Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  “Bit premature to read this,” said Mr Oyler, “but since I’m here, and it’s here, and you’re all here, and we don’t want a lot of unnecessary speculation at a time of great uncertainty for us all, and there’s the difficulty of getting everyone together …”

  He drew a wheezing breath. The clerk took her chance to whisper in his ear.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “I’d best explain before I start that there are provisions in this will—my father drew it up … when was it? Oh, yes, 1922—provisions about which my father was dubious from the first … whether they would stand the test of the courts, you understand … supposing it came to litigation, that is. Sir Arnold was absolutely insistent, it seems. Be that as it may … ahem … in view of recent events, let us hope …”

  He glanced at Charles who was staring at his own shoes and did not stir. As the lawyer began to read, Andrew withdrew himself into his inner cave. The will was nothing to do with him. He would not move a muscle, breathe a breath, for the sake of a single penny of the estate. He would not even take an interest in the outcome. He let the words bumble against his mind like the flies against the window.

  “To Samuel Mkele, so long as he shall remain in service at The Mimms … To Mary Mkele … service at The Mimms … To Florence Lavender Franklin … The Mimms … The Mimms … The Mimms …”

  Endless commaless sentences. Jean would be at the cinema by now—he’d bike out and meet her on her way back. No rehearsal tomorrow. Church, of course. Black arm-bands? Uncle Vole’s death was not part of the plan but it was perfectly timed, heightening the drama, the feeling of world-change, of time rushing away, of a moment to be seized and clung to—she would feel that. He would see that she did. And at a tactical level the domestic upheavals meant that he could see just as much of her as he needed, judging his point each time at which to sigh and say he’d better be getting back to the house, so that by the time she cycled off to milking tomorrow afternoon … He must find an hour somewhere to get the eyrie ready. It looked like being a colder evening than he’d hoped for. They’d need something to cover themselves …

  “… my son Charles Arnold Bellamy Wragge … using their utmost diligence in such inquiry … failing such proof … my grandson John Nicholas Wragge … conditional upon his residence at The Mimms …”

  As Mr Oyler tired, his voice became hollow and dragging, a voice from the grave, muttering instructions—well said, old Vole, canst work i’ th’ ground so fast.

  “… predecease me, leaving no male issue … my house The Mimms … and all other structures whatsoever to be utterly demolished …”

  “No!”

  Cousin Blue’s shriek of protest shook Andrew from his trance and allowed his aural memory to reconstruct the rhythm of the preceding phrase and then to understand it. Mr Oyler looked up.

  “This is the provision about which my father was dubious,” he said. “Rightly, in my opinion. It could certainly be contested in the courts by any interested party, though the litigation might prove lengthy and costly, so let us hope …”

  His voice trailed away. He glanced towards Charles, as if expecting him to come to his rescue, but it was Cousin Brown who spoke.

  “May we have this quite clear? My father left instructions that a search was to be made for my brother Charles, and if he was found then the estate was to be his …”

  “After certain bequests and the settlements upon yourself and Miss May, yes, yes.”

  “If he was not found, then Nicholas was to be heir. And if Nicholas died before my father, leaving no children …”

  “No male issue …”

  “… then May and I and the servants would still get our share and after that something called the Wragge Foundation was to be set up, and everything left would be sold and put into it, except that this house and all its outbuildings had to be pulled down …”

  “Ridiculous!” said Cousin Blue. “He must have been of unsound mind.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cousin Brown. “It was absolutely typical of Father. He hated women.”

