Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  That was then. Now, Helen was one of his sixth formers. And Maria Spinetti was doing time – life with hard labour on a Tesco’s checkout.

  ‘Helen,’ Maxwell had hoped for some opening gambit. He was to be disappointed. ‘Is there something?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s just that I promised to give Year Eight my legendary Cromwell impression and it takes a while to stick the warts on.’

  Helen was fighting with her plain, brass ring. ‘Well …’ It was a start.

  ‘Yes?’ Maxwell eased himself back in his chair, a man with all the time in the world.

  ‘Well, I was wondering … that is … the History sets were wondering …’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t sit the Module for you, Helen. It’s not that I’m not totally corrupt, it’s just that I can’t disguise my handwriting seventeen different ways. As Sir Robert Walpole would have told you, had you read the book, “every man has his price – he just can’t do calligraphy”.’

  A grin flitted briefly across the girl’s stodgy face. ‘No, no. It’s not that.’

  ‘Well, then …’ Maxwell could hear Year 8 swinging from the chandeliers in H4 as he spoke.

  ‘Well, the paper said there was a television crew coming to Leighford. They’re going to make a series, right here in town. And … well, they were asking for extras.’

  ‘Extras?’ Maxwell tried not to show he was flabbergasted. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I didn’t know you were a thespian. You weren’t in Hello, Dolly were you?’

  The girl blushed crimson. ‘No, I’m not. It’s just … well, it’s only a walk-on part. You only stand there.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  The girl shifted uneasily. It was like sitting in Old Sparky as her wrists twisted on the arms and her throat felt tight and dry. ‘It’s Marc Lamont.’ Her eyes dazzled at his name and she felt her heart leap.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘He’s the lead.’

  ‘Lamont?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Do I know him?’

  Utter disbelief crossed Helen McGregor’s face. ‘Brookside,’ she said as though the Red Sea had just parted for her. ‘He was Dawson’s brother.’

  ‘Ah, Lamont,’’ Maxwell clicked his fingers. ‘Of course.’ He’d really have to tell his sixth form one day that he thought a soap was something you washed with in the morning.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ Helen sat there transfixed, the gorgeous actor smiling at her through the ether. Maxwell daren’t mention Leonardo di Caprio or the girl might have fainted on the spot.

  ‘Ravishing, Helen,’ the Head of Sixth Form nodded. ‘But I don’t really see how I can …’

  ‘Oh, but you’re into films, Mr Maxwell,’ she threw her arms around the room, waving frantically to the posters that lined the man’s office wall – Paul Newman outgrinning Robert Redford in The Sting, Robert de Niro looking weird in front of his yellow cab in Taxi Driver, ten white-suited John Travoltas in Saturday Night Fever.

  ‘Ah, yes, my dear,’ he smiled, ‘films, I’ll grant you. The silver screen. The one and nines. The roar of the popcorn and the smell of Pearl and Dean. But telly … well, if I have to …’

  ‘But it’s historical,’ Helen was unbelievably persistent. ‘It’s what you love.’

  Maxwell laughed. ‘And you love Marc Lamont?’ he asked the girl.

  Anyone more sophisticated than Helen McGregor would have checked him, told him, as far as they dared, not to be so silly. Instead, Helen McGregor just hugged her knees and nodded like a three-year-old.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell was on his feet, ‘I’ll see what I can do. It does so happen that I’ll be working with that very television crew of which you spoke. Perhaps an autograph …’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Helen was with him, babbling, grinning. ‘Yes, that would be wonderful.’

  ‘Now, run along, Helen. You, I’m sure, have private study and I …’ he sunk his head into his neck and sprouted metaphorical warts, ‘must expel the Rump. I’m sure you can see yourself out.’

  John Irving found himself wandering the windy corridors of Leighford High that Friday. Accustomed as he was to the oak-panelled halls of academe, with their debating and philosophical societies, handwritten posters announcing that it was Geek’s 18th and Everyone was invited came as a bit of a shock. So did the single, ill-spelt note flapping in the May breeze that told him that Stacey did blow jobs to die for. In Cambridge, there was no need to advertise that sort of thing – it was common knowledge all along the Backs.

  ‘Hello,’ a voice hailed him. ‘Can I help?’

