Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (39 page)

EYES

A happy face peered round the door of the Argyll, seeking the landlord’s attention.

‘Is it all right if I bring the kids in?’ asked the man.

The landlord looked to left and right, as if the forces of licensing oppression were poised outside ready to strike.

‘Course you can—but if the polis arrive, then out of the back door quickly, if you please. There’s my license to think about.’

The man entered, cheerfulness (or was it relief?) still shining from every pore. In the decently subdued atmosphere of the Argyll, such expressions seemed almost improper and it soon worked upon him to tone down the joy level.

The other very noticeable thing about the visitor was that he was not alone. In his arms he carried a baby, asleep and bundled up in a space suit arrangement of clashing primary colours. Close behind came a young lady of sixteen or so, whose features suggested a blood relationship with the happy man rather than anything more interesting. Speaking of her features, I also managed to note both her painful beauty and the wolfish, protective devotion to the man that shone in her sloe-eyes.

Mr Disvan registered my sudden awakening of interest and waved an admonitory finger.

‘Not for you, Mr Oakley,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘She deserves better than that—and you couldn’t handle the trouble.’

As usual, any protest on my part at this implied slur on my morals and/or courage, was cut short by more pressing developments.

The happy man and his family (?) came up to our table. He grabbed Disvan’s right hand and pumped it furiously.

‘I can’t ever thank you enough,’ he said, with deep feeling. ‘I’m forever in your debt.’

Everyone was staring at us and Mr Disvan was clearly discomfited by the scene. He extricated his hand from the happy man’s death-grip with some difficulty.

Despite Disvan’s warning, I was still appraising the girl but, on reaching the level of her eyes, I desisted. Whilst clearly just as grateful to Mr Disvan, she was now looking about for fresh threats to her father. The backwash of dangerous energy I caught from her glance made me reconsider the plans I’d laid. She was obviously a girl to watch—but not in the sense that I’d been doing.

‘There’s nothing to thank me for,’ said Mr Disvan briskly, eager to be out of this. ‘Nothing at all.’

The happy man shook his head and the girl fixed Disvan with a look I was glad not to be receiving.

‘Nothing? You saved our lives, more or less. I hardly call that nothing!’

Mr Disvan still refused to accept responsibility for the happy man’s continued survival.

‘All I did was listen to you,’ he said, ‘and then suggest the obvious. A commonsense suggestion, that’s all I provided. However, if you’re so keen to be obliged, why don’t you go and buy me a drink and we’ll call it quits. How about that?’

A certain natural English desire to remain in the background played a large part in forming Mr Disvan’s reaction, but I detected something else. There was a feature of what was going on that greatly disturbed him—something more profound than embarrassment. I had intended to probe this suspicion when the happy man was at the bar. However, instead of leaving us alone for the moment, as Disvan had doubtless intended, the man stayed put whilst his daughter (?) rushed off to perform the task for him.

I had the distinct impression that the little family unit before us was a well-oiled machine, communicating by telepathy and dedicated to a single objective—like a Bedouin sub-tribe, only without the knives (as far as I could tell).

Mr Disvan appeared to give in to the inevitable. ‘Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘allow me to introduce you to Mr Edmund Maccabi. That’s Joseph, his son, he’s holding and Bridget, his daughter, up at the bar.

I stood up and we shook hands.

‘I believe I’ve seen you around the village, Mr Maccabi,’ I said, by way of getting a normal conversation going, ‘but I don’t recall you visiting the Argyll before.’

Maccabi was suddenly rather grave.

‘No, you wouldn’t have, Mr Oakley,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid my wife passed away about a year ago. Before that, I was always busy working. Now looking after the family takes all my time. I used to come in here when I was younger, but it’s not possible now.’

He seemed a personable enough sort of man and I conceded that perhaps his earlier excitability was the product of some momentous event, and therefore excusable.

Possibly he read my mind for, as his daughter returned, thoughtfully carrying a tray of drinks, he turned to me and said, ‘I hope you’ll excuse the fuss just now, Mr Oakley. I’m not always like that, you understand. It’s just that the last few weeks have been a real trial to us and today was a great deliverance.’

Mr Disvan raised his eyebrows as if to suggest surprise at this disclosure. A moment followed when no one knew what to say. I was uncomfortably aware that the girl had rejoined us and had, sipping at a glass of shandy, again fixed those eyes of infinite possibility upon me.

The final straw was that even Joseph, the baby, woke up and stared at me. I was obliged to take the plunge.

‘If you’ll excuse me asking,’ I said, inwardly questioning the wisdom of curiosity, ‘what was it you had to thank Mr Disvan for?’

Mr Maccabi thought his response through before replying. He was clearly not ordinarily a glib spinner of tales.

‘Just advice, really,’ he said finally, setting down his pint of Guinness, ‘like Mr Disvan said. Very important advice, mind you. It saved six lives this morning, including our own.’

I knew that Disvan was a man of many accomplishments, but this was more than usually worthy of note.

‘Well, congratulations!’ I said to Mr Disvan. ‘Why didn’t you mention it earlier? We could have done with the conversation.’

