by Peter Benson
“I know.”
“I didn’t…” and she pulled away. I turned back to the suitcase and said, “I’ll pack some things for you.”
“Thank you,” she said, and she lay back and watched me.
It was half-past three. I know this was the time because I checked it before I picked up the case and said, “I have to fetch some things from the shop. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
“I’ll be here,” she said.
I opened the door and stepped onto the landing outside my rooms. Sun was streaming in the window. It pooled on the floor, dripped over the banisters and trickled down the stairs towards the rooms below. I could hear someone playing a violin. I remember it was beautiful – a slow, melancholic melody. It matched my mood. And I remember looking at my doormat and hearing a faint shuffle. I saw a shadow rearing up behind me, dark and malevolent. It was straight and then it curved towards me, but before I could turn or duck, I was hit. I have no idea what he used or how hard it fell, but he was strong. It happened in a split second, and I was shot through with heat and pain. The sunlight failed. The music twisted and I looked up, and before I blacked out I knew who was standing over me, and I heard him say, “Fool…” But then I was gone. No dreams, no memory and no time, just black pouring down and down to nothing.
I fell down hard. I twisted my arm behind my back and clipped my head on the skirting board. I felt the wood, but by the time I hit the floor I was unconscious. Out cold and dreaming of school. Coal-tar soap, mud peeling away from old shoes, scratching shirts, towels. The dark place under the chapel where the coal was stored. Damp towels, damp blankets, damp floors and fists.
When I was at school I avoided the worst of boy terror by being the one who sat by a window, gazed into the distance and carried a book. I only got into trouble when I opened my mouth. No one likes someone who thinks they know more than anyone else. I never thought this about myself, but there were boys who thought I did, and when I was boarding in Dorset, my chief tormentor was Nigel Russeter.
He was a promising cricketer and tipped for great things. He could bowl an unplayable ball, field like a cat, and his straight bat and superb footwork had been described by the cricket master as “a combination of the instinctive, the preternatural and the musical”. This praise had gone to the boy’s head, and he believed, at the age of sixteen, that he was invincible. Connections guaranteed him a place at Cambridge, where first-class cricket was also guaranteed. So when, following one of his rambling observations about the superiority of the English, I suggested to a history class that it was amazing a game as tedious as cricket was such an important element in the empire-builders’ policy of divide and rule, I was smacked on the neck with a ruler by a livid Russeter, and told to look forward to a damn good thrashing.
That evening, after supper, I was walking down the top corridor, reading an atlas. I was looking at a map of Paraguay when a door opened and I was pulled into Nelson Dorm by Russeter and two of his friends, Milton St George and Perks.
Milton St George had red hair and a large face, and was always eating something, usually a piece of sponge cake. Perks was pasty and sweaty, wore glasses and sniffed a lot.
“Morris,” said Russeter, as if he was surprised to see me. He had a cricket bat in his hand.
“Russeter…” I said, as if I was almost too tired to say his name.
Milton St George closed the door and stood in front of it. Perks blinked at me and licked his lips.
“So. Cricket is a tedious game?” he said. He looked at the others and they smiled.
“Yes.”
Russeter shook his head. “What does your father do?”
“He’s a parson.”
“A parson, Morris? Not a bishop? Maybe an archbishop?”
“No, Russeter, a parson.”
“And he has a nose, I hope?”
They all laughed at the joke.
“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s in the middle of his face.”
“You see?” Russeter’s face reddened and he turned to Milton St George. “He thinks he’s clever.”
“My father’s a baron,” said Milton St George.
“And mine’s a judge,” said Perks.
“Really,” I said.
“Yes,” said Russeter. “And when someone like you, someone who doesn’t even deserve to be here, starts lecturing class about things he doesn’t understand…”
“You tell him, Russeter,” said Perks.
“Well… people like that have to be taught a lesson.”
At this point, I was grabbed by Milton St George and hauled over a bed. I was pushed face down, and while Perks knelt on my shoulders and Milton St George held my legs, Russeter started hitting my backside with the cricket bat. I started to yell, and a minute later Mr Thomas the housemaster came running to see what the rumpus was about. Russeter convinced him we were all simply celebrating the end of term, and after being told that it was high time we behaved like adults, we were sent to our own dormitories to think about what we had done.