  The silhouette was darker than he was until it emerged into the light and then it was paler than death. ‘Bernard Ryan,’ it announced. ‘Deputy Headteacher. Can I help?’

  ‘What’s that black man doing on the premises?’ a familiar voice bellowed.

  Ryan’s jaw dropped. He’d always known Peter Maxwell was the last of the velociraptors, but this was incredible. Thank God there were no kids about to hear it.

  ‘I think it’s far too late,’ Irving smiled at Ryan, ‘to help, I mean. If years of medication and a spell in Rampton couldn’t do the trick, well … what can any of us do?’

  ‘John, you old bastard!’ Maxwell shook the man’s hand heartily. ‘How the Hell have you been?’

  ‘Pretty well, Bwana, thanks.’

  Maxwell caught sight of Bernard Ryan for the first time. ‘Er … Bernard. Bernard … the mouth. Close the mouth, there’s a good chap.’

  The hapless Head’s deputy turned the gape into a smile. ‘Ah, you two know each other … clearly.’

  Maxwell patted the man’s shoulder patronizingly. ‘Coming on a treat in Business Studies. Well done. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow, John.’

  ‘Couldn’t keep away,’ said Irving. ‘I’ve brought the script – The Captain’s Fancy.’’

  ‘Aha. Excellent. Walk this way,’ and he crouched low, eyes spinning in all directions, like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.

  ‘Not a bad time, is it?’ Irving asked.

  ‘Lord, no,’ Maxwell straightened. ‘I’ve just got to teach the Year Nine Set From Hell – got the reading ages of three-toed sloths, all of ’em – then I’m all yours. I don’t suppose you’d like to take them on? No.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, Max?’ Bernard Ryan called.

  The Head of Sixth Form paused. ‘No,’ he said and swept out of sight.

  They did a mean Chicken Chasseur in a Basket at the Weathervane. Mercifully, it wasn’t one of those plastic places where children are allowed to run riot, that most damnable of twentieth-century inventions, the Family Pub. Those who frequented the Weathervane had been abandoned by their families years ago; wrecks of men who liked real ale and played dominoes for keeps. Maxwell settled back into the monk’s settle in the corner and watched the head gleam on his pint in the dying rays of Friday’s sun.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Irving tapped the dog-eared slab of paper resting alongside Maxwell’s empty prawn cocktail bowl.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The script – The Captain’s Fancy.’

  ‘Well, it’s crap, John.’ He tweezered that annoying piece of lettuce out of his incisors.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘God, you didn’t write it, did you?’ Maxwell said suddenly; he wouldn’t have offended his old oppo for the world.

  Irving laughed. ‘No, no. The writer of the novel – and this bastardized version – is one Erika Marriner. I met her once at some publisher’s bash. Insufferable. Gets all her history from the Ladybird series. Joe Public of course loves her. She’s the new Catherine Cookson.’

  ‘Goodie,’ Maxwell clapped his hands in glee. ‘Do television companies pay for tosh like this?’

  ‘Eight Counties do. It’s all about franchising and merchandizing and God knows what. I’m a bit out of my depth, frankly.’

  ‘Your chicken, Mr Maxwell.’ A scrawny kid with an annoying lock of hair over her face thumped the man’s main course down.

  ‘That’s a lie, Donna,�
�� Maxwell smiled and seeing the total lack of understanding on the waitress’s face, added, ‘But let it pass.’

  ‘Was yours the steak?’ she asked Irving.

  It crossed Maxwell’s mind to correct her with an order of hominy grits and chick-eyed peas with a side-helping of cornpone, but he knew he was wasting his time.

  ‘Tell me, Bwana,’ Irving reached for the condiments when the girl had gone, ‘Do you know everybody in this town?’

  ‘Everybody,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘From the Mayor to the bog attendants – or should that be the other way around? I have been at Leighford since before the Flood, John. If I haven’t taught them, I’ve taught their fathers or their grandfathers and so on until the handle fell off.’

  ‘We’re going to have some problems with Eight Counties, Bwana.’

  ‘Now he tells me,’ Maxwell tackled the unidentifiable vegetables at one end of his platter. ‘Politics?’

