The Marvellous Boy

by Peter Corris

It got to me, the simple, blind command, trampling on the wounded, rough-riding over the lower ranks. I was coiled up tight and my temper snapped.

  “Listen to me,” I snarled into the phone. “He’s been out in the real world doing dirty things with some dirty people. He’s hurt and he needs help. I’ll tell you this, he’s more like Henry Brain than a Chatterton right now.”

  The silence again; I could imagine her struggling against the impulse to strike down a subordinate, knowing that she was a crippled old lady locked up in a big house and that what she most wanted in the world couldn’t quite be bought, not outright.

  “Could you be more specific, Mr. Hardy, about my grandson’s condition,” she said at last, “and about your plans?”

  I wanted to say, he’s simple-minded from Mogadon and liquor and he looks like a Sumo wrestler, but what good would it have done? She could probably have summoned up enough doctors and lawyers to get her hands on Baudin there and then if she had a mind to. It was probably then that I admitted to myself that I was interested in the problem of renovating Warwick Baudin. In my business I saw so many people putting themselves into this sort of nose-dive, I even gave them a nudge when I had to. It would be interesting to try to pull someone out of it. Gently, gently was the way with her ladyship.

  “There is a drug problem, Lady Catherine,” I said quietly, “and the question of rebuilding his self-confidence.” I thought that’d reach her. No Chatterton ever liked to be without a full measure of that.

  “You can provide this care, Mr. Hardy? Surely a doctor . . .”

  Why didn’t I just turn him over to her? What did I care how he handled it or what she thought of him? Maybe it was that first picture, with the record-breaking 440 just behind him and the whole world ahead. Maybe it was the wish to do a good, neat job and tie the package with ribbon. Maybe it was something else . . .”

  “I’ll have a doctor helping me,” I said. “He needs close attention from someone expert in watching people. A wrong move and he might take off and we’d have the same sorry business all over again.”

  She didn’t like it but she came around. She gave me a month and agreed to meet expenses and pay me a salary. We didn’t discuss the bonus but I had the impression that it was still in the offing. Towards the end of the conversation she started to lose faith and seemed about to exercise her God-given right to change her mind. She was subtle about it though, referring to her health and suggesting that she didn’t have long to go. I thought she probably had a month and told her so.

  “You are impertinent, Mr. Hardy,” she said. “You have your month and not a day more. It will be almost Christmas.”

  It was hard to think of the snoring slob upstairs as a present but, if that was how she wanted it, it was okay with me.

  “How do you get on with Mrs. McMahon?”

  “Oh, a charming person, quite marvelous. But I suppose Verna will be back soon.”

  “She won’t be back,” I said. “She was part of the nastiness. She was part of a plan to keep your grandson’s identity hidden.”

  This was enough to consign her to the fourth circle of outer darkness. “I see,” she said icily; like all autocrats she valued loyalty.

  “How’re the memoirs going?” I asked, to needle her.

  “Oh, quite well.”

  This would be the end of them I thought, and I’d probably done the public a service there. Since I had her on the defensive I gave her one last thrust.

  “You might care to contact your daughter, Lady Catherine.”

  “Bettina?” Her voice was sharp and anxious. “What has she got to do with this?”

  “She can vouch for what I say. She’s met her son.”

  I left her to think that one over, spoke to Mrs. McMahon again about money matters, and rang off. I was tired and not as drunk as I intended to be. While I changed that I thought about Warwick Baudin and Lady C. and wondered whether I’d done either of them a favour. He could prove as big a headache for her as he had for his wise old foster father. On the other hand, despite her protestations, she could keep him waiting for his money for a long while yet. Maybe they deserved each other.

  25

  It started badly early the next morning. I came up slowly out of a foggy, boozy sleep to hear something crashing on the stairs. When I got out there he was lying at the bottom of the stairs with his limbs at all angles like a crashed hang-glider. He was unconscious but breathing steadily. I propped him up a bit and made coffee. His eyes were flickering open when I came back.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said in that same, thickened, tongue-tied voice.

