Mr. Chartwell

by Rebecca Hunt

  Next to a box of Italian pencils and a Chinese inkwell on the desk was a glass paperweight in the shape of a pear. A tiny reflection in the pear shifted as something behind Clementine stirred, entering the room. Clementine’s eyes had it, steadily holding the reflection, but she didn’t move. Her writing slowed fractionally.

  There was the cool, smooth sound of a cumbersome leg being put on the salmon-red moiré silk spread of her four-poster bed, then another one. Observing the reflection, Clementine’s eyebrows flickered as the intruder jumped its hind legs on the bed and turned round several times, trampling the silk. The intruder’s back and humped shoulders brushed the gazebo roof of the four-poster as he moved, then keeled over, covering the mattress. A sloshing started up as the intruder gave the pads of his paws a hot wash, lost in the task, the tongue moving in a rhythmic trance.

  “You are distracting me from my writing, I hope you know,” said Clementine.

  There was a startled quiet. Then another experimental tongue wipe.

  “And I want you to get off my bed immediately,” she said.

  The tongue slid back into the mouth with trepidation.

  “Off the bed, thank you.”

  Black Pat spoke faintly, in shock. “Can you hear me?”

  “I would have thought that was perfectly obvious.”

  “You can see me?”

  Clementine stopped writing, but didn’t turn round. Instead her eyes lifted to regard the dog in the antique gilt-gesso mirror hanging above the chimneypiece in front of her. “This must be quite a surprise for you.”

  The silence told her it was a stunning uppercut of a surprise. The dog found her eyes in the mirror. “Have you always been able to see me?”

  “On some level I suppose I have. Will you please remove yourself from my bed? I don’t want to have to ask again.”

  Black Pat lumped down off the mattress, claws catching the silk and making small scrapes. “You’ve never spoken to me before.”

  Clementine did turn now, to give the animal the benefit of seeing her determination. “It’s a complicated situation. But this particular visitation of yours is different so I am requesting parley.”

  Black Pat’s face pulled into a dainty expression of astonishment. “You want to chat?”

  Clementine let out a bristled snort at this. “No, I do not want to chat. I am calling a temporary truce in order to discuss the terms of this current sabotage on my husband.”

  “Right,” Black Pat said meekly. “Should I come and sit with you?”

  “My God, no,” Clementine retorted. “Stay over there.” She reconsidered. “Oh, all right, go on then.”

  A 1920s dressing table covered in pale pleated silk stood in front of a long window running down the right-hand side of the room. A six-legged stool, painted white, sat in front of the dressing table’s mirror. Black Pat pulled the stool to the opposite side of the mahogany desk, then sat. Clementine leant back in her Regency chair, partly to give the dog her full attention, and partly so she could take in his awesome physique at close range. Black Pat looked wild and colossal, his shaggy ruff falling in great sections. He tried to rest an arm on the desk and his elbow hit the box of pencils, the pencils exploding over the floor. Black Pat’s hind leg thumped the underside of the desk as he went to collect the pencils. Jumping back, he knocked a copper dish used for holding letters. The dish pitched up and made a dull peal as it hit the carpet.

  “Just stop!” Clementine cried as he bent for the dish. “I’ll get it in a minute!”

  Black Pat cast another squint at the copper dish. A hind paw crept stealthily along the floor towards an escaped pencil, finding it with the toes and attempting to roll it back. The weight of the foot broke the pencil in three, grinding graphite fragments into the cream carpet.

  “I almost preferred it when you were on my bed,” said Clementine.

  Black Pat said to her sincerely, “I honestly never realised you knew I was there. In all these years you’ve never made me even suspect it.”

  “Oh, it was quite a challenge, let me tell you,” Clementine told him briskly.

  “So what do you want to talk about?”

  “I want you to leave this house and let Winston go. I’ve never asked for anything before, but I am asking you for this, just this once.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You must.”

  “It’s not in my control.” Black Pat spoke respectfully. Existing in parallel to her for decades had caused him to develop a slight worshipfulness of her talents as an adversary. And despite the fact that Clementine was now elderly, she cowed him.

