The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  “Huns knew we were coming, of course, but we insisted on a full rehearsal, week early, and Dick and I went in on the rehearsal. Nobody thought we could do it; tides quite wrong, they said. Dick knew better. Caught the Hun bending. Caught ’em bending at the Air Ministry, too, but I knew old Rufus McGoggin couldn’t afford to pull out without letting the Bomber Command boys have everything their own way in future. Always hated my guts, but he had to put on a show for me. Hello, your pal’s getting ideas above his station.”

  He watched with mild interest as the lion, maddened beyond bearing by the noise of this garrulous meal above its head in the darkness, compressed itself back onto its haunches and sprang for the balustrade; its claws scrabbled at the brickwork a couple of feet below where they stood; then, still flailing, it fell thudding on hard earth. Pibble could hear the wind whoosh out of its lungs. It lay gasping for several seconds before it rose painfully to its feet and stalked off through the gloaming.

  The General talked on; his short sentences, clipped of articles and pronouns like early Auden verse, were a fitting vehicle for the brutal story. Much of his argument was mathematical: how many men had it been worth sacrificing in the feint toward the double submarine pen on the chance of reaching the single pen? What were the odds that they’d get mauled to bits during the sudden switch from the Western Harbour to the Eastern? How long would the Resistance manage to delay the panzers coming up from the south? And, finally, how many deaths was it worth to last out how many days before the Admiral could get them off?

  The lion came back, discouraged, and stared up into the cloister, its tail twitching slightly. The moon rose, full and regal, into a cloudless night. Pibble grew cold, listening to the old man with half his mind, glancing unconvincingly around from time to time (as Mr. Chanceley had glanced while he teased the lion cub’s ears) but never seeing an attacker; he knew he was being set up for something, being lulled into a sense of trust and friendship, but he couldn’t tell why. And, dammit, when would an ex-upper-lower-middle-class detective again get the chance to stand in the grounds of one of the greatest houses in England and listen to the bearer of one of his country’s proudest names telling the secret history of the greatest single feat of arms in the Second World War? You could set that in G.C.E. as an example of a rhetorical question.

  “I’d lost a stone and a quarter,” said the General, “but they rang the City bells for us. And that was that.”

  “You mean you never got another command?”

  “Unemployable. You’ve got to remember St. Quentin was a defeat. Lost two-thirds of my men, four-fifths of my equipment, only destroyed one submarine pen. The Boche had the other two working again three weeks after we left. They had to sell it as a victory, but the professionals knew what it was worth. A few heads rolled when Winnie found out what had been going on, but he couldn’t do much, considering that it had all been his idea and then he’d been the first to get cold feet. You’ve heard about me smashing my wirelesses? Those signals were coming from him. Wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. But the others didn’t care how much of a bloody shambles it became—they were proving their point about raids.

  “Dick sailored on for a bit, but his heart wasn’t in it. I went lecturing in the States—never liked the Yanks since then. There was a bit of a move to put me in command at Arnhem but Monty wasn’t too joyous about the idea.

  “Nor was I. I’d had enough. You spend your life training for one thing, you give every second of your time to your profession, you sacrifice your wife and daughter to it, you’re there, coiled, ready—and they launch you off on a bloody abortion of an enterprise like St. Quentin. I gave up. I’d done my best for my country and my service; Herryngs and the Claverings were the limits of my horizon now. I told you earlier that Dick and I thought of the Raid as our capital; I just sat down to nurse it. Even on the boat coming back I was thinking along those lines—hadn’t got it worked out clearly, of course—but chose the bods for the decorations strictly according to what would look good in the papers. Had to fake the record a bit with Prosser, you know; we’d got at those gunners with a couple of rooftop Brens before he did his death-or-glory bit, but he was just right for a V.C., handsome, dashing, good family, dead. Couldn’t have a live V.C. stealing any of the limelight. Chap who should have got it was a Signals corporal called Martin. He was working his wireless in a house by the quay when the room caught fire just as the signals were coming through from Dick about taking us off. He stuck it out. Never seen a man so burnt. Wouldn’t have looked good in the papers, not at all. I did put him on the list for an M.M., but some civilian desk wallah decided I’d had my ration and crossed him off.”

