Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (15 page)

It was indeed a monochrome print of some kind, though whether it was an engraving, an etching or even a lithograph I am simply not qualified to say. The style of it was vaguely antique, possibly Victorian, but no particular artist sprang to mind. Perhaps there was a hint of Gustave Doré about it, but it was certainly not by him. Whoever had done it possessed an extraordinary skill and power. All these reflections I give as afterthoughts because what possessed me at the time was the image itself.

Under a lowering sky of thick, dirty cloud was stretched a vast frozen lake. Its distant edges were fringed with jagged pitiless mountains whose peaks and ridges were laced with snow. In the middle distance a number of figures were skating aimlessly about on the surface of the lake. They were human apart from their heads which were those of birds, reptiles or insects. The foreground was dominated by a single figure standing rather unsteadily on the ice in his bare feet. He wore a shapeless baggy overall that vaguely resembled an ancient prison uniform. What shocked us most was the face of the man, because it was Reg McCall to the life.

The expression on his face was not so much of horror as of resentful despair. He looks out of the picture directly at us. Perhaps he pleads.

‘What is this shit?’ said Den. ‘Who did it?’ There was menace in his voice, as if he were threatening to punish the artist responsible.

‘I wonder if you gentlemen could be seated once more,’ said Mr Pigsny. I obeyed and so, to my surprise, did Den.

Mr Pigsny said: ‘The picture was commissioned by Mr McCall before his death. It depicts his present existence in Hell.’

I saw Den’s mouth gape. I am sure he wanted to say something, but he was as incapable of speech as I was. He looked at me and I felt a tiny spark of fellow feeling pass between us.

‘Naturally, this is not a precise and naturalistic depiction. That would be impossible given the circumstances, but it does represent a reality. Was it not Picasso who told us that art is a lie which tells us the truth?’

‘Piss off, Pigsny,’ said Den, and again I felt at one with him. I could not have put it better myself. ‘Who’s the little shit who drew that crap? I’ll ring his bastard neck for him.’

‘The artist in question is beyond even your reach, Mr McCall,’ said Pigsny, putting the print back into his portfolio and preparing to leave the room. Den barred his way.

He said: ‘What’s the point of all this, Pigsny? Tell me what you want. Come on, out with it, and don’t mess me about. I warn you, I don’t like being messed about.’

‘Surprisingly few people do, in my experience, Mr McCall. As to what I want,
I
want nothing. It was your late brother who wanted you to see the picture. You may wish to reflect on it, as he intended you to do. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I will be calling on you both in due course.’ With that Pigsny left the room unhindered by Den who seemed shattered by the whole experience.

‘Fuck me!’ he said eventually, after a long silence. As I could not contribute anything more cogent myself I remained silent until my nephews Robert and Arthur burst into the room.

‘Is it okay if we go now, dad?’ said Arthur. ‘We’ve said our goodbyes to Auntie Maureen and she’s now gone into a huddle with that ghastly Piggy man who was in the limo with us.’

Den waved us away wearily, almost graciously.

II

Within a month or so my rooms at Cambridge were graced by the Ming vase. I rang to thank Den for its safe delivery. He dismissed my gratitude quickly.

‘Has that Pigsny been onto you?’ he asked.

‘No. Have
you
seen him, then?’

‘No! So, what’s the fucker up to?’

‘I can’t say I’m bothered.’

‘Yeah. Right. But that’s all very well. I mean . . . he must be up to something. I mean, who is he? Where’s he come from? What’s his bloody game?’

I had no answers for him, so the conversation ended inconclusively, but by the end of it he had managed to infect me with some of his unease.

It was May, and in the gardens of King’s College some undergraduates were performing the
Orestes
in its original language. I like to keep my acquaintance with Greek literature in good repair, and encourage it in others, so I went. It was a warm evening, and I must admit my attention wandered. The diction of the actors, somewhat hampered by masks, was not good enough to hold me, and I began to lose the thread of the Greek. The words transformed themselves from meaningful sentences into an alien music.

The wooden seating for the audience was tiered and in a horseshoe shape, like an ancient auditorium. I was seated near to the bottom of one extremity of the horseshoe so that I had as good a view of the audience as I did of the action on stage. I began to watch the watchers.

