Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  ‘That’s just the way it worked out. The opportunity arose. I needed a job. A job was offered.’

  ‘And Captain Carson. Why did he pick you?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that myself.’

  ‘Have you now, Sonny Jim?’

  ‘There was no particular reason that I can think of. There were good reasons not to offer me the post. I’m as much in the dark as you, Inspector.’ Smales folded the keys into his hand and came closer.

  ‘I tell you what, you half-clever little bastard. You’re a wrong ’un. Sooner or later I’ll have you, if not for this then for some other thing, because one thing you are is fucking trouble, and I won’t have trouble here, not in this city and especially not at Blake’s.’

  ‘Perhaps I should leave. Would you like me to go and work somewhere else?’

  ‘You stay where I can fucking see you, sunshine.’

  ‘Inspector, I might make an official complaint about all this. You’re harassing me.’

  Smales laughed. ‘Yeah? Go on, then. See where that gets you. Strapped to the fucking steam pipes at North Dock nick if I’ve got anything to do with it.’

  At school a day or two later I received a letter from Bundrick and Teale in the afternoon post. Carson had left a will. I was its sole beneficiary. If I would make an appointment the details would be explained to me.

  I stood in the staffroom for several minutes, incapable of thought, then found a seat at the table and re-read the solicitor’s elaborately matter-of-fact letter. Why me? Carson had been unmarried, with no living relatives, but was there really nobody else? A fever of transferred loneliness gripped my mind. Poor Carson. Had he been so alone? I was no candidate at all. This was too much – his hopes of me were too great. His position had damaged his judgement. I would let him down. Surely he must have known that. I was already doing so. It was wrong. It was a mistake. I would have to explain to some authority that this was beyond my capacities. No such authority suggested itself.

  At the school there was an air of discreet relief that the funeral could take place. Something practical could be done. A terrible accident, everyone agreed. It just went to show. Now the matter needed to be closed, for the good of Blake’s, as Captain Carson himself would, of course, have wished. That was the general tone.

  I contacted the funeral directors and made arrangements. In Carson’s honour a half-holiday was declared for the funeral and an instruction was issued that all sixth formers and members of the cadets should attend the service at St Michael’s, the nearby parish church.

  The ceremony took place on a bright, cold Wednesday afternoon. The trees in the graveyard were bare. Black-suited sixth-form boys and cadets in full uniform obediently filled the rear pews of the church. Carson had been alone in the world, and it fell to the school to do him appropriate honour. The boys, I knew, were inclined to view him with a blend of awe, mockery and affection – the highest accolade they had to offer. I served as one of the pallbearers, with Gammon and Rackham, Sergeant Risman and a couple of the senior cadets. There were only a handful of adults present who were not members of staff – a couple of academics from the History Department at the university, some elderly ladies, the odd military-looking type and others unidentifiable.

  In his coffin Carson patiently endured the toneless nasality of Gammon, who reduced the Twenty-third Psalm to the status of an announcement cancelling house rugby fixtures because of measles. Later, Rackham delivered, to my surprise quite beautifully, an extract from Ecclesiastes, including ‘Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness to the flesh’. The vicar eulogized Carson’s life of study and service and declared him a soldier, a scholar and a Christian gentleman, and we sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. For a moment I thought I would lose control. We carried the coffin out into the graveyard for its interment – one of the last on that crowded site. Carson had been a lifelong parishioner and had earned the privilege.

  The funeral refreshments were served in the hotel across the road. A chilly, damp-smelling function room looking onto the park had been laid out with sandwiches and sherry. I served a couple of elderly ladies from Carson’s evening courses at the university with drinks and sandwiches, exchanged pleasantries with the vicar, who had somewhere else he needed to be, and watched the staff and the history sixth form milling about. It was tempting to get completely plastered, but I seemed to be a representative of something, so I held off.