  “Do you know what my husband has to do tomorrow?” Clementine’s expression was resolute. “He has to retire from Parliament; he has to retire from his life’s work. And don’t pretend that you don’t know how much this means to him.”

  “I know exactly what it means to him,” Black Pat replied.

  Folded neatly together, Clementine’s hands sat as a dove in her lap. “Then maybe you could be a friend.”

  “I’m not his friend.”

  “I don’t mean to Winston,” Clementine interrupted. “Be a friend to me.”

  “Oh.” Black Pat’s little whiskery brow buds rose.

  For a time they watched each other. There was an epic quality in Clementine’s stare; it telescoped out and showed the landscape of her emotions. Planted in the centre was the bed-rock of her family, not about to go undefended.

  “Will you?” she asked. “Please will you do this?”

  “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “Winston is eighty-nine years old. I’m beseeching you to release him, to let him go.”

  “You are asking for something I can’t give.” Black Pat watched her disappointment, a balloon of remorse swelling in his chest. It made him reflective, circling a possibility and its consequences in his mind. There was no comfort in what he could tell Clementine, but her disappointment made him desperate. Black Pat was unable to look directly at her, her profile a pastel object in his peripheral vision.

  “Although,” Clementine heard him say after a while, his voice like midnight in the space between them, “it would not breach the codes of my contract to notify you that on this occasion my intervention might not be a very prolonged one.”

  Clementine brightened, then became suspicious. “Is this a promise?”

  “I don’t make promises.” Black Pat urged her not to continue with her questions, the questions leading to heartbreak. He urged her to be satisfied.

  “But you will spare Winston?”

  There was a pause.

  “The only thing I can offer you is the hope that he may not have to endure this for too long.” The span of time allocated to a life was a drop of milk diluting in thin tentacles through the ink of Black Pat, and his answer was duplicitous in a way Clementine could not yet conceive. She would come to in time. “There is an end to it.” There was an end to everything. “There is an end to it,” he said again.

  She was brittle in her chair. “Are you telling the truth?”

  Black Pat made a compassionate gesture to save her from the truth contained within him. But for Clementine it was enough; it was, for that moment, a victory.

  She let out a sigh. “That’s marvellous news.” She started writing again.

  Light ran in through the lead-latticed windows and chalked a pattern of diamonds on the floor. Set back in thick stone walls, the windows framed miles of stubbled forest. The room was warmed by the cloudless sky rolling above them. Allowing the tranquillity to overpower him, Black Pat’s tail swiped against the stool legs, dragging over the carpet in long brushstrokes.

  Hearing the tail, Clementine looked up from the page, the pen still. “Many thanks for listening to my case.” Her tone was an instruction to leave. Black Pat’s tail stopped, hanging dead on the floor.

  “… You understand this conversation has been a unique occurrence. I won’t be talking to you again.”

  “I know.”
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  “And I don’t want you to mention this to Winston. It wouldn’t be fair if he knew I know about you in the way that I do.” She held her gaze steady. “It’s easier this way, easier on him.”

  “You have heard him talk about me.…”

  “Yes, of course. His depression, although private, is no secret. He has often talked about the Black Dog, your visits, your tormenting; it’s a very real, very open state.” She swallowed. “But what you actually are, your hyperreality … well, I don’t need to tell you it’s something he doesn’t discuss. So I appeal to you not to say a word to him. This is a confidential conversation, between us only.”

  Black Pat accepted it.

  Clementine turned back to her writing, a clear statement that the conversation was terminated.

  Sliding from the stool, Black Pat started off out of the room. A thought stopped him. He tried to express it sensitively.

  “You do realise this won’t be the last time you see me, don’t you?”

  Clementine looked fine and poised, her pussy-bow collar immaculate, the gold earrings handsome next to her cheeks. Around one wrist was a bracelet of pearls. She shook her hand slightly, working the pearls free from her cuff.

  “I suspected as much. But even if this isn’t the last time I see you, it is certainly the last time I acknowledge you. It’ll be exactly as it always has been. It’ll appear as though you simply don’t exist.”

