The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  I was having no success with the Christmas tree. In fact, after I'd tried all the bulbs and tightened them one after the other, they were flickering more spasmodically than before and fizzing in their sockets. But the look I got from Mrs Kemp, when I glanced to her for advice or help, warned me to stay where I was and say nothing: a look that said in an instant that sometimes it was better to seek out the shadows and the safety of darkness.

  'It's c-c-c-creepy,' Sophie said. 'A bedtime requiem. "Grant them, O Lord, eternal rest." Do the boys know what it m-m-means?'

  Pryce ignored her. He said disarmingly, as the music from the record player soared and his greasy-bacon fingers moved with the rhythm, 'The strange thing is, I really don't know if I love it or hate it.'

  Dr Kemp acknowledged the remark with a graceful smile, as though he too were prepared to give ground, and he said warmly, 'My boy, how could you hate this? Just listen . . .'

  So we all listened together, Pryce and Sophie, Dr and Mrs Kemp, Wagner aquiver for a lick of fat or a sliver of rind, and me, furtively at work on the festive lights. The longer we listened and said nothing, after the ugly confrontation of the morning and the ensuing punishment that the headmaster had meted out to me, the more likely it would be that we could spend a civil evening together. Mrs Kemp was counting the seconds. The music was lovely, a kind of healing.

  But then Pryce glanced across the hall to me. Unaware that anyone was watching me, I'd been licking the palm of my right hand and then blowing on it. I looked up and met his eyes. Mrs Kemp saw that Pryce was looking, and she saw what I was doing. And in the grey coldness of the man's eyes, she must have known that the time for healing had run out.

  'It's my turn.' Pryce's words were so sudden, so unexpected, so out of context, that they seemed louder than they actually were. The other grown-ups frowned quizzically at him, as he knew they would do, and he said again, 'It's my turn,' in the tone of voice a teacher might use with a simpleton.

  The headmaster leaned to the record player and turned down the volume, in order to elicit some sense from what Pryce had said.

  Given the floor, the young man said, 'No one's asked me what I do or where I work, although we've been here a couple of days already, but I'll tell you anyway.' He was charming, the firelight gleaming in his eyes. 'Funnily enough I'm in the music business too. A bit like you, Dr Kemp, but different.' He paused and waited for the headmaster to raise a questioning eyebrow. 'Like you, I instill a love of music. I work for a record company. The more sales I generate, the more records I shift, the more I'm appreciated by the company and the more money I get. You saw the car? Not bad for a twenty-year-old . . .'

  'That's marvellous, Martin,' Mrs Kemp said. 'So what do you mean, it's your turn? Do you mean you just wanted to tell us that? I'm so sorry we didn't ask you. We get a bit absorbed with our own little life out here.'

  'No, I mean it's my turn to play a bit of music. The kind of music I like, and Sophie likes, and Alan likes. The kind that millions of young people like. I've got some upstairs. Shall I go and get it?'

  Dr Kemp shuddered. 'Please no, not if it's anything like the dreadful racket that was blaring out of your car this morning.'

  'Thank you, Martin, but I think it would jar a bit,' said Mrs Kemp, attempting the difficult task of supporting her husband and mollifying Pryce at the same time. 'In an old-fashioned place like this, with a couple of fuddy-duddies like us . . .'

  'Thank you, but no thank you,' the headmaster put in.

  'You would like it, Mrs Kemp, you're still young,' Pryce insisted, leaning towards the woman with sudden enthusiasm. 'It has energy. You'd feel the heat in it. I'll go and get some.'

  He jumped to his feet. At the same moment, Kemp lunged to the record player and turned the volume as high as it would go. The music blasted out, rattling the speakers. He shouted, 'Remember this, Pryce? Remember? You'll never forget it!' and he swished his arms up and down, from side to side, conducting with exaggerated passion.

  The noise was deafening. They were face to face, jutting their chins together. Straight away, Wagner was up and ready for action. The dog wrinkled his muzzle into a horrible mask, teeth bared, eyes wild, and went for Pryce.

  'Jesus!' Pryce lashed out with his boot. The table crashed to the floor. Wagner did a canine double-take, saw the scattered sandwiches, and decided in an instant that bacon was a higher priority than protecting his master. He swerved away from Pryce's boot and snaffled a sandwich as fast as he could.

