The Big Day

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘Mark her well,’ said the Sheikh. ‘Dancing and laughing there, tricked out as an Egyptian queen. On such unworthy objects greats causes and movements sometimes depend. We are all in travesty now. But the day is coming, and coming sooner than – ’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Turning, they saw a figure in an old-fashioned crash helmet, dark green in colour, fitting closely round the face like a medieval knight’s. The face itself was obscured by enormous black goggles.

  ‘What on earth are you?’ the Sheikh said.

  ‘Despatch Rider,’ this person said. ‘First World War. Do you know which is our host?’

  He peered through his goggles at the Toad and Sheikh. The lenses were scratched and grainy, so that sight was darkened and blurred by them. He had been in the pub till closing-time, celebrating with Weekes their acquisition of the lease on a house in Stratford-on-Avon, a perfect place, Weekes said, for a School. The noise, and the changing effects of the light, and the large quantity of beer he had drunk, confused his mind and vision, gave him a sense of being involved in some strange, clamorous, irridescent twilight, full of flickering shapes and forms. He was unwilling, however, to remove the goggles, partly because of the edict against it, mainly because he didn’t know where Bishop was, nor what he looked like, and couldn’t risk being recognized until he had a chance of running Cuthbertson to earth, and getting his cheque changed. They needed every penny now, to get the School going.

  ‘I’m afraid not, old boy,’ the Sheikh said. ‘You’ll have to wait for the witching hour.’

  He nodded and moved away. The Despatch Rider watched him thread his way through the dancers to the opposite side of the room. Here the goggles lost track of him in the murk. All the same there had been a similarity in build and gait to Cuthbertson, and the Despatch Rider was not convinced that this was not his host. When he looked round, the Toad was no longer in evidence, but a female tennis player with a flaxen wig and a grotesquely simpering mask, who was carrying what looked like a Guiness away from the bar, knocked lightly against him and said, ‘Oops! Steady the Buffs.’

  The Tennis Player had abandoned his falsetto and now spoke in a man’s voice which, although slightly muffled by the mask, was familiar. ‘Cheers!’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’ He turned aside a little, pulled his mask outwards from his face, and tilted his glass to drink. Mafferty, hampered by the goggles, did not succeed in identifying him during this process.

  ‘Do you know who our host is?’ Mafferty said. ‘It isn’t you, is it?’

  ‘ ’Fraid not,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘I’m trying to find him myself.’ He drank again ‘Bassum est optimum,’ he said. ‘Beer is best.’

  Suddenly Mafferty knew who the Tennis Player was, and extreme caution descended on him, in spite of his drunkenness.

  ‘You won’t go far wrong on beer,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Your voice sounds familiar. You’re not a member of staff, by any chance?’

  ‘No, no,’ Mafferty said, in an artificially deep voice. ‘I am a friend of Mrs Cuthbertson.’

  ‘Oh. She’s not wearing anything under those beads you know.’

  ‘Really.’ Mrs Cuthbertson must be the one in strings of beads then, with the black and silver face. If he kept a watch on her, perhaps she would lead him to her husband. Mafferty peered down at his watch: it was gone eleven. He had an hour before the unmasking. It was essential he should escape detection until then. His eye fell on the figure of a referee, sitting against the far wall. ’I only know one person here,’ he said, ‘and that is Mr Mafferty. He told me he was coming as a referee.’

  He nodded at the Tennis Player and allowed himself to drift away through the crowd.

  ‘I didn’t get a real chance to thank you,’ the Sheikh said to Cleopatra, ‘for asking me to your party tonight.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Cleopatra said. ‘I am delighted you were able to come.’ She was wearing a tall headdress and a rather in-human, bird-like mask with a prominent, beaky nose-piece.

  ‘Kind of you to say so,’ the Sheikh said. ’I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say something personal to you?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Cleopatra said.

  ‘Let me just say this,’ the Sheikh said. He had decided on a bold frontal approach. ‘Your presence here has made all the difference to me. I am not normally a sociable man. You will not find me in the centre of a crowd. By nature I am solitary. But when I looked across and saw you … I knew at once who you were …’

  Cleopatra threw back her head and laughed, on a deep baying note.

