Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  As the holidays went by Andrew had plenty of time to study this pair, since Mrs Althorp divided operations into men’s and women’s work. She did this deliberately, and often at some inconvenience. At first Dave treated Andrew as a hostile intruder and spoke to him in a jeer. About anything else his tone was a whine of anger. Andrew had no problem coping with Dave’s attacks—he let Adrian bear the brunt, listening with patient and respectful attention. On the fourth morning Dave became friendly. He showed Andrew how to do certain things, sharpen a sickle, use a hay-prong to pick up a liftable load, and so on. His talk became more general. He confirmed with guffawing relish Andrew’s guess about the twins’ father, then explained how last autumn he had cornered Jean alone in an outlying shed, and described what he’d have done if she hadn’t fought him off with a fence-pole. His account of the episode had the wrought and rhythmic quality of a recitation monologue. He evidently thought about it often, and told and retold it to his son when they were alone together. One of his ideas was that once he had broken Jean’s resistance she would let poor Brian have his bit of fun too.

  Jean had probably complained to Mrs Althorp, who had somehow persuaded her not to tell the Land Army supervisors who came round once a month—or perhaps Jean had been too shy. Mrs Althorp couldn’t have run the farm without Dave, so since that time she had kept him away from Jean as much as she could, and when that wasn’t possible had seen to it that one of her daughters was there too. The arrangement dominated the workings of the farm. Perhaps, Andrew thought, its real importance in Mrs Althorp’s mind had little to do with protecting Jean, and was actually more of a sort of monument to the late Mr Althorp. At any rate, after that first morning she seemed to have decided that though there mightn’t be a lot of Andrew, what there was was still dangerous enough to be classified along with Dave and Brian, so he saw very little of Jean during his work at the farm. He didn’t really mind. The test he had set himself ought to have practical difficulties, as well as psychological. It needed not only a dramatic shape—shifts and struggles and set-backs, leading to his eventual triumph—but also its own location, somewhere satisfying, right. Not the farm, with its dirt and smells and effort. Somewhere detached from the world. The Amphitheatre might be a possibility. When summer evenings came they could meet down there on the pretence of rehearsing. He might get a key to one of the huts. But that wasn’t right either, somehow. Anyway, there was plenty of time.

  There was another break at noon, for dinner. Andrew knocked off then and went back across the gardens to The Mimms for luncheon, as he had learnt to call it. Cousin Blue was very quick to pick on some of the things he said, always of course pretending to wish to help him, but really as part of her general sidelong attack on anything connected with Cousin Brown’s activities, in this case the play. A typical snatch of conversation might go like this:

  Brown: I’ll patch that shirt, Andrew, if you would bring it to me.

  Andrew: I’m afraid it’s gone with the laundry.

  Blue: No, dear—gawn with the lahndry.

  Brown: Nonsense, May. We may say lahndry, but nobody under fifty does so. For Andrew it would be affected in the extreme.

  Cousin Blue would then turn a sniff into a sigh and go back to her patience. Andrew, in fact, was grateful for these admonitions. The obvious ones, like not saying “marge”, he simply adopted as sometimes socially useful—it would depend on who he was with. The more absurd he noted for the day when a part would need them.

  Often he ate the mid-day meal alone. Uncle Vole had a tray in his study, and the Cousins’ days were filled with little activities—not work, not play—which they felt had to be performed. Often these seemed to be little more than a defence against each other’s intrusions. One or other of them sat on various committees—the Village Institute, a home for the feeble-minded, the alms houses, comforts for the troops and so on. Cousin Brown was also a magistrate. Business of this kind took them at least to the village and sometimes as far as Petersfield, and then Mrs Mkele would pack them a luncheon basket to save them the slow journey home by pony-trap. After his meal Andrew went down to Mrs Mkele’s cramped little parlour and read Nada the Lily aloud.