  Yes, thought Andrew. The old poison-spitter, in his prime of malice, twenty-five years ago, just after he’d lost his law case to get his hands on Nicholas, standing on his terraces one evening, looking at his view, hearing a daughter’s voice from behind his rose walk—May’s simper to some shiny fortune-hunter, perhaps, or had it been Elspeth hallooing to her actors—women, stupid cows, only good for a couple of functions. No harm in daughters, rounded the family out, wore the stones, gave the artist-Johnny something to paint. But it was the house that mattered, and a man in it, a man with your own name, living on for you when you were a goner and his sons doing the same after. You’d have thought Charles had the right ideas about women, way he treated his sisters—what did he want to go marrying that Aussie cow for? Couldn’t he have had her without? Had all the women he wanted on his allowance? Now there was only this brat, other side of the world. He’d come back for the money though, and boot his cow of a mother out for the money too. Must remember to put that in the bloody will. But suppose he went and died like Charlie … (May’s simper beyond the roses. Elspeth’s bray.) No! Nobody! Hang on as long as you can, squeeze the utmost relish from your pile, then when you’ve got to go wipe the slate clean. Finish.

  “… all so dreadfully complicated,” Cousin Blue was saying. “Such a good thing dear Charles came back to us in time, and we needn’t worry any more.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr Oyler. “It appears to have saved a great deal of trouble. Of course it would have saved yet more if Sir Arnold had lived long enough to clarify his wishes to me, but I have little doubt that it was to that end he sent for me at this juncture … Well, I think I have no need to read you the rest of this document, which concerns the detailed instructions for the establishment and running of the Wragge Foundation …”

  He began to push back his chair, closing the meeting, but as he did so his face changed. A quick look of surprise, replaced at once by wariness, came over it. At the same instant there was a muttering from the servants. Andrew turned his head and saw Samuel standing and holding up his hand, palm forward, fingers spread, not asking for attention but commanding it.

  Once in Chapel Miss Dandy, a quiet little spinster, had stood up just as the sermon was about to start and accused Mr Ruggles, the Minister, of breach of promise. Now in this other congregation Andrew felt much the same tangle of responses—embarrassment, shock, pity, inquisitiveness, relief from tedium and so on. You were aware of them before anything was said. It was the speaking-out-of-turn that aroused them—Miss Dandy, a woman, unmarried at that, and plain and poor too—Samuel, despite his long connection with the family still only a servant. Though he had been remembered in the will, the will wasn’t for him. Andrew could sense that the other servants, Mrs Mkele included, felt the same social shock.

  Ignoring them, Samuel spoke quietly but with complete confidence, in the Hampshire accent he normally used only below stairs.

  “You haven’t told us, sir, what and if this Mr Charles turns out to be not our Mr Charles after all.”

  “Really! Samuel!” said Cousin Blue.

  Mrs Mkele whispered and tugged at the hem of Samuel’s jacket. He put down his hand and eased her fingers loose, then stood waiting.

  “Ahem,” said Mr Oyler, waiting too and looking towards Charles, who simply shrugged his shoulders and half-spread his hands.

  “I think it would be as well to clear the point up,” said Cousin Brown.

  “Quite unnecessary,” said Cousin Blue. “We must offer Mr Oyler some tea before he goes.”

  Mr Oyler turned helplessly to his clerk, who took the will from him, turned a couple of pages, pointed and whispered. Mr Oyler sighed and whispered back. Andrew cursed. If this was going to drag on he wouldn’t have biked out far enough by the time he met Jean coming back. He wanted her to feel his eagerness, to be sure of him, tr
usting … At last the clerk prodded Mr Oyler back to his duty.

  “The contingency in question,” he said, “… of course Miss Elspeth is right … I shall have to look into it … naturally it is not covered in the will itself … I may have to take further advice, but my impression—please note that it is only an impression—is that the only parties who could bring a case disputing the authenticity of a claimant are those whose interest is affected, and since the other provisions of the will would stand the only such parties are the Trustees of the proposed Wragge Foundation. Most unfortunately the original appointees have all deceased, and, ahem, for some reason fresh Trustees seem not to have been appointed …”

  “You mean that I, or Andrew here, or even Samuel, could not bring such a case?” said Cousin Brown.

