Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  ‘That’s all lies, sir,’ Kitty said.

  ‘When we don’t know the facts we’re entitled to invent,’ Tup replied.

  There were facts enough for me, her bones were facts. He raised her arms like mantis arms – but likenesses were nothing beside names. Tup told me them: occipital and parietal, clavicle and scapula, humerus, ulna, femur, fibula, and lovely toes and fingers, phalanges. Mouthing these, I possessed Miss Montez. I entered a world shining with order, bright with controls, where two follows one and three follows two. To know the name of things is my desire; our only proper knowing is through names. Circles are completed in the noun, margins and boundaries are clear, and we are free from vagueness, free from fear, with every object known from every other. The name, the name, is the single proper epithet.

  And having said that, what about the verb? Isn’t breaking down and building up the thing that chemistry is all about? For I’m a chemist. Nouns create a landscape without movement or sound. Nothing happens. Verbs bring activity and change. Yes, I agree with that argument. But I see predication as closer naming. Noun and verb unite in my craft or science.

  I say this as though it remains true all my life. It started long ago when I was young, uncertain of what was real and what was not, afraid, and glimpsing powers (seeming to glimpse) – ready for religion, that is. The answer did not come from there, and never can for me, not now, even though the answer that I found doesn’t hold. The name’s a lovely shell, lovely container, but outside and in, chaos, harmony, unknowable. I remember now, better than occipital, parietal, the hollows in her skull, the aching void.

  I go on too long about Miss Montez. Miss Montez was not my bride, the oxidizing flame was my true bride. Let me come to her by even steps. And in all these words find one big name? I don’t hope for it. Nor is my question theological. Anything considered, but no theology, never that. By big name I simply mean my life. I’ll be selective – direct, evasive – and perhaps come close to it, a shadow shape. I’ll go along by predication. That’s the method. But acting shall be my vehicle. I’ve placed that talent second long enough.

  How I shall howl! How I shall laugh!

  4

  But I shall also say things quietly and try to put them in their proper place. Howls and laughs will be imperatives, chronology will be my discipline. So – the patriotic pageant, that comes next.

  I can say my speeches to this day: ‘No scrap of paper binds me. Might is right. The weak I feed into my iron jaws. What care I for truth and peace and justice? I tear this poppy Belgium from her stem. I trample her red petals in the mud –’

  Mrs Beattie wrote it with the vicar of St Bede’s. The Kaiser had the best lines. Kitty, on her throne, might cry, ‘Fight we must and fight we will. Who will follow? Speak!’ and Egypt, India, Canada step forward – ‘I’, ‘And I’ – and poor Phil, rifle shouldered, at attention, ‘Mother of Empire, furthest are we from Home of all your sons, far far we lie from those dear whait cliffs – ’ but that was all just wind and I had words. My moustache went crooked and I tore it off and held it like a blade in my hand, killing laughter. And in the end, though I squatted shrinking at Kitty’s feet, though she held me snarling till I died, with her trident digging in my back, while everyone sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and the hall joined in, I knew there had been one peak in the night and I, Noel Papps, had stood on it alone.

  Before we could take our bows, Jacklin, our MP, came bounding on stage. ‘Friends, people of Jessop, children of Jessop school…’ He was a doggy fellow, oh how he wanted to be patted, to be loved. And how ready he was to snarl and bite and prove this way his devotion and worth. He pumped with his little fat arms. We smelled him – tobacco and ripe meat – and heard, the nearest, Phil and I, a bubbling in his guts, and heard him fart, poot, poot, poot, three little woofs. ‘What a glorious night! And what a lesson we’ve learned! Out of the mouths of babes, eh? True patriotic feeling.’

  Tup Ogier, in the front row, shook his head. He’d had words with Mrs Beattie about the jingoistic huff and puff in her pageant. Lomax, the mayor, who had filled Jacklin with the food that caused his borborygmus, began to pull his lower lip. And perhaps Jacklin had not meant to speak real words but lost his judgement. Real words came out in the end. ‘Which of us wouldn’t like to shoot a Hun right now? A Hun or Turk? For Empire. For Mother England. Remember those lads in Gisborne, how they wrecked that German pork butcher’s shop? He’ll never show his face again. And that one in Wellington, with the name no civilized person can pronounce. Von this! Von that! We’ll show ’em, eh? We’ll show ‘em, with these young soldier lads and lasses at our backs. Von, two, three, out!’

