by Rebecca Hunt
“And you’re strong …” said Beth, taking her arm back, “… smelling.”
CHAPTER 10
8.15 p.m.
Black Pat stood up, the chair knocked around by his huge legs. Esther remained seated. She brought a hand up in order to bite her nails, all of them already hard-chewed. “Black Pat, what you just said … how would I know?”
The kitchen was filled with a luminous gloom. Shadows worked as a clock, informing Black Pat that he was late.
“Right, then,” he said, the authoritarian, her question ignored, “we’ve got to make a decision.” He corrected this: “You have, you make a decision. But make it quickly, I’ve got to go.” He ate more cheese, eating in a gobble to demonstrate the speed he would prefer.
“Please don’t do that,” said Esther, wet cheese sprinkling over everything. “I really hate it when you do that.”
“Do you?” said Black Pat, astonished.
“Please could you stop,” said Esther. “I really hate it.”
“Do you?” Black Pat said, again astonished, cheese spraying.
It was a form of punishment, this eating. And now enough time had passed, enough tedious wavering. “What’s your decision?”
“Are you going to Churchill?”
This wasn’t a decision. Black Pat’s tongue moistened the roof of his mouth with slow smacks. Resigned, his haunches hit the tiled floor. Sitting there he was still taller than Esther on the chair. He gave her a display of magnificent disappointment, eyes dull with it. But his delicate senses were in motion. Those instincts sent out frequencies and recorded specks of phosphorescence in the blank screen of Esther’s deliberation. Yes, she would make the choice, it was made without her. Secretly he found a cupboard handle behind him and pressed his hip against it, enjoying the massage. The handle snapped off. They both heard it fall to the floor.
Esther was looking at him. His thick neck was almost the circumference of her circled arms. She imagined putting her arms around that neck. With the intuitive memory of muscle she knew that the sensation would be similar to gripping the neck of a horse and feeling it react with shimmering strength. His blackness was radiant in the rising dusk. A handsome spectre, he let her look.
“I can’t seem to make a decision.…”
“Why?” Black Pat’s left ear leant in a fold, head cocked.
“Because …” Esther said eventually, trying hard to pin an answer.
“You won’t let me stay here?”
“I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.”
“The right thing?”
Esther rubbed a wrist on the tabletop, conflicted. “I mean the thing that most people would do.”
“Most people …” Black Pat made a sassy little move.
“What would most people do?” Esther asked him and herself, mainly herself. “When faced with this situation, what would everyone else do?”
He said, “But what do you want to do, Esther?”
Esther didn’t know. She didn’t believe she knew. She wallowed in a highly melodramatic sort of self-pity. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
Yes she did. The phosphorescence collected in little pools, gathering. Other glowing points emerged and grew brighter.
Esther wouldn’t say it, no she wouldn’t. A small poisonous voice slithered through her: Yes, say it, Esther. Admit it.
Black Pat played it cool. That colossal physique heaved up, the beefy sound made by four animal legs. The rough leather of the pads on his paws pounded across the tiled floor into the hall.
“I’m sorry, it’s just …” Esther called after him, “… I’m too boring to make this sort of decision.”
From the hall came this reply: “You’re much too honest.”
“Sorry?” She nearly rose from her seat.
A grin burst from the voice: “I said you’re much too modest.” The acoustics changed. Black Pat had mooched into another room and there was silence.
The kitchen was impossibly empty without him. Outside the window a blackbird called with its brisk song. The broken silence healed back together. Soon shadows would grow down the walls as the evening became night, the night becoming late. Esther watched a sad film of herself enduring the dregs of the day, watched herself sitting here over a talentless meal, watched herself from behind as she scraped the food into the bin. And here was the scene where she washed up in socked feet, one sock worked loose and bent under her foot. This sock would flap as she trudged around. Repulsively desperate, the whole scene. Esther made her fingers into a comb, brushing hair behind her ears. A tuft on the crown had been slept on so it rebelled from the rest, not about to surrender now.
