After Brock (13 page)

It was not only Pete whose spirits had dropped this year. Jim Kempsey was visibly over-working, as a senior partner in his accountancy firm and in his public life too. Next month there would be a vacancy on the town council which he was favourite to fill. Dad knew that he had something serious to offer Leominster, but throughout this year, he was beset by the kind of anxieties such as, Pete gathered from half-heard conversations between Mum and Ol Merchant, had dogged him earlier, in his National Service and his early training. While he believed it his duty to take part in civic life, join discussion groups, be on committees etc, he was not naturally sociable, found dealing with other people hard, and sometimes downright painful. How he'd ever managed to get himself married was a question Pete increasingly asked himself.

A strawberry-blond like his second son Julian, he had a still-youthful appearance, an unlined face and energetic walk which not infrequently broke into a run, and few detectable bald patches. These features only added to the general impression he gave of some grave schoolboy overburdened with studies. A passionate internationalist like any good liberal, he strongly supported Tory Heath's belief in the European Economic Community. As someone who'd been a teenager in the war, he shared the PM's hopes that Europe could use its past conflicts and sufferings as leverage for the creation of a uniquely prosperous, peaceful continent. But as a local citizen and professional man, handling the accounts of farmers and rural-based businesses, he agonised about its effects on agriculture.

Compounding these divisions was the Chancellor's melan-choly announcement last month of the country's woes and of the dire measures needed to restore its health; all this went to Dad's already troubled heart, for any responsible person involved in politics should have an answer. So his thoughts were constantly and heavily elsewhere, and only could be assuaged, and that but occasionally, by games and conversations with his younger boys, in which Pete was not included. He didn't disguise the fact that he found the Brats far more congenial company, and he listened to Julian scraping away on his fiddle like one privileged to hear a rare musician.

Dad's preoccupation created this gap in Mum's life which the Lugg Valley Players now filled. And behold her now, on the last night (thank God!) of the show, capering with unseemly abandon across the stage partnered by – who else but genial old Ol, one of the players' mainstays, as Koko, Lord High Executioner. The applause was so fervent, so boisterous, that they had to perform the duet declaring their weird compatibility all over again!

Before the show began the producer had stepped forward to say: ‘Well, hasn't our good Chancellor told us that we're living in (and I quote) “the gravest situation by far since the end of the war”. So I reckon we need a little G & S, even more than a little G & T,' sycophantic laughter here, ‘to cheer us up. But we are all good citizens, here in the Lugg Valley. We have scaled down the lighting on-stage, without detriment to actors or sets. And house lights tonight must go off at the same hour as TV shuts down – i.e. 10.30. So we ask you all to leave the Assembly Room as promptly after the entertainment as possible…'

And this,
this
was judged likely to brighten up the spirits, Mum padded out in ridiculous robes and made up like a hag, carrying on a travesty of flirtation with old Ol, in light purple kimono with an obi round his over-expanded waist. Pete cringed in his seat as he watched them, just as Mum and Dad had doubtless cringed in this selfsame spot, while he'd told the whole listening nation from the rostrum how brilliant the Wellerman-Kreutz tests had found him.

   

‘If that is so,

Sing derry down derry!

It's evident, very,

Our tastes are one!

Away we'll go,

And merrily marry,

Nor tardily tarry

Till day is done!'

   

The final bows of the cast brought forth no fewer than four curtain calls, and then the producer emerged again, first to say a big thank you for such a heart-warming reception, and second, to remind everybody to leave the hall speedily because the lights simply had to be off in five minutes' time.

Pete had just reached the gangway when Mrs Richards, wife of a High Street dentist, tugged at his jacket sleeve. ‘Marion – your mother,' was what she had to say, ‘was
wonderful
, wasn't she? So can you be a love, Julian, and take this to her backstage?' ‘This' was a bouquet wrapped up in holly-patterned paper. Irritating to be confused with the elder of the two Brats, when Pete had always preferred the younger one, Robin, dark-haired like himself. His feelings for both had been grossly undermined the day before yesterday when he'd overheard Dad saying to Mum, ‘I know Peter comes out so well in Mary Smith's tests, and can answer any number of useless questions on Radio 4. But Julian and Robin are, in my view, far abler boys. To listen to Julian at his age talking about music, to hear his command of the tech-nicalities of notation…' His voice trailed away in sheer admiration.

