The Perils and Dangers of this Night (12 page)

Outside, in the treetops, the carrion crows were calling.

Dr Kemp ordered me along to the practice room at the
other end of the school, near the kitchens and dining-room.
I had no choice but to obey his abrupt command,
although I took a couple of seconds and the opportunity
– in the sullen activity which followed the confrontation,
as Sophie mopped the spilt coffee and put the table
upright, as Pryce picked up the shards of the broken mug,
as Dr Kemp tried once more to console his wife – to slip
the wallet of tuning keys out of my pocket and down the
side of an armchair, where I thought I could pretend to
discover it later. Then I hurried to the practice room and
waited for the headmaster to come.

The room was tiny, not much more than a walk-in
cupboard with an upright piano and a stool in it. The
floor was piled with sheet music, there was a shelf
stacked with old hymn books and psalters, and there
were books of graded pieces on top of the piano itself.
The light came from a bare overhead bulb and a
ventilation panel near the ceiling.

I'd spent many hours in there over the five years I'd
been at Foxwood Manor, on my own, with the door shut,
working on scales and fingering exercises and the pieces
I practised for Dr Kemp. More recently, since the death
of my father, the room had been a place where I could
escape from the dull routines and enforced matiness of
prep-school life, find a quiet, peaceful corner among the
nightmares which filled my head; where sometimes I
thought of a hymn we often sang in chapel – '
speak
through the earthquake, wind and fire, o still small voice
of calm
. . .' – and I tried to conjure the calm, loving voice
of my father.

But now I was squeezed into the little space with the
headmaster. Dr Kemp sat at the piano and I stood beside
him. With the door closed, the air grew stale and stuffy.

'Again.' Dr Kemp kept repeating the word, and so,
dutifully, I repeated the phrase I was singing. The pitch
rose, the tension too, and the testiness in the headmaster's
voice increased in the way he said those two dry syllables.
He banged a note. 'Listen! Can't you
hear
it? If you can't
hear
it, if you don't
listen
, if you don't use your
ear
and
listen
, then you're no better than all – than all – than all
the rest of them!'

I wetted my lips and sang the phrase again. I knew the
tuning was perfect, but the tone was woody, my voice
deadened in the dead stale air of the cupboard – as
though I'd been locked inside the suffocating darkness of
my own school trunk and was shouting, hopelessly, to be
let out.

'Again.' The headmaster played the same phrase a
semitone higher. This time he jumped from the stool. He
pressed his body right against mine, from behind, put his
arms around me and put his hands on my belly – 'From
here! You breathe from here!' – and his hands were big
and hot, burning through the material of my shirt,
burning my skin as I breathed deeply and sang. 'Again!'
the headmaster cried out, holding himself hard against
me, so close that the odour of his breath and his body
were suddenly strong in the airless room. 'No, no good,
no good!'

With an expression of utter weariness, almost defeat,
he thrust me aside and stood there, panting like a
wounded bear. 'Go. Just go away. I've had enough.'

Quite miserable, I dragged my feet along the corridor. I
didn't know where to go or what to do. For the first time,
even the prospect of communing with my bird or
searching out Roly in the woods seemed pointless: what
a choice of company on a dreary winter's afternoon, a
crow with a brain the size of a pea, or a weasly old
hermit. Trying to shake the meanness of these thoughts
from my head, I found myself close to the entrance to the
hall and saw Mrs Kemp still sitting by the fire.

* * *

She'd stayed there, alone, since her husband's row with
Pryce. From the other end of the school she must have
heard the muted sound of the piano in the practice
room and our repeated, fruitless exercises, the same
futile arpeggio. Now she was staring into the fire, where
the flames were blue from the sap as the holly twigs
fizzled and spat. Her eyes fell miserably on the spot on
the worn carpet where Wagner used to sleep, where
he'd been sleeping only twelve hours before. She stared
into space.

Suddenly, there was a movement at the window. I
caught it from where I'd paused to watch her, and she
turned her head to see what it was. The sunlight was
dazzling, but there was a flutter of black against the
blanket of snow. Again, a similar movement, a bit of
blackness, as though someone had tossed a rag from an
upstairs window, a rag or an old glove, and then again,
bigger, past the window and onto the snow.