About half way up the other side of the auditorium, almost directly opposite me, but higher, sat a man I thought I recognised. I had spotted him first because he was dressed differently from the rest of us. Instead of loose summery clothes he wore a dark suit and a tie. He was short and he covered his baldness with a rather nasty ‘comb-over’ of greasy reddish hair. It was Mr Pigsny.

His appearance at such an event seemed to me so bizarre that it took me quite some time before my mind would authorise what my senses told me. After that I ignored the play completely and divided my time between taking furtive glances at him, and speculating on his possible motives in attending an undergraduate performance of a play in Greek.

His whole attention was fixed on the action on stage, and it did not look as if he had noticed me. Eventually there was another chorus about vengeance and the guilt of the house of Atreus, and an interval was declared. I toyed with the idea of leaving, but I was too curious about Mr Pigsny.

I found him over by the makeshift bar in the cloisters, sipping tomato juice.

‘Hello, Professor Chibnall. Fancy seeing you here!’ He spoke to me with a condescension I had expected to use towards him.

‘I didn’t know you were a devotee of Classical drama,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. These olden time Greeks, they knew a thing or two, didn’t they?’

‘You’re finding the Euripides easy to follow?’

‘Oh, not so bad,’ he said, and he proceeded to quote in Greek from the chorus we had just heard, those lines about blood upon blood, murder upon murder not leaving go of the two sons of Atreus. There was something odd about his pronunciation. It was far from barbarous—all the quantities were correct—but I had never heard anything quite like it before. He spoke in a hieratic tone, as if pronouncing a liturgy. His style reminded me most of a performance I had once seen in Tokyo of the Nõ drama.

I was too astounded to react in any other way than to bow respectfully. After a moment of silence I said: ‘Were you wanting to see me about something?’

‘I left an envelope for you with the porter at your college,’ said Mr Pigsny and then, quite pointedly, turned his back on me.

On returning to my own college, St Jude’s, I asked at the porter’s lodge if there was anything for me and our porter, George, handed me a large manila envelope. Usually George has plenty to say for himself but on this occasion, for some reason, loquaciousness had deserted him.

In my rooms I opened the envelope and took out a print similar, but not identical to the one Mr Pigsny had shown us on the day of the funeral

There was the lowering sky of dirty cloud, the frozen lake, the distant horned peaks. The figure of Reg was still on the ice in the foreground, but something had happened to him. The lower part of his body had begun to deliquesce into a dark, slug-like shape that seemed fixed by frozen bonds to the lake. The body’s dark viscosity was beginning to extend into the features of the face, stretching and distorting them in strange ways. The head was still recognisably Reg’s, and his expression was that of a drowning man just about to go under for the last time, and knowing it.

As before, the scene was depicted with a meticulous graphic accuracy, and a touch of genuine artistic flair which only made it more obscene. I could not bear to look at it, but at the same time I felt somehow that to destroy it would amount to a betrayal of the trust Reg had placed in me. I rolled up the print and placed it carefully in Reg’s Ming vase.

My bedroom in college looks over one of the quads and usually I sleep soundly, but that night I was restless. I did eventually fall asleep, but, it seemed to me I woke up again almost immediately. I listened. Was it a noise that had woken me? No, all was silent.

Then the silence was disturbed by a faint sound. It was not one of the usual ones that occasionally afflict a Cambridge quadrangle late at night, like drunken laughter or argument, or a sudden blast of pop music. It was the sound of a single flute playing a lively dance tune. Its note sequences were vaguely familiar: sometimes Irish in feel, sometimes gypsy-like or mid-European, perhaps even Middle Eastern at moments, but ultimately belonging to none of these cultures. The rhythm was a kind of jig, I think, but I am no musical expert. Its tone was cold as if blown not through reed and wood, but granite and cold steel, and it was compelling enough to make me get up to look out of my window and into the quad.

The world outside my window was flooded with moonlight and on the grass at the centre of the quadrangle was a short man in a suit dancing and blowing on some sort of instrument. I knew it at once to be Pigsny, even though his strange coppery hair was not lying flat on his cranium but sticking up from it in ragged peaks. They shimmered slightly as if he had covered them with gel.

Because he was on grass it was only to be expected that his leaps and capers should be entirely silent, but still it seemed strange. He had a grace, and an extraordinary vitality for a little fat man.

The flute music stopped, Mr Pigsny made one final leap into the air, landed with a kind of pirouette and then bowed low in my direction, as if he had known all along that I was watching. I hurried down from my rooms to catch him, but, as I had expected, he had gone when I reached the quad. The college gates had been locked for well over an hour. Who had given him a key?

