Mr Campion's Fault

by Mike Ripley

  Rupert grinned mischievously and whispered back: ‘I think saying “faux pas” is probably making a faux pas in this neck of the woods, but from what I’ve seen of the locals, they won’t be reluctant to point it out.’

  They stood facing each other, toe-to-toe, their heads almost touching, bent down concentrating on their drinks, resembling naughty children awaiting an inevitable and properly justified scolding, glancing around to take in their surroundings in short, sharp, furtive glances. The décor of the main room of the Denby Ash Working Men’s Club (‘and Institute’) was predominantly of varnished pinewood, tables, chairs and the bar itself all stained to make them look older, although the design was spare, functional and modern. There was a small stage – a platform really – at one end with a metal stand which seemed to be buckling under the weight of a large square microphone which had probably, Rupert thought, been declared surplus to requirements by the BBC around the time of the Abdication. At the other end of the room was a raging coal fire and between that and the stage were lines of tables, each with six chairs and two large green ashtrays, arranged with almost military precision.

  The tables nearest the stage were fully occupied by groups of men, almost all wearing flat caps, with pints of foaming beer in straight glasses in front of them and the majority puffing on untipped cigarettes so that a blue haze formed above their heads but a foot or so below the nicotine-stained ceiling. The tables and chairs nearest the coal fire were conspicuously empty and the only sound was the tap-tap of dominoes being laid.

  ‘I wonder why nobody sits near the fire,’ said Rupert, partly to engage his wife in conversation and partly to break the uncomfortable silence.

  No one in the club had protested at their arrival and none of the inhabitants were actually staring at them, but even so, the atmosphere was a nervous one.

  ‘They don’t want their beer to get warm,’ intruded an unfamiliar Yorkshire voice.

  The Campions had not been aware of his approach, so quietly did he move across the carpeted floor for a broad, muscular man.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Rupert. ‘It just seemed strange to us as in our part of the world a coal fire in a country pub would act like a magnet in winter and you wouldn’t be able to get near it. You must be Mr Exley.’

  ‘That I am,’ said the short, bulky man, offering neither a handshake nor a smile, ‘and I bet it’s not the only thing you find strange round here. F’r a start this in’t a country pub, it’s a working men’s club. If tha’ wants a pub, we’ve got two: Green Dragon and t’Sun at either end of the village; take yer pick. Mebbe better suit the lady. We don’t get many in here unless it’s a bingo night or a Saturday when they put on a turn.’

  Exley nodded his square-shaped head towards the far stage as if to clarify what ‘turn’ meant.

  ‘This lady,’ said Perdita brightly, ‘is perfectly happy here. Your beer is tasty and remarkably cheap and I’m dying to know what sort of turns you put on here.’

  Exley eyed her suspiciously, but Perdita’s face shone with honest curiosity.

  ‘We have singers – proper singers, none of them rubbishy pop groups – the odd impressionist and even a magician on occasion, but most popular are the comedians. Some of ’em might be a bit blue for you, though.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Rupert, and was secretly pleased that Exley looked slightly shocked.

  ‘So there’s no proper music here?’ Perdita asked with the briefest flutter of eyelash. ‘I mean brass band music. I thought that was why you asked to meet us here.’

  Mr Exley now looked mildly embarrassed and it was his eyes which flashed furtively around the room to see if his encounter with the two strangers, especially the pretty female one wearing the Mary Quant pink alligator cape coat and the soft brown leather boots, was being noticed. It was, Rupert estimated, by at least ninety per cent of the drinkers.

  ‘I thought here would be convenient for you after school, like,’ said Arthur Exley. ‘Band practice is in the parish room down the hill a-ways, by the junior school and the church.’

  It had nothing to do with convenience, Rupert thought. The Campions had been told by all the dragons in the Ash Grange staff room that Arthur Exley would rather be seen dead than crossing the threshold of ‘the posh school’ and that he would insist on meeting in a place he considered more proletarian. In the club, he would have all the advantages as his ‘toff’ southern visitors would be like fish out of water. Yet this brace of fish appeared to be quite relaxed, particularly the girl, who insisted on standing at the bar rather than taking a seat as most females were expected to, and supping bitter instead of gin-and-orange or a Babycham.

