After Brock (11 page)

   

‘My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death….'

   

‘The photo showed a youth on a summer's day, longish dark hair parted in the middle, bare arms, bare feet, and a shirt unbuttoned all the way down and worn over trousers turned up as if to aid paddling in a stream. He was sitting on a tree stump, and looking ahead of him, but what held the attention – as it obviously did his – was the white fox terrier between his splayed legs. This dog's pointed, bright-eyed face wore an expression of true content, as one who could envisage no happier, safer place to be than where he actually was. His back legs were on the ground, but his front ones rested and dangled over the youth's right thigh. This youth was my dad – no doubt about that. He had his left hand on his dog's rump while his other hand stroked his back. I'd never known the Pete Kempsey I was seeing here, and I don't say this just because I was born so many years after the picture. But I've glimpsed him, I believe, every so often, especially when he thought you weren't looking his way.

‘There was something written at the foot of the photo, and I could tell it was in Dad's writing even though it was from way back. “Your former friend as he is now”. Strange words!

‘The cutting was from the
Wrexham Leader,
just a photograph headed
:

  

UFOs in the Berwyn Mountains – Anniversary Rally 

   

Time and poor quality reproduction made people and bleak mountain almost impossible to make out. Attached to this by paperclip was a sheet of notepaper with, again, Dad's writing on it. No address or date, just “Sam, Got this picture through college where we can get copies of practically every goddam paper there is. Don't you think it's time we got together too? Whatcher think? And here's what I look like, with my closest mate, Pete.” Then, after this the unnecessary words: NEVER SENT.'

‘And what do
I
think
?

‘I think there's a very great deal about my dad's past I know nothing about. '

Trade was excellent throughout Lydcastle in the golden weather days leading up to and including the Michaelmas Fair of 2009; High Flyers did really good business. ‘We're both rushed off our feet!' scribbled Nat, ‘and Dad actually has sold (at a good price) one of his two beloved Barrolettas from Guatemala. He'll be sorry to see it leave, but he's happy too, and feels vindicated. He truly deserves to do well and yet – everything isn't as it should be with the shop, and he should understand this. How terrible if he went under!' These are the very last two sentences in Nat's Journal. As doubtless he intended them to be.

The Fair itself was a real cornucopia of entertainments throughout Lydcastle's cheerful old centre: Morris dancers (West Midlands style), Street dancers (New York subway style), toffee-apple vendors, three brass bands competing and an accor-dionist for the duration, jugglers, ‘The Tiger's Last Chance' performing in the evenings on a platform underneath the early eighteenth-century Town Hall, and young, middle aged and old dancing to their rhythm in the streets while the moon climbed higher in the sky… Nat thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it all, and many is the person who saw and heard him doing so.

Yet the Monday morning after so much community fun, Nat disappeared. And did not re-appear until police operations found him stranded on a lonely mountain.

  

‘Our Midlands edition of
High Flyers
comes to you this evening from the old market-town of Leominster in the county of Hereford-and-Worcester. With me here, facing an audience of local folk, are six of the district's brightest and best, three boys and three girls to prove it as fertile in talent as in apples, hops and good pastureland. My name is Bob Thurlow, and it will shortly be my pleasure to introduce our contestants. But before I do that, a brief reminder of how our programme works.

‘It's all a matter of sixes. So one accusation you can't make against
High Flyers
is that we are at sixes and sevens.'

Laughter, as anticipated.

‘For our purposes the United Kingdom is divided into
six
regions: London-and-the-South; Wales-and-the-West-Country; The Midlands; The North; Scotland; Northern Ireland. We visit
six
different places in every region and, in each,
six
young people compete, first in general knowledge and then in a special subject of their own choice. Each region then has its own heat, in which its
six
strongest do battle. The winners of these regional contests then go up to London for the final, when we find the Highest Flyer of all. After which we makers of the programme have a well-earned summer break.

‘And now on this golden evening in the county which boasts, not far from here, a Golden Valley, let me give you our latest High Flyers, selected after the most intense auditioning process man can devise.

