The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  'Music,' he said. 'At a time like this, people like us, we have our music.'

  It was hopeless to protest. I gaped at him, stammered, 'Please sir, please sir, no sir', but the headmaster was too much for me. Evincing an avuncular kindliness which he must have thought appropriate to the occasion, Dr Kemp was overwhelming. He'd seen in my eyes how much the death of the dog had moved me, and now he reached for my hand and eased me across the room towards the piano. He even, feeling me wince from his touch, folded open my palm to appraise the three red stripes on it, and he pursed his lips to express sympathy tinged with regret.

  He said gently, 'It's your gift, it's your duty. Sing for me and Mrs Kemp. Sing for Wagner.'

  I held my breath as Kemp sat at the piano. My heart had stopped beating.

  The headmaster played an arpeggio. With a yell, flapping his hands as though he had dipped them in boiling oil, he leaped to his feet.

  'What's this?' he roared. 'Who has done this?' He banged a chord, a mess of noise. He whirled at me. 'Where are they? You know what I mean! Don't just stand there gawping like an idiot! Where are they?'

  For a blinding second, thinking he meant Pryce and Sophie, I gestured feebly towards the corridor. He shoved past me, snarling, knocked over the table that had been knocked over the night before, and stormed to the hearth. His wife blinked at him through bleary eyes.

  'You know where they are!' he shouted. 'I left them on the mantelpiece! I put them on the piano! I was using them! The keys! Where are they?'

  'Anyone for coffee?'

  Pryce emerged from the corridor, with Sophie behind him. He was carrying a tray with five steaming mugs and a plate of mince pies. He frowned at the overturned table. 'Oh dear, where can I put this?'

  'It's unplayable!' the headmaster shouted. 'The piano is unplayable! It might as well be chopped into pieces and burned on the fire! That's all it's good for!'

  Pryce put the tray on the hearth, gave a mug of coffee to Mrs Kemp and took one for himself. 'What happened to the piano tuner you were expecting? I suppose he's stuck in the snow somewhere.'

  'I'm looking for the tuning keys!' the headmaster hissed at him, barely controlling his anger. 'They were here, on top of the piano, and now they're gone. Have you seen them?'

  'Search me,' he said, like an innocent caught in the crossfire. 'Alan? Any idea?'

  They all stared at me. I saw a flicker of a smirk on Pryce's face and felt the cold grey eyes run down to the bulge in my pocket. I licked my lips, for my mouth was very dry, and said, 'No sir, no idea, sir.'

  Pryce moved to the piano. 'Don't touch it,' the headmaster said softly. 'I cannot stand the noise.' Pryce ignored him. He set his mug down on the end of the keyboard, right next to the highest note. The headmaster repeated himself, as softly as before. 'Do not touch the piano.'

  Pryce sat on the stool. 'Unplayable? I like a challenge.'

  As he laid his hands on the keyboard, the headmaster stormed towards him. Pryce had one second to bang out the first excruciating line of 'Ding Dong Merrily on High' before Dr Kemp reached the piano.

  Pryce withdrew his fingers just in time. Bellowing, 'Are you deaf? ' the headmaster slammed the lid shut with all his might. The mug splintered into smithereens. The coffee splashed onto Pryce's hands and face.

  There was a lull. The only sound was the drip-drip-drip of coffee from the piano to the floor. We all looked at each other, as though waiting – waiting for a familiar sound to fill the silence. But there was no gurgling growl. No booming bark. Nothing to punctuate the moment with a resounding exclamation mark.

  It was an uncomfortable silence. It pronounced the unalterable fact that Wagner had gone for ever.

  'Be careful, Dr Kemp,' Pryce said at last. 'Be very careful.' His voice was gentle, as soft as silk. 'I'm not deaf, although you've told me many times that my ear is not as good as yours. That's one thing you instilled in me at Foxwood.'

  Mrs Kemp was crying very quietly. The fire collapsed and settled, consuming itself. The coffee dripped and dripped and stopped dripping.

  Outside, in the treetops, the carrion crows were calling.