  ‘Well, as you’re the bandmaster, can I at least pick your brains about the musical element of our end-of-term show?’ Perdita smiled sweetly and then played her masterstroke, producing a purse from the folds of her coat. ‘And you must allow me buy you a drink, Mr Exley.’

  She had raised her voice enough to make sure she was heard by their unofficial audience, over which a hush had descended. Even the dominoes were being laid more quietly.

  Exley cleared his throat loudly before declaiming: ‘I don’t drink, Mrs Campion, but I don’t begrudge others the pleasure if that’s what they see it as.’

  Marxism or Methodism? Rupert wondered, for he had been warned to expect both dogmas, but Arthur Exley preferred to play the host and guide rather than the soap-box evangelist.

  ‘I thought I’d take you down to the parish room so you can meet the lads who’ll be playing in your show. They’re practising tonight,’ he said, then pointed a finger at Perdita’s glass. ‘When you’ve supped up, that is, but don’t swig it down on my account.’

  Perdita nursed her glass in front of her face to show she had no intention of being hurried and tried to ignore Rupert taking large, rapid swallows to lower the level of his pint.

  ‘I hope you haven’t put the band to any trouble on my account,’ she said sweetly.

  Exley stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and rocked back on the heels of his boots before answering. ‘Band has to practice, otherwise it won’t be right on t’night, will it?’

  ‘I’m sure the musical contribution will be the one thing that does go right on the night, though I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea what the music content is going to be or how it fits with the play. Mr Cawthorne, the music master, seems to know very little about it.’

  Exley twisted his head as if exercising the muscles in his thick neck.

  ‘He’s been warned off by Mrs Cawthorne, hasn’t he? Mustn’t have owt to do with a play about conjuring up Old Nick, not with her being a devout churchgoer.’

  ‘Didn’t Mr Browne leave any instructions?’ asked Rupert between rapid sips from his glass.

  ‘Mr Browne was in no position to give the band instructions,’ said Exley stiffly. ‘The committee instructs the band on matters of policy and the bandmaster, reporting to the committee, chooses the music. In any case, Bertie Browne didn’t dare stand up to his sister. She wanted to swan on stage to Offenbach!’

  ‘Not La Belle Hélène?’ Perdita spluttered into her beer.

  ‘Aye, the same.’

  ‘Did you tell her it wasn’t in your repertoire?’ grinned Rupert, then wiped the grin away when he saw Exley’s stony face.

  ‘Of course it’s in our repertoire; it’s a recognized test piece in competitions along with “Poet and Peasant” and the “Zampa” overture, but they’re all a bit too happy-go-lucky for your play, I’d’ve thought.’

  ‘Oh, you’re absolutely right,’ Rupert said, making hurried amends. ‘Those would remind people of cartoons – Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker and such – not conjure up the Devil.’

  ‘That’s the way I figured it, so we’ve gone for the overture from Rienzi. There’s a fanfare leitmotif suitable for when the Pope and the King of Hungary and the Holy Roman Emperor appear, and it speeds up nicely for when the devils come and get Faustus to drag him down to hell.’

  �
��Richard Wagner,’ said Perdita. ‘Good choice.’

  ‘Wasn’t he a favourite of Hitler?’ said Rupert casually.

  ‘Yes, he was; and Hitler was a teetotaller as well, if you want to make anything of it.’

  ‘Please ignore my husband, Mr Exley,’ Perdita jumped in quickly. ‘He is well known for speaking when his foot is only halfway to his brain. Now, is it far to this band room of yours?’

  ‘It’s the parish room and it’s tacked on to the village school down the ’ill a step, next to the church. The band rents it off the Parochial Church Council and I reckon what we pay keeps old Twiggy in Bourbon biscuits for ’is coffee mornings.’

  ‘Twiggy?’

  ‘The Reverend Cuthbertson-Twigg,’ said Exley, curling a lip as if the words tasted bitter, ‘vicar of this parish for longer than anyone cares to remember and no earthly good to man nor beast. He’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’ said Rupert. ‘I’m sure he means well. Country vicars usually do.’

