Mr. Chartwell

by Rebecca Hunt

  Churchill kicked at the dog, catching him hard in the side. He went to kick him again but Black Pat jinked out of the way. Clementine let her shirt go. “Ah, that’s better. It’s warmed up again.” She weeded as she spoke. “So how are you feeling today, Mr. Pug?”

  “Oh, you know, Mrs. Pussycat. Not so bad.”

  She didn’t look up from the plants. “Now, you mustn’t lie to me, Mr. Pug. I know Monday must be playing on your mind. Don’t you want to talk about it?”

  Churchill surveyed the distance. Black Pat threw his head round, assessing what Churchill was looking at, and saw it wasn’t anything.

  Churchill passed a hand over his scalp. “It’s nothing, Clemmie. I’m just being doomy.”

  “Come on, Winston. Tell me.”

  She stood up, a woven basket full of fruit over one forearm, and offered Churchill a strawberry. He stared at the strawberry sadly, picking at the stem as he spoke.

  “It feels indulgent, but I suppose my father is on my mind a great deal these days. As Monday nears I seem to think about him more and more often. I would have liked him to live long enough to see I was going to do some good. I dearly wish I knew that he thought I had done well.”

  Clementine’s tone was kind, knowing the difficult spectre of Lord Randolph Churchill across Winston’s life, its ceaseless presence. “I’m sure he would be very proud of you. I’m sure he was very proud of you when he was alive.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Churchill. “I feel so uneasy about everything. I can’t bear to think of it. It’s exhausting. All I want to do is lie doggo until it’s all over, to frowst in my bedroom.”

  “Stop that.” Clementine put her hands fondly on his shoulders, the basket swinging on her elbow. “You’ve worried yourself into a hole and I won’t allow it. You must talk to me about it, I insist.”

  “I know, I know.” Churchill turned the strawberry over. “It’s pure baboonery on my part.”

  “Baboonery at its absolute purest, yes.”

  Black Pat was upright on his back feet, dwarfing Churchill. A rough front paw swatted the strawberry from Churchill’s hands. The strawberry fell. A hind leg came out and ground it into a red spot on the grass. Churchill glowered with barbaric eyes. Black Pat said in a flat, moronic whisper, just loud enough to be heard, “Heh-eh-eh. Heh-eh.”

  Hearing Churchill growl, Clementine looked quickly to see what he was frowning at, appeared to see nothing, and set about collecting her gardening tools, the fruit basket placed on a garden chair. Finished, Clementine looked at the pulp curiously. “Winston! That was a perfectly fine strawberry.”

  “There was a beetle …” Churchill said hastily. “It caught me by surprise.”

  Clementine cuffed his arm, smiling. “A beetle? Don’t be so silly. Now, won’t you come in for a cup of tea?”

  “Ah.” Churchill exhaled heavily. “I suppose so, I suppose so.”

  “Winston, you’re a good man. A good man.” Clementine smiled directly into his face, arresting his gaze, seeing buried between the years the younger ginger-haired man who had pursued her. “And as a good man you deserve a cup of tea and a slice of cake, perhaps even two if you pull yourself together. How’s that for an offer?”

  CHAPTER 21

  6.20 p.m.

  At home Esther levered off her stained brogues with her heels, kicking them away. A distracted singing came from the kitchen. The parquet floor in the hall was marked with soil, something she noticed as she walked, the singing becoming clearer. A pain in her foot made her lift it up to inspect, wobbling on one leg: It was a sharp piece of gravel, gravel dotted around, now a hole in her stockings.

  Black Pat sat at the kitchen table, playing patience with the deck of ancient cards from the sideboard. A vase from the windowsill was on the table, the flowers emptied into the sink. Black Pat took a finishing swig from the vase, singing through his swallow. He poured in more beer from the bottle next to him. He started to sing again with a crooning tilt to his forehead. “A bone in the fridge may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

  “In the popular version Marilyn Monroe sang about a kiss on the hand,” Esther said, slipping to the fridge.

  “ ‘Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it!’ ”

  Esther turned with a hand on the fridge door. “If that’s a Marilyn impression, you’ve made her sound like something from the crypt.”