Crows. She wheeled herself quickly across the room, to
the further end of the hall near the piano. I tiptoed to
another window and looked out too. I heard her gasp at
the sight of what the crows were doing.

The birds were dropping from the treetops. They'd
stopped calling. And in their silent, uncanny communion,
there was a terrible purpose. They fell to the body of the
dog.

'Oh no, please . . .' She leaned towards the glass and
banged on it with the heel of her hand. The crows, six or
eight of them, sprang from the dog and wafted into the
air. They dropped, and they hopped through the snow on
their black, muscular legs. She banged again, and again
they recoiled from the dog, cloaking their bodies with
half-open wings. Then the boldest bird flapped and
flapped and beat through the air, lifting a cloud of sunlit
powdery snow like a miraculous halo, and it landed on
top of the dog. It pecked. But the beak, a black dagger,
jarred on the stiffened, freezing body. So the bird sprang
to the dog's head. And it pecked. Another bird slunk
through the snow to the other end of the dog. Where it
pecked.

'Oh please God no . . .' Mrs Kemp rapped and rapped
on the window. She banged with all her strength, but her
fists were weak and white and the glass was like ice.

Instinctively, I moved to help her: to reach for the front
door and open it wide, to step outside and clap the crows
away. But as I started forwards, a hand closed onto the
collar of my shirt. It wrenched me back with a breathtaking
jolt.

Pryce. A second later, with my shirt wrung so tight
against my throat that I thought I was strangling, he'd
lugged me into the corridor, back-heeled open the door
of the staffroom and pulled me inside.

He pinioned me there. And he hissed into my ear, with
both of our faces close to the crack in the door, forcing
me to peer out with him, 'Let her work it out for herself,
she thinks she's so fucking perfect.'

She was shouting, 'Dr Kemp! Headmaster!' but her
voice was feeble from sitting too long in the freezing air,
from the smoke of the fireside, from weeping. She took
as big a breath as her lungs could hold, and she shouted,
'No! No!' thumping the window at the same time. 'Dr
Kemp! Please! Please!'

The crows were on the dog. They were hungry. The
night had been bitter and long: a long night to be
hunched in a cloak of wings, muffled in a coat of feathers,
shivering in the treetops while the forest creaked and
groaned through the hardest frost of winter. Hungry,
they were on the dog, plying their beaks in the softest
places.

We watched her. I couldn't speak, I could hardly
breathe, as Pryce screwed my collar tighter and his face
bent close to mine. We saw her spin her chair and thrust
with all her weight towards the headmaster's study.
There was a look of steel on her face, as cold as the glass
on which she had bruised her hands. She had neither the
time nor the inclination to go wheeling the whole length
of the school for the assistance of her husband, who, as
far as she knew, was preoccupied with venting his
unhappiness in a misguidedly punitive singing lesson, so
she sped to his desk, pulled open a drawer and rummaged
among a mess of papers until she found the bunch of keys
she was looking for.

In moments she was accelerating along the smooth lino
of the corridor, so close to our faces that I caught a waft
of her perfume; and almost directly opposite us, she
skidded to a halt at the door which was her destination:
NO BOYS TO ENTER WITHOUT A MEMBER OF STAFF
.

Still we could hear her hissing, 'Dr Kemp, headmaster
. . .' but the words were all but smothered by the
hoarseness of her breathing. 'No no, please God no . . .'
It was only a noise she made to drive herself faster to get
what she needed. We watched her as she found the key,
as she fitted it into the keyhole with speed and accuracy
and a well-oiled snugness, and she rolled inside the room,
unlocked the big black iron safe and tugged the door
wide open.

A row of guns: half a dozen single-shot, Martini-action
.22 rifles.

She snatched one of them from the rack, pulled the
lever and opened the chamber. She ripped open a box of
cartridges and thumbed one into the chamber. The smell
of the gun was strong, a dark oily smell which did not
allow for cobwebs and fustiness. She snapped it shut. She
was in and out of the room in less than thirty seconds and
thrusting back along the corridor, towards the hall again,
with the gun balanced on the arms of her chair and the
box of cartridges in her lap.

