Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  It was not unusual, therefore, for him to display signs of upset which needn’t unduly concern us.

  ‘What’s torn it, Wessy?’ asked Doctor Bani-Sadr, in order to humour him.

  Mr Wessner took a deep breath before answering.

  ‘I have, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Torn what, though?’ said Mr Bretwalda. ‘Come on man, spit it out!’

  ‘It!’ repeated Wessner, windmilling his arms to encompass the entirety of the universe. ‘Everything!’

  Up to that moment, Mr Disvan had been engrossed in studying his vast copy of the Koran but, on hearing Wessner say this, he started to pay close heed.

  The landlord, leaning over the bar and half paying attention to our conversation, also picked up on this point.

  ‘You’ve had enough, Wessy,’ he said in a reasonably kind way; ‘no more for you tonight.’

  Mr Wessner was outraged.

  ‘This is my first one today!’ he shouted. ‘I’m as sober as a... no, more sober than a judge! I’ll prove it—look at my hand.’

  He held his palm out, palm down, for our perusal. We politely observed that it was shaking wildly, as usual.

  Mr Wessner started to feel that he was being baited and the nanosecond fuse of his temper began to burn. We recognised the signs of him arming himself with words from his vocabulary of vitriol.

  Happily, Mr Disvan intervened and at least postponed the explosion.

  ‘When you say you’ve “torn it”,’ he said, sweeping the air with his gaze to mimic Wessner’s gesture, ‘would you care to expand on that?’

  ‘Not really,’ answered Mr Wessner. ‘Not after I’ve been laughed at.’

  ‘Not even if I absolutely insist?’ said Disvan in a neutral tone that admirably expressed menace without the crudity of threats.

  We hadn’t realised that this was a matter of any import. Mr Disvan clearly thought otherwise. Everyone sat up and looked at Mr Wessner.

  ‘On reflection,’ he said slowly, in a dignified rearguard action, ‘perhaps I do owe you all an explanation. But, if I’m going to do that, you’d best come to my house. There’s something there I want you to look into.’

  * * *

  The ‘it’ that Mr Wessner had torn, we found hanging in mid-air in his kitchen. The half dozen of us who’d accepted his invitation, stared at the small, jagged rend in the fabric of creation and wondered what to say.

  It looked like a window made by a hasty workman, but the similarity ended there. A window requires some form of support and offers a perspective between two proximate areas. The ‘it’, however, simply hung in position, entirely unaided, and the view it provided was most definitely not of Mr Wessner’s kitchen.

  For a start, it seemed to be quite dark beyond the ‘window’, whereas the kitchen was flooded with electric light. Where we would have expected to see the top of the fridge-freezer and a dust-covered spice rack, there was a vista of what looked like a wall, in another room altogether.

  Mr Disvan crossed the room and stood on tip-toe, his fingers clutching the bottom edge of the tear, in order to peer in. He looked left and right, tested the strength of the ‘frame’ with his hands and, at long last, passed judgement by saying, ‘Hmmmm...’

  We awaited something a little more illuminating, but it showed no signs of arriving. Predictably, and not unreasonably, Mr Wessner’s patience broke first.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what’s in there, for God’s sake?’

  Mr Disvan looked hurt, sensitive as ever to breaches of the third commandment.

  ‘There’s no need to lose your temper,’ he said. ‘I should imagine that’s what started all this.’ He waved his hand to indicate the ‘window’. ‘Anyway, do you mean to say you haven’t looked in there yourself?’

  Mr Wessner looked abashed.

  ‘Well, no... I was so surprised when it happened, I thought I’d better go and get some advice first.’

  To avoid injuring our friend’s delicate sensitivities, we all tried to look stony faced and inscrutable. For all his occasionally violent tongue, Mr Wessner was not known for a ‘derring-do’ attitude to life and he was painfully aware of it. The effect of our thoughtfulness was, of course, to increase his embarrassment

  ‘What did you want me to do,’ he said in the silence that followed, ‘crawl straight through?’

