Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  “No. My mother says Great-grandfather was very strict, and so was Grandfather, so I suppose they didn’t try to make it up.”

  “Whey-faced, tight-fisted, canting, sermonizing, hypocritical, yellow­bellied, bootlicking, brass-arsed Judas. Your great-grandfather, my respected elder brother. Same goes for my dad. Drink up. Let’s see the glass tilt. Six quid a bottle this, if you could buy it. Opened it for you.”

  One day, Andrew thought, he would be able to buy wine at six pounds a bottle and drink as much as he felt like. Not yet. Deliberately he only half-filled his glass.

  “Right up.”

  “That’s as much as I want, thank you.”

  “Got you placed. Pansy little runt who can’t hold his liquor.”

  “No, sir. All you know about me is that you can’t make me do what I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t bully me and you can’t buy me.”

  (Mistake. He hadn’t meant to say that. Good thing he’d stopped drinking.)

  “Buy you?” drawled Uncle Vole. “I only buy the best available.”

  “Perhaps I’m the best Wragge available.”

  “Where’s your father then?”

  “In a Jap POW camp, but we haven’t heard for more than a year.”

  “Ain’t he too old to fight?”

  “He was mate of a merchant ship. They got caught in Singapore.”

  “Gimme some more port.”

  Adrian poured. That was the third glass, and there’d been at least three of wine with the meal. Of course the old man was used to it …

  “Chapel?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you sneak out of it when you get the chance.”

  “No. I don’t mind it.”

  (Watching the others—families, with their suppressed twitches of help and rejection; attempts to assume the spiritual look; the give-away tensions of necks.)

  “Scared to tell them you ain’t coming again?”

  “No.”

  “You’re scared. You’d have said. You’re not the Chapel sort, no more than I was, but I wasn’t scared, though my dad leathered the hell out of me and my whey-faced brother held me down while he did it. You ain’t got a brother, eh?”

  “No, sir, and no sisters either. Dad’s the same.”

  The old man nodded, as though he already knew that. A shudder shook him. He twisted his chair round and shrugged it across the carpet till the cylinder of the stove rose almost between his knees. When Adrian passed him his glass he cradled it in shivering hands as he crouched into the rising warmth. The flame, shining through the pattern of holes in the stove-top, cast yellow oval blobs on to the mottled face.

  “Done a job yet?”

  “Only war-work in the hols. I got a scholarship to the grammar school and I’m staying on to take Higher Cert in the summer. Then I’ll be due for call-up.”

  “I left school when I was twelve. What’s the good, once you’ve learnt to write a hand and add up? Time I was your age I was digging on the Vaal. Time I was twenty-one I had three hundred thousand pounds in the bank. You going to beat that, acting?”

  “I might strike it lucky as you did.”

  “Horse shit. What I struck was fellows less sharp than I was. I learnt my lesson on the Vaal, up to my waist in water, rocking a cradle six hours a day, nothing to show for it beyond a pile of gravel. When I trekked out to the dry diggings I promised myself that then on I’d see to it that some other bugger did that sort of work for me. Heard of Cecil Rhodes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He was a gent. Liked to make a show of it. Read the books and you’ll find not more than a couple of lines about Arnold Wragge, the writer-johnny wondering how a gent like Rhodes could have given the time of day to a bounder like Wragge. They wrap it up, of course, or I’d screw them for libel, but it’s there, and it’s true. I tell you, Rhodes would never have got started without me. He wanted to keep his hands clean, so he’d got to have a partner didn’t mind paddling in the shit. I didn’t, and I don’t. Gimme some more port.”

  He drank without bothering to sluice the wine round for the taste. The glass was empty in three gulps. He held it out again.

  “I built this house by paddling in the shit. What makes you think I intend to leave one brick of it to a pansy little actor?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I don’t expect you to leave me anything, sir.”

  “Horse shit. The moment I whistled, there you were on the doorstep.”

