Mr. Chartwell

by Rebecca Hunt

  Black Pat chomped his jaws in a small bark, the atmosphere a lullaby to him. Churchill crumpled a piece of paper in his fist. He toughed out a smile. The crowd of journalists turned back up at him, dreading it.

  “Pah, aren’t we the gang of whelps and jugginses. Forgive me. I didn’t intend to waft in such a miasma of spiritual famine. Anyway”—he surveyed them, these men decades younger—“you needn’t much concern yourselves, you’re all just ducklings.” Churchill smiled, this smile coming freely. “Have gumption, my dear ducklings.”

  Black Pat’s tail lifted, wary of the change in Churchill’s tone, then dropped at the next comment.

  “And should you remember this fear, remember courage equally,” said Churchill. “Beard the fear with courage.”

  Beard the fear, wrote the journalists, some with question marks.

  “For,” said Churchill, speaking to the faces and the canine face above, fastening his hard eyes on that canine face, “you can’t stop fear snaring you with a headstall, and you can’t stop it landing a buss on your headstone, but you can damn well try.”

  A long staid period, fiercely awkward. A hand lifted. No one welcomed it, desperate for the easy release of the pub.

  “Yes, your question please,” said Langford-Holt.

  “Sir Winston.” The journalist cleared his throat. “In 1929 you caught a one-hundred-and-eighty-eight-pound marlin.” He coached himself. Out came the ridiculous question: “Do you have any fishing tips for readers?”

  Muffled sarcastic laughter. Jackals near the stricken journalist made trumpeting sounds.

  Langford-Holt gave him a brisk stare. “Are you representing a legitimate newspaper?”

  The journalist lifted his shoulders. “I also freelance for a fishing journal. Thought I might …”

  Churchill cut in. “An excellent query. Yes, by God, let’s refresh the mood.” He grinned broadly as Black Pat huffed. Black Pat made a teenage flop with one arm, a thwarted move, absolutely bored. It was the move of a gambler flinging his tickets to the floor, hating his losing horse.

  Churchill said, “I’d advise your fishing readers who aspire to other than a brown trout that the waters of California are certainly a more glamorous affair.”

  Relief spread through the room, even Langford-Holt slacking into his chair. The spectre of mortality lost its teeth, replaced by an unexpected interest in angling.

  “And for those game readers who harbour a pash to land one of Neptune’s giants, I’d urge them to make ready for battle,” said Churchill. The memory of that day in California was vivid, a triumph of sporting happiness. “It was a dramatic experience, wrestling that marlin. We would meet, that much was certain, the marlin and I. The problem was on whose terms. I tried to haul him in, and he tried to haul me over, warring like a typhoon. I eventually drew him to me, raging and punching his head against the line. More than once he nearly succeeded in hurling me from the bow. Ho!” Churchill knocked down an amused fist. “I would have gone off behind him like a bottle rocket.”

  CHAPTER 32

  6.30 p.m.

  Light made a pair of tennis shorts over the bedroom wall. A shirt dropped on the floor had developed a modest beauty, cultivating the painterly creases of a restaurant napkin. On the windowsill was a small balding plant. The magic of the late light made it gorgeous and exotic.

  Esther stared from her bed, blind to these things. She lay on her side of the mattress. A hand explored the other side and it was a dictionary of loss. Up came the hand, disturbed by something disgusting. A tuft of collected fur. Over the bed, over everything, were long black hairs, a smell in the room. Black Pat had been in here? But he had been everywhere. Forget it, there were other things to think about. The bed made an angry twang. That was new. So he had crashed around on her bed and damaged the springs. She found the energy to work up a docile grunt.

  A moment of decadent self-pity ensued. She wallowed. Then she quickly sat up.

  “Y’ello?” It was Black Pat’s voice from downstairs. Paws made a whacking ascent. Sniffs came at the stairhead and sucked at the edges of the bedroom door, the shiny bulb of his nose against the paintwork. “Esther?”

  “I’m reading.”

  This was a tart and clear instruction to leave her alone. Shoving the door open, Black Pat burst through like a bowling ball smashing into fresh pins.

  “Hello,” he said coolly, registering the scene on the bed. “So you were reading, were you?”

