A Pack of Lies (8 page)

The wine poured down like Iguaçu Falls;
It dyed the Squire’s beard a bloody red;
And champagne splashed the oaken panelled walls,
And corks lodged in the ceiling overhead.

Glazed ribs and cutlets dipped in creamy sauce,
Slivers of veal and ducklings on a spit:
No sooner had they gobbled up one course
Than dozens more delights succeeded it.

Hastily the Judge took off his coat
And belt and rolled his sleeves up and began
To bawl, demented, ‘Pass the gravy boat!’
And carve great slices from the honeyed ham.

Like Death Valley where the sun-bleached bones
Of buffalo litter the burning ground,
The greasy table sways and rocks and groans
Beneath stripped carcases heaped up in mounds.

But though the muscles of their jaws were flagging,
The greed of man and maid alike was not.
The Marchioness was shrilly heard a-bragging
That
she’d
like second helpings of the lot.

‘Oh save a little appetite for sweet,
My lords and ladies, gentlemen and friends!’
The Lady Bowdley sweetly did entreat,
As if so mean a meal called for amends.

There was a rending then of dinner suits,
Of shirts and blouses, frocks and cummerbunds,
As trolleys brought in gateaux, tarts and fruits
And
crêmes brûlées
, compotes and sugar buns.

Dark-backed éclairs and trifles, cherry flans,
And Baked Alaska,
bombe surprise
and tubs
Of caramel, and rum babas, and pans
Of flaming
crêpes Suzettes
and syllabubs.

‘Bring in the port, the brandy, the cointreau!
The
petits fours
, the after-dinner sweets!’
Called Lady Bowdley from some spot below
The table, in among a host of feet.

Holding his sides, the Squire sprawled and gasped
Face down among the lemon meringue pie.
The groaning, grinning, gurgling Bishop clasped
An empty brandy glass against his eye:

‘I see no chips!’ he chortled, then expired —
Likewise the Marchioness, so grossly fat.
With sugar-spangled hair and cheeks affired,
They slithered from their chairs on to the mat.

The Prince of Wales drove up with honking horn,
But no reception waited at the door.
The stubs of candles glimmering forlorn
Showed the sad story written on the floor.

Amid the pools of candlewax and wine,
The county’s gentry and nobility
In ragged finery all lay in line —
Victims of too much hospitality.

* * *

The floor of the hall was littered with half-eaten sandwiches and paper bags. A dozen dealers were scribbling notes on the back of business cards and, as MCC Berkshire stepped from the rostrum and strode back down the hall, they pressed their messages into his hand or into the pockets of the green corduroy jacket. He resumed his seat and read all the notes through, showing now one, now another, to Mrs Povey. At the sight of each one she would give a little hysterical shriek of laughter and begin sobbing again. After a few minutes he leaned across the chairs in front and said to a man in a black wool coat with an astrakhan collar, ‘I hate to part with the table, but my employer Mrs Povey instructs me to accept your offer of one thousand pounds.’

The man in the astrakhan collar paid cash, and MCC was able to give seventy clean ten-pound notes to the auctioneer. ‘Want a job, young man?’ said the auctioneer with a wink. ‘I can always use a good talker.’

‘Thank you for the kind offer, but I’m very content with Mrs Povey,’ said MCC, and Ailsa’s mother burst into tears all over again.

After that, MCC took very little interest in the proceedings, but slipped a small book out of his pocket and read, wholly and completely absorbed, while the auctioneer’s patter rained down on the assembly. Ailsa glanced over MCC’s shoulder. It was poetry he was reading, of course.

Chapter Six

The Harpsichord:
A Story of Honour and Trust

Then they came to cut off the telephone.

Mrs Povey thrust money at the engineer but he only sniffed and said, ‘Shoulda paid it biffor, Mrs. It’ll cost a packet for you to be reconnected now. Yer on a party line or they could just of cut you off at the Exchange. But yer on a party line, see, so here I am to cut you off.’

Ailsa was reminded of the nursery rhyme:

Here comes the candle to light you to bed,

And here comes . . . the Post Office engineer to cut off your phone.

Mrs Povey went upstairs to have a cry, because of the shame of being cut off.

He was a big, brawny man, the engineer, with tattoos on his forearms. He had short, thin hair, and a face so weather-beaten that the lines and creases showed white like the loose cottons on a teddy bear. He walked with a decided roll, to and from his van, to fetch the dreadful instruments of Disconnection. At the sight of MCC lying along the
chaise longue
, reading, he bared a few tobacco-stained teeth and muttered, ‘Idle, good-fer-nuffing pansies.’

