‘Strange?’ Christina said.
‘Yes,’ Jago said. ‘I don’t know. Just strange. And how is it you come to look so different?’
Christina laughed. She shrugged. ‘Papa’s Girl. Mama’s Girl,’ she said, tongue in cheek. ‘Virgin Birth, maybe? How should I know.’ She did not say that her sister had been adopted. She was wishing then to have Jago concentrate entirely upon herself. Enjoying the balm of their benign aloneness there in the car park, she felt enclosed by the faint hum of traffic and by the rustle of trees from the wood.
‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ she said.
Jago avoided the question. It was not one that, at any time, he felt equipped to answer. Did he have a brother? Yes, he had. He had had a twin brother about whom he fancied that he retained some shadowy memory. Or had it merely been that the first of the au pairs – that young Frenchwoman, who had wrenched him free from his mother – had undertaken, artificially, to reconstruct his recollections in those first, early months?
When Jago thought about his brother, it was all to do with presence; nothing to do with physiognomy. Nothing tangible. A silhouette; a dream-time doppelgänger; a sense of movement caught at the corner of the eye when the head turned suddenly; an occasional, curious apprehension of altered smell and light that always faded within the moment.
The same was true for his mother. She was a presence without definition. Once, long ago, he had had a mother and a brother. They had gone. Back to France. The south of France. Somewhere near the Spanish border. How was it he knew that? Because, other than that, he knew nothing. No detail. His father had simply erased the subject. It wasn’t on the menu. Charles Rutherford – with whom Jago continued to have a perfectly easy, chappish sort of communion – had so effectively wound a bramble hedge around the question, that it had become impossible for Jago to think of asking.
And then, as he struggled to blot out Christina’s question, something else of greater immediacy flashed upon the inward eye. The clipboard. Shit! He had handed Pongo the clipboard just as he’d met Christina. And the clipboard had his name on it. Plus his handwriting, of course. And the ghouls would – of course – whoop and shriek their way drunkenly through the wood. And get caught – of course.
The bloody wood was private property, was it not? Seriously out of bounds. It belonged to old Sir Peregrine. Sir P had been known to get pretty shirty if boys were found trespassing there. So had the housemaster. And, even if they didn’t get caught, Pongo would, in all likelihood, abandon the bloody clipboard with its list of bogus names. It would be returned to the school and its purpose duly investigated.
In the cold night air, Jago began to realize that he had probably gone over the top. His crazy, driving anger had got the better of him that evening. He had invaded householders’ privacy and had given offence to the citizenry. Especially to a number of apprehensive younger women. And definitely to that Catholic party with the papal tack in the hall.
Oh, Jesus, and he had even gone so far as to offer his arm here and there. Could this be interpreted as molestation? Attempted assault? It was certainly possible that the Catholic party might guess at their schoolboy status and lodge a complaint with the Head. Might somebody even go so far as to contact the police?
God in heaven, but the barrow had better find its way back, pronto, to its position alongside the gardener’s toolshed from whence Pongo had been moron enough to take it. Yet the first priority just had to be to get the clipboard back from said moron. He would have to abandon Christina for the moment and get the groupies to return by road. Then, with luck, she’d have no objection to returning the wheelbarrow with him before they went on to Henry’s party.
Jago, unlike the groupies, was completely serious about his future. He fully intended to go far. He had always been elitist and open-eyed about his abilities, particularly in maths. Then again, the groupies’ parents were all backed by huge amounts of money – far more money than his own father could ever begin to dream of. Their post-school role in life would be to fart around and play the stock market and fly small, private aircraft, etcetera, until they stepped into directorships and married vacuous, tittering women who would then give birth to the groupies of the twenty-first century.
Jago had always taken it as read that he would get into Cambridge. Brilliant exam performance coupled with glowing reports from his Head and housemaster would be his open sesame. And, right now, he was fucked if bloody Ned Portius and Co. – if one indiscreet but unimpressive prank – was going to snatch all that from him.