  Again there was that air of relief. This is common on such occasions, but here it was as if, since Carson’s death was assumed to be accidental, all was well and the school unharmed. The great man had been given a ceremonious send-off but clearly he was now to be thought of as having decisively left the premises. The truth of that was hardly disputable, but the underlying tone was of discreet haste, if not of any want of affection for the deceased. Things had to be got on with – a view Carson himself would have endorsed. I felt slightly disconnected from what had happened. It was like postponing a nightmare. Carson was dead. The word fell flat in my mind.

  I saw Arnesen among a group of boys surrounding Maggie. I hadn’t spoken to her since the day Carson’s death had been discovered. She was making the boys laugh, and they looked round to see if this was a punishable offence, given the occasion, but the volume of the whole party was rising as the sherry went down. Feldberg stood to one side. Arnesen seemed to have recovered from the shock of the discovery.

  ‘Are you all right, Arnesen?’ I asked. He remembered what we were there for and looked slightly guilty.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  I moved him slightly aside from the others. Smales appeared in the doorway but I ignored him and he did not approach. He was talking to Gammon.

  ‘There was something I wanted to ask you. I know you will have been asked before, but I’m curious.’

  ‘Sir?’ He became wary.

  ‘What were you doing by the lake at that time of the morning?’

  ‘Just having a smoke, sir. Do you have to report me?’ I shook my head. He relaxed. ‘After we found him, Dr Carson, in the lake, no one asked me anything about being there. They just – the detective and Mr Gammon – asked if I was all right. I was a bit surprised. I thought I’d be expelled. My dad would have done his nut.’

  ‘Well, let’s say no more about it.’

  But Arnesen needed to complete the memory.

  ‘Then my mother came and gave me a lift home. And we’ve hardly said anything about it since.’

  ‘It’s probably for the best.’ Imagine saying that nowadays, during the permanent triumph of emotional incontinence. I nodded a dismissal, but before Arnesen could go Maggie came and joined us.

  ‘I hope you’re not belabouring poor Arnesen, Mr Maxwell,’ she said, with a note of affable challenge. ‘It’s bad enough for him having to come along today, without you making it worse. I’m not sure it’s really suitable for the boys.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Rowan,’ said Arnesen. ‘We all wanted to come, to show our respect for the Captain.’

  ‘Good boy. Your friends are still over there,’ she said, and waited until he disappeared. ‘When can we get out of here?’

  ‘I have to stay, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Christ. I feared as much.’ She finished her drink, took another from the table and moved away to join a group of staff wives. They studied the expensive and faintly Parisian cut of her black suit, and clearly viewed her as an exotic and improper creature, but would never say so openly. I shuddered to think what their coffee mornings were like.

  At a loss, I went to the window and looked out across the park in the direction of Carson’s house, a large Victorian semi-detached that stood on the far side of the park pond, its dark frontage partly masked by the bare black chestnut trees. It was as if an element of the prospect, a dimension of the real, had been irreplaceably removed, and some part of my own feelings arrested with it. The house stood there like a prison, waiting for me to enter and be immured. That would be m
y duty. As I was testing this egotistical hypothesis to see if it might hurt, Feldberg approached.

  ‘I wanted to offer my condolences, and those of my father, sir. I believe you and Captain Carson were friends as well as colleagues.’

  ‘Thank you, Feldberg. That’s very considerate of you. We shall all miss him a good deal.’ The boy lingered. ‘And don’t worry. I know what Captain Carson had in mind for you. We’re still on course for that, as he would have wished.’ Feldberg nodded his thanks and I turned back to the window.

  As Feldberg’s reflection vanished from the dimming glass, Gammon appeared, accompanied by two others I did not recognize. Give me a minute, I thought, tempted to seem not to have noticed, but I turned to meet them.

  Gammon, whose black suit showed a remarkable quantity of dandruff, given his complete baldness, was flanked on one side by someone I immediately knew to be a retired senior officer, a tall, severe, cadaverous man of sixty-odd, and on the other by a younger civilian whom I took to be a civil servant of some kind. He introduced them as Colonel Dennison and Mr Hamer, two Old Blakeans.