I thought carefully about what I had done, and decided to never let it happen again.
The following term, Russeter was a house monitor. And when he called me to his study and told me that my opinion of the French – I had informed a language class that they were the most cultured nation on earth – was tantamount to treason, he hit me on the head with a copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Angry and no longer prepared to be treated like a punchbag, I grabbed a stool and pushed him in the stomach. He was surprised. I had caught him off balance, and he tipped sideways into a bookcase. The bookcase swayed, toppled over and crushed his legs. I heard a pair of nasty cracks, ran from the room and called for help. When Mr Thomas arrived, I explained that Russeter had slipped while trying to fetch a copy of The Iliad from the top shelf. While the matron shook her head and arranged for a doctor’s visit, Mr Thomas told me I had done the right thing. And I was not to worry. My friend was strong and brave, and did I know that Hampshire County Cricket Club had offered him a place in their youth team? Boys like that, he said, were survivors.
Boys like that are not survivors. I destroyed Russeter’s chances of being a cricketer, and although even he said it had been an accident, I knew he knew. He was just too ashamed to tell anyone that someone like me had beaten him, and the last I heard, he was working as a livestock auctioneer in Hampshire, dreams shattered, living in a boring town, married to a woman who grew sluggish and gave him three arrogant children.
When I woke up, I was lying on the landing. I could hear a bright, raging ringing, and beyond this, a distant piano. My downstairs neighbour was shaking me, and when I sat up he said, “What happened to you?”
I touched my head and felt the back of my neck. I had a damp, weeping bump there. It was the size of a prune. I winced. He gave me his hand and helped me up. I perched on the window sill. “I don’t know,” I said. The ringing got louder. My shopping basket was lying on the landing below.
“Is that yours?”
I nodded.
He fetched the basket, carried it up, put it on the floor beside me and said, “Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Are you quite sure?”
I nodded while he poked his head into my rooms. When he looked back at me his face was white and he stammered, “Well I…” but did not finish whatever it was he was trying to say.
“Look,” I said, but I could not finish what I was going to say either. He was scared and I was aching, and when I said, “Go back home. I’ll be fine,” he turned and went downstairs with a relieved sigh.
Isabel had put up a fight. The rug in the hall was rucked up, and the occasional table was on its side. A nice vase was smashed, and flowers and water spread across the floor. I went through to the sitting room; my old oak bookshelf was upended and books were strewn around. A candle stand my father had given me when he left Dover was lying on its side, the candles broken. The prints of Edinburgh were crooked,
and an armchair was facing the wrong way. As I picked my way through the wreckage, my head heated up and the bump on the back of my neck began to throb. I kicked a cushion across the room and picked up a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Its spine was broken. I flicked my way through the pages, lingered on the lines “Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war, How to divide the conquest of thy sight…” put the book on the arm of the settle and sat down. There was a whining in my ears, and my eyes watered.
For a moment I thought about calling her name, but there was no point, no point at all. I called it anyway – “Isabel?” – and as her name echoed around the rooms, I was hit by loss, as if something had been ripped out of my chest and shattered, and the pieces buried in a mine. A deep, hidden mine, a place I had visited before and thought I would never see again. I had pictures of this place and music to remind me. Sometimes I played the songs in my head while I looked at the pictures and allowed my throat to tighten. And sometimes I simply sat alone and imagined the place. I said her name again – “Isabel?” – and the sense deepened and filled, and my empty, rubbished rooms wagged their fingers at me and told me to go.
I took a hackney to Kew. It was expensive, but did I care? I did not. My head was boiling. The bruise on my neck was screaming. Sweats had broken out all over my body. My eyes were smarting. The gaps between my teeth had filled with salt and my tongue was swollen. Anger boiled inside me, and I rhymed Hunt’s name over the rattle of the cab.