‘So – Miss Melanie Clarkson.'

‘Good evening!'

‘Mr Andrew Wheeler.'

‘Hullo!'

‘Miss Linda Rhys-Jones.'

‘Hullo!'

‘Mr Peter Kempsey!'

‘Hi!'

‘Miss Fiona Chambers.'

‘Oh… hi!'

‘And last but not least, Mr Robert Fitzwilliam.'

‘A very good evening to all listeners!'

What a way of announcing yourself, thought Pete. He felt the agreeable prickling of the urge to win.

‘It's a cherished custom of ours to begin with the six contestants introducing themselves. We like our listeners to
know
our participants; this programme celebrates comradeship as much as competition. Therefore I call on Miss Melanie Clarkson to give the opening self-presentation of the evening.'

The assembly hall of one of Leominster's chief junior schools, close to its Priory, was filled to capacity with people looking terribly proud that BBC Radio 4 had elected to honour their town on so popular a programme. Only Jim and Marion Kempsey appeared to be attending the show with visible reluctance; their claps, Pete could see from the platform, were mere token ones, palms barely impacting. When the ‘recruiting poster' first appeared in public places, Jim Kempsey had said to his eldest son, ‘You'll be just like those gullible young Britons in 1914, you know, Peter. They saw the picture of old Kitchener's face, and the words “WANTS YOU”, and off they went, won over by flattery, to horror and death.'

‘But some came back heroes,' said Pete. Neither parent denied the likelihood of his being chosen for the show, nor that he'd excel on it. They knew only too well that he was an extraordinary storehouse of facts. The explanation for this was something they repeatedly begged him never to disclose, but always Pete grinned and replied: ‘I'm making no promises. Isn't there a saying, the truth must out?'

All other contestants in the show would have left home to volleys of good wishes. But not Pete with his younger brothers' words ringing in his ears: ‘Mum and Dad are worried you're going to make an idiot of yourself this evening, Peter. They nearly stopped us coming along to see you perform. Thought you'd be a bad example for the two of us.' (It was Julian who spoke, of course!) But as Pete walked across the smooth stretch of lawn below the sandstone Priory in the early evening, he could not only sense September's tang of ripened apples but also an invitation to trust in his special gift, surely given to him for some great purpose. ‘Tonight will be the turning point of my life,' he told himself, as he approached the red-brick, mock-ecclesiastical, late Victorian buildings of the junior school.

‘…It's always good to remember,' Linda Rhys-Jones was saying in a curiously reverberant voice (sitting too close to the mic), ‘that the poet, Robert Herrick praised our local wool, actually speaking of a “bank of moss more soft than Lemster Ore” (spelling the name LEMSTER).' This information, nothing to what Peter Kempsey was going to give 'em shortly, so charmed the audience that they spontaneously broke into a silly little burst of clapping.

‘And now for Mr Peter Kempsey,' said Bob Thurlow. ‘Sixteen years of age, and in his first term in the Lower Sixth at the boys' grammar school, Hereford. Peter's already told us his principal activities are day-dreaming and skiving off set work.' The laughter here was mild and muted, and his parents, Pete noticed, did not join in; indeed his mother lowered her head. Dad, in his best crested blazer tonight, was, after all, a highly respected accountant with an office in Leominster High Street and an open ambition to become a Liberal town councillor; Mum taught home economics at the comp. But someone more sympathetic to Pete's wit was sitting by his mother's side: his parents' closest friend, Oliver Merchant, founder of The Sunbeam Press, a bachelor who called the Kempseys' house, Woodgarth, his ‘second home', and the only man in Leominster to accord Pete the dignity he deserved.

‘So, over to Peter Kempsey who can tell us whether that is really an accurate self portrait.'

An icy cold wave of fear broke over and drenched him. Irrelevantly he noted that Bob Thurlow wore a toupee. What if he said this aloud? But, to his relief, he heard himself saying: ‘It's as accurate as any, I guess.' He preferred the American ‘guess' to the English ‘suppose'. ‘It's odd, I know, that a guy who doesn't particularly shine academically should want to take part in a brains challenge like this, and has already cleared the auditions with outstanding ease.' He tried not to take in the malign smirk of Mr Robert Fitzwilliam. ‘But you see I have a secret, which I am going to make public for the first time ever.'

