Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  “I better lend you my camera,” said Sergeant Stephens.

  “It may be a bit tricky persuading him, specially if he’s a phoney. I’ll have to get my Cousin May to coax him somehow. I can tell her you want the picture to send to your folks back home, but … Tell you what—she’s quarrelled with General Odway.”

  “She and who else?”

  “The point is the General used to let her have extra butter and now he’s stopped it. I don’t suppose you could …”

  “No problem.”

  TWO

  Though he was later than he’d said, Andrew climbed the plantation path slowly. His legs were still rubbery tired after the ride from Southampton. No harm in keeping her waiting—and when he got there, still no hurry. She’d had five days to brood since Sunday’s farewells. Things had gone with a rush after the Saturday evening tryst at the stile among the still-dripping beeches. She might easily have become frightened again. So just chat to begin with, perhaps about the rather amusing business of watching Cousin Blue cajole Charles into joining a family photograph—picture to be taken tomorrow morning—to send to Sergeant Stephens’s folks back home. (Equally amusing, though he could not tell Jean this, had been Cousin Blue’s delight at being allowed an entry into the mysterious world of the Black Market. The Sergeant’s butter wasn’t a gift. She was paying for it, at real black-market prices. Thrilling!) Then, perhaps, ask about the farm gossip …

  A cry in the still woods—a sort of squawk, cut short. A throaty growl continuing. A mad high cackle. That was Brian. Before that Dave’s snarl. The squawk had been human too—when Sergeant Stephens had hoisted Jean into his lorry she …

  Andrew ran up the slanting path. Rage made him stupid, those two repulsive louts barging in and ruining everything—but in a few strides he slowed. The imagined scene cleared in his mind, Jean threshing in Dave’s grasp, Brian standing by with his father’s blackthorn stick, thick as a cudgel, himself rushing into the dell. Dave was far stronger than he was. Brian too.

  He slowed to a fast stride, still trembling with fury. Brian’s mad laugh filled the underwoods. Andrew picked up a fallen branch and drew a deep breath.

  “This way, men!” he yelled. “Up here!”

  “Coming, Sarge!”

  He thrashed the branch against a holly as he passed.

  “Get moving! Set the dogs on ’em!”

  He barked, yaps, mixed in with deeper baying, inarticulate human shouts. He thrashed at the bushes. Brian’s laughter had stopped. Where the path levelled Andrew forked to one side, still yelling and baying and threshing his feet through the leaf-litter. Between the tree-trunks he saw Brian scampering ape-like up the paddock towards the cow-sheds, but the dell with the stile was empty.

  A muffled movement under the hedge hazels. He ran into the open shouting in his own voices

  “Over here! Sergeant! There they are!”

  Dave broke from a hollow under the hedge and scurried away up to the right. Andrew ran a few paces after him shouting in three voices and thrashing his branch around, then, still yelling and barking, turned and made urgent signals to Jean, who was climbing to her feet with her fists clutched at the waistband of her riding-breeches.

  “Thataway!” he shouted. “Up by the hedge!”

  “You OK, lady?”

  She pulled herself together and ran for the path, up over the ridge. He loosed one more flurry of baying and trampled around, calling to himself, losing the trail, then followed her at a wallowing run all the way down to the Amphitheatre, catching her just beyond the Green Room huts. As he touched her shoulder she swung round, snarling, her fingers griped into talons. He caught her wrist before she could claw his face.

  “It’s me, darling. Andrew. You’re all right. You’re all right.”

  Calm, assurance, power.

  Her face went white and her mouth gaped like a hen’s. He thought she was going to faint, but she fell conscious into his arms. He soothed her back with gentle strokes as she sobbed.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No … not really … only …”

  He kept his eyes on a slant of path he could see between the tree-trunks, just in case Dave realized what had happened and came after them. At last Jean raised her head and looked dumbly round.

  “Where … Where are the others? The dogs?”

  “Only me.”

  “No. No. The others; the wood was full of them.”

  “‘The noise of hunters heard. Enter divers spirits in the shape of dogs. Ariel setting them on.’”

  “All … you?”

