The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  He read not a glimmer of warmth in the young man's eyes. With a lift of his brows and a movement of his hand to the spade, Pryce merely asked if he should start to close the grave. Dr Kemp pursed his lips, and his mottled face set in a look of determination. 'I'll do it,' he said. 'I wish I could have dug the hole myself. I'll fill it in even if it kills me.'

  He took the spade from Pryce. 'Don't judge us too harshly,' he said. 'We've always done our best for all the boys who've been at Foxwood. That includes you.'

  Still Pryce said nothing. He reached for Sophie's hand, as though to lead her away from the grave and back to the house. But she recoiled, and, in a quick, instinctive movement, she stepped to the headmaster, folded her arms around him and hugged him.

  His body seemed to sag, all of a sudden, as though the warmth of her embrace had thawed the aches and pains from his bones. His eyes filled with tears. To cover his embarrassment, he eased the girl away from him and wiped his face. 'Thank you, thank you,' he murmured. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then peered blearily into the treetops for something to say. As a clumsy non-sequitur, he added, 'It'll snow again. It's Christmas.'

  Pryce and Sophie trudged across the lawn. Kemp leaned into the grave and folded the sides of the sheet over the dog, shrouding it completely. I waited a moment for the headmaster to say that he needed help or give me permission to go, but he seemed to have forgotten that I was there. I moved away as quietly as I could.

  When I reached the corner of the building, I paused and looked back. Dr Kemp had taken off his jacket and thrown his hat onto the ground and was shovelling the earth into the hole – a small, dark figure against the silvery woodland, under the spreading boughs of the tree, beneath a leaden sky.

  Sophie moved along the downstairs corridor. She'd come down the boys' staircase, on her own. It was only five o'clock in the afternoon, but it could have been midnight, the house was so dark. She must have thought the Kemps were in their apartment at the top of the building, and that I was moping upstairs or in the yard.

  Utterly dismal, the silence and the chill, the musty gloom. She padded up and down the unfamiliar ramps, she slithered on the worn lino; she tiptoed past closed wooden doors, past the iron grilles of the two lifts. She hurried past doors which were ajar and whose shadows exhaled a whiff of stale cigarette smoke, the dust of a neglected library, the lingering smell of little boys.

  I'd been skulking in the library. I heard her come down the stairs and go by.

  When she reached the great hall the only light was the glow of the embers in the hearth. I watched her as she felt for the switch on the wall, found it, but then decided not to turn on the lights. Instead she crossed to the fire, fumbled and fumbled for something beside the walnut cabinet of the record player, until at last her hand fell on the telephone.

  With a furtive glance around her and back to the grand staircase, thinking she was quite alone, she picked up the receiver and put it to her ear. I could hear the faint humming from where I was hiding. She pressed down the receiver bar and released it, but there was only a humming, no dialling tone. She dialled a number, waited, listened. She jiggled the bar impatiently, hissing come on come on, and still there was nothing but a hum, worse and more infuriating than silence: it was the sound of somewhere faraway and out of reach.

  'It still isn't working . . .'

  Sophie whirled around at the sudden voice. She dropped the receiver so hard that it banged on top of the record player and fell towards the floor. Mrs Kemp wheeled silently towards her. 'Still not working,' the woman said, 'but I don't blame you for trying.'

  Mrs Kemp pushed her way to the hearth. I knew she'd been sitting at the window earlier in the afternoon, in the far corner behind the great black bulk of the piano, watching the grave of the dog: keeping a kind of vigil. She must have stayed there into the evening, through all the hours I'd been lurking in the library. From time to time, I'd been drawn to the window too – no more snow, not yet, although the sky had bulged with snow clouds and threatened throughout the short hours of daylight – until, in the sullen glimmer of dusk, the heap of earth was the only mark on the lawn. It looked as though the dog were still lying where we'd left it the day before. Yet I'd seen the headmaster filling the hole and patting it smooth with the flat of his spade, so I knew that Wagner was safely sleeping where nothing and no one could disturb him.

  Alone in the lightless hall, Mrs Kemp had been sitting and watching his grave.

  'I'm sorry I frightened you,' she said to the girl. 'I was sitting and thinking.' In the glow of the embers, her face was thin and lined. Her fine hair looked dry. Her fingers twitched at something in her lap, picking and unpicking. She had the dog's brush in her hands and she was teasing out a ball of hair.