  When the laughter had died down he put his hands on his knees, he almost squatted, and leaned his face into the audience. ‘What a pity it is we haven’t got any pork butchers in our town.’

  A man at the back said in a loud voice, ‘We’ve got that piano teacher down the road.’ It was Edgar Le Grice.

  Now there’s a name. I feel when I’ve put it down I’ve said enough. Jacklin I need a lot of words for and at the end he’s barely there. Edgar Le Grice though – that’s enough. He comes spinning back like a moon. And he’s black. He’s red and black. And he has fire in his head. You see it burning there behind his eyes. He’s on his feet below neat-lettered Sunday School texts and the paragraphs make his head start out of a page. A hulking fellow, silent. I’ve seen him once before, squatting beside his hydraulic ram and watching over his shoulder as Tup marches us up the river bank for swimming in Bucks Hole. We’re on his property but have right-of-way and Tup keeps us strictly to the path. The thump thump of the ram is the beat of Le Grice’s rage. He never moves, he’s like stone there.

  Now here he is, with ‘love’ and ‘Lamb of God’ about his head, but different words coming from his mouth. ‘Why should she grow fat here when we’ve got soldiers dying over there?’

  Others took it up, young fellows mostly. Cries, thick and brutal, filled the air.

  Lomax mounted halfway up the steps. ‘Now, wait a minute, boys, wait a minute.’ He tried to say we didn’t want any trouble in Jessop, not tonight; but Le Grice said, ‘Shut up, Lomax. Your daughter goes there for piano lessons.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Lomax cried.

  Le Grice took no more notice; ignored Jacklin too, flapping on the stage. He said in his passionless way, while rage leaked from his eyes, ‘We’re not having her, so follow me,’ and I seemed to hear again the ram’s thick beating.

  Although I did not know it, my father had gone, which was brave of him. With a name like ours it would have been more sensible to go home quietly and lock the door. But he ran down the road with Tup Ogier and found Frau Reinbold at her piano. He threw his coat on her and took her along the alley by the park and hid her in the bakehouse, with Kitty and Irene to look after her.

  Tup faced Le Grice’s mob from the middle of Frau Reinbold’s garden path. Phil and I arrived in time to hear the end of his speech and had not heard his voice so lost before. He was a man of too many words. On the other side of the white picket fence was Edgar Le Grice.

  ‘She’s your fancy lady, teacher, so shut up.’ He kicked the toy gate and sent it spinning off its hinges. They knocked Tup Ogier down and ran over him. Sunday-suited for our pageant, black and dense, they wedged through the door, one stopping to wrench Frau Reinbold’s plate from the wall and spin it like a discus into the street.

  We helped Tup Ogier up. His tattered ear was bleeding. I felt the bottom fall out of one of my certainties. We sat him on the garden seat and he panted, ‘Stay away, boys, they’ve gone mad.’ My father came back. ‘It’s all right, Tom. She’s in the bakehouse. She’s all right.’ A smashing of glass came from the house. The noise seemed to fracture my teeth, I felt them throbbing. Tup tried to stand up but my father held him. ‘They’ll tear you to bits. Get the police, boys.’

  ‘Mr Lomax went for them.’

  The French doors bulged and burst. Le Grice appeared, with curtains dra
ping his torso. He tore them in handfuls from their rings and balled them and flung them into the garden, where they opened out and floated like scarves and settled on the round-headed shrubs. He leaned back inside and gave a heave and seemed to lift the Bechstein over the step. Men with white mad faces came beetling round its sides. They beat it across the flower beds, kicked it like a donkey and tipped it three feet into the sunken garden. One jumped on it and struck it with an axe. The letters of the name sprang out and looped to my feet. (And my father lifted the spiked Prussian helmet from my head and put it down behind a daphne bush.)

  The axe made kindling of the ebony wood. The keys came out and made a waterfall. Wires sighed, and hammers did a caterpillar walk. Edgar Le Grice had gone back into the house. Now he appeared in the doorway, with a bottle held stiff-armed above his head, and throat lined up as though he meant to swig. He jumped on the piano, shouldered the axeman away, stood wide-legged in the broken keys. Liquid spun like glycerine and fractured into glass at his feet. He held the bottle until it was empty, then flung it back-handed at the house, where it burst on the wall and rained his mob with splinters. Le Grice had sucked motion, speech, intention, even fear, from us all. We were like the sleepers in the castle and could not move as he passed among us, but could see. The rattle of his matches brought us awake.

