The Old English Peep Show (14 page)

The General stared at the rising moon. Only the gleam of reflection from his cornea showed that he wasn't stone, or perhaps a wax model propped there until it should be needed for some puppetlike re-enactment of the heroic story. The lion lay down still watching them. Pibble shivered and listened to the silences behind him.

“It was a mistake,” said the General, the thin tongue licking between the thinner lips.

“The Admiral's death?” slid Pibble.

“No. Yes. No,” said the General impatiently. “I mean that was a mistake, too, dammit, but the mistake I was talking about was shutting up shop. You remember what I said about being trained, being coiled and ready, and then going off at half cock? Your mind's a machine, and it can't take that sort of treatment. It goes sick, and the only cure is work. Work. Work. Slog away at the job you were bred for. But we packed it in, settled down to be heroes. Nothing to do but let the adulation roll in. Bad mistake.

“We
were
heroes, mark you. We'd done everything between us, saved everybody's bacon, given Englishmen something to be proud of. I know, as well as I know that I'm talking to Superintendent James Pibble, that if Dick and I hadn't been there it would have been an absolute bloody shambles. They might have lost a few less lives, but they wouldn't have got anything done, and then they'd have surrendered. We didn't win the bloody war, but if we hadn't done what we did at St. Quentin we might have lost it: we bucked people up, strengthened Winnie's hand a bit, lopped out a few useless bastards in high places, shook the Boche—he had nineteen men to my one there by the end, you know—we felt we'd done our stuff, but we trapped ourselves. Twenty-five years we've sat here, doing nothing to spoil our investment. We could have done anything, absolutely any bloody thing, Dick and I, but we stored ourselves away like apples in a loft, and lay on our shelves, waiting for the soft brown patches to appear. We got a bit mad, like your pal down there. Daresay you noticed it.”

“Do you think he's mad?” said Pibble.

“Course I do. Hasn't got rabies, but you've only got to look at his eyes. I'll be honest with you: he reminds me of Dotty Prosser. Dotty was a killer—he'd have been in Broadmoor if there hadn't been a war—very nasty type indeed. Your pal has just the same sort of look about his eyes. All lions are a bit loopy, you know: comes of being the strongest animal around, like Captains R.N.
They
go out on those shapeless great seas in their little tin ships, nobody of their own rank to talk to, so they go potty, start believing they're the lost ten tribes, learn Tamil, think they're going to retire and make money out of dairy farming, that sort of thing. Lions are the same—dangerous clowns. But your pal's not dotty—he's
mad.
Aren't you, boy?”

The lion sensed that a communication was being made to it and raised its sullen head. It looked completely black by now in, the moonlight, but as it opened its jaws the thin rays caught its teeth so that they glistened for a moment, like remote stars. The roar came late, bored, ghastly.

“I see what you mean,” said Pibble.

“Come along here and I'll show you something else.”

Pibble, poised for a trap, followed half behind the old man's shoulder, almost on tiptoe, like a tennis player readied for a fast serve, peering into the thick but moving shadows for the inevitable ambush. The General had his torch out and was shining it along the obscene frieze, making the stone limbs quake in slow-motion simulations of the ecstasies of flesh.

“Here we are,” he said, and allowed the beam to pick out a particular character, hold it for a moment, and then move on to a handsome couple who were engaged in Nature's trade in a fashion which, for once in all that extraordinary carving, did not seem corrupt or perverse. The sculptor had taken more trouble over them, rounding the splayed limbs with real affection, giving the pair, in his own crude terms, an innocence and beauty wholly different from the Swiftian frenzy of the rest of the work.

The torch moved up and to the side a little, and Pibble saw that this section had been separated from the rest of the riot; there was a lull, a clearing in the jungle of limbs, a blank space in which stood three shocks of corn. The beam moved back to the first figure and Pibble saw that it was fully clothed: an elderly, austere man with a high-buttoned frock coat, and a small wig above a thin face and a hooky nose, gazed down at the busy pair.

“That's Josiah,” said the General. “That's his mistress, girl called Mercy Plum. And that's her lover, horse coper called Simon—nobody knows his other name. Josiah framed him and had him transported, and Mercy hanged herself in the old man's bedroom. All this”—he waved his torch up and down the frieze—“is their monument. Rum sort of fellow, Josiah, don't you think?”

