Perfect Gallows Read online

  Cousin Blue did almost all the talking, mainly about the years before the First War, trilling and giggling as she sweetened every scene into panto-fairy prettiness—Christmases in the sun above the spread vineyards of Constantia, Mediterranean dusks viewed from under the awnings of Diamond, tennis parties at The Mimms, Fourths of June at Eton, Goodwood trips in the trio of Silver Ghosts. Cousin Brown’s deep-voiced contradictions added an occasional demon-king note. Charles, between them at the bottom of the table, played a quavering Prince Charming—not a difficult part, but well done. Andrew began to see what Cousin Brown meant about the problem of disproving his story. You couldn’t pin him down in a falsehood or contradiction, ask him about things Cousin May couldn’t prompt him on—Eton, or his regiment, for instance. There were just one or two weak spots. You could go to Hull, find out if a shelter had been bombed that winter, check the hospital records … But here, even when he did admit to a memory, it was in a dreamy way, as if he couldn’t be quite sure. He didn’t make the mistake of remembering too much, either.

  “You can’t have forgotten tripping Canon Golightly into the perch-pond!” Cousin Blue cried. “It was one of the funniest things!”

  “I’m afraid for the moment … perhaps it will come back.”

  “Very likely,” said Cousin Brown.

  Charles nodded, smiling, deaf to the tone of doubt. Andrew was not very well placed to watch him. Charles was at the far end of the table and Andrew was along the left-hand side, next to Uncle Vole. The noise of the old man’s scrapings and gobblings drowned most of Charles’s murmurs. Andrew hadn’t seen his great-uncle for nearly three weeks now, and he looked a lot shakier than last time. The Schoolroom was almost too warm for comfort, but the trembling mottled hands seemed hardly able to hold the spoon and fork, and though Samuel only half-filled the glass it seldom reached the blue-lipped mouth without spilling. It took Andrew a little while to realize that though Uncle Vole’s face was bent right down over his plate to eat, his eyes were rolled up under the bristling brows to peer along the table. The big silver ornament that usually stood in the middle was missing too.

  About halfway through the meal Uncle Vole spoke for the first time. The wine was white, South African—it had been the cue for Cousin Blue’s Constantia memories—and as Samuel floated silently up to fill Charles’s glass for the third time Cousin Blue made a little ripple of tongue-clicks and shook her index finger urgently, just above table level. Charles put out his hand to cover his glass.

  “Fill it up,” snarled Uncle Vole.

  The glass was filled, but from then on remained untouched, though once when Charles reached absent-mindedly for it he snatched his hand back, clearly in response to a kick under the table. The glasses, Andrew now noticed were larger than usual. His own had only been filled once and there was a jug of water in his reach, but not in Charles’s. Usually during suppers in the Schoolroom Samuel stood between the sideboard and the door to the lift, but this evening he had chosen a different place, rather awkward because the table was a bit too wide for the room, almost directly behind Cousin Blue’s chair. He could see Charles’s face from there.

  Was Charles aware that he was performing to so intent an audience? If so, he gave no sign. When Cousin Elspeth finally pushed her chair back he instantly rose to help Cousin Blue with hers and then almost dashed to the door to open and hold it, courtier-fashion, clearly expecting to follow the Cousins and Andrew out.

  There was a snorting bellow from the table.

  “Hey! You two! Where you off to?”

  “Don’t be too long,” trilled Cousin Blue from the doorway. She hissed a couple of words to Charles, who nodded, closed the door and came back to the chair which Samuel was holding for him on Uncle Vole’s right. Samuel poured the first glasses of port, wheeled the dumb waiter with the used dishes into the lift and squeezed in beside it. The doors hissed shut and the lift whined down. There was nowhere for him to listen from up here, Andrew realized.

  They sat in silence, Uncle Vole sucking and sluicing, Charles frowning as he sipped, apparently lost in a puzzling dream, but tense enough to spill when the old man spoke.

  “Charles, uh?”

  “Yes, sir. Pretty well sure of it now.”