  He nodded. The conceit was real. The power was there. If a dozen yokels had broken from the wood with cudgels and hay-prongs he would have faced and cowed them. Adrian—the secret spirit whom nobody else in the play was aware of—could do it. The whole arena between the sunlit wood and the shadowed slope of derelict lawns was filled with his private magic, so strong that it changed the physical shape of things—she was staring up at him, her green eyes and ginger lashes wet, her lips parted, her whole face trembling. He saw that from now on he could make her do whatever he wanted. He kissed her gently and let go.

  “You mustn’t sleep at the farm tonight.”

  “No. Oh, no.”

  “We’ll go and talk to Cousin Elspeth. She’ll know what to do. She’s a magistrate, anyway. Don’t worry. I’ll do the talking.”

  “The difficulty,” said Cousin Brown, “is that Mrs Althorp cannot run the farm without the men. Our local Land Army officials are not really up to the job—in fact they are thoroughly spineless. We have had several cases of this kind, and I am sorry to say my male colleagues on the bench tend not to take them seriously. They regard the war effort as more important than what they see as a minor misfortune for the poor girl. Anyway, clearly Jean will have to transfer …”

  “Oh …” said Jean. “But … I mean …”

  She managed not to look at Andrew.

  “What about the play?” she said.

  “My dear Jean, how very considerate of you to think of it. Certainly it would be a great blow should you have to leave us, but I think it very unlikely that we can find you another billet close by.”

  “I don’t mind working at the farm. Mrs Althorp will look after me. It’s living there, so I can’t go out in the evenings or anything.”

  “What about West Lodge?” said Andrew.

  The power was still there. He was in complete control. He need only make the smallest moves, just a nudge or a pause, and the whole flow of events would run along the channel he chose. The idea of West Lodge—a cottage at the top of the drive which seemed to have been built as an excuse to display one monstrous Jacobean chimney—had come to him just at that moment.

  “Now, that is a distinct possibility,” said Cousin Brown. “Do you know old Mrs Oliphant, Jean?”

  “Only what she looks like.”

  “And sounds like, I dare say. Deaf as a post but cannot stop talking. She keeps a room for her grandson, but he is fighting in India. You would have a cycle ride along Abb’s Lane from the farm. Let me see. I will telephone Mrs Althorp and tell her that you will be spending the night here, and that I wish to speak to both Brundells tomorrow morning. I will make arrangements with Mrs Oliphant on the way. Andrew, dear, will you go and ask Florrie to put the Ivory Room in order for Jean?”

  Some time after midnight Andrew woke and saw through his open curtains a starry sky and the sheen of a waning moon on the cedar branches close outside. He pictured Jean dreaming in the white four-poster three doors along the passage. The moonlight would seem stronger in there, with the creamy hangings and fairy-tale white furniture. Her hair would be a dark cloud on the pillow. There was nothing to stop him. If anyone heard a footstep they would think it was one of the Americans moving around on the floor above—they did a good deal of that. Almost he could send out his invisible me
ssenger to whisper through Jean’s dream and she would slide from her sheets and come drifting to his summons … No. He needed no effort of will to turn on his side and close his eyes. The Ivory Room was pretty, but it was not the set he had designed. He wanted the eyrie above the dovecote, the sideways light of a summer dusk, so that he could watch the come-and-go of blood beneath the freckled skin. And she must come because she chose, not in the after-shock of Dave’s attack. No tricks, no traps. He would tell her to come, and he would wait there. She would climb the ladder pretending not to know, but knowing all the same, what was going to happen. She must obey—his Art was of such pow’r.

  Sergeant Stephens’s camera, like all props and gadgets, refused to function for Andrew.

  “Let me try,” said Cousin Brown. “I took the pictures for my plays whenever that was possible. Look, you have forgotten to set the shutter. Charles, please take off that hat and those sun-glasses. They make you look like an Argentinian gambler.”

  “Just like!” trilled Cousin Blue. “Oh, don’t you remember that dago who hoped Father might invest in his patent trams? Take them off, Charles. We must keep faith with our allies.”

  “But my eyes …” said Charles.

  “Nonsense,” said Cousin Brown. “The light is not as strong as all that.”

