by Rebecca Hunt
“Absolutely,” said Esther. She felt Mr. Chartwell studying her again and didn’t meet his eyes, making an ordeal of examining her wine, dipping a finger to retrieve an imaginary fly, then checking the glass again from all angles.
With a grunt Mr. Chartwell heaved himself up. He didn’t rise onto his two back legs this time, choosing to walk informally on all fours. Although he moved easily on two legs, it looked oafish, as if invisible hands were lifting him under the arms. It reminded Esther of a child holding up a cat to make it dance with its hind paws.
She followed behind. “Don’t you want to stay outside? It’s still warm.”
Mr. Chartwell gave her a shot of his profile. “I can’t risk being overheard.” He reached up, turned the door handle, and then pushed through, filling the doorway.
CHAPTER 8
7.30 p.m.
Mr. Chartwell wedged himself into a wooden chair at the powder-blue Formica-topped table. The chair sent out a ripple of creaks at his weight. The yellow kitchen wall behind him was a complementary backdrop for his jet-black fur. Opposite him, Esther sat with the incredible posture of the very edgy. The promise of revelation had created a sense of electricity in the room. But while the tension made Esther worry, Mr. Chartwell was quiet with deep monastic contemplation.
Not wanting to be distracted by hunger, she had laid out a plate with some cheeses and a handful of crackers. They lay unmolested. The weight of expectation building, it became a contest to see who could remain silent the longest. Esther trapped a sound against the roof of her mouth before it became a recognizable word. Then Mr. Chartwell cleared his throat. Esther leant forward.
“Could I have some of the Red Leicester?” he asked, carving a great chunk of it off with the knife. He shovelled it in and resumed his thinking. They both listened to him chew. Not just a sickening noise, it was also a vigorous one. The shape of his face didn’t permit quiet eating, or subtle eating with a closed mouth. Loud and visible, the cheese mashed into a pulp.
The Red Leicester finished, Mr. Chartwell went to speak again. “And that Cheshire, do you mind?” Another slab was hacked off and fed through the jaws. Crumbs fell from his teeth, littering the table and the fur on his chest. He wiped at the crumbs and this made it worse.
Esther couldn’t look at him. To distract herself she started humming “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” by Manfred Mann, unable to concentrate. The hummed tune developed an abnormal pitch. It was razor wire to Mr. Chartwell’s acutely sensitive ears. He relented at last with an enormous sigh.
“Look, as I said in the garden, I’m really not happy about having to do this. The only reason I’m agreeing to tell you anything is because I believe it when you say you won’t tell anyone. You seem like a private person.”
Esther nodded sincerely. “Really private. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Excellent.” Gathering his thoughts, Mr. Chartwell put his paws to his temples and pulled slightly. This stretched his cheeks back, revealing teeth that would not normally be seen. His eyelids also pulled, showing their rims.
Esther watched this behaviour sceptically.
“So then, let’s start with what you do?” she asked. There followed another frustrating silence. Refusing to participate, Esther surveyed the room. She studied the antique dresser pushed against one wall. It was loaded with worthless but friendly trinkets collected over the years: photographs and fraying postcards, painted plates, a pair of novelty Punch and Judy eggcups, a metal jelly mould. They had been selected carefully. The dresser was more than a storage place for holiday trophies; it was a strategic device for forcing good memories to the lid of the mind, a raft in a sea of empty grief. Over the twin blockade of a china lighthouse and a wooden elephant, Michael’s forehead creased at her. His early-greying hair, with all the style of a tuft of old wool, flew up to meet the breeze. Obscured from view in the photograph, Esther was folded in his arms, one eye closed, her mouth captured grousing about the rain. They had been on a beach in Cornwall.
“What do you do?” Mr. Chartwell shot back, ending the standoff.
Esther looked at him. “I work in Westminster Palace as a library clerk. I’ve worked there for six years now. It’s okay.” Esther smiled in the way that said, hey-ho. She said, knowing it was foolish, “I don’t suppose you do anything similar?”