  “I think not, Miss Elspeth. That is to say you would have to contest the whole will, not merely Mr Charles’s right to inherit. Any such move would involve extremely protracted and costly litigation. Let us most sincerely hope it can be avoided.”

  Again he pushed back his chair and half rose, but again he was stopped by a gesture from Samuel.

  “It’d be something for the police, too, wouldn’t it, sir?” he said.

  This time Mr Oyler completed his movement and rose. He passed the will to the clerk, who folded it and tied its pink ribbon round it.

  “I doubt if the police would be interested,” he said. “If the family recognize Mr Charles, which they appear to do, that would satisfy them. They are extremely busy these days. There is a war on, you know.”

  The clerk tucked the will at last into Mr Oyler’s briefcase and snapped and locked the clasp. Nothing for me, thought Andrew. Not a mention. Be free and fare thou well.

  The mood stayed with him as he pumped up the drive, past the camp gate. A convoy of empty lorries was jolting across towards the wood. He could see men waiting in paraded lines beneath the trees. Some smaller trucks, closed and not canvas-topped, were parked near Sergeant Stephens’s store shed, having their camouflage touched up it looked like, but then something on one of them slipped and a whole square of cloth flopped down, revealing a large white circle with a red cross on it. Of course, you don’t let the heroes notice the ambulances, not on their way to the war. For once the notion didn’t fill him with dread. The confidence, the sense of power and invulnerability that had welled up in him as he gazed down on Uncle Vole’s dead body was strong enough to make him feel that when the time came somehow the same power would be there to rescue him from between the closing talons. And meanwhile there was Jean.

  Twenty minutes later he crossed a crest and saw her already started down the opposite slope. He put on a spurt till the wind whined round his ears, and when he had made up ground he freewheeled, timing his descent so that they came swooping effortlessly down to meet in the valley bottom.

  “Now you’ve got to climb the whole way back up,” she said. “You should’ve waited for me at the top.”

  “Couldn’t.”

  SEVEN

  She had begun to sob, a gentle watery sound that blended with all the other noises of the evening, the bubbling call of a dove below, the crackle of the camp tannoy, and the drumming of lorry after lorry crossing the park loaded with soldiers. There had been thousands of them in the camp two nights back. Tonight all but a hundred or two would be gone. Tomorrow they would be across the Channel, fighting their way on to the beaches, and you and you and you would be dead.

  Andrew lay on his back listening, with his hands beneath his head and the peeling dome above him. The canvas of the old cart-cover rasped on his naked shoulder-blades. Under the eiderdown, borrowed from Florrie’s linen-room, Jean’s fingers drifted over his rib-cage.

  “You shouldn’t’ve. You shouldn’t’ve,” she whispered.

  All his choice then? No will of her own? So wholly in his power? Anyway, her fingers said she was lying.

  The painted fingers on the ceiling were saying something too as they reached for the dove. There were yellowish lines to their left, loose curves. Hair. And the foot—that thing it was standing on was a scallop shell. Instantly all the other fragments of paint came into their context, spoke. There were three fingers of the other hand, covering a breast. An edge of floating gauze. A wave-crest. Venus, landing from the sea, new-naked. And there would have been satyrs in the niches, or nymphs. A bed, here, where the cart-cover was, against the blanked-off window—no wonder you weren’t meant to see in from the house! The old goat!

  He almost laughed aloud, but stopped himself. Mustn’t spoil the mood. Her sobs were satisfying to both of them in different ways. And it wasn’t the sort of joke she’d enjoy.

  Perhaps it had been a young goat, though. Long before Uncle Vole, two hundred years ago, living in the house Uncle Vole had pulled down to build his new one, plonking this extravagant top-knot on to the squat old dovecote so that he’d have somewhere to bring his milkmaids to. No, not milkmaids, actresses lured down from London. They’d know what the room was—a private theatre, a wooden O, for a play by a cast of two who were their own and only audience. Now Andrew had staged it again, after all these years.