  She reached to the girl and took her by the wrist. 'I don't blame you for trying,' she said urgently. 'For trying to get out of here. I know you said your mother and father were angry with you and you'd run away from home, but it's Christmas, you should be with your family and . . .'

  'How can I? There's no phone, no car, no . . .' Sophie winced at the strength of the woman's grip.

  'Are you hurt?' the woman hissed. 'Is Martin hurting you? You must get away from him! He's a bad bad man . . .'

  'How can I? I can't get out and I can't go home! It's too late! We're both bad! It makes me sick to think about it!'

  She suddenly knelt onto the floor and, taking hold of both Mrs Kemp's hands, leaned forwards and pressed them to her face in a sad, impulsive gesture, as if they were the only comfort she could find in such a wretched place.

  'I thought Martin loved me,' she started, and then the words came sobbing, spilling from her. 'At first he was nice to me, he was nice and funny and – and then last week, he took me to see his brother in his college rooms. I didn't want to go but he made me, and it was horrible, he . . .'

  'Tell me, Sophie, go on, tell me,' the woman whispered to her. 'Did he hurt you?'

  'We drank a lot, we drank too much, the three of us – until it was late and Martin crashed out somewhere and left us on our own, me and Jeremy – and we were kissing and it was nice and I thought it was OK and it was what Martin wanted me to do . . .' She took a big gulping breath, looked up at the woman and said, 'I thought it was why he'd taken me to see Jeremy, to go with him for the first time 'cos he'd never had a girl before, and so we . . .'

  She kissed the palms of the woman's hands. She was confessing, she was begging forgiveness. Having gone so far and said so much, she wanted – she needed – to go on.

  'But then Martin woke up. He came in and saw us together, me and Jeremy, and he – he just went crazy, I couldn't stop him – it makes me sick . . .'

  'Ah, there you are.' Pryce's voice cut through the darkness, from the foot of the staircase. He crossed the hall to the hearth, and he smiled at the woman and the girl, as he saw Sophie let go of Mrs Kemp's hands and get up from her knees. The light from the dying fire gleamed on his teeth and the whites of his eyes. 'So, what's this? A cosy chat? Not talking about me, I hope?'

  Mrs Kemp flinched from him, ducking her head, and her fingers worked fast and feverishly at the dog's brush. Sophie said nothing, just smearing at her eyes with the backs of her hands. The quiet was so intense that even a fall of needles from the Christmas tree seemed suddenly loud: so quiet that Pryce heard a very faint humming from the fireside.

  He saw the receiver of the telephone dangling on its flex. His smile somehow froze, as charming as ever but oddly crooked. 'Any luck with the phone? What's the matter, Sophie? Don't you like it here?'

  'Dr Kemp thought it might be rec-c-c-connected soon,' she said. 'I just tried . . .'

  Pryce reached for the receiver and put it to his ear. 'Hello?' he said. He cooed into the mouthpiece, 'Is there anybody out there?' He replaced it gently on its cradle. There was a click, then dead silence. 'No good,' he said. 'Good.'

  He took Sophie by the wrist and, the tiniest bit harder than he needed to, squeezed on the bone. She sq
uirmed and grimaced, but he didn't let go. 'Come on, Sophie, you've been talking too much. I want you to help me with something.'

  He led her out of the hall. Before they were swallowed into the darkness of the corridor, Sophie cast a look over her shoulder. Mrs Kemp had wheeled herself as close as she could get to the hearth. She tossed the ball of hair into the embers.

  It sizzled and burst into flame. For the briefest moment it lit the pain and the fear on her face, and then it went out.

  ELEVEN

  The school kitchen, a scene of catastrophic disorder . . .

  Every pan, every utensil, had been used and left heaped, unrinsed, unwashed, in the sink. The stove was splashed with gravy. The oven door swung open, billowing a breath of residual warmth into the air. On the work-table, there were loops of potato peelings, onion skins, the wrinkly outer leaves of sprouts.

  The room was empty and dark, but a mouse had crossed the floor and shimmied up the table leg and onto the top to investigate the scraps. With its whiskers it tested the edge of a meat tray, decided it had cooled down enough to negotiate, and hopped inside to nibble the sweetness of a roasted parsnip that had been left behind. The silver of stainless steel shone in its eyes. It moved from corner to corner of the tray, leaving tiny footprints in the congealing fat.

