‘I was glad of the move to South London (Norbury) that Oliver Merchant and I made. He’d always pronounced himself impressed by the way I inspected and commented on new designs, new lettering for his cards, a service I rendered him from age ten or eleven upwards. So when he suggested that I actually entered Sunbeam Press, as chief assistant who would quite definitely become a partner, and maybe one day – a heady promise then for any young man! – managing director, I said yes, Ol, yes, that’s the best future for me I can see. Ol arranged for me to sit my A Levels that winter in a South London school, and I didn’t do so badly. And, with these results, the London School of Printing – looking on me kindly because of my family tragedy – allowed me to start my degree course a term late.
‘One really thoughtful thing Ol did for me, the Christmas after the exams, was present me – to my astonished joy – with a dog. From Battersea Dogs’ Home. We never knew exactly how old he was, a couple of years they reckoned. A white smooth-haired fox-terrier (well, that’s as accurate a description as you could come up with). I called him Baron, I don’t know why; name just came to me, and he seemed to like it from the first. He was very clever, very sharp of hearing, very loving, wanted to go everywhere with me – and to an amazing degree succeeded. I even smuggled him into college classes, and he became quite a party-goer, and saw a lot of human nature which most ‘pets’ don’t, but it never fazed him. He slept at the foot of my bed, but he’d always edge up to the pillow by the time I woke up in the morning.’
Nat sees with sudden, moving clarity that photo of his father when still a youth, long hair parted in the middle, and a white dog between his firm hands. The Pete Kempsey of that picture was as capable of devotion as Baron, he reckoned.
‘And he lived to a good enough age, though his death, when it came, tore me up, I don’t mind admitting. I was going out with Izzie when he had his last illness, his heart. She helped to look after him, and that drew us even closer together.
‘What kind of student was I? Well, a pretty average one, I’d say, no high flyer at all, better at some things than others, but at those competent and steady (believe it or not). As for life-style, well, again much as you might expect. (I daresay you can match it, Luke.) Some pubbing, some clubbing, some casual sex, some dope-taking, some protest marches for good causes (a big and enjoyable one on behalf of Allende’s Chile, I remember, on which I met a girl I went out with for about a year), some playing rugby until I got fed up with the amount of practice-time it required, some trips to good gigs and exhibitions (most of which have slipped into mental oblivion years since) – all singularly unremarkable. In fact, my painful past history apart, I suppose that my having Baron as a constant companion was the only outstanding thing about me. It’s strange to reflect on now, but I never once went back to Leominster. Refused to do so. Hence the abyss that opened up between me and my brother, Julian Pringle. And Sam I banished to the horrors of the past.
‘Baron and I lived with Ol, in his large, comfortable terraced villa in Norbury, which was often pleasantly full of visitors, as Ol was hospitable to any people who worked in any capacity for Sunbeam Press. He allowed me to bring friends there too, but I mostly chose not to. Why? (Apart from the fact that he might smell dope!) Well, I’ve probably already made myself out a shit, so why not do so further? I came to long for freedom from Oliver Merchant, and cherish any I got. (And Baron was something of a bulwark against him too.) You see, Ol was over-kind to me, over-solicitous; there was no getting away from him, and yet I wasn’t – still am not, I guess – the kind of guy who stands up for himself with strong words or shows of temper. Far from it! Mates of mine, usually after too many drinks or smokes, said: “He’s an old pouff, isn’t he? A jealous, fussy old queen!” Well, I wasn’t having any of that; I was loyal to him – but also, of course protective of my own reputation… And, you may well ask, were my friends right? Yes and no’s the answer. I would take my Bible oath he never had sex with another male, and I would even go so far as to say he never wanted to. My mother he’d adored from a safe distance for more than twenty years, entrusting her with confidences, listening to hers (whatever they might have been), paying her compliments, singing her praises, and Dad, obviously, hadn’t felt a flicker of threat. After their deaths the sentimental fondness he’d already developed for myself – partly as his dear Marion’s son – occupied his emotional centre, and that could be a burden for us both. Particularly when I took girls out. He definitely got jealous then, which took the form of fault-finding first with them, then, if I persisted with my friendship, with me. He hoped, he’d say, I wasn’t going to slacken in my Sunbeam Press work, there had been a case of a complaint from a major shop, a long-valued customer, and so on and so forth. And wasn’t Baron enough of a companion for me? The dog surely had more sense than… well, than whoever was on the scene at the time! Such tensions were usually resolved by me stopping seeing the girl in question. Weak, I know, but there you are! Until, Nat, I met your mother. I fell in love with Izzie so overwhelmingly there could be no reining me in. After a month or two of sulky remonstrations Oliver had to swallow his pride, and later of course he was Unselfish Aid personified when it came to helping the two of us buy a house. (We’d buried poor old Baron by then.) You came into the world, Nat, eighteen months after our having moved there, as a happy couple.
