The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  Where I paused. Just as I arrived at the foot of the stairs, as I caught a glimpse of Mrs Kemp's head bent over the keys of the piano, her hair bright in the firelight and the glow from the coloured bulbs on the Christmas tree, Dr Kemp stormed out of his study.

  'Stop!' he bellowed. 'Can't you hear it? Stop, for heaven's sake!'

  She stopped immediately. He stomped across the hall towards her. 'Can't you hear it?' he hissed. 'Don't you listen?' And as she shunted her chair away from the keyboard, he leaned across her and banged a series of ugly chords.

  'There! There! There!' he grunted, with each heavy handprint on the keys. 'If you can't hear how horrid it is, then you've learned nothing after all these years!'

  I froze in the shadows. I held my breath and watched as Mrs Kemp put her hand on her husband's hand. Dr Kemp pushed it away and brushed the flopping hair from his forehead, panting a bit.

  'Mr huffing and puffing headmaster,' she said very softly. 'I'm not one of your little boys, you know. What are you going to do to me? Swish me with your little cane? Put me in detention? Try to be nice. It's the holiday . . .'

  The man pulled himself together. With an odd, embarrassed movement of his shoulders and an awkward hitch of his trousers, he was all of a sudden like a child who'd made a fool of himself in front of a grown-up. Not man enough to apologise, he blustered a bit more. 'The keys,' he said, 'for heaven's sake, where are the keys?' and he reached into the piano stool and took out a wallet of tuning keys, lifted the lid of the piano and started to busy himself inside it, like an irritable surgeon botching an operation. From inside the piano, he produced a few random, plangent notes by lifting and dropping the hammers, peering sideways at his wife and muttering, 'It'll need the tuner, we'll call the tuner, he can come and do all the pianos while he's here.'

  'Huff huff, puff puff,' the woman softly said. 'I'll call the piano tuner tomorrow.'

  The headmaster emerged from inside the piano, red-faced, his hair flopping again. Again she took hold of his hand, his left hand, where his third and fourth fingers were curled hard into his palm. She brought it to her face and kissed the stiffened joints.

  'Your war wound,' she whispered. 'Don't always take it out on the boys, or on me.' She smiled up at his blustery, flustered face. 'And it's the holiday now. They've all gone home.'

  At that moment the stair creaked under my feet. They both looked up and saw me standing there. 'Not all of them,' Dr Kemp said. 'Not yet.'

  I tiptoed from the foot of the stairs to the corridor leading from the hall. Like a rabbit plunging to the safety of its burrow, I hurried into the darkness. I could hear the tinkle of Mrs Kemp's laughter fading into the distance behind me.

  Like a rabbit, but not scared.

  I was hurt and angry, and all I wanted to do was to get away from the two people with whom I'd been abandoned. I knew every inch of the building, after nearly five years as a boarder there, and now I padded round corners without slowing at all, up one ramp and down another, past the dark cavern of the library and the forbidden, fuggy den of the staffroom. The school was in darkness, but I needed no light to guide me through the downstairs corridors and into the changing-room at the back of the house. I paused there, struck by the strangeness and emptiness of the place which was usually so noisy and smelly, where sweaty small boys stripped and showered and tumbled and fought, where dozens of pairs of socks and muddy boots were tangled and jumbled together.

  Now, in the gloom, all the lockers were empty, and all the pegs were bare – except one, where my own outdoor coat was hanging.

  I slipped softly through the changing-room, which had already been swept out and mopped with disinfectant and smelled, to me, so oddly, boylessly clean. I slid back a puny bolt, pushed open the door and stepped outside, into the cobbled stable-yard.

  To my surprise, as I crossed the yard I saw a glow of light from inside the furthest stable. I approached as quietly as I could, unable to believe that I could have left a lamp burning the last time I'd been there. The door was ajar. I peered through. There was a man moving slowly in the corner, throwing an enormous black shadow into the rafters. I could smell him too.

  'Roly?' I whispered. The man spun round, and I slipped into the stable. 'It's me, it's Scott.'

  The man, startled by my unexpected arrival, squinted at me. He was lean and wiry, with the leathery, raddled look of an old jockey: his face reddened by the cold, a flat cap pushed back on a head of thin grey hair. He was wearing green corduroy trousers over a pair of heavy boots, and a waterproof coat which filled the air around him with a whiff of wood smoke and damp soil – not an offensive smell, not to me at least, for it was the smell of the woodland I knew so well, the smell of a wild outdoors and the creatures that lived in it. A double-barrelled shotgun leaned in a corner of the stall. Roly was the gamekeeper, who lived in the woods, in an old caravan a couple of miles from the school.

