Chorus Endings

by David Warwick

  ‘The hell he was!’ A complete change of tone. ‘Goid’s Intent hitting pay-doit more like.’ Brady scowled into his whisky. ‘Discovered their noimber one enemy – the Antichrist would you believe it – not fifty miles from where we’re now sitting. Tracked down and moidered in cold blood, along with those who’d protected him. Rumoirs, of course. An oiban myth. Same as alligators in the drains, the angels of Mons.’ There was real bitterness in his voice. ‘What else could it have been with Omnipresent’s lawyers having such deep pockets, Goid’s Intent so far out of reach? No mention, either, of what was going on behind the scenes. Resignations and demoitions. Police, hoim office, coist guard, the armed soivices – all of them blaming one anoither. With everyone from the toip – and I mean the very toip – down detoimend it should never happen again. Except that it did.’

  Now we were getting somewhere. ‘You mean there’s more?’ I asked, replenishing his glass.

  ‘Always is as far as O.E.I’s concoined.’ There was a tannoy announcement; Brady’s flight was called. ‘But I’ve a plane to catch.’

  ‘Best make it quick, then.’ I planted my feet on his luggage. We’d come too far to be stymied at the last moment.

  Brady glanced desperately from the luggage to the departure board, to Peter, myself, then back to his luggage, obviously weighing the merits of a public tug-of-war, before: ‘Hardly woith repeating.’ He shrugged a slurred surrender. ‘One week Goid’s Intent causes mayhem up here in the noith. Public woinings, radio broadcasts, shipping checked, twenty-foir hour watch on airpoits – all the stops pulled ouit. Then, just a few days later, a secoind strike – the one no one’s hoid about – down in the south this time. Foices of law and oider left completely in the dark. Some outhouse boint down, that’s all that was repoited, and no telling why they were there, what they were after. All rumoirs, like I say, and best forgotten. Now give me my Goddamned luggage and get me out of here.’

  Together we made our way across the lounge, Peter in possession of the hand luggage, Brady unsteady on his feet. ‘Praise the Lord’, ‘Goid’s Intent’, Antichrists – you couldn’t make it up,’ he muttered. We joined the queue at the boarding gate. ‘One day someone will write a Goddamned book about it. Make themsoilves a foitune!’

  With which he was gone. Leaving Peter clutching the empty whisky bottle and a scenario, if the rumours were true, that neither of us had considered. Third Class Cottage trashed neither by louts out on a spree, nor the secret army on the rampage but God’s Intent. Fitting perfectly with the facts as we knew them; just a few more days, hours even, and it’d have been curtains for Jimmy.

  Sending me right back to the diary. I’d spent hours with it over the last few weeks, deciphering just what it was the Squire had written, selecting extracts suitable for inclusion within the exhibition, deciding how best to fit them in with the rest of the material. Left to my own devices this time, with no one to guide me; turning the pages, providing a running commentary, suggesting where I should, and should not look. And I’d come to rather a different conclusion. True, it had rambled, was unintelligible in places. So, too, had a score or so others that I’d read, both published and unpublished, with celebrated authors and playwrights among the worst offenders. The writing grew progressively more difficult to read, but tell me whose doesn’t as they grow older. Even so, there was a rough overall coherence to the narrative and, no matter what Giles said, Sir Desmond did seem to have had his wits about him. Those references to Savonarola, for instance; the auto da fee, that satis sapientia. The way he’d dealt with the MI5 contingent in their shiny black cars with the swept-back mudguards. Capable enough to spot the danger presented by Mappa Mundi, of whisking it away into protective custody. And sound enough to remember ‘where the bodies were buried’ when challenged by his superiors.

