploitation of near-slave labour. You and me. Our anshestors. So that a few … bastards, yes, bastards could live in luchshury.’
‘Aye, but,’ said one man suddenly interested, ‘they were different, them what’m-you-call-it, Trevigores. Aristocrats. Sommut to look up to. They’ve got t’breeding. Not like some o’ these jumped-up twats that made their brass on black market in t’war. I could name a few round ’ere. Aye.’
He nodded and others nodded with him.
‘But that’s just what the Trevigores did!’ cried Joe, excitedly banging the table. ‘Jus’ that. They were your jump up twatsh of the Hunnerd Years War!’
He made a large gesture, depositing three or four glasses in Lord Jim’s lap. The squat little man bunched an enormous fist. Cess shook his head.
‘Time for beddy-byes, Sir,’ he said standing up. ‘Give us a hand there, Jim. Open car, Cyn, there’s a lass. I reckon we’ll have to take him home. It wouldn’t look good, school-teacher been done for d. and d.’
He laughed raucously.
The night air sobered Joe up for a moment as he was half-dragged past his VW towards the old two-tone Consul. He wondered what Carter had done with his wife. Let her walk home while he went off to meet his lady love? Cyn. Cess and Cyn! What a pair!
He began laughing.
‘Chuck him in the back,’ said Cess.
‘He’s not going to be sick, is he?’ asked Cynthia.
‘No, no,’ assured Joe, falling across the back seat. Then he decided he might have been premature and lowered his head gently on to an old travelling-rug which was lying loosely over something hard. He fumbled with the rug, trying to fold it over to increase the softness. It slid to the floor and he leaned down to retrieve it.
In the light of a passing sodium lamp he saw without interest what it was he had been lying on.
It wasn’t until six o’clock in the morning after a night disturbed by a succession of nightmares and visits to the bathroom that he sat up in bed, suddenly and painfully, and wondered what the wall-clock from the physics laboratory had been doing in the back of Cess Carter’s car.
CHAPTER III
Despite t
he outcries of his social conscience (which in any case was only strong enough to excite him to argument, never action) the sight of the great grey western façade of Averingerett, looped by the winding river and made mellow by the afternoon sun, always sent a thrill of pure delight along Joe’s spine.
It was the second he had had that day. The first had been occasioned by the arrival at the coach of Maisie Uppadine. He had not yet grown accustomed to the incredible aesthetic changes she brought about in the drab school uniform. But today she was in civvies, orange hipster slacks and a simple white sun-top, which made no pretence of meeting at her midriff.
His pleasure here, however, had been shortlived. Despite Cess Carter’s assurances at the PTA meeting, Joe had not really been convinced that Mickey Carter would turn up. Surely the thousand and one other Saturday afternoon attractions which usually kept the yobbos away would work their melancholy charm on the boy? But no. Round the corner he had come, dressed with a kind of hideous dapperness in a very light grey double-breasted suit.
‘Nice to see you, Mickey,’ said Joe, hoping the lad had come merely to mock. But he swung himself casually aboard, saying gloomily as he did so, ‘Dad said I had to.’
‘Did he now,’ said Joe, hearing with pleasure Maisie’s mocking squeal at the sight of Mickey’s finery. Fortunately the Saturday-afternoon-drop-out-law seemed to be applying itself in the case of most of Mickey’s cronies and he had hastily instructed the bus-driver to set off.
On the drive to the house, the familiar beauties of the countryside had failed to grip him. Why, he wondered, was Cess Carter so keen on Mickey’s attendance today? Some kind of warning? Perhaps. He had decided to decide he was wrong about the clock. Coincidence. Such old-fashioned, wood-encased timepieces weren’t all that uncommon. But a little silent film-sequence kept on forming and running through his mind in which Mickey Carter tiptoed down the lab corridor, opened the door with a master-key (entry had been through the door, he had established in casual conversation with Sergeant Prince—Sol and Onions were dropping large hints that Vernon had left it unlocked) and, having filled his swag-bag or whatever he used, the boy then opened a window and gently deposited the loot in the flower-bed behind the row of cars parked there by parents attending the meeting. Perhaps Carter’s car had been under that very window. Then the lad left casually, openly, wandered round to the car-park and dropped the stuff, clock and all, on to the back seat of the old Consul, covering it up with the travelling-rug. All this in daylight, or at least early dusk.
A Fairly Dangerous Thing Page 2