‘Abler boys', ‘
far
abler', the words stabbed Pete cruelly at the most inopportune times: when in the middle of an answer in class, while being offered a plate of sandwiches by a friend's mum, even on the toilet…

‘Well, I could…' said Pete.

‘That's where real actresses receive their tributes, isn't it? Backstage. And your mother's as good as – well, better than – most professionals.' Mrs Richards, oblivious of his lack of enthusiasm, thrust the flowers into his arm. ‘So sweet of you, Julian! Marion absolutely adores freesias!!' and scuttled off to join the general exit. By now the Assembly Room had, in compliance with the producer's note of urgency, all but emptied. But Pete felt it'd be as much as his later life was worth not to carry out this request, much as it went against the grain being part of any compliment to such tripe as that he'd just sat through. So now, moving in the opposite direction from everybody else, he made his way to the swing door leading backstage, where actors and orchestral players would now be changing. And just as he'd reached this, all the lights went out.

Those few folk still in the Assembly Room, though forewarned, gave out little gasps and cries of vexation. But for Pete the bouquet in his hands acted like a rudimentary natural torch, the flowers giving out a gold-and-white glow and a heady fragrance, providing a lead through the darkness ahead. He was moving down a white-tiled, concrete-floored corridor which, yards later, turned sharply to the left. This new section terminated in a large changing room, announcing itself this evening by a flotilla of flickering candles – and audible talk and laughter. Pete might be bold enough to give a cheeky self-presentation to a visible and an invisible audience on a radio show, but he loathed entering social gatherings where people knew each other better than they did him, especially if clutching a poxy ‘floral tribute'.

Off the left wall of the corridor three doors opened, and what made him peer through the gap in the last one? Into a space not much larger than a toilet, seemingly a repository for kids' missing boots and shoes. Plus two canvas chairs, a low table on which was guttering a candle in a lemonade bottle – and two human figures, Mum as Katisha in her splendiferous robes, and Oliver Merchant still dressed as Titipu's Lord High Executioner, locked in an embrace of a physiologically extraordinary kind. Even in the stinky gloom of this cubby-hole affection (or lust?) was having its way! For a moment Pete couldn't get his breath. Then he made himself look more closely.

Oliver was sitting on one of the two chairs, head between his knees, while Mum pressed a hand hard on his face. Presently (though how could they not be aware of his panting breath and the sudden sweet waft from his bouquet?) he realised his mother, crouching over, was firmly gripping Ol's nose with the right thumb and forefinger.

If the nation hadn't been ordered by its government to use only five days' worth of electricity per week, and this junior-school-acting-as-arts-centre to switch off lights when it wouldn't normally have done, Pete would have seen instantly that Oliver was having a nose-bleed with Mum tending him. But at first sight it had seemed they… would it be cunnilingus? Or some grotesque Kama-sutra act Pete didn't yet know the name of? Then he heard Mum say: ‘Your nose must be held a good ten minutes. Usually the sufferer's too giddy to do this, so it's just as well for someone else to oblige.'

‘Particularly if that someone is you, Marion,' came Oliver's voice, strangely nasal because his nostrils were being blocked, yet, because of the position of his body, also sounding as if it came up from his groin, through the unsteady candlelight, ‘always so kind and good.'

‘Aye, aye! What
is
all this?' thought Pete.

But Mum hadn't taken Oliver's words amorously. ‘I do teach Health and Safety in my Home Economics classes, you know, and most of my girls would be infinitely better informed about your little trouble than yourself, Oliver. And keep your head
absolutely
still. Otherwise you might swallow your blood, which could lead to vomiting.'

Spare me the details, poor Pete said to himself, waiting to make his entrance. But, ‘Always so kind and good!' reiterated old Ol Merchant.

