Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  When the third tour ended and Andrew had bolted the ladder back into its fixed position with its foot close by the door he stayed for a moment to catch the doves’ return. As usual his imagination started to shape a piece of theatre into the space. It would have to be film, of course. The camera looking up, as he was. A girl on the ladder—peasant dress, but lots of leg. Everything foreshortened. The white doves whirring past. Sunlight slanting through the flight-holes, making the roof invisible. The girl looking down, happy, excited, saying something, not noticing that up beyond something … a trapdoor, slowly opening.

  It was as though his imaginative power had by its magic caused the thing to happen. Not that the trapdoor opened, but it was there, just discernible in the planking of the shadowed ceiling. Of course it would have to be, now he thought of it. You’d need to get into that silly structure on top, even if it was only there to be looked at from the house. Andrew picked up the piece of broken slate he had used to scrape the lower rungs and slowly climbed the ladder, cleaning the droppings off the rest. The trapdoor wasn’t bolted so he pushed it up and climbed through.

  From three large arched windows the spring light dazzled in to the bare space. It was an octagon with a rounded ceiling under the outer dome. The windows were very dirty. It was the peeling whitewash which made it seem so bright after the gloom of the dovecote. He looked at the view. Funny—you couldn’t see the house from any of the windows, though there was what looked like a window in that direction on the outside. It must be false, behind the one blank wall. The other four walls had niches for statues. And the ceiling had been painted. You could see that, where the whitewash had peeled. There was a dove, with a thin-fingered hand reaching or pointing towards it. A foot, too, opposite the blank wall, standing on an odd curved something. Other bits, all as meaningless as scraps of jig-saw.

  For all its brightness and its nearness to the house (you could see the dovecote from all the front rooms) the octagonal space seemed extraordinarily secret and remote—an eyrie on a crystal cliff, waiting for its nest. Andrew looked slowly round.

  Yes, he thought. We’ll need something to lie on, of course.

  May, June 1944

  ONE

  Andrew’s first thought was that it oughtn’t to have happened that way. A chance for a moment of drama had been muffed. He should have been the first to meet the man—wheeling his bike up the drive on a Sunday evening on his way back to Southampton, and there would have been this stranger wandering down, shabby, battered, but with a soldier’s spine, looking about him with wondering vague eyes. The questions, the leap of understanding …

  Instead it had all happened while Andrew was off stage.

  “My dear boy,

  “You will be surprised to receive a letter from me, since we expect to be meeting again in so very few days, but I feel I must warn you that something decidedly startling has happened. As far as you are concerned it seems to me very bad news, though certain things you have said suggest that you may well have mixed feelings on the matter.

  “The fact is that a man claiming to be my brother Charles has returned to us, as it were from the dead. He—if it is indeed Charles, but though I have not yet made up my mind it is simplest to write on that assumption—is much altered since we knew him, but then he has lived a very hard life for more than twenty years, having lost his memory in the attack in which he was assumed to have been killed. He still remembers none of that, nor indeed anything much else in his life, either before or for some years after. Until recently his earliest memory was of waking on a park bench in the rain in some northern town and realizing that he did not know who he was. This was some time around 1930, he believes, though he is vague on many matters that are supposedly within his recollection. Since then he has barely survived, doing numerous jobs, obtained one imagines by his being well-spoken and evidently a gentleman, and then lost again.

  “So he might have continued, had it not been for this war. He was in Hull in the winter of 1942 when he was caught in an air raid. A bomb landed on the shelter in which he had taken refuge, killing half the occupants and burying the rest alive. By the time he was dug out he was in a poor way and was taken to hospital. While there he began to have a series of what he calls visions. He is unable to explain how these differed from ordinary dreams, except in their vividness, and the way they remained with him after he woke. Nothing happened in the dreams, except that he saw certain objects—a stuffed stag behind a billiard-table, a round tower standing in a green field with a structure like a greenhouse on top, a picture of a negro carrying a silver tray into a room, besides two or three other things less remarkable to those who know this house. Both while having them and afterwards he was convinced of the reality of these ‘visions’, and furthermore he asserts that from the very first time one occurred he became aware of his own real name, Charles Arthur Wragge.