  Black Pat made a playful face at the cards, this conversation fun for him if not for anyone else. “Well, we all lose our charms in the end.” Bothered by an itch, he shook his massive head, plush ears smacking against his skull. The bottle of milk in the fridge door was reached for and then forgotten as Esther confronted a giant bone squatting there on a baking tray.

  “Oh my God.” She bent into the fridge. “What’s this?”

  “A pineapple.” Black Pat checked over a shoulder to receive appreciation for the joke, a scene for canned laughter. No laughter, just a cold wait for an explanation. The cards clapped down. “It’s a bone, obviously.”

  “Yes, but what is it doing in my fridge?”

  “Causing a crisis.”

  Another joke was wasted on this unresponsive audience.

  A paw reached out, claws beckoning. “Look, the crisis is easily solved, give it here.”

  Esther handed it over and Black Pat made a ravenous noise. He cracked at the bone with the egg-sized molars at the rear of his mouth. An eye tightened in a squint. The bone crushed into fragments. Black Pat’s muscular tongue worked to get at the marrow inside. Splinters scattered over the table and cards, teeth grating. A quick pause for inspection aroused his appetite and the mauling resumed. Esther got a glass of water, the first sip taking her to a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  Black Pat had hollowed the bone into a pipe now, both ends ground off and the marrow emptied.

  “That’s quite unlovely to watch,” Esther said.

  “Don’t watch then,” said Black Pat. “Shut your eyes.”

  “I will still be able to hear you doing it.”

  Black Pat put his lips to the bone and jeered down the pipe at her: “Booo!”

  His muzzle was crusted in a dark substance. She peered at it. “What’s that on your face?”

  “Blood,” he replied straightforwardly. He saw her expression. “Mud?”

  Was this better? … It didn’t seem to convince her. Then he said, “What are you doing this evening?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She debated with the water, swirling it in her glass. Some splashed out. She dried a hand on her thigh. “Probably what I do every night. Nothing much.”

  “I thought so, yep.” Black Pat was on his hind legs, the beer vase squeezed in an elbow. The bone was a tour guide’s baton, held to the back door. “Follow me.”

  The rosy-gold garden yellowed in the late sunlight, midges and little insects yellow specks. There in the centre of the lawn, a collection of stones and bricks, on top a wire tray badly fashioned from chicken wire. Underneath burnt small, snapping flames.

  “A fire?” Esther sprang towards it.

  “I’ve built”—Black Pat announced it with a ringmaster’s arm—“a barbecue.”

  “It’ll burn the grass!”

  “Who cares about the grass?” said Black Pat.

  Resigned, Esther sat on her knees and prodded the fire with a slim twig. The lawn around it was scorched. It prickled through her stockings, the blades made tough and pale by the sun. Esther shifted onto her bottom, taking a look at the gravel hole at her foot. She stretched her legs out, rocking her ankles and enjoying the blanket heat of the evening. Black Pat was busy with a shrub near the fence, one paw scooping through it. The paw found an object and Black Pat slammed his head through the foliage. A pillowcase in his teeth, he came up. Esther looked at Black Pat, not delighted to see the pillowcase.

  This pillowcase, it was immediately apparent, had been stolen from the pillow in the boxroom. And it contained something, a swing
ing bulge inside.

  Remembering the tea towel and the spoon, and already rinsed with the futility of arguing, Esther said, “That’s my pillowcase you’ve buried in the garden, I hope you know.”

  “I’ve organised this as a surprise for you, I hope you know,” Black Pat answered. “It’s not every day you get surprised with a barbecue … or by a barbecue.” He smirked at the lump in the pillowcase as it swung.

  “What’s in there? Is that something else I own?”

  “Nope.” Black Pat upturned the case. A small bald shape fell out, crudely plucked and gutted. Two legs showed it was a bird with a pair of oversized feet. He picked it up, dangling the bird by a naked wing.

  Esther wanted to leap up but not enough to actually do it. “What are you going to do with that?”

  “This,” said Black Pat, tossing the wing. The bird landed with a sizzle on the wire tray.

  Esther inched over to inspect. “What sort of bird is that?”

