Mr. Chartwell

by Rebecca Hunt

  “I don’t want to hear your blimpish opinion,” Churchill said, swerving past and heading back out into the hall. He called hopefully, “Clemmie?”

  “Yes, Mr. Pug?” Clementine’s voice called back from upstairs. “In here … I’m writing some letters. Do you want to come in with me and read for a while?”

  He went up the stairs, the dog barging up next to him. Clementine was waiting in the doorway of her bedroom. The sunlight warmed the duck-egg-blue walls and high barrel-vaulted ceiling, making them fluorescent. White roses radiated from a crystal vase on her writing desk. Before Black Pat could enter, Churchill banged shut the door.

  “I’ll be here when you come out,” Black Pat hissed through the crack between the door and the floor.

  “So wait, you bastard,” he heard Churchill mutter.

  Black Pat crushed his snout so hard against the gap it bent to one side. “I can wait for you in a way you can’t comprehend. The days flash past like the rotating beam of a lighthouse and I wait through them. I will take what I have come for.”

  Churchill reappeared at the door. Escaping to Clementine had shored up his heart. “Oh, really. Well, what smokes cigars and doesn’t give a fat damn?” Hammering the point squarely home, he retrieved a cigar from his breast pocket, lifted it to his mouth, and champed it. With a grin like a sunset he disappeared back behind the door to his wife.

  “I was leaving anyway,” Black Pat called after him, and left.

  CHAPTER 27

  8.30 p.m.

  Esther was in the unused boxroom, unused by anyone—either herself, the house owner, or Black Pat, the official lodger. She doodled with one of Michael’s pencils. Shading with the pencil made a methodical sketching noise. An ornamental sword, drawn on graph paper, was improved by a pair of dolphins jumping over it. The dolphins were drawn with the word dolphin on their sides because they looked like thick snakes. Then she remembered dorsal fins. These were added. Back to the ornamental sword. Perhaps draft an eagle’s foot making the A-OK sign next to this bit. Perhaps draft a pair of Corkbowl’s spectacles there in honour of his being kind about having to drive her to Kent, in honour of his being kind and also quite handsome. It was a while before she realised Black Pat was watching her from the doorway.

  “When did you get back?”

  “Why, did you miss me?” Black Pat sat there, his shoulder against the wall. Not especially interested, Esther continued drawing. Black Pat hummed out a few seconds and heaved off, loitering over to her, dried leaves and muck scattering from his fur. He bulldozed to the space beside the desk. An unreasonable amount of slathering and grunting proved distracting, Black Pat lowering himself into a sphinx position on the worn carpet. Esther’s pencil stopped, about to object, when she caught his expression. Initially buried anticipation, he replaced it with the expression of mindless contentment.

  That space there, Black Pat there. It sparked a realisation, very fractured. Esther felt a shot of recognition, something distant coming closer in a drifting rainbow of greys. And it was lost as Black Pat said, “Yikes.”

  “What?”

  “When you pull that face you look a hundred years old.”

  She said dryly, “Thank you.”

  Here came the clubbing of his hairy deadweight tail.

  “Beth’s invited me to lunch on Sunday.”

  His tail went quiet. “Sounds nice.”

  “I suppose, I don’t know. It’s supposed to be nice.”

  “Are you going?” A little twist in his tone wasn’t keen.

  As an experiment Esther tried to break the pencil in half with her thumb. It resisted. She ground her thumb against its ridged sides until the thumb hurt. This failed and she tossed the pencil so it rattled across the desk. “It’s difficult.”

  “Difficult?” The twist had vanished, Black Pat pleased. “Eating lunch?” He found an elastic band and ate it in a demonstration of the simplicity of eating. The rubber band escaped and he pounced after it, his chest catching the desk with a thwack. The band recaptured, he sank to his stomach, tearing up puckers of carpet. Privately his snout journeyed under Esther’s chair to sniff her sock.

  Esther’s legs stretched out under the desk, the sock going with them. She put a hand on her stomach and rubbed it. “It’s hard to describe, I feel like I’m being cornered, like I’m—”

  “Like you’re lying in a crate full of meat?” This was delicious to Black Pat, the ultimate happiness.

