Mr. Chartwell (19 page)

“How are you feeling?” Big Oliver squeezed Esther to him, talking mutinously into her ear.

Esther spoke into the wall of his shoulder. “Not too bad.”

He manoeuvred her by the arms so he could read her expression. “We’re all glad to have you here today.” Another embrace was rough with emotion. “You’re going to get through this, Hammerhans. You will. We’ll all get through it.” Beth and Corkbowl were talking. Big Oliver kissed Esther on the cheek. “The three of us, we’ll stick together as we always have.” He was
still holding her shoulders. “Or the two of us.” He shunted his head at Beth. “Just say the word, we’ll ditch her and make a run for it.”

Corkbowl came over with three glasses of wine held in tripod fingers.

“And what’s this I hear about you having an audience with Churchill this afternoon?” asked Big Oliver, opening the conversation to Corkbowl. “Beth told me and I thought I was hallucinating. Who are you meeting tomorrow? Che Guevara?”

Corkbowl smiled, not so chatty now as there was a stone of embarrassment in his throat. His cod had finished warming in the oven and was ready to be judged. On the other side of the room Beth was busy with a bowl of new potatoes and cauliflower. Down came a dish of peas. She made a cone of her oven gloves and shouted through the cone, “Come and get it!”

At the table there was the banging of cutlery and friendly bustling as they took their chairs and handed round the food.

Big Oliver talked through a cheek of fish. “Nice. Good work, Corkbowl.”

“Happy to be of service,” Corkbowl answered, clearly delighted.

Little Oliver didn’t want cauliflower, and was forced to have some. “But I don’t like this,” he appealed to his mother.

“Chin up, soldier,” Big Oliver said to him, a massive piece of cauliflower on his fork, “nobody likes it.”

Corkbowl nodded his agreement and Little Oliver was more or less persuaded. Between mouthfuls he drove his truck around the cruets. When he wasn’t looking Beth put a serving of peas in the truck’s trailer. Little Oliver was obliged to unload this haul onto his plate and eat his greens.

Beth laughed. “As the best meal of the week, I think Sunday lunch should always be fun.”

“Absolutely correct,” said Big Oliver.

“It’s a serious business, having fun at lunch.” Beth grabbed Esther’s and Corkbowl’s wrists, solemn doing this, lowering her head in a joking grace. “Gathered here together, O Lord, let us bray.”

She made a sly survey of their faces. “Forgive me, Father, for I have grinned.”

Even Esther smiled. Big Oliver saw this and lifted his glass, prompting a toast.

“To the chef.”

All glasses met, fragile clinks in a group.

“And …”—Big Oliver’s smile went to Esther, went to everyone, went back to Esther—“here’s to absent friends.”

“Absent friends,” Corkbowl repeated obediently. Beth said the same, sending cautioning eyes to Big Oliver.

“Yes.” Esther put her glass on the table. “To absent friends.”

The smiles at the table misted. Corkbowl was watching, aware that the awkward colours of the mood converged in streams to the quiet prism of Esther. He sensed a darkness woven into the day, but couldn’t divine it. Very slightly, Esther’s head turned to the garden. Nothing there. She checked again.

Beth rallied herself, needing to rescue Esther. Big Oliver was always a good source of communal amusement. “Hey,” she said to him and the rest of the group, “tell Corkbowl about the time you sang onstage with your awful pop group.…”

Big Oliver knew his instructions. He also knew this story, having polished it over thousands of retellings. “Corkbowl,” he said, leaning over, “you appear to be a man acquainted with
tragedy, so let me tell you about the tragedy of my university group.”

A laugh of anticipation burst from Beth like popcorn, the story a classic.

“The night had gone badly,” Big Oliver lamented to Corkbowl. “The songs we’d written …”—he shook his head, disturbed—“they had gone badly.” Beth mimed the next line along with him: “We were staring into the face of desperation.”

“Not a pretty face,” Beth said, as always.

“No,” Big Oliver confirmed, “not
at all.”

Beth winked at Esther. And the conversation was stitched together, Corkbowl an audience to the historic group anecdote. Little Oliver had a big announcement; he intended to paint a picture of them all. Esther listened from the edges, glanced at by Corkbowl. They all ate, stray forks moving to claim leftover potatoes from the serving bowl once the plates were empty. Unluckier forks picked at scraps of cauliflower. They fell into the easy nonsense brought on by afternoon wine. But the air bore a smell which distracted Esther. Corkbowl was talking to her and she gave a thin answer. Her laughs were perfunctory and Corkbowl registered it. That smell; Esther hunted around her again, hunting the house from her seat.

