Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  “Hey! Tony!” he said.

  A grease-smeared face craned out below the running-board. “Get a tool-box and tag along,” said the sergeant.

  “Look, I promised Captain Schwitters …”

  “OK, OK, I’ll fix the captain. You pack your tools.”

  The sergeant unfolded himself and loped away. His long, thin legs in their sharp-creased trousers ended in a pair of enormous boots, size fourteen at least, so his gait was that of a figure in an animated cartoon. The mechanic humped his toolbox into the back of the jeep and stood leaning against the side. He seemed to have no doubts about the fixability of Captain Schwitters.

  “The officers, they figure they run the camp,” he said. “Sergeant Stephens and the men, we know different.”

  His New-York-Italian lilt was very strong. A few minutes of him would be more useful than twenty gangster films.

  “Are you from New York?” said Andrew.

  “Brooklyn. You ever been in New York?”

  “Not a chance yet.”

  “When you go, you never want to come away. This dump …”

  His dark southern eyes looked out from under the trees.

  Across the valley the house was in shadow but the setting sun still lit the big chimney-stacks, whose smoke drifted into the pale spring sky.

  “Does everyone feel like that?” said Andrew.

  “It ain’t home. You get pretty sick waiting. Eight months I been here, sitting on my ass. I got a girl …”

  The movement of his hands accented his longing. He fell silent. To start him going again Andrew gazed around and said,

  “It seems a bit empty.”

  “Sure. Transit camp, ready for the invasion. When we start filling up you’ll know it’s gonna happen.”

  “There’s a general and his staff moved into the house.”

  “Sure. It’ll be this year. It gotta be. June, I heard a guy saying.”

  “What’s your girl like?”

  “She’s great. She’s …”

  Tony’s enthusiasm carried him on without further prompting until Sergeant Stephens came loping back. The engine seemed to start before the lean rump touched the driving seat. They went storming up to the camp gate with the horn blasting. The sentry slouched out of his booth to raise the pole.

  “I’ll get down here, please,” said Andrew.

  “Not coming for the ride?”

  “No thanks. It’s been fun, but I’m late already.”

  “Right. Say, you the kid who ran away from fifty million bucks?”

  “Me? Oh, well, I didn’t exactly run away. I got thrown out.”

  “But you’re back to collect.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t even know if I want it.”

  “Jesus! Kids! Well, I guess it’s your life.”

  “At least it isn’t anyone else’s. Thanks for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  There was a sentry-box now inside the porch of The Mimms, with a military policeman—white helmet, clean uniform, gleaming boots, stiff pose, very different from Sergeant Stephens’s casual lope and lounge.

  “You Mister Wragge?” he said. “OK, pick up your pass at the front desk.”

  The hall had been turned into a kind of office with a telephone switchboard, desks, filing-cabinets, pin-boards. As Andrew waited for the WAC receptionist to find his pass he noticed another difference, in its way much more surprising.

  “It’s warm!” he said.

  “I’m from Florida,” said the WAC, “and I say it’s cold.”

  “Last time I was here … I suppose they’ve got the central heating going.”

  “Just about stops the icicles forming,” she said, cuddling herself sexily. She was not particularly pretty but wore a lot of make-up and looked as though she expected anyone who came through the door to make a pass at her. They probably did, too. It was almost part of their language, like the “You’re welcomes”.

  The big radiator at the foot of the main stair was too hot to touch. How many tons of coke a week would that take? Three officers came down the stairs with files under their arms. They seemed to be working­ late.

  “I’ll chew his balls off,” said one. “I’ve just been waiting for the chance.”

  “Better watch out or he’ll chew right back,” said another. “He’s gotten himself a line through to GA3.”