  The rector, though, had acted right out of character. Codpiece they’d called him; doubt if he’d give off much heat had been Sir Desmond’s assessment. Yet here he was stealing a march; plotting with others to get his hands on it with no holds barred; whilst the Squire must act quickly and bring in an ex-commando-like unit to protect it. Unless it was not the picture but the artist who was in danger; not the rector – who didn’t know the half of it – but a far more sinister gang of Holy Joes from whom they were shielding him. I recalled the press coverage of the Pendarrell murders. Those photos of the American academic, wheelchair-bound and tortured. The Savonarola scenario was the least Jimmy could expect if ever God’s Intent caught up with him. And who might he have turned to if this had been the case? Sir Desmond, whose authority might have been diminished, but who was already deeply in Jimmy’s debt; the Squire who, but for his intervention, would have been in even deeper trouble with the authorities. And the diary’s last entry: Pity about the cottage – regret that its destruction had served as an alibi for the picture’s disappearance? Or merely his inability to save Jimmy’s home as well as the fugitive himself?

  Giles, though, stuck with his original interpretation. The old man had been too frail and vulnerable to take part in such adventures, “going the way of Enid Quintock” to quote him directly. Far more likely, he’d known nothing of it; Jimmy had gone of his own accord.

  ‘He might at least have shown some gratitude,’ I complained to Peter later. ‘You’d have thought he’d have jumped at the chance to restore something of his father’s reputation.’

  ‘Not if you look at it from Giles’ point of view.’ They’d spent some time together recently, planning the exhibition. ‘Our arrival put him in quite a quandary. Wanting to see Jimmy exonerated but anxious to preserve his father’s reputation. Affable enough and holding nothing back, but suspicious of us from the outset, thrown by our continually changing stories; playing along to find out just how much we knew. Quite a shock, realizing we were aware of Mappa Mundi’s existence, that our friend, the embroiderer, already suspected it held wartime secrets. What more might she have said? The picture, though, presented him with a golden opportunity. Take us through events as Jimmy portrayed them, as and where they’d happened, leading directly to the operation centre; diverting attention away from the Squire’s peacetime activities. A good deal of one-upmanship involved, as he now admits, deciphering a puzzle that had foxed us, leading us along a route that only he could follow, but I suppose links between Mappa Mundi and the auxiliary units were fairly obvious.’

  ‘To the bastions of academe and literature especially,’ I recalled, ‘as he was at pains to tell us’.

  Peter shook his head. ‘And he might have succeeded, suggesting Jimmy really had been what was it: a “stool pigeon”, that he’d betrayed the unit, done “a runner”.’

  With Giles unaware of the guilt that had hung over Peter all those years. Not till I let it slip. ‘A bravura performance,’ I said, ‘storming off like that,’

  ‘Genuine enough. I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry in my life.’

  Bringing Giles to his senses, realizing just how much this meant to Peter. Unable to go through with it and allowing us to read the diary.

  ‘With all that fuss about being there when we did so,’ Peter was saying. ‘Taking us through it line-by-line; his insistence that the old man was into his dotage almost. Your building him up as a hero undercuts all notions that the Squire was not fully aware of what he was doing. If he’d been that far gone, he’d never have masterminded Jimmy’s escape. But, if this really is what happened, then…’

  ‘…he’d have been savvy enough to know precisely what Stapleton was up to.’

  ‘Catch 22, isn’t that what you call it?’

  ‘Or, as Brady put it…’

  ‘Just another oiban myth.’

  But, with the exhibition well-nigh upon us, we had little time to discuss it further.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Threads

  ‘Here’s to her memory. Geraldine always knew there was such a picture. Right fro
m the beginning.’ Mildred clinked her glass against Helen’s and Giles glanced anxiously about him. It had not been easy persuading him to feature Mappa Mundi as a focal point of the exhibition, nor to invite feature writers and art critics from across the cultural spectrum to attend the opening ceremony. He need not have worried; few of them replied, still less had availed themselves of the opportunity.

  ‘Such a shame she couldn’t be here to see it.’ We’d taken Mildred on a conducted tour of the grounds that afternoon and she stood in front of the picture now, making a great show of scrutinising it, top to bottom.

  ‘Checking it out for clues she might have missed?’ I enquired.