  He made some attempt to interest his doctors and others in his ‘visions’ but was unable to get them taken seriously. He simply wandered about, surviving by begging (he seems to have neither ration-book nor identity card). In some ways this is the hardest part of his story to credit—I do not remember seeing a tramp since the beginning of this war. Be that as it may, some two months back he entered a public library to keep warm, and so as not to be ejected pretended to be reading a newspaper. His eye happened to be caught by a name in a company report: Father’s name.

  It took him some weeks to discover where we lived and then to make his way here and nerve himself to face us. He came, he says, not for the money but to try to ascertain the truth about himself, and especially whether anything in this house coincided with the details of his “visions”. The American sentry at the door sent him round to the kitchen entrance and Mary Jane came out and talked to him. Quite properly, she sent for me.

  “I was not at first much impressed, but having heard him out I took him by way of experiment up to Mother’s Boudoir and stood him at the window. He was silent for some while, though he betrayed signs of considerable agitation. Then he said, speaking like a man in a trance, so low I could barely catch the words, ‘The ladder went round and round’.

  Now, when we were small girls Charles used to steal the key of the dovecote and make us climb the ladder, with him at the bottom, and set it spinning, fast as he could drive it, with the doves whirling out around us. I can remember his laughter and May’s screams echoing together. Unfortunately I was not able to test this particular memory further, as May, who was in the room at the time, immediately blurted the story out. She, I may say, appears to have decided that there is no question but that the man is Charles. Father has been poorly and has refused to see him. I myself waver. Certain things that he says and does, such as the moment when he first saw the dovecote, seem utterly convincing, others less so. We have of course sent for the lawyers, but unfortunately the active partners in the Winchester firm are away fighting and our affairs are in the hands of old Mr Oyler, who is somewhat past the responsibility.

  “We have also to consider the problem of Charles’s wife, who is now as you know in Australia. Since she has remarried, and that marriage would become bigamous should this man indeed prove to be Charles, we have thought it kindest not to worry her until we stand on firmer ground.

  “I tell you all this, of course, so that you may give yourself time (wartime mail services permitting) to consider your own position before you see us on Friday. I need hardly tell you whose side I would be on, should it come to a contest. May I at least advise you not to commit yourself in any way (tho’ as a minor you may not be legally free to do so) until you have yourself consulted solicitors. Mutton and Boot in Bargate are I believe a very good firm, if their office still stands after the bombs.

  “Yours affctntly,

  “Elspeth Wragge”

  Wartime mail services permitted, just. The letter had come by the Friday post and Andrew found it when he went back to his lodgings to change out of his s
chool uniform and leave his books. He read it through twice, and then tried to do as Cousin Brown said and consider his position while he cycled the twenty-four miles out to The Mimms.

  It was mid-May now, pasture and plough and woodland all green as salad, and the underwoods smoky or skyey where the sun dappled through on to the bluebells. Cousin Brown had drawn him a map of a route along bye-lanes, safer she thought than the main roads with their thundering convoys of tanks and lorries; but now, as if brought on by the same forces as the uprush of summer growth, the pressure of armies round the ports increased every day until it was more than the main roads could hold and it squeezed itself out into narrower and yet narrower lanes, clogging them with grumbling khaki monsters. The pressure was not just physical. The whole landscape was tense with it, vibrated with it, with the churn of big engines, the rattle of tank-tracks, the scurry of despatch-riders, the clank clank of a mechanic repairing a Bren-gun-carrier in a farm gateway … the busy hammers closing rivets up.