‘Chris,’ he said. ‘Will you excuse me? But only for a moment. Look. I’ll have to go after them. They’ll end up breaking their legs, you know – falling into rabbit holes and Christ knows what. They’ll certainly call out Sir Whatshis-name. Say. You will wait for me, won’t you? Wait inside, Chris. It’s warmer. I’ll pull them out in a flash, I promise, and make them go by road.’
Jago took off the white coat. He handed it to her and then he turned to go. ‘Wait for me,’ he said.
‘I’ll wait,’ Christina said. His concern for the unworthy revellers was, in a way, rather impressive, she considered. And what the hell. Had she not waited for him two whole years already?
Shortly thereafter, Jago found himself fuming as he stumbled, through the uncompromising dark, on the roots of Sir Peregrine’s oak trees. He caught his clothes on brambles. And where the fuck had the groupies got to, that they had managed to outpace him so quickly? Christina, he fretted, would be beginning to wonder where on earth he was.
Pam, meanwhile, was all alone in the tiny, ancient church in the wood, appointed for her rehearsal. It was a thousand years old that year. She had come to the conclusion, earlier, that Peter had been held up and that she ought to proceed there ahead of him. She could accompany herself as she sang.
She knew that Peter had been visiting Roland’s parents near Lyme Regis and that the two elderlies were due to deliver him back in time for this extra, last-minute run-through. She knew, also, that Roland’s parents were planning to stay over and attend St Elfreda’s birthday concert which was to happen in two days’ time.
Music was just one of the things that Pam and Peter shared. Both of them had piano lessons and Peter had, in addition, become quite accomplished as an organist. He loved to play and, because of his special access to the school chapel during the holidays, he had had ample opportunity to practise.
Pam took voice lessons. She had a beautiful soprano voice and Lady Vanessa, her teacher, was as anxious as Pam’s parents to see that it was properly nurtured.
Lady Vanessa was Sir Peregrine’s wife. The elderly couple lived quietly in a pretty little gamekeeper’s cottage within the wood that adjoined the school. The school had acquired its present premises, shortly after World War I, when the incumbent nobleman – Sir Peregrine’s late uncle – his four sons killed in the war, had decided to sell up and retreat to smaller quarters.
After dismissing the servants and shipping the last of the ancestral portraits off to the auction house, he had retired gratefully to the gamekeeper’s cottage, along with a pair of guns, a half-dozen pipes, and two devoted labradors. Then the school had moved into the big house.
Upon the old man’s death, Sir Peregrine had inherited the cottage along with the wood. He and Lady Vanessa, a one-time concert soprano, were a devoted, childless couple. They had decided, some eight years previously, to give up their lives in Chelsea and retire to the cottage. Ever since, they had had excellent relations with the school and had become particular friends of Roland and Gentille. Lady Vanessa was godmother to Roland’s younger daughter Lydia.
In addition, she had come to consider Pam and Peter as her ‘special’ young people. She was charmed by their decorous friendship and found them most adorably old-fashioned. Besides, Pam’s voice was a responsibility and a challenge. She felt that the project kept her young.
Peter frequently accompanied Pam when she walked the five hundred metres into the wood for her singing less
ons. These took place in Lady Vanessa’s sitting-room which was only just big enough to accommodate her two young guests along with herself and her upright piano. The rest of the space was taken up with Lady Vanessa’s collection of antique dolls’ houses and with a small musical curiosity. This was a portable, seventeenth-century reed organ, which Lady Vanessa had acquired along the way and which she was delighted to have Peter play.
Among a multitude of laudable projects, all of which kept her young, Lady Vanessa had championed the restoration of the tiny, tenth-century church of St Elfreda’s. It had stood, neglected and half derelict, in the wood near her home. Public subscription, charity concerts and all manner of local and metropolitan effort had gone into its restoration, until St Elfreda’s, complete with new roof, new bell rope, anti-damp treatment, wall-mounted oil lamps and well-tended churchyard, was once again a functioning church. It was visited, occasionally, by a local vicar and had become a popular venue for weddings and memorial services.
