“Neither Daisy nor myself,” put in Grandma swiftly, thus including herself in the deal, “will find it easy to tell untruths – or rather, pretend.”
“Of course not,” said the BLUE LAGOON man, by now thoroughly mesmerised.
“So if you will draw up a contract,” went on Grandma smoothly, “we shall be able to sign it when your photographer comes.”
Soon after, the BLUE LAGOON men took their leave in a daze, while the Unholy Alliance exchanged happy glances. Mr Bagthorpe, when he heard of the extra payments to be made to Daisy and Grandma, went into a fresh series of apoplexies.
“Machiavelli,” he ended by declaring, “was a beginner. Lucretia Borgia was a novice.”
It seemed to him that the only thing in life he had to look forward to now, was the return of Aunt Celia and Uncle Parker.
Chapter Ten
The confrontation that took place on the return of the tanned and pleasantly smiling Parkers was, indeed, something of a landmark in Bagthorpian rows. What marked it out, apart from the four-, five-, or even at times six-cornered nature of the battle, was the presence of a kind of Greek Chorus of assorted workmen, all of whom, at some stage, downed tools to listen and even, from time to time, participate. There was no doubt that this gave the whole thing an extra dimension, and added to its already epic quality.
Sorting out the various claims and counterclaims, weighing the comparative rights and wrongs of the different parties, would have presented a gargantuan problem even to a trained legal mind. The threads of debate were so intricately ravelled that the workmen could not be expected to follow them, and were accordingly always weighing it on the wrong side.
They made the natural mistake, to begin with, of assuming that Grandma and Daisy, in view of their respective extreme age and youth, were automatically innocent. Because Aunt Celia was so beautiful, and did so much weeping and clasping of her only child to her bosom, they tended to exonerate her too. When Uncle Parker affably offered each workman a duty-free packet of cigarettes, there was really very little doubt in their minds as to who was the real villain of the piece, especially as he did so much yelling.
They had been influenced too by Mrs Fosdyke (who missed the row owing to an urgent appointment with the dentist). She had kept them liberally supplied with hot beverages, on condition that they should drink these out of sight of Mr Bagthorpe. He was, she told them, so mean-minded that he would as likely as not begin hurling these hot drinks about and even scald somebody. They were inclined to believe this.
Jack, who had an untypically Bagthorpian sense of fair play, thus found himself, for the first time he could remember, actually in sympathy with his father. He became particularly irritated by Aunt Celia’s moans and warblings and claspings of a reluctant, and even struggling Daisy. Along with his parents, he was unconvinced by the elevation of ALL THE BEES ARE DED to the status of mystic utterance. He even risked putting his own oar in.
“But all the bees aren’t dead,” he protested during a momentary lull. Aunt Celia cast on him a look of disbelieving pity.
“Oh so literal!” she murmured. “Whence is it fled, the visionary gleam – and so young!”
Jack had no way of answering this remark, of which he could make neither head nor tail.
The row raged on for something near two hours. To plot its course was near impossible since at any given moment it was hard to know who exactly was ranged against whom. Grandma changed sides the most. The row kicked off with the writing-on-walls issue. Grandma came right out and said that her spell of writing on the walls had been the best days of her life since she had lost Thomas, and that she would feel everlasting gratitude to Daisy for this. She intended, she added, to alter her will.
Nonetheless, Uncle Parker was about to concede that perhaps he had better contribute a couple of tins of paint, when Daisy gave the whole battle an unexpected turn by announcing loudly:
“I di’n’t write on the walls, so there. Arry Awk did. He’s a bad boy.”
“Arryawk?” echoed Aunt Celia faintly. She ran the syllables together and the way she said the name gave it a distinctly different sound, like that of an Arab Oil Sheik or Indian Spirit Guide. She made it sound a quite different name.
When she finally understood who Arry Awk was, she became, even for Aunt Celia, decidedly distraught. Her hairpins fell out and her ringlets tumbled wildly down and the plumber and carpenter and their mates gazed, fascinated.