  It was a challenge, he found. In fact the challenge was issued by the author on page four, in the clipped voice of an Englishman who has lost some cattle and been persuaded by his native servants to go to a local witch-doctor to see if he can help. While they wait for the cattle to be fetched the witch-doctor—a blind old man with a withered hand—tells the main story. Andrew had been put out—bored-in-advance, as it were—to see the size of the book he was going to have to plough through, day after day. But then he had come to the challenge:

  “Neither has it been possible to render the full force of the Zulu idiom nor to convey a picture of the teller. For in truth, he acted rather than told his story. Was the death of a warrior in question, he stabbed with his stick, showing how the blow fell and where; did the story grow sorrowful, he groaned, or even wept. Moreover, he had many voices, one for each of the actors in his tale. This man, ancient and withered, seemed to live again in the far past. It was the past that spoke to his listeners, telling of deeds long forgotten, of deeds that are no more known.”

  Andrew found the old witch-doctor’s voice with his very first breath and kept it throughout his readings, dry, quiet, not markedly different in weight and pitch from his own, and therefore capable of variations; not copied from anything he’d heard, Robeson or Samuel or the occasional darkie sailor who used to come wandering up from the docks, but right. Voices wouldn’t always come like that, he knew. Often he would have to make them build themselves, slowly, trial by trial. But sometimes one would be there, speaking immediately from his inward cave, a spirit that had been waiting to be raised. Such times were important. They might seem like gifts, but then you had to give everything back, even when your audience was six old dodderers in a country basement. Otherwise you betrayed the gift.

  The dodderers, in fact, were a good audience. On the first afternoon it was only Samuel and Mrs Mkele, but from then on all the house servants came, and one or two from the cottages. They listened in rapt silence, apart from an occasional cluck of the tongue at some especially monstrous moment of savagery, the slaughter of the narrator’s tribe or the trial scene when Chaka forces him to burn his right hand to the bone as a proof of his loyalty. The women knitted comforts for the forces, scarves, balaclavas and mittens. Samuel sat under the window, pecking with a knife-point at the block from which he was whittling Andrew’s personal butter-mould, but for long intervals he would stop and sit motionless, apparently in one of his trances. He couldn’t have been, because once Andrew came down and found him retelling the previous episode for the benefit of Jack’s hunchback sister, who had missed it. He used all Andrew’s voices and repeated the more striking passages almost word for word. At the end of the reading-hour he would join the polite clapping but not the clatter of comment. Only once, after the chapter about the murder of Balaka, he said something.

  “You read pretty good, Master Andrew. I smell the blood in your voice.”

  The readings were satisfying in a way Andrew hadn’t expected, nothing to do with his own performance. It was something about the audience themselves, their pleasantness with each other, their unity of outlook, the way they had managed to build themselves a satisfactory life in the spaces left to them by the family upstairs, a sort of unspoken conspiracy to be what they themselves chose while still fulfilling the demands of their masters. That may have been why they were so resentful of the presence in these spaces of the American cooks along the passage—much more so than the Cousins were of the officers who had taken over most of their normal living rooms. The feud this side of the green baize door was bitter and unforgiving, with poor Lieutenant Sternholz—young but shiny-bald and bespectacled, an embodiment of weak will, given to little gesticulations of impotence, fascinating to Andrew—trying to keep the peace. Reading to the serva
nts was very like reading to Mum, which Andrew had often done through winter evenings in Fawley Street, not that Mum could have knitted a mitten to save her life. And their content with themselves, their small certainties, were a bit like Mum too. Perhaps that was why Andrew felt so refreshed and encouraged by those after-luncheon hours—he could have a bit of his past without the wrench of going back.

  The rest of the afternoon he had to himself. Cousin Brown had rescued for him from the Library, now occupied by General Odway’s staff, a thirty-six-volume leather-bound collection of British Dramatists. Dutifully he started to read his way through, but the plays were dismal stuff, the jokes meaningless, the serious bits all wind and rant. If it wasn’t raining he read an Act or two and then went out. The first few afternoons he mooned around the derelict gardens behind the house, did the Hamlet soliloquies in the Amphitheatre, staged imaginary duel-scenes. Then, by accident, he discovered an amusing hobby, climbing the house.