“Yes,” said Pibble, realizing with a jerk that he'd let his defenses drop, fascinated by the abrupt Arcadian tone which the unknown sculptor had achieved. He looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but the arched darkness, then back to the sad, cruel face held in the beam of the torch.

“That's what happened to us,” said the General, “in a manner of speaking. Haven't got to that stage physically yet, thank God. We became remote, ‘outsiders' is the fashionable jargon, I think. We just stared at the world as if it didn't concern us. But we knew it did, same way that Mercy and Simon concerned
him.
We soured. We rotted. The brown patches came. I was worse than Dick, maybe, but not much. He could be a terror in private. I used to break out a bit in public, to show the world what I thought of it.”

“I read about the cuckoos,” said Pibble, “and the Epstein at Framplingfield.”

“Poor old George,” said the General. “Absolutely bloody awful artist. Typical of the sort of people they wished on me for the Raid. But I really did that to get at Blight. You know he cut down a row of limes my mother had planted, in Richmond, just in order to put up a filthy great block of offices?”

“Tell me about the duel,” said Pibble.

“Ha! Didn't realize you'd sorted it out that far. Suppose we'd better get on to that. What's your pal up to?”

Pibble moved well away from the old man, just in case of attack, and leaned over the balustrade to scan the moonlit floor. He couldn't see the lion anywhere.

“Gone away to think,” said the General. “Better keep an eye open. Madmen might try anything, once they've thought about it a bit.”

“The duel,” said Pibble.

“Coming to that,” said the General. “You met our Judith?”

“Yes,” said Pibble.

“Funny face she's got,” said the General. “Noticed how it slopes backward, all the way up, like an orangutan's? Not so much, but quite marked once you've spotted it. Flat face, big mouth, little nose, everything tilted a bit backward. Ape woman—Eve must have been like that in Eden, Dick used to say.”

“You talked about her a lot?” asked Pibble.

“Nothing else, during the fortnight she was here. Not much else for two old men to talk about, really: not when they haven't had a proper job for over twenty years, and they find themselves taking stairs in ones which they always used to take in twos. Rotting's a slow process, and you think about it all the time. I tell you, I've found myself in bed with a woman, everything gone like a house on fire, she's feeling all soft and mumbly, but what I've been thinking about is whether I'll ever be able to do it again. Takes the edge off your pleasure, that sort of thing. Last few years Dick and I've been tending to egg each other on, if you see what I mean. Just talk, fantasy, but a sort of challenge at the same time—like when we were kids and used to dare each other to climb trees. And the same with horses, later.”

He paused, looking up at the minareted skyline. Pibble saw that the lion had come back and was sniffing one of the pillars farther along the arcade—the one he himself had climbed down and up by, most likely. He felt bewildered by all this self-revelation; there seemed to be too much of it for it to be just bait to lull him into unwariness. Probably it was no more than repressed shock, the old boy having played the Spartan over his brother's death but now being betrayed by the second shock of being found out.

“Plenty of women in these parts, of course,” said the General, “happy to oblige a rich old hero. Then there are fancier campaigns which keep you occupied for a bit: Dick spent eight months maneuvering to cuckold old Blight after he'd cut down my mother's trees—brought it off, too. Pretty girl, been a model, got that expensive leather look, very good, Dick said. But every now and then you come across a girl (and they get younger as you get older) who really cuts you up. You begin to think that having her is the most important thing in the whole bloody world—tell yourself that after her you'll die happy. Funny thing, those are the ones you never make, more often than not. These last years Dick and I managed to steer clear of each other's obsessions until Judith turned up.

“Anty chose her, and still can't see what all the cheering's about. But Dick and I developed a lot of needle over her. Started to get jealous of each other's dirty minds, even. Didn't stop us talking about her, of course, but there was no best-man-win nonsense about it. We'd sit up into the small hours jeering at each other and drinking too much. Couldn't sail straight in and start seducing her the day she arrived, naturally. Got to give her the chance to feel like one of the family first. But the time was coming, and we both wanted to make a start before the other one. Trouble was we both thought we'd seen her first and the other one ought to do the decent thing and lay off.
Two
rich old heroes scratching on her door in the small hours and she'd have packed up and gone home to Mum.