  June, the GI at the camp had said. The first week, General Odway had hinted to Cousin Blue. The tensions gathered not just to the focus of the ports but also to a point in time, a few days, less than a month. Their energies seemed to suck everything in to that moment. Andrew, pumping his way up the hills, was a fleck, a straw, a gnat, battling against the whirl of the vortex. He almost felt, as you do in a nightmare, that at any moment the new bike would melt away and he would be plodding hopelessly towards ever-more-distant safety. When Cousin Brown had quoted the bit about the hammers last week-end he had of course pictured himself playing the king, musing alone and noble through his sleeping army. Now, with the real armies jostling round him, he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Bardolph, rubbed out of the script unnoticed, hanged off-stage.

  The nightmare made it impossible to think about Cousin Brown’s letter. He still believed that he didn’t want The Mimms, and its immense fortune, but in spite of what he had always told himself he had found that he would prefer to miss out on the noble poverty too. The comforts of his new existence—the lodgings Cousin Brown had found for him, the allowance she gave him, the good-as-new-bike with its five-speed gear and drop handles—were well worth having, but it wasn’t just that. Money gave you a sort of psychic space around you. You didn’t have to spend your time jostling among the sweaty and anxious. You moved on a larger stage. He would like something out of Uncle Vole’s will. Cousin Brown, though, seemed to be asking him to choose between having nothing and having everything. He couldn’t make up his mind.

  About six miles from The Mimms the lane dipped through beech-woods, crossed a main road and began to climb the last long hill before running along an undulating ridge and finally dropping to the valley that held the house. An immense ammunition dump filled the woods by the crossroads, long stacks of shells and ammo-boxes stretching away out of sight between the pale grey tree-trunks. Andrew had come to regard this as a landmark, an almost-there point. Just this one more hill. The main road was busy as anywhere, but beyond it the pressure of armies dwindled and he could think. He pushed both the nightmare and Cousin Brown’s letter out of his mind and thought instead about Jean.

  Last Sunday he had kissed her for the first time, leaning yokel-fashion across the stile below the farm, pretending to be old-man-exhausted after the scamper up through the plantation, barring her way without seeming to; then moving on with rehearsed naturalness to complain about having to ride all the way back to Southampton.

  “O, most dear mistress, the sun will set before I shall discharge what I must strive to do.”

  That had been Adrian/Ferdinand, as he helped her across the stile. A pause, looking into her eyes, still in the part, then Adrian alone—quizzical­, amused, professionally condescending.

  “You’ll have to practise a bit, you know.”

  She had waited, hypnotized, and let him put his arm round her shoulders and then break the spell by a brief brushing of lips, absolutely unfrightening. He had let go before she could push him away, laughing at the fun of play-acting the lover. She had begun to laugh too—with relief, mainly.

  As Cousin Brown had said, he was going to have to be extremely sensitive how he proceeded. Keep the momentum up, but not hurry or scare her. More “practice” this week-end. At the stile again, but a bit longer? See what offered. Saturday after, if it was the right kind of flick, take her to the back rows. Then … Then it would be almost June. Amusing if he could beat the invasion to it. But not essential.

  “This is Andrew,” said Cousin Blue. “Andrew, this is your cousin Charles. My brother, you know.”

  “How do you do, sir?”

  Andrew shook the trembling hand. The man frowned.

  “Andrew?” he murmured.

  His tweed jacket and grey flannels were slightly too small for him, though he was only a couple of inches taller than Andrew. Out of Uncle Vole’s wardrobe, of course—he’d have sold or lost his clothing coupons, if he ever had any. Andrew had expected him to be bald, like Uncle Vole, but he wore his silvery hair brushed back over the ears. His face was mottled and veined, purple over the bridge of the thin nose, and his mouth stayed slightly open in repose, as though he were about to drag it down in a grimace like poor Brian’s, but he spoke perfectly clearly, though in a tone of bewilderment.

  “The other branch,” said Cousin Blue. “Don’t you remember about Father quarrelling with his brother Oswald before he went to South Africa? I told you again last evening. We found dear Andrew only this Christmas. He is here to help Elspeth put on her little play.”