  Mrs Kemp laughed brightly, and Dr Kemp turned down the volume to make a sarcastic remark about Wagner's dubious allegiance. As I set the table upright, Pryce salvaged the last of the sandwiches from the floor and took a big bite out of it, more to thwart the dog than because he wanted it himself.

  Only the girl was not amused. Pryce said, 'Not funny, Sophie?' because she was staring at him, incredulous, as though nothing in her life would ever be funny again.

  She tried to echo the word, 'F-f-f-' but it stuck in her throat. She hunched her shoulders and heaved, like a cat struggling to cough up a ball of fur, until at last she regained her breath and wiped her mouth and eyes, catlike, with the back of her hands.

  I returned to the fireside, knelt and hugged the dog, which was breathless from the exertion and slobbering at the taste of bacon. Mrs Kemp seemed determined to keep the mood light. 'Martin, could you have a go?' she said. 'Alan's been trying to fix the Christmas tree lights – could you?'

  Pryce smiled gracefully and drifted away from the hearth, to the cool shadows at the end of the hall. The music was softer now, and there was a perceptible lifting of tension as he left the rest of us grouped around the fire. He must have known that was why she'd asked him so sweetly to do this unnecessary task: to make a little space, to have a little peace without him. So, obligingly, he wandered past the school photographs, paused, took another bite at his sandwich and studied the rows of serious faces. I watched him smear the glass with a greasy fingertip as he moved to the Christmas tree.

  From where I was kneeling, I saw him bend to the skirting board, where the floor was carpeted with pine needles. In the socket there was an adapter overloaded with plugs, and the flex for the lights was so frayed that some of the wires were bare.

  He put down his sandwich and jiggled the adapter. The Christmas tree lights went off and the music slurred almost to silence. Another jiggle and the lights came on; the music lurched and picked up again. 'Sorry,' he called out, crouched on the floor behind the bole of the tree. 'It isn't the bulbs, it's the plug. The connections are loose.'

  He knelt, disappearing into the darkness. Mrs Kemp started quizzing Sophie, drawing her out a bit. The girl had recovered from her coughing fit. She was saying that she'd left school in the summer, had had such disastrous A-level results that her parents had hit the roof, that she'd packed a bag and run off to London and taken the first job she could get, in the record company that Martin worked for, 'not really working, just looking cute and b-b-brainless at the front desk . . .' I was listening, and aware that Pryce was listening too, because once or twice his face popped up as though he were ready to butt in and stop the girl if she said too much.

  The music continued, so marvellous, so much a part of Foxwood Manor. It swooped and lurched again. 'Sorry, sorry,' I heard Pryce mumbling through a mouthful of bread and bacon, and I knew he'd jiggled the wires on purpose: because, in the prickling of my palms which was suddenly more than just the salt in my wounds but a flash of the dream I'd had and the faces in it, I knew that the music was as maddeningly familiar to him as it was for me.

  The lights stopped flickering. Pryce stood up and stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth. He looked round for somewhere to wipe the bacon grease from his hands, ducked out of sight again.

  At last he wandered back to the fireside. Dr Kemp was conducting again, more relaxed now, allowing himself a little nod of thanks as Pryce sat down. I was holding Wagner's collar, and I tightened my grip as he leaned towards Pryce.

 
; 'It's all right,' Pryce said softly, 'I think he's getting used to me.' I warily let go of the collar and Wagner sniffed at Pryce's fingers. After a moment, the dog lifted his head, peered blearily around him, and limped away. He disappeared into the shadows. 'He's hot,' Pryce said.

  The music was reaching a surging climax. 'Quando coeli movendi sunt, quando coeli movendi sunt, in dia illa tremenda . . .'

  There was a sharp bang at the other end of the hall. A flash, a cloud of smoke. The music groaned and died. And there was a dreadful, snarling commotion by the Christmas tree.

  Everyone – except Mrs Kemp – jumped to their feet. The tree groaned and leaned and fell to the floor with an enormous crash. The lights exploded like a crackle of gunfire. The snarling continued for another second, became a horrid gurgling growl, and stopped.

  We gathered around to see what had happened. It took Mrs Kemp a few frantic seconds to manoeuvre her wheel-chair from the fireside to the wreckage of the Christmas tree.

