Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  In due course, led on by voices and the clinking of glass, I found the bar—a glitzy affair stuck in the corner of a large and dowdy room. For all its cheerless air, it seemed popular enough and a thriving trade milled round and about.

  I stood and stared at these flesh and blood ghosts, walk-on characters from a long lost age, until one of them spotted me gawping.

  ‘How do,’ he said, smiling warmly. ‘Are you our exchange visitor?’

  I looked blankly at him: a stereotype spiv and race-track wide-boy from half a century ago, and saw, alas, he was too real to ignore.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m lost.’

  This got a laugh from the assembled crowd, more at me than with me, and for a second I would have cheerfully mown them down, Valentine’s Day style. They were, after all, dressed for the part.

  Mr Spiv advanced and shook my hand.

  ‘Well,’ he said, seeming friendly enough, ‘that’s a spot of bad luck for you but, on the other hand, we could do with a new face. Come and have a drink.’

  I allowed myself to be drawn into the throng and acknowledged a barrage of ‘hi’s’, ‘hello’s’ and ‘how d’you do’s’. In point of fact, they did seem pleased to see me.

  ‘Here,’ said the white coated barman, handing me a mega-brandy, ‘on the house!’

  For its last stand, my sanity retreated to the castle keep of mundanity.

  ‘Actually, it’s a bit early for me,’ I said.

  Again they all laughed.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, old boy,’ said a bluff, red-faced golfing type. ‘Drink the whole bloody bottle and you won’t feel any different. We’re just going through the motions. Same a-bloody-gain, please.’

  ‘One just has to drink at a party, doesn’t one?’ announced a tall, gaunt woman. ‘Otherwise it’s just too bore-making.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ I said, suddenly inconsolable. My brandy bombshell was downed in one and I found that the man had been right. It tasted, it burned, but it didn’t do the trick.

  ‘You and me both,’ agreed the golfer. ‘We drink when there’s no reason to, we celebrate when there’s no cause to. Bloody senseless if you ask me!’

  ‘But what else is there to do?’ asked a young girl with golden, bobbed hair, apparently a hotel chambermaid. ‘Nothing. So let’s get on with it!’

  Everyone made ‘yes, quite right’ noises and, the temporary slough now over, the ‘party’ resumed as before.

  ‘But... don’t you want to know who I am?’ I said, failing to keep the edge out of my voice.

  ‘Steady on, old chap,’ said the golfer comfortingly. ‘We don’t want to rush things. There’ll be plenty of time for all that.’

  I went to speak, paused, and then forced myself on. ‘When?’

  ‘Well,’ said the golfer, turning a coward’s back on me, ‘somewhen in the years to come, I suppose.’

  This finally and definitively flicked my panic button to on, and with a high pitched shriek I turned for the door. Quite where I was heading I’m still not able to say, but at the time it seemed like a genuine bit of hysteria would occupy a few minutes and thus forestall thought.

  In the event, my path was barred as a large, crisply-suited man entered the room and occupied the door. He looked down at me from some height (actual and moral), hands crossed behind his back, Duke of Edinburgh style, trim moustache bristling. Short of him wearing a peaked hat with the legend ‘ex-Army’, his history could not have been plainer.

  ‘STAND WHERE YOU ARE!’ he boomed and I did. The, first tearful, then resentful, years of OTC at school left me no choice in the matter.

  ‘New arrival?’ he asked, directing the question over my shoulder.

  ‘Apparently so,’ said the gaunt woman. ‘Biffo’s managed to get through again and this one’s come in his stead.’

  A half-hearted and puzzling chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good Biffo’ did the rounds of the bar.

  ‘Looks like the racial stock’s deteriorated since our time,’ said the golfer. ‘He seems a bit of a shower.’

  ‘I see...’ said the black-suited man, putting a thousand rich ambiguities into the simple answer whilst deigning to look at me again. ‘Well, be that as it may, it’s my pleasant duty as manager to welcome you to the Grand. I hope your stay will be an enjoyable one.’