  Their tone and attitudes expressed both urgency and frustration. They crossed into the Library from which came the rattle of typewriters. On the pretence of looking for the nursery wing Andrew moved on down the main corridor. The door of the Saloon was open so he peered in. The room was empty, the furniture not much changed, though moved to make room for a pool table. There were piles of New Yorkers and Saturday Evening Posts on a table near the door. The door of the Morning Room bore a sign saying GENERAL HIRAM D. ODWAY. A WAC came out carrying a wire tray full of files and talking angrily over her shoulder to someone in the room. She was decidedly pretty, with hair as yellow as butter—generals presumably could take their pick. In the Dining Room three orderlies were laying for the evening meal. The table had all its leaves in but the cutlery was steel, not silver. There was iced water in jugs on the table, Coke bottles on the sideboard, thick coffee cups by each setting.

  “For crying out loud,” one of them was saying. “I tell him nineteen and he only sends seventeen!”

  They fell silent at the movement of the door but as soon as Andrew backed out the furious mutters began again. The green baize door was hooked open and from down the stairs came the same smell of frying that Andrew had noticed in the camp. With it rose the bellow of male voices. Though he knew it was the wrong direction he ran silently down the stairs and along the lower corridor. The shouting came from the kitchen where four army cooks were getting the officers’ meal ready. A man at the centre table was making most of the noise, bellowing his rage as he pounded great spreads of red meat with a rough-ended mallet. A second man yelled back as he sorted bits of vegetable on to salad plates. A third was scooping butter out of a half-gallon can on to another set of plates; whenever he tried to join in the argument he raised his scoop for emphasis, as if about to hurl its contents (a good week’s ration) across the room. The fourth seemed to be trying to count portions of ham and pineapple, losing count at each fresh outburst of yelling, shrugging and starting again. Over all hung the blue haze of frying. It was a transfixing scene, the dreamlike mounds of unobtainable food, the furies who commanded them. It expressed something that Andrew had felt more diffusely upstairs, a sense of frustration, beyond boredom, of the huge weight of American energy and wealth bogged down, stuck, unable to get on with the job it had come to do.

  “Outta the doorway will ya?” snarled a voice behind Andrew’s shoulder. “Looking for someone?”

  “I’m sorry. Where do the family …?”

  “They don’t teach you Limeys to read, huh?”

  The newcomer jerked his thumb along the corridor and hustled into the kitchen yelling at the disputants, louder than either of them, to lay off. Andrew moved off in the direction he had pointed. The rooms on his left, like the kitchen, had windows opening into daylight, now almost dusk; the ones on his right seemed to be coal-cellars and store-rooms, dark chambers running into the hill, their walls massively thick to support the pile above. Halfway down the corridor stood a notice-board. “NO US PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. D. STERNHOLZ, LIEUT.” Andrew sidled round it and went on.

  The first door on his right disclosed a long vault with brick compartments either side. By the weak yellow bulb just inside he could see that it opened out into a great dark space. He paused for a moment to look, and as he did so Samuel Mkele came out of the darkness carrying a dusty bottle which he placed carefully on a shelf near the entrance. He had seen Andrew and turned.

  “Supper pretty soon, Master Andrew,�
�� he said. “Do you want me calling you that? Or I jus’ call you baas—you saying.”

  He had deliberately slipped his voice halfway through, from Hampshire to the nigger-talk he used with Uncle Vole. Andrew laughed.

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “I suppose I’d get used to either. At least they’re better than some of the things Caliban calls me. I say, congratulations on the way you played him. I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”

  The old man was delighted but shook his head.

  “Last time we had plenties good actors. Now it’s just Miss Elspeth and you. The others …” He shrugged.

  “And you,” said Andrew. “Some of the rest will get better, I expect.”

  Samuel shrugged without optimism and turned to another broad shelf which held a number of dishes protected by wire-mesh covers or pottery lids. Evidently this was now the family larder, the Americans having taken over the one which belonged to the main kitchen. A faint draught blew through from the wine-cellar beyond, smelling cool and earthy, making the vault feel like a natural cave, far older than the house; Samuel’s solemn and dignified movements as he moved one of the dishes towards him and lifted its cover seemed like the preliminaries to a mystic rite he was about to perform in these depths, in order to keep the whole building above from melting into air, into thin air.