  ‘Just searching for that elusive Duchess, my dear. Oops! There I go forgetting myself again! We’re going to have to treat him more respectfully, you and I, now he’s come up in the world.’ She’d turned to Helen. ‘No more tales out of school. Glamorous redheads, adolescent crushes – all forgotten. I promise.’

  Unlikely. Mildred was not going to forget my youthful indiscretions, never in a hundred years; not if I became Chancellor of the most prestigious university in the land.

  ‘Beats me how you and Geraldine could have known about the picture,’ I came in quickly, forestalling any further comments, ‘when all you had to go on were deductions from a newspaper article. The name even: Mappa Mundi.’

  Mildred accepted my flattery as nothing less than her due: ‘We made a good team, that’s for certain. If there was anything to be known about the man, she’d be bound to hear about it. Depended on me for most of the actual research, of course, not wishing to be recognised around these parts. A natural journalist, though, Geraldine. Talking of which…’

  We were being signalled from across the room. The press had arrived and a photographic record was required: Giles for the board of management; myself as executive director; Helen the distaff side of the partnership; chairmen of the parish, district and county councils – all of us gathered before a portrait of Sir Desmond Amberstone, moved from Hall to exhibition centre. By the time we returned, Mildred had disappeared.

  ‘Guesswork, more like,’ I said, returning to the previous topic. ‘Picking up rumours about Mappa Mundi and how it came to be painted, then convincing themselves it must have been destroyed.’ We made our way out of the dining room, where a band was getting ready to play. ‘And with Geraldine gone I don’t suppose we’ll ever discover how much she actually knew about it.’

  ‘Maybe Jimmy will show up, let all of us in on the secret.’ Something that had been on Helen’s mind since our conversation with Brady. ‘Could be he’s out there watching us right now.’

  ‘Shacked up in the forest, you mean – at eighty plus? Not that we ever got to know just how old he was, nor even the date of his birthday, no matter how much we pestered.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? Didn’t you tell me that out there time stood still?’

  Yterdene, she meant. A settlement deep in the forest to which the Jutes had fled following the final Saxon invasion. Living there to this day in a type of perpetual time-warp according to the stories I’d been told as a child. How else had ramblers sometimes caught a glimpse of strangers in old-fashioned attire disappearing into the trees? Or toddlers lost in the forest tell of waking blindfold; being comforted by unfamiliar voices, tended and gently led to safety by unseen hands? How was it that, long into the age of musketry and gunpowder, brand new axes, sharpened to perfection, were discovered embedded in oak or ash; freshly wrought swords of antique design found along its most distant pathways. And why, with the forest all but destroyed, was the sound of metal being beaten into shape sometimes heard echoing across its empty valleys; at sunset, plumes of smoke seen rising skywards, and yet no trace as to their source?

  ‘Along with the screech owls and cockatrices.’ Helen shielded her eyes and gazed theatrically mid-distance into the woodland. ‘Except Jimmy, of course, had that St Christopher talisman to ward off evil spirits.’

  It was at that moment, I swear it, we heard the bell, a steady regular chime. ‘Nice touch,’ I said, ‘ringing Saint to mark the opening.’

  But here was an anxious Giles hurrying towards us. ‘None of my doing, they’ve been out of commission, waiting for renovation, these last six months. Someone will do themselves an injury if they’re monkeying around in there.’ And, as he spoke, Jimmy’s bell continued to toll.

  Down at St Matthias, the constable was equally perplexed. ‘Stopped the moment we arrived,’ he was telling the rector. ‘Door wide open, rope still swinging, but the place deserted and not a soul in sight.’

  ‘The choirboys up to their usual tricks,’ intoned the rector.

  ‘Could have been anyone, keeping the church unlocked as the reverend does. Those scoundrels from the youth centre, most like. Knew how to deal with them in my day.’ The constable adjusted his helmet. ‘And nothing suspicious up at the Hall?’