  Since last week-end, Andrew noticed, the relationships had shifted. Cousin Brown’s absurd-seeming idea of involving Charles in the play was now seriously being discussed. Part of her motive, only half-unconscious, may have been to detach him to some extent from Cousin Blue’s influence, but the play itself might become a hostage if she could not afford to have Charles proved a phoney at least till August. Indeed everybody except Samuel seemed to be settling down to a wary and provisional acceptance of the new order, and Cousin Brown was emphasizing this by bossing Charles around. Perhaps the sisters were so used to a three-cornered relationship that with Uncle Vole increasingly withdrawn to his sick-bed they were beginning to build a new triangle, an inversion of the old one, with poor Charles at the bottom point. It was all very interesting to watch, expressing itself hardly at all in words, but in attitudes, gestures, tones.

  Cousin Brown did not relinquish the camera.

  “Andrew,” she said, “if you were to lean against the sundial that would balance the composition. Less of the Gielgud look, I think. You must be your own man. Capital. Try not to simper, May. Stand still, Charles. And again. One more. There. You may put your disguise back on, Charles.”

  She laid the camera on the sundial and nodded to Andrew to move aside with her.

  “Did you see Mrs Oliphant?” he asked. He had breakfasted in the kitchen with Jean and walked back with her through the plantation to the farm. They had found Mrs Althorp juddering with exasperation, mainly at Jean for sneaking out in the dusk and letting herself get caught by Dave and Brian. She made it clear too that she thought it no kind of coincidence that Andrew should be coming up through the wood at that moment. No doubt she had said the same to Cousin Brown. At any rate, while Jean had gone to help Dolly finish the milking, Andrew had been sent with Carrie to move a batch of heifers into a fresh field and then to attempt to repair a gap in a hedge through which they had been breaking out into a barley-field—work which would normally have been done by Dave and Brian, but they had to stay up at the farm for Cousin Brown to talk to. Andrew had only got back to The Mimms just in time for the camera session, with no knowledge of what else had been happening, but he was not in the least worried—he knew it was all destined to go as he wanted.

  “She is delighted,” said Cousin Brown. “It will be somebody to talk to, she says.”

  “Great. I thought I’d help Jean ferry her stuff across this afternoon, instead of going to the flicks.”

  Cousin Brown glanced to where her sister and Charles were chatting by the sundial and lowered her voice.

  “Andrew, dear, you may think it none of my business, but perhaps we should have a word about Jean. Of course she is some years older than you, but in other ways she is a child by comparison.”

  Andrew let Adrian smile, unembarrassed, open, trustworthy.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “She just needs a bit of company. It’s not much fun at the farm. You were quite right, about her father—he sounds a pretty good tyrant.”

  This was true, though not perhaps in the way Cousin Brown took it. Mr Arthur was not much like Uncle Vole, just the sort of dad who doesn’t want his little girl ever to get beyond twelve. The mum running off must have made it worse.

  “You do want a happy Miranda, don’t you?” he said.

  She smiled, abandoning the attempt at reproof.

  “I suggested she might prefer not to rehearse this morning,” she said. “But she seemed determined to. I never supposed I should find her such a committed actress … you will be careful, Andrew?”

  “Yes, of course. What did Dave say?”

  “Old Brundell? No sign of shame, but I hope I managed to frighten him sufficiently. I explained the maximum sentences for crimes of this nature. Of course, there is nothing one can say to his poor wretched son … Charles! Put that camera down! Really, if you have let the light in …”

  Like Dave, Mrs Oliphant had her recitation-piece, an account of her husband’s slow and agonizing death, told in identical detail to every fresh face and now having become by repetition a one-woman folk-drama, giving her deep satisfaction no longer connected with her loss, or anything except the performance itself. While Jean unpacked upstairs Andrew listened and watched, mouthing the ritual replies for her to lip-read. Her deafness, he discovered, was absolute. The lodge had been built to the same standards as the main house—nothing would quiver at a footstep. There was a latch to the parlour window Jean could sneak down and undo.

  “How can you bear it?” said Jean, as they walked down the drive. “It was all so dreadful.”