  “More ’n I am, I can tell you. Know who this other little bugger is?”

  “Er … Andrew … our cousin, May said?”

  “Tell yer he hoped I was going to leave him the house till you turned up?”

  “Good lord! No, I don’t think she … My memory, you know.”

  “Drink up, man. Let’s see what yer made of. I’ve told yer now. What d’yer think about it?”

  “About …?”

  “Andrew, yer fool! Not leaving the little bugger the house!”

  “Oh … I suppose … but my dear Andrew, I can’t say how sorry I am that things should have turned out like this.”

  Andrew let Adrian do the shrug and smile—our hero at life’s gaming-table, losing his whole estate with a laugh.

  “Not much money in acting, eh?” cackled Uncle Vole.

  “It’s a dog’s life,” said Charles.

  “What yer know about it?”

  “Well, ah …” said Charles, twisting his empty glass by the stem, frowning as though he wasn’t aware of having drunk the wine.

  “He’s the one’s going to be an actor,” said Uncle Vole.

  “Have you been on the stage, sir?” said Andrew.

  “Me? Well … you know, I do seem to remember …”

  “Jesus bloody Christ!” said Uncle Vole. “D’yer mean all I’ve got is a choice between a couple of fairies?”

  Charles flicked a glance at Andrew, one eyebrow slightly raised. It was natural—Uncle Vole’s line in theatre-criticism would have baffled any stranger—but was there, as well as the appeal for help, a momentary hint of collusion, as if from a colleague? Of course, all Charles might be vaguely remembering was his long-ago performances here at The Mimms, his Aguecheek, his Demetrius.

  “Sir Arnold doesn’t care for actors,” said Andrew. “He says we’re all queers. In fact the first time I came here he told me to go away because he said I was a bugger who wouldn’t get drunk and couldn’t talk women.”

  He spoke in a clinical voice as if telling a fellow-doctor the symptoms of a madness. The tone must have stung a bit.

  “Little pansy runt,” snarled Uncle Vole. “Fill yer glass, man. Not you, boy. You stick to water. Don’t want to make you spew on the table.”

  Charles did as he was told and tilted his chair back, cradling his glass in his hand.

  “Women,” he murmured.

  He took a gulp and nodded, as if having made up his mind.

  “They’re all the same,” said Uncle Vole.

  “Ah, yes, but all different too,” said Charles. “F’rinstance, I remember a French lass. Said she was French, that is, but she had a Chinese look. What was her name? Mimi? Fifi? Something like that. Did an act with a knife-thrower …”

  Uncle Vole grabbed the decanter, sloshed himself some more port and huddled forward to listen. The story was obviously a recitation piece, similar in a much posher way to the Dame’s saga about the siren, but Charles told it teasingly, falling into apparent reveries and having to be snarled awake, or rambling off on diversions about circus life. Though he said he had slept with the girl and described doing so he didn’t claim to have played a part in the main incident, which concerned the anatomical reasons for her preference of a hunchback clown to the circus strong man.

  Uncle Vole sat twitching and snuffling.

  “Bitches are all the same,” he said. “Seen it time and again, back in the Cape, white women getting on heat for a nigger boy. Why, me own cook here, simple country girl you’d have thought, she got it into her head she wanted to marry my Zulu boy. Everyone else said she was stark raving, not me. I knew what she was after. Provided it d
oesn’t spoil her cooking, I said, having all that dark meat in her pot. Get it? All that dark meat in her pot.”

  Charles produced the guffaw demanded, finished his glass and refilled it. Uncle Vole sat cackling, then swung to Andrew. “Learnt to talk better than milk-sop yet?”

  “I could, but I’m not going to.”

  “Still not been with a woman?”

  “I have.”

  “Tell us, then.”

  “No.”

  “Made a mess of it, of course.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t want us to watch your maiden blushes?”

