She was surprised that Jim hadn’t inquired where her ‘friend’ had got to. Only last night Avril had rung to say that they had moved two camp-beds into the stables to accommodate Lawrence Oates and his Russian boy. ‘It’s bloody parky in there,’ she had said. ‘Any normal human being would turn into an icicle.’
‘About my friend,’ began Mrs Evans. ‘I’m afraid he’s –’
‘He’s odd,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll give you that. He gave us quite a turn, arriving on skis with that fellow Dimitrie slithering along behind. But I rather like him. He insisted on taking an inventory of the larder. He made Avril sharpen her pencil. He implied that she was a bit slack. But he’s bloody willing, I’ll say that for him. He’s given the pony a bath.’
Mrs Evans was at a loss for words. Jim Scott had two houses, a kindly disposition, a job in the Foreign Office, inherited wealth and a valuable stamp collection. The one thing he didn’t have was a sense of humour.
Avril was at the window of the sitting room when the car came up the drive. She waved frantically and mouthed greetings. The house was Victorian and had been a vicarage. But for the fourteen bedrooms Avril would have called it a cottage. As it was, she referred to it as ‘our little retreat’. Almost immediately Mrs Evans was run all over the house, up stairs and down, and asked to give an opinion on the paintwork. ‘It’s a better colour, don’t you think?’ urged Avril. ‘The cream was too cold, don’t you think?’
‘It was, it was,’ agreed Mrs Evans, for whom one colour was very like another, and clutching her coat about her she hurried in the direction of the kitchen, to the blessed warmth of the Aga.
From the cobblestoned yard beyond the back door came the seasonal sound of wood being chopped.
‘I must say Lawrence is frightfully useful,’ said Avril. ‘I didn’t expect him to be so young. He’s cleaned out the barn, oiled all those old saddles, wormed the dog, and tomorrow he says he’s going to whitewash the stables.’
‘Young,’ said Mrs Evans, shocked.
‘Well, youngish,’ Avril said, and going to the window she rapped on the glass and shouted, ‘Lawrence … she’s arrived.’
They had tea together, the three of them. ‘Where did you two meet?’ asked Avril. ‘Was it abroad?’
‘Was it?’ said Lawrence, looking at Mrs Evans. His eyes were very blue, very sad in expression. He was wearing mittens, tapping the edge of the table with the tips of his blackened nails.
‘No,’ said Mrs Evans. ‘Surely you remember. It was at a party given by the Bells … in Hampshire. Kitty Bell sprained her ankle and you dipped your scarf in the lake and made a compress.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Poor old Kitty. How she blubbed. I never got the scarf back, you know.’
This is absurd, thought Mrs Evans, and as soon as she had drunk her tea she went up to her room. She had never known anybody called Kitty Bell, not in all her long life.
Supper was an ordeal. As it was not yet Christmas Eve there were just the four of them. Jim’s sister was not arriving until tomorrow, or the Carter family, or Teddy and Jane Gordon. The Russian boy, Dimitrie, who spoke no English, had wolfed down a bowl of soup and retired to the stables. Even Jason, not normally one of Mrs Evans’s favourite people, would have been acceptable, but he had gone out to some youth club. As it was, she was forced into taking part in the most peculiar conversations with Lawrence Oates, peculiar in that no matter where she said she had been, or to whom she had been talking, he implied that he had been there as well. She said she had gone to the theatre to see the new musical and that she had enjoyed it, and he said, yes, the first act was not bad but the second half hadn’t matched up to it. Then she said George Isaacs was in hospital again, being dried out for the umpteenth time, and how awful he looked, obviously not long for this world, and Lawrence shook his head sorrowfully from side to side, echoing her words and murmuring over and over, not long for this world. Cruelly, she asked him how many years he had known George, and he looked at her out of those blue and baffled eyes and repeated helplessly, ‘How many years is it, my dear?’
Shortly after supper the lights went out. ‘Damn,’ said Jim Scott, and he blundered about searching for candles. Avril said power failures were rather frequent in this neck of the woods. The Aga was electric too, so thank goodness they had already eaten. It was just as well there was a nice fire in the sitting room. ‘And a vast supply of logs,’ she said. ‘Thanks to Lawrence.’
