'Let's give it a try,' Pryce said.
He yanked open the driver's door. He dug away the snow on the seat until the upholstery showed through and he climbed inside the car. He inserted the ignition key and turned it, and we could all hear the whir and click of the petrol pump as the engine primed. And suddenly, deafeningly, the crashing chords of 'My Generation' which he didn't bother to turn off before he pressed the starter button.
The engine churned and churned. The music blasted out. And as the engine churned slower and slower, as a couple of bangs like shotgun blasts exploded from the exhaust pipes and the air was filled with the stink of oil smoke, so the music churned slower as well, grotesquely distorted, 'my generation – my generation baby . . .' just as loud but even more dangerously ugly.
'You could turn that off!' Dr Kemp was shouting. 'Turn it off!'
But Pryce cupped his hand to his ear and grimaced as though he couldn't make out what the man was saying. And still he pressed and pressed at the starter button, pumping at the throttle with his foot so that the exhaust pipes banged again.
The battery died. The music slowed to a grinding standstill. As the smoke drifted and thinned, as the rooks whirled in sudden confusion, at last there was silence and stillness again in the snow-filled yard. Pryce essayed a couple more jabs at the button. There was nothing.
He got out of the car and banged the door shut. 'She's dead,' he said.
Sophie looked hopelessly from Dr Kemp to Pryce and back to the headmaster. 'Isn't there s-s-somebody . . .?' she started to say. 'I mean, c-c-can't you telephone someone and maybe . . . ?'
'The phone is dead,' Dr Kemp put in, pointedly echoing what Pryce had said. 'The lines are down. It happens out here if there's a heavy fall of snow. And the snow-plough can't come because the lane's too narrow. Mrs Kemp and I can be cut off for days, or even a week at Christmas and New Year. We don't usually mind . . .'
Pryce took a deep breath. He held it for a second, then blew out a silvery plume, like a man enjoying the best and most expensive cigar in the world. He flashed a glittering smile at the headmaster.
'It's so beautiful,' he said. 'And you've got company this time.'
I was singing. 'In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan – earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone . . .'
I stood with my hands on top of the piano, as Dr Kemp accompanied me, and it was a timeless scene in the grand, shabby hall, where now the light from the snow outside fell on every cobwebby crack in the oak panelling, on every smear of dust on the photographs and the honours boards, on the dry needles of the Christmas tree and the mottled tarnish of the tin cups in the trophy cabinets. The light was perfect, too perfect, because it showed every imperfection of the neglected room. Mrs Kemp sat at the hearth, and although the fire was burning briskly, spitting and crackling, the glow of it was quenched by the gleam of snow. The light showed how lovely she was, a fragile, broken creature swaddled in her wheelchair, her stockinged feet resting on the body of the sleeping dog.
I sang until, thump, a snowball hit the window nearest to the piano, stuck for a moment and slid slowly down. I hesitated in mid-phrase, so that Dr Kemp stopped playing. At the same time, Wagner struggled to his feet and started barking in the vague direction of the thump, although he had no idea what had caused it or what it meant. His voice was hoarse and booming, after the precision and clarity of the carol.
'Thank you, Wagner, that will do . . .' the headmaster cried out above the noise, so that the dog slumped down again, still wondering where the thud had come from. 'Now, Scott, try to concentrate. Where were we? Earth stood hard as iron . . .'
I took a breath and continued to sing. There was another thump, harder than the first, and this time Pryce's face appeared in the blur where the snowball had struck the window. Wagner was on his feet again, bellowing, big and brave and ready for battle. Dr Kemp sighed heavily, and in a little space between the barks he mouthed at the young man outside, 'Yes, Pryce, that will do, thank you very much,' in more or less the same weary way he'd addressed the dog.
The difference was that the young man didn't respond with the automatic deference that Wagner had shown. He affected misunderstanding, frowning and cupping his hand to his ear as he'd done in the stable-yard.
'Go,' the headmaster intoned loudly. 'Go elsewhere, please.'
The face disappeared, although a hand made a final swipe at the snow on the window so that a long smear remained. Wagner collapsed onto the floor with a terrible groan, breathing hard.