Mr. Chartwell shook his head, entertained by this. “No, nothing similar at all. I’m a specialist. I provide specific services for varying lengths of time to specific individuals.”
“What services?” asked Esther.
Mr. Chartwell exhaled. He took another breath, exhaled again.
“It might be easier to start by discussing my current client. That might make it easier to understand.”
Esther prepared herself. “Who’s your client, then?”
“A political great,” answered Mr. Chartwell.
“Abraham Lincoln?” said Esther.
“A British political great.”
“Oliver Cromwell.”
“A living British political great,” Mr. Chartwell said patiently.
Esther thought for a minute. “Winston Churchill?”
Mr. Chartwell nodded in a sweeping movement. “Yup.”
Surely a hoax; she waited for him to confess. Not a hoax; he looked at her with expressionless sincerity. So it was true. The impossibility of the idea, its hysterical strangeness, made Esther slump against her chair. “You work with Winston Churchill?”
“I do,” said Mr. Chartwell. “I have done on and off for a long time.”
The clock beat out a few seconds.
“Are you friends?” said Esther.
Mr. Chartwell answered quickly and decidedly. “Oh no, oho no, we most certainly are not, although we know each other very well.”
Esther leant in and looked into Mr. Chartwell’s face, trying to divine the truth. “You don’t like each other?”
Using the knife skilfully, Mr. Chartwell sliced a hoggish chunk of Cheddar. He threw it into his mouth, teeth snapping together like a trap. “Actually I do rather like him. But he fears and despises me.” Mr. Chartwell shrugged in a way that suggested he was used to it.
Esther said in a papery voice, “Why?”
“Because the service I provide is not much fun.”
Esther waited before allowing herself to say anything else. “What’s the service?”
Mr. Chartwell’s eyes moved around the room. He started to say something and then stopped. “I’m finding it quite difficult to talk about,” he said at last.
“Is it really awful?” asked Esther, scared. “Do you hurt people?”
“Not as such,” Mr. Chartwell said slowly. “I don’t actually hurt them.” He searched for the words, a paw circling.
Esther spoke. “Yes you do, I bet you do.”
“No,” Mr. Chartwell said testily. “I depress them.”
Esther was still. “You depress them? As in you crush them? As in by depress you mean weight?”
Mr. Chartwell made an explanatory gesture. “The weight is emotional, if you want to use those basic terms”—a little twitch in his face showed he reserved a less-flattering opinion of the terms—“so indirectly, perhaps.”
“Emotional weight? I don’t …” Esther unconsciously reached for a cracker. The cracker was extremely dry. The room was silent apart from the sound of her grinding the cracker to dust. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. My services consist of periods of time when I visit specific people, people who experience a specific darkness. Churchill is a regular.” Mr. Chartwell made this next disclosure carefully. “He names his depression the Black Dog.”
A choke was overpowered. “You are the Black Dog?”
“Obviously,” said Mr. Chartwell.
“Haven’t you told him your name is Mr. Chartwell?”
“That’s not really my name. I made it up for your benefit.”
Esther started as she realised something. “Chartwell is the name of Churchill’s house, isn’t it?”<
br />
“It is,” confirmed Mr. Chartwell.
“Do you call yourself the Black Dog?”
He moved his brow. “No, it’s not much of a name, is it? Really more of a description, although I don’t mind it.”
“It’s pretty accurate,” said Esther. “It is what you are.”
He smiled: He was undeniably a black dog.
“So what’s your real name?” Esther asked.
Mr. Chartwell puffed some air out between his lips. It made an unpleasant vibrating sound. He reached an arm up, letting it rest across his head. “My real name? Phew … okay, my real name is …” He paused, frowning in concentration, one paw meddling with an ear. “My real name is Black Patrick.”
It was a definite lie. Esther said, “That’s not your name.”
“No, but it’s a name I like. I certainly like it more than the Black Dog.” He tested out Black Patrick and then the shortened Black Pat a few times to himself before saying, “You can call me Black Pat.”
“What’s your actual name?”
“I think we’ll stick with Black Pat Chartwell for now,” Mr. Chartwell said firmly. It was clear that the discussion was finished. “Call me Black Pat.”