Little Oliver was released from the captivity, allowed to leave the table and play for a while. Beth collected the plates. “Who wants to help me do the washing up?”

“I will,” Esther and Corkbowl said in chorus.

“Anyone?” Beth asked again, lasers on Big Oliver.

“I’ll help,” repeated Corkbowl.

Beth bent towards Big Oliver. “No one’s going to help me?”

Big Oliver made a grim expression, the expression of someone realising they are chewing soil. He trailed after Beth to the
large kitchen area, quiet and argumentative, questioning her on the purpose of this instant dishwashing. Beth silenced him with a serrated glare, stood at the sink. “Because I say so.” She poked her chin at Esther and Corkbowl out of earshot in the dining room. “Because that’s the plan.”

Corkbowl remounted his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose with a prod. His finger retracted into its fist on the tablecloth. Next to him Esther was gazing at the garden. The gravitational field of instinct pulled her eyes there.

“Are you okay?” He gave her a friendly bump on the elbow with his own.

She reassured him: Yes, she was fine.

“Esther, has something happened?” Corkbowl remembered their conversation in the library, remembering the car journey. “It’s just that I don’t believe you are okay. Not quite, not really.”

Eyes to the garden. Sketched through with shadows of cedars and poplars, the large garden spread away from the house and merged with the wild border of holly trees that barricaded a tract of public forest. Anchored in the lawn were a bed of flowering bushes and a flat-headed yew, an old kneeling apple tree.

Chatter came faintly from behind them in the kitchen, Big Oliver and Beth piling wet crockery on the draining board.

“I think you might be right, if I’m completely honest.” A smash of cutlery, Big Oliver dropping it into the sink. Then Esther risked a glance at Corkbowl, daring herself. “Can I tell you about it? I wanted to tell you before, and then …” She felt that black mercenary tracking her, a hostile force coming for her fast. “I don’t know if I’ve got enough time, but …” So do it with haste, do it now. “Corkbowl, do you mind if I tell you?”

“Esther, of course you can.” Corkbowl looked over his shoulder
at the kitchen, at Big Oliver taunting his wife, trying to gauge the time they had left alone, not understanding. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

But time was up.

A white feather geyser of pampas grass came from the middle of the lawn. And lounging there like a burn in the celluloid was Black Pat.

Very casual, he gave Esther an upward nod. Sitting down, he stood up. He assumed the canine bow of play in a stretch. It was a luxurious stretch, huge in size and sensual. Chest to the floor, his bottom made a black hummock in the sky. Black Pat’s face wrinkled with pleasure, flat front legs driving out into the turf. Too relaxing, the process inspired a yawn, the tip of his tongue in an elegant curve. It forced a shrill faint sound:
“Yow!”

Fully refreshed, Black Pat sauntered towards the French doors. He paused. Moles! His paw raked up a cup of earth.

Esther found her courage and held it steady. She spoke with the soft, determined speed of an impossibly short deadline. “My husband, Michael, died two years ago. Today is the anniversary of his death.”

“Oh, Esther.”

“He was a good man, a good husband. He was a brave man.” She smiled and it was just the vapours of a smile. “He was always very brave.”

Corkbowl heard the raw tone she used. “Yes.”

“Michael tried so hard, and it matters so much that he did.” Esther stopped. “Because,” she said, and stopped again.

“Esther?” said Corkbowl.

No, Esther, don’t say it
. Black Pat willed her not to say the words.

But those words came from her gently. “He took his own life. Michael committed suicide.”

Esther struggled against Black Pat’s ferocious will as she remembered Michael’s measured destruction. It had been a long and increasingly desperate fight with a darkness that broke in moonless waves, claiming him for weeks, sometimes more. Esther would wait for her lost husband, a little light on the shoreline waiting to guide him back. And eventually these episodes would fade, retreating in staining tides. Michael would surface, liberated. He was with her. The days would pass. Then: a change. The water would return, thinly at first, a gradual process. Perhaps this time it wasn’t going to be so bad. But they could never stop it, and it would start to pour in. Michael wouldn’t tell her, he would try and spare her. Neither of them was ever spared. Finally there came the roar of gathering water. A force would draw it into a peaked body, racing on the engine of its own momentum. Michael kept swimming to the little light on the shoreline as the horizon lifted in a great rearing wall.