‘Except that we weren’t one, not really. Oh yes I was pleased to be a father all right – I never quite understand what the phrase “a proud father” means, because one thing that I felt right from the first, Nat, is: Here’s an individual, with a life before him, who, for all his dependence on others at the moment, is utterly separate – from all others even from those who have brought his life about, who has ways and desires demonstrably and absolutely his own. Possibly I’ve felt that too strongly. Possibly it’s a form of evading responsibility – or of my difficulty in receiving another person’s life. I felt my own separateness encroached on by my householder existence, though I never ceased, Nat, to feel that you and your mother were the two people most important to me. And I…’ he resents the painful lump that’s come into his throat, ‘and I haven’t changed in that respect either. But I haven’t got enough, I reckon, to spare from that separateness to give out to others. Izzie said all I could really manage to tell the outside world about was my own pursuits. Greeting cards and now kites. Sounds comical, doesn’t it? And that’s why finally I bored her, I guess, but from my point of view… Well, I don’t know I really want to tell anybody about much else. I am, and must remain, the text books would say, a loner. Some of us are loners, some of us aren’t. And only sorrow follows when you read yourself wrongly.
‘Funny thing is Oliver Merchant – Leominster’s most prominent bachelor, said Sam Price once – came firmly in the second category. He was not a loner. He started – ludicrous though the word may sound for one of his age and mannerisms – dating women. In South London, as back in Herefordshire, he got involved with Am Dram, and I even think he capered comically over some Norbury or Dulwich stage as Koko to another Katisha. (I did not go to watch!) And he and one of these women, Rosie Roberts – who, far from being a lead-part in these shows, was merely a member of the Chorus – got on so well that they married. The proverbial feather wasn’t in it when I heard, but of course I said I was glad to hear it. I wasn’t. Not a bit! I’d guessed that Rosie would start taking an interest in Sunbeam and work her way into it as shareholder and Board member. Still the actual settling up of the company’s affairs after Ol’s death wasn’t as fraught as I’d once feared. For by this time – I’m truly sorry, Nat, for you to hear this in such black-and-white terms – I knew for definite that I couldn’t sustain a family life any more, that I’d bring more unhappiness than happiness to my wife and son if I stayed. I remembered what joy I’d had from kites – my little brother Robin had always liked them, and you, Nat, long before the move, enjoyed flying them on Clapham Common and out on Box Hill, when we made those expeditions into Surrey. So I bought myself out
of Sunbeam, saw that Izzie was well provided for, and then came out here to The Marches, my native region after all, to look for some property in which to establish a kite shop. And the rest, as they say, is History.
‘Some history, I hear you thinking!’
For a moment both Luke and Nat think he’s finished, that, in a surprisingly flat way, he has got to the climax of this last part of his story. But just by looking at his flushed face they see that they are wrong. Pete is just bracing himself for what he still must tell them.
In Nat’s head those Berwyn colours repeat themselves – light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale) – all to be subsumed now in the variegated blackness of night. Which denied them their power.