Well, he had refused to make any promise that he wouldn't, hadn't he?

‘It was a hot summer afternoon when I was seven, and my mother's friend, the eminent educational psychologist, Dr Mary Smith, was staying with us. I didn't much like her visits because she always seemed to be investigating my faults. But on this occasion she decided to sit me down in the garden, and, without telling me what she was doing, give me the Wellerman-Kreutz Intelligence Test, a method of measuring brain-power she valued more than any other. I was just glad to be out of earshot of the horrible bawling new baby. When we'd finished, she didn't say anything to me, but went indoors into our kitchen and told my mother: “Marion, your Peter has just achieved an absolutely
amazing
score. The highest that I personally have encountered in a whole decade devoted to this form of IQ assessment.”'

Could, Pete wondered, a child of seven really have absorbed such adult language? Her words must have been repeated to him later. Also was it wise to reproduce the psychologist's flutey, fervid voice? Some members of the audience were giggling nervously… ‘The Wellerman-Kreutz test had given me an IQ of well over 160. Ever since, she's tested me regularly, and the only change has been upward. So here I am, a…' But what did his staggering IQ total make him? A genius? Surely not. A genius meant a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, an Einstein, and he didn't even
want
to be in their company.

No time left now for a more orthodox self-presentation. Later he learned that never in the programme's history had Bob Thurlow, experienced radio host that he was, felt such disquiet about what might be coming next. But he kept his cool. ‘Quite some story, Peter! I don't think anybody's told anything like it on
High Flyers
. Well, listeners can judge this evening the accuracy of those tests. As for you, you'd better keep your fingers crossed; you're up against some mighty strong contenders.'

Why, the guy sounds as if I ought not to win, thought Peter, mopping the sweat now positively oozing from his forehead. Thinks I've overstepped the mark or something! Well, I'll show him!

During the first half of the programme he sensed that his visible public, a number of whom he knew personally, was against him. (About his huge invisible one it was best not to think.) Of his fellow contestants he had endeared himself only to Melanie Clarkson, who, with her long light-brown tresses, was the only one he himself had really taken to. During the rehearsal Melanie had surreptitiously whispered to him; ‘You're going to be tonight's Highest Flyer, I know it!' The two were regularly to meet at a local coffee bar and at the town's liveliest Saturday disco throughout the following fifteen months. Those were blissful moments when Pete stroked or ran his fingers through her soft hair.

‘General Knowledge:

‘Peter, which novelist wrote
The Idiot
and
The Brothers
Karamazov
and what nationality was he?''

‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and he was Russian.'

‘Peter, which way do Earth's magnetic field lines go?'

‘From south to north.'

‘Peter, who was victorious at the Battle of Naseby in 1645?'

‘Cromwell's Roundheads. Like in most Civil War battles.'

‘Peter, approximately how many cells are there in the human body?'

‘Approximately 50 million million.'

He gave his answers quickly but quietly, his manner belying the bombast of his self-introduction. Which he should never have made. Out there, in uncountable sitting rooms, kitchens and bedrooms of Britain people were doubtless preferring Linda and Robert to himself, despite his uniquely faultless performance. Why had he joked about skiving and day-dreaming? If he had given a different, more serious picture of himself, he wouldn't have had to counterbalance it by informing the whole bloody country of his electrifying IQ. Pete was burdened by this persistent feeling that he was neither liked nor admired, and so was over-compensating desperately.

‘And for his special subject Peter Kempsey has chosen apples in Herefordshire. May I be so bold as to ask a personage of such high Intelligence Quotient as yours –
why
?'

Pete, detecting a sneer in Bob Thurlow's manner, answered straight. ‘Because my native county has been famous for apples since way back. We produce what many say are the best cider apples in the world. And I love the sight of all the orchards round here, many by the banks of the river, especially at this time of year with the fruit ready for picking.'