  It wasn’t true, but it must have looked that way. In fact Andrew had fought against coming, because Cyril had half-promised him a job helping with the panto. It was only going to be a semi-professional production, two weeks’ run in St Michael’s Hall, because all three theatres had been bombed flat in the blitz, but it was what Andrew wanted. Then the letter had come with the last Christmas cards, and Mum had said better go. Now that that poor young man had gone and got himself killed in Italy, Andrew was the last of the line. Stupid to pass up a chance like that. And so on. She had got really worked up about it. He’d even thought of pretending to set off and sneaking back to take the job at St Michael’s, and sleeping rough somewhere, but of course the Wragges would have started asking where’d he got to. In the end he’d given in, but there was no need to tell Uncle Vole any of that.

  “I don’t want you to leave me anything,” he said. “I’m going to make my own way.”

  “Horse shit again. You live in Fawley Street. I remember Fawley Street.”

  “It’s been bombed since then, but not our end.”

  “Shut up. I tell you I know Fawley Street. One cut above a slum. Front parlour, snug, back kitchen. Two rooms up, neither big enough to swing a cat. Outside shit-house. Right?”

  “We’re on main drains. Dad put the plumbing in when I was born.”

  “You’d give your right arm to be shut of it.”

  “I will do that myself.”

  “Acting? I know actors. I knew ’em at the Lanyon in Kimberley. If the diggers didn’t like the play they’d flip gravel on the stage and watch the actors crawl about picking it up, case it might be diamonds. Actresses, now. They could get diamonds. But not like that.”

  “I think that’s what you’re trying with me.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Flipping gravel on to the stage to see if I’ll crawl. Well, I won’t. I’m going to make my own way, by acting. To the top. I’ve got it in me.”

  “How d’yer know, when you’ve done nothing more than put on a long skirt and simper. Oh, la, Sir Jasper. How d’yer know you’re not a bugger when you’ve never had a woman?”

  “I do know. To me, it’s obvious. I’m the only person who can know. In both cases.”

  “Cocky little bugger. All the answers.”

  “I expect they said the same about you, sir.”

  “Horse shit. They could’ve carved six of you out of me.”

  “I think I’ve got about an inch to grow. I’ll be five-foot-four then.”

  His height used to bother Andrew. Until he was twelve or so he’d invented exercises, such as hanging from the kitchen door lintel with his toes hooked into the handles of two of Mum’s flat irons, to stretch his joints. Then he’d noticed how boys a couple of years older suddenly shot up, and had waited for the magic moment. The moment had come with its odd magic, but not the extra inches. He still did exercises, teaching his body to be fit for the most exhausting roles, but nowadays told himself that his shortness didn’t matter. Part of his power would lie in making the audience not see it. The line of his heroes ran from Garrick to Olivier. Six-foot players had to be hams.

  Uncle Vole sneered. He had an A-one sneer, worth copying.

  “Kn
ow what the gents called me at the diggings? ‘Wragges-to-riches’. Meant it as an insult, but when I had this place built I half thought of having it carved on my gateposts. I built this house and no man else, and I did it spite of all the nobs and Holy Joes and snivelling politicians in the world. But you, Mr Andrew Wragge, you’ll never carve that anywhere. You’ll be Wragges-and-Tatters, more like, poncing around in flea-pits till you drink yourself into a pauper’s grave.”

  “As a matter of fact my stage name is Adrian Waring.”

  It was the first time he had ever told anyone the secret, since he had chosen the name three years ago, a sudden but fixed decision, made while Mum was out serving at the NAAFI and he was sitting at her dressing-table trying out mouths with the last of her pre-war lipstick. He was startled to hear his own lips speaking it aloud, and the effect on Uncle Vole was startling too. The old man poked his head forward like a darting terrier. A froth of spittle, purple with port, appeared at the corner of his mouth. He snarled. The sneer a moment ago had been calculated, intended to rile Andrew. The snarl was involuntary, real.

  “Clear out!” he said. “Clear out and don’t come back. I’m through with you.”