Pete is going, ‘When, after being unobtainable by mobile all day, all fucking day, Nat didn’t return on the night of the twenty-first, I went spare; do you both understand that? I didn’t know what to do, where to put myself, who to be with, how to eat, how to sleep – from that time on, right up to my going into the air with the North Wales Police, Heddlu Gogledd Cymru, taking off from Wrexham… Hard to decide whether I felt worse before or after receiving the jiffy-bag from the Co-op here! A case could be made for either, and, take it from me, these last few days I’ve made both. Before last Friday I thought Nat might just have buggered off on some giant escapade that could lead him half-across the globe, that those Heights he mentioned in his note were emotional or psychological ones – a bewitching girl, quality-time sex, ‘Ecstasy’, the chance to travel to Arctic Norway and Sweden before the winter begins – any of these! But the devil in all that was, however were Izzie and I ever to get in contact with him?
Assuming he was alive. Then when those items came to us from Llanrhaeadr, then, yes, we now knew at least where he had unde-niably been, and therefore where we should start looking.
‘But both Izzie and I, at our most despairing, thought what we’d got could well be farewell tokens. Either sent by Nat instead of the conventional suicide note – never a satisfactory form of leave-taking – or else found in a little heap somewhere, with no owner visible or traceable, by some kind busybody, and then forwarded – though why to the Cooperative here in Lydcastle we couldn’t explain. We got to the stage, you see, when we couldn’t feel a hundred per cent sure of the handwriting on the package; it was all in Caps, and rather wonky ones at that, and as Nat has never been a great communicator, neither of us could even remember the last addressed envelope from him we’d received or exactly what the lettering on it looked like.’
Nat is inclined to chip in here: ‘I sent the things partly because I was keen you didn’t think I’d topped myself, Dad.’ But he doesn’t; it would be a little less than the truth. He’d inwardly provided for the possibility that the world might well think that was what he had done. And had gone on with his scheme.
‘Izzie was too frightened of what we might discover on the Berwyns to go into the police helicopter, and that’s the first time in all the years I’ve known her that I’ve seen her show fear. Anyway there was barely room for a fourth person in so small a space on such a ghastly journey. When I say “ghastly” I mean from the point of view of my spirits, my appalling fears. Remember I am someone who knows what it’s like to have close ones, dear ones, taken from me. In another frame of mind it would have been a journey of great beauty, one never to forget, flying above the heather-covered Berwyns on a sunny September morning, able to see all the contours of the mountains below.
‘We went up in a Eurocopter EC 135T fitted with a day camera with a zoom lens, and the guy beside me, Islwyn, was in charge of the map reading. And I remember thinking “I know many a lad in Lydcastle who’d give his eye-teeth (and perhaps more) to be in this helicopter. But me, I can’t properly see for the dread throbbing behind my eyeballs, and the whirr of the machine is almost drowned out by the loudness of my own fast-beating heart. If we discover Nat dead down there, well, then, I will die too. I shan’t think even about poor Izzie or the kite stock or any unpaid bills or my pals in Lydcastle, or any other hopes I’ve been daft enough to harbour these last years. I’ll force myself out of the aircraft, so I’m dashed to pieces by whatever rocks catch me. And good riddance, I would say…’
‘Dad!’ Nat can’t help himself crying out, and as for Luke: ‘When I first made a journey in a Eurocopter, I was like a kid, over the moon. Except literally, of course! I thought well, now I’d really fucking arrived as a full-blooded investigative journalist. But if we’d all been searching for our Jared…’ It doesn’t stand thinking about.
‘Over and over those peaks, round and round the massif we circled until I thought I would go stark staring crazy. I could not have believed so many gulleys cut their way into the slopes, nor how many outcrops of rock obscure exactly the natural aperture the crew thought we had to peer down into. We flew over not just Cadair Berwyn and Cadair Bronwen, but over their rivals, Moely-Henfaes and Moel Fferna. Until we passed over Pen-plaenau. And there we saw…’
But he can’t continue. Anyway both his listeners know what they saw. On Pen-plaenau both the police team and the father were rewarded with the sight of Nathaniel Robin Kempsey standing on a slope, looking up towards them, perfectly alive, and – with the pilot’s eminently reliable expertise and patience – perfectly rescuable.