  ‘Singing hymns, smelling of incense and consorting with the landed gentry isn’t my idea of looking after the needs of this community, but I’m an atheist so it’s none of my business what he does. For them that wants religion, we’ve no shortage of chapels in Denby Ash.’

  ‘We’ve noticed that you seem well served by all the known branches of Methodism,’ said Perdita.

  ‘Aye, and I bet there’s a few branches you’ve not heard of. It’s all the same to me, but Old Twiggy ’asn’t got much of a flock left.’

  Exley looked at his wristwatch, then at Rupert’s pint glass, then back at his watch. ‘We’d best get a move on, otherwise they’ll have finished their practice afore we get there.’

  ‘Well then,’ Perdita beamed, ‘let us make haste to Wittenberg.’

  ‘Nay,’ said Exley, smiling for the first time, ‘we’re not goin’ that far. It’s nobbut a step down Oaker Hill.’

  The Campions deposited their empty glasses on the bar, thanked and wished the surly barmaid a good night, which she acknowledged with a nod but no change of expression. As they followed Arthur Exley across the bar towards the small entrance lobby, they felt all the silent eyes in the room tracking them but their escape was delayed as Exley held open the door to allow a small, shambling figure to enter.

  It was an older man who walked with a pronounced stoop. He wore a dark suit with a scarf knotted around his throat in lieu of a tie and was vigorously shaking a flat cap. The cap and his suit jacket were shadowed with wet stains.

  ‘’Evening, Tom,’ Exley greeted the newcomer. ‘Is it raining?’

  ‘Just now started spittin’, Arthur,’ came the answer as the man wiped a hand down his face and strode firmly towards the bar where the barmaid was already pulling the pint with Tom’s name on it.

  Perdita peered out of the open door and into a night curtain heavy with rain, through which the street lights shimmered weakly.

  ‘I’d hardly call this a few spits of rain,’ she said, pulling a tightly folded polka-dot plastic rain hood from the folds of her coat. ‘It looks positively torrential. Does it always rain this much here, Mr Exley?’

  ‘Might do; couldn’t really say. It’s difficult to know if it’s raining when you’re seven hundred feet below ground.’

  Arthur Exley did not seem to mind the rain; in fact, he seemed impervious to it and as they trooped and splashed their way down Oaker Hill he played the role of tour guide as if escorting visiting dignitaries around a county show. He pointed out the ‘pit house’ he had been born in, though even with the street lighting is was difficult to pinpoint exactly which part of the terrace would one day be adorned with a commemorative plaque. On the nearside of the road – Perdita remembering the road safety adage to always ‘walk on the right, especially at night’ – Exley indicated a new road leading to a new housing estate, an area called with a breath-taking lack of imagination ‘the New Houses’. And then another, older road where there were no street lights, which ended, their guide assured them, in not one but two dissenting chapels: the Zion Methodists and The Mission.

  ‘To be honest,’ Exley said, ‘the Mission is little more than a glorified garden shed rented from the Zion Chapel and it probably has less of a congregation than St James’, but most folk of that persuasion go to the Primitive Methodists up the other end of the village near the Co-Op.’

  Perdita noticed that once outside the working men’s club, Exley’s Yorkshire accent had almost disappeared.

  ‘You seem well provided here with the opiate of the people,’ she said, but Exley did not break stride.

  ‘I wondered when you would start to quote Marx at me but it doesn’t worry me. It’s you that should be worried because all the God-botherers we have in Denby – whatever they call themselves – are all dead against your Doctor Faustus, and have been from the start.’

  ‘Do you know the play, Mr Exley? You picked up on my reference to Wittenberg back at the club.’

  ‘I’ve read it.’

  ‘Did you have to do it at school … or university?’ Rupert asked.

  ‘No. It might surprise you to learn that I did go to university but I didn’t do literature – I did politics at Manchester. I read the Marlowe play for … personal reasons, and so I knew what I was getting the band into.’

  ‘Sensible chap,’ said Rupert, then stopped dead in his tracks and loudly sniffed the wet night air. ‘I say, what is that delicious smell?’