  The General stared at the rising moon. Only the gleam of reflection from his cornea showed that he wasn’t stone, or perhaps a wax model propped there until it should be needed for some puppetlike re-enactment of the heroic story. The lion lay down still watching them. Pibble shivered and listened to the silences behind him.

  “It was a mistake,” said the General, the thin tongue licking between the thinner lips.

  “The Admiral’s death?” slid Pibble.

  “No. Yes. No,” said the General impatiently. “I mean that was a mistake, too, dammit, but the mistake I was talking about was shutting up shop. You remember what I said about being trained, being coiled and ready, and then going off at half cock? Your mind’s a machine, and it can’t take that sort of treatment. It goes sick, and the only cure is work. Work. Work. Slog away at the job you were bred for. But we packed it in, settled down to be heroes. Nothing to do but let the adulation roll in. Bad mistake.

  “We were heroes, mark you. We’d done everything between us, saved everybody’s bacon, given Englishmen something to be proud of. I know, as well as I know that I’m talking to Superintendent James Pibble, that if Dick and I hadn’t been there it would have been an absolute bloody shambles. They might have lost a few less lives, but they wouldn’t have got anything done, and then they’d have surrendered. We didn’t win the bloody war, but if we hadn’t done what we did at St. Quentin we might have lost it: we bucked people up, strengthened Winnie’s hand a bit, lopped out a few useless bastards in high places, shook the Boche—he had nineteen men to my one there by the end, you know—we felt we’d done our stuff, but we trapped ourselves. Twenty-five years we’ve sat here, doing nothing to spoil our investment. We could have done anything, absolutely any bloody thing, Dick and I, but we stored ourselves away like apples in a loft, and lay on our shelves, waiting for the soft brown patches to appear. We got a bit mad, like your pal down there. Daresay you noticed it.”

  “Do you think he’s mad?” said Pibble.

  “Course I do. Hasn’t got rabies, but you’ve only got to look at his eyes. I’ll be honest with you: he reminds me of Dotty Prosser. Dotty was a killer—he’d have been in Broadmoor if there hadn’t been a war—very nasty type indeed. Your pal has just the same sort of look about his eyes. All lions are a bit loopy, you know: comes of being the strongest animal around, like Captains R.N. They go out on those shapeless great seas in their little tin ships, nobody of their own rank to talk to, so they go potty, start believing they’re the lost ten tribes, learn Tamil, think they’re going to retire and make money out of dairy farming, that sort of thing. Lions are the same—dangerous clowns. But your pal’s not dotty—he’s mad. Aren’t you, boy?”

  The lion sensed that a communication was being made to it and raised its sullen head. It looked completely black by now in, the moonlight, but as it opened its jaws the thin rays caught its teeth so that they glistened for a moment, like remote stars. The roar came late, bored, ghastly.

  “I see what you mean,” said Pibble.

  “Come along here and I’ll show you something else.”

  Pibble, poised for a trap, followed half behind the old man’s shoulder, almost on tiptoe, like a tennis player readied for a fast serve, peering into the thick but moving shadows for the i
nevitable ambush. The General had his torch out and was shining it along the obscene frieze, making the stone limbs quake in slow-motion simulations of the ecstasies of flesh.

  “Here we are,” he said, and allowed the beam to pick out a particular character, hold it for a moment, and then move on to a handsome couple who were engaged in Nature’s trade in a fashion which, for once in all that extraordinary carving, did not seem corrupt or perverse. The sculptor had taken more trouble over them, rounding the splayed limbs with real affection, giving the pair, in his own crude terms, an innocence and beauty wholly different from the Swiftian frenzy of the rest of the work.