  ‘Of course not, of course not,’ said Disvan in an effort to placate. ‘I’m sure you acted for the best. Now, why don’t you lead us into the living room and explain it all to us over a drink?’

  Mr Wessner’s response was sphinx-like.

  ‘Drink? he said. ‘Drink! It’s drink that’s responsible for this. If I’d had enough drink, none of this would have happened!’

  * * *

  Seated (drinkless) on the various randomly acquired bits of furniture in the ‘living room’, we waited for Mr Wessner to explain the riddle.

  ‘It had been a really hard day at the town hall,’ he started, by way of introduction.

  ‘Ha!’ laughed the landlord, before Disvan hushed him to silence.

  ‘It had,’ Wessner insisted. ‘Some of my memos had gone astray in the internal post, the borough treasurer was in a funny mood—you know how it is...’

  We didn’t, but let it pass.

  ‘So, all in all, when I got home, having been rained on all the way, I was feeling pretty fractious. What should I find on the doormat but a lot of bills waiting for me. Not only that, but there was a letter demanding money with menaces.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mr Patel, his interest aroused. ‘Did you tell the police?’

  Mr Wessner furrowed his brow.

  ‘What for? It was from my ex-wife’s solicitors, and the police are in league with them. Anyway, that was nearly the last straw—or so it seemed then. “I need a drink,” I thought, and went into the kitchen to fetch one. It was then I remembered that I should have gone shopping in the lunch hour but hadn’t had the time, what with the memos and everything. Needless to say, restocking the drinks cabinet had been item number one on the shopping list and now, to quote a phrase, the cupboard was bare.

  ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘chin up; there’s a bottle of champagne in the fridge that you’ve been saving, on the off-chance you’ll ever have something to celebrate again. Splash out and salvage the day with that.

  ‘So I did. Then the fridge door joined the conspiracy against me. Somehow, Lord knows why, the handle sort of trapped my hand and down goes the bottle to the floor—SMASH! And that really was the last straw.

  ‘I can remember staring up at the heavens, at a loss for something bad enough to say. When I’d finished my message to the Almighty, I looked down and saw that there were champagne splashes all over my newly dry-cleaned suit. Thereafter, it’s all a bit blurred but I recall wanting to get to grips with the fates that were doing this to me. I wanted to get my hands on the person responsible and see how they liked being mucked about.

  ‘It sounds a bit childish, I know, but I was so angry that I must have sort of scrabbled at the air in front of me with my nails—and it tore!’

  Involuntarily, we all turned to look at the closed door to the kitchen.

  ‘And then I decided to go to the Argyll,’ said Mr Wessner, briskly ending on an unconvincing note.

  Mr Disvan had his ‘heard it all before and was bored the first time’ expression on. Like supplicants at an ancient oracle, we waited for him to pronounce judgement on the matter. As happened in about fifty percent of such cases, we were wasting our time.

  ‘I must admit,’ he said eventually, ‘I did wonder about that pool of liquid and broken bottle on the floor. I know Mrs Wessner used to be a bit devil-may-care, but it’s not like you to leave a mess lying around.’

  Doctor Bani-Sadr shook his head in sad dismay and suggested we go and inspect Mr Wessner’s creation once again. We had all risen and were half way to the kitchen before Disvan abandoned whatever tangent it was he’d gone off on and agreed that this was a ‘good idea’.


  The ‘window’ hung there as before. We gathered before it, like tribesmen before a broken Kalashnikov, none of us caring to admit our total bafflement. This could have gone on all night had not Mr Patel proposed that, for want of something better to do, we all take a peek.

  One by one we did so, standing on tiptoe (except Mr Bretwalda who had no need) and peering into the half gloom of the ragged square.

  When my turn came, I saw that the ‘window’ looked not into another room, as I’d first thought, but into a corridor. Our vantage point was at the middle of its twenty foot length and at either end stout wooden doors shut off the view. A small amount of light was provided by what looked like two gas lamps, turned down very low, and the same number of narrow slit-windows in the opposite wall. Through the latter I could just glimpse a greenish country landscape at dusk.