  ‘That’s Willy Elliff’s chip shop and he’s frying tonight,’ said Exley. ‘He uses proper lard – none of that oil muck. Can’t beat it for frying.’

  All three of them paused outside the dark stone frontage of the village school to take in the aroma wafting through the steadily pouring rain.

  ‘And what’s that sound?’ asked Perdita.

  Exley cocked his head to one side as if his ears were direction-finders. ‘That would be the tenor horns.’

  Perdita would later think of her first encounter with a brass band as diving into a pool of warm tonal mellowness. That feeling was encouraged by the fact the she and Rupert were sitting on low, fat iron radiators, their wet clothes steaming faintly to demonstrate that unlike Ash Grange School there seemed to be no curfew for central heating in the parish room.

  Arthur Exley had explained that the full band would not be providing the music for Doctor Faustus for the simple reason that the school hall was not big enough to accommodate band, play and an audience. The music would therefore be provided by a select unit of younger members of the band: four cornets, a soprano cornet, three tenor horns and one euphonium.

  The bandsmen – no bandswomen, Perdita noted – sat on folding wooden chairs in a circle almost, she thought fancifully, like garden gnomes arranged around an ornamental pond, though these gnomes did not hold fishing poles but brass instruments to which were attached ornate clips holding a musical score written in minute calligraphy on postcard-sized sheets.

  When Exley entered the band fell silent as if a teacher had entered a classroom earlier than expected and nine red faces turned towards him. But these boys displayed neither fear nor guilty conscience. They were eager for instruction – a situation any teacher in any school would have been jealous of.

  ‘Good work, lads,’ said Exley. ‘We’re almost there. Now I want you to run through the whole piece for Mrs Campion here, who’ll be producing the show. So we’ll go from the top when you’re ready, Neil.’

  The soprano cornet player licked his lips and nodded acknowledgement.

  ‘And Kevin …’ he turned to the euphonium player, ‘… just keep in mind we’ve got neither tuba nor percussion for this, so you’re our bass line. Don’t be frightened to show it. Right, keep it crisp and put a drop of devilry into it. After all, that’s what it’s all about.’

  Although neither of the Campions professed to be fans of Wagner, they had to admit that the arrangement performed for them was a subtle one and certainly well-executed. Perdita also reco
gnized it as a clever choice to accompany the Faustus story as it had a long, single-note motif introducing a baleful fanfare of cornets; there was a section of an almost pompous march and even a ‘gallop’ before a dramatic finale, all of which she could relate to scenes in the play even though she had as yet no idea how they might be welded to the text.

  She and Rupert started to clap as the piece finished but Exley waved a finger at them.

  ‘Steady on, we don’t want them getting swell-headed,’ he admonished, which raised a nervous titter from the band members.

  ‘Well, I thought that an exemplary performance,’ said Perdita. ‘Who did the arrangement?’

  ‘That’d be me,’ said Exley rather coyly.

  ‘And they follow the score from those little cards? The notation is so small I’m surprised they’re not all wearing glasses.’

  ‘You’ve got be able to read spider shit if you want to be in this band,’ offered the soprano cornet player, a tousle-headed young man not long out of his teens.

  ‘Language, Neil,’ warned Exley.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Arthur, forgot teacher were int’ room. Is she going to give me lines, then? Bin a long time since I ’ad to stay behind after school …’

  The band began to laugh and Neil played to his audience with a wide grin.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Neil, Mrs Campion,’ Exley apologised. ‘He’s a bit rough round the edges but he means well.’

  ‘Well, his playing certainly isn’t rough,’ said Perdita graciously. ‘I thought it as smooth as silk and his triple-tongue technique is amazing.’

  She eased herself away from the radiator and walked slowly towards the circle of players, the clicking of the heels of her boots acting like a metronome on the eyes of the bandsmen. As she approached the cornetist, she lowered her voice and spoke with a stage-vamp breathlessness as she looked down at young Neil, whose cheeks were starting to glow pink though not from musical exertion.

  ‘It must be true when they say that the cornet is a divine instrument,’ she purred. ‘Man blows into it but God only knows what comes out of it.’