  Of course Uncle Vole was pretending to set up a sort of competition with The Mimms as the prize, and Andrew could easily have talked about Lily in a way that would warm the old brute’s blood for a minute or two, but he had no intention of doing so, any more than he would have talked to anyone (except Mum, and she was dead) about what he was going to do and be as an actor. Both were gifts, powers he could command thanks to the mysterious daemon inside him, which must not be taken for granted by talking about them. It wasn’t the physical ability to perform that mattered—everybody had that, almost. It was the power that had made Lily say yes, that had made Jean stand still and be kissed—and was also going to make the crammed tiers of a theatre stop their breathing at a gesture, their souls swaying all with one movement, reeds in his wind … There’s a very extraordinary thing about Ariel, Cousin Brown had said. No other character in the play, not Miranda, not even Caliban, knows he exists. If they did then Prospero might lose his power over him. And it is Ariel who makes the whole plot happen. All the characters dance to his tunes, heard or unheard.

  “I just don’t talk about them,” said Andrew.

  “More’n one, hey?”

  Andrew nodded to Charles, returning the flash of collusion, and rose.

  “Siddown, you,” said Uncle Vole.

  “Thank you for supper, sir,” said Andrew, and left.

  Despite what she’d said on leaving the Schoolroom Andrew was surprised to find Cousin Blue in the Boudoir, looking through a leather-bound photograph album. She glanced up at his entrance, saw he was alone, and sighed.

  “No bridge tonight, Cousin May?”

  “Poor May’s had a squabble with General Odway,” said Cousin Brown.

  “These Americans,” said Cousin Blue. “Really, I think the Russians would be more considerate. They are much too fond of winning. If they lose, they seem to think that someone must be cheating them.”

  “He didn’t!” said Andrew, all sympathetic shock.

  “Let us not talk about it,” said Cousin Blue. “Come and see what I have found. I was going to show them to Charles.”

  Cousin Brown was frowning her way through one of her diaries, still apparently hunting for a play in which she might have seen Charles act, so Andrew settled on the bungy sofa beside Cousin Blue. She was wearing a lot of flowery girlish scent, he noticed.

  It wasn’t like an ordinary snapshot album. The pictures were brown and not shiny, but very clear. Each of them filled a whole page. The first showed a big white bungalow with a mountain behind it. Spiky and cactusy plants grew in the garden. You could guess how bright the sunlight was from the blackness beneath the heavy verandah. Under the photograph a clear round hand had written the words “South Mimms”. The next picture was of children having tea on a rug in the same garden under the shadow of a leaning tree with deep-fissured bark. A white nursemaid supervised from a canvas chair. “M., C., Nanny Bounce, E.” said the caption.

  “That was us,” said Cousin Blue. “I was only a baby, so of course I don’t remember.”

  “Who took them?” asked Andrew.

  “Mother did. It was her hobby. She was rather clever at it. She did all the messing about afterwards—what’s it called?—too.”

  “Developing.”

  “Of course.”

  They leafed slowly on. Andrew looked at the photographs with interest. You never knew. Just possibly some time he might come across a part which needed a feel for that particular way of life, and the album seemed to hold it trapped in its own time, not just the moustaches and the women’s hats and the glittering carriages and the sporting guns, but the whole feel of a society in its landscape. It was something about the sky, perhaps. You could feel the country going endlessly on and on. Andrew could even imagine, far away up north, a white man who might actually have come to one of the parties, sitting in a native hut and listening to an old blind witch-doctor telling him the story of Nada. In fact there were very few darkies in any of the pictures. Sometimes a servant with a tray of drinks. Once a line of men and women doing something in a vineyard. It was almost a shock when Cousin Blue turned a page and twisted the album round because the photograph was higher than it was wide and had been pasted in sideways.

  Two figures stood in the foreground. Their stunted shadows showed it must be almost noon. One was a white boy, about six, the other a black adult. The darkie was wearing the servants’ clothes Andrew had seen in earlier photographs, bare feet, white trousers, a thigh-length white jacket. The white child was wearing nothing except a solar topi. “Master and Man!” said the caption.