And Esther’s thoughts collected at the end, at how this cycle was ended.

It finished in secluded woodland, nowhere particular, the agony of decision played out in the slow lock of the hammer. The despairing search for release had narrowed and tightened, narrowing finally into the tight dimensions of a steel chamber.

Corkbowl was talking to her, his fingers pressed to his temple. “Esther, I’m sorry.”

Thank you, Corkbowl: She hurried to thank him.

Black Pat was at the French doors, five panels that folded open on runners. He pressed his snout to the glass and it crooked to make a troll nose, the black nostrils squashed. Finding himself fabulous, he walked into the kitchen, unseen by the others. He accepted Esther’s ugly glance as a standing ovation.

“Ha, those two,” Black Pat said, recognising Beth and Big Oliver over there. “And
him
again,” he said, recognising Corkbowl and resentful.

Beth was scraping from a tub of hard-frozen ice cream, serving it into bowls. Big Oliver, a used tea towel slung on his shoulder, got in her way, eating directly from the tub with a stolen wafer.

“Oh, Esther …” Corkbowl said, the dog slumped next to her.

Black Pat craned his neck at Corkbowl in a nasty examination. Bound to be hilarious, he smirked at his poem: “A man such as this is an acquired taste—he’d be decent in chunks, but better as paste.”

“I can’t believe it, I’m just so sorry,” Corkbowl repeated.

“It’s taken me a long time to understand his depression. I think I do now.” Esther heard the slow applause of a tail. “I think I’ve started to.” The applause increased, approving. “But sometimes I find it”—it was difficult to concentrate through the burr created by the beating tail—“I find I can’t believe it either.” She amended this. “Well, I believe it here.” Esther touched her forehead. “But here”—she put a palm on her heart—“
here
it still doesn’t make sense.”

“What you just said,” Black Pat choked off a dirty laugh, “makes sense to me here.” He pointed to his rear end.

Corkbowl said, “Did Michael ever talk about his depression?”

“Not in any way that let me see the full extent of it. Michael didn’t even use the word. He refused to name it.”

“Which offends me …”—Black Pat moved his paw, deciding, then pointing again at his rear end—“… yes, here.”

Esther recalled to Corkbowl, “I suppose occasionally I glimpsed how much trouble Michael was in, when he couldn’t
hide it. It was there in his exhaustion and his face. It was in the atmosphere he had around him. During the worst times the weight of the atmosphere was almost like another presence.”

Black Pat was a giant leering blot in her peripheral vision.
You bet it was
, thought Esther, the line for him. She said firmly to Corkbowl, “That’s the best way I can think of to describe it, really, as a presence draining him.”

The blot of Black Pat came into focus as he approached Esther, and went out of focus as he got too close. “I’ve come to take you home.”

Beth and Big Oliver had rowdily taken their seats at the table, both carrying bowls. “What are you kids talking about?” asked Beth, the prying aunt.

“Oh, not much,” Esther said, with a faultless performance of sincerity.

“Pudding,” said Corkbowl, taking Esther’s cue.

The china bowls held the pale yellow scoops of ice cream, pools of gently melting vanilla. Little Oliver ran back to his chair at full speed, ice cream the king of all foods.

Black Pat put his head on Esther’s shoulder, his buffalo weight against her. “Esther …”

“Anyone want more wafers?” said Big Oliver, ramming another into Esther’s ice cream. The wafer shattered. “ ’Scuse fingers,” he grinned at her.

“… Is you is”—the damp rubber of Black Pat’s nose touched Esther’s cheek—“or is you ain’t coming home?”

Corkbowl realised the time. “Esther, umm … I hate to mention it. We’ll need to leave soon if we’re going to get to Churchill’s on time.”

“Ah!” said Big Oliver. “But the hour cometh, and now is.”

Esther and Churchill. Black Pat looked sharply at Corkbowl.
He gave the same cheated look to Esther. The prospect of her meeting Churchill was a ticklish one. His breath made a hot bloom on her skin, urgent now.
“Listen to me, listen to me.”

The heat of his head was sordid, the stink of him in her nose and mouth, that sea cucumber of a tongue channelling its rot-scented whispers into her ear. Beaten, Esther said to Corkbowl, “I’m not sure I can go to Kent.”