The light was greying. A cactus on the windowsill greyed with it. Another evening with me? it said. Here in the kitchen, us together.
It was too much, too awful.
She jumped from her chair and made her way to the hall, standing there in the twilight. No dog there. He’d already gone? Quick steps took her towards the front door.
A shape in the dimness stopped her, a shape propped against the front-room doorway.
Esther leant back on the wall. “I thought you’d gone.”
“I can’t until I get an answer from you.” Black Pat waited a beat. “So maybe it’s time you said what you meant.”
“I honestly don’t have an answer.”
A sarcastic scoff: “Arf.” His eyes came out at her like horns. “Maybe it’s time you meant what you said.”
“What are you talking about?”
Black Pat shifted, his shoulder hitting the doorframe. “Listen, how long is it going to take you to make up your mind?”
Esther pushed off the wall and sat on the bottom step of the stairs. Her arm went round the sturdy gloss-painted banister and she shrugged with an elbow. “How long is a piece of string? …”
Black Pat threw a glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. “About two minutes.”
“Okay,” she said. It’s okay, she said to herself. “You can stay.”
“De-lovely.” Black Pat’s tail drummed the carpet. Dust rose in a mist, beaten from his shaggy tail. He said, “I’ve got some bits to put in my new room.”
He sailed out. She could hear him poking round the hydrangeas in the front garden. He came back hugging a cardboard box.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“My luggage,” he replied as if she had the intellect of a baby. He carried the box up the stairs. She heard him up there, crashing in the boxroom, then down he came, satisfied.
A nervous laugh escaped. The presumption of his box ready in the garden. “That was quick.”
He accepted it. “I’m a professional.”
“But your box was in the garden? You didn’t know I’d let you stay here.”
He had a good answer for this. “A professional prepares.”
She mustered the courage to ask him. “Black Pat, you can stay for tonight, as a trial run. But, ahm, perhaps you wouldn’t mind sleeping in the front room.”
Black Pat made a wet cough from his sinuses, so unimpressed.
“Just for now.” This was an apology. “I suppose I’ll feel safer.” This sounded artlessly rude. “Sorry, no, I’m trying to say it’s only a period of adjustment, that’s all.”
Black Pat’s tongue slid over the black bulb of his nose. “Well, at least the front room is better than the garden.”
As an idea, even better. “The garden? So you’d consider sleeping in the—”
“No,” Black Pat interrupted flatly.
“I could put out a blanket and—”
“Forget it!” He walked on hind legs to the front door.
Esther remained on her stair, surprised to feel slightly forlorn at his departure. “Will you be coming back tonight?”
“Very late.” Black Pat was fiddling with the door lock, finding it hard to grasp. Then he had it, the door opening a crack. Something took his attention.
On the wall next to the front door was a c
orkboard with hooks for keys. The board was a biography of keys and key rings: a doll’s leather sandal from Greece on the car keys; a shell on a chain hung beside a red plastic pendant of a Welsh dragon; a large ornate key hung uselessly, its lost lock long forgotten. Another key held a cardboard room-number tag, a stolen key from the honeymoon suite. Buried in the middle of the board was a key with a wishbone attached to it. From the tangle of countless keys and talismans Black Pat unhooked this one. He stooped to it, the coarse whiskers of his muzzle highlighted as he examined. Esther stretched to see what he held.
To Black Pat’s nostrils the scent of the wishbone was still informative, telling a chemical story of pockets and jackets, of frost and rain and humidity. It was a Pantone chart of hormones passed through the owner’s hand and linked to the heart.
Esther recognised the outline of the white bone in his paw. She didn’t want him touching that key. “Oh, I forgot to offer you a key. I’ll get you a key.…”
Black Pat looked at her quickly, the wishbone replaced on its hook. “It’s all right, I don’t need it.”
“You don’t need a key?” Esther said, disbelieving.
“Nope.”
She watched him. The headlines of her face changed. “Why did you pick that one?”