They all agreed it was very cosy, very Christmassy, sitting in candlelight beside a blazing hearth, the curtains drawn against the dark night. Only Avril and Jim Scott were telling the truth.
After a few minutes Lawrence moved from the sofa and went and sat on the hard-backed chair in front of the curtain. Avril said he must surely be in a draught. ‘There’s an old door behind there,’ she explained. ‘We can’t use it because the wistaria outside has grown all over it. Jim’s always talking of having it bricked in, but we never got round to it.’ ‘I’m not used to the warmth,’ Lawrence said. ‘I prefer to be away from the fire.’
Mrs Evans stared into the flames, and presently fell into a doze. She dreamt that she was on a walking tour in the Lake District with her dead father. It must have been winter, for she heard the low moan of the wind as it swept down from the hills. Her father kept striding on ahead and urging her to walk faster. But she couldn’t, she was so tired that she could hardly drag one foot after the other. Soon her father was a blurred figure in the distance, and when next she looked up he had vanished altogether. She whimpered with fright, and woke. Opening her eyes she saw that the fire had settled and dimmed. Jim and Avril had evidently gone to bed. There were fresh candles burning on saucers on the mantelpiece. Then she heard the moaning again, and now there was a rattling sound, like canvas flapping in the wind. She knew that there was something she must do, something she must finish. One had to be cruel to be kind.
Struggling upright on the sofa she looked behind her to where Lawrence Oates stood, his mittened hands covering his face. The curtain over the door billowed outwards.
‘Can you not go on?’ she asked him, and he shook his head.
‘You have nothing to be ashamed of,’ she told him. ‘You are the bravest of men. Rest assured, you have done your very best.’ He uncovered his face and worked the ragged slit of his mouth. The tip of his nose had turned black, and his lips were so cracked and torn that it was agony for him to shape the words. ‘I slept a little,’ he whispered.
‘And hoped not to wake,’ she prompted. ‘Now you are just going outside.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And may be some time.’
When he pulled aside the curtain the door opened easily enough. He stepped out and a flurry of snow whirled into the room. The candles blew out.
I hope I am dreaming, thought Mrs Evans; but oh how cold it was.
THE BEAST IN THE TOWER
When Rita’s mother, Mrs Mountjoy, invited me to Scotland for a week’s holiday, she plunged my mother into a dilemma. Thing was, Mrs Mountjoy was considered both fast and loose, on top of which she was living in sin. On the other hand, her fancy man was a Laird and the sinning was being conducted in a castle. There was also the question of my fascination with matches; could I or could I not be trusted? I’d only been ten at the time, but it was a bit embarrassing my having set fire to the shed that housed the school sports equipment. It was an accident, of course, and it was only a few old hockey sticks that got consumed; all the same …
After wrestling with her conscience for several minutes, my mother accepted on my behalf. I travelled up to Edinburgh with Dodie, Rita’s grandmother, who sucked peppermints. My mother had always held that Mrs Mountjoy inherited her gadding ways from Dodie, who’d been seen winking at men on more than one occasion while going up in the lift to the restaurant on the fifth floor of the Bon Marché. Dodie was sixty if she was a day, but in spite of this we arrived at Edinburgh with a commercial traveller and a foreign gentleman in tow. They laughed a lot, and we sat o
n a bench in the booking hall while the commercial traveller went backwards and forwards to the bar to fetch measures of what he called ‘the cup that cheers’.
I drank pints of tea and had to go to the Ladies Room, where I was bothered by those notices that said the Seaman’s Mission would be glad to help me if I felt I had contracted something called venereal disease. There was a drawing of a boy who looked as though he had measles. Pimples came into it, especially round the mouth, and I had plenty of those.
We missed two connections and arrived at the castle in the small moonlit hours, driven by a taxi-driver who stopped twice to go behind a hedge. The first time the car slowed down, Dodie clutched my arm and said I was to stare straight ahead. The second time, she said that if he opened the door I was to run like hell into the countryside.
Rita wasn’t my best friend; we didn’t even go to the same school. She’d been thrust upon me by Mrs Mountjoy, who had once, on one of her flying maternal visits, stopped me in the street and urged me to look after her daughter.