  ‘I am the Principal,’ Cuthbertson said. Returning to his corner after the dance he had found himself face to face with a person resembling a very old woman, corpulent, and with extremely untidy hair.

  ‘I told her and no mistake,’ this person said. ‘I don’t mince my words, not when it is a matter of principle. I could only listen to the radio when she said so. She brought it to the Home with her, you see.’

  The mask that Cuthbertson looked out on from his own referee’s mask was plump-cheeked, wrinkled and shrunken round in the mouth, marked by sagging, drooping skin everywhere. In the soft folds round the eyes there were little white spots.

  ‘That is a marvellously life-like mask,’ Cuthbertson said. He still found difficulty in forming and uttering words, though the full effects of the sedative were wearing off now, and he was experiencing a return of tension, of that same conflict of impulses which had earlier sent him wandering around the school. ‘I congratulate you on that mask,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Mask?’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘This is my face, and my eyes as blue as when I was a girl. My waist was no bigger than that.’ She held up two plump, speckled hands making an unsteady hoop with forefingers and thumbs. ‘You could of spanned it,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘This is my house, you know,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I am the Principal of this place.’

  Mrs Mercer’s head, declining in a dozing sort of way towards her black velvet bosom, was arrested at a certain downward point and jerked up again. ‘Some people can lay no claim to beauty, past or present,’ she said. Since arriving at the party she had spent her time sitting on the floor alongside the bar, drinking rum and peppermint, exchanging occasional remarks with the barman, who had kept her glass replenished. Now, however, with intoxication, her delight at the radio situation could no longer be contained, and she had taken to wandering around telling people about it.

  ‘Yes,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘I am the Principal.’ A desire to confide in this elderly, trustworthy person was growing within him. ‘I built the place up with my own hands, actually,’ he said. ‘I saw the possibilities right from the start. The place was a ruin when I first saw it. It lies adjacent to open country behind, you know, and the open country was taking over. You will hardly believe this, but one of the first things I saw on my initial tour of inspection was a large brown rat. It sat up on its back legs and looked at me.’

  ‘Mask indeed,’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘Saucy!’ She gave Cuthbertson’s bare knee a slap. ‘My legs is still as good as they ever was. In shape, but there is the veins, of course.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Cuthbertson said, eager to keep the conversation going. ‘The fact is,’ he added, ‘I never had any qualifications myself, and it was a source of great regret to me as I grew older. I saw in this place an opportunity of giving people what I myself had missed. It had to be commercially viable, of course. I believe in the profit motive. Drake believed in the profit motive. Hawkins believed in the profit motive. Frobisher believed in the profit motive.’

  ‘You’ve got a nice place here,’ Mrs Mercer said.

  ‘I have worked hard over the years.’ Cuthbertson looked emotionally at Mrs Mercer through his mask. ‘Striving to build something of permanent value. An institution to be proud of. Commercially viable, but with standards, rigorous standards. And I think I succeeded. Over the years.’

  ‘All them years,’ Mrs Mercer said. ‘All them years, the
n this afternoon her radio blew up. She misused the volume.’

  ‘Now something has gone wrong,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Badly wrong.’ He advanced his mask earnestly towards her. ‘Something has got in,’ he said.

  Mrs Mercer’s head drooped again, was again raised abruptly. Her hair, which under the combined stresses of joy, alcohol and conversation had finally escaped from all control, fell around her face, partially obscuring it. ‘Just this evening,’ she said. ‘She came and asked me if she could listen to the six o’clock news. She came and asked me. After all them years, it was vouchsafed to me. God was good to a lonely old woman.’ She looked up triumphantly through her hair. ‘I told her to go and fuck herself,’ she said.