  “That’s really repulsive,” said Esther. The lying analogy was useful though. Yes, it was a feeling of being laid down and waiting, of being held down. “I do feel like I’m lying—”

  “We’re all lying in the gutter.” Black Pat’s snout bashed the chair as he snatched it out, quick to interrupt. “But, as the line goes, some of us have our heads in the road.”

  “That isn’t the line. It goes, ‘but some of us are looking—’ ”

  “But some of us are looking at all the other idiots in the gutter, making plans.…”

  Esther scoffed at how infuriating he was. “ ‘But some of us are looking at the stars.’ ”

  Black Pat misheard intentionally. “Yes, some of us are looking at the cars, at all those cars. And wanting to lie in the comfortable cars.”

  Esther rolled her head in a way that said, I give up. She said it. “I give up.”

  There was a quiet period. Esther’s silence was withdrawn. Black Pat’s silence became suspicious. She looked at him. He was sprawled on his side, nearly on his back, a slightly gratuitous pose. He was staring at the photograph replaced on the wall.

  Esther found the intensity of his stare odd. It had an unusual quality, the picture transmitting a secret to him and causing a litmus-paper response that coloured through his wolfish features.

  It wasn’t exactly accusing, not dissimilar though, as he said, “Why did you put it back up?”

  “It’s our wedding day.” This sounded like an excuse. “It hung there before Michael moved it, so …” She let this trail off, mostly because the ending eluded her. The next sentence was a test. “We were happier on that day than anyone has ever been.”

  Impossibly cruel, Black Pat repeated it. “Happier than anyone has ever been.”

  A spined and poisonous thing was allowed to pass. Esther studied the photograph.

  “… Both of you?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t be certain.

  Black Pat’s following silence was an admission. Esther read it.

  “You do know that Michael isn’t living here anymore.”

  Black Pat made a noise in his throat, an oral nod.

  “And do you know why?”

  There was no answer.

  Esther said, “I think you do.”

  No answer.

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “So don’t, Esther.”

  A couple of seconds, and she said to him, “… I think you’re involved somehow.”

  Black Pat lay there on the floor. “That photograph, do you ever wonder why he took it down?”

  Now it was Esther who didn’t answer.

  A crack of joints: The dog hauled onto his haunches. He put his head on the desk, inches from her. Esther sat stiff in her chair, alarmed by his strange intimacy.

  At this short distance Black Pat’s fur was revealed as several textures. The ruff of his neck fell in thick chunks, a downy insulating layer beneath. The petlike fur on his head was fine and smooth. They stayed this way, the two of them. Then Black Pat turned down his mouth, a friendly thing. He wagged his head on the desk and was harmless. Esther’s right hand touched the flat expanse between his ears. Her hand was tiny there, a pale object on the black barrel of his head. The shape of his skull was not as she imagined, its domed contours examined. Sick with apathy, Esther stroked the fur and said, “I hate that you won’t tell me how you’re involved and what you know. And more than that, I hate that you can find it funny.”

  “What?”

  “You’re always making jokes, you find
it funny.”

  “Oh, Esther.” He sounded tired. “I don’t find it funny.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Black Pat’s head rolled to manoeuvre her hand to the base of his ecstatic ear. She scratched it, swearing never to eat with this hand again. Fur worked loose in clouds.

  “Why don’t you ask me what I know if it’s that important?” He dared her, “Go on, ask me.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because …” She grinned in defeat. “Because I don’t want to know.” Her hand went to her lap. Black Pat made his ears tall in protest.

  Esther had a question. “So wait, if neither of us finds it funny, why do you make jokes?”

  His eyebrow buds hitched, the connoisseur. “Because we need the laughs.”

  CHAPTER 28

  10.30 a.m.

  “There we go,” said Clementine, helping Churchill on with his navy-blue jacket. She stood back. “You look grand.”

  Standing in the drawing room next to the east-facing window, Churchill stared down at himself. Behind Clementine, the dog, who had recently arrived, was leering at him. Black Pat raised a paw, Caesar-style, and swung it round to the floor.