‘You’re an intelligent girl,’ she said, ‘and you know the score. I’d feel easier in my mind if you took her under your wing.’
As it happened, I didn’t know the score, but it was pretty heady being called intelligent by a grown-up who wore a fox fur, even if she was considered flighty. From then on I went out of my way to let Rita buy me comics and spent every Saturday evening sitting with her in Dodie’s kitchen listening to ‘Bandwaggon’ on the wireless.
The castle was a bit small and a bit ruined. I gathered it was being renovated, only the Laird had run out of money and work had long since been abandoned. The back door was missing and the windows on the side had fallen out. There was a ladder propped up against the north wall under Mrs Mountjoy’s window. I thought it was part of the builder’s left-over equipment, until Hamish, the butler, told me the Laird had put it there so he could get into Mrs M’s room whenever she locked him out. Hamish hinted she locked him out fairly often.
To this day I don’t really know what the Laird looked like. He swayed on his feet a lot and besides, my mother had told me to avoid his gaze. She didn’t put it into so many words, but I understood it’d be best all round, he being a man of the world. Hamish said that Mrs Mountjoy and the Laird enjoyed a stormy relationship and that the ladder was a necessity.
They didn’t see eye to eye over St George.
St George was a statue bought by the Laird’s English mother, and consigned to a window-sill in one of the empty rooms in the tower. I went up to look at it the morning after I arrived. George was sitting on a horse brandishing a sword in the jaws of a dragon whose nostrils snorted gusts of painted fire. Actually, most of the dragon was missing; there was just his head left. Years before, owing to some argument, the hindquarters had been smashed to bits. Hamish didn’t elaborate, but I took it that stormy relationships ran in the family.
Mrs Mountjoy wanted the statue brought downstairs, and the Laird said he’d rather die than have an English saint featured in the dining hall. Hamish said in his opinion, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mrs M didn’t take the Laird at his word and saw through the rungs of the ladder.
‘Mark what I say, lassie,’ he prophesied. ‘It’ll end in tears.’
I’d never heard of St George, but according to Hamish he was a refugee on the run from foreign parts, and a mercenary into the bargain. He was always galloping about righting injustices, until somebody or other hung him upside down and cut off his head. The dragon was a mythical beast. It didn’t exist. Rita said George couldn’t be a saint if he was a mercenary, because that involved money and he was obviously venal. I wasn’t sure whether she meant he had venereal disease, so I kept quiet.
On the second day of the holiday the grounds of the castle were thrown open to what Mrs Mountjoy referred to as ‘the children of the peasants’. I was a bit confused because the term before we’d studied wildlife in Sussex and I thought she meant those birds with blue caps on. I’d expected a fly-over of fluffy chicks, and all we got was a honking contingent of children, sired by Jamie Gow, the Laird’s gamekeeper. There were twelve of them, seven boys and five girls, and whenever the Laird turned his back the boys pelted us with pebbles and pulled rude faces.
At the last moment Mrs Mountjoy invited the vicar, and somebody totally daft persuaded him to judge a competition for the best bunch of wild flowers garnered from the surrounding fields. Neither Rita nor I completed the course. We began, but half way through, Stuart Gow, an adolescent built like a bus, sprang up from behind a bush and fiddled with his trousers. We ran home breathless and swore a bull had chased us.
Later that evening, the sun already drowning in the loch, Mrs M said that she and the Laird and Dodie were off to a cocktail party in Kinross. We were to brush our teeth and go straight to bed. Hamish had the night off.
‘Lock the front door and don’t let anyone in,’ she warned. ‘There are some con-men pretending to be antique dealers working the neighbourhood.’
Seeing the back door had been removed, this was a pretty silly thing to say, but as she thought I was intelligent I nodded vigorously.
Rita and I had baked beans on toast for supper, and afterwards we sat on the front steps in the gloaming, watching the bats swoop from the tower. I was lighting matches and flicking them on to the gravel stones.
Twenty minutes later, we heard the car scrunch up the drive.