  An old but unread copy of Moby-Dick lay peacefully by her knee, a bowl of oxidizing fruit salad on top. A bar of Dairy Milk was not completely eaten. Black Pat’s eyes veered to the book, took a scornful holiday there, and then travelled back to hers.

  “It must be a riveting read.”

  “It’s quite brilliant. At least that’s what it says on the dust jacket.” Esther took off a block of chocolate with her teeth.

  Black Pat was moving around her, now at the foot of the bed, obscuring the wardrobe. Now blocking the window.

  “But I am about to read,” Esther said. She opened the book at random. “ ‘Drink, ye harpooners! Drink and swear.…’ ” This was recited aloud, proof of how absorbed she was in the text. “So if you don’t mind, I’d like to be left alone.”

  Uncooperative, Black Pat set his front legs on the sheets, lingering for her objections. She did nothing, eating more chocolate and pretending to read. This was all she did, and it was therefore an act of compliance.

  The hind legs bent to jump and jumped. Entirely on the bed, Black Pat was cartoonishly too large and heavy for it, furious twangs coming from the springs.

  “Hey!” she cried in a shout. His trundling rotations trampled near her, driving great ruts in the mattress. “Black Pat!” she shouted again, and he didn’t hear her over his nasal humming, a tune in the spirit of housework as he obeyed the canine instinct to circle. His paws caught in the quilt and dragged it up into a nest. He dug at the nest with his claws and there was the rip of tearing fabric. A mighty ricochet went through the structure of the injured bed as he hurled himself down with an animal rumble of comfort: “Mrrrt.”

  Esther tried to push him to the floor and he retaliated by rolling on her arms. She rescued her arms and gave him a cross jab with her toe. The toe snatched away as his mouth came to challenge it.

  Black Pat lifted his head. “Your side is much more comfortable.” His lifted head showed her a smiling profile. “What’s orange, purple, the colours of the four humours, a type of grey, and brown?”

  “I don’t know.” Esther waited. “What is?”

  Black Pat’s paw made a flop in the area around her knees, a feeble shake.

  Esther searched for the answer and couldn’t find it. “What is?” she said again. “What’s your stupid punch line?”

  “That’s the punch line. That fruit salad.” The paw joggled on its wrist in the direction of her bowl. “It stinks.”

  Ridiculous. Esther ignored him, finishing the bar of chocolate. Black Pat watched her, his stomach expressing itself with a sound of bubbling mud. Unmoved, she sat cross-legged on her tiny corner of the bed. Black Pat punished her selfishness by abusing the division of the mattress. Rudely he budged his way over. Her muscles were indignant at the pressure of his body. But she wouldn’t be chased from her own room. All attempts to force him back only made him more enamoured of the game. The bowl was toppled and soaked the bed with juices. A grape escaped Esther’s hurried efforts to clean up the spilled fruit. Interesting, a grape. Black Pat chewed it and then wiped his horrified tongue down the length of a foreleg. A short period of inactivity occurred and ended as he bulked his massive hips, knocking Esther. He said insincerely, “Oops!”

  Esther pleaded with the wall. “Could you please get out of my room.”

  “You get out. I can’t.” Black Pat caught a hiccup in his throat and then made a foul frazzled rasp. His ear felt a fleck of something and performed a whip.

  His eyes were turned aside, but she felt him studying her indirectl
y, studying her with his other senses. “Black Pat, I can never understand what you’re … Why do you always talk in riddles?”

  Black Pat lay calmly. “Riddle sticks.”

  Esther was confused at his grannyish oath. “… Fiddlesticks?”

  “Riddle,” a sarcastic gap was inserted, “sticks.”

  “That’s such rubbish.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Black Pat said with a wide grin. Then he thrust his neck onto Esther’s pillow, which bunched by the headboard. He tested the durability of cotton with his jaws, feathers appearing at a new hole. Dirt from his paws made brown stripes on the sheets and bedding, his dirt and pungency turning the bed into a hideous place. He caressed the corner of her book with his mouth to analyse the texture. She swiped the book from him and felt pulp in her fingers.

  “Black Pat! You’ve got the manners of an animal.”

