by Xan Brooks
One of the scouts peeks through a slit in the canvas. “Malcolm, step back,” the Great Crested Owl scolds him. “You must at all times show respect for the dead.”
Lucy sees Coach draw his brother to one side. He instructs Crisis again to get out of it, quick. In a whisper, he tells him to lay up and wait down on Turpentine Lane. He shall follow on with the kids when he can.
Crisis nods and turns away. He gestures for the funny men to climb up in the back.
The Owl says, “Memorise these registration plates, boys. These men are intending to evade justice.”
The Tin Man attempts to intercede. He says, “Sir, please try to remember that we have lost a good friend here tonight. We’re all quite upset. I don’t doubt you mean well but some sensitivity, please.”
“Into the truck,” says Crisis.
Lucy and Fred help Toto out of his chair and into the cab. The Tin Man and Scarecrow clamber in the back with the body. Then Coach cranks the handle and Crisis peels out so fast that the back wheels dig out a fan tail of dirt.
“Memorise that registration plate, boys!”
The Maudslay jumps across the clearing until it finds the rutted trail. They can hear it crashing through the brambles like an elephant in retreat.
“It’s from the Grantwood estate,” reports the scout named Malcolm. “They had it written on the side.”
The Great Crested Owl appears to weigh up this information. Lucy sees that beneath all the bangles and plumage lurks a four-square middle-aged man with outsized dentures and an undershot chin. The Owl looks so fearsome from a distance and so unimpressive up close. She reaches across and squeezes Winifred’s hand. In the hush that follows the lorry’s departure, she can hear Coach still toiling to get his breathing under control.
“Why are they wearing masks and things?” asks the second scout.
Instead of replying, the Owl rounds on Coach. “Of course, you must realise I know what goes in these woods. Were you honestly under the impression that your activities had gone unnoticed? If so, you must be a more stupid man than you look. But this is doubly shocking. Are we to believe this is how Grantwood conducts itself now?”
The groundsman winces. “Sir, hang about. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’s not as bad as all that.”
The second scout says, “Why did that one have a mask and some hooks?”
“He was hurt in the war,” Lucy explains in a murmur. “They all were.”
Without turning his head, the Owl says, “Do not speak with these girls. They are both prostitutes.”
The scout stares at Lucy and she quickly drops her gaze.
“What’s prostitutes?”
Malcolm says, “He means that they’re tarts. They kiss the soldiers for money.”
Coach tries again. “Sir, hang about, there’s an important thing I would say. A bloody tragedy has happened to us here tonight. But there is one important thing I would say to you now.”
“If a man has died by his own hand, the authorities must be informed.”
“Yes, sir, and they will be, much good it’ll do. But the trouble is, sir, that the poor fellow in question is already listed as dead. All the rest of them too. They’re officially listed as dead.”
The Owl shakes his headgear. “What nonsense.”
Winifred pipes up. “You know what you look like? In that feathery hat?”
“Hand on heart,” Coach continues. “I’m telling the God’s honest truth.”
“You know what you look like? Go on, have a guess.”
The Owl says, “A man has died. That is the salient fact.”
“But hang about, sir, I am trying to explain. It’s true enough, what the little boy says, Grantwood House looks after these men. And swear to God, the authorities couldn’t be more happy that we do. It’s part of our help for the heroes. But this is the important thing I would say to you now. Officially speaking, these soldiers are dead.”
It falls to Winifred to break the silence that follows. “Big Chief Pig’s Arse,” she says.
On Turpentine Lane they come upon Crisis’s truck. Coach draws up at the rear and the brothers gather on the verge for a moon-lit conference. The upshot, explains Coach, is that the arrangement is over and that the Sunday nights in the forest have now run their course. No question, it’s turned out to be a right fucking mess and they are all sad about the Lion – he was all right, the Lion – but that is only the half of it. He says he’s willing to bet that the scoutmaster will alert the authorities and that the authorities in turn will alert the young master or maybe even the old master, which would be worst of all. If the Lion had only seen fit to do away with himself in the comfort of his room, or even in grounds, they might have got out with minimum fuss and bother. Or how about if the boy scouts had managed to mind their own fucking business? Well, then that probably would have been all right as well. But it was not to be, so here they are. It never rains but it fucking pours.