  Dr Kemp ordered me along to the practice room at the other end of the school, near the kitchens and dining-room. I had no choice but to obey his abrupt command, although I took a couple of seconds and the opportunity – in the sullen activity which followed the confrontation, as Sophie mopped the spilt coffee and put the table upright, as Pryce picked up the shards of the broken mug, as Dr Kemp tried once more to console his wife – to slip the wallet of tuning keys out of my pocket and down the side of an armchair, where I thought I could pretend to discover it later. Then I hurried to the practice room and waited for the headmaster to come.

  The room was tiny, not much more than a walk-in cupboard with an upright piano and a stool in it. The floor was piled with sheet music, there was a shelf stacked with old hymn books and psalters, and there were books of graded pieces on top of the piano itself. The light came from a bare overhead bulb and a ventilation panel near the ceiling.

  I'd spent many hours in there over the five years I'd been at Foxwood Manor, on my own, with the door shut, working on scales and fingering exercises and the pieces I practised for Dr Kemp. More recently, since the death of my father, the room had been a place where I could escape from the dull routines and enforced matiness of prep-school life, find a quiet, peaceful corner among the nightmares which filled my head; where sometimes I thought of a hymn we often sang in chapel – 'speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, o still small voice of calm . . .' – and I tried to conjure the calm, loving voice of my father.

  But now I was squeezed into the little space with the headmaster. Dr Kemp sat at the piano and I stood beside him. With the door closed, the air grew stale and stuffy.

  'Again.' Dr Kemp kept repeating the word, and so, dutifully, I repeated the phrase I was singing. The pitch rose, the tension too, and the testiness in the headmaster's voice increased in the way he said those two dry syllables. He banged a note. 'Listen! Can't you hear it? If you can't hear it, if you don't listen, if you don't use your ear and listen, then you're no better than all – than all – than all the rest of them!'

  I wetted my lips and sang the phrase again. I knew the tuning was perfect, but the tone was woody, my voice deadened in the dead stale air of the cupboard – as though I'd been locked inside the suffocating darkness of my own school trunk and was shouting, hopelessly, to be let out.

  'Again.' The headmaster played the same phrase a semitone higher. This time he jumped from the stool. He pressed his body right against mine, from behind, put his arms around me and put his hands on my belly – 'From here! You breathe from here!' – and his hands were big and hot, burning through the material of my shirt, burning my skin as I breathed deeply and sang. 'Again!' the headmaster cried out, holding himself hard against me, so close that the odour of his breath and his body were suddenly strong in the airless room. 'No, no good, no good!'

  With an expression of utter weariness, almost defeat, he thrust me aside and stood there, panting like a wounded bear. 'Go. Just go away. I've had enough.'

  Quite miserable, I dragged my feet along the corridor. I didn't know where to go or what to do. For the first time, even the prospect of communing with my bird or searching out Roly in the woods seemed pointless: what a choice of company on a dreary winter's afternoon, a crow with a brain the size of a pea, or a weasly old hermit. Trying to shake the meanness of these thoughts from my head, I found myself close to the entrance to the hall and saw Mrs Kemp still sitting by the fire.

  * * *

  She'd stayed there, alone, since her husband's row with Pryce. From the other end of the school she must have heard the muted sound of the piano in the practice room and our repeated, fruitless exercises, the same futile arpeggio. Now she was staring into the fire, where the flames were blue from the sap as the holly twigs fizzled and spat. Her eyes fell miserably on the spot on the worn carpet where Wagner used to sleep, where he'd
been sleeping only twelve hours before. She stared into space.

  Suddenly, there was a movement at the window. I caught it from where I'd paused to watch her, and she turned her head to see what it was. The sunlight was dazzling, but there was a flutter of black against the blanket of snow. Again, a similar movement, a bit of blackness, as though someone had tossed a rag from an upstairs window, a rag or an old glove, and then again, bigger, past the window and onto the snow.

  Crows. She wheeled herself quickly across the room, to the further end of the hall near the piano. I tiptoed to another window and looked out too. I heard her gasp at the sight of what the crows were doing.

  The birds were dropping from the treetops. They'd stopped calling. And in their silent, uncanny communion, there was a terrible purpose. They fell to the body of the dog.