  A triumphant expression: “I am an animal.”

  Esther examined the ruined pages. “You’re supposed to be my lodger.”

  “I think you recognise what I am.”

  She looked from the book; Black Pat was watching her with the gaze of a predatory animal. He said, “I am given my assignments and I follow them without deviation. Esther, you should recognise that I do not deviate in my residence here.” He said in a horrible coax, “Come on, you know that.”

  So she was part of his assignment. It was the crescendo of a piano heaved from the top of a staircase. The piano hit the floor and detonated with all chords. Yes, she supposed she had known. Why hadn’t he told her this before?

  “Because it was inappropriate.”

  Esther perched on her small corner of the invaded bed, in her invaded house. She thought of Michael and those days. Thoughts swarmed in droves to the boxroom study. She closed her eyes to find Michael in her library. He appeared automatically, wolf-whistling at Big Oliver’s new wellington boots. Another memory was selected, Michael with a messy smile, waking up in this bed and denying that he snored. Here he was standing in the front room, posing with a Christmas tree. Here he was, running away from her snowball and not getting far. The camera shutter went down and came up on Michael burning an omelette, lifting one end with a spatula and blaming the frying pan. The shutter went down and came up on Michael looking awestruck and kissing Beth at the hospital after Little Oliver was born. And there were the other times when he was sitting in exhausted solitude in his study. There he was sitting bent in the garden with his elbow on the bench. There he was—a deathly silence on him, binding him. These places where Michael had sat alone, Esther saw them. Yet not alone, for every minute of that time Black Pat had sat with him, his body wearing out a sandy trench in the garden, wearing the carpet by the desk into a patch.

  “You were here in this house.”

  “Not just here.”

  Then where?

  “In a lot of places, almost all of them.”

  Something terrible flowered. “Black Pat, did you make him do it?”

  Black Pat fawned in his loathing of this question. “No.”

  “Were you with him?”

  No answer. Low sunlight through the window, the sky lilac. It would go from lilac to indigo, from today to tomorrow. The room had the moist heat of compost.

  “Black Pat, could you have stopped him?”

  An answer of sorts: a paw coming closer and sorry.

  “You didn’t even try and stop him?”

  “Esther,” Black Pat’s words came pensively, “I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “I mean I can’t. Esther, you must understand what I am.”

  Yes she knew what he was, she told him. No she didn’t, he explained. Let me tell you, Esther.

  “I’m only the grease in a crease,” he said. “A kink in the link.”

  What did that mean? His reply was complicated and elusive. It was useless. He was so meek: “There’s a reason why I’m a dog, with the desires of a dog. If I could have resisted the compulsion and left Michael I would have lain in the grass like a bonnet monkey and searched for nits.” Black Pat became taken by the poetry of this fantasy. “I would have picked for nits, a harmless nanny goat with a bell on her collar.” Out came a bellyaching moan. “But I am not benign. I’m a dog with the hunger of a dog and I am compelled by it.”

  He was desperate for her to understand: Listen, Esther, the strength of the compulsion is terrifying; a violent and depthless appetite. It’s a lust from a cosmology of carnivorous instincts, all those instincts channelled into one incinerating white-hot heart streaming with smoke and magnesium.

  Esther listened. She pulled a loose thread on her top. She listened to Black Pat, letting him explain without interruption. “So you see,” he said, “I don’t have a choice.”

  Was Michael given a choice? No. It wasn’t a matter of choice. Black Pat spoke of the photograph in the drawer. Look at it, Esther. Look at it again, take it from the nail and pore over it.

  Off the bed like a hawk and into the boxroom, the photograph in her hands. Their wedding day, hers and Michael’s. She scrutinised the familiar landmarks: the wedding guests, her head back in laughter, Michael turning to smile at someone. Petals of confetti. The car door open to show a bottle of champagne. Behind them the church. Flagstones and rose bushes; a committee of stones in the graveyard. Esther searched the photograph. All was the same. She kept searching. And she found it.

  The car door was open and the window mirrored the church. Wedding guests applauded, gloved hands clapping, a baby in a white cap. But there behind them in the window of the car, in the mirrored image of the church steps. A shape captured amidst the distractions of flapping dresses and corsages. Just visible, just a small irregularity in the reflection.