  The torch moved up and to the side a little, and Pibble saw that this section had been separated from the rest of the riot; there was a lull, a clearing in the jungle of limbs, a blank space in which stood three shocks of corn. The beam moved back to the first figure and Pibble saw that it was fully clothed: an elderly, austere man with a high-buttoned frock coat, and a small wig above a thin face and a hooky nose, gazed down at the busy pair.

  “That’s Josiah,” said the General. “That’s his mistress, girl called Mercy Plum. And that’s her lover, horse coper called Simon—nobody knows his other name. Josiah framed him and had him transported, and Mercy hanged herself in the old man’s bedroom. All this”—he waved his torch up and down the frieze—“is their monument. Rum sort of fellow, Josiah, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” said Pibble, realizing with a jerk that he’d let his defenses drop, fascinated by the abrupt Arcadian tone which the unknown sculptor had achieved. He looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but the arched darkness, then back to the sad, cruel face held in the beam of the torch.

  “That’s what happened to us,” said the General, “in a manner of speaking. Haven’t got to that stage physically yet, thank God. We became remote, ‘outsiders’ is the fashionable jargon, I think. We just stared at the world as if it didn’t concern us. But we knew it did, same way that Mercy and Simon concerned him. We soured. We rotted. The brown patches came. I was worse than Dick, maybe, but not much. He could be a terror in private. I used to break out a bit in public, to show the world what I thought of it.”

  “I read about the cuckoos,” said Pibble, “and the Epstein at Framplingfield.”

  “Poor old George,” said the General. “Absolutely bloody awful artist. Typical of the sort of people they wished on me for the Raid. But I really did that to get at Blight. You know he cut down a row of limes my mother had planted, in Richmond, just in order to put up a filthy great block of offices?”

  “Tell me about the duel,” said Pibble.

  “Ha! Didn’t realize you’d sorted it out that far. Suppose we’d better get on to that. What’s your pal up to?”

  Pibble moved well away from the old man, just in case of attack, and leaned over the balustrade to scan the moonlit floor. He couldn’t see the lion anywhere.

  “Gone away to think,” said the General. “Better keep an eye open. Madmen might try anything, once they’ve thought about it a bit.”

  “The duel,” said Pibble.

  “Coming to that,” said the General. “You met our Judith?”

  “Yes,” said Pibble.

  “Funny face she’s got,” said the General. “Noticed how it slopes backward, all the way up, like an orangutan’s? Not so much, but quite marked once you’ve spotted it. Flat face, big mouth, little nose, everything tilted a bit backward. Ape woman—Eve must have been like that in Eden, Dick used to say.”

  “You talked about her a lot?” asked Pibble.

  “Nothing else, during the fortnight she was here. Not much else for two old men to talk about, really: not when they haven’t had a proper job for over twenty years, and they find themselves taking stairs in ones which they always used to take in twos. Rotting’s a slow process, and you think about it all the time. I tell you, I’ve found myself in bed with a woman, everything gone like a house on fire, she’s feeling all soft and mumbly, but what I’ve been thinking about is whether I’ll ever be able to do it again. Takes the edge off your pleasure, that sort of thing. Last few years Dick and I’ve been tending to egg each other on, if you see what I mean. Just talk, fantasy, but a sort of challenge at the same time—like when we were kids and used to dare each other to climb trees. And the same with horses, later.”

  He paused, looking up at the minareted skyline. Pibble saw that the lion had come back and was sniffing one of the pillars farther along the arcade—the one he himself had climbed down and up by, most likely. He felt bewildered by all this self-revelation; there seemed to be too much of it for it to be just bait to lull him into unwariness. Probably it was no more than repressed shock, the old boy having played the Spartan over his brother’s death but now being betrayed by the second shock of being found out.