At this point Grandma, who never minded taking two sides at once in the interests of stirring things up, proclaimed that she too wished Arry Awk to go away. She was tired, she said, of hearing everlastingly about Arry Awk and how bad he was.
This was, of course, a clear case of jealousy. Daisy had now become the light of Grandma’s life. She saw that awful child through glasses as rose-tinted as she had ever directed on the late Thomas. It seemed to her that just as she had lost him under Uncle Parker’s wheels, so she was now in danger of losing Daisy to Arry Awk.
“She talks more to that awful Arry Awk than she does to me,” she complained. “There is no such person, and I demand that you get rid of him instantly.”
This brought such squeals of protest from Daisy herself that Grandma swiftly modified her position.
“All I meant was,” she explained, “that I wish Arry Awk would speak up. So far, I have had difficulty in hearing him. Any friend of Daisy’s is a friend of mine.”
When the row swung round to Daisy’s Flood, Mr Bagthorpe did so much yelling that the carpenter and his mate set to hammering on new skirting boards. The plumbers, after a swift exchange of glances, initiated their own sabotage by fetching a lot of pipes and clanking them about. When the speech, and the Greek Chorus’s racket, ended more or less simultaneously, Uncle Parker was left, in effect, with no case to answer.
All he in fact said was:
“I’m sorry you feel like that about it, Henry,” and Daisy added:
“It wasn’t me. It was Arry Awk.”
To which Grandma, eager to reinstate herself, added:
“Of course it was.”
Where Mr Bagthorpe made his big tactical mistake was in leaving the matter of his desecrated script to the end. He himself felt this to be the most outrageous of Daisy’s misdemeanours and had saved it as his climax. The rest, however, were left relatively cold by the matter. As his father’s voice rose and fell Jack could sense that the heat had gone, the atmosphere was cooling, interest dying off. Right in the middle, Grandpa entered and nodded all round to everyone and switched on the television. The sound was off, but most of the company present, including the workmen, found their eyes wandering to the screen. Mr Bagthorpe, unaware that his sound and fury were signifying nothing, carried on.
He made a further tactical error. Throughout the row he dwelt obsessively on the subject of money. He did a lot of yelling about paying bills and whose moral responsibility they were. The result of this was that the plumber and the carpenter and their mates informed Mrs Bagthorpe at the end of the day that they wished to terminate their services. Their estimation of Mr Bagthorpe had sunk to the point where they saw that the likelihood of their bills ever being paid was slight, if not non-existent. They had accordingly decided to cut their losses and go.
They did not tell Mrs Bagthorpe this, of course. They made excuses about ailing old mothers and so forth, and Mrs Bagthorpe enquired of them how much was owed. With alacrity they fixed on a sum and she wrote out a cheque then and there. They hastily collected their tools and left. (Mr Bagthorpe was in his study making notes about the row.)
When he emerged his wife unwisely told him what had happened, and he was just beginning to shout again when the front door knocker banged. Mr Bagthorpe almost ran through the hall and flung open the door. Jack, who happened to be halfway downstairs, heard the typical, snapped-out “Well?” and saw in the porch a colourful young man and woman, carrying briefcases and wearing a lot of shoulder-bags and cases on straps.
“Mr Bagthorpe?” he heard th
e young woman cry. “Oh, congratulations! Oh, you happy, happy family!”
“Oh what?” repeated Mr Bagthorpe incredulously. “Who are you? What are you selling? I don’t want any.”
Slowly, Jack descended. He had the feeling that he might be going to witness something interesting. The girl caught sight of him.
“And that must be Jack!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Jack – I feel as if I know you already!”
Mr Bagthorpe and Jack were now equally nonplussed. The only way the former could think of for dealing with this enigmatic pair was to slam the door in their faces. It was not as if it were an unusual thing for him to do, even at the best of times.
From the other side came peals of merry laughter and even outright giggles.
“My God!” exclaimed Mr Bagthorpe. “Listen to that. They’re lunatics.”
“We know you and your little jokes, Mr Bagthorpe,” came a teasing girlish voice.