A frightening thought occurred to Esther. “Wait, what would happen if Churchill knew you were here? What if he knew I was talking about letting you stay here? If I let you stay here to depress him, I’d be profiting from his misery.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Black Pat. “He’s too depressed to do anything but loaf around watching his black swans.”
“But it seems immoral for me to help in assisting with this. It feels so deeply immoral. Mr. Chartwell, I can’t be a part of it.”
Black Pat Chartwell sprawled across the table. “First of all, Esther, as we just discussed, call me Black Pat. Secondly, my business is none of your concern. It’s between me and the client. Thirdly, this is just something that has to happen. It happens to a lot of people. You, Esther, should know this.”
That quality in his tone did not invite questions. Esther watched him with a tight mistrustful mouth, wondering what he meant.
Black Pat didn’t speak.
She said, “It’s a very weird situation. Terrible.”
He filled his chest and strained back against the chair, stretching. “Just a job. I’m just doing my job, that’s all.”
“Your job is extremely cruel, Black Pat,” said Esther. She had another thought. “What do you do all day? How do you make people depressed?”
Black Pat’s ears, which usually hung down the sides of his face, lifted to stand higher. It was a sure sign he was engaged with the conversation. “It’s hard to explain. With Churchill we know each other’s movements, so we have a routine, I guess. I like to be there when he wakes up in the morning. Sometimes I drape across his chest. That slows him down for a bit. And then I like to lie around in the corner of the room, crying out like I have terrible injuries. Sometimes I’ll burst out at him from behind some furniture and bark in his face. During meals I’ll squat near his plate and breathe over his food. I might lean on him too when he’s standing up, or hang off him in some way. I also make an effort to block out the sunlight whenever I can.” He gave her a sloped glance. “Ha. Ack, not really. I’m making light of it, trying to make a joke.” He slid his eyes away in a sort of embarrassment. “I don’t like talking about the operational intricacies, it’s unsavoury.”
“Whatever it is, it still sounds horrible,” said Esther.
“It certainly gets him down,” agreed Black Pat.
“Do you ever give him a break?”
“Nope. He’s wily though, so I have to watch him. He might look depressed, but in fact he’ll be concentrating on a book. When I catch him reading I sit next to him and chew rocks. The sound drives him crazy, absolutely crazy.”
“And do you do this for everyone?” asked Esther.
“Everyone has a different way of working, so it changes,” Black Pat answered.
Esther suddenly had an uneasy feeling, a nag of apprehension. She dug a fingernail into the soft plastic rim running around the edge of the table. “What would happen to me? How would I know?”
Black Pat said immediately, “You tell me.”
CHAPTER 9
8.00 p.m.
The ground floor of the Olivers’ home, an impressive detached house in Barnes, was a luxurious showroom for open-plan living:
The living area was on a split level, divided from the dining room. It was populated by low bookcases, sofas and chairs with buttoned upholstery, mostly pale green, and a couple of rya-style rugs. Above one of the armchairs, Big Oliver’s specific chair, a standard lamp arched overhead on its metal arm. This was a new addition to the house and still exciting. Next to the lamp was a John Piper print.
The dining area, a fine example of Scandinavian modernism, was dominated along one wall by an expensive model of system furnishing: exotic rosewood units suspended from batons at fashionably diverse levels. The lower units were dressed with two stylish wood and spun-aluminium lamps, a marble horse galloping with its mane flung into thick peaks, and a bulbous glass vase with a miniature garden of ferns inside. A small African antelope-skin drum lived on top of the drinks cabinet, the cabinet’s sliding door clad with dimpled bronze. The higher units displayed small ethnic sculptures and framed photographs of Beth and her husband, Big Oliver, all artistic and flattering. One larger photograph showed Beth holding their son, Little Oliver, in a tasselled white blanket at his christening, Big Oliver standing with his arm around her. Little Oliver, now three years old, was in bed. Over the dining table a spot lamp complete with counterbalanced mechanism and anodised aluminium shade hung low, shining into the mouth of an empty bottle of tomato sauce.