'Yes, old boy,' Mrs Kemp said to him, 'it is a pity for you to be indoors on a day like this, isn't it? Perhaps you'll be able to go out soon?' The question mark in her voice hung in mid-air, like a chime.
Dr Kemp relented. 'Well then. The last verse, one more time, and that'll do for this morning. Snow had fallen, snow on snow . . .'
I burst out of the front door. Wagner forced past me so violently, mad to get out, that he almost knocked me headlong. Boy and dog, together we flung ourselves onto the lawn and ran and ran, for the joy of the sparkling whiteness of the snow, the snapping cold of the air and the perfect blue heavens above.
I shouted and whooped, the dog bellowed from the depths of his barrel chest – until we both stopped and listened, oddly abashed by the deadened echo of our voices.
A flock of crows rose from the trees and whirled like cinders, black and smutty and strangely silent. As old and as wise as the woods, they did not cry out. They only folded and unfolded, alerted by the cries but not alarmed. Indeed, even before we reached the middle of the lawn, beneath the bare boughs of the copper beech, the crows had returned to their roost, shuffling their wings, watching and waiting.
'Hey, Scott!'
A snowball thudded on the back of my head, an explosion of ice on my red hair. And there was Pryce, already armed with another snowball and ready to launch it: a big grinning boy a few years older than me, hurling the snow and then bending for more. I bent to the ground, scooped a handful of snow so crisp and crunchy and easy to compact that, in one single movement, I'd packed a missile and thrown it. It smacked on the side of the young man's head. Nothing could be better, more perfect, than to be boys in snow on a sparkling morning – so we joined in battle, we shouted and dodged and scooped and ran and hurled, until at last we closed in hand-to-hand combat, smothering handfuls of snow into each other's faces and necks and laughing and spluttering.
We rolled apart. For a second, gasping for breath, as I blinked at the infinite sky through kaleidoscopic eyelashes, I was suffused with love – yes, it felt like love, the warmth of companionship with this miraculous man who'd arrived at Foxwood in a snarling, filthy red chariot with a stam-mering elf as his companion, who'd spoken such rare, forbidden words, and who later, in the fluttering candlelight, had performed an act of such startling bestiality that I'd surely never forget it – who, overnight, had transformed my lonely world into a glitter of snow and sunlight.
Then, 'Fuck!' Wagner came for Pryce.
Sophie had been watching, as disinterested as the crows, crouching in the snow with her arms around the old dog's neck; it seemed that she'd found a friend in Wagner. Myopic, he'd sensed from her touch and her voice that she was someone he would never dream of biting. But as he watched the blur of snowballing and fighting, and when he knew that his true friend, me, was in battle with a tall dark figure he'd never liked and indeed had learned to hate so many years ago, he wrenched himself from the grasp of the girl and came rollicking forwards, burly, black and all but blind.
The dog hit Pryce's shoulder with a breathtaking shock. Wagner rolled him over, and he shoved his grey, slobbering muzzle into his enemy's throat. For a mad moment, Wagner had the young man pinned into the snow. Only the scarf and the collar of Pryce's coat prevented the dog's teeth from meeting bare flesh.
The teeth tore at the young man's ear. Pryce squealed, 'Fuck!' again as I manhandled the dog away.
Pryce sat up and squeezed the lobe of his ear. He said the word once mor
e when he saw blood on his fingers, and he flicked a spatter of it into the snow. In the bright sunlight the blood was black at first, then red, and almost at once it fused into the ice, the loveliest pink. I hugged the dog, who was panting so hard that his fat old body was hot and huffing like a boiler. Sophie stared and gaped, as if half-afraid, half-thrilled by the conflict, and a funny, fake smile played on her face.
I tugged Wagner across the lawn, our feet crunching where the snow was still perfectly unmarked. I spotted something under the boughs of the copper beech, and bent to pick up the frozen capsule of an owl's pellet: sometime in the night, since the snow had stopped falling, a tawny owl must have perched in the branches and regurgitated this pellet of indigestible matter. I broke it apart with numb, clumsy fingers, and found, among the chitinous remains of many beetles, the skull and bones and matted fur of a shrew that the owl had swallowed whole. I glanced upwards to see where the owl had gripped the tree with its talons, and I tried to imagine how the bird had sat there, its feathers puffed out, its swivelling head hunched into its shoulders, through the cold, dark hours before dawn broke, while I'd been fast asleep in bed. I saw also that Sophie had crossed towards Pryce and knelt beside him.