Rita was mithering on about whether Stuart Gow would make a good husband or not. She thought he would; she said her stomach had looped the loop when the sun touched the beginnings of his moustache. I said she was potty, that the moment he slipped the ring on her finger he’d object to her reading The Mill on the Floss.
‘I don’t care,’ she said, just as the wheels of the car spat gravel.
I knew the men were suspect the moment they faced us. For one thing the tall chap wore a trilby hat with a feather in the band, and for another his companion was sporting suede shoes. My mother had alerted me to such signs of danger, along with the inadvisability of ever purchasing shop-made pork pies or sitting down on strange toilet seats.
‘We were just passing through, girls,’ the tall man said. ‘We’re into buying artefacts. Perhaps your parents are in the vicinity.’
‘They’ve gone to a cocktail party,’ Rita said, daft as a brush.
‘Ah,’ breathed the chappie in the suede shoes.
‘They’re due back any moment,’ I said, ‘along with Mr MacLeish from the local constabulary. Meanwhile there’s a man called George from Armenia hiding in the tower.’
‘A lodger?’ inquired suede shoes.
‘Sort of, leastways he’s on the run and stations a wild beast outside his door.’
All the same, the men marched up the steps into the castle.
I whispered to Rita that she should ring for the fire brigade. Then I ran ahead to the room in the tower. St George was perched on his horse on the window-sill. In spite of his brandished sword, he looked very ineffectual. The tip of his nose was missing.
‘Please God,’ I said, fingering the chipped plaster where, the dragon’s body had once writhed, ‘come to our aid.’
When I went downstairs, the man with the feather in his hat was carrying a Chinese vase out of the door. He laid it in the boot of the car and then returned to help his companion shift the Laird’s writing desk across the hall.
‘The man from Armenia won’t like it,’ I said. ‘He hates things being disturbed.’
At that moment a strange whooshing sound filled the night, something like a gust of wind blowing through an empty space. We were out into the drive by now, in moonlight, the men lumbering towards the car, Rita and I skittering on the little stones, mouths trembling.
There was a tinkle of glass hitting the gravel, and we looked upwards and saw a belch of flame billowing from the top window. A sword licked by fire flashed in the moonlight against the blackened stones of the tower.
‘It’s St George,’ I cried, ‘fighting a drago
n.’
At that precise, fiery moment we heard the bell of the fire brigade.
Nobody ever worked out who had started the blaze. The insurance company tried to prove the wiring was faulty, but in the end they paid out on the damage done both to the top room and to the statue of St George, which turned out to be valuable. There were thousands of such statues in the world, but only a very few with flames coming out of their nostrils. The Laird claimed the dragon had been in one piece until the fire started, and nobody dared call him a liar.
As Hamish said, ‘It’s an ill wind that blows somebody some good.’
My mother was a bit agitated when she heard what had happened, but she couldn’t really say anything because the Laird wrote her a letter telling how resourceful I had been in urging Rita to ring the fire brigade, thus apprehending the robbers. He enclosed five pounds for my piggy bank. Besides, when she met me and Dodie and Rita at the station, Rita kept babbling on about how she had seen a dragon belching flame.
‘There’s no such thing as dragons,’ my mother said.
‘I saw it,’ Rita said. ‘St George was trying to slash its head off.’
I stopped being friendly with Rita quite soon afterwards. There wasn’t anything special that came between us, not unless you count the letter she got from Stuart Gow saying she had nice eyebrows. I said I expected he mentioned those because he couldn’t think of anything else to praise, and she took offence.
I telephone her every St George’s Day. She says, ‘Who’s that, who’s speaking?’ and I sort of pant, like I’m blowing fire down her ear. I think I’m doing her a favour. Sooner or later, we all need to slay dragons.
KISS ME, HARDY
Hardy Roget and his friend had been booked on to the cruise two months before; it seemed foolish to abandon the whole idea just because one of them had died in the meantime. There was also a penalty clause, although Roget’s agent said the shipping company would never hold him to it. Not in the circumstances; it wouldn’t be good publicity. Besides, now that the funeral was six weeks into the past, Damien Cartwright had stopped asking him along to the BBC club for a drink and Barbie Cartwright no longer phoned up to see if he needed a spot of shopping. And he was sick to death of eating alone.
Collected Stories Page 17