It was half-past four when I left Highbury and began the crawl down Upper Street. When we reached the Angel, we were forced to stop for a few minutes. There had been an accident. A child had fallen under the hooves of a horse, and a woman was wailing over the little body. I saw someone bring a blanket, as another tried to comfort the woman. There was a puddle of blood on the cobbles, and a small rag doll lay in the gutter, stained red and brown. I almost stepped out to help, but there was enough help already, and enough commotion. So I stared and listened and was taken to musing.
Ancient stones used to stand at the Angel. Thousands of years ago people came from miles to visit them, and beyond a grass oval and the high circle of stones, trees stretched towards the river, the marshes and downs. No one knows what these people did. Some say they worshipped the sun, others believe they slaughtered calves on a platform and washed the stones with the blood. The blood dried, the people left, the place looked like it had changed but it never did. Everything remains the same even though there are shops and offices and public houses there now, and the people wear smart clothes and walk their dogs on the raised pavements. Yes – I thought, wrongly as it turned out – maybe nothing really changes, and when the way was clear and we were allowed to continue our journey, all my thoughts collided in fury and crisis, and I beat my knees with my fists until we were past the King’s Cross and heading towards the west.
Less than an hour later I was in Kew. I had the hackney wait for me by the entrance to the gardens, and set off to look for… what? A house? There were too many with hidden drives, and I had to stalk around walls and hedges and pretend I was lost. Dogs barked and cats arched, and once a woman asked me what I was doing and I’d better be away sharpish or she’d call her husband. She had a fat face and grey eyes. I apologized in my best voice and explained I was looking for my mother’s cat. “It disappeared last week and she’s frantic with worry.”
“Oh, I am sorry,” said the woman, different now and touching her face and hair. “I know how desperate it can be when you lose a pet. I lost my dog last year. He was such a lovely companion, such a joy,” and she was about to tell me a story about love and regret and worry, but I hurried on. On and round I walked, back on myself and up dead ends, and past another two dozen houses with neat hedges and locked gates. I felt my mind as it started to thrash and fail, and was ready to turn around and go home when I came upon a house with a weedy drive and an untidy hedge. The place was big, the curtains were pulled shut and it simply shouted “This is the one!” to me. A waiting horse and carriage stood by the door. I had nothing to lose, so I went to the pair of iron gates at the end of the drive. They were open, but the drive was straight, and anyone walking up it could be seen from the house. So I walked on, climbed a low wall and jumped down into an overgrown garden. I fought my way through brambles and shrubs until I came to the edge of a lawn, and crouched behind a bush.
The place looked deserted, but there was a suitcase on the front step. I sat down and waited as I had waited in Ashbrittle, surrounded by twittering birds and rustling voles, and I caught a smell of the countryside. I remembered hay and flies on cows and twists of wool caught in barbed wire. The sound of water running beneath the trees, stones moving through the water, one inch a day, one inch a day. I thought about yielding and I thought about chickens. I thought I heard chickens in that shrubbery in Kew, the sounds they made breaking into me, leading me to think about mad people who take other people and how change will break us all but does not have to. I picked a leaf from a bush and held its panic between my fingers, the cells in the fading leaf crying back to the bush, and all this madness kept me still and watching until the front door opened and Hunt emerged. He picked up the suitcase, lifted it onto the carriage’s luggage rack, and went back to the house. I heard the door close, but it did not latch. I stood up. I listened to my body. My breathing was fast but steady. I waited a moment, then ran from the shrubbery, across the edge of the drive and up to the corner of the house.
I ducked down and walked beneath two windows to the door. I pushed it open. It made no sound and stopped halfway.
The hall was long and dark, lined with doors. There was a Chinese ginger jar on a low table, and a picture of a dog with odd eyes. They looked like grapes. At the end of the hall I could see into the kitchen, and dirty light spilt through the windows onto the floor. There was a rush mat there and dust balls in the corners.