  “The name’s Hardy. Have some coffee.” I handed him the mug and he looked at it indifferently.

  “Shit, I’ve got a head,” he mumbled. “Got anything stronger?”

  “Not for you boy. You’re on the wagon.”

  He sneered at me and drank some of the scalding coffee without seeming to notice how hot it was. All he had on was a pair of underpants and I looked him over appraisingly. The remnants of his athlete’s physique were still there, buried under the fat. There were signs that his muscles weren’t too far gone and he’d scrub up fairly well with the fat sweated off. His face was ghastly though, heavy bearded, scummy and bluish pale. I was glad I hadn’t yielded to Lady Catherine’s wish to see him. I doubt she’d have accepted him as the genuine article. He saw me assessing him and sneered some more.

  “Hardy means fuck-all to me,” he growled. “I never heard of you. I’m going.” He started to struggle up and I pushed him down easily using my left hand.

  “Finish your coffee,” I said, “I’ve got a few things to tell you.”

  It took a while to get the message through to him and I had to push him around a few times to keep him listening. He was getting jumpier as the time passed. But eventually he got the picture. I got him a dressing gown and after a whole pot of coffee and my refusal to lace it with anything he was a quivering mess but very, very interested in his prospects. He told me about his long road to perdition and I was willing to listen. He’d had European and Southeast Asian adventures and was deep in trouble with the narcs and the drug heavies when he’d run into Russell James and Selby. After that it was a bit of a blur. He’d been blackmailing his foster brother for years over a sexual matter and he put one last bite on him to finance a big buy. That came unstuck and so did he. I got pieces of the story over the next few days but it boiled down to a total dependance on James and the drugs he supplied.

  I put his clothes in the wash and turned the bathroom and my shaving gear over to him. Then I took all the grog in the house—wine and beer in the fridge, scotch and brandy in a cupboard—and emptied it down the sink. My tobacco was lying around and I threw it in the rubbish. It was going to be tough all around and there was no sense in taking half-measures.

  Tough is what it was. He was keen enough to become one of the pampered rich and he took my word that his best move was to present himself to the old lady in tip-top shape. It was easier to say than do; his dependence on the drugs and the booze was deep and the withdrawal was like a slow roasting over a fire. I’ll say this for him, he tried. He fought the screaming pains and the chills and the black despair until he wept with the effort. Sangster was right, I had to watch him. After a week, in a phase of confidence he slipped away from me and got a bottle. When I found him in the park he’d drunk the lot and was sleeping peacefully under a tree. I over-reacted; I took him to a Turkish bath and sweated him unmercifully, then I walked him and then I ran him. I was suffering myself; I hadn’t had a drink or a cigarette for a week and I’d lost a lot of sleep and I was mean.

  Strangely, it turned out to be the right thing to do. He was losing weight fast after the first ten days and his jeans were getting loose around his waist. We went to get some clothes which I could charge to Lady C. and his eye was taken by some jogging gear. The shoes and shorts lay around the house for a few days while we drank coffee and watched television and screamed silently at each other.
I could feel the resistance building in him; it was partly a false confidence based on a few days’ clean living, partly an attraction to the degraded addict’s life where there are no responsibilities and a thousand excuses. The novelty of rehabilitation was wearing off when he read a newspaper article about a hop-step-and-jumper who’d cleared the metric equivalent of fifty-seven feet.

  “I did fifty-two myself, once,” he said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true. I could do a twenty-two foot long jump any day of the week and I tried the triple jump a few times and wasn’t bad. One day in practice I put it all together and I did a fifty-two-footer dead, wind-assisted.”

  I thought of my own triple-jumps into the rough school sand-pits—well short of fifty feet as my high jumps had been below six feet. My running was better and I looked at his brand new track shoes and felt a stirring, a nostalgia for jock-straps and starting blocks.