The following day I rang Den to ask if he had seen Mr Pigsny and was on the receiving end of a torrent of bad language, at the end of which he said:

‘ . . .What is that fucker playing at, eh? Eh? Went to the Dog and Gibbet the other night. Need to show my face there now and again to stop them getting out of order. Horace—you know, the Hoxton Strangler—and Enid were having a knees up to celebrate their silver, and there was a Ceilidh Band, and bugger me if that Pigsny bastard wasn’t in it playing the flute. Then he did one of those Irish, step dance things. Doing a fucking step dance in my effing pub! If it wasn’t for Horace and Enid, I’d have had him slung out on his arse. Did you put him up to this?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then what are you calling me for?’

I briefly told him of my recent experiences. Den said: ‘Yeah, I had one of those stupid prints. I mean, what’s it all about? It must be some kind of a wind up. I mean what is this Hell crap? Eh? What the bloody hell is all that about. Eh? When you’re dead, you're bloody dead. End of story. It’s all a piss-take and I seriously do not like having the piss taken.’

Den was not going to be of help to me; I could see that. My irritation with Mr Pigsny was no less than his but I needed some kind of explanation. As an epigraphist I am, in my own way, a man of science. Mr Pigsny may have been a madman, but even madness has its reasons. I rang up my sister to see if she could help me.

Once a wayward and slender beauty, Gwen had grown over the years into a rather solid woman, a stalwart on all the committees in the Buckinghamshire village where she lived. She came to the phone rather breathlessly.

‘Hello! Sorry about that. We’re in the middle of a garden crisis. I’ve called in Parker who does our garden on Fridays usually. There’s a slug invasion, so it’s all hands to the pumps. I’ve even got the boys setting beer traps.’

She sounded hearty and conventional. Marriage to a Merchant Banker had undoubtedly changed her, but not necessarily for the better. I told her what I wanted which was the telephone number of Reg’s widow, Maureen.

‘Oh, really, Lawrence! Can’t you get it off Den? Frankly, Lawrence, I do not want to know. That wretched little Maureen woman has been ringing me up and saying that I should meet a friend of hers called Mr Piggy or something. He sounds perfectly dreadful. Apparently he’s a kind of spiritualist. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying. Well, I told her very firmly that we were all Church of England here which shut her up, but I mean, really!’

Patiently, I asked her again for the number and she went off to get it. When she had given it to me she said: ‘Don’t you get me involved again with that awful little woman; I have quite enough to contend with, what with these slugs. What they have done to my courgettes is quite literally unspeakable.’

III

It took me some days before I had the courage to ring Maureen. It was not her I was afraid of, naturally, but what she might tell me. And what might she tell me? I had no idea. That was the problem: fear is the shadow of the unknown. When I finally got round to phoning her, I came straight to the point and asked her about Mr Pigsny.

Maureen is one of those people who finds it hard to answer any question directly. I had to disentangle the information she gave me from a litany of complaints about Den’s handling of Reg’s estate; how so few people had been in touch with her after Reg’s death; how she was not receiving the respect she felt she was owed. Apparently the one person who had behaved himself to her satisfaction had been Mr Pigsny; though, like Den, and for that matter myself, she was not at all sure what he was ‘up to’.

She told me that about a year before he died Reg had begun to take an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife. Ostensibly his main object was to get in touch with their daughter Janet who had died in a car crash, though Maureen suspected that the knowledge of his own impending death had played a part. He had visited various psychics and Spiritualist churches and it was at one of these meetings that he had encountered Mr Pigsny. As far as she knew Pigsny was not an established psychic, or medium with a following; but he had impressed Reg with his wide understanding of occult matters. Reg had once told her that Mr Pigsny knew more about the spirit world than ‘all those other bullshit artists put together’. For the last few months of Reg’s life the two men had been virtually inseparable. Mr Pigsny had come to stay in their house, though he had always made himself scarce when other people, like Den came visiting. As far as she knew there had been no financial transactions between Reg and Pigsny, though she did think that Reg had ‘signed some sort of document’. Maureen said that after Reg’s death, Mr Pigsny had continued to come to the house. He was able to reassure her that Reg was ‘doing all right’ in the afterlife and had met up with his daughter Janet.