Pete, to his own dismay, is not merely weeping now but sobbing, a kid’s sobbing, his head resting against hands held up as if in prayer, sobbing to the point of breathlessness, as he has never done during the past days of either loss or discovery, as he never did even after learning that all his family save one had been killed.
Luke says, with a tender gruffness he doesn’t know himself capable of: ‘This has been a rough ride for you, Pete! A good part of the morning’s already gone. Why don’t we get some lunch?’
Pete, trying to compose himself and sound ordinary, says: ‘Why not?’
‘No! Not yet!’ Nat’s voice is so loud and urgent it startles both Pete and Luke, ‘not till… Dad, please leave the room. I want to have time with Luke Fleming.’
Pete is wiping his tear-spattered face, and trying to recover his normal breathing rhythm back. Old Nat has been right about him all along; he truly is out of condition, a man shouldn’t get as short-of-breath as this when only in his early fifties. He feels he must resemble some clumsy dog who’s tumbled in a cold pool by mistake on a country walk, and is now sorry for himself. ‘I dunno if I should do what you’re suggesting,’ he says.
‘Dad, please!’
‘He’ll be okay with me, Pete, I promise,’ says Luke Fleming. Where’s the Reuters’ wonder now, where the methods of the 87th Precinct in those American detective stories he devoured once in a holiday guesthouse in Rhyl?
So Pete leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. He walks down two stairs before returning to the landing and listening outside the door. Nat, preparing himself for the last and worst haul of them all, recites: Light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale). And it’s full sunlight, a splendid midday. Just see the strolling people in the Square below, enjoying it all. And with their dogs with them, including Harvey, my favourite border collie from Bull Street…
‘Luke,’ begins Nat – best to stick to the first-name approach, ‘I did it all for Dad. You’ve got to know that from the very start, and keep it in your head all the way through. Now I’ve heard everything he went through at my age, all those things I truly didn’t know about, I can’t feel the same about my action – even less so now I’ve learned how he suffered when I went missing. Which is why I want to get it all off my chest, especially as it seems to have backfired! Otherwise why would you be here, Luke, in my bedroom, come to hear me make a cock-up, to spill beans you’ve probably already counted up, like a Spanish Inquisitor getting his heretic? But when the idea first came to me – well, it seemed brilliant, I don’t mind telling y
ou! A stroke of genius.
‘As I sit here now, it feels not brilliant, just plain stupid! And unmindful of its true effect on other people. The decision of an idiot really – even though I’ve nearly brought it off! All except one extremely important aspect of my plan, which hasn’t – shall we say, materialised at all.’
‘Money?’ says Luke, but his grin isn’t of his former gloating kind. Is this because, after the dad’s breaking down, triumphalism of any kind isn’t in order. The boy knows he’s been rumbled, but instead of being sorry or angry, is, on the contrary, pretty fucking glad.
‘I’ve always said, haven’t I, I’m a news-freak who’s going to be a newshound. I never had any doubt what course I wanted to take at Uni if my A Levels were good enough to get me there: journalism. I’m still headed in that direction. Though the way you press guys have set yourselves at me and baited me, like dogs attacking some shackled bear, has made me more than once, these last days, have second thoughts about joining your pack. Well, it all began, my Big Idea, with my getting excited about the story which broke in mid-July…’
‘Of Jamie Neale. In the Blue Mountains of Australia?’ hazards Luke Fleming, though of course it isn’t a ‘hazarding’ at all. Luke’s used up a hell of a lot of brain-power working the whole thing out. And he wouldn’t have hurried over here to Lydcastle, ahead of his colleagues and rivals, if he hadn’t been sure of his conclusion (though needing help from Nat himself about the stages leading to it). Only when the intriguingly strong parallels between the two boys’ adventures came home to him had he appreciated just how right he (and certain others too) had been to have misgivings from the first about Nat Kempsey and the tale he told. The key to it, to its inconsistencies and difficulties, lay, he became convinced, in that other boy’s experience. Meeting Joel Easton only vindicated his thoughts.
After Brock Page 24