  Churchill ignored him, turning to one of the large mirrors which hung at either side of the window. “I look old,” he said to his reflection. “I look like an old man.”

  Black Pat’s reflection nodded slowly behind him.

  Clementine tutted, brushing Churchill’s shoulders. “Stop that. Here …” She folded a spotted silk handkerchief into his top pocket. “That’s for luck. You remember Marigold used to like this one?”

  “Yes.” Churchill touched the handkerchief, remembering his dear young daughter who had died in 1921, before she was three. “I miss her still, I miss our Duckadilly.”

  Clementine’s expression was kind. “I know you do. I miss her terribly.” She went to a bunch of freshly cut flowers on the chimneypiece and busied herself, arranging them in a small vase. A bunch of oxeye daisies was laid nearby, intended for Churchill’s bedroom.

  Below the mirror a walnut side table inlaid with medallions of satinwood held a silver-framed photograph of Diana, Churchill’s oldest daughter, who had committed suicide the year before. She was standing with him on the porch of the governor’s house in the Bahamas, a diminutive figure next to her dark-suited father. Diana had an engaging face, her dark bobbed hair brushed to the side, a belted white dress blowing against her shins. Churchill held the photograph, thoughts of his daughters in a display of black fireworks across the landscape of his memory.

  Lying against the wall like a row of military sandbags, the dog was motionless apart from the swell of his rib cage.

  Churchill replaced the photograph gently. “I think I’ll go to my study, Clemmie, and wait for the car there.” Churchill’s steady steps climbed the staircase. Black Pat rocked to his feet, padding after him.

  In the study Churchill sat heavily, a cigar in his hand, and reached for the box of matches on his desk. Squatting next to him Black Pat pushed the box out of range, nudging it to the farthest corner. Churchill was forced to stand, snatching at it. Back in his chair, Churchill struck a match. A flame sprang up. Held steady between teeth, the cigar went to meet it. The tobacco didn’t catch. Black Pat’s wet tongue shot out, smothering the flame. It was obscene.

  “Stop it.”

  Churchill looked at the dog. His tongue had reeled out like a grey vine.

  “I’m warning you. Desist,” Churchill said to him in a challenge.

  Black Pat grinned, face pleating, watching as Churchill puffed at the cigar.

  “I can only presume you’ll be accompanying me to this press conference.” Churchill’s fingers dragged across his forehead from the temples and met.

  Black Pat put his chin on the desk, papers crumpling beneath it. “Of course. We’ve had it arranged for decades, haven’t we?”

  Churchill stared out the window at the green slopes below. On the wall above the fireplace was a huge painting of Blenheim Palace, the place in which he was unintentionally born—his mother going into labour early while visiting relatives. “I’ve wondered on occasion whether you were there, waiting to stake your flag from the moment my soul entered this world.”

  “I didn’t come until sent for.” Black Pat’s eyes were like leeches on him. “But I’ve been a companion to others around you, so I’ve never been far away.”

  Churchill heard in this answer references to his father, his daughter Diana, other family members rising and disintegrating.

  Clementine had finished arranging the vase of daisies on his bedroom windowsill. Her voice called through from the landing. “So when will you be back, Winston?”

  Churchill turned away from Black Pat, brutalised. “What you’ve done, the damage you’ve done …” His tone was wind-swept. “… The node of your corrosive presence in our family tree, it is at times more than I can endure.”

  “Mr. Pug?” called Clementine, coming to the study. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, not long I hope,” Churchill answered. “Those hacks will no doubt want to grill me interminably.”

  Clementine was at the doorway, a hand on the frame. “Don’t give them a hard time, Mr. Pug. They’re only doing their job.”

  “I know, I know.” Churchill took a pull on his cigar and exhaled a funnel of smoke. “But they are all such boobs.”

  At the sound of wheels crawling across gravel Clementine went to the window, looking down onto the drive at the front of the house. “Your car is here.”

  “Righto,” said Churchill, getting up. “See you soon, Clemmie.”