When I was eight, my school friend Simon Harmon told me about dust balls. They waited under your bed, and when you were asleep they stole your dreams, stored them in their minds and worked out what you wanted. They had millions of eyes and could look in every direction at once, even inside themselves. They whispered to each other, and when I was at school and sunlight filled my room, they came out from under my bed, sat in groups and composed music. They sold the music to the motes that chimed in sunlight, but kept the finest tunes to themselves. Like Mozart, they believed rests were the best parts of music, but by this time I did not know what Simon was talking about. But I listened to him because his father was a surgeon and had once attended a minor member of the Royal Family who had a skin complaint.
Dust balls and motes enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The motes returned the favour by finding dust and carrying it to the balls and building eyes out of grit. They could also build ears, mouths, tongues and fingertips, but eyes were their favourites. I think Simon Harmon became a surgeon too, but I am not sure. I remember he was a good singer, had blonde hair and believed tunnels riddled the ground beneath the streets of Dover.
I heard someone moving about upstairs, and a chair scraped across the floor. I stepped inside and stood at the bottom of the stairs. The air smelt damp and old, like the air in a church-hall kitchen. I heard him shout, “Get up!” and a door slammed. The sound of his voice sent the blood racing to my head. I did not think. I climbed the stairs without worrying about stepping on a loose board, and was halfway up when I saw Isabel. She was standing on the landing, wearing a white coat. I leapt up the last stairs as Hunt appeared behind her. His hair was wild and his face was shining with sweat. He was carrying the black bag, and the surprise of seeing me there stopped him in his tracks. For a second, he showed me his shrewd and charming face, but then the mask dropped, the darkness came and he narrowed his eyes. “You!” he hissed.
“Yes,” I said to him, and then I yelled “Get down!” at Isabel. She dropped to her knees. As soon as she did I put my head down, jumped over her, ran towards him and smashed into his chest. He grabbed the door frame, swiv
elled and pushed me over. I rolled onto the floor, turned and looked up. As I did, he threw the bag at my head. I ducked, and as the bag hit the floor, it broke open and phials of the potion she needed spilt out. Some rolled across the landing, slipped through the banisters, dropped onto the stairs and smashed. More bumped against the skirting board as Hunt shouted something in German and aimed a kick at my head. I grabbed his foot and pulled him over, and as he fell I punched him in the stomach. The air shot from his body with a squeal, and when he was down I stood up and stamped on the small of his back. “Go!” I yelled to Isabel. She grabbed the bag, scooped up as many phials as she could and ran down the stairs.
As she disappeared, Hunt turned over and pushed himself up. His face was screwed with fury, and blood was dripping from his nose. He caught some on his tongue and spat it at me. I swivelled and kicked him in the chin. He made a sound like a hot glass shattering on a tin table. Two of his teeth fell out. He pointed at me and opened his mouth, but before he could say anything he fell back, lay on the floor and let out a long sigh.
My foot hurt, and I wanted to be sick. Bile shot into my mouth. My teeth felt like silver. More blood came from his nose and bubbled over his lips. I doubled up, and flashes of light came and ripped behind my eyes.
I looked over the banisters. Isabel was crouching in the hall, the black case tucked into the space between her knees and chin.
“David?” she said.
“Yes…” I said.
Hunt wheezed.
I stood up, wobbled and stepped on a phial. As it cracked, the sweet smell exploded around me. Isabel wailed. I heard a dog barking. There was a window at the end of the landing, and a tree outside. Its branches were rubbing against the glass. I said, “Give me the bag.”
Isabel climbed the stairs. I picked up three phials. Hunt was quiet but breathing. She looked at him. She said, “Wait a minute,” and opened a door. I saw an unmade bed, clothes on the floor, a desk and long, heavy curtains. She fetched a brass waste-paper bin from beneath the desk, came back and as she stepped over Hunt she slammed it against the side of his head as if it was something she had only just thought of doing. He gasped, and blood trickled from the wound. She looked at the bin in her hand like she was surprised to see it and did not understand what was going on, and threw it down the landing, turned, pushed past me and walked down the stairs. I picked up the bag and followed. She took her coat from a rack by the front door, wrapped it over the white coat and pulled the cowl over her head. She stepped outside and started to run. I caught up with her in the street, took her hand and pulled her towards the gardens.