“Four nights ago, one o'clock in the morning, we decided to have a duel. Both pretty tight by then. Deakin made the dueling pistols they use at the Abbey—made 'em to throw low and to the left, so that nobody gets bits of wadding in their eye and sues us. We've often loaded them up and pooped off at each other. Silly game, but made the old blood run quicker for a few minutes. No chance of hitting, provided you aimed straight.

“But this time I meant to hit him, and I knew he meant the same. Partly whiskey, partly jealousy. We both fell over a couple of times on the way down to the Abbey, and didn't help each other up. I thought we weren't going to be able to do it after all, it took such a time to load those damn pistols, black powder everywhere, both of us swearing like fishwives at the other one's clumsiness. But we managed. Night like this, almost bright as day, heavy shadows.

“Dick said, ‘Feed me to Bonzo, Ralph.' That's Bonzo down there. He'd often said it before, much obsessed by death, so I knew he meant it. Can't remember what I said. We stood back to back and paced apart, both counting aloud, turned round at ten, aimed. You're allowed to fire as soon as you've turned, but there's no point in it. Thing is to take a steady aim. I could see Dick's pistol pointing high and to his right. Mine was, too. We fired just about together and I felt his ball going past my ear. Couldn't hear it, because of the echoes. Then I saw I'd got him. He'd keeled over before in duels, just for the hell of it, but we weren't in the mood this time.

“I walked across and saw I'd got his heart. Bloody fine shot. Serve you right, you randy old bastard, I thought. Then I went and fetched Rastus's tractor and levered him onto the trailer and brought him up here and pitched him over. Took his shoes off, first—kicking­ myself now for not realizing Deakin would clean 'em and put 'em back. Spotted that, didn't you? I was pretty sure Bonzo would drag him under cover, and he did. Told Harvey what had happened next morning, Harvey told Anty. We didn't tell anyone else, but Deakin seems to have sorted it out. That's why he hanged himself. Elsa knows now, and I've a sort of feeling some of the others­ have guessed something's up. Rastus was acting up in the bone house, too. Did you say anything to him?”

“I asked him about the lion,” said Pibble. “He didn't tell me anything. Now, this is an important point, Sir Ralph. Would you have done the same thing if you'd been sober?”

“Wouldn't have tried to hit him if I'd been sober, if that's what you mean. Least, I don't think so. Difficult to tell: we were both considerably touched about that girl. Wouldn't kill him again, of course, now that I know what it's like living without him. But if you mean would I have fed him to Bonzo if I'd been sober—yes, I would. That's what he wanted, and what the hell bloody business is it of anyone else's?”

Pibble sighed, and the lion, who had come back to pace below the arch at their feet, answered with its enormous breathy roar.

“I'll just go and get my bucket,” he said, “and then we can go to the house and ask one of the local policemen up to hear you make a formal statement.”

“He's going to be disappointed,” said the General. “You don't believe I'm going to spout that lot out in front of a witness, do you? Just because I felt the urge to get it off my chest to you? You've got a long furrow to plow yet, my boy.”

Pibble sighed again, but this time the lion did not answer.

“It won't make a lot of difference, I'm afraid,” he said, and started to walk back down the arcading. He didn't mind any more. What the General had told him about the Raid—particularly about the Signals corporal and Dotty Prosser—had dealt with the Clavering myth as a first frost deals with dahlias, turning all their green sappiness to blackened withering. He saw that the old boy was mad, probably always had been mad. No definition of sanity covered people who believed they could treat the world they lived in, the citizens they lived among, with such brutal, insolent … Why, the man was as mad and—

Something banged bonily into his rib cage behind his left elbow, hustling him half sprawling against the balustrade. His ankle was gripped and wrenched upward, twisting him further over, so that for a second he was almost on his back on top of the stonework, with no handhold to prevent his being pitched down below like a hay bale tossed from a barn loft; but as his left arm flailed outward above his head its knuckles banged against stonework—the next pillar. His right arm was already flailing, but he steered it in a panicky sweep in that direction and grabbed. Magically his fist was full of clean, unmoving stone. Suddenly he was in control of his body, which an instant before had been whirling mindlessly about like a tangle of snapped hawser. He let the attacker waste his attack on forcing his legs over the balustrade while he jerked himself upward with his right arm.