  The latest move in the kitchen feud had been for the GI cooks to get an MP posted to guard the back door of the house, thus forcing the old servants to carry and show their passes each time they went in or out. Naturally the MPs regarded this as a boring chore, and did their best to get it stopped by enforcing the rules with unworkable rigour. Andrew had gone out, forgetting that he’d left his pass in the pocket of his farm-work trousers. The MP at the back door had told him to go round to the front and explain himself, and then someone would perhaps sign him through. In some moods Andrew would have enjoyed letting Adrian cope with that sort of confrontation, but not today. As he walked up the steep path between the woodland garden and the house he looked at the heavy façade with irritation. It was like a fortress, keeping him out … except that you could climb it. Yes, it was almost made to be climbed, with its ledges and nooks. If you could get up that first bit of drainpipe …

  He wormed his way through the block of shrubs at the base of the wall and started. The drainpipe, it turned out, was the worst bit, because something the Americans had thrown down the sink in Samuel’s old pantry had blocked the hopper-head, so that what they’d thrown down later had flowed on the outside. It wasn’t very difficult, just filthy. There would have been an even easier way, he realized, if he could have climbed up to one of the windowsills of the big front rooms and edged along the ledge that joined them, running right across that façade, but that would have meant coming past the Morning Room, where General Odway sat stuffed with the secrets of the invasion. The appearance of a figure spread-eagled against the glass would have set off bells and sirens, and perhaps even bullets from the ebony-handled Colt which dangled against the General’s taut-trousered rump. Not worth the risk.

  The other risk, of falling, was small, but just enough to be exciting. There was a satisfaction too in the physical task, the balance and muscular control, the using of his hours of exercises. What he hadn’t expected was the definite thrill he felt not only when he slid in through the open window he had spotted from the ground (it turned out to be Florrie’s linen-room, with bath-towels airing) but while he was still climbing. Part of it was the simple childish pleasure of secrecy, of play-acting spy or burglar, but part of it—though he only came to realize this slowly as he extended his routes and explorations on other afternoons—was subtler. It was a bit like the feeling he used to have walking the streets of Southampton after the panto, of being different, outside, free. Other people were trapped by the house. They had to stick to its rules, go up and down its stairs and along its corridors to get where they wanted to be. Andrew was not. He—at least in fantasy—could simply appear in any room he chose, act any role, vanish …

  Tea was at four o’clock in the Schoolroom—fresh scones and jam, the tea itself much sighed over by Cousin Blue as she doled quarter teaspoons into the silver pot and then boiling water (again in indecisive dribblings) from the silver kettle that hummed beside her on its spirit-lamp. The Times crossword was done at tea, Cousin Brown reading the clues, starting with the quotations which she usually knew and then attempting the anagrams with the help of a set of ivory letters. Cousin Blue got most of the answers, without apparently thinking about them, and Cousin Brown put them grudgingly in, clearly hoping they would turn out to be wrong.

  After tea on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays Jean came down to rehearse for an hour before milking. Andrew began to see why Cousin Brown had insisted on the immense schedule of rehearsals she had arranged—in fact he said as much after the second session.

  “That is a curiosity about such things,” said Cousin Brown. “People make the mistake of thinking that one cannot imagine what it might be like to be able to do some difficult trick, when really it is harder for those who can do it to imagine what it is like not to be able to. I am not at all musical, but I can often perceive what my musical friends are driving at, while they remain exasperated by my inability to hear what they so easily hear. It is the same with you and acting. I am confident that we will get Jean there in the end, so far as her scenes with you are concerned. I am much more worried about the love scenes. I have not yet come across a remotely adequate Ferdinand in the neighbourhood, and we cannot keep one from a distance here all summer.”

  “What about me running through them with her?”

  “Well, it’s a possibility. At least she is used to you by now, and she is going to find those very difficult to start with.”

  This turned out an understatement. Cousin Brown was extraordinarily patient with Jean’s numb stumblings but as the session closed she could not prevent a sigh.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Miss Elspeth,” said Jean. “I do wish you could find someone else.”

  “We mustn’t give up,” said Cousin Brown. “I’m sure you can do it. Your scene with Prospero is coming along quite promisingly.”

  “I suppose so. I just feel comfier with him.”

  “But they’re both only me,” said Andrew.

  “Oh, no! Well, of course they are, but …”

  “Shall I walk back with you? In case Brian’s hanging around in the plantation?”