  'Scott,' he said. His smile was quick and weaselly. 'You're still here.'

  I crossed the room towards him. I edged past the shotgun, for the dull gleam of it and its fume of oil and burned powder were repugnant to me. I moved into the stall and saw, with a twinge of relief, that the jackdaw was calm, just bobbing a bit and staring to see me come into the circle of lamplight. The bird was calm, but as I stepped up to the man, something wild and strong erupted inside his pungent coat, something kicking and lunging hysterically.

  'I came with this,' he said, 'for the bird.'

  It was a rabbit. Roly pulled his coat open and expertly grabbed the terrified animal. 'I was going to finish it off,' he said, 'but then I brought it like this, to show you how.' He held the animal out towards me. 'Go on, young man, do you want to do it?'

  It had a gunshot in its haunches, a lot of blood where the pellets had blasted it as it weaved and jinked through the undergrowth. And then Roly must have caught up with it as it tried to drag itself away, tromped it under his boot, and he'd stuffed it under his jacket, securing it with his belt so that, paralysed by shock, it was strapped against his body – until, just then, in a trauma of darkness and strangeness and slow suffocation, the rabbit had burst alive again.

  I took it, and it kicked and squealed, possessed by an extraordinary strength: every muscle, every tissue expressed defiance and rage in the face of death.

  Roly was calm, expert, a good teacher. No fuss, no hurry, he moved behind me and adjusted my hands to the squirming body. I remember the smell of his clothes, his beery breath, the heat in his fingers. He whispered, 'One pull and it's done.'

  I pulled. There was a click. I felt the slippage of bone, and the rabbit was limp in my hands.

  'Good man,' he said, standing away from me. 'Nice and quick, no pain. Here, use this, you can do the rest yourself.'

  He took a knife from his pocket and handed it to me. I lifted the rabbit to the workbench in the stall, and Roly watched approvingly as I started to skin it, as he'd already shown me, slitting and opening and peeling until the flesh of the dead animal, still warm, still twitching here and there like the body of an exhausted athlete, shone in the lamplight.

  'I saw all the cars,' Roly was saying. 'Posh, some of them. I can't be doing with all that nonsense. I waited till they'd gone before I came through the wood. What about your folks? Are they coming?'

  But all my concentration was on the skinning and cleaning of the rabbit, and the watchful presence of my bird. I was half-listening while Roly went on, 'I don't envy you staying in the big house all on your own, just you and the Kemps, I reckon she's all right but I'm not sure about him . . .' For me, the bird and the warm flesh of the rabbit were all that really mattered, that existed just then.

  Indeed, as I sliced the leanest strips of meat from the dead animal and held them to the jackdaw, Roly picked up his gun and made for the door. I was lost in a kind of worship. I didn't see a shabby crow with dusty feathers and a brittle, skeletal frame. To me the bird was an imp, damaged but not beyond repair, delivered into my care by some mischievous spirit of the
forest. It took the meat from my fingers with grace and tenderness, obsequious, as though mocking my silly, boyish reverence. I stared deep into its eyes and it stared into mine.

  I heard the door creak behind me, heard the heavy step of boots on the cobbles outside. Still I didn't turn from the bird.

  'Roly?' I called over my shoulder. 'Thanks, Roly.' I waited, and when I knew that the man had disappeared into the night and left me alone in the stable, I whispered to the bird, 'You're mine, you're mine . . .'

  Too late, I realised that Roly had left his knife. I hurried to the door and looked out, but he'd gone. I cleaned the blade with my fingers, flicking the blood onto the stable floor.

  THREE

  Flint and slate, Foxwood Manor gleamed in the moonlight.

  It was eight o'clock that night. The house was a block of blackness, surrounded by deep woodland, and the moon, full and round but embedded in cloud, gave only a milky light – enough to catch a gleam from the walls which were faced with shards of flint and from the slates of the roof. As I crossed the lawn to the front door, there was one light in the building, from the windows of the great hall on the ground floor. Upstairs, the windows of the dormitories on the first and second floors were black. The old house was all but empty. No one moved along the corridors, upstairs or downstairs: no cries or laughter or boyish complaint rang from the changing-rooms or bathrooms; no one was reading in a secret corner of the library; not even a bored and lonely teacher was gawping at the television in the staffroom or drinking beer in his garret.