  In fact all he was doing was dividing a half-pound slab of butter into four portions, using a schoolroom ruler to get the measurements exact.

  “Did you ever play Othello?” said Andrew.

  “Only learned the lines so I could understudy for Mr Howard, and rehearse till he came down. You’d laugh, the way we done it. I don’t read, and Mary Jane, she reads just about good enough for cook books, so first she puzzles the words out and tells me, and I learn ’em, and then I go off and say ’em to Miss Elspeth and she tells me what it all means.”

  “You can’t read at all? That’s amazing.”

  “Baas Wragge, he never let me learn. He reckoned I knew more ’n enough about him, without that.”

  With his knife-point he lifted one of the sections of butter on to a brass letter-balance. The beam levelled exactly. Andrew watched, remembering the shock of excitement which had run through him down at the Institute, summoning him out of his hiding-place, forcing him to respond. There weren’t a lot of parts for a darkie, but still it was a fearsome waste of a life, of powers and possibilities, come down to fiddling with butter-pats so that Cousin Blue shouldn’t be able to complain. The old man seemed to guess his thought.

  “Miss Elspeth, she talked a bit about me going on the stage,” he said. “She knew it was only talk. Baas Wragge, he’d never let me. Mary Jane, too. You get only the one life. No point in crying.”

  He paused to concentrate on cramming his exact two ounces into a hole bored through a small block of greyish wood and then with a wooden disc of the same diameter as the hole pressing it out on to a silver butter-dish. The butter came out in a neat cylinder, its surface stamped with a capital A. He stood, looking dreamily not at the butter but at the disc which he held poised on his finger-tips. The knob on it was carved to represent the head of an old man, crude, but still recognizable.

  “That’s Sir Arnold!” said Andrew. “Did you make it?”

  “And Miss Elspeth, and Miss May. D’you want I make you one?”

  “Well …”

  “And while I’m making it, you do something for me? You read me my old book?”

  “What book?”

  “Nada, it’s called. Used to belong to Baas Charlie. Miss Elspeth, she give it me, ’cause of it being all about my own folk back in Africa. She says how Mary Jane can read it for me, but Mary Jane don’t read too good, so we never got beyond maybe a couple of chapters.”

  “OK, I’ll give it a go if you like. When’s a good time—it looks as if I may be doing farm-work in the mornings?”

  “Right after luncheon. Nothing much doing then.”

  “Fine. I suppose I’d better go and find my room. How long till supper?”

  Samuel took a gun-metal fob-watch from the pocket of his waistcoat.

  “Six minutes before I ring the gong,” he said.

  TWO

  “Down by the Africa statue at the end of Top Walk,” Cousin Brown had said. “That brings you out at the Amphitheatre. You will know it when you see it. Such a shame we cannot use it this time. You will find a path going up through the plantation just to the right of the Green Room huts. Up there and over the stile and you are immediately below the farmyard.”

  Top Walk was a terrace running for almost a hundred yards behind the house. Statues guarded either end, Europe first, wearing breeches, bushjacket and wide-brimmed hat and carrying a rifle under his arm while shading his eyes with his other hand and gazing towards the statue of Africa, a bare-breasted woman carrying a basket on her head. Between them the ground sloped away into a valley, wooded on the far side but on this side what once had been a huge sweep of mown lawn dotted with topiary but now was hummocky with brown winter-killed tussocks, though patched here and there with daffodils. Dead bramble stems arched out of the blocks of shrubs, and the yews had lost their shapes and become fuzzy mounds. It had rained in the night, and the air was full of the mixed smells of spring growth and winter left-overs.

  Andrew did breathing exercises as he walked down the winding path that branched off at the Africa statue. He felt fully alive, fully himself. This was partly because it was a pleasant soft morning with lolloping white clouds, blue sky and sunshine, partly because he now knew he was committed to the production in August, but mainly because the decision had somehow been made while he slept that he was going to use the time between now and then to seduce Jean. Not “Have an affair with” or “Get off with”. Not “Fuck” or “Lay” or anything like that. It was the actual process of getting there that mattered. That was going to be the test. It wasn’t just a way of filling the next few months, taking his mind off call-up, and so on. It was a necessary and important proof of his hidden powers.