“My little jokes?” Mr Bagthorpe now banged a fist against his forehead – always a bad sign.
“Get out of here!” he yelled at the front door. “Get the hell out of here!”
There were further giggles from the other side, a whispered conference, and then footsteps receded over the gravel. Mr Bagthorpe stood and listened, then shook his head dully.
“I think I have a persecution complex,” he said. “That felt like persecution to me. Even complete strangers are after me now.”
“They knew your name,” Jack pointed out. “And they said something about congratulations. Mind you, they did seem a bit mad.”
“I should have been a monk.” Mr Bagthorpe was soliloquising now, walking slowly back to the kitchen where he had left his current row half finished.
“Yoooeeeh!”
He stopped in his tracks. Jack and his father gaped. The girl they had just banged the door on was now, incredibly, inside the house and poking her head round the corner at the far end of the hall.
“Your turn now!” cried the head. “Count ten first!”
The head vanished.
“Did you see that?” Mr Bagthorpe asked after a pause.
Jack nodded.
“There is a mad female at large in my house,” said Mr Bagthorpe slowly and carefully. He was clearly trying very hard to keep a hold on his own reason. “This female knows my name. She wishes to play hide-and-seek.”
“Looks like it,” Jack agreed. “The only thing is, Mother’s in the kitchen. She must have let them in.”
“She –” Mr Bagthorpe strode forward and flung open the kitchen door, looking wildly about him as he did so. Jack peered past them.
“Where are they?” yelled Mr Bagthorpe. “What d’you mean by letting ’em in?”
“Ssshhh!” hissed his wife. She put a finger to her lips and looked meaningly towards the pantry. He looked incredulously at her. In the silence that followed there came another sharp rap on the knocker that caused Mr Bagthorpe to leap into the air. Jack made a move.
“Don’t answer it!” came the order. “The whole asylum’s probably out there.”
“Answer it, Jack,” said his mother firmly.
“I’ll do it!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “Here!”
He snatched up a small meat axe from the rack of kitchen tools.
“Henry!” wailed his wife.
Jack followed him through into the hall. His father flung open the front door. Beyond the raised arm and hand brandishing the axe, Jack could see the telegraph boy. He recognised him because the Bagthorpes went in a lot for telegrams. The boy was cowering away, the yellow envelope clutched up against his chest.
“Give me that!” ordered Mr Bagthorpe, lowering the axe. The boy held it at arm’s length and it was whipped away. Mr Bagthorpe tore open the envelope and ran his eye over what Jack could see was a very long telegram, as telegrams go. Later everyone in the family read it. It said:
CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAPPY BAGTHORPES STOP GREETINGS TO YOU ALL MOTHER FATHER GRANDMA GRANDPA WILLIAM ROSIE JACK AND MOST OF ALL YOU LUCKY TESS STOP YOU ARE OUR HAPPIEST FAMILY IN ENGLAND STOP SUE AND JEREMY ARE ON THEIR WAY TO TELL YOU ALL OUR MARVELLOUS PLANS FOR YOU STOP CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN AND SINCERE REGARDS STOP JOHN STONE CONTROLLER BORDERLAND TELEVISION
Mr Bagthorpe was in no state to take in the full import of this communication. The words that really seemed to stand out in it were ‘happy’ and ‘lucky’. He at once pounced on these as firm evidence that the telegram was some kind of hoax.
“Where did you get this from?” he demanded. “Let’s see your credentials.”
“Is it – is there any answer?” stammered the boy, preparing to mount his bicycle.
“Of course there isn’t!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “How in the name of all that’s wonderful could you reply to a burble like that?”
The telegraph boy skidded off over the gravel and Mr Bagthorpe looked down at the telegram again. He looked at it in much the same way as an angler might look at what he had taken to be a fish but which turned out to be a part of a recently dismembered corpse.
“Oh, Henry, darling!”
They both turned. Mrs Bagthorpe, looking unusually pink, was advancing on them with a pronounced air of sweetness and light.
“Oh, darling, wait till you hear!” she cried.
“You can cut out the darling bit,” replied her husband. “Read this.”