Lucy says, “But what about the Lion?”
Coach throws her a distracted look. “What about him?”
She points at the truck. “What happens to the Lion now?”
“Dig a hole in the grounds. Put some dirt on the top. What does it matter? What’s done is done.”
“Oh God,” she cries. “Did you not love him at all?”
The Scarecrow says quietly, “It’s not as easy as that.”
“Well, I loved him,” says Fred. “You bastards. I loved him.”
But Crisis is anxious. He says time is pressing and here they are gabbing and that there are houses close by, which means they might be overheard. They must now say their goodbyes and put the whole sorry business behind them, once and for all and without looking back. Coach is in agreement. He concludes that it was nice while it lasted and that everybody benefited, but what’s done is done. He adds that if you take a shit in the woods, you don’t hang about smelling it, you get away from the thing as fast as you can. He says he might go back to Epping Forest when the scouts are full grown and not scouts any more. Until that happy day he is giving the place a wide berth.
In the midst of this exchange, Lucy takes the chance to step away from the group and look under the canvas. The Great Crested Owl had felt that Malcolm was disrespecting the dead and this was probably true in his case, but it is less so in hers. The Lion is laid on his side facing the opposite way and he registers only as a black shape in the gloom. The girl kisses the tips of her fingers and touches her hand to his shoulder. “Lion,” she says.
Crisis calls, “Wrong vehicle, darling. You’re wanting the one over there.”
And yet when Coach attempts to round up the children, it turns out to be John who’s the most reluctant to leave. All at once it’s as if the consequences of the Lion’s death come crashing in on his head and it is imperative that he speaks to Coach right away. He says he enjoys his trips to the forest and would be quite keen to return – if not next week then why not the Sunday after that? He explains that he loved the Lion and is ever so sad that he died. But he says that he loves all the other funny men just as much.
“Get off out of it,” barks Coach.
The Scarecrow is beside her. “Goodbye,” he says. “We treated you badly. You deserved much better than this.”
“Oh don’t say that,” she says, finding herself suddenly choked. “Don’t say that. It makes it sound horrible.”
He looks into her eyes. “Lucy,” he says. “That’s what it was.”
“And is it true what Coach said? That you’ve been listed as dead?”
“I’m afraid it is,” the Scarecrow says.
Coach cranks the handle and the engine turns over. “Farewell, sweet helpers,” the Tin Man is calling. Lucy moves to climb up behind Fred, but she sees that John has turned stubborn and won’t leave Coach alone. The boy says that he needs the ten shillings each week or hi
s stepfather gets upset. He says Mr Parnell is counting on John to earn the money each week. He says he loves the funny men and wants to keep on seeing them.
“Will you at hark at this one,” Crisis marvels. “Hardly says a word for weeks on end and now tonight of all nights we can’t shut him up.”
“Fucking hell,” Coach says. “He was boring when he didn’t say anything and he’s twice as boring when he does. Get off out of it.”
John says, “If I don’t earn the money, Mr Parnell will be cross. Please Coach, I want to keep earning the money each Sunday. Please Coach, it’s not our fault, is it? If I can borrow a bike I can get here on my own.”
“John,” says Lucy. “It’s all right. Come on.”
The boy spins on his heels and fixes her with a look of pure loathing. “Shut up!” he shouts. “I’m talking to Coach not to you!”
“Fuck off out of it,” Coach says. “Useless little get.”