  'Oh no, please . . .' She leaned towards the glass and banged on it with the heel of her hand. The crows, six or eight of them, sprang from the dog and wafted into the air. They dropped, and they hopped through the snow on their black, muscular legs. She banged again, and again they recoiled from the dog, cloaking their bodies with half-open wings. Then the boldest bird flapped and flapped and beat through the air, lifting a cloud of sunlit powdery snow like a miraculous halo, and it landed on top of the dog. It pecked. But the beak, a black dagger, jarred on the stiffened, freezing body. So the bird sprang to the dog's head. And it pecked. Another bird slunk through the snow to the other end of the dog. Where it pecked.

  'Oh please God no . . .' Mrs Kemp rapped and rapped on the window. She banged with all her strength, but her fists were weak and white and the glass was like ice.

  Instinctively, I moved to help her: to reach for the front door and open it wide, to step outside and clap the crows away. But as I started forwards, a hand closed onto the collar of my shirt. It wrenched me back with a breathtaking jolt.

  Pryce. A second later, with my shirt wrung so tight against my throat that I thought I was strangling, he'd lugged me into the corridor, back-heeled open the door of the staffroom and pulled me inside.

  He pinioned me there. And he hissed into my ear, with both of our faces close to the crack in the door, forcing me to peer out with him, 'Let her work it out for herself, she thinks she's so fucking perfect.'

  She was shouting, 'Dr Kemp! Headmaster!' but her voice was feeble from sitting too long in the freezing air, from the smoke of the fireside, from weeping. She took as big a breath as her lungs could hold, and she shouted, 'No! No!' thumping the window at the same time. 'Dr Kemp! Please! Please!'

  The crows were on the dog. They were hungry. The night had been bitter and long: a long night to be hunched in a cloak of wings, muffled in a coat of feathers, shivering in the treetops while the forest creaked and groaned through the hardest frost of winter. Hungry, they were on the dog, plying their beaks in the softest places.

  We watched her. I couldn't speak, I could hardly breathe, as Pryce screwed my collar tighter and his face bent close to mine. We saw her spin her chair and thrust with all her weight towards the headmaster's study. There was a look of steel on her face, as cold as the glass on which she had bruised her hands. She had neither the time nor the inclination to go wheeling the whole length of the school for the assistance of her husband, who, as far as she knew, was preoccupied with venting his unhappiness in a misguidedly punitive singing lesson, so she sped to his desk, pulled open a drawer and rummaged among a mess of papers until she found the bunch of keys she was looking for.

  In moments she was accelerating along the smooth lino of the corridor, so close to our faces that I caught a waft of her perfume; and almost directly opposite us, she skidded to a halt at the door which was her destination: NO BOYS TO ENTER WITHOUT A MEMBER OF STAFF.

  Still we could hear her hissing, 'Dr Kemp, headmaster . . .' but the words were all but smothered by the hoarseness of her breathing. 'No no, please God no . . .' It was only a noise she made to drive herself faster to get what she needed. We watched her as she found the key, as she fitted it into the keyhole with speed and accuracy and a well-oiled snugness, and she rolled inside the room, unlocked the big black iron safe and tugged the door wide open.

  A row of guns: half a dozen single-shot, Martini-action .22 rifles.

  She snatched one of them from the rack, pulled the lever and opened the chamber. She ripped open a box of cartridges and thumbed one into the chamber. The smell of the gun was strong, a dark oily smell which did not allow for cobwebs and fustiness. She snapped it shut. She was in and out of the room in less than thirty seconds and thrusting back along the corridor, towards the hall again, with the gun balanced on the arms of her chair and the box of cartridges in her lap.

  Pryce manhandled me across the staffroom. I'd never set foot in there before, only glimpsing inside whenever I'd had to knock on the door and ask for one of the teachers. Now I had a second to glance around me as I was whirled from the door and over to the window. Threadbare armchairs, a table littered with sherry glasses, left-over Christmas cake and overflowing ash-trays. A noticeboard stuck with duty lists, newspaper cuttings; the calendar for December 1966, a red-faced Santa with a bikini-girl snuggling on his lap. Bizarrely, a glass case with a stuffed badger inside it.

  No air. A fume of stale smoke and stale middle-aged men.

  Pryce had me at the window just in time. He sniggered, tightening his grip at my throat, as Mrs Kemp burst out of the front door of the house. The brightness was intense, after the gloom of the hall, and she hurtled the chair down the ramp so hard and so blindly that it crunched into the snow and tipped over. She was flung right out of it and landed headlong, with such a thump that all the air was driven from her body.