  Wagner's teeth were clenched on the bare wires. His eyes bulged red, and his legs twitched as though he were asleep and dreaming of rabbits. He was smouldering. A haze of blue smoke rose from his fur.

  EIGHT

  The spade cut through the snow and the encrusted blades of grass, then banged to a jarring halt. The impact sent a shock through Dr Kemp's wrist and right up to his elbow. The ground was frozen hard. It might as well have been rock.

  He and Mrs Kemp were on the lawn, under the branches of their favourite copper beech. I was there too; I'd been trying to help.

  It was another glorious morning. In the night it had been snowing again, so all the world was gleaming, a pristine, immaculate world from which all things less than perfect had been expunged. The sky was blue, the sun was shining. Indeed, there was a glow of sweat on the headmaster's brow as he struck again and again with the spade. Mrs Kemp sat beside him in her wheelchair, wrapped in her coat and scarf, with the tartan rug around her legs. Wagner's body lay on the dazzling snow.

  'It's no good.' Kemp stopped and wiped his face with the palm of his hand. He was breathing heavily. He loosened the scarf around his throat and glanced back to the house. After fifteen frustrating minutes he'd made hardly a dint in the surface of the lawn. Before that, he and I had struggled to get the unwieldy corpse out of the house. The only way, after we'd tried and failed to carry it in our arms for more than a yard or two, had been to use his wife's wheelchair. Kemp had taken her into his study, leaving her sitting at his desk with the door shut, and then I'd helped him to manhandle the dog on board. A bizarre sight, if there'd been anyone else to see it, as we'd emerged from the front door and crunched the chair through the deep snow, not with the headmaster's beloved wife but the stiffening body of a dead labrador. And there, in the spot he'd decided on, we'd attempted to lift the dog and rest it gently on the snow, but its bulk and unusual rigidity had proved so awkward that at last there was no choice but to tip it unceremoniously onto the ground. It had lain there on its back, its legs sticking into the air, until Kemp rolled it onto one side.

  Now, having returned to the house to bring out his wife, he was clanging at the unyielding ground with a spade. No good, no good, no good. Mrs Kemp began to sob. He hurled the spade into the snow and stood there, heaving for breath, with tears of rage and sorrow pricking in his eyes. He panted at me testily, 'There's no need for you to be here, Scott, for heaven's sake go indoors.'

  Pryce and Sophie were watching from the great hall. 'Come on, old man,' Pryce whispered, 'we need a good, big hole.'

  He strolled to the piano, where the tree lay bristling and black, where fragments of glass from the exploded bulbs crunched under his boots. He sat down, and with one finger he played the first lines of 'In the Deep Mid-winter', so spare, so cold, every note an icicle. He stopped, affecting the headmaster's look of puzzlement and exasperation, and reached for the leather wallet of tuning keys that lay on top of the piano. He stood up, lifted the lid of the instrument and propped it open.

  'What are you d-d-d-doing?' Sophie asked, unnecessarily. He was leaning into the piano and randomly loosening string after string. 'Don't you think . . .?'

  'The piano tuner never made it. I'll have a go. Now, which way do you turn these things?'

  Unseen, unheard, I'd come into the hall from the long corridor. I'd been watching them, hesitating, dazed from the exertion and misery of helping the headmaster with the dog. When Pryce opened the piano and I saw my reflection in the shine of the lid, I stepped forwards, as though in a dream, to meet the figure of the boy who was walking towards me.

  With a feeling of horror in my stomach, I peered into the dark hole. Before either Pryce or Sophie had time to acknowledge that I was there, I saw what he'd been doing and I said sharply, 'Please don't, sir, I got into enough trouble yesterday.'

  'The b-b-boy'll get the blame,' Sophie blurted. 'Kemp's already mad about the d-d-d-dog . . .'

  'The dog had it coming. So has Kemp.'

  Pryce pushed me out of the way and submerged himself again in the piano. He turned a key with one hand, while his other arm snaked out and felt blindly for the keyboard, and the notes he struck were strangely plangent, quite different from the chilly air he'd conjured from the carol.

  Sophie gestured hopelessly at me, seeing the despair on my face. Pryce glanced up from the piano and saw the little exchange. 'Hey Alan,' he started, 'are you with me or Kemp? Do you want a bit of fun with us, or a cosy threesome with the old farts?'

  'Watch out!' Sophie hissed without a hint of a stammer.