MCC looked at him coldly over the edge of
Plunder of the Spanish Main!
and asked, ‘Is it my fault if there’s no work on the ships any more?’

The sneer disappeared so fast from the engineer’s face that it might have short-circuited. ‘Don’t I know it?’ he groaned. ‘What, Merchant Navy, are you?’

‘Not now,’ said MCC dolefully, just as though last week he had been.

‘Which ships? What line? Where? I was on the
Avro
— beautiful little lady she was, biffor she got herself sold to Sri Lanka. Went for scrap last year. Tragic. Tragic,’ moaned the engineer. ‘These days it’s all supertankers and no-one needed to crew them. It’s curtains fer the likes of us. Got a fag?’

MCC cemented the friendship by fetching out a battered pack of Senior Service cigarettes from his jacket pocket (though Ailsa had never ever seen him smoke). It was as if the anchor on the packet cleaved the two men’s hearts together. ‘Tragic. Tragic,’ said MCC lugubriously. ‘Of course the
real
ships were the sailing ships. Wish I’d been a naval man then. Concertinas on the poop deck. Shanties on the fore bits — and the songs circling up to the crow’s-nest like seagulls on the wing!’

The engineer’s eyes drifted involuntarily towards the ceiling, and his lips smiled. ‘Got a Yamaha electronic organ misself,’ he said.

This seemed to come as no surprise to MCC. But perhaps he had already seen the roll of sheet music protruding from the pocket of the blue overalls.

Ailsa, watching through the kitchen door, pushed aside her homework and hurried into the shop. She dragged the winged armchair up behind the telephone engineer, then curled up herself in a basket chair alongside him. The engineer was put out — irritated that his conversation had been interrupted. ‘What d’you want?’ he said rudely.

Ailsa waved him into the chair. ‘Sit down and listen. MCC’s going to tell you a story. There’s no point arguing. He’ll tell it anyway. You may as well give in.’

Unease, suspicion, curiosity and eagerness, all at one time, shared the weather-beaten face between them. He sat down, but took the doomed telephone on to his lap, as if to say that no last minute rescue bid would save it from grisly execution. ‘Get on wiffit, then.’

* * *

‘Look what we found, Captain!’

They dragged the little boy out from behind a barrel in the hold, and held him up by his collar and belt. ‘A stowaway, Captain!’

‘Fetch him up. Let me have a look at him!’

A sailor ran up the ladder with the stowaway over his shoulder, and set him down, blinking and dazzled, at the Captain’s feet. ‘Up brat! Up!’ snarled the Captain, examining the trembling heap with the toe of his boot. ‘Name? You do have a name, I suppose?’

‘Ned, sir,’ said the stowaway. ‘Ned Cox, sir. And I didn’t mean no harm, sir, honest!’

The Captain’s top lip drew back off a straggle of small, pointed teeth. ‘Not mean harm, sir? Stow away and not mean harm, sir? Ride without paying your passage? Help yourself to victuals every mealtime, I daresay? Smuggle yourself aboard to save capture for your crimes, I daresay?’

‘Oh no, sir! I never did no crimes, sir, honest!’

‘Honest? But honest is what you are not, sir. And do you know what I do with dishonest little stowaways? I throw them over the side, sir, to feed the sharks on the way down and the crawling things on the bottom. Do it, Second.’

Nobody moved. Beyond the Captain’s shoulder, Ned could see the green horizon slanting first one way then the other as the ship rolled. The hands on his clothing tightened, but still nobody moved. In the distance he could hear somebody crying, and did not realize that it was himself. In the distance, too, a voice said, ‘You don’t mean it, Captain.’

‘Mean it? Of course I mean it! Do it, then perhaps we can all get back to work.’

‘You could put him in the brig, sir, and put him off in the Barbadies, sir . . .’

‘If you bandy words with me, sir, it’s the brig for you and the sea for him. You do it, bo’sun, if the Second takes a dislike to my orders!’

The hands on Ned’s shoulders changed, but still nobody moved a step closer to the rail.

‘I couldn’t do that, sir. It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Right? I’ll tell you what’s right. On board this ship what I say is right and what you think ain’t worth a ladle of tar. Right?’

‘
Thou shalt not kill.
I couldn’t go against my Christian conscience, sir.’ An unhappy murmur of approval ran through the assembled crew, and the sailors who had found Ned and handed him over, murmured loudest of all, and their fists were clenched in their gabardine trousers.