  With a kiss he lumbered down the stairs. Black Pat went too, storming ahead. Paws hammering the steps, he hit the bottom with a clatter of claws on the black-tiled floor of the narrow hall.

  The scene was watched with melancholy eyes by Rufus the poodle. He curled round the dried pig’s ear in his bed and hid his face.

  Clementine came downstairs as Churchill closed the car door, the car easing in an arc away from the house, then moving faster, its engine becoming faint as it set off on the hour’s drive to Westminster. Clementine looked at the poodle. “I know, Roofy,” she said to him. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  CHAPTER 29

  11.20 a.m.

  The streaming activity was gone at the weekends, Westminster Palace now serene and ornamental with deserted corridors. Corkbowl was enjoying it, feeling like a Robinson Crusoe type among the unexplored shelves. The reason for his being there, a thick book of British road maps, had been located and discarded in favour of one about Morocco. The pictures were of an exotic fantasy world, bustling souks, stalls with baskets full of spices and piles of woven cloth, people pouring through the thin pathways between. Corkbowl would get to road maps immediately after just a quick look at this other book detailing the history of the Tower of London.

  When Esther walked into the Reference Room, Corkbowl yanked round, not expecting to see anyone. His dark hair was more spirited at weekends, Corkbowl not bothering to subdue it. He hadn’t shaved and it suited him. Shirtsleeves folded to the elbow, he walked from behind the table. Esther saw his trousers were tucked into his socks.

  Corkbowl noticed at the same time. “Yep. I know what you’re thinking, how debonair.”

  She smiled as he said, “And you’re probably also thinking that it’s a very adventurous look for a Saturday morning, very Courrèges.”

  “I am now. Although Courrèges is more futuristic, isn’t he? You need to add a few metallic touches.”

  “An aluminium jacket. Got you.” Deep lines appeared down his cheeks when he grinned, as he did at the idea of an aluminium jacket. “And that’s even safer on the roads when I ride my bike.” He came clean. “The socks are because I rode my bike, if I’m honest.”

  “Thought so,” answered Esther. “I had a suspicion.”

  He relaxed, hands in his pockets. “Do you ofte
n come to the library at the weekends?”

  “Not usually, but I’ve not got a lot on.… There wasn’t much happening at home and I …” She felt a flush of embarrassment at this disclosure. “I didn’t finish my work the other day. It seemed a good chance to get it done. You know what the library can be like in the week.…” The implication was that the library was an indulgence of lawless distractions.

  She said it lightly but Corkbowl registered an undertone. She knew he had heard it, a nude and unashamed truth rolling there. Esther scrambled to think of something funny to say to disguise her loneliness. The spotlight shone on an empty stage.

  It was Corkbowl who saved her. “And we’ve got to go to Kent tomorrow. As your chaperone I thought I’d better take advantage of my access to all the maps they have in here so that I don’t get us totally lost.”

  A brilliant excuse. “Exactly,” Esther said. “If I’m going to meet Sir Winston Churchill, the least I should do is practise my typing.”

  “Which is also why I’ve taken my car to be serviced. It’s an old car and I want to make sure it behaves.” Corkbowl bowed gallantly. “No flames under the bonnet this time, m’lady.” He checked his wristwatch. “I’ve got to cycle over and fetch it in half an hour, so I’m not here for long.”

  “Oh, right,” Esther said. “Yes, awful,” she said, carefully airy, “work on a Saturday! I’m going to get out as soon as possible.”

  “It could be more awful, though,” Corkbowl said, not finding it awful at all, “Dennis-John could be here too.” He scanned around the room, checking. “In fact, I’m sort of surprised he isn’t. I can’t imagine anywhere else would let him in.”

  “I think his wife lets him into the house sporadically to terrorise their two children.”

  “His wife?” A stunned Corkbowl. “He’s got children?”

  “And a tortoise.” Esther added, “I suppose because Dennis-John can’t bite through the shell.”

  “Dennis-John the family man?” Corkbowl considered it. “Quick, we’d better change the subject. If I think about this too hard my brain will need help getting in and out of the bath.”