  What held my attention more than anything else were the vast and colourful tapestries which covered the corridor’s walls. They appeared to depict the stages of a great sea battle in vivid, loving detail. Old style galleons exchanged exaggerated cannonades or grappled to allow their armoured crews to fight it out with pistol and half-pike. I was quite fascinated by the story unfolding before my eyes and would have studied it for far longer had I not felt a tap on my shoulder. Looking round, I saw that Doctor Bani-Sadr was waiting impatiently for his turn.

  A trifle reluctantly, I stepped down. Everyone was standing round the kitchen in unproductive silence. I thought, therefore, I might as well offer my own evaluation, for what it was worth.

  ‘Do you know what it reminds me of?’ I said. ‘Restoration England—you know, sort of late seventeenth century, to judge by the tapestries and the style of the doors and all that.’

  Mr Disvan raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t dare fault your knowledge of period style, Mr Oakley, but I don’t think they had gas lamps in the late seventeenth century, did they?’

  I hadn’t considered that, but declined to admit it. ‘That’s as may be, Mr Disvan, but all I’m saying is that it looks like a corridor in a Stuart period house.’

  ‘Fair enough, Mr Oakley. I was only pointing out a flaw in your theory for you.’

  Mr Wessner wasn’t happy and wanted to make sure we knew.

  ‘Theory?’ he said. ‘Theory? Are you seriously suggesting that we’ve been looking at the seventeenth century?’

  Disvan shrugged. ‘Why not? Have you got any better ideas?’

  He hadn’t but didn’t allow this to stop him.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he continued, ‘I’ve never heard anything so... far fetched.’

  ‘Fetched about three hundred years, if Mr Oakley is right,’ said the landlord with a grin, purely to infuriate Wessner even further.

  ‘I mean,’ said Wessner, grasping for objections, ‘what we can see in there is a corridor in big, classy sort of house. There wasn’t anything like that in seventeenth century Binscombe.’

  This seemed to offend Mr Disvan’s sense of patriotism.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ he said, almost angrily. ‘You weren’t there. Anyway, why assume it’s Binscombe in there? Why couldn’t it equally be another world, an alternative history, or even another dimension we can see?’

  Once again, we all turned, herd-like, to look at the ‘window’ as if it might vote for one of the explanations on offer. The view remained unchanged and silent however, but for the gentle hiss of the gas lamps.

  ‘Bah! Rubbish!’ said Mr Wessner unconvincingly.

  Mr Disvan turned on him.

  ‘Well, if you’re so sceptical,’ he said, ‘why don’t you go and investigate and find out the truth for yourself? There’s just about room for a little chap like you to squeeze through.’

  The diminutive Mr Wessner suddenly found the floor terribly fascinating.

  ‘I... might pop my head through occasionally,’ he said at length, ‘but I don’t think it would be wise for anyone to actually go in. I mean, who knows what’s in there?’

  ‘Who indeed?’ said Disvan.

  The landlord, obviously in one of his more tactful phases, stepped in to support the crestfallen Wessner.

  ‘I reckon you’re right, Wessy,’ he said. ‘It’s only a rotten old corridor, when all’s said and done. Why don’t you just mend what you’ve torn and then we’ll all go back for a drink and forget all about it.’

  Mr Wessner instantly brightened up.

  ‘That’s a very good idea,’ he said. ‘Like you say; you see one corridor, you’ve seen ‘em all.’

  I was going to disagree with this because I quite liked some corridors and not others, but, with an eloquent gesture, Mr Disvan suggested that I should let things be.

  Wessner went up to the ‘window’ and, I suppose, repeated the movements that had led to its creation. In a way that isn’t easy to describe, he managed after much trouble to gather up a loose flap of our world that was hanging down from the ‘window’s’ base and tried to fix it over the view of the corridor. Several times he almost succeeded in covering the tear so that there was nearly an uninterrupted perspective of the kitchen once more. However, even his best attempts left gaps at the edges through which the corridor could be glimpsed. Worse still, when Wessner took his hands away, the damaged piece of reality straightaway fell back down like an unpasted strip of wallpaper. After a few moments of fruitless efforts, he gave up. The ‘window’ remained hanging there, quietly triumphant.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Disvan slowly, ‘it looks like you really have torn it.’