  The whisky that Lavinia had drunk before the party, combined with the whisky she had drunk since, and the exhilaration of causing a stir with her costume, had excited her spirits and inclined her to amorous speculations about some of her guests, particularly that friend of Mr Honeyball’s, whom he had praised so highly to her. She had made several attempts to seek him out, and was at the moment extricating herself from a conversation with a man in the costume of an old-fashioned anarchist, whom she had thought might be Baines until a certain mumbling habit with his plosives had betrayed him as Mr Benny, her teacher in the evening pottery class of the previous winter, of whom she had at one time entertained some hopes, until she had discovered that he lived with another man on terms of domestic intimacy. She had invited them both to her party to show there were no ill-feelings, but it was definitely not with a person of that sort that she wanted to spend time talking that evening.

  She was moving away from the Anarchist when a person in a dark green crash helmet and huge black goggles drew near her and said, ‘What a marvellous costume. So daring.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lavinia said. ‘You look like some kind of beetle.’

  ‘Despatch Rider. First World War.’ Mafferty had made several trips to the bar, in between efforts to identify Cuthbertson, and was now finding balance something of a problem – the upper part of his body tended to waver from the vertical even when his feet, as now, were carefully planted and at rest. With a confused recollection that his hostess was a goddess of some kind, he said, ’I have come to worship at your shrine.’

  Lavinia smiled and shimmered and her beads hissed. This man was drunk, his costume was ridiculous, he was not tall enough for Mr Baines. She took a step or two away, and Mafferty, seeing her form recede into glimmering mists called after her, ‘Is this your consort?’ Lavinia looked over her shoulder, and nodded, and Mafferty said to the Anarchist, ‘There is something I wanted to ask you about, Mr Cuthbertson.’

  The Anarchist had a very elaborate mask, going right up over his face and head, bald and domed on top and with a great spade-shaped libertarian beard below. He nodded at Mafferty’s words, but said nothing.

  ‘It is about the cheque,’ Mafferty said, enunciating with care. ‘The cheque that you gave me this afternoon. It is difficult to read.’

  The Anarchist again nodded his imposing head.

  ‘In fact it is impossible.’ Mafferty peered forward through his goggles. ‘It is illegible,’ he said, wanting to drive the point home.

  ‘P—p—perhaps I was drunk,’ the Anarchist said. ‘Or am. Or p—p—possibly you are, or were. Or m—m—maybe we b—b—both – ’

  ‘You are not Cuthbertson,’ Mafferty said loudly. He had a sudden desire to bash the Anarchist in the centre of his mask, cave his false features in.

  Suppressing his violent impulse, he turned away. He was in time to see, quite close beside him, the bright form of Lavinia and a tall figure in Bedouin dress whom he recognized as the person he had spoken to earlier. They moved away together across the room. For some moments they were still visible, over the heads of dancers and talking groups, then they disappeared and Mafferty surmised that they must have crouched or sat down together against the wall. His early suspicion that the Arab was Cuthbertson returned to him. Man and wife, he thought dizzily. Snatching a brief tête à tête in the midst of the throng. He began to make his way, very carefully, towards the point at which they had disappeared from view, peering right and left through his goggles at the fixed expressions of the masks which moved in the process of dancing, and changed with the changing light, but registered nothing that naked faces did. He would have liked to take off his goggles; it would have been like returning to the upper air, but he could not be sure that Bishop was not somewhere on the look-out for just such a move. He moved with precarious equilibrium towards the place where Goddess and consort had sunk down below sight.

  Before he could make it, however, he found himself accosted by a very old, stout lady with a mass of gingerish brown hair largely obscuring her face. His vision darkened by the goggles, he was at first under the impression that she was wearing a mask of ingenious make, but then he detected movement of eyes and lashes, and a gleam of moisture – apparently an overplus from the eye – caught in one of the shallow folds of her left cheek.

  ‘Excuse me, dearie,’ this person said. ‘Do you know where the toilet is?’

  ‘There’s one just off the main hall,’ Mafferty said. ‘It’s the way you came in, actually.’ He pointed over the heads of people to the door. ‘Go straight across the hall,’ he said. ‘You’ll see the door facing you.’ In the midst of saying this he saw the Goddess and the Bedouin, having apparently worked their way along the wall, leaving by that very door. ‘That’s the way I’m going myself,’ he said. He made an attempt to move forward, but the old lady did not give way.

  ‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘All the costumes.’ Her head declined slightly, as if she were dozing, and was arrested with something of a jerk. ‘I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a party more,’ she said. ‘Drink in abundance and a very pleasant class of person. When I was a girl, of course…’ She shook the hair out of her eyes and reared up her head suddenly to stare him in the face. ‘What are you supposed to be?’ she said.

  ‘Despatch Rider. World War One,’ Mafferty said.

  ‘Mask,’ the old lady said. ‘He asked me if I was wearing a mask. Sauce, I said to him. Saucy! They was often saying things like that. Well if you had listened to everything they said …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mafferty said, trying to edge past. There couldn’t be much more than half an hour left now.

  ‘Not like some,’ the old lady said. ‘But I told her today. It was vouchsafed to me.’

  She raised both hands and parted the hair from her face, which bore an expression of tranquil contentment. ‘I told her to go and fuck herself,’ she said. ‘I must go to the toilet.’

  ‘This way,’ Mafferty said, seizing his opportunity. ‘I’m going in that direction myself.’

  ‘Referee, eh?’ Bishop said. ‘You are an anguis in herba. Not only masquerading as a B. A. Cantab, but it was you who disrupted the degree ceremony this afternoon, wasn’t it? It was you who disarranged the Chief’s papers. Do you realize that you have driven the Principal to the verge of a breakdown? A man whose shoes you are not worthy to – ’

  Cuthbertson looked steadily through his eye-holes at the simpering mask of the Tennis Player.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t attempt to deny it, I saw you coming away from the Principal’s office.’

  ‘Principal’s office?’

  ‘Don’t prevaricate with me,’ Bishop said, grinding his teeth. ‘You inserted sheets of gibberish among the degree certificates.’

  ‘All my life,’ the Sheikh said, ‘I have had an ideal of womanhood, but I had given up all hope of realizing it in this earthly existence.’ His voice throbbed with an excitement that gave accents of absolute sincerity to his words. It was eleven-ten: only five minutes to go. ‘Until tonight,’ he said. It was an historic moment: the first bomb to be detonated by the Party in his area. And at the precise moment of the explosion here he was, getting on to the right terms with a potential benefactress. ‘Un
til tonight,’ he repeated, looking at the strangely painted glistening face of his companion.

  They were sitting half-way up the hall stairs, holding hands. The hall light was on and they could see each other by it, though not very clearly. Lavinia’s black stripes merged into the dimness, her silver one glowed phosphorescently. The Sheikh had taken off his dark glasses.

  ‘I had grown reconciled,’ he said, smiling sadly, ‘never to finding it. I had come to terms with my solitude.’

  ‘There were others,’ Lavinia said. ‘There must have been others.’ For the first time in her life the language she was uttering and hearing corresponded to her sense of reality and fitness. She was enthralled. ‘Others to console you on the way,’ she said, looking at the large face framed by the Arab headdress.

  ‘I won’t deny it,’ the Sheikh said. ‘I am flesh and blood, after all. I have the usual instincts and appetites.’ He began to describe sexy little circles with his forefinger in Lavinia’s soft palm. ‘But they were only makeshifts, Lavinia,’ he said.

  Lavinia rubbed the side of her naked thigh against his gown. ‘It is natural in a man,’ she said. She raised herself on her haunches and moved two steps higher up. ‘Only to be expected,’ she said.

  ‘In my soul I was always lonely, even desolate,’ the Sheikh said, moving up in his turn.

  ‘Lonely as the desert breeze,’ Lavinia said smiling phosphorescently. ‘You are dressed the part.’ She moved up two more steps.

  ‘I had this impalpable ideal,’ the Sheikh said, moving up after her. He placed his right hand on Lavinia’s lower ribs, below the beads. ‘As I say, I had despaired of ever finding her.’ Acting on his own initiative, he moved up two stairs. ‘Until tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Across a crowded room,’ Lavinia said, humping herself up after him. They were near the top of the stairs now. The Sheikh replaced his hand, but higher up and more to the front, taking the weight of Lavinia’s left breast.