  To my astonishment I found myself saying ‘thank you, I’m sure it will.’ Some sort of polite robot (or possibly just Englishness) had evidently taken over my response functions.

  Either way, the manager clearly approved of the new stiffness to my upper lip.

  ‘Good man. Now, if you’d care to step into my office, there’s one or two formalities to sort out.’

  There being nothing better or more sensible for me to do, I followed in the shadow of his broad back. As we left, the golfer at the bar seemed to remember something urgent.

  ‘Forgot to ask you, old boy,’ he shouted, almost toppling off his bar stool as he twisted round. ‘Was there another war? Did we win it?’

  * * *

  ‘Look!’ I said, exasperation making me brave. ‘You’ve had name, age, occupation, political, religious and ethical beliefs, conversational specialities and miscellaneous aptitudes (if any). Isn’t this a bit thorough just to check into a hotel? And when can I ask a few questions?’

  The manager ignored me and continued to study his checklist.

  ‘Do you play a musical instrument?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you any dramatic monologues or ballads committed to memory?’

  ‘No!’

  He looked up at me. ‘And yet I see you were educated at a good school. Did your father ever consider asking for a refund?’

  ‘No. Right, now it’s my turn. Who’s this Biffo character I keep hearing about? He’s not the famous bear of that name, I take it?’

  The manager gave me a very cool look.

  ‘Bears tend not have Christian names as far as I’m aware, Mr...’ he consulted his notes in a leisurely way, ‘Okey.’

  ‘Oakley.’

  ‘…since bears don’t have souls to christen—though I’m C of E, of course, and other churches may say differently. No, Biffo was one of the team, a damn fine chap, if a bit of a sort.’

  ‘Sort of what?’

  ‘A character, a card, a rough diamond, a go-getter. He got you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Absolutely. Biffo never reconciled himself to being trapped here, never gave up hope of “going over the wire”, so to speak, not even after his first bitter disappointment. It’s a shame innocent chaps like you get dragged in but, there it is. A chap’s got to do what...’

  ‘…a chap’s got to do, yes. Incidentally, when are you going to start talking sense?’

  Like the shock of seeing the Queen die during her Christmas broadcast, I was taken aback to see the manager crack and fail. He buried his head in his hands and a strangled voice struggled through his clenched fingers:

  ‘Probably never, Oakley. I can’t face telling you. I can’t go through it all again! I’ve wearied myself in the repetition, laying awake in this ersatz Eastbourne, staring at a fake horizon. Just go away, will you? Go back to the bar, find someone less tired to talk to you.’

  * * *

  ‘Oh God, what a bore!’ said the gaunt woman. ‘Can’t you just pick it up as you go along?’

  ‘No,’ I said with unparalleled firmness. ‘I must know.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said a bespectacled bald man sitting hitherto silently alone at a table. ‘I’ll tell him. I can take it.’

  ‘Well do it, then,’ said a depressed looking vicar, morosely cradling a chartreuse bottle, ‘but for Christ’s sake keep your voice down. I don’t want to hear!’

  Taking the advice of this very probably ex-man of God, I swiftly joined the lonely volunteer. To my eyes he looked like a caricature librarian, but I suspect his shaving mirror daily showed him a scissors-sharp intellectual. To be charitable, in his day
that wasn’t such an unforgivable thing to be. He peered at me through his John Lennon glasses and was similarly unimpressed.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked, holding out a bottle of—what else?—champagne. Since a glass didn’t seem included in the offer, I declined.

  ‘It’s no loss,’ he said, taking a hefty swig himself. ‘There’s no intoxicating effect. Drink ten gallons of it and you’d still be sober. Same with food; we just eat for the sake of it. We feast as much as we like and the stocks replenish overnight. It’s all part of the stupid rules of the place.’

  This was about as decent an entrance as I was going to get, and I caught it in a death-grip.

  ‘What place? Where are we?’

  ‘Eastbourne, of course. Where do you think?’