  ‘No!’ shouted Tup Ogier.

  ‘Ha!’ cried the mob – a breath in time with the fire’s explosion. Le Grice seemed lifted by it and thrown back. He landed on his feet on the garden wall, and stood wide-legged, lit-up, facets of him flashing red and yellow. I think of him now as pleochromatic, but that’s a defence, that’s a retreat, it leaves out black. And as the piano crackles and the flames turn crystalline, it’s black I see: Le Grice spinning at me, basalt moon.

  5

  ‘A tragic family,’ Tup Ogier said; and that was with their story only half told. Everybody knew it but my mother told it best, especially stirring pots at the stove or beating dough on the kitchen table, when her busy-ness became a kind of counterpoint to the story. The Le Grices had been lazy and proud, treating their farm out there in the river bend as a country estate, and he, Edgar’s father, not doing a hand’s turn but strolling with a walking stick – called it his ash-plant – and pointing out this and that wanted doing. He owned property in town and ran for mayor but failed because he was too snooty to ask for people’s votes. He thought the highest place should be his by right.

  Mrs Le Grice, the old lady? Well, my mother said, fixing us, then slapping dough, she wasn’t always old, remember that. A beautiful woman, in her day – if you go for the sort without any flesh on their bones. And of course she could spend as much as she liked on clothes. A fashion-plate, and very social too. They had garden parties there, and English lords and ladies to stay. But all that changed, my mother said; and could not be satisfied, for it came about from the death of a child. Lucy was her name, Lucy Le Grice. To hear my mother tell it, she was a kind of fairy or woodsprite, flitting about the farm, among the lords and ladies, picking flowers. She drowned when she was nine, in a river pool, called Girlies Hole later, where classes from our school had swimming lessons. Her brother, Edgar, was meant to be watching her, but he had gone off fishing with his mates. They found her in the deep part, down past the rapids, floating under the water like a fish, with her eyes wide open.

  ‘Oh, the poor thing,’ Kitty said, her own eyes brimming.

  ‘I’ve seen her photograph. It’s all over the house,’ Irene Lomax said.

  My mother gave her a puzzled look. She disapproved of Irene, that confidence and knowingness, yet was pleased Kitty should have the mayor’s daughter as a friend. A part of her story, too, was robbed from her – that no one ever saw Mrs Le Grice after Lucy drowned. I waited to see if she would work it in. Cecil Le Grice, she went on, became a shadow. He wasted away and died from grief. As thin as a matchstick, she said, and his skull nearly breaking through his skin. And, she said doggedly, not looking at Irene, no one saw Mrs Le Grice after Lucy drowned, not close up. They saw her on the porch sometimes, but she went inside if people called. She wore sandshoes and a garden party hat. The tennis court grew weeds and the fences rusted. All the workmen left and Edgar Le Grice tried to run the farm. Gorse came down the hills. He grew into a hulking silent fellow.

  And at forty-five (it’s not my mother now) he started burning buildings round the town. He burned a grocer shop and a quarry shed and the band rotunda in the park and Dargie’s Livery Stables. He tried to burn Lomax’s seed and grain warehouse, but Phil and I stopped him. It happened on the night after the pageant. The day too had its terrible event.

  I find it hard to go on. Not because of terror, I can face that. Because of shifts, because of dizziness. Nothing will be still. Poverty and abundance transmute. And this is that and that is this. And it was so, but yet not so. What other option but silence do I have? Imperfections strike at me like hail. And there, you see, this double focus, which is a kind of seeing round corners, a view through mirrors cunningly placed, when all I want is to look straight at the single thing. Obliquity makes me dizzy, multiplicity smothers me. Yet I’ll go on. I think that if I’m silent I’ll soon die.

  Frau Reinbold then. She sat at our breakfast table, and, ‘Oh, you are spoiling me,’ and, ‘I shall grow fat,’ she cried as my mother ladled porridge into her plate. Plump and pink and sugar-spun Frau Reinbold, with eyes so sparkling blue they looked as if she took them out at night etc. etc. ‘Outside it was Walpurgisnacht. But Kitty and Irene – two angels.’

  ‘She was more like a devil with that fork,’ I said.

  ‘Ha!’ The Frau seized her spoon and poked my ribs. My mother frowned.

  ‘If you’ve finished, Noel, go and get ready for school.’