Black Pat spoke: “I’ve always liked it.” Too explicit. “I’ve always liked wishbones, I really like them,” he said, devastatingly unpersuasive, scratching his cheek.
Again he started to go and was halted by a tone in Esther’s voice. She had crept up behind him, seizing the key from the corkboard. They were several inches apart. A dangerous gravity, the strangeness of his proximity fastening her there. Black Pat felt his physicality mesmerising her, he felt her being spellbound. That gothic seducer, he understood this.
“Black Pat, you’ll come back?” Her question wasn’t supposed to sound hopeful. It embarrassed her.
His furry head tilted at her, his mouth in a grin she wouldn’t yet understand. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
The door slammed.
Minutes went by in the dusk of the hall. The empty house closed around her like a shroud. Esther held the key with wrapped fingers, the wishbone making white indentations in the drumstick of her thumb. It had been Michael’s key and so she held it hard, holding it to her chest and protective.
CHAPTER 11
9.30 p.m.
“Everyone’s downstairs, Mr. Pug,” Clementine said gently, trying to coax him into conversation. She stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the warm light of the landing.
The study was a cavern. Puncturing the gloom, a couple of standard lamps illuminated Churchill at his table, sitting with his back to her. The massive mahogany table with claw-and-ball feet had been inherited from his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the third surviving son of the seventh duke of Marlborough. Heaped across it was a wreckage of photographs, papers, and books, all ignored. Churchill sat at this mess, a block of red velvet. He had changed into one of his siren suits, a comfortable man-sized romper with a zip running down the front. Now it was mostly unzipped, and a bright vein of white shirt showed through. His hands had abandoned the smouldering cigar stub in favour of pressing firmly on his temples, their pressure causing ridges of skin to buckle.
He was preoccupied by something Clementine couldn’t hear, coming from an area near the fireplace. It was a truly disgusting sound, the sound of rocks being chewed so rampantly they would have slashed apart a normal mouth. At Clementine’s appearance the source of the noise drew closer to his ears, the chewing accelerating.
“Won’t you come down and see everybody?” said Clementine. “They’d love to see you. Mary and Christopher are here.”
Mary, their youngest daughter, and her husband were regular visitors and good company, but Churchill could hardly hear her now. The rocks ground together with such speed it seemed sparks would flare from them. They were so near it was obscene. Clementine began speaking again. The combination of noises was intolerable.
“I’ll be down in a minute, Mrs. Pussycat,” said Churchill, without the usual affection.
“We’ve saved you some supper. It’s chicken,” Clementine said, hopeful.
“It’s pointless,” Black Pat said instantly, his voice distorted by a mouthful of rocks. “We’ve got things to discuss, you know that.” The thud of a wet rock being tongued out was followed quickly by another. One rock hit the rug, a present from the shah of Persia, and made a soft noise. The second rock hit the wooden floorboards with a bang.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” Churchill repeated with more force. And after fifty-five years of marriage, Clementine knew when to leave him to the thorns of his solitude.
A hole of hushed voices replaced the lively chatter from the floor below as she explained. There was a gap of sad disappointment before footsteps trailed off to another room.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Black Pat said, louder now they were alone, his mouth baggy and elastic without a jawful of rocks. “I always do. We understand each other too well.”
With a grim look over the rims of his tortoiseshell glasses, Churchill began writing. Getting no reaction, Black Pat continued, “You can’t ignore me. We’ve got too much to do.” A cruel smirk pulled up his muzzle at Churchill’s refusal to engage. “Fine, take your time. I can wait.”
Black Pat moved with heavy, gunslinger steps to the large bookcase behind Churchill, one of many embedded in the walls of the room, and admired a selection of black-and-white photographs displayed there among the oxblood-and-gilt books. One photograph attracted him particularly: an image of Rota, the lion given to Churchill as a cub. The lion had been transferred to London Zoo, where it had matured a luxuriant dark mane. Black Pat studied the mane, feeling jealousy itch. Returning the picture, he went over to the aquarium balanced on a seventeenth-century oak chest. Inside were two black mollies.