  ‘But it can’t be, it’s—’

  ‘But it is,’ said the man emphatically. ‘It’s an Eastbourne, a limited Eastbourne, true, but the real thing nevertheless. It may only extend for a half a mile radius from hereabouts, but within that boundary it’s Eastbourne all right.’

  ‘But...’ I pleaded, without having anything in particular to tack onto the single word protest.

  ‘My theory,’ said the man, pressing on regardless, ‘is that the photograph did it. Biffo—he’s the one whose escape we’re celebrating, the one who swapped with you—Biffo says he had his picture taken, just the instant we were all caught. The picture “captured his likeness” as they say, and at the same it captured all us too—the passers-by, the people in the hotels and restaurants, the whole surrounding area.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Your favourite word, that, isn’t it?’ said the man with a wry smile. ‘Anyway, the theory fits the known facts so it’s no good you complaining. We were caught in a moment of time, in a bubble universe, frozen and perpetuated in the chemicals and energy lattice of a photograph. We don’t get old or die. We can’t even kill ourselves. And things don’t run out, they mostly just stay as they were. Like out on the seafront, for instance, where the picture was taken, nothing changes at all. Elsewhere, out of sight in the picture, there’s dust and decay. Fortunately, in Eastbourne we’re used to that but, I must admit, I am bored now, very bored—very very very bored.’

  He paused and ran his hand through the area where his hair must once have rolled.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ he went on, now with passion in his voice, ‘what it’s like for an educated man here? What it’s like to just have back numbers of the Eastbourne Herald to read? Oh, and about one tenth of the public library. The bookcase devoted to gardening and botany, to be precise. I ask you, can you imagine that?’

  Not being much of a reading man myself, it didn’t sound too agonising but I put on a sympathetic face.

  ‘Well,’ said the man, with just a touch of nastiness in his voice, ‘you’ll get a chance to find out in the decades to come. You’ll become an involuntary expert on carnations and cacti like me. You’ll be able to recite the last available Eastbourne Herald by heart. I mean, what a waste! Do you know who I was?’

  ‘No, but I expect you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘All right, I will. I was the Astronomer Royal, working at the Hurstmonceaux observatory near here. I had international prizes, I had the honour of being presented to their majesties, I was at the height of my profession... and then I came into Eastbourne for a stroll and a cup of tea one Bank Holiday Monday. Now I read silly books about polyanthuses and peonies. And reread them and reread them and reread them and reread them...’

  He lapsed into bitter silence.

  Seeing before my eyes what panic would make of me in fifty or so years’ time, I gathered my remaining mental strength together. Treat it like a tricky corporate take-over or a dodgy share issue, I told myself. Look for the angle, the handle to turn this thing around.

  ‘Don’t dry up,’ I said to the sometime Astronomer Royal, sinking down in my seat to try and catch his eye. ‘What about this Biffo chap? What about escape?’

  The Astronomer Royal applied himself to the champagne bottle before answering. A frothy wayward trickle found its way down his starched shirtfront.

  ‘Biffo’s the only one who has,’ he said at last. ‘He got out once before, substituted himself for some chap from a little village...’

  ‘Binscombe?’ I suggested. ‘A man called Windsor?’

  ‘Maybe, perhaps, the name rings bells but there again we don’t go much on names here, not any more. Also my memory’s not so good now... too full of bloody data about planting and pruning techniques.’

  ‘But this Biffo really did escape?’

  ‘Oh yes. Ironic really, considering it’s his picture got us all in this mess. You see, he reckoned that if you stayed just where the photograph showed you to be, if you were precisely in accord with it as often as you could be, then you might just be able to seize someone who was looking in. Biffo said it was all a matter of patience and will, nothing to do with logic and science. If photographs capture life, he said, then surely the life within could interact with life outside—they being interconnected in some unfathomable way. That’s what the Buddhists maintain, I believe. You know, the universe as an interconnected whole, every part, however distant, affecting every other part. Do you follow?’