  “Not sure,” said Black Pat, now the chef, poking the bird onto another side with a stick, then drawing it back. Fat dripped into the flames and sparked. “It wasn’t flying when I got it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t fly.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Near a pond, it was standing near the water.”

  “What colour was it?” Esther made the beginning of a diagnosis.

  “A bit white on the beak, mostly black.”

  “Black Pat, was it a coot?”

  “Coot.” He experimented with the sound of the word, finding it amusing. “A coot.”

  “You’re cooking a coot for us?”

  “Not us, you. I’m cooking it for you.”

  The coot had performed a rotation, the wire tray uneven. It was about to topple from the grill, but Black Pat stabbed it back with his stick.

  A selection of other corpses were piled discreetly farther up the lawn, all spatchcocked by that butchering mouth. Was that a heron? she asked him.

  “Heron?” he repeated, no authority on bird breeds.

  “How many birds did you kill?”

  “Dum-de-dum,” Black Pat answered in a breathy song, ignoring her. Then finally, “Don’t worry, none you knew personally.”

  Esther had a new thing to examine, a horse chestnut leaf next to the fire, the wide green paddles ready for service. Probably cooked, the coot was barged to the edge of the barbecue. Black Pat’s stick knocked it off. The coot rolled to a stop on the grass. Black Pat jabbed it onto the leaf plate. Trickier than expected. He punted it with a hind leg. Esther wouldn’t see. Yes she did.

  “There, that’s for you.” Black Pat performed a medieval bow.

  Unpleasant: “Just me?”

  “Bon appetite.”

  “Appétit,” Esther corrected.

  Black Pat’s final correction was uninspired. “Bon eat-it-up.”

  The coot’s heat had wilted the leaf. Esther drew it to her and a section ripped loose. The bird was revolting. She pushed a finger at the hot meat. She cleaned the finger on the grass. Feeling Black Pat watching her closely, Esther twisted a drumstick. The coot held together. Black Pat’s anticipating eyes gave her no alternative. She lifted the whole bird by its leg and dared herself to bite it. The drumstick went to her mouth and then retreated. She brought it back and then moved it away. Here it came, another try. No, hideous, it wasn’t possible.

  Black Pat had wanted some gratitude. What he got was this babyish ingratitude. In a gesture of magnificent clemency he let out a little canine whine. It was an invitation for the drumstick. Glad to be rid of it, Esther threw the coot over. He blocked it with his neck and the coot did a wild rebound and lobbed into the bushes. Black Pat went after it, crouching in the flowers, mashing them beneath him with a green popping of stalks.

  “Please don’t do that,” said Esther. “You’re destroying my plants.”

  “Am I?” said Black Pat, the idea incredible. More stalks popped. A lunge from the waist did this on purpose, the bushes shaking and crushed.

  “You are destroying them,” Esther said, the moody narrator.

  “Am I?” Such an irresistible game. He ended it, emerging with a hiking shoe in his mouth.

  The brown leather had split with age, old dirt caked on the sole. Black Pat pitched the shoe onto the barbecue. Wood collapsed from the main frame in a flare of orange ashes. He moved around the fire and blocked her view.

  “Whose shoe is that?”

  “Mine, now,” he answered. A big sheet of smoke, the smoke of a blazing shoe, hit them. Esther shuffled from the smoke on her heels and hands. Black Pat used a stick to dig through the tangle of burning laces, the shoe cooked. A quick, thumping paw stamped out the embers and he lay with his back to her in the dusty trough beside the bench.

  “Are you really going to eat a shoe?”

  “Are you really asking?” It was an original and difficult pronunciation, mouth crammed. He pinned the shoe with his claws and ate with the pigging guilt of a thieving dog.

  “Why are you eating like that?”

  An ear rotated. “Like what?”

  “Like you’re trying to eat in secret …”

  Black Pat nudged himself round. He watched with the haze of his outer sight as Esther studied the shoe. And she recognised it in a wave of familiarity.

  “… Black Pat, that’s Michael’s.”

  He lowered his apologetic nose.

  “You stole it from the shed?”