  ‘Maxwell will be looking after History for the moment, and he of course knew Captain Carson. He will do all he can to assist you gentlemen, I’m sure.’ Smales chose this moment to approach, but Gammon steered him away and left me with the two strangers in the bay window. It felt like being surrounded.

  ‘Following on from my old friend James Carson, eh?’ said the old soldier, taking my unsatisfactory measure. ‘Knew him at school, and in Germany in ’forty-five, of course. Sound fellow. A good soldier and, so I’ve been told, a fine teacher.’

  ‘It’s true. He was an inspiring teacher.’

  ‘Good, good. And you’re the heir apparent.’ The Colonel sipped his sherry and grimaced. The other man gazed out of the window.

  ‘Well, not exactly, sir,’ I replied. The Colonel looked through me and nodded as if confirming something to himself. ‘I hope I shall do my best until a permanent appointment is made.’

  ‘Of course you will. A challenge to rise to. A proving ground with live firing, one might say. Important that the CCF is maintained, of course. Never know when they’ll be needed. Things are not all that handy on the Rhine at the moment. As I’m sure you know. The Czechoslovakia business, of course.’

  ‘Not my field, Colonel, I’m afraid, the cadets. I look after the library.’

  ‘Do you now? Of course. Well, Carson would certainly have understood the imperatives. Saw a lot after Luneberg Heath.’ The old soldier looked at his pale companion and nodded.

  ‘Carson claimed to be something of a scholar, of course,’ said Hamer, shifting his gaze from the park and examining me curiously as if uncertain what language I spoke. His eyes, like his hair, were very pale and he seemed not to blink. He gave off an air of sustained patience in the face of tedious provocation. He irritated me.

  ‘Captain – Dr – Carson wrote a number of essays,’ I said. ‘And a couple of books when he was younger, about the Civil War in these parts. He had some reputation in the field.’

  ‘Civil War, eh? Well, that’s another worry, eh?’ said the Colonel. ‘Unions and so on.’ I tried to look as if I was giving consideration to this view. He grimaced again, more fiercely. I wondered if he had gout.

  ‘A productive life, then,’ said Hamer. ‘Hard work and routine. Never married?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, no,’ I said, not following this line of enquiry.

  ‘So there was nothing else, though – no novels, journals, that sort of thing.’ These were surely different sorts of things, I thought, but did not point it out.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Did he teach you?’

  I became aware of Miss Ormond, librarian of the city’s Philosophical Society, approaching and then turning aside again with a discreet shake of her head.

  Hamer did not answer the question. ‘As you say, the deceased had a reputation,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I just thought he might have done more.’

  ‘Teaching made his life very busy. And fulfilled.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ said the Colonel, extending his hand. Hamer looked away.

  ‘What’s your interest?’ I asked. ‘Are you an academic? A publisher?’

  ‘Jack of all trades, is Hamer,’ said the Colonel. ‘Time we were gone. Anyway, good to pay our respects to an old comrade in arms.’

  ‘You’re our point of contact, then,’ said Hamer. ‘If anything arises.’ He began to move away. ‘If you come across anything, Gammon can put you in touch.’

  ‘Keep it up, won’t you, Maxwell? There’s a good chap. Know we can rely on you, yes?’ said the Colonel. The pair retired through the crowd. My gaze followed them until I noticed Maggie looking at me across the room, all the while speaking to her dowdy companions. I gave what I hoped was a distracted smile. The burden of the Colonel’s expectations seemed both onerous and mysterious. As for Hamer, I couldn’t place him at all. I looked for Miss Ormond, but she too had gone. I went out into the car park for a cigarette. Smales was leaning against his car. Now he came forward and produced a lighter. I thanked him and made to step away, but he came with me. I turned, wondering what he had in store now.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ he said. He nodded to indicate the Colonel, who was climbing stiffly into his Bentley. Hamer had stopped to look over at us. Now he got into the passenger seat.