  I'd been sent to the kitchen a few times, to run an errand, to fetch this and that. Now, back in the great hall, the fire was blazing. It was the best fire since Pryce and Sophie had arrived. I'd carried armfuls of logs and stacked them neatly on the hearth, careful to be sure that neither a toad nor a bat were sleeping there, rebuilding and reviving the fire from the embers which had all but died earlier in the evening. Pryce had told me to do it. And throughout the evening I'd watched the fire and kept it ablaze.

  It had been the only successful part of the proceedings. When the Kemps had come down in the lift, along the corridor and into the hall, they'd found a table set for all of us. An hour later, it was strewn with the remains of a cheerless Christmas dinner: the carcase of a capon, picked to the bone; a tureen of bland, over-cooked vegetables; a solitary bottle of wine beside a candelabra whose flames had dripped wax onto the table cloth and finally sputtered out; the crumbs of a few mince pies – the paltriest trappings of a slapdash dinner, not enough, and not a scrap of festive spirit.

  In the corner, the tree had been propped against the wall. The flex and its shattered bulbs dangled haphazardly from the branches.

  The fire threw a ball of heat into the room. Mrs Kemp sat close to the hearth; once, the flames had driven her back when my carefully constructed pyre had collapsed in a shower of sparks and spilled towards her feet: the liveliest moment of the evening. She had not come to the table. Morose, deeply wounded in a way that her husband could not have imagined, she hardly spoke. She'd hardly eaten. Dr Kemp finished his wine, set down the empty glass, got up and joined her at the fireside.

  'Not exactly a banquet,' Pryce said. 'But it was the best we could do. We used up everything we could find in the kitchen.'

  'Yes, everything,' the headmaster said sourly. 'And no, not a banquet. We didn't think there'd be five of us. There would've been plenty for me and Mrs Kemp, for the dinner we traditionally have together on Christmas Day.'

  Pryce shrugged. 'We thought it would be a nice surprise for you. It's Christmas Eve. Sophie and I wanted to show our appreciation of your hospitality.' He raised his glass, still half-full, and waved it in the air. 'Thank you for having us.'

  'I don't know what we'll eat tomorrow,' Kemp said.

  'The snow'll clear soon,' Pryce went on. 'I'll get the car started, get the tyre blown up just enough for us to get going, and we'll limp away. Sophie and I'll be gone.' He turned to me, as I knelt on the rug where Wagner used to lie. 'What about you, Alan? Have you heard from your mother?'

  Kemp harrumphed. 'He might as well stay until the beginning of next term. There's no word . . .'

  'She couldn't come anyway, could she?' My voice was unusually forceful, louder than I'd meant it to be. Flushing from the heat of the fire, I blinked at the adults' surprised faces. 'I mean, even if she's back in England, the road's blocked and the phone isn't working. It's not her fault.'

  Mrs Kemp reached to me and put her hand on my head. 'No, it isn't, Alan. And it isn't your fault either. I'm so sorry you're having a horrid time . . .'

  'Did you w-w-w-want anything, Mrs Kemp? A glass of w-w-w-wine, before Martin drinks the lot?'

  The woman shook her head. Before she could speak, her husband said, 'My wife has a chill. I told her not to come outside with me yesterday. And then she was lying in the snow for goodness knows how long.'

  'A hot bath,' Pryce said. 'Best thing for a chill. Let the heat get deep inside you.'

  The woman stared at him. She fixed her eyes on his, unflinching. Then she swivelled her eyes onto me. And she read on my puzzled, frightened face that it was as extra-ordinary for me as it was for her, to think of what Pryce had done to her the night before: so nearly unbelievable that it had left us both numb, that it must have been a dream, that surely we'd had the same dream and now we could read it on each other's face. Then she turned back to Pryce, and she stared at him so hard and so coldly that it was he, at last, who looked away.

  She felt for her husband's hand and squeezed it – the crotchety, moody man to whom she'd been married for the past twenty years – and I felt her despair at the realisation that he didn't know what had happened to her during the night, that he would never know, that for all he knew she was glum because the dog was dead.