The Captain stepped forward and snatched hold of Ned by the wrists and pulled him so sharply towards the rail that the ragged back of his shirt was left in the grip of the bo’sun. He swung the boy bodily over the side, like the whip-end of a rope, but kept hold of his wrists. Beneath Ned the sea glittered and made mouths — deeper and deeper gullets of dark green water. His feet banged against the planks of the ship and his arms were half out of their sockets.

‘It’s not right, Captain,’ said the bo’sun loudly, and the muttering grew to a hubbub, and the whole length of the rail was hidden by sailors leaning over.

‘You mutinous pack of blubbering women,’ said the Captain contemptuously. ‘If you want him that much, you fish him out like the herring he is.’ And he dropped Ned into a shattering world of sharp-flying emeralds, rib-creasing cold and salt-tasting panic of bubbles as the water rushed up over his head. Surfacing was like running up an immensely long staircase with no treads.

At once a tail-end of heavy ship’s rope hit the water beside his head and he made a clumsy grab at it and it slipped through his hands. His head went under again.

‘Catch hold boy, quick!’ shouted a dozen voices from overhead, and the rope came down again, just out of reach. Ned could see the side of the ship slipping by him at great speed, like the barnacled flank of a massive whale.
The stern was coming closer, and once the ship had passed him by, it would not turn back. A third time the rope hit the water, and he grabbed tight hold with hands and feet and teeth and knees and was hauled up the splintery side of the speeding square-rigger.

A dozen pairs of hands pulled him over the rail, but they dropped him on the deck, and the first face he saw was again the Captain’s, pushed close against his. ‘Well, get to the crow’s-nest, boy, and keep watch for a day. I reckon you’ll be sorry these jellified women here fished you out. I’m putting you off at Barbado.’

He stalked to his cabin, and the sailors who had defied him turned their eyes away from Ned as though he were a sin they had rather not have committed. Everyone would suffer for crossing Captain Lock.

‘Better do as he says, lad,’ said the bo’sun. ‘Have you ever climbed rigging?’ Ned shook his head. ‘Well here’s your chance to learn. Take a can of water with you and keep a sharp look-out. If you see a ship, sing out. He’ll maybe soften before Barbado if he thinks you’ll make a ship’s boy.’

The mast rose out of the deck like some naked, lopped, jungle tree shrouded in vines of rigging. The slack ropes sagged beneath him so that he was like a small animal struggling in a net, a fly trapped in a spider’s web. He looked up at the crow’s-nest and the white midday sun was behind it, so that his eyes were momentarily blinded. By the time he reached the first yard-arm, the joints of his arms and legs were burningly useless and he thought he would simply cling there until he fell. But when he looked down, the deck below seemed to be racing from side to side as the ship rolled. It was a sight so unnerving that he kept climbing despite himself, with sweaty hands on the coarse rope, up among the huge, flapping sails.

The crow’s-nest was a miserable little basket, no bigger than a bath-tub. As the ship rolled, it swung way out to port side, then to starboard side. Even a hardened sailor gets sick in the crow’s-nest. Ned felt certain he would die
with each flick of the masthead. The sun dried the sea salt on his clothes and on his skin until he was caked in corrosive white, and burning, burning. There was nothing to do but crouch down in the bottom of the basket and cover his head with his salty arms and groan.

They left him there all night, when the stars and their reflections in the sea became indistinguishable and both were flecks of ice which pierced him through and through, as the mast tossed him across the whole arc of space, to and fro. As for keeping watch, he would sooner have been born without eyes than scan the lurching horizon.

He never so much as saw the pinnace coming. It closed out of a heavy sea mist in the morning, and the first he knew of it was the cry of ‘Pirates!’ from the deck.

Captain Lock, who had been drinking heavily and whose cruelties of the day before were nothing but a forgotten blur, demanded to know who was in the crow’s-nest, who had failed to keep watch. But it was too late for blame. The pinnace was upon them, closing from astern as if she would gouge the side out of them with her bowsprit. From point-blank range she fired her cannon — first at the yards, so that tackle and ropes rattled down like twigs through a stormy tree — then deeper and deeper into the body of the ship, but above the water-line. As the bo’sun ran out one cannon, it crashed through the weakened deck into the hold below. Another rolled clean through the shattered gunwale and plunged into the sea. There was utter confusion among the sailors — whether to fight or whether to surrender. At their backs stood Captain Lock, cursing them, blaming them, threatening them with a hangman’s noose if they allowed his ship to fall to pirates.