  “I knew you were a runner, what was your best hundred?”

  “Nine point six.”

  “Wind-assisted?”

  “No. I did a 440 in 48.4 once.”

  “I know.” I dug out the photoprint and showed it to him. He turned it over and over in his hands and looked down sadly at his gut.

  “God,” he said. “They were good days.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a lot of pressure to keep starring and there was that little shit Keir around the place. We were too different, I never felt right about my family. I was interested in the Law course and I did all right the first year, then the grog and the girls got to me. I had hundreds of girls . . .” He looked down again at his ruined figure. “I haven’t had one for a long time now.”

  One thing led to another and within a few days we were out running around Glebe in the early morning and evening. It was slow, lumbering stuff at first for both of us, but we built it up. We kept up the steam baths and he went in for massage—Lady Catherine’s boy wasn’t going to come cheap. The weight dropped off him because he went onto a diet as well—I only followed him part of the way there. My own weight went down and I felt I’d kicked the tobacco habit after a couple of weeks. But I was promising myself a bottle of Chivas Regal when all this was through.

  I got hooked on it and was pleased to see my stomach flatten and the wind get longer, but some of my weight loss was due to stress. I was nursemaid, trainer, and jailer and I was deeply worried about Kay Fletcher. I toyed with the idea of going down to Canberra but I’d have had to take Baudin along and that seemed like a very bad idea.

  So I worried. But we kept at it, partly because I had too much invested in a successful outcome by now, partly because the processes had acquired a momentum and interest of their own. It was childish certainly; we raised the number of laps and the distance we’d run, we lifted the number and rate of the sit-ups and press-ups. He was competitive to his back teeth and I’m a bit the same way, going back to schooldays when I occasionally won things against the more talented by sheer dint of effort.

  We competed. We went down to the University track and started running set distances against each other and against the clock. I beat him at first over his favoured 440 and on up to a mile. Then he ran an 880 in 2.35 and beat me by ten yards. He was standing there, cocky again, as I came past the post.

  “Licked you,” he said. He was breathing easily, not as easily as he pretended but pretty good—better than me.

  I remembered that I didn’t like him, that he’d rolled cars and scarred girls, pushed drugs and informed on his mates. I’d lost sight of this in the competition—that’s what competing does, it makes you insensitive to anything but yourself so that you could tolerate Jack the Ripper out there on the track.

  “So you should,” I said. “You’re ten years younger than me. I need a handicap—a yard a year.”

  His self-satisfied face went sullen. The features were clearer now that the fat had dropped off; he was still fleshy and probably always would be, a comfortable life and he’d need the best tailoring available, but you’d have to have been blind not to see the resemblance to Bettina and her late Dad. It was there in the high colour and the ‘up yours’ look in the eyes and efficient way they had of moving their bulk around.

  “You’re on,” he said. “Ten yards, tomorrow.” He turned away and I gestured at his back. He slid into some loosening up exercises and I creaked off towards the showers feeling old and resentful and used-up.

  He gave me the ten yards the next day and beat me going away. After nearly four weeks he could beat me at every distance and although he’d never be spring-heeled Jack again he was doing good jumps. I could still out-swim him but if we’d kept on he’d probably have taken care of that, too.

  A few days before the month was up Cy Sackville rang.

  “I’ve got news for you Cliff.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’ve bought a Greek island and you want me for head of security.”

  “Shut up, I’m busy. I’ve got a mountain of work.”

  “Great tan though.”

  “Cliff,” he sighed, “I’ll say this once. Old Booth died, young Booth has seen all the papers.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The late Sir Clive’s residence can’t be sold. It can be used to produce income to cover expenses but if anyone tries to sell it the Imperial Legal Society has an option to buy at a nominal price. How do you like it?”

  I thought about it for one or two seconds. “I love it.”

  “So glad. I’ll send a bill.”