  ‘With a capital “P”,’ Irving confided. ‘I thought my colleagues at Caius were bitchy, but these people …’

  ‘Ah, it’s the artistic temperament,’ Maxwell couldn’t decide whether it was swede or carrot that tickled his taste buds.

  ‘No, it’s more than that.’

  ‘Have you met Marc Lamont?’

  ‘I have. We’ve completed most of the studio stuff. They were waiting for decent weather to do the location shots. Why do you ask about Lamont?’

  ‘I’ve got eighty or ninety post-pubescent girls slavering to meet him.’

  ‘They’ll be disappointed.’

  Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean, he’s not as other heart-throbs?’

  Irving chuckled. ‘I don’t know how many ways he swings, although there are rumours,’ he said. ‘No, I mean he’s a bastard. Overexposed and overrated.’

  ‘Ah, aren’t we all. Who else am I going to meet on Sunday?’

  ‘His leading lady is Hannah Morpeth – you know, the girl from the Morse episode where John Thaw’s on holiday.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Pretty girl. Big …’

  ‘Potential, yes,’ Irving winked. ‘Her bum looks a bit big on telly. It’s all right in the flesh.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Maxwell warned. ‘I want none of that. You’ll be drooling next “Where de white women at?” Remember to keep one foot on the floor at all times.’

  ‘The point is, it’s mutual hatred between those two. And I haven’t even got on to Miles Needham.’

  ‘Who he?’ Maxwell drowned his scalded tonsils in the amber nectar.

  ‘Director. One of John Birt’s blue-eyed boys at the Beeb before he got greedy.’

  ‘Not a nice person?’ Maxwell asked, wide eyed.

  ‘Bwana.’ Irving leaned forward. ‘Those two words cannot possibly follow each other from Sunday. Believe me, it’s going to be murder. Still want to play?’

  3

  The headland drops away alarmingly at Willow Bay, out to the Shingle in the east. Here the terns dip and swerve, faster, more frantic, than the grey-backed gulls gliding on the breakers, riding the spray. To the west the sand blows sharp like needles off the dunes, the coarse grass swept flat in the winter winds. The end of May was kinder and the sky a pale aquamarine that morning when Maxwell tumbled out of John Irving’s car and made for the beach.

  They didn’t, at first sight, look much like an army of invasion, the ragtag re-enactors who sat around on the sand, tucking into tea and sandwiches courtesy of Eight Counties catering. A tall, rather elegant man in a white roll-neck sweater was on his feet in front of them, the early morning sun dazzling on his Rolex.

  ‘That’s Miles Needham,’ Irving muttered as they approached. ‘Are you sure you’ve never heard of him? He got some award or other last year.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maxwell stopped in his tracks, ‘How preternaturally stupid of me. He got Best Director at Cannes, didn’t he? Some pretentious tosh by Somerset Maugham if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Miles,’ Irving called out, realizing they were within earshot, ‘Miles, this is Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Needham turned from his troops to shake the man’s hand, ‘Delighted you’re with us on this. You’ve read the script?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Quite.’ Needham read the signs quickly. ‘All I can say in its defence is that it was a fuck-sight worse before I tinkered with it. Look …’ and he took Maxwell by the shoulder, leading him away from the extras huddled on the sand, ‘They’re not very good, I’m afraid. I’ve had words with my casting man, already, but time is of the essence. How soon can you lick them into shape?’

  Maxwell turned back to look at them. There were forty or fifty of them, mostly in their early twenties or late teens. To a man they were too tall and too well fed for the ragged armies of Revolutionary France or the British Yeomanry who repelled them.

  ‘That depends,’ he said cagily.

  ‘Meaning?’ Miles Needham didn’t have the time to suffer fools gladly, ‘expert’ fools not at all.

  ‘On how realistic you want this to be.’

  ‘Well, totally, of course,’ the director told him. ‘But we don’t have the time or the money to be picky. If a button’s out of place or something, tough shit. I’ve got a pathetic budget from the powers that be. You’ll just have to improvise. What about time?’

  Maxwell looked back at them again. ‘Any professional re-enactors here?’ he bellowed over the lapping waters and rolling surf. A couple of hands went up, reluctantly.

  ‘For what you want them to do, three days basic training,’ he told the director.