  The exclamation mark was justified. The picture was startling, only partly because in all the other pictures the children had been rather over-dressed. The standard throughout the album was high (“Mother used to throw hundreds away,” Cousin Blue had said) but this one was special. It had energy, presence. It was a whole play stilled into an instant. The black man stared at the camera with a clear, calm gaze. The white boy’s face was invisible in the shadow of his hat with the result that the focal point of his figure became the little dangling penis. The background was out of focus but the figures were sharp, with every wrinkle of flesh and fold of cloth exact.

  “That’s Charlie and Samuel, of course,” said Cousin Blue. “That’s the one I’m longing to show him. Isn’t it quaint? It was a bit naughty of Mother to take him like that—we were never let run around without any clothes, like children used to after the war. But Mother said it was Art, so it didn’t count. I do wish he would come!”

  She rose with a sigh and left the room. Cousin Brown at once looked up from her diary.

  “Of course,” she said, “what happened was that May decided she would rather be with Charles in the evenings. They are like young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, almost, too ridiculous. Be that as may be, she chose to take umbrage at one of General Odway’s jocularities—his style of badinage is decidedly heavy-handed. I have no doubt that May is a better player than he, but she took the opportunity to suggest to him in front of his officers that that was the case, and the upshot, among other things is that she can no longer gorge herself on tinned American butter. The arrangement has caused endless friction below stairs, and everyone but May is delighted that it should cease. She is far from unintelligent, but she has never been able to imagine that an action may have other results, besides the one she is set on. Tell me quickly, what do you make of Charles?”

  “He good as let on he’d been an actor.”

  “Did he now?”

  “But he might have been thinking about your plays here. You said he did a good Aguecheek.”

  “And an excellent Lucius O’Trigger Do you know …”

  She paused. A mischievous look, a sudden likeness to her sister, came into her face.

  “Antonio has dropped out,” she said. “I had guessed she might.”

  “It’s quite a big part.”

  “Ah, but Alonso—Mrs Ferris, you know—has come along out of all recognition. I was regretting that I had not given her more. Suppose she were to take Sebastian, then I might persuade Charles to attempt Antonio, which is only some thirty lines.”

  “And all ‘Prithee, peace’ until that last scene.”

  “May will not like it, of course, but … Well, dear, are the gentlem
en still enjoying themselves?”

  Cousin Blue ignored the sprightly malice of the question, sighed, and put the album away. Andrew had risen as she came in and was waiting for her to sit down, but she did not return to the sofa. Instead she drew a chair up to a three-legged table, cleared the knick-knacks to one side and started to lay out a game of patience. After a couple of minutes she looked up.

  “Andrew, dear, I’m afraid I must ask you to help Samuel put my brother to bed. You know, Father can be a brute, a real brute. No, not yet—they are still talking. It is enough to make one weep.”

  Charles sat slumped with his head on his arms across the Schoolroom table, snorting.

  “I think I can manage the shoulders,” said Andrew. “He can’t weigh much.”

  “Easier each take one arm,” said Samuel. “Like this, look. He won’t feel nothing.”

  “What about Sir Arnold?”

  “I just walked him to bed. Tomorrow he’ll feel pretty bad. Stay in bed, maybe. He’s not been too well. Just made the effort for tonight. Wanted to see the pair of you together.”

  “I’m afraid I refused to play.”

  “You did right. He’ll respect you better for that.”

  Moving as though they had rehearsed the routine for days they eased the inert torso up and twisted the body sideways on the chair. Andrew supported the shoulders while Samuel knelt and removed the shoes. With an elbow under each armpit they hauled the body out into the corridor. The heels slithered, made a ghostly thumping on the half-flight of stairs up to the family bedrooms, then returned to their slither along the soft carpet. In what thirty years ago had been Charles’s bedroom they sat the body on an upright chair.

  “If you’ll hold his shoulders again, please,” said. Samuel. He went to the mahogany wash-stand and fetched a face-towel and a large piss pot, decorated with Chinese figures. “Now pull him up, high as you can. Let go when I say.