  I nodded. ‘Modern physics is coming round to that notion,’ I said without enthusiasm. ‘I read about it in the Independent.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said the Astronomer Royal sadly, ‘maybe so. But in my day, we thought differently. Biffo got laughed at about his ideas. I told him I couldn’t see any scientific method in the theory—which there isn’t—but it turns out he was right. As you can imagine, that hasn’t done wonders for my standing in this community.’

  I was underwhelmed with sympathy, as the Astronomer Royal clearly noted. He gave me a sulky look and pressed on.

  ‘Very taken about willpower and trials of strength was Biffo. He had all sorts of notions about that sort of thing, said that’s what led him to join Moseley’s crowd.’

  ‘How nice for him.’

  ‘Possibly. They attracted a lissom crowd of aristocratic gels I’m told. Anyhow, he spent day after day, stock still out on the prom, just as depicted in that dashed picture. You’ve got to hand it to him, he kept it up long after we all lost patience. You see, he maintained that if you achieved stillness, sometimes—just sometimes, mark you—you could sense an observer, a person in the real world looking in. And then, if you pounced, not literally of course, and the person was a weaker... well, soul, to use a phrase, an inferior life-force, then an exchange, an escape, could be effected.’

  ‘With all due respect to present company, naturally,’ I said dryly, repressing a desire to deprive this Astronomer Royal of his ears.

  ‘What? Oh yes, well, no offence intended. It was Biffo’s theory, not mine.’

  He paused and peered gingerly down into the champagne bottle as if it were a rifle.

  ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘when all’s said and done, it did work, didn’t it?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Naturally, everyone has an occasional go now. Now that they know it’s possible. But no one else has been successful. I reckon the photograph’s been stowed away and rarely sees the light of day—presumably by this... What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Windsor.’

  ‘…Windsor chap. And what a misery he turned out to be. I hope you’re not going to be like him.’

  I ignored that in favour of a more vital question, the bitter flavour of the expected response to which was already invading my mouth.

  ‘And just for the record,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose dear old Biffo, with all his iron will and can-do spirit, ever said how he got recaptured the first time?’

  ‘No, you’re right. Not a word.’

  My spirits hit bottom—and then kept on going down, beyond the world, into everlasting freefall.

  I got up to leave, having absolutely nothing more to say to the Astronomer Royal. However, he altered my plans by calling me back.

>   ‘I say, chappie, before you go, I wonder if you could tell me something?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well, it’s like this. Before here, before I got caught, I was working on a research project, up at the observatory. I was looking at gravitational perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, searching for the presumed ninth planet that caused them. We were going to call it Minerva... or maybe Pluto. Did I discover it?’

  For the first time he looked fresh faced and eager, a pale shadow of the enthusiast he must once have been.

  Desire strove with conscience, and won a first round knock-out. With glee I told him no, he hadn’t—and watched him subside back into despair.

  * * *

  Out on the prom, the ‘sun’ was still shining and people were still sauntering by, just as though it really were a holiday and not just another damn period of phoney light. The words of a Tom Robinson song were squatting in my head and wouldn’t depart when asked:

  ‘All day today, just excuse for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow just something to do.’

  Mr Disvan, if he were here, would doubtless tell me the lines were derived from a psalm or somesuch, and I’d moan about him not allowing anything under the sun be new. And he’d go on to say that phrase itself came from Ecclesiastes... etc, etc. How much I would have given at that moment to hear that annoying, soft-spoken voice again, telling me I was wrong about everything. But now my wishes were like the proverbial pagan’s prayer; they ascended into nothingness and were of no matter. Nothing was to be the in-word from now on. Nothing mattered in this place, because this was nothing.

  Out to sea I could now detect, a fair way out but still distinct, the wall of nothing, that ended this silly little universe. It circled round and cut through the cliffs, the fields and streets and houses, shearing through the public library no doubt, before heading back out into the water to complete the useless sphere. I hadn’t noticed it before. Now I couldn’t notice anything else.