‘Really? Always?' thought Pete, ‘only to someone infatuated by her she is!' (And how did you explain ‘Uncle' Oliver's odd family status otherwise?) Well, his mother was ‘good', he supposed, because of her many admirable qualities: patience, putting others before herself, sense of duty, industriousness. But ‘kind' – no, not so you'd notice, not to himself anyway. And in that measureless, unbounded period before the Brats' birth, to be recaptured only in patches now, she had been, if anything, less kind still. Perhaps she'd resented the inquisitive, graceless, independent infant he'd been.

And then, despite himself, he recalled, even in the split seconds of getting ready to announce his presence, that tricky situation between himself and Mum, of which he alone was aware. His lie about the Christmas card he'd sent Bob Thurlow…

Up to this moment he'd felt no guilt. Now, witnessing his mother's administrations to her ‘friend' (‘lover'?) he belatedly experienced that softening of the guts which registers this emotion, recalling earlier occasions of being caught out in mis-chief or deceit. Poised in the doorway to this stupid little boot-room, and now on the point of sneezing, thanks to the flowers so close to his face, he forced from himself an exclamation, ‘Ah, there you both are!'

Mum gave Oliver Merchant's head a vice-like squeeze. ‘It's only Peter, Oliver, so please don't move a single inch, otherwise you'll undo all my good work… Oliver has just had a nose-bleed, g

Peter. But it's the common anterior kind, thank heavens. Not the posterior variety which one would treat differently. Just the burst-ing of a blood vessel in a nasal septum.'

‘As if I care!' thought Pete, though aloud he said, ‘Good, good! What shall I do with the bouquet, Mum?'

‘Put it on that little table there – where else? I can see that the roses and freesias are hand-tied together beautifully. I couldn't have made a better job of them myself.'

‘They're richly deserved as well,' said Oliver Merchant from his seated position, his voice, still adenoidal, still bizarrely issuing from his crotch, ‘and very thoughtful of you, Peter, to have brought it round here, amid all the confusion of this wretched lights-out. You are a most kindly lad who doesn't mind inconveniencing himself on others' behalf. Unlike so many young people of this “me” generation.'

Mum should have said that, shouldn't she? Rather than someone not flesh-and-blood. A mere godfather, and one not a whit bothered by his godson seeing him so intimate with his own mother. Pete knew he should now add something about the show itself, but couldn't find the words. He was seeing again Koko (without nose-bleed) and Katisha (not playing nurse) capering hand-in-hand to their sprightly tune arousing laughter, just like – well, like a husband-and-wife team. That was why he, Pete, had felt so discomfited watching them as well as – well, something not so far off insulted. Oliver Merchant might be Leominster's nearest to a saint, but he was decidedly flabby, as Pete could see tonight like he'd never quite done before – yes, even in this semi-darkness. Whereas Jim Kempsey was a
real
man,
however abstracted and pompous, and even though he believed the Brats to be ‘abler boys' than his first-born of the phenomenal IQ.

It was as he was having these surprising but instinctive reflections (as he was long afterwards to remember) that the door to this cluttered shoe-room opened a little wider, to show a young man who drawled out: ‘His Royal Highness the Mikado of Japan – otherwise known as Trevor Price, my father – has sent me to inquire after the Lord High Executioner's health, and asks if his Daughter-in-Law Elect needs any assistance.'

   

For thirty-five years, Pete has said to himself: ‘If it hadn't been Sam Price, wouldn't it have been someone else? Without consciously knowing it, I longed for a transformer of the soul. And here came one I could not resist. Maybe I even needed a Mephistopheles, with temptations so sweet and alluring, that they appeared like divine refreshments. What else did I have in my life to sustain my dreams and hopes except
High Flyers
? And Sam was as resourceful a friend over that as I could have hoped (or not hoped) for. For me now his entrance that evening from the dark, white-tiled corridor is indissoluble from the development of my life.

‘Youth my own age in black bomber jacket, red scarf and tight Levis. Sleek dark hair framing the oval of his face, and curling crisply upwards at the shoulders. A pervasive aroma of patchouli, which I'd already planned to use myself in my life-away-from-home in the autumn but which was incompatible with Woodgarth. Said to be a real come-on!'