  ‘Three days. Angela!’ Needham clicked his fingers and a harassed looking exec came running, clutching a clipboard. She was not unattractive in a harassed sort of way, her dark hair blown about by the wind. A mobile hung at her hip like a fashion statement. ‘Angela, this is … sorry, I didn’t catch your name …’

  ‘Maxwell,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘This is Maxwell. He’s our adviser on the battle scenes. Three days he says to get this lot into shape. Have we got that?’

  ‘Two would be better, Miles,’ she slipped a pair of shades up onto her head. ‘Hello, Maxwell.’

  ‘Angela,’ Maxwell smiled and waved. Hers was the first human face he’d seen this morning.

  ‘Can you do it in two, Maxwell?’ Needham asked.

  ‘I’ll give it a whirl,’ the historical adviser’s historical adviser said.

  ‘Right. Sort it, then, Angela. We’re all at the Grand, Maxwell. I’ve got a fuck of a production meeting this morning, but I’ll be back this afternoon to see how it’s going. Anything you need, ask Angela,’ and Britain’s answer to Quentin Tarantino was gone over the dunes, John Irving striding to keep up.

  ‘A man in a hurry,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘You mustn’t mind him,’ Angela defended, ‘He’s got a lot on his plate. I’m Angela Badham.’

  ‘What are you, exactly?’ Maxwell was trying to guess the girl’s age. Twenty-four, perhaps? Twenty-five? William Pitt was already Prime Minister by then, but that was 1783; different days. And besides, William Pitt, for all the blue rinse, was a bloke.

  ‘Oh, I’m Miles’s assistant. Well, not that really. Sort of Johanna Factotum.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘a Latin scholar. How rare.’

  ‘Benenden,’ Angela popped her shades back on. ‘All seems rather a long time ago now. Maxwell, you mustn’t be offended by Miles. He’s not … well, he can be difficult, I know, but …’

  Maxwell hated dark glasses. What he wanted to see was the girl’s eyes, their softness, their glow. All he saw was a double image of himself, his hair madder than ever in the stiffening breeze. ‘When do the costumes arrive?’ he asked.

  Angela consulted her clipboard, riffling through sheaves of paper. ‘Tuesday at the earliest. Nathans and Bermans.’

  ‘What about horses?’

  ‘We’ve hired them locally. From a Mr … Ecclestone who lives at Me
rstone Farm.’

  Maxwell vaguely knew it. ‘How many has he got?’

  ‘Twenty, he said,’ Angela confirmed. ‘But we haven’t seen the quality yet. Does it matter if they’re not all the same colour?’

  ‘I’ve got my orders not to be too picky,’ he chuckled. ‘As long as we’ve got a grey for the trumpeter. It’ll offend my sensibilities otherwise. Trumpeters always rode greys.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee, Maxwell?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’d love some, Angela. And that’s Max, by the way.’

  ‘Max,’ and she smiled at him. Maxwell had a knack of making women do that.

  Working under Maxwell was a bit like working under Napoleon Bonaparte, with just a threat of Attila the Hun. First, that Sunday morning, with Angela’s welcome flask contents in his fist, he gave the extras the gist of the speech the young General Bonaparte gave to the Army of Italy when he first took command in 1796. Then, instead of leading them into the beautiful, green fields of Lombardy, he led them to the shelter of the dunes where the discarded condoms lay; at least here he didn’t have to compete with the roar of the surf. Then, like Bonaparte, he gave instant promotion to the men of talent, a great believer in the former Emperor’s maxim that every extra carried in his holdall a statuette of a Bafta award. The two re-enactors became sergeants in the twinkling of Maxwell’s eye.

  ‘Bob, is it?’ Maxwell asked the older of the two. Angela had already pointed him out.

  ‘Don’t you remember me, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Er …’ It was a question all ancient teachers dread. A thousand thousand children pass through their chalky hands and each and every one of them remembers ‘sir’. ‘Sir’, as his memory fades and the blinds come down, remembers fewer each year.

  ‘Bob Pickering. I didn’t come into the sixth form. I left in ’79.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ Maxwell smiled, shaking the man’s hand, searching the face. The sandy hair, the large grey eyes, he couldn’t place them.