  The discovery was immensely exhilarating. It wasn’t a fluke. He had felt it the moment he’d first climbed through the hatch, had understood the essence of it in his bones, had refused other chances—the night she had slept in the Ivory Room, or last Sunday night, kissing good-bye at midnight through Mrs Oliphant’s window—because he had recognized what this place was and known that the play must be staged here. The room was sacred to the act, built for this ritual, this triumph, wrought by his sole power, his Art. To savour the moment more he let Adrian slip free, turn and look down, cool and benign, on the tableau, the yellow satin eiderdown, Andrew full face and smiling at the ceiling, Jean’s ginger head in profile on his bare left arm.

  “My brave spirit!”

  The murmur set Jean off again.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t’ve!”

  Rot. She had bought her own ticket for the performance. She had stood at the bottom of the ladder on the floor they had swept together, softly calling his name. He had raised the trapdoor.

  “Come down.”

  He had shaken his head. She had climbed slowly up the ladder, looking into his face, seeing in his eyes what was going to happen, knowing it must because she wanted it too. That was important. It always would be. The triumph didn’t lie in persuading them to pay for their tickets, but in causing them to experience all the exhilaration of the event, to be swept up, rapt, made into something more than themselves for as long as the performance lasted, and then to go home changed. All that he had done for her.

  He slid his arm from under her head, rose on his elbow and eased her on to her back so that he could gaze down at her. The only undesigned element was the lighting, not the gold summer dusk he had asked for but almost better, a storm buffeting the dirty panes, a heavy, drab light but still enough to let him see the tender-to-the-touch look under the freckled skin, and the wet half-open lips and the greenish eyes blurred with tears. He bent his head to lick as much as kiss the salty lashes, but she nuzzled her mouth upward, looking for his. The wind thumped against the glass. Further off, but still part of its roar, the lorries trundled another load of Americans away to the tempest on the beaches.

  April 1986

  Do you keep count?”

  “Of what?”

  “How many of us?”

  “I don’t think about the past much.”

  “You like reading your press cuttings.”

  “That’s different.”

  “You’re only awake on the stage? Everything else is dreams, the sort you can’t remember?”

  “In a manner of speaking. We are such stuff.”

  Adrian was lounging in the corner of the sofa wearing a blue silk dressing-gown over shirt and slacks. The girl, in black jeans and black angora jersey, cuddled catlike at his sid
e. It was after midnight. On the low table to his right lay the remains of the supper she had had ready for his return from the theatre—raie au beurre noir, a pear, a half bottle of Meursault, brandy. The fire murmured to itself. The attitudes of the couple had a composed look, not because there was any audience but because it was part of a deliberate exercise in relaxation after the tensions of a big performance. The girl’s skill in conforming to the ritual was as important as her looks or her cooking. Perhaps Adrian’s satisfaction, though he had not expressed it in words, had prompted the question.

  “Do you want me to give you a list?”

  “Course not. I’m not jealous, promise. Only sometimes, when you’re not here, I’m sort of haunted. You know, when I was a little girl I used to sit in buses and things and wonder about all the people who’d sat in that seat before me, and it felt—I don’t know how to say it—well, as if they’d left a sort of shimmer of themselves there, lives inside lives inside lives, like an onion, and me in the middle. Don’t you feel that sometimes?”

  “I am far too conscious of my own uniqueness. I have never given a moment’s thought to any of your other lovers.”

  “There’ve only been three!”

  “You have a life before you.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone after you.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Body and soul?”

  “If you want them.”

  He did not answer, but with his free hand picked up a morsel of broken roll, mopped it round the congealed butter on his plate and chewed.

  “Nice?”

  “Excellent.”

  “I’ve got veal in cream and calvados for tomorrow.”

  “We’re eating in town tomorrow. Will it keep?”

  “Oh. Me too?”

  “If you please. Benny is over.”