  ‘I’ve never seen them before, Mr Smales. I’m not even sure who they are.’

  ‘You don’t want to be, Mr Maxwell. You don’t want them taking an interest.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ The Colonel waved as the Bentley passed. Hamer looked straight ahead.

  ‘Anything you do know, anything crops up, come to me. Give those two the go-by. Don’t tell Gammon. Tell me.’ He gave me a card with his number on it.

  ‘Who are they? I don’t understand.’ He looked at me as if baffled by my obtuseness.

  ‘Well, that’s for the best. Take my word for it.’ Smales went back to his car and drove off. I made my way back into the function room. The crowd was discreetly thinning. Before long it would be dark.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘I thought I should go mad myself,’ Maggie said. She tried stretching out on the settee in my flat but then found she could not be still. She went round the room examining books and pictures. ‘All those women after the funeral. It’s as if they were the ones who were dead, never mind poor old Carson.’

  ‘Poor old Carson?’ I wanted to say that he did not provide the object for anyone’s pity. But I could see Maggie was in a volatile state. Things could go either way – frost or fire, it was hard to anticipate. I felt exhausted and hollowed out, and to my amazement I wished she would leave me alone, so that I could lie on the bed and read and not think, until with luck I might eventually go to sleep. It had been a mistake to give in to her curiosity about my flat. She swallowed the last of her brandy and poured a second. I found myself wanting to ask about her brother.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said, with a touch of impatience. ‘It’s terrible, Carson’s death, but that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Can’t be other than grim.’ She went and looked out of the window. ‘And of course he loomed large, a character. Not that it could save him when his number came up. There but for the grace of God.’ She seemed half-distracted. I joined her where she stood. The woods opposite were almost invisible. I drew the curtains and she turned back to the room. ‘Do want me to stay?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I do. But it might be unwise.’

  ‘And we don’t want that.’

  I shrugged, helpless. It was strange to be here, fully and formally clothed. She had kicked off her high heels. ‘There’s nobody downstairs, is there? No one will know.’

  ‘Best to be cautious.’

  ‘This is supposed to be an affair, isn’t it? Reckless abandon. Or so I’d been led to believe.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune.’

  ‘Well, maybe I have. That’s my business. Aren’t you going to tak
e advantage? Death makes people randy, don’t you find?’

  ‘I haven’t much experience to judge by.’ I had meant to put aside the matter of Carson’s will until tomorrow, when the funeral would be done and I was to visit the solicitors. ‘I have something to do tomorrow. It’s weighing rather heavily on my mind.’

  ‘And do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘Not really.’ But I couldn’t help it. ‘Carson’s made me his heir.’

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘Quite. Blimey.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘A little while.’ I wanted to tell her my suspicions, but something made me hesitate.

  ‘You’ve been playing that close to your chest.’ She gave a conspiratorial grin.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  ‘Hay, I should think.’ She poured more brandy into her glass. ‘Anyway . . .’

  ‘It just seems an odd coincidence.’

  ‘What does?’

  I didn’t seem to have her full attention.

  ‘Carson makes me his executor. Then he dies.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, at least he was prepared. Not everyone is.’

  ‘What I mean is, well, I don’t know, but it seems wrong.’

  ‘It was sudden, Stephen, so that’s hardly surprising. Like being struck by lightning.’

  ‘But why was he there by the lake?’ I asked.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘Was there some reason he shouldn’t have been?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I feel as though there’s something missing. Something I haven’t grasped.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re trying to rewrite history, in order for it to make sense. That would be understandable.’ She put her hand on mine.

  ‘You’re being unusually reasonable, Maggie.’

  ‘Oh, well, serves me right for trying.’

  ‘Sorry. As you can see, I’m in a tangle. A lot to take in.’

  ‘Yes, I see that.’

  ‘So it might not be the time for you to stay.’

  She was drunker than I’d realized. Her expression was suddenly sharp with challenge.