One vanished behind the weeds. The other came to inspect, its swollen head guided by trailing gossamer fins. Black Pat pressed his tongue against the glass, very keen to eat it, the tongue flattening into a grey aubergine slice. The molly darted away and hid. Black Pat’s hot instinct to eat it withered, his tongue leaving a large smear. He slouched back to the fireplace and lay down, making a show of readjusting his giant forelegs several times, the big head propped against them.
Churchill watched this from the corner of an eye. He took off his glasses, holding them in a fist. “I had expected you to attend the meeting in Westminster this afternoon.”
“I thought about it.”
“Yes.” Churchill massaged his forehead wearily. “Must we do this tonight? I’m exhausted.”
“I don’t negotiate.” Black Pat held his gaze level, cutting into Churchill’s tolerance.
On the desk was a cuboid glass paperweight, a miniature cloth poodle set on the top. Churchill put his hand around it, testing the weight. A bronze cast of his daughter-in-law’s hand was on the windowsill. He remembered the weight of it, and thought about reaching over. But using this ornament as a missile would probably damage the delicate bronze fingers, maybe smashing them off, and Churchill, fond of the ornament, abandoned the idea. Instead he spoke solemnly, so drained he shut his eyes to draw strength. The dog’s ears twitched from the base at his voice.
“You don’t negotiate, yes, but perhaps on this occasion you could extend a measure of compassion. I understand that we share a wicked union, and I know the goblin bell which summons you comes from a tomb in my heart. And I will honour my principles, labouring against the shadows you herald. I don’t blench from this burden, but”—here he let out a deep breath, laying the glasses down gently—“it’s so demanding; it leaves me so very tired. It would be some small comfort to me if I could ask how long I must endure this visit. Please, when do you leave?”
Black Pat chose not to answer.
With less conviction, Churchill asked, “Do you leave?”
“Pffft” came the reply. “You know I can’t tell you that. And
now we’ve exchanged pleasantries, let’s begin.”
CHAPTER 12
12.00 a.m.
Esther lay on her bed, watching nothing. She commanded herself to drop into a deep restful sleep and didn’t. Hours had passed since she’d made the sensible decision to go to sleep fully clothed. Now the decision seemed wildly misjudged, staying on the sheets impossible.
Out of bed in a bounce. She reached for the tattered dressing gown, an unattractive thing, yellow-and-brown paisley flannel and absurdly oversized. But it had been Michael’s, so was classified as a treasure. Esther put the dressing gown over her clothes, knotting the belt. Then she shambled around her room looking for a reason to leave, a scratching hand roaming from a shoulder to an ear. It occurred to Esther that food was a good excuse. Eating was as good an excuse as anything. She made her way downstairs to the kitchen, holding the banister through a billowing flannel sleeve.
The bread bin contained the hard heel of a loaf. Esther inspected the heel for mould and then decorated it with a gourmet slop of salad cream. Mud was dried in paw smears on the floor, and some shed fur. Wiping salad-creamed fingers off on the dressing gown, she took a bite. Seasoning might help. The lid fell from the pepper pot when shaken over the mangled crust, pepper coming down in a handful. The emptied pot escaped to the floor, spinning in a curve towards the front room. The bread heel was left to overbalance on the draining board, dropping into the sink.
Not discouraged, Esther remembered an orange and also remembered sherry. Hacked open, the orange was abandoned after a couple of old dry segments. Knowing sherry should be served in a small vessel, and without one, Esther studied an eggcup. She made an undiscerning horseshoe with her mouth. Sipping from her eggcup, she looked around at the kitchen and found nothing else to occupy her there.
But the boxroom was deeply occupying.
Michael’s study was enchanting with its new occupation as a rented room, and it called to her morbid curiosity in an alluring song. Black Pat would be late, he had said as much. And he had agreed to stay downstairs that night. So it wasn’t technically his room yet. A verdict was made. Esther refilled her fortifying eggcup.