The girl winced as Pryce took hold of her arm and pulled her closer. 'You're hurting me,' she said. 'You hurt me last night . . .'
He tried to kiss her, but she squirmed like a child and averted her face, flicking his lips with her hair.
'Hey relax, Sophie,' he said, and he caressed her cheek with the snowflakes on his fingers. 'No one knows we're here. No one knows anything. Look, we're in the middle of nowhere.' And he gestured around him, at the encircling woodland and the tall, cold sky.
But the girl glanced over her shoulder towards the house. There was a movement in one of the upstairs windows. They both saw that Mrs Kemp was watching them.
'Don't worry about her,' Pryce said. 'We'll do what we came to do. There are a few loose ends I need to tie up, then we'll get out of here. Trust me.'
He looked up again at Mrs Kemp.
'Revenge is a dish best served cold,' he muttered, 'and it doesn't get much colder than this.' The woman withdrew from the window.
He tried again to pull the girl close, and this time she relented, quite wooden as he folded her into his arms. I watched him closely, and the momentary joy I'd experienced in the snowball fight dissolved into a shudder of anxiety. I held my breath as they kissed, and, without realising I was doing it, I clenched my fingers so tightly that the skull of the shrew popped in my fist. For a second, Pryce turned his eyes and stared at me.
Dusting the remains of the pellet into the snow, I led the dog across the lawn and back to the house.
Dr Kemp was working in his study. Mrs Kemp was there too, keeping him company with tea and fig rolls which I'd helped her to bring from the kitchen. While he was shuffling accounts, deciding which bills it was best to pay and which could be put aside a little longer, she leafed through a riding magazine she'd already read many times before. Wagner lay sleeping at her feet. The study was a fine, tall room with panelled walls and a corniced ceiling. There were books everywhere, and stacks of sheet music on the mantelpiece of a grand fireplace. The hearth itself was heaped with papers. The formidable faces of the past headmasters of Foxwood Manor peered gloomily down from a row of oil paintings.
Sunlight fell through a high window, reflected from the snow outside. I was moping in a corner, nibbling a biscuit. The only sounds were the steady rhythm of the dog's breathing, the scratching of the headmaster's fountain pen and the flick-flick-flick of Mrs Kemp's fingers on familiar pages.
They both glanced up at the tromping of footsteps in the corridor above their heads. Wagner cocked an ear without opening his eyes. A heavy tread and a lighter, softer footfall: the movement of other people elsewhere in the house was strangely unsettling for Dr and Mrs Kemp. He sighed with exasperation and cleared his throat to say something, but she quickly put in, with a smile in her voice to try and keep him sweet, 'He's revisiting his childhood, that's all. There's no harm in it.' Then, when they heard the rattle of a door and the clank of the pulleys as one of the lifts started to move, as Dr Kemp tutted and puffed to himself, she added, 'It says "No boys to use the lifts". Martin Pryce is not a boy, and nor is the sweet little Sophie. Try to ignore them, dear, they'll be gone in a day or two.'
'How will they be gone?' he snorted. 'The lane is blocked, the telephone is out of order, his swanky car has a flat tyre and a flat battery. How will they be gone?' He made a great play of tossing a sheaf of bills into the air, so that they fell back onto the desk in an untidy heap. 'I had the lifts installed for you, and for nobody else.'
'Please, dear, try not to get worked up,' she said, and she reached to him and squeezed his hand. She turned to me, a bit embarrassed that I should hear them wrangling, and said, 'We must remember it's Alan's Christmas holiday too. We should let him try to enjoy himself a bit.'