Leaving the finished dinner plates on the dining table, Beth went barefoot past the open French doors, heading from the dining level to the sofa. Thumping steps came down the stairs, Big Oliver entering with one of Little Oliver’s hats on his head, perched there as a joke, a tiny hat on a giant adult head. He had just come from checking on their son, and was now smashing around in the kitchen, always loud.
The clerk of the parliaments at Westminster, he was a heavily constructed man, with the build of a boxer when younger, although he had never tested it. Less than young, the muscle had softened. Now he had the figure of a domesticated, beer-fed bear. When he frowned, two dark creases appeared like the marks of a spoon end. The spoon ends appeared as he saw his wife lying across the sofa in sullen psychic conversation with the bottom of her sherry glass.
“Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from, you beautiful old soak.” Over he came with a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream. He propped the little hat at a jaunty angle, standing like a weight lifter in preparation. And then, a one-man circus, Big Oliver strained at the bottle, heaving the cork. It came out with a faint pop. Beth’s smile was weak and disappeared. Her glass was refilled. The open bottle went gently onto the low teak table next to a sgraffito pot of white-rimmed ivy.
“What’s wrong?”
Beth spread her toes on a sofa cushion, each red nail pressed into the green corduroy. “Your wife is an idiot, that’s what.”
“Everyone knows that, I’ve known it for years.” Big Oliver tugged the knees of his trousers, sitting next to her on the sofa.
She nudged a foot into his stomach. It bulged, a hard pillow pushing at the shirt buttons.
“I’m big-boned, thank you very much.” Big Oliver gave her a hooded stare.
“Aren’t you just.” Also a great lover of food, Beth had a generous figure. “And they’re growing all the time.” The foot prodded his waist. “Especially here.” She smiled through a sip of sherry.
Big Oliver said, “So, anyway, back to the fascinating subject of you being an idiot …”
“Ummm,” she answered, annoyed at herself. “I was teasing Esther this morning in the library.” She shuffled to sit up, heels propelling her over the cushions to the armrest. Behind the sofa wa
s a room divider—a tall varnished structure of differently sized square compartments, the lower squares containing hundreds of LPs and a set of encyclopedias. She propped her head against the ledge of a shelf which held a spider plant in a red pot and a stack of National Geographic magazines. Near Beth, in a square of its own, was a funny wooden animal, a South American animal, perhaps a llama or a goat. It had a wild raffia tail. Beth twisted to grab it, plucking at the tail.
“I was teasing Esther about going on a date—”
Big Oliver’s head dropped back against the shallow sofa. “Beth, why can’t you leave her alone? …”
Beth threw her arms up from the elbow, the wooden animal in a fist. “I can’t help it! I’m an idiot! I just want her to meet someone else.” More tail-plucking, trying to bend it down. “Anyway, Es was acting very defensive, very sensitive, as I was talking about her going on a date. And now I remember that it’s nearly the date.” Beth put the animal on the floor and it fell to its side.
“God,” said Big Oliver. “Is it?”
“I’d completely forgotten.”
“Pccch.” It was a sound from Big Oliver’s parachute cheeks. He nipped at the inside of his lip. “Poor Es … two years, bloody hell.”
Beth watched Big Oliver over the rim of her glass.
“Well, why don’t we get her to come and stay with us? She could have the spare room for a couple of days.”
Beth considered this. “Yes, she probably shouldn’t be alone. You know how difficult it was last year.”
Big Oliver remembered. “Um-hm.” It said, I vividly remember.
“She seemed strange today,” Beth said. “Lonely, I suppose. Withdrawn and lonely. I don’t know … she seemed something.”
“Do you think you can persuade her to come here?” Big Oliver explained his reserve with a lifted shoulder. “Esther’s a strong woman in her quiet, quirky way.”
“I’m a strong woman too,” answered Beth. “I’ll just have to strong-arm her, woman to woman.”
“You are strong,” agreed Big Oliver. He squeezed her arm, pretending to admire it. The arm was relaxed, soft flabby skin. He gasped at the power in her Herculean arm. “Very strong.”