  I was reluctant. I’d worked out what a fancy lady was and I was a little drunk with Frau Reinbold. My father came in and said Tup Ogier was in the sitting room and wanted to talk to her. ‘Ah, dear Thomas,’ she cried, dabbing her lips with a hanky and tweaking her cheeks to colour them up, though already they were pink as cherry icing. Dad showed her out, winking at Mum; and according to Kitty, who peeped through the door, Tup Ogier held Frau Reinbold in his arm – like this, she demonstrated – and wiped tears from her cheeks with his own hanky. Mum looked into the hall then and made a charge at Kitty with the flyswat, so she saw no more. But, ‘Fancy having to kiss him,’ Irene Lomax breathed.

  We sat in our desks with fingers folded and looked at Tup with interest and respect. His ragged ear was yellow with iodine. Lady-powder smudged his black waistcoat. ‘Tup tup, tup tup,’ he sang as he moved about.

  ‘Sir,’ Phil said, ‘my father reckons Mr Le Grice must be the fire-raiser.’

  ‘Well, Dockery,’ Tup replied, ‘we mustn’t start rumours. We must leave the fire-raiser to the police.’

  ‘Sir,’ Kitty said, ‘those bumps you told us about, on people’s heads –’

  ‘Phrenology,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a science remember, it’s like astrology, a pseudo-science.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Would a fire-raiser have a special bump?’

  ‘If we believed in it, Kitty, he certainly would. Just here, above the ear. Destructiveness. Quite close to music, strangely enough. I wonder what harmonies he hears.’

  ‘Sir, can we see Miss Montez?’

  ‘Ah no, not today. Arithmetic.’

  ‘Do Germans have a special bump?’ I asked, meaning fancy ladies.

  ‘No, Papps, certainly not.’

  ‘Germans have got square heads,’ said a boy called Ray Stack. (Hay stack.)

  ‘Who told you that?’ Tup said.

  ‘My father. He says it’s square with a hole where the brains should be.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ we laughed uneasily.

  Tup breathed through his nose. ‘Arithmetic.’

  ‘Was Frau Reinbold’s piano worth a lot of money?’ I asked. I could not stop rubbing myself against her.

  ‘Enough. Enough. Books out.’

>   ‘It was a Bechstein,’ Irene said. Her own Bechstein was sold and replaced with a Broadwood. And her music teacher was Mrs Wilson now. Irene had been Frau Reinbold’s Wunderkind. ‘Bechsteins are the best in the world.’

  ‘They can’t be if they’re German,’ Ray Stack said.

  ‘Sir,’ Phil said, ‘what about the war? Are the Turks still floating mines down the Bosporus?’

  Tup Ogier held his finger up. ‘Another word and out comes Dr Brown. Arithmetic.’

  In the afternoon we went swimming in the river. Mrs Beattie led the way and Tup came in the rear, watching to see no boys sneaked into the tomato gardens. The girls turned down the path to Girlies Hole and we crossed a wooden one-way bridge – for English lords’ and ladies’ carriages – and went up the river bank to Bucks Hole. Over the paddocks the Le Grice house sat brown-sided, rusty-roofed, with yellow gorse behind it on the hills. The rocking-chair on the veranda was the one Mrs Le Grice was sitting in when they carried Lucy home. She rose and put her hands on her throat and squeezed a peacock scream out of herself. (That’s my embellishment. I’ve no idea if it’s true, but now it’s down I’ll leave it, for it seems to include judgement as well as decoration – though why should I judge?)

  Mrs Le Grice, Irene Lomax said, never cut her nails. They curled over her fingertips and clicked like knitting needles when she touched anything. Her hair came down to her knees and sometimes she plaited it and used it like a club to hit her son. I don’t need to say that’s a lie. Irene must have enjoyed herself telling Kitty. It’s true her mother took her there several times and made her play the piano for the old lady. And it’s likely the music room was full of photographs of Lucy Le Grice, and five-finger exercises were on the piano still, and the piano had dead notes and played like a wire mattress (she was oddly mature in some of her language, Irene), and dust rained from the curtains if you tried to pull them back, and came from the sofa in little puffs when the old lady patted it for Irene to sit down. Irene claimed Mrs Le Grice mistook her for Lucy, and that’s likely too. ‘You must practise harder, Lucy,’ she said, which made Irene cross, for her mistakes were the piano’s fault.