  The light which shone from the hall was the only light for miles and miles. The nearest road – apart from the lane which wound like a worm through the school park – was a twenty-minute drive away, and then the nearest village or pub or telephone box was further still. Maybe, in the darkest corner of the woods, a lamp was lit in Roly's caravan. But that would be all. Foxwood Manor, once the grand and opulent hunting lodge of some reclusive gentry, now a decaying boarding-school, was cut off from the world by acres of deciduous Dorset forest, some of the oldest and densest in England.

  An owl hooted. For a moment, the clouds thinned and parted and the moon was bright as daylight. Then the flint and the slate of Foxwood Manor shimmered like diamonds. The dead dry leaves of the ivy which had crawled up the walls and round the windows shivered in a cold wind. The woodland creaked and rattled.

  The cloud fogged the moon. Suddenly, at the same time as the house became black again, the bright light in the hall went out.

  Dr Kemp was closing the shutters. He moved from window to window and pulled the wooden shutters shut. Then, from outside, the building was in total darkness, as though nobody was inside and it had been abandoned for years.

  I went in and sat by the fire with Mrs Kemp and the old dog. It was dismal, the long, oak-panelled room, which had looked and sounded quite festive when all the parents and boys had been bustling there just a few hours before. Now it was revealed in all its shabbiness. It was a poor fire, a few spitting and smouldering spars of fence posts and gnarled timber. The Christmas tree, which almost reached the ceiling in the far corner, was sparsely lit by a few coloured bulbs and draped with tarnished tinsel. Along the walls, the photographs of boys and teachers who had been and gone years ago were faded and fusty, as blurred as the memory of the faces themselves. There was a trophy cupboard, but the cups and shields were nothing much, simply the in-house prizes for tennis or cricket or soccer or shooting contested every year by a dwindling number of Foxwood boys. The honours boards had pride of place, for the school had a history of real achievement under the rigorous instruction of Dr Kemp. There was a roll of names going back through the twenty years he'd been teacher and headmaster at Foxwood, boys whom he would never forget, whose talent for music, whose self-discipline and, above all, whose perfect ear had won them scholarships to many different and famous schools.

  But the hall was dingy and cold. Worse, somehow, because it was so grand. The size of a tennis court, with an enormous stone fireplace and great tall windows with oak shutters, it had been the warm heart of a lovely country house. With a splendid fire and warm lighting, with the heads of gallant beasts displayed around the walls, with a host of ruddy-faced people, with brave, sweet-smelling dogs asleep on fine rugs, with good wine and hot food and maybe some music, it would still have been the grandest hall in all the county.

  But not now. There was a dog, Wagner, an eighteen-year-old black labrador, who was just then snoring sonorously at his mistress's feet: once a fine, strong, handsome beast – his name pronounced the English way in reference to his tail – he was fat, with bad hips, a sagging belly and a malodorous mouth. There would have been music, from the grand piano in the far corner of the room, but not now. There was an excuse for a fire. No laughter, no wine.

  As for food, Mrs Kemp said to me, 'Alan, have another biscuit.'

  I had a glass of milk in one hand and a chocolate biscuit in the other. On a little table in front of me there was a plate with another chocolate biscuit on it. I sat awkwardly upright on a threadbare sofa. I'd never sat in the hall before – it was out of bounds except during music practice – and I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed. I managed to say through a mouthful of biscuit, 'No thank you, Mrs Kemp.'

  Dr Kemp was closing the shutters, with his back to me and his wife, half a tennis court away. But when Mrs Kemp leaned closer to me and whispered, 'Give it to Wagner then', and even as the dog stirred and started to struggle to his feet in anticipation of a treat, the man said loudly, without even glancing over his shoulder, 'No you don't. We've had him all this time and never fed him from the table once. We're not starting now.'

  Mrs Kemp raised her eyebrows, winked at me and back-handed the biscuit to Wagner, who crunched and swallowed it horribly just before Dr Kemp crossed the room towards us.