  Too soon to make actual plans, though a farm should have a quiet hay-loft somewhere, breaks in the farm-work to do a bit of private rehearsal, not just the Prospero scene, Ferdinand’s too, later … He was still brooding on possibilities when he reached the Amphitheatre.

  Yes, he knew it when he saw it, but despite its name and the photographs in the albums it still surprised him. The stage was a paved oval, backed by a ten-foot yew-hedge pierced for entrances and with lichened statues of Greek gods at either end. Facing the stage was a semicircular bank into which tiers of seating had been cut, slabs of paving laid stepwise up the slope with twin flights of real steps going down between them. Tussocks of grass now grew along the rows but someone had tried to keep the stage itself weed-free and had rough-clipped the openings in the hedge.

  Andrew paused at the top of the seating, looking down, then walked down and climbed on to the stage itself. He stood and turned at its centre.

  The lip of the bank hid the nearer ground, but the beech wood rose on his left and stretched away, curving gradually in to join the opposite slope. The whole valley was silent, empty, waiting for something. Not even a pigeon called. Andrew raised his arms in a gesture of blessing.

  “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,

  And ye that on the sand with printless foot

  Do chase the ebbing Neptune …”

  He did the whole invocation. In the pauses he could hear the whisper of an echo, but he felt certain that however he lowered his voice the top row of seats would still hear every syllable, and be aware of the energies in the quiet words. Yes, you could do something here which people would remember for a long time. Such a pity, as Cousin Brown had said.

  Behind the hedge he found a pair of what looked like small cricket pavilions, the Green Room huts, presumably, one for each sex. The path was obvious, slanting up through the trees, zig
-zagging to take the steepest bits, but running in general towards the head of the valley. After a couple of hundred yards it crossed a ridge and dipped to a stile in a hedgerow, then rose through a cow-pat-mottled paddock to a muddy gate between two windowless flint-and-brick walls roofed with dull red tiles.

  “Not a lot of you,” said Mrs Althorp with a sniff. “Might as well go and help Jean muck out till cocoa. Carrie’ll keep an eye on the pair of you.”

  Andrew answered with a smile, but Mrs Althorp was immune to charm, a severe, calculating woman who ran the farm because her husband had been killed, according to Cousin Brown, in a tractor accident last summer. Andrew believed himself to be pretty strong for his size, thanks to keeping himself fit with exercises. He found that mucking-out required a different kind of strength. It was back-breaking and blister-forming. He had to pick up forkfuls of dungy straw and sling them across the shed to the doorway, where Jean, working outside, picked up and slung them on to the muck-heap. There was little chance of conversation and in any case they were watched the whole time by one of Mrs Althorp’s daughters, aged around nine. If Andrew rested for a moment she said, “Tired, mister?” in a half-jeering nag, copied no doubt from her mother.

  At mid-morning they broke off for cocoa. As they crossed the yard towards the farmhouse Jean whispered with embarrassed urgency, “Don’t ask about Dolly’s husband.”

  Dolly turned out to be not Mrs Althorp but another woman, dull and floppy-limbed, part servant, part dependant, the mother of year-old twins who slept in a huge pram outside the kitchen door. Andrew perceived at once that Dolly didn’t have a husband, and very soon guessed, from the snap of righteousness in Mrs Althorp’s remarks and the seemingly submissive but also resistant tone of Dolly’s replies, that the late Mr Althorp had been the twins’ father.

  The other cocoa-drinkers were the foreman, Dave, and his grown-up but half-witted son, Brian. Brian was a sad creature. Andrew noted the forward thrust of the pallid face, the sticky down-dragging of the jaw as he attempted words, the barnyard cackle at a moment of excitement. Dave was also interesting, with a permanent dew-drop on his mottled nose, a gaze of stony aggression, and conversation interminably repetitious and so in the end comprehensible, despite the clotted accent.