At the end of the lane, Crisis’s truck swerves away to the north, carrying its load of the dead, official and actual. Coach points himself to the south, in the direction of London, the children huddled in the bed for their last ride on this road. John is lying prone with his face in deep shadow, and seeing him in this way reminds her of the Lion. Stare at the boy long enough and she might start to believe that she climbed into the wrong truck after all. She is numb, desolate, and so she raises her head and focuses on the landscape instead. Who on earth knows the time? It must be well beyond midnight. Here come the Tudor suburbs. There is not a light in the houses, they might just as well be abandoned.
The soldiers who are dead when they are not really dead. The dark empty homes and the bright empty stars. She cannot process it all. Her brain is exhausted.
“So that’s that,” Winifred says. “Goodbye to the forest. Goodbye, funny men. Goodbye money, more’s the pity.”
John says in a monotone, “I’m going back there next Sunday. You see if I don’t.”
“You can do what you like. Won’t be nobody there.”
“You see if I don’t. I’ll go there on a bike.”
The truck strikes a pothole. The children briefly leave the bed and return with a bump.
Fred says, “Poor old John knows he’s about to get battered.”
“Shut up, you.”
“Old Mr Parnell’s going to come at him with a stick.”
Lucy says, “All right, don’t tease him.”
“I’m not teasing,” Fred retorts. “I’m feeling sorry for him.”
“All right,” says Lucy. “But do leave him alone for a bit.”
Instead, defying this instruction, Fred gathers John in her arms and plants a kiss in his hair. Lucy is braced for his furious response. But tonight of all nights the boy is full of surprises, just like Coach said, and he accepts the embrace without a word. He docks his thumb in his mouth and stares beyond and through Fred to watch the night sky overhead. The pair’s intimacy is such that Lucy feels abruptly excluded. From her place by the gate she hears him mumble something about his new house and his step-brothers and about Mr Parnell.
“Well, I won’t let that happen,” Fred reassures him. “Wicked old bastard’ll have to get past me first.”
Around the sides of his thumb, he says, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Then I shall show you,” Fred says with a matter-of-fact air. “Will you promise to do exactly as I say?”
Lucy guesses that the boy must have nodded or given some sign of assent, because then Fred tells him, “Tap your feet together and repeat these words after me. Tap your feet together and say, ‘I wish I was at home’.”
In the darkness of the truck, above the noise of the engine, she hears the knock of John’s wooden clogs. Tock-tock-tock. “I wish I was home.”
“Louder,” Fred tells him. “And take that thumb out your mouth.”
“I wish I was home.”
“Louder.”
“I wish I was home,” John says. And in this way the truck delivers the children to town.
THE HOUSE
17
Grantwood House has stood in this fold of rural Hertfordshire since 1625, and there is no reason to suppose it will not still be standing three centuries from now. Its porticoed entrance is set back and shielded by gabled sandstone wings, which in turn are bookended by a pair of cedar trees, older even than the house itself. In fair weather, the sun glints off mullioned windows. In winter, blue woodsmoke streams from a symmetrical arrangement of chimneys. Whatever fierce storms bedevil the nation at large, the weary traveller is assured of safe haven behind the doors of Grantwood House.
If, for whatever reason, the traveller is unable to gain access to the house itself, he may console himself with the fact that Grantwood’s hospitality extends beyond mere bricks and mortar. Grand though it is, the manor is merely the centrepiece of a five-thousand acre estate that rolls out on either side of the River Lea, crawls for half a mile into Essex and incorporates forest and farmland and the village of Brent. And it might be argued that the borders of Grantwood extend even further than that, because the family holdings also include a sugar estate in Jamaica, twelve London townhouses and an ongoing stake in the British South Africa Company. The current Lord Hertford has been heard to remark that his earldom exists as a set of core principles as much as it exists as a physical plot. He says that if a house does not stand for something, then more often than not it risks falling for anything.