  The shed was a gracefully rotting structure at the shady end of the garden. Padlocked, it contained the lawn mower and other tools, packets of fossilized seeds, and a stack of pots with the bloom of old terra-cotta. This shoe was from a pair worn by Michael. He had worn them when it rained, when he and his wheelbarrow had an engagement with manure; he wore them during autumn bonfires, laughing at Esther’s and Beth’s puckered faces as they braced for fireworks.

  “You’re eating Michael’s shoe.” Esther’s voice ran with warmth for the shoe. Her thoughts bucketed around the parameters of the coming anniversary. Black Pat was baiting her and she was afraid of the intention behind it. But then this was replaced by a type of flaccid affection. He was her disgusting companion. Company, it was company.

  Oblivious, Black Pat clawed a morsel of leather from his teeth. He choked something up and then swallowed it down. He put his head on the ground. A gluttonous intake of breath made something catch in his throat with a “Hyup!” The cure was a hacking cough.

  Esther stood up, the soles of her stockings brown with soil.

  “Where are you going?” called Black Pat.

  “To get a gin and tonic.”

  “Can I have one?”

  The joking hostility was only partly joking, the wound of Michael’s eaten shoe still red. “Why should I let you?”

  “Because, because, because, because, because,” Black Pat said to the tune from The Wizard of Oz, speaking in a song, “because of the wonderful things I does.”

  A curt response came from the kitchen doorway. “Everything you does is horrible.”

  “Stop being,” Black Pat called after her with a rich grin, “so flirtatious.”

  In the kitchen Esther made herself a drink. She selected the plastic watering can from under the sink for Black Pat, making a cocktail ten times bigger. Back in the garden she saw he had performed a vivisection on the shoe remains, taking it into separate parts and dealing them out in a fan of bits. A surgeon, Black Pat pored over each leather organ.

  Esther’s toes scrubbed around, disturbing the display.

  “Is that watering can for me?”

  “No, me obviously.” Esther’s serious face was betrayed by a smile. Handing him the watering can, she said, “It’s absolutely ideal for you, admit it.”

  A dubious solution, Black Pat took it anyway. He had drunk enough beer, the effect in him being an ambitious embrace of novelty. He pushed the nozzle down his throat, sucking at it like a foal, and bowled his eyes at Esther. The look was an exclamation mark, a victory
for novelty. But he was serious when he next spoke.

  “You can talk to me, you know … if you want.”

  “About what?”

  A cautious pause: “… About him.”

  Michael? Esther said, “Why?”

  “Because he was nice,” Black Pat answered. He heard himself. “He must have been.… You did marry him.”

  Esther had this to say: “Yup.”

  “So talk to me.”

  A period of silence clipped past. “I can’t.” She said it again, to him and herself. “I can’t.”

  Soft and ulcerous: “Esther, you can.”

  And she practically did. But the hood came down. “Well, I don’t want to, so you’ll be waiting a long time.”

  Black Pat was quiet for a moment, feeling the electricity that blossomed from the little casket of Esther’s chest. He lay there, feeling it. Then he said with a violating intimacy, “I can wait.”

  CHAPTER 22

  7.45 p.m.

  “I got this from the tree at the bottom of the garden,” Big Oliver said, striding through the French doors into the dining room. In an Olympic-torch hand he held an apple. “From the garden!” he repeated, looking at the apple as if it were the first on Earth. He took a bite and a chunk with core and pips came away. “Christ,” he said, sharpness pinching his face, “that’s sour.” The apple was abandoned on the table.

  “I’ve had an idea,” Beth announced to the pages of last week’s newspaper.

  “Oh yeah?” Big Oliver landed heavily on the sofa.

  “Esther doesn’t want to stay with us, but—”

  “She doesn’t? Did you keep trying?”

  Beth chucked the paper to the floor. “It didn’t work, but I’ve got a plan.” She told him about Corkbowl. He was an intriguing find, she explained, with excellent credentials; tall and charming. And as if being a tall charmer wasn’t enough, he could also potentially be a counterpart to some of her single female colleagues; she couldn’t think who, exactly, no, it wasn’t as though she had anyone in mind.…