  His ears were in lax salute, two black tips. The reflection captured the curve of his bullish shoulders. Too small in the mirroring window, his features were lost. The angle of his head gave away his attitude: a relaxed ownership, watching Michael and covetous. An observer at this event, Black Pat set himself away on the steps: You can go, Michael. But back you’ll come. Off you go, but not for long. Back you’ll come because I’ll bring you back.

  “I met him a long time before you did. He took the photograph down towards the end because he didn’t want to be reminded of this. It got worse.” Black Pat had followed her to the boxroom. Sulking with guilt, he looked for a distraction. Good friends with the corner of the desk, he gave it a gnawing.

  Esther shoved his head from the desk. “Why didn’t Michael tell me about you?”

  Black Pat was on the worn patch of carpet by the desk. “Why haven’t you told anyone about me?”

  She sat on the edge of the desk and floundered for a reply. “How can I?” She asked him genuinely, “How could I begin to talk about you? When I tell myself it sounds impossible, and that’s with you sitting opposite me.” She said, stumped, “I thought about telling Corkbowl, and then I realised that even if I did he wouldn’t know how to believe me, would he? It’s absurd.”

  “Absurd, yes,” said Black Pat, “totally absurd!” He had sunk to the floor.

  Esther thought about Michael in here with this dog, trapped with him, already trapped when they first met. “And you’re going to trap me too.” She recalled the day he moved in, her gullibility. “This is an ambush.”

  “No, it’s an affinity. I didn’t initiate it.” From behind the desk Black Pat said, “The magnet that keeps me here is the magnet which brought me here. We are twinned by the same orbit and I’m all yours. Esther, I’m all yours.” He said hopefully, “Don’t you like me even slightly?”

  “I—” Esther was smothered by a weight of contempt, hating herself because she hated her answer. “I suppose I do. I suppose I don’t really have an option.”

  His answer was a version of the truth. “You don’t. We have an affinity and it chains us.” He wanted to soothe her though. “Cosy chains,” he said, willing her to be soothed, to be resigned.

  Esther shut her eyes. Her respo
nse to this was no response. But it wasn’t entirely the lapse into resignation he had wanted, a glimmer of defiance remaining beneath.

  Black Pat’s face came up above the desk, just half of it, the top of his big domed head peering over. Was she crying? It seemed so by the way a rough sleeve swept at her cheeks.

  And then penitence came on him like an illness. Watching Esther cry stripped him of his usual mockery. Here was the remorse which intermittently touched him. Embarrassing when it happened; he railed at it now. A sentimental thing had been roused, making a mouse of him.

  A time passed silently.

  Black Pat spoke to her in soft adoration. “One of those happy souls which are the salt of the earth, and without whom this world would smell like what it is—a tomb.”

  Esther’s voice was puffy. “Do you mean Michael?”

  Black Pat jockeyed himself, needing to take back his professionalism. He seethed at his vulnerability and the chump it made of him.

  “I mean me.” He didn’t. “No, I mean you.” Hopeless, he was still clenched with it. So he struggled to clarify, the sorrow in his pulse. “For what I can regret, I do. And I will regret you, Esther.”

  Her sleeve wiped at her cheek and then her chin. “Who wrote that?”

  He nodded gravely. “I did, I wrote it.” Seeing her complete cynicism he wasted a few seconds, blowing something off his nose, a piece of fluff, his bottom lip extended to aim air at it. He confessed, “Or perhaps Shelley did.”

  CHAPTER 33

  10.05 a.m.

  Clementine had elegant handwriting which looped across the page. She was writing to Randolph at the mahogany desk in the centre of her bedroom, a peaceful figure in a taupe blouse. A photograph of Marigold was positioned on the desk corner. The small white figurine of the maternal goddess Kwan Yin stood on a low shelf above a radiator. From the centre of the mantelpiece, a Louis XVI clock, once belonging to Clementine’s mother, kept time with its star-shaped pendulum.

  Apart from this ticking and the sound of Clementine’s hand moving in fast, irregular bursts over the paper as she wrote, the room was silent.