He thrust the telegram at her and she gave it, surprisingly, only the briefest of glances.
“It’s all true! Oh, Henry – Jack – go and tell the others!”
“Tell them what?” Jack asked.
“Tell them –” she was positively girlish now – “tell them that we have been chosen as The Happiest Family in England!”
“What?” said Jack and his father together.
“The Happiest Family in England!” She clasped her hands together. Even Jack felt irritated.
“Laura,” pointed out Mr Bagthorpe, “you know, and I know, that we are not The Happiest Family in England. You are deluded.”
“It was a Competition – Tess did it. Oh, Jack – do fetch the others. Fetch Tess, fetch everyone!”
Jack started up the stairs.
“Even Grandma?” he enquired.
“Of course. Oh, Henry, darling, do come into the kitchen and meet our guests. They’re so thrilled you would think it was they who had won.”
She took him by the arm and Mr Bagthorpe, looking like a tiger that has been given a tranquillising dart and is being led meekly into captivity, went with her.
Jack told Grandma the news first. He had to repeat it three times because she kept thinking she must have misheard him.
“But we are not The Happiest Family in England,” she said, using almost exactly the same words as her son. “Wherever did these people get that impression?”
“It’s something to do with some Competition Tess went in for,” Jack told her.
This made more sense to Grandma, who had cheated to win her Competition, and did not deny others the same licence.
“I’ll come down, I suppose,” she said, beginning to rummage round for extra rings to wear, “because I always, as you know, put the family first. I personally am not in the least happy, and don’t feel as if I shall ever be happy again now that Daisy has gone. A light has gone out of my life.”
William had to remove his headphones to receive the news. There was a lot of crackling going on inside them and other noises that gave the irrational impression that he had contacted a duck.
“Quick,” he said. “Get on with it. I’ve made a contact.”
Jack told him the news in as few words as possible.
“So what’s that to do with me?” he asked. “Tess’s lookout, not mine. Happy. That’s a joke.”
“I think Mother wants us all to go down and look happy,” Jack told him.
“There’s nobody can force me to look happy if I’m not,” William returned. “And I’m not. Go away, will you?”
“All right,” Jack said. “Shall I tell them you don’t want
the prizes, if there are any?”
He shut the door and went along to Rosie’s room. She was standing at her easel with tears running down her face and dripping off.
“Cheer up, Rosie,” said Jack. He did not feel that Rosie was going to pass as happy in the immediate future.
“I’m doing a portrait of darling little Daisy,” she sniffed. “She wouldn’t let me do one while she was here. I think she was too shy. I shall hang it where I can look at it when I lie in bed.”
“That’s a really good idea,” Jack told her encouragingly. “Look…”
He went on to impart the news.
“B–but I’m n–n–not happy!” Rosie dropped her brush and began to sob in earnest now. Jack felt that there was a depressing sameness of reaction to the news he was imparting.
“Well anyway, Rosie,” he said, “if you can manage to look happy even if you aren’t, you might win a prize. I should wash your face before you come down.”
Tess was the only person to be made unfeignedly glad by the news. She was too glad, Jack felt. She positively smirked.
“We’ll be on television!” she sang, giving her hair a swift brush. “Won’t Father be furious? Oh, clever me!”
“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Jack told her. “Nobody’s very happy at the moment. They might take the prize back when they see we’re not happy. I’ll go and tell Grandpa. He usually manages to look quite happy.”
Tess, he reflected as he went to fetch Zero, was going to be insufferable for a long time to come, and the worst would be brought out in the others. Mr Bagthorpe would be moody, and William at his most caustic.
None the less, within less than half an hour the entire Bagthorpe ménage was forgathered in the kitchen, which was still the most presentable room in the house. Jack himself arrived last, because he had spent some time praising Zero to try to get his ears up and create an impression of happiness.
Everyone was talking very loudly. Most people were boasting. Jack sat and listened and gradually pieced together what was happening. Borderland Television wanted to make a film about a Real Live Happy Family, and show it to the nation on Christmas Day.
Absolute Zero Page 10