  Andrew pushed back his chair and stood looking down, while the old man huddled himself back round the stove, so close that a smell of scorching cloth prickled the air. Pity. It might have been useful to stay long enough to see him get properly drunk. He wouldn’t have been an ordinary drunk either. There was something extra about him, something rare—personality, energy, rage at being so near the end. Andrew knew he mightn’t be able to watch anything like that again.

  But at the same time he felt triumphant. He’d got exactly what he wanted. He could go home. It was the naming of his secret name that had done the trick.

  He bowed politely.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, sir,” he said. “I will leave first thing tomorrow.”

  TWO

  The bugle call began in his nightmare and ended with him lying awake, stiff with the terror of it, slowing realizing the meaning of the soft, warm, unfamiliar bed, but baffled still by the sound, fairly distant but oddly loud and distorted. The distortion had been part of the dream. A war-film, first war, playing the young doomed officer about to lead his men over the top. Some of the time he was in the film, on set, and some of it he was in a cinema, watching the screen. The bugle call for the attack came through the cinema loudspeakers, but at the same moment came the understanding that the director had taken advantage of a real war to save money on extras and sets. One of the bullets now beginning to whine on the sound-track was going to kill the young star dead.

  The terror continued as real as the sound. A secret name was no protection in dreams. Andrew lay unable to move until the bugle call ended and the music began. “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” also horridly distorted by the loudspeakers. Soldiers, somewhere out in the dark. Reveille. Yanks—Andrew recognised the tune from having heard it on AFN—you wouldn’t get music like that in a British camp.

  He sighed and slowly relaxed. Terror subsided into the usual, permanent, unspoken dread of call-up, some time next autumn. Adrian would be no protection there, either.

  To push the thought out of his mind he reached into the icy air outside the Lanaircell blankets, pulled his clothes off the chair beside the bed and teased them down either side of his body. Waiting for them to warm through he considered the problem of getting away before Cousin Brown was up and about. He’d need something to eat. It must be three miles to the village, lugging his suitcase, and then God knows how long before a bus came. He didn’t want to argue with Cousin Brown about leaving, though he would if he must. Sometimes you had to hurt people. It was necessary.

  He thought about the end of yesterday evening. He’d come into the Saloon and found the two Cousins huddled either side of a log fire, most of whose heat must have gone up the huge chimney. There was a portrait of the whole family over the mantelpiece, painted in this very room, but that had been summer, about fifty years ago, to judge by the clothes. Now Cousin Blue was playing patience on a sort of tray hitched to the arm of her chair, but Cousin Brown had got out three albums and made Andrew sit beside her on the settee to look through them. Programmes, photographs, newspaper cuttings, all of productions by something called The Mimms Players. Kids at first, dressing up on the garden lawn. Then growing up, and a stone stage, still outdoors, with yew hedges behind it. The obvious plays, Dream, Rivals, As You Like It. Elspeth and May Wragge in the cast list, and sometimes Charles Wragge. A gap for the first war, and then only Elspeth. Big parts for her—Electra, Ghosts, the Scotch play—Ghosts indoors, on a special stage in what Cousin Brown said was the Ballroom. Money spent on scenery, costumes and lighting. And real actors, names Andrew knew, people he’d seen, though they must have been just beginning then. Grander and grander … And then the war, and back to unknowns. Village halls. You couldn’t get an audience out to The Mimms in wartime, Cousin Brown said. Last production Dear Brutus, 1940.

  Andrew had started to look through the albums both bored and wary. Kiddy-plays, amateurs, Bottoms and Starvelings. Soon he’d seen that though The Mimms Players might have begun like that, Cousin Brown had made it into something different. It wasn’t only because she had the money. She was obsessed with the theatre. It was the most important thing in her life. She was, Andrew realized, the first person he’d met who actually understood what he meant when he announced he was going to be an actor, took him seriously, knew that it mattered. When they’d finished looking at the albums they talked about other productions—she’d of course seen dozens of plays he’d only read, or read about until long after Cousin Blue had gone sighing off to bed. There had been no further sign of Uncle Vole. Andrew hadn’t told her what had happened in the dining-room. As soon as he got home he would send her a letter, explaining.