  “Oh,” said Black Pat.

  “Quite.”

  Clementine had one final point to make. “You don’t intimidate me and you don’t intimidate Winston, especially Winston. No, you do not daunt Winston or stunt him. And he has shouldered the burden of your destructive relationship alone and that has been his choice, a brave choice. And it’s due to my husband’s strength of character that he has been able to withstand it, still achieving what he has.” Clementine stopped to give the dog a precise smile, a smile from the freezer. “… It must be terribly frustrating for you.”

  “It isn’t.” Black Pat was thick with complicated feelings.

  She finished, “I’ve watched Winston battle against you all these years, and let me tell you, he’ll never surrender.”

  Black Pat said as he left, “And you should commend yourself for that.”

  CHAPTER 34

  11.45 a.m.

  Corkbowl pressed the car horn and waited outside Esther’s house. His tie received a careful straightening, in mathematical alliance with the shirt buttons and ironed with a palm. Esther still hadn’t emerged so he gave the horn some cautious taps. Eventually she appeared in whorls through the glass panes of the door, wrestling with the catch.

  She was dressed in a green cotton dress and a long-employed camel cardigan, the cuffs flared out into funnels with use. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  Around them in the canyons of the seat bases and the foot wells lay the rubble of an old car: sweets wrappers and indistinct dust. In the foundations of the moulded gear stick was a festival of scrunched receipts. The car smelt of fresh herby fish.

  Corkbowl explained, starting the ignition and watching for traffic. “It’s a cod dish I made. I offered to bring it to the lunch.” He chatted about cod as they pulled out from the kerb. The car shuddered on its chassis as they waited at a junction, the conversation entirely about cod. Esther nodded along, agreeing, but there was a weird enthusiasm in her answers. Slipping a look at her profile, Corkbowl saw pink scalloped shapes over her cheek and eye. Her lips were the fat animated lips of a person who has been crying.

  “Esther, what’s wrong?” Unable to stop the car, he sent glances back and forth. Something was wrong.

  A wrist scrubbed under her eye. Then a wet laugh full of embarrassment. “Oh, nothing.”

  Corkbowl recognised that she badly wanted him to change the subject. A distraction was needed quickly. The indicator ticked in the dashboard as the car veered right. Corkbowl sifted through the possibilities. Yes, it came to him. He ransacked through the inside pocket of his jacket, one hand sliding about on the wheel. The other hand had retrieved a tiny notepad, a miniature blue plastic pen in the wire spiral binding, the end whitened with chewing. “I invented something this morning and”—Corkbowl passed over the pad—“I think it will probably make me a millionaire. Probably definitely.”

  She had been saved. Esther felt an elasticated sense of relief. She inspected the drawing. “Gosh, this is …”

  The drawing was of a long tube composed of several telescoping pipes, a large flat disc at the top. At the bottom, a curious lump. An arrow informed any interested viewer that the object was fifteen feet in length.

  “It’s a snorkel.” Corkbowl’s finger travelled blindly to the drawing, jabbing around the lump area. “That’s the mouthpiece. It’s difficult to draw, which is why it looks a bit …” Corkbowl risked a look at the pad, his finger moving to the disc. “That disc will keep the top of the snorkel afloat. The aerating end will always be above the sea because it floats.”

  Esther studied the drawing. The gratitude she felt towards Corkbowl made her very attentive to this madcap snorkel idea. “Fifteen feet?” A few quick tissue wipes, dabbing away any evidence, back to normal. “Quite deep, isn’t it?”

  “Really deep. Impressively deep.” Corkbowl tapped at the telescoping pipes. “But you see, this is the genius of the idea. The snorkel tube extends as you dive, and contracts as you rise up. Forget those short snorkels, bin them, this is a renaissance snorkel.”

  “Right,” said Esther. “The renaissance snorkel.”

  “Picture it,” Corkbowl said passionately, “diving to any level, diving to the seabed with the giant clams!” His hand did a whale dive to illustrate this, dipping to his lap. “And then diving back up.” This was also illustrated, the whale hand soaring to the car’s roof.

  Esther smiled at him, a thankful smile which made her look very young.