  Through the window we saw that the Kemps were approaching the house. We heard the crunch of the wheel-chair on the snow, the hiss of its tyres as it ran up the ramp to the front door. And as the handle turned and the door creaked open, Pryce said, 'Alan, here!' and tossed the wallet of tuning keys through the air.

  I had no choice but to catch it and stuff it into my pocket, just as Kemp propelled the wheelchair into the hall.

  Without looking at me or Pryce or Sophie, the headmaster manoeuvred the chair to the fire. His face was set, as though frozen, but ruddy from the cold and the effort of pushing. His breathing was hoarse. Mrs Kemp's face was hidden behind the fall of her hair. She was dabbing her eyes and nose with a white handkerchief.

  'You shouldn't have come out,' he said to her. 'It's much too cold. You should've stayed indoors.'

  'I wanted to be there,' she said, controlling her voice with difficulty. 'And now we've left him lying in the snow . . .'

  Kemp swivelled furiously towards Pryce. 'I don't suppose you could've helped at all, instead of just standing there grinning like a fool.'

  Pryce demurred, affecting the manners of a perfect gentleman. 'I'm so sorry. I didn't want to intrude at the graveside.'

  'There is no grave,' the headmaster retorted, 'so, by definition, there is no graveside.' This provoked an outburst of sobbing from his wife. He bent to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  'Oh dear,' Pryce said. 'Perhaps we should make some coffee, to warm you up a bit. Come on, Sophie.' He led the girl out of the hall and into the corridor.

  I stood there, as though nailed to the floorboards. My whole body ached with the unfairness of the situation. My head groaned with it. It was mean, just mean, that I was standing in that place, at that moment, with an enormous nail of obligation driven through each foot. The effortlessness of Pryce's exit made it worse. I was on my own. And the question that Pryce had tossed to me just before the Kemps came in, as casual and yet as weighted as the keys he'd tossed through the air a moment later, whirled in my mind.

  It wasn't the first time I'd considered it. I'd lain awake the previous night and weighed it one way and the other, the same question, my eyes staring into the darkness of the dormitory. On the one hand, I was a twelve-year-old choirboy, blessed with a perfect ear and imbued with a genuine love of church music; on the other, I was an incipient teenager, my ear glued to the rock'n'roll on my transistor radio. On the one hand, I was a prefect at Foxwood Ma
nor, infused with a grudging respect for my headmaster and a real affection for the headmaster's wife; on the other, I was a defiant adolescent thrilled by the arrival of Martin Pryce. Who was I? And when I glimpsed the reflection of a small boy in the polished blackness of the piano, it wasn't me, but a different boy who folded and vanished as I turned my head towards him.

  'You've let the fire go out.' Dr Kemp's words cut through the room. 'While you're here with us, Scott, you could do something to earn your keep, couldn't you? This is supposed to be our holiday as well, you know.'

  I bent to the hearth immediately, trying to set aside the thought of what would happen next, or soon: in either case, the appalling inevitability of it. I picked up some of the holly twigs and branches I'd collected from the woods a few days before, which I'd carried into the hall and stacked neatly so that they'd be dry and ready for burning. I laid them onto the neglected embers, knelt close and blew softly. There was a sudden glow and a little blue flame stood up. It licked around the fuel that I'd put there. With a crackle and spit, the fire was alive again.

  Dr Kemp was kneeling too. He'd taken off his scarf and coat and was helping his wife with hers. He slipped off her shoes and started to rub her feet gently; they were white as marble between his reddened hands. 'We all loved the old boy,' he was saying. 'Was he seventeen, eighteen? And this was his place, right here, in front of the fire . . .'

  Mrs Kemp wept again. As I stood away from the hearth and saw her shoulders shuddering as she sobbed and sobbed, my heart ached to see her crying, and a lump came into my throat. The headmaster squeezed her feet, then looked up and saw the sadness in my eyes.

  'Oh yes,' he said, 'the boys were fond of him too, years and years of Foxwood boys. What a character, what a dog . . .'

  And then he stood up. He held my eyes as though there were a special bond between us, something only we could understand: a bond which excluded his wife and the love he felt for her and was far beyond the comprehension of Pryce and Sophie. I read his thoughts – I wished I could not. It was a nightmare, to know what the man was about to say, and to be powerless, utterly powerless to forestall it.