  * * *

  Several weeks went by and, from being played in a low key, the affair of Mr Wessner’s do-it-yourself home improvement passed into positive inaudibly. Mr Wessner still paid his normal number of visits to the Argyll, and if he was a little more taciturn than before that was both understandable and not unwelcome.

  In one sense, the mysterious ‘window’, while a pleasant subject for speculation, was also—since it remained unexplored and unexplained—a reminder of our lack of knowledge and pioneer spirit. Therefore, when the topic seemed to crop up in conversation less and less, those of us ‘in the know’ were happy to go along with the process and let the subject drop. It was destined to become, or so I thought, just another piece of the disquieting mental furniture that was part and parcel of living in Binscombe.

  In the event, this was only partly so, for since we declined to probe the ‘window’ world’s secrets, it came forth, in one form or another, to have a look at us.

  Events came to a head, as they so often did, one Friday night in the Argyll. Mr Wessner had just arrived and, as an opening conversational gambit, the landlord asked him how ‘his window thing’ was coming along. Wessner gave the question a lot more thought than it was intended to inspire and considered his answer very carefully. Assuming that something had happened, we were all agog.

  ‘It hasn’t come along at all,’ he said at last. ‘Nothing ever seems to change in there—apart from the fact that the gas lamps have gone off. I think they’ve run out of fuel or something. Anyway, you never hear any noise or see anyone in the corridor. I wonder if it’s a deserted world?’

  ‘So you’ve been poking your head through to have a look around, have you?’ asked Mr Disvan with interest.

  ‘Oh yes, all the time,’ said Wessner, visibly cheering up now that someone had asked the right question. ‘I’m not frightened of the thing, you know. I’ve spent hours leaning in, staring at those tapestries and the view through the slit windows. It gives me something to do in the evenings.’

  Disvan nodded, apparently satisfied by this response, and returned to his Islamic holy book.

  Conversation faltered a little after Wessner’s exhaustive answer, and people resumed their reading or gazing into space or whatever. It was the pattern that such a silence would be tolerated for three or four minutes before someone else in the group would feel obliged to revive the evening with a new subject for talk. This unwritten rule of Argyll life eventually prompted D
octor Bani-Sadr to put down his newspaper.

  ‘There’s an interesting story in the Advertiser,’ he said.

  ‘Makes a change,’ said the landlord.

  ‘Apparently,’ continued the Doctor, unthrown by this, ‘to mark the 400th anniversary of the Armada, there’s going to be a chain of commemorative beacons lit on the sites of the original ones.’

  ‘Really?’ said Disvan with obvious pleasure at this bit of news. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it. Beacons on Binscombe Ridge and out at Pewley, eh?’

  Doctor Bani-Sadr consulted his source.

  ‘Not according to this. It says Binscombe Ridge and Hascombe Hill.’

  Disvan bristled. ‘What nonsense. There was no beacon at Hascombe.’

  Ever ready, I swept down on Disvan’s lack of caution. ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I just do,’ he answered, colouring up slightly.

  I would have pressed home my rare advantage had not someone else spoken and things then taken a more imperative turn.

  Father Wiltshire, the local Roman Catholic priest, was honouring us with a visit that evening. A man who combined the necessary intimidation with a gentle liberality and sly humour acceptable even to a pagan like myself, he was a frequent and welcome attendant at our Argyll soirees. He’d listened to Doctor Bani-Sadr’s announcement with great interest.

  ‘I don’t see much to celebrate in that sad occasion,’ he said jokingly, ‘If I had my way, the Armada would have won!’

  We’d started our ‘polite amusement’ response when Mr Wessner brought proceedings to an emergency stop. He looked puzzledly at Father Wiltshire and said, ‘But they did win, Deo Gratias, didn’t they?’

  I could see that the priest first thought to treat the remark as a jest but, observing Wessner’s transparent sincerity, he changed his tone.