  He stood with his back to the fire, as though he were warming his legs on the flames. As always, he was wearing grey trousers and a chequered tweed jacket, a white shirt and a flannel tie; suede shoes with shiny toes. Fifty-five, he had the build of a man who'd been a sportsman in his youth, stocky and well balanced like a scrum-half, and the disgruntled look of a poor loser. Odd – I remember thinking, although I was only twelve and had known the man for five years and watched him with great caution for all of that time – odd, that a man in such a strong squat body, who looked like he'd been a rugby player or a handy boxer, should be so alive with music. Odd, that someone suffused with a love of music and its beauty should be so testy, so ill at ease with everyone else around him, even with his wife, as irritable as an oyster with a grain of sand pricking and prickling inside it all the time.

  Looking at him, I felt a sudden squirming of dislike for the man. And just then Dr Kemp turned such a peevish eye on me that I ducked my mouth to my glass and swallowed long and hard. When I surfaced I had a milky moustache.

  'So,' the headmaster said. 'So, Scott, what am I going to do with you?'

  I knew I wasn't supposed to answer. It was what Mr Bradfield, my English teacher, called a rhetorical question. But Mrs Kemp, who either didn't recognise the form or had acquired some kind of waiver from years of marriage, said, 'You are not going to do anything with Alan. He's going to spend a couple of nice days with us before his mother comes and takes him home for Christmas.'

  'I spoke to his mother on the telephone,' Dr Kemp said. 'She called from Switzerland, said she'd been held up.'

  'And you had a letter, didn't you, Alan?' Mrs Kemp put in. 'Did she tell you when she was coming? By the way, could you give me the stamps, for the school album?'

  I glanced from one of the faces to the other: from the grey gull's eye of the man to the woman who was trying so hard to be nice. I thought for a moment of the piece of air-mail paper and the crumpled envelope with its bright, Christmassy stamps, lying soiled and sodden somewhere in the woods – of my mother's sweetly childish, loopy handwriting smudged with the damp of the earth and the cold night air.

  'Austria,' I said. The word seem
ed to stick in my throat, with the crumbs of the chocolate biscuit. 'She said the snow was especially good and she might stay another week.'

  I saw the look exchanged between the man and the woman, how she tried with a tiny frown to prevent her husband from expressing his exasperation. And quickly, to forestall him, she said, 'Well, you can always take Wagner out with you, for some nice long walks in the woods. And there's the bird, of course. I suppose there's lots for you to do?'

  'What about the bird?' the headmaster said. 'What is it, a crow or something?'

  It was my bird. The idea of describing it, of trying to describe it to Dr Kemp, filled me with a kind of numb, helpless anger. Maybe to Mrs Kemp, I could have told her something – that I'd been out in the woods on a Sunday afternoon in November, when the other boys were doing scouts with Mr Furness or stamps with Mr Newton or raking leaves off the lawns with Miss Hayes and Mr Buxton; that I'd escaped alone to wander the woodland I knew inch by inch after years of exploring, and I'd heard a commotion in the bramble beds – in the tangle of brambles in the deep ditches round the barrows and tumuli now overgrown in the forest. I'd burrowed inside, like a prisoner of war bellying through rolls of rusty barbed wire, snagging and tearing my coat, scratching my face and hands, and found the bird struggling in a straitjacket of thorns.

  Nothing but a bit of black rag, waterlogged, spluttering. But to me it had seemed so marvellous in its rage, exquisitely mad, although the struggle had left it exhausted and the tail feathers damaged so badly it would never have flown even if it had managed to tear itself free. Indeed, in its fury, the bird had pecked at its own foot, which had been entwined by the unbreakable bramble wire, and tweaked it off, leaving a raw stump from which the bone protruded. I'd freed the bird, although it jabbed at my hands with its beak, and even when I'd secured it in a firm grip it had pecked and pecked until my wrists were raw. I remember the beat of its little heart between my hands, the heat of it, the force of its life – and I'd carried the shattered, terrified creature back to the stable-yard, where Roly, who'd bump-ed into me by chance on his way back from the woods, had helped me to settle it safely, without panic or commotion, onto the manger in the abandoned stall. Yes, it had trembled and shrieked for a while, so crazed by the trauma of its entanglement and the strangeness of the smells and the alien handling it had experienced that it had flung itself off the perch and dangled by the thong which I'd attached to the intact leg. Upside down, squawking, beating its wet wings until the air of the stable was a whirl of dust and chaff – until I'd eased it back onto the perch and it had stared at me, panting. A wild spirit with wild black eyes.