Pryce had been touring the school, revisiting the half-remembered corners of his childhood. He had Sophie in tow; with nowhere else to go, she was a helpless satellite. And I too had been in his thrall, following him from dorm to dorm, where he'd trailed his fingers along the frames of bed after bed and recited the names of the boys who'd slept there, a list of half-forgotten names like the mumbled words of a prayer. For a while, I'd tagged along as he mooched through the bathrooms, watched him lie down in one of the baths – in all his clothes, of course, so that he looked like a corpse in a deep, white coffin – and do a clownish reminiscence of long-ago matrons and masters-on-duty. At the further end of the top corridor, he'd pulled open a tiny door and peered up a narrow staircase to the attic in the roof of the house – a mysterious place traditionally out of bounds to the boys on pain of dreadful punishment, but which, according to Foxwood legend, had once or twice been visited in the dead of night by the daring and foolhardy.
I'd said I'd never been up there. Pryce said that he had, but shrugged and looked away when Sophie scoffed.
Now, from the headmaster's study, we heard them come down in one of the lifts. Mrs Kemp signalled to me with a little smile that I was excused, so I picked up another fig-roll and hurried along the bottom corridor – to rejoin the tour, for something to do, to be with anyone else for a change from the Kemps. The three of us veered in and out of the classrooms, where Pryce went opening and slamming all the desks before he found the crude carving of his own initials. He rattled the door of the gun-room, which was always locked, and recited the sign in a pompous, headmasterly voice – no boys to enter without a member of staff. We went through the changing-room, where Sophie grim-aced at the residual smells of wet socks and muddy boys, past the door to the stable-yard and into the chapel.
Pryce paused as soon as he stepped inside. It was as though, somehow, the room sucked all of the bombast and truculence from him and pulled him back, really back, to the days when he'd been a choirboy at Foxwood Manor. He fell silent. He gazed at the rows of pews where generations of boys and teachers had sat, at the stained-glass windows with the crest and motto of the school frostily lit by a gleam of snow, at the cassocks hanging on pegs at the vestry door. A small private chapel, built into the house long before it became a school, it might have seated fifty or sixty at most – the family and estate workers and a few parishioners from scattered hamlets – a place of worship and music and close-togetherness in such an isolated location. Now, quietened by the stillness of the room and the feeling that so little had changed within it for scores or even hundreds of years, Pryce walked up the aisle to the choir-stalls. He found the place where he used to sit, the very spot where he'd rested his hymn book and his psalter and the anthems and carols he'd sung, and he touched the polished oak with reverent fingers.
So much dust. He ran his thumb through it, the specks of skin and hair of all the people who'd sat there: even, as he examined the powder on the tip of his nail, even of himself, the minutest remains of himself as a boy at Foxwood Manor.
A cob
web drifted past us. It wafted through the air, dislodged from a dark corner by the sudden intervention of three warm and breathing bodies into the room. And, for an oddly holy moment, I thought of the generations of spiders which had lived their lives in the chapel, their lineage as long and as noble as any of the gentry who had passed this way and whispered their futile prayers.
Pryce was quiet, as though entranced. Until his eyes lit on the piano.
'I'll play,' he said. 'And Scott, you can accompany me.'
As Sophie sulked in another corner of the chapel, scuffing her boots at a dapple of red and blue sunlight on the floor, Pryce sat at the piano and flung open the lid. He blew a cloud of dust from the keys. Very softly and beautifully, he started to play 'While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night'. No mockery, no tomfoolery: he played the carol with grace and simplicity, so that Sophie sat down in the back row of the pews and I stood silently in the aisle. It was lovely. It somehow made the room complete, suffused with a holiness beyond the ken of a million spiders.
At the end of the verse, Pryce stopped and left the final chord humming in mid-air. Then he looked archly at me. 'I thought you were going to accompany me. What's up?'
'You mean . . .?' Confused and embarrassed at the thought of singing for the visitors, I stepped towards the piano and cleared my throat.
'No, I don't mean your precious fucking tonsils,' Pryce said. 'I mean . . .,' and he gestured into the shadows where the cassocks were hanging, by the open door of the vestry 'I mean the fucking bell. Give it a few tugs, in time with the music.'
I turned and hesitated. I could see the bell rope hanging like a noose inside the vestry. I'd rung it many times, whenever my turn came to ring it for the beginning of Sunday morning service. Now I glanced from Pryce's wolfish smile to Sophie's bleak, ashen face.
The Perils and Dangers of this Night Page 8