  “Plenty of women in these parts, of course,” said the General, “happy to oblige a rich old hero. Then there are fancier campaigns which keep you occupied for a bit: Dick spent eight months maneuvering to cuckold old Blight after he’d cut down my mother’s trees—brought it off, too. Pretty girl, been a model, got that expensive leather look, very good, Dick said. But every now and then you come across a girl (and they get younger as you get older) who really cuts you up. You begin to think that having her is the most important thing in the whole bloody world—tell yourself that after her you’ll die happy. Funny thing, those are the ones you never make, more often than not. These last years Dick and I managed to steer clear of each other’s obsessions until Judith turned up.

  “Anty chose her, and still can’t see what all the cheering’s about. But Dick and I developed a lot of needle over her. Started to get jealous of each other’s dirty minds, even. Didn’t stop us talking about her, of course, but there was no best-man-win nonsense about it. We’d sit up into the small hours jeering at each other and drinking too much. Couldn’t sail straight in and start seducing her the day she arrived, naturally. Got to give her the chance to feel like one of the family first. But the time was coming, and we both wanted to make a start before the other one. Trouble was we both thought we’d seen her first and the other one ought to do the decent thing and lay off. Two rich old heroes scratching on her door in the small hours and she’d have packed up and gone home to Mum.

  “Four nights ago, one o’clock in the morning, we decided to have a duel. Both pretty tight by then. Deakin made the dueling pistols they use at the Abbey—made ’em to throw low and to the left, so that nobody gets bits of wadding in their eye and sues us. We’ve often loaded them up and pooped off at each other. Silly game, but made the old blood run quicker for a few minutes. No chance of hitting, provided you aimed straight.

  “But this time I meant to hit him, and I knew he meant the same. Partly whiskey, partly jealousy. We both fell over a couple of times on the way down to the Abbey, and didn’t help each other up. I thought we weren’t going to be able to do it after all, it took such a time to load those damn pistols, black powder everywhere, both of us swearing like fishwives at the other one’s clumsiness. But we managed. Night like this, almost bright as day, heavy shadows.

  “Dick said, ‘Feed me to Bonzo, Ralph.’ That’s Bonzo down there. He’d often said it before, much obsessed by death, so I knew he meant it. Can’t remember what I said. We stood back to back and paced apart, both counting aloud, turned round at ten, aimed. You’re allowed to fire as soon as you’ve turned, but there’s no point in it. Thing is to take a steady aim. I could see Dick’s pistol pointing high and to his right. Mine was, too. We fired just about together and I felt his ball going past my ear. Couldn’t hear it, because of the echoes. Then I saw I’d got him. He’d keeled over before in duels, just for the hell of it, but we weren’t in the mood this time.

  “I walked across and saw I’d got his heart. Bloody fine shot. Serve you right, you randy old bastard, I thought. Then I went and fetched Rastus’s tractor and levered him onto the trailer and
brought him up here and pitched him over. Took his shoes off, first—kicking­ myself now for not realizing Deakin would clean ’em and put ’em back. Spotted that, didn’t you? I was pretty sure Bonzo would drag him under cover, and he did. Told Harvey what had happened next morning, Harvey told Anty. We didn’t tell anyone else, but Deakin seems to have sorted it out. That’s why he hanged himself. Elsa knows now, and I’ve a sort of feeling some of the others­ have guessed something’s up. Rastus was acting up in the bone house, too. Did you say anything to him?”

  “I asked him about the lion,” said Pibble. “He didn’t tell me anything. Now, this is an important point, Sir Ralph. Would you have done the same thing if you’d been sober?”

  “Wouldn’t have tried to hit him if I’d been sober, if that’s what you mean. Least, I don’t think so. Difficult to tell: we were both considerably touched about that girl. Wouldn’t kill him again, of course, now that I know what it’s like living without him. But if you mean would I have fed him to Bonzo if I’d been sober—yes, I would. That’s what he wanted, and what the hell bloody business is it of anyone else’s?”