Pryce manhandled me across the staffroom. I'd never
set foot in there before, only glimpsing inside whenever
I'd had to knock on the door and ask for one of the
teachers. Now I had a second to glance around me as I
was whirled from the door and over to the window.
Threadbare armchairs, a table littered with sherry glasses,
left-over Christmas cake and overflowing ash-trays. A
noticeboard stuck with duty lists, newspaper cuttings; the
calendar for December 1966, a red-faced Santa with a
bikini-girl snuggling on his lap. Bizarrely, a glass case
with a stuffed badger inside it.

No air. A fume of stale smoke and stale middle-aged
men.

Pryce had me at the window just in time. He sniggered,
tightening his grip at my throat, as Mrs Kemp burst out
of the front door of the house. The brightness was
intense, after the gloom of the hall, and she hurtled the
chair down the ramp so hard and so blindly that it
crunched into the snow and tipped over. She was flung
right out of it and landed headlong, with such a thump
that all the air was driven from her body.

The crows were startled by her sudden appearance, but
they did not relinquish their prize. As she sprawled in the
snow, winded so badly that she gaped like somebody
drowning, they bent their beady eyes towards her.

We watched from the window of the staffroom.

Mrs Kemp dragged herself over the snow on her belly
and reached for the rifle. Lying in the snow like a
backwoodsman, she splayed her legs, steadied her breathing
and squinted down the barrel, just as I'd learned to
do in the school's rifle range. She fired. But still her chest
was heaving, so the first shot missed her target and
thudded into the swollen body of the dog. The birds
scattered, alarmed by the sudden report and its repercussions
in the woodland; the way the dog groaned as a
blast of gas escaped from the bullet hole in its belly. But
one of them was reluctant to let go of the dog's tongue,
which it had pierced and tugged out like a slice of veal.
The woman ejected the spent cartridge, scrabbled for the
box which lay nearby, reloaded and fired again, and her
second shot sent the crow cartwheeling through the air
and onto the lawn, an explosion of black feathers on the
sparkling snow.

Dr Kemp appeared at the front door. He'd heard the
shots and come running. In a blink he took in the
extraordinary scene.

The wheelchair was capsized at the foot of the ramp.
His wife lay flat on her belly, retching for breath, a rifle
flung to one side. Under the copper beech, the dead dog
was deflating. A crow was sculling around it, beating the
lawn with shattered wings.

Pryce let go of me. I squirmed away from him, across the
room and into the corridor. I was right behind Kemp at the
front door of the house, as he ran forwards and bent to his
wife, turned her over and felt her fragile body gasping.

'My dear, my dear,' he panted, 'what on earth are you
doing?' and he tried to lift her from the ground. He
glanced up and saw me at the door, staring, so astonished
that I couldn't move. 'Help me, Scott!' he called out.
'Bring the chair, the chair . . .'

I was galvanised into action – or would have been.
About to run down the ramp and right the chair, I felt a
hand on my shoulder. Pryce was beside me, and the
weight of the hand stopped me dead. He squeezed my
shoulder hard enough to show that he meant me to stay
where I was, and then he let go, brought his hands
together and started to clap.

Slow, sarcastic clapping. Kemp, cradling his exhausted
wife, goggled back at him. Pryce stood at the top of the
ramp, and he clapped. 'Bravo,' he said. 'Good shooting,
Mrs Kemp.'

And then, before the headmaster could express one jot
of the outrage he felt, Pryce strode swiftly onto the lawn.
He was superb, a gentleman come to the rescue of a
distressed lady. In one effortless movement, he bent to
her, swept her into his arms and stood up. She gazed up
at him, a limp, swooning figure. He blew softly into her
face. 'You have snow on your eyelashes,' he whispered.

I hurried to the chair and set it upright. In another
moment, Pryce was wheeling the woman up the ramp
and into the house.

Dr Kemp struggled to his feet. He was negated, he was
a negligible man. He dusted the snow from his trouser
legs, picked up the rifle and the box of ammunition,
stomped to the front door and disappeared inside.