  When his clothes were warm he eased himself out of his pyjama bottoms and into pants, socks and trousers. Then the top half. It was a game, but also an exercise in muscular control. A watcher in the room must not be aware what you were up to, so you must make only the visible movements natural to a sleeper, including getting your head right under the blankets in order to push it through the neck of your vest. He varied the imaginary play from which the scene came. This time he was in a prison hospital, about to escape and prove his own innocence …

  He flung back the bedclothes and sprang forth. Phee, it was cold! Uncle Vole had sneered at Fawley Street, but all his millions couldn’t buy that snugness. Andrew eased back the heavy curtain. Still almost dark … But now from somewhere down in the house he heard a rhythmic click and clump. A carpet sweeper. The servants were up. There’d be someone he could ask about food. He switched on the bedside light, stuffed his pyjamas into his already-packed suitcase, laced his shoes, crept out. None of the door-fittings rattled. Not a plank creaked, nor any of the treads in the staircase. He used the banister to feel his way.

  A yellow light shone in the main downstairs corridor, off which all the big rooms opened. Beneath it an old woman was working the sweeper, some kind of housemaid, though she wasn’t wearing the smart black-and-white uniform as the other old girl had who’d shown him his room yesterday. Or perhaps she was, only it was hidden beneath her thick tweed overcoat and shawl. Her frosted breath rose in a cloud as she thumped the sweeper to and fro. Intent on her work she didn’t notice his approach.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She looked up—wispy hair, puckered lips, sunken pale cheeks. She glanced at the suitcase.

  “Going, then? Thought you was here till Monday.”

  She wasn’t wearing her dentures.

  “Sir Arnold changed his mind.”

  “How many’d he had?”

  She tilted an imaginary glass to her lips.

  “I was wondering if there’s any hope of a lift to the village.”

  “No bus, Tuesdays.”

  “Oh.�
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  “Jack’s taking Hazel down for the choir-treat, mind you. Suppose you’ll be wanting early breakfast. They don’t have it till nine, upstairs.”

  “Well …”

  “You’ll have to see Mrs McHealy. Green baize door and down the stairs. Follow your nose—she’s baking.”

  The door was next to the dining-room. Just inside it on the left was what looked like a pantry, with a scrubbed table bearing compartmented trays of cutlery, cruets, candlesticks, glasses, decanters. Beyond that a wide flight of stairs with slate treads descended, apparently underground. At the bottom a lino-floored corridor led left and right. The smell of baking bread was easy to trace. He followed it along into a large square room with a huge Aga cooker on the further side, and on the right two tall barred windows, their glass reflecting the room because of the dark outside. So he wasn’t in the bowels of the earth—the house must stand on a hill which sloped away at the back.

  In the middle of the room was a long scrubbed table at which sat the man who had driven the pony-trap last night, with a steaming mug in front of him. He was older than Andrew had realized in the dark, with a gipsy-looking face, very coarse grey hair and strong brows, a slight hunch to his shoulders. He looked up as Andrew came through the door and coughed unconvincingly. The woman standing at the Aga turned at the signal.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Mrs McHealy?”

  “That’s right, sir. Breakfast for upstairs isn’t till nine.”

  Her voice was soft country Hampshire, not the harder Southampton accent which Andrew could do in his sleep. The “isn’t” was “idn’t” and the “r”s had a burr to them. Mrs McHealy’s eyes, pale blue in a flattish, doughy face, had glanced at the suitcase and back. Andrew tried anxious charm.

  “Won’t someone be driving to the village before that?”

  The man at the table stirred but said nothing.

  “And I think you’ve got my ration-book,” said Andrew. “Sir Arnold asked me to leave, you see. I said I’d go as soon as I could.”

  “Where’s my Sambo?” said Mrs McHealy. “Give him a shout, Jack. You’ll be wanting a bit of breakfast in any case, won’t you, sir?”