  “Ah. The play. Yes. Of course. So we are long-lost cousins, Andrew. Though I have been lost longer, I suppose. What a rum story.”

  “Not a relation for a breakfast, sir,” said Andrew.

  The man blinked and shook his head. He looked at his sherry glass.

  “But it is … ah … almost time for supper, is it not?”

  His voice was baffled, as if he was in a waking dream, where without warning a meal can become a different meal. The headshake had been right too. But the involuntary blink before—had that been different, a response to another sort of ambush?

  Cousin Blue laughed. Andrew had never seen her so lively.

  “I expect it’s a quotation from Tennyson or someone,” she said. “You must not tease poor Charles, Andrew. His memory is coming back, but it is still rather patchy—isn’t it, dear?”

  “Comes and goes, comes and goes … ah, Elspeth, allow me to introduce your cousin … tsk …”

  “Andrew and I are already well acquainted, thank you, Charles. I trust that the bicycle is still behaving.”

  “Going like a bird, thanks. Down hill, anyway. I’d have been earlier, but the lanes are crammed with convoys so you keep having to get off and climb into the hedge to let them past.”

  “Father is to have supper with us,” said Cousin Brown.

  “No!” said Cousin Blue. “Really he can be most trying. Do you know, Andrew, Father has been pretending to be ill and has refused to meet Charles, and now he is going to spring himself on the poor boy over supper.”

  “I … I shall be delighted to … er … see him again,” said Charles. “I suppose he is much changed. Not that I remember him clearly. Just a presence I sometimes think I can recall.”

  “Now, Andrew,” said Cousin Brown. “I want to talk to you about the rehearsal arrangements. I have the diary over here. If you will excuse us, Charles.”

  Andrew followed her to her desk by the further window of the Boudoir and joined in the pretence of looking at the rehearsal schedule. She kept her back to the room but signalled him round to stand sideways so that he could glance across to where the others were talking in front of the fireplace. Cousin May was whispering, her gestures ones of warning. The man reassured, made calming movements with his fingers. Andrew decided not to give him a private name yet. There could only be one Uncle Vole, but Charles might be one of
any number of Charleses. He tried to recall the family portrait in the saloon. The face … hard to tell. It had the weakness, but it had been battered by time and poverty and (to judge by the mottlings) drink. The boy’s soft nose might have hardened into that beakiness. But the pose was spot on, with the right hand in the trouser pocket and the left holding the empty sherry glass in the exact hesitant gesture of the portrait.

  “What do you think?” said Cousin Brown.

  “Did he stand like that before he saw the picture?”

  “You noticed? Yes. In here, when I first brought him up.”

  “I don’t see how …”

  “No more do I. We are presented with a few very striking details, but because of his loss of memory we have no way of testing them or anything else. I have only one straw to clutch at. I am convinced I have seen him somewhere.”

  “On the stage?”

  “I have been racking my brains and going through the diaries. It would have been some very minor part. Chekhov? Or is it that he has become a Chekhov character now?”

  “He could have acted a bit and still be your brother. I mean, he used to.”

  “Charles was an admirable Aguecheek. I have to admit to a bias. I do so much want you to be the one who inherits.”

  “Elspeth,” called Cousin Blue. “Charles has just remembered … Hurrah! There’s the gong! I must say all this excitement does wonders for the appetite. Dear Charles! So happy to have you back!”

  It looked as if Cousin Blue must have started losing at bridge—at least butter seemed to be back on rations again. Cousin Brown and Uncle Vole each had about two-thirds of a cylinder left, Cousin Blue less than half that. Charles had an ounce-size cube in front of his place, but Andrew had a perfect cylinder, stamped with a small “a” what’s more, to distinguish it from Uncle Vole’s capital. Only the colour told him it was marge—quite fair, since his ration-book stayed in Southampton, but he’d become used to the luxurious crumbs from General Odway’s table.