It was true. That particular Saturday dinnertime at the Argyll had not been a festival of stimulation. Things were so quiet that the landlord had been allowed to start on his monologue about the shortcomings of brewery managers—and then silence was found to be preferable to that.

‘I didn’t mention it,’ said Disvan, ‘because I didn’t know. Simple as that.’

‘I’d been having these dreams, you see,’ said Mr Maccabi helpfully, just as the thread of conversation was about to slip from our fingers again. ‘They were pretty distressing and, whilst the meaning was clear as day, I didn’t know whether to believe them—or what to do in any case.

‘Then I remembered my father asking Mr Disvan for assistance years back, when we had those mysterious tappings in the attic. Not only that, but he was a tower of strength when my Amy passed away. He sorted out all the admin and paperwork at a time when I just wasn’t up to it.’

Mr Disvan in the role of good Samaritan and social worker was a new concept to me, and not altogether credible. We could all see, however, that he was far from pleased to be unmasked, and the subject was left undeveloped.

‘Anyway,’ Mr Maccabi continued, ‘I asked Mr Disvan to pop round to see if he had any suggestions to make...’

Disvan butted in, apparently keen to bring matters to a brisk conclusion. ‘Mr Maccabi kept dreaming that he and his family were in a bus queue, waiting to go to Goldenford, with three other people...’

‘A mother and child and a chap going to work,’ said Maccabi.

‘Whatever. But when the bus turned up, it went out of control and ploughed into the queue, presumably killing everyone. Mr Maccabi said it was so vivid, it had to be more than merely a dream. Not only that, but he was intending to make just such a journey in the near future. And all I advised was that he and his family, being forewarned, shouldn’t be there to be run over.’

‘Ah yes, but that’s not all,’ added Mr Maccabi, addressing his comments to me. That, I agree, was just commonsense. Why I’m really obliged to Mr Disvan is that he went on to explain we still had to catch the bus to Goldenford that morning because that was also ordained. If we’d just not turned up, things would have got all twisted. It might have meant the accident was merely postponed and the bus would catch us some other time when we weren’t expecting it.’

Mr Disvan didn’t seem happy with this.

‘I put it a little more subtly than that, Mr Oakley. I seem to recall speaking about the concept of wyrd, the threads of fate and so on.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Maccabi, ‘there was a lot of superstition mixed in there  but the majority of it was sound.’

Mr Disvan rested his head on his hand and looked away.

‘Anyway,’ Maccabi continued blithely, ‘I gave it a lot of thought and decided to confront the prediction on the ground it’d chosen. We turned up at the right time but, beforehand, I’d rung the bus depot. I’d said there was a serious fault on the Binscombe bus. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t believe me at first. I heard someone say “we’ve got a right loony here” and then they hung up.

‘I had to ring back and say I’d got into the depot the night before and tampered with the brakes, the steering, you name it. The next stage was to say the Binscombe Liberation Front, or someone, had planted a bomb on it but luckily it didn’t come to that.

‘They must have taken a look at the bus and found out whatever the fault was. Either way, when the bus turned up, it wasn’t the one I saw in my dreams but an older, replacement vehicle. It rolled up, stopped safely and took us to Goldenford.

‘A tragedy averted and six people saved,’ said Bridget Maccabi. Her voice was like the crack of a playful whip.

‘Precisely. So that’s the end of that,’ her father agreed, and toasted the supposed agent of their salvation. ‘Here’s to you, Mr Disvan!’

I looked at Disvan and saw at once that he was harbouring doubts so far unexpressed. I was wondering what these might be, when a noise from across the table distracted me.

Mr Maccabi had stood up with a strangled cry. He was staring in horror at his pint of Guinness on the table.

‘What’s the mat—’ I started to ask.

Maccabi didn’t seem to hear me. He lunged at the drink and began a furious search of the glass’s contents with his fingers. Great gouts of Guinness flew everywhere, covering our party and the surrounding area.

The landlord, who hated seeing good beer go to waste and who liked seeing it on his floor even less, shouted a no-nonsense assessment of events at Mr Maccabi, but he took no notice.

Bridget Maccabi was on her feet and I thought her gaze would shatter the unoffending glass.

When less than a third of a pint remained to distribute, Mr Maccabi seemed to come to. He looked at the damp and sticky havoc he’d caused and silently appealed to us for sympathy. We all remained silent, not knowing yet whether we ought to give it.

‘There was an eye in there,’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘Honestly—an eye—floating in the beer. It blinked at me!’

He returned to staring into the glass and shook his head sadly. His voice became softer and more reflective.

‘Really, there was an eye,’ he said. ‘It was looking at me.’

‘Alas no,’ said Mr Disvan, finding an age-old lampshade suddenly fascinating in his attempt to avoid Mr Maccabi’s face. ‘It was looking
for
you.’

*  *  *

‘Dad needs to see you,’ said Bridget Maccabi. ‘Now, please.’

The request seemed to dispense with actually consulting our brains and cut in at some reflex level. We found ourselves rising to answer the call before really considering it.

A mere minute or two after entering the Argyll, Bridget Maccabi had prised Mr Disvan and myself out and was ushering us down the street. I was going to compensate for this brutal herding by some jocular comment about Bo-peep and sheep but a cautious look at those black, flashing eyes caused me to reconsider.