None of which is to imply that the earldom of Hertford is an unbending institution, some calcified relic of a feudal age. History records that the seat was originally created to accommodate one of Charles II’s bastard sons and this vibrant mongrel pedigree remains much in evidence today. Critics have joked that there’s an obvious reason why Grantwood hastens to make common cause with the more roguish strains of modern British society. Like calls to like, some are minded to say. One set of bastards instantly recognises another.
What the house stands for, specifically, is social justice and progressive politics. As a young man, Lord Hertford lobbied for improved living conditions for factory workers in the coke towns of the north, and since inheriting the estate from his own wayward father, he has for the most part maintained his youthful idealism. First he shocked observers by establishing a minimum wage for Grantwood’s agricultural workers. Then he shocked them again by holding his farmers to the terms of the deal after cereal prices collapsed and most of the fields went for grazing. The Brent residents were goitrous from dipping their pails in the pond. Lord Hertford ensured they had drinking water piped in.
Casting further afield in search of fresh challenges, Grantwood installed itself as a base camp in the campaign for female suffrage. It set up a charitable arm – the Grantwood Foundation – to provide support for disabled war veterans. More recently it has added an annex to the local hospital (the Grantwood Wing), built a theatre for the Bluecoats school and funded an ambitious programme of musical performances (New Productions of Lesser-Known Operas) that has been touring town halls between Aberdeen and Truro. To his supporters, Lord Hertford is a hero to the masses, enlightened and kind. To his detractors, however, he’s the reviled “Pink Earl”: an addled eccentric; an establishment radical. It has been said that he cannot see a liberal cause without ransacking the coffers and throwing good money after bad.
On the last Monday in August, an Essex sedan rounds the Palladian lodge and begins its ascent of Grantwood’s gravelled drive. Inside sits Sir William Hunt of the Department of War Casualties. Sir William tips the scales at thirteen stone, but he feels roughly ten pounds lighter than he did leaving London. The weather is brutal: the back seat of the closed car is as intense as a greenhouse, and one cannot wind down a window because the roads are all topsoil and billowing dust, which means there is nothing to do but simply sweat oneself thinner. Given the conditions, he ought not to be overly surprised when he glances up from his
papers to see a North African camel loose in the grounds. Nonetheless the sight still makes him start. There is a camel blocking the drive of the Grantwood estate.
Sir William leans forward and peers over the top of his spectacles. “Burton, I wonder if you’d be so good as to clarify a small matter.”
“Sir,” replies Burton. “It looks very much like a camel to me.”
“Jolly good. So it is. Thank heaven we are able to solve the mystery between us.”
When Burton sounds the horn, the camel moves on. Its pelt is matted and its flanks are heaving, but it picks and plants its hoofs with a fastidious air. The very set of its head speaks of overweening contempt. As the beast makes its exit, it takes the attendant horseflies a moment to regroup and catch up.
Burton adds, “As to why they keep a camel, sir, I’m afraid I haven’t a blinking clue.”
Lord Hertford is awaiting his presence in the Italian garden. A butler takes Sir William’s coat and escorts him under the barrel-vaulted ceilings, past the garish abstract by that young brute, Picasso, and across a marble-floored ballroom. At the back of the house they descend a set of crumbling steps, which opens onto a thicket of plaster pillars and potted plants and the speckled statues of Grecian gods. Looking up, he can see that the west wing of the house has been dust-sheeted and is no longer in use. Sir William has heard that Grantwood’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse and that the estate may be as much as forty-thousand pounds in debt – and all at once, this astronomical figure seems entirely plausible. Taxes have throttled the noble families of England. The place has faded and faltered since he visited last.
Gesturing ahead at the sunlight, the butler says, “My Lord, the Earl of Hertford.”
Beside the ornamental pond sits a lanky, sand-coloured specimen lacking any obvious demarcation of sex. He has pale eyes and big teeth, and his hair is so long that only his earlobes remain visible. A valet has seen fit to attire Lord Hertford in pristine tennis whites, although Sir William very much doubts he would strike a ball with much mustard. More likely the outfit has been deliberately chosen to project an image of youth.