Lady Vanessa’s assiduous local researches, including her perusal of the Domesday Book, had satisfied her that this was the year of St Elfreda’s thousandth birthday, and it was to mark this occasion that she had arranged a special concert during which Pam would sing a variety of sacred songs, accompanied by Peter on the reed organ.
For this purpose – although there was a perfectly usable piano in there already – she had had the reed organ transferred to the church which, for the duration, was to be kept locked. Pam and Peter had been issued with one precious key to share in case of impromptu rehearsals. The key was an enormous black iron item and Lady Vanessa had impressed upon them that to replace it, should it be lost, would cost her two hundred pounds.
Lady Vanessa had also undertaken to see that Pam and Peter were given special dispensation to go to the church whenever they were free. To exercise this recent and temporary privilege had given both young people particular delight and they had planned to spend the early part of Saturday evening there together, running through the programme. The final rehearsal was to be with Lady Vanessa the next day and they wanted to do her proud.
Pam had never been afraid of being alone in the dark. Nor was she ever afraid of being alone in old churches. She felt their aura of sanctity. And, besides, St Elfreda’s had become a very familiar edifice. Armed with a torch, she had walked the short distance through the wood and, having turned the huge key in the lock, she had entered and set about lighting the lamps in the front half of the church. After that, she had opened the piano and had begun to warm up.
Then she worked at the Purcell Te Deum for St Cecilia’s Day. Pam was especially fond of the Te Deum. She had told Peter, just the previous week, that St Ambrose and St Augustine had sung it together at the baptism of St Augustine. The anecdote had charmed Peter, who – not knowing, then, that St Augustine had been a black man; an African – had seen, in his mind’s eye, the two tall saints as blond, long-haired Duccio figures in pale, flat gold haloes, their mouths making shapes like smoke rings.
Pam’s voice conveyed a peculiarly appealing combination of personal humility and spiritual certainty as it rose to the wooden roof beam of the little church with its rush mat floor-covering and scrubbed wooden chairs. When she stopped, the silence hummed at her strangely.
She looked at her watch. ‘Oh, come on, Petie,’ she said. She sat for a moment taking in the smell of recent washing soda along with the ancient smell of stone until she became aware, suddenly, that the silence had developed a kind of rhythm and that the rhythm was the sound of someone breathing. It was coming from the back of the church.
Pam made her way up the aisle, keeping the beam of her torch low on the ground. She saw then that an old man lay, dead to the world, on the floor between the two back pews. He was wrapped in a ragged overcoat and had an empty vodka bottle beside him.
It was extraordinary to Pam how he had got there, though the truth was he had entered that afternoon, while Lady Vanessa’s cleaner had been busy at the east end with her ears plugged blissfully into James Last and his Orchestra on her Sony personal headset.
Suddenly Pam knew that she ought not to be in there; that she ought to leave at once. Suddenly she knew that Peter was not coming. She turned quickly to go. She closed the instrument and gathered up her sheet music. It gave her a moment’s uncertainty, not knowing quite what to do about locking up, but she was, after all, only four minutes’ walk from Lady Vanessa’s house. For this reason, she left the oil lamps burning and locked the church door quickly behind her.
It was just as the groupies were entering the churchyard. Marty and Pongo had come through the trees together, guffawing and falling about. This was because Stet – drink having provoked in him the urge to urinate – was some few yards behind them, struggling to free his penis from the latticework of bandages under which his underpants, along with his nether anatomy, had been trapped.
‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Oh, Jesus, I’m about to piss down my leg.’ Having succeeded at last in freeing himself, Stet peed in profusion, churning up a muddy froth at the root of an old yew tree.
‘Christ!’ he said. ‘That’s better.’ And he tucked himself back into the loosened grave clothes. He grinned at Marty and Pongo through the beery, discoloured suck-hole, just as Pam emerged, illumined, from the porch.
Pam did not at first recognize Marty and Pongo, but she could see that they were Hallowe’en revellers and, as such, they gave her no fear. Quite the opposite. They brought to her a touch of home. And it occurred to her at once that she could enlist their aid in rousing the old man.