  How odd. I knew, a little boy of twelve, and her husband did not. And it would be like this forever.

  Pryce said, 'Good shooting, Mrs Kemp. I mean, yesterday. I was impressed. And I say that as a bit of an expert myself.'

  How odd, that he could look at her, that he could speak to her, that he was not dumb with shame . . . I remember these thoughts running through my head, I remember opening my mouth to speak them. But my mouth opened and closed, my tongue was still, and I just stared at him while the ideas trickled away and left my head empty.

  Sophie snorted. 'You aren't an exp-p-p-pert on anything, Martin. What do you know?'

  He got up from the table and strolled across the hall. He peered into the trophy cabinets, found the one he was looking for and opened it. He took out a little tin cup, tarnished and dented, which looked as though it hadn't been cleaned in years. He blew into it and a cloud of dust flew out. 'School shooting champion, under-11,' he said. 'It's got my name on it.' He rubbed it up and down his sleeve.

  'It's p-p-pathetic,' Sophie said. 'You're pathetic.'

  'I'm inclined to agree.' Dr Kemp leaned to the fire and put another log on it. He did it in a somehow proprietorial way, as if to assert that it was his fire, in his house, where he should have been enjoying Christmas with his wife. He sat back in his armchair, assuming an air of magnanimity. 'Really, Pryce, I don't want to disparage your prowess as a marksman. I meant it yesterday when I said that my wife and I do all we can for all the boys in our care. But you wouldn't scoff so much if you'd made any significant achievement at Foxwood.' He waved his empty wine glass towards the honours boards on the walls. 'These are the boys who took a pride in the gifts that God gave them. I don't see your name, although your brother's is there. Of course you were a valued member of the school and, like it or not, you'll always have a love of music that we fostered in you. But your brother had a perfect ear, and he had self-discipline. Scott, your name will be up there too, if you . . .'

  'Well, I'm proud of this.' Pryce interrupted the headmaster with an elaborate show of polishing the cup, breathing on it, rubbing it, holding it to the light as though it were a priceless antique. 'Apart from my initials carved into an old desk, it's the only sign that I was ever here.'

  'And what about your brother?' All of a sudden, Mrs Kemp's voice rang clear and strong. 'Tell us about Jeremy.'

  Pryce hesitated, taken aback by her intervention. He tried a little swagger, a laconic smile.
'Why do you want to talk about Jeremy, when you've got me here?'

  'He went to Oxford, didn't he? He won a choral scholarship.' She made the points and pressed them home. 'Come along, Martin, we've acknowledged the sum of your achievements: at school you were the under-11 shooting champion, and now you're a salesman with a big car. How's Jeremy getting on?'

  Turning to the girl, who'd swung her head so low that her fringe of hair completely covered her face, she added, 'Jeremy was a favourite of ours, Sophie, one of our brightest and best. You were telling me you'd met him a few days ago . . .'

  'Yes, as a matter of fact Sophie has met Jeremy,' Pryce put in quickly. 'I introduced her to him in his college rooms last week. They got on rather well – didn't you, Sophie?' She didn't look up. His voice was very soft, but something in the way he spoke made a curious pause, an uneven beat in the pulse of the conversation – as though everyone in the room had stopped breathing. 'But we'll deal with Jeremy later. He's on the agenda.'

  'What do you mean?' Mrs Kemp said. 'What agenda?'

  Sophie was crying. She made not a sound, but her shoulders heaved and shuddered in a strange, silent convulsion. The Kemps stared at her. I stared at Pryce.

  Slowly, with great deliberation, Pryce ticked the items on his fingers. 'There was the dog, there was Mrs Kemp, there's Jeremy, and there's Dr Kemp. All in good time.'

  A longer silence. The flutter of the fire. A little gasping sob from the girl.

  Mrs Kemp whispered, 'What do you want with us?'

  'I don't understand,' the headmaster blustered. 'What are you talking about?'

  Pryce moved to the hearth, reached up and put the tin cup on the mantelpiece. He stepped back and appraised it. Then he turned to us, and he licked his lips with a flickering, snakelike tongue. His eyes were cold and empty.

  'It's Christmas,' he whispered. 'Let's have a game.'

  * * *

  'Get the keys,' he said to me. 'There's a good boy.'