  “She’s made it not-dreadful by the way she tells it. Purging pity and terror, you know. Anyway, I had to listen. I want her to think of me as a nice young chap, so that she doesn’t sling me out when I come calling on her lodger.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’ve begged a picnic off Mrs Mkele. We’ll find a nice flat private place somewhere … and do another run-through.”

  “Oh.”

  “Remember you’ve got your real Ferdinand coming out next week-end.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “All right, except that he’s under the impression he can act. His name’s Pete Boller. He’s five foot eleven, so you won’t have to bend your knees.”

  “I’m not going to kiss him!”

  “You’re going to kiss anyone the producer tells you to, including my new Cousin Charles who looks like becoming your father-in-law.”

  “My … oh, in the play, you mean.”

  “If it’s any comfort I don’t think my Cousin Elspeth is the kissing kind of producer. She hasn’t suggested it so far.”

  “But we’ve only been saying the words. Anyway, you said …”

  “I had to break the ice somehow.”

  She looked at him sideways for several paces.

  “You were right in Sergeant Stephens’s lorry,” he said. “I played you false. Do you want to go back and pretend none of it happened?”

  They were passing the camp entrance as he spoke. A couple of lorries came swinging out, their canvas covers down, crammed with GIs. Jean tossed her head and blushed, trying to look as though she thought the whistles meaningless as bird-song. Just what you would have expected, but different somehow. She had changed. You couldn’t even say she was prettier, but there was something new there. Not exactly new, but hidden before, a liveliness, energies of her own, sensed behind her defences at their first meeting, an interestingness as a person … Watch it, he thought. You don’t want to get too involved with her.

  As the lorries climbed out of sigh
t she felt for his hand. He let her fingers twine into his for a moment but then eased them free.

  “Let’s go on play-acting,” he said. “When anyone might be watching.”

  “Mrs Althorp suspects the worst.”

  “Yes. And she told my Cousin Elspeth.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re a bit lonely. I wanted her to have a happy Miranda.”

  “Really?”

  “I want that too. But in public we’re not serious. OK?”

  “What about in private?”

  “You’ll have to work it out for yourself.”

  THREE

  “I forget,” read Peter. “But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours, most busiest when idlest.”

  “Oh, dear, you have a different text,” said Cousin Brown. “Never mind, since you have not learnt it it will be simple to change. Now, enter Miranda. Prospero at a distance, unseen.”

  Standing to one side, wrapped in his cloak of invisibility, Andrew watched the lovers rehearse. Peter had of course promised to be word-perfect when Cousin Brown had come to audition him in Southampton three weeks back, though Andrew had warned her he wouldn’t be. It was a pity there was no one else. On the other hand it was part of the whole experience, performing with somebody you detested. Andrew knew Peter only too well. He had been Rosalind to Peter’s Orlando, Viola to his Duke, Titania to his Oberon. He had the looks for Ferdinand, the hidalgo stance and the passionate glance under strong black brows, but working with him was going to be hell. Though Cousin Brown was actually treating him as a pro, and paying him—not much, but something—he would somehow not manage to make half the handful of rehearsals he’d agreed on; he would barely know his lines by the opening night; he would treat the rest of the cast as though they were privileged to be on stage with him; and regard the scenes when he wasn’t on as a boring waste of time. Years ago Andrew had realized that he couldn’t afford love or hate. Mild liking, slight antipathy had got to be his limits—anything more would be an involvement—but somehow he couldn’t help it with Peter. Others, however repellent—Uncle Vole, Dave Brundell, playground thugs long ago—were outside the castle. He could send Adrian out to fight or parley. Peter, by his pretensions to be an actor, his announcement that that was going to be his career, had a spy in the keep. They were almost twins. They had been born two days apart, lived in the same town, been taught in the same classes, acted in the same plays under Mr Dingle’s frenzied direction. Their call-up papers were due the same week. Suppose they both survived (suppose, suppose …) a vista of twin careers stretched ahead—Peter would get a start on his looks and self-confidence. But one day, one day, Andrew thought, I am going to boot you off the stage in such a way that you won’t ever come back. And you won’t ever know why, either. I shall look forward to that.