‘Pardon me,’ she said into the darkness. ‘But I have a little problem.’
The pair stopped dead in their tracks and stared at her. Then they looked at each other, grinning stupidly. Pongo threw down the clipboard, ready for action. In that moment, two things came to Pam at once. One was that the revellers were drunk and the other was that they had been joined by a third who had the unmistakable gait of Stet Gregory. He had stepped from the more opaque darkness beyond, with his grave clothes gleaming white in the dull glow thrown by the oil lamps.
Pam’s eyes darted quickly from one to the other as they advanced, within that second, to close her in because, with the appearance of Stet, the groupies had at once seemed to take on the nature of a posse. Their every gesture spoke menace. Pongo’s face was shining, idiot-like, with latex puckering and blacked-out teeth. Marty had a trickle of blood dribbling from a hairline crack. But it was Stet who most alarmed her. Stet, who was almost eyeless – almost faceless – except for that ugly, reptilian suck-hole. And the tongue within, like a darting snake.
Pam’s first thought was to make a dash for the church and take her chance with the old man, but to unlock the door would take precious seconds. And then her shaking hand, as she assessed her chances, betrayed her and let the key drop. When Stet stepped forward and stood on it and breathed into her face, that was when she made her mistake and turned on her heels to run.
Stet, who was still in possession of the crutch, extended it and tripped her, so that she fell hard and ignominiously, on to her left hip and elbow. Then she turned and raised herself with intent, at least, to face him. She opened her mouth to speak, but Stet prodded her downwards with the cane. He planted it across her chest and held it there with his foot.
‘Is it a worm or is it a Werewolf?’ he said, as she tried to writhe free.
For that instant, Stet felt terrific. He felt heroic. A conqueror posed with planted flag. He felt like Jago, as he loomed over the girl with the crutch pinning her to the ground. He was aware that his two companions had become transfixed by him.
‘Leave her to me,’ he said, though neither Marty nor Pongo had moved. He bent to take the torch from the ground beside her right hand. Then, using it first to throw back her skirt, he flicked the switch and beamed the thing crudely between her legs, where Pam’s wide, loose-fit silk underpants made possible for him a glimpse of her vaginal lobes and a section of dark pubic hair.
Wh
en Stet began to press his mouth insistently down on to hers, Pam found not only that the suck-hole stank, but that it was bordered with the stiff, rasping fabric of the crêpe bandage which had by then been formidably starched with dried beer. It eroded the skin around her mouth. A sensation of oral violation invaded her mind so profoundly, that she was hardly aware that Stet was wrenching at the grave clothes around his pelvic region. He found access to himself much easier this time, since his peeing had conveniently loosened the bandages.
As an act of rape, the episode was not of the most dramatic, since Stet, having made his entry, had almost immediately lost his nerve. Though he had always been big enough and handsome enough, and quick-witted enough to pass muster with the in-group by miming the right degree of nonchalant credibility, Stet’s was by no means a sanguine character. He had always been a more complex, more sardonic, more brooding proposition than either Marty or Pongo. And, unlike them, he had not as yet made it all the way with a person of the female sex. What was driving him to it now, along with drunken bravado, was his long habit of ascendancy in the business of hounding the Werewolf.
What was putting him off, however, was disgust – not for himself, but for the girl. It had been that unfortunate, injudicious glimpse, which he had afforded himself in the beam of the torch, of Pam’s pubic region.
Stet was of course acquainted with the photographs in girlie magazines. It had seemed to him, from a perusal of these, that what women harboured between their thighs was not an attractive item. It had struck him as an unpleasant sort of mutation; a kind of hirsute clam. Now that he was actually confronting the thing, it had become, in addition, a sly, concealed weapon; a bearded malformation of dark, bruise-coloured flesh, designed precisely to lie in wait and to lure. It was like one of those spooky, insect-eating plants. Unnatural. Treacherous. Neither fish nor fowl. And actually being there felt to him like playing Dead Man’s Eye. Murder in the Dark. Stet shrank inside her and was at once overcome by nausea.
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