  Giles shook his head and the three of us returned to the festivities.

  The rector had been right. Quite obviously a practical joke and anyone could have been responsible, just as the constable suggested. But I had my suspicions. Strange how Saint came in on cue, just when Helen led me into a discussion on Yterdene, at the mention of screech owls – the moment she’d shielded her eyes. A signal, it must have been, with Gerundive lurking not too far away. Both of them in it together.

  They denied it, of course; have continued to do so. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls,’ was all Helen would say at the time, insisting we double-check all the ‘Saintley’ haunts that evening.

  ‘A theme park in the making,’ I grumbled, as we ducked under the Parkland Closed barrier and made our way up Stoyan’s Hidden Pathway. Neatly sign-posted, with further directions to Morgana’s Mystic Grotto and Bereden’s Secret Bunker. ‘And “tricks of the light” to go with them.’ A series of multi-coloured mini-lanterns had come suddenly to life, snaking their way along the route we should follow. ‘Geraldine must have had a hand in the planning.’

  ‘Solves Jimmy’s problem, though, doesn’t it? What happens after the folk are dispersed, when their landmarks are uprooted?’ Helen had pressed on ahead and stood waiting alongside a This Way to Tonbert’s Stepping-Stones sign-post. ‘The answer’s simple: we create new ones.’

  I struggled up the hill to join her, wondering what new stunt she’d planned this time.

  ‘But still the same old stories.’ Helen chattered away, to herself almost, as I did so. ‘The ingredients rather. Love, hate. Hope and despair. Loyalty, betrayal, deceit. The sort of thing you read about in Homer or Dante. Boccaccio. Scheherazade. Grimm. Hans Christian Andersen. My daddy; your Jimmy.’ She took both my hands in hers. ‘Though I doubt we’re ever going to agree about either of them.’

  ‘Nor the music,’ I said. Below us the band had struck up, catches of some rhythmic refrain, straight from the charts, reaching us faintly on a quickening breeze. Miniscule couples had emerged onto the terrace, floodlit for the occasion, and were gyrating like so many puppets. ‘And certainly not the dancing.’

  ‘Well, we’ve always seen things differently, haven’t we? Part of the attraction, I suppose.’ Helen was snapping her fingers to the beat now. ‘The knack you have of separating out everything that happens to you. Schooldays with Miss Quintock, the meeting with Veronica in your youth, then later as Geraldine; Jimmy’s stories, his pictures, Squire Desmond’s secret army, Mappa Mundi, Brady’s revelations. Each stored away in a different compartment of your mind. A file-card index almost.’ Her arm snaked round my waist. ‘Whilst to me they’re all of a piece. Like Geraldine’s embroidery. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since her death: individual threads, contrasting colours, different textures. Each one important in itself, adding to the overall effect, but it’s not till the end that we realise how each fits in, contributes to the picture as a whole. Like the man says – Kierkegaard, not Jimmy! –
we live life forward, understand it backwards.’

  Fine, I think, as long as you know when the whole thing’s finished; if you’re lucky, and the colours don’t fade. Or, sticking to her previous analogy, the file-cards aren’t shuffled. Even then we find what we want to find, hear what we’re accustomed to hear, see what we’re used to see, read what we expect to find on the page.

  ‘Each time feeling sure of our facts,’ I tell her, ‘certain we’d reached the end of the road, confident in our suppositions. When suddenly, out of the blue – an inscription in a book, a meeting with an old flame, a newspaper article long forgotten, the framing of a picture, the backside of a canvas, an American academic – fate, chance, kismet, providence, call it what you like, was on hand, suggesting another route; pointing us in a different, more profitable, direction. “Just when we were safest,” in fact.’

  Helen comes in on cue:

  ‘… there’s a sunset touch,

  A fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s death,

  A chorus-ending from Euripides,

  And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears, –

  The grand Perhaps’

  – the few lines of Browning she could tolerate.

  ‘And not a bad epitaph for Jimmy,’ I say.