  Twenty-four hours from D-Day I phoned Mrs. McMahon and made the arrangements. She told me that Verna Reid had picked up her traps and departed, also that a Mr. Booth had been in touch with Lady Catherine.

  “How did she take that?” I asked.

  “Oh, very well, she seemed very relieved. I gather there’s not much money, though.”

  “Aah,” I said.

  “But there is a cheque here for your fee—Mr. Booth spoke very highly of you.”

  “Mrs. McMahon,” I said, “I’m looking forward to meeting you.”

  Baudin went to bed early and I settled down with my notes on the case and the bottle I’d bought to celebrate. I drank and pushed bits of paper around in front of me. Baudin Senior had arranged his birth registration nicely and some doctor and some government clerk had got a little spending money. A mere push of the pen could transform him into a Chatterton who could sow his seed in some suitable girl and produce a line of Managing Directors and hostesses with exquisite taste. To hell with them. I drank some more. By a roundabout route I’d found out that cops weren’t interested in the demise of Henry Brain. An old drunk, dead in a toilet—why should they care? His room was ransacked but anyone of his fellow knights of the bottle could have done that. To hell with them, too.

  I had the level of the scotch well down when Baudin came into the room in his pyjamas. He looked at the bottle and sneered at me.

  “On the piss again, Hardy? What, no cigarette?” He was smug but his eyes were full of pain and a terrible question. I poured myself out a big one and took a drink.

  “How d’you feel about tomorrow. Nervous?”

  He shrugged. “Why should I be?” He watched me drinking like a lizard watches a fly. “It’ll be all right.” He stretched and yawned and for a second I thought he was going to ask for a drink. I don’t think I’d have known what to do if he had. But he just stood there, six-foot-two of ego, all in pretty good shape.

  “What will you do when you’re all set up?” I asked.

  “I think I’ll finish the Law course.”

  I had to laugh at that. I could see him in his after-shave and three piece suit, dealing. I laughed some more and drank.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing. Be sure to look up Honey Gully, won’t you? She’d love to see you.”

  He gave me a look that told me he hated me for what I knew about him. He was already living the role of Chatterton and Hardy was c
ast as an enemy. He marched out of the room and I got on with my bottle.

  26

  I delivered him on a fine, sparkling morning two days before Christmas. He was freshly shaved and barbered and he had a good tan. He had on a beige safari suit and everything that matched. He still had flab on him and there was a muddiness about his eyes, but you had to look very closely to see it. His teeth were good.

  Mrs. McMahon met us at the door; she was a middle-sized, middle-aged woman with grey hair and a restful face. She was grateful to me the way people sometimes are to those who help them get jobs they like.

  I introduced Baudin-Chatterton and they looked each other over warily. He hadn’t yet acquired that particular way of looking through servants but I was sure he’d pick it up. We went into the house and started on the great trek.

  “How do you get along with her ladyship?” I asked.

  Mrs. McMahon smiled. “She’s wilful, but she has her soft spots.”

  “I suppose your predecessor found that, too.”

  She stopped dead in her tracks. “That woman! I can’t begin to tell you the things she did. The things she paid for and didn’t pay for, it was a scandal.” We got moving again. “Did you know she drank?” she said.

  Touchy ground I thought. “Well, perhaps . . .’

  “Dreadfully, bottles everywhere.”

  “Dreadful,” I agreed. “But I expect you’ve sorted things out.”

  “Oh yes,” she glanced at the heir who was avoiding a bare patch in the carpet. “Mr. Booth has been very helpful and things are on a very sound footing now.”

  Lady Catherine Chatterton was waiting in state in the room I’d had an audience in the last time. There was colour in her cheeks and her white hair was waved softly. Her dress was new, a brown silk affair with white lace and it suited her. She looked as good as an old lady could.

  I made the introductions; he bowed over her hand, a little eighteenth century I thought, but it went down well enough.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hardy, my deepest thanks,” she said dismissively.