  They pulled into the street, next to Beth and Big Oliver’s house. The key came out and the engine died. Corkbowl strained to twist to the rear seat, grappling up the foil-wrapped serving dish balanced there. He sat back with the dish on his legs. “So …” His car door swayed. “So, shall we?” He hesitated. “We can sit here for a minute if you want to.” The door drew shut protectively. “Or …”

  “No, come on.” She had restored her composure. “Let’s go in.”

  Beth bounced to the door as they rang the bell. Her oven gloves welcomed them into the hall, Corkbowl admiring a framed poster of Kenilworth Castle and another hanging near the telephone table of a girl feeding an ostrich. Corkbowl also admired Little Oliver’s new toy truck, Little Oliver keen to demonstrate its rotating wheels by driving it up Corkbowl’s leg. Wearing his new smart outfit of a gingham shirt and blue trousers, Little Oliver jumped to hug Esther and then stood on his mother’s shoes, arms locked around her waist as a waddling Beth ushered Esther and Corkbowl into the kitchen area.

  Beth barked for her husband and he appeared with a bottle of white wine.

  “Welcome to my humble commode.” As usual here was the joke, as usual Big Oliver loving it.

  Big Oliver shook Corkbowl’s hand, dealing him the wine bottle, which he accepted with a free elbow. Big Oliver subtly herded Corkbowl and his foil cod over to Beth. “Someone needs to help my wife”—he gave a comedian’s frown at Beth, a large glass of wine in her oven glove—“before she helps herself.”

  Corkbowl presented his cod and was subjected to voracious praise. For less than a second, only once was there evidence of collaboration between Beth and Big Oliver. Beth fired a squash-ball look at her husband. That was the signal.

  “How are you feeling?” Big Oliver squeezed Esther to him, talking mutinously into her ear.

  Esther spoke into the wall of his shoulder. “Not too bad.”

  He manoeuvred her by the arms so he could read her expression. “We’re all glad to have you here today.” Another embrace was rough with emotion. “You’re going to get through this, Hammerhans. You will. We’ll all ge
t through it.” Beth and Corkbowl were talking. Big Oliver kissed Esther on the cheek. “The three of us, we’ll stick together as we always have.” He was still holding her shoulders. “Or the two of us.” He shunted his head at Beth. “Just say the word, we’ll ditch her and make a run for it.”

  Corkbowl came over with three glasses of wine held in tripod fingers.

  “And what’s this I hear about you having an audience with Churchill this afternoon?” asked Big Oliver, opening the conversation to Corkbowl. “Beth told me and I thought I was hallucinating. Who are you meeting tomorrow? Che Guevara?”

  Corkbowl smiled, not so chatty now as there was a stone of embarrassment in his throat. His cod had finished warming in the oven and was ready to be judged. On the other side of the room Beth was busy with a bowl of new potatoes and cauliflower. Down came a dish of peas. She made a cone of her oven gloves and shouted through the cone, “Come and get it!”

  At the table there was the banging of cutlery and friendly bustling as they took their chairs and handed round the food.

  Big Oliver talked through a cheek of fish. “Nice. Good work, Corkbowl.”

  “Happy to be of service,” Corkbowl answered, clearly delighted.

  Little Oliver didn’t want cauliflower, and was forced to have some. “But I don’t like this,” he appealed to his mother.

  “Chin up, soldier,” Big Oliver said to him, a massive piece of cauliflower on his fork, “nobody likes it.”

  Corkbowl nodded his agreement and Little Oliver was more or less persuaded. Between mouthfuls he drove his truck around the cruets. When he wasn’t looking Beth put a serving of peas in the truck’s trailer. Little Oliver was obliged to unload this haul onto his plate and eat his greens.

  Beth laughed. “As the best meal of the week, I think Sunday lunch should always be fun.”

  “Absolutely correct,” said Big Oliver.

  “It’s a serious business, having fun at lunch.” Beth grabbed Esther’s and Corkbowl’s wrists, solemn doing this, lowering her head in a joking grace. “Gathered here together, O Lord, let us bray.”