  The crows were startled by her sudden appearance, but they did not relinquish their prize. As she sprawled in the snow, winded so badly that she gaped like somebody drowning, they bent their beady eyes towards her.

  We watched from the window of the staffroom.

  Mrs Kemp dragged herself over the snow on her belly and reached for the rifle. Lying in the snow like a backwoodsman, she splayed her legs, steadied her breathing and squinted down the barrel, just as I'd learned to do in the school's rifle range. She fired. But still her chest was heaving, so the first shot missed her target and thudded into the swollen body of the dog. The birds scattered, alarmed by the sudden report and its repercussions in the woodland; the way the dog groaned as a blast of gas escaped from the bullet hole in its belly. But one of them was reluctant to let go of the dog's tongue, which it had pierced and tugged out like a slice of veal. The woman ejected the spent cartridge, scrabbled for the box which lay nearby, reloaded and fired again, and her second shot sent the crow cartwheeling through the air and onto the lawn, an explosion of black feathers on the sparkling snow.

  Dr Kemp appeared at the front door. He'd heard the shots and come running. In a blink he took in the extraordinary scene.

  The wheelchair was capsized at the foot of the ramp. His wife lay flat on her belly, retching for breath, a rifle flung to one side. Under the copper beech, the dead dog was deflating. A crow was sculling around it, beating the lawn with shattered wings.

  Pryce let go of me. I squirmed away from him, across the room and into the corridor. I was right behind Kemp at the front door of the house, as he ran forwards and bent to his wife, turned her over and felt her fragile body gasping.

  'My dear, my dear,' he panted, 'what on earth are you doing?' and he tried to lift her from the ground. He glanced up and saw me at the door, staring, so astonished that I couldn't move. 'Help me, Scott!' he called out. 'Bring the chair, the chair . . .'

  I was galvanised into action – or would have been. About to run down the ramp and right the chair, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Pryce was beside me, and the weight of the hand stopped me dead. He squeezed my shoulder hard enough to show that he meant me to stay where I was, and then he let go, brought his hands together and started to clap.

  Slow, sarcastic clapping. Kemp, cradling his exhausted wif
e, goggled back at him. Pryce stood at the top of the ramp, and he clapped. 'Bravo,' he said. 'Good shooting, Mrs Kemp.'

  And then, before the headmaster could express one jot of the outrage he felt, Pryce strode swiftly onto the lawn. He was superb, a gentleman come to the rescue of a distressed lady. In one effortless movement, he bent to her, swept her into his arms and stood up. She gazed up at him, a limp, swooning figure. He blew softly into her face. 'You have snow on your eyelashes,' he whispered.

  I hurried to the chair and set it upright. In another moment, Pryce was wheeling the woman up the ramp and into the house.

  Dr Kemp struggled to his feet. He was negated, he was a negligible man. He dusted the snow from his trouser legs, picked up the rifle and the box of ammunition, stomped to the front door and disappeared inside.

  I watched the stricken crow. It had slowed down and stopped, but it was still alive. I crunched across the lawn towards it. The bird lay on its breast, its eyes wild, its breath hissing through whiskery nostrils. Both wings were outstretched, spread-eagled, and as I came close it tried with all its failing strength to row away from me. It pulled at the ground with its beak and claws, crawling like a grotesque clockwork toy.

  So I bent to the bird. It flopped against my foot, quite submissive, as though it knew what I was going to do and wanted it done quickly. It allowed my hands on its head and neck, a kind of blessing. I pulled very suddenly and the bird went limp.

  Disinterested, the other crows watched from the woodland. Even before I'd walked off the lawn and around the side of the house, they dropped from the trees, in silence, to the body of the dog.

  It was evening. In the stable, in the lamplight, I held the dead crow close to the flame and plucked the feathers from its breast. I'd nearly finished. The bird had been so brazen a few hours before, gleaming on the sunlit snow; now it was little, skinny, nude. It still had a head, but the weight and heft of the beak were out of proportion to the naked body. The legs and claws, strong and black, almost saurian, were quite incongruous. I swung the bird by its feet, and it weighed nothing. I took it across the room to my living, impish jackdaw.