  “Oh, all right. Thanks. I’ll get my coat. Won’t be a mo.”

  It was warm for April, so they had been rehearsing outdoors, under the cedar to the left of the terraces, with General Odway’s staff jeeps bustling to and fro along the drive fifty yards away. Cousin Brown sighed again, this time with a genuinely despondent note, as Jean ran up to the bench on the terrace where she’d left her coat.

  “Of course,” she said, “Miranda might well be sufficiently obsessed with her father … a middle-aged Ferdinand would certainly be easier to find, if your school-friends are unwilling What do you think?”

  “Well, he might be a bit older.”

  “A whole generation?”

  “He says he’s known a lot of women. But …”

  “They are young lovers. The balance of the whole play … No, ridiculous!”

  Walking with Jean down towards the Amphitheatre Andrew thought about it. Jean had not mentioned her father since that time in the Institute, but her yearning then had been obvious. Suppose he were to start by seeing if he could provide a substitute.

  As she climbed the stile at the top of the plantation he said, “Going to the flicks tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I told you. I always do on Saturdays.”

  “I’ll come too.”

  “Oh. All right. Have you got a bike? It’s eleven miles.”

  “There’s one I can borrow.”

  He kept that tone of command throughout the expedition, paid for the tickets, sat well forward from the intertwined couples in the back rows, told her what to think about the films (the main feature was Claudia with McGuire and Young, story silly sentimental, acting deft enough to rescue it), refused to use her normal bun-shop afterwards and took her to a poky dark tearoom where middle-aged women in tweed hats talked in barking voices about WVS feuds. On the way home, as his legs tired (the bike belonged
to Jack’s sailor nephew and had a rack of a saddle and no gears) he put on a burlesque of age which made Jean laugh and encouraged her to join in by laying her hand against his shoulder to help him up a hill and then as they crossed the crest leaving it there for a few moments while they free-wheeled down.

  On the Monday he played Ferdinand young and dashing, but let the mask slip at times to reassure her in Prospero’s voice or tease her stumblings in that of his generalized dotard. A very faint improvement began, which Cousin Brown noticed and understood.

  “Well done,” she said afterwards. “A most ingenious ploy. But you will need to be extremely sensitive how you proceed.”

  Andrew agreed.

  Uncle Vole kept to his study all day, a book-lined den immediately below the Schoolroom, looking out over the back courtyard towards the plantation. Here, despite the dollar-funded heat in the radiators, he would heap logs on to his fire until the flames began to roar so loudly up the chimney that he became alarmed and doused them with a watering-can kept there for the purpose. He would then ring for Samuel to clear up the mess and rebuild the fire. The books on one wall were fakes, concealing doors—to his private WC, to a strong-room, to the electric lift, never used in peacetime by any other member of the household but now permitted to take meals up to the Schoolroom. Uncle Vole seemed even shakier than he had on Andrew’s January visit, and sometimes stayed in bed all day. He never referred to that episode and showed no wish to talk after supper, so Andrew rose with the Cousins and left him to his port. He and Cousin Brown settled in what was called “Mother’s Boudoir”, a bright room cluttered with chintzy furniture and cabinets of Venetian glass, while Cousin Blue went downstairs to play bridge with General Odway.

  Cousin Brown had kept a diary of every theatrical production she had ever seen, running now into several volumes. She brought these out after supper and started to go through them with Andrew, expanding from memory on what she had written. Often neither the plays nor her own views were of much interest, but Andrew concentrated, knowing this was something he might not get many chances to listen to. Cousin Brown had seen Irving, of course, and Bernhardt—not only on the London visits, which she described as “ludicrous”—but in Paris too. She had seen all the Granville Barker Shakespeares. She had seen Terry and Campbell, Tree and du Maurier times beyond counting, and the debuts of Olivier and Gielgud and Evans, and almost everyone now working. She had seen Robeson’s Othello. Though stage-struck she was not star-struck. She had absolutely no awe of reputations. Through she admired fine acting she was always more interested in the production than the performances, and had the knack of making both vivid enough for Andrew to recreate in his own imagination.