Bleak Expectations (3 page)

This Mr Benevolent stood in stark contrast to Mr Parsimonious. Where the latter was soft and melty-edged, it was as if this other man had been precisely carved into being with a chisel, then honed on a whetstone to a fine edge. He was dressed in black from head to toe and back again, and from beneath a fury-clenched brow, his eyes glinted with obsidian malice.

‘How do you do, sir?’ We three children repeated our curtsied greeting.

‘I do all the better for not having to listen to your childish prattle. Speak to me again and you will find yourselves horse-whipped. With a real horse.’ But we did not need a horse-whipping, for his words were simultaneously both sharp and blunt enough to cut and clout in equal quantity. He spun on his heel, not gleefully as would a dancer or giddy schoolgirl but angrily as would a thwarted cad or disgruntled navvy, then stalked to the corner of the room where he kicked Poppy’s puppy and stood brooding like a sulky, eggless hen.

Alas, despite his obvious violent grumpiness, and because I was probably still a bit drunk from the gin, another clever thought struck me and I sought to impress it upon him.

‘Ah, your name, too, is ironic. For Mr Gently Benevolent would imply a loving nature, and yet you appear to be absolutely horrible.’

My regret at my boldness was instant, for he whirled around, hand raised to strike me a blow that doubtless would have felled me, like a small, boy-shaped tree.

‘No, Benevolent!’ It was my father, leaping to my rescue. ‘If there is any hitting of my children to be done, I shall do it!’

In truth, my father was not a keen advocate of corporal punishment, having beaten me only once in my young life after I had broken a vase during a vigorous game of spang. He was abroad at the time, and rather than actually beating me he had sent a long letter from the North Indies describing how he would in theory have beaten me had he been there, an experience in some ways more painful than any physical assault, but in most ways not.

Yet at my father’s son-defending words, Mr Benevolent did not immediately set his hand down. Instead, he held it high and tense, a palsy of fury shaking his arm. His face reddened, purpled and puced, then finally flashed a vivid multi-coloured rainbow of rage. Veins twitched and pulsed in splenetic syncopation. Finally, he lowered his hand and emitted a tremendous snort of anger and disdain, which seemed to say, ‘I loathe you, Thomas Bin, for preventing me from hitting your son and, in addition, your actions have enraged me more than the original infraction, which had already made me pretty damned angry, and you and your family will pay for it many times over indeed, yes, you will, you will, you will, yes, you will.’

Or it might just have been a sneeze.

‘Besides,’ my father eventually continued, ‘we must hurry if we are to catch our boat.’

‘You are returning to the North Indies so soon?’ This from my mother, who had been quiet thus far due to her badger hat having slipped down to cover her entire head; she had only recently fought free of it.

‘No, dear Agnes. For the North Indies no longer exist. We have completely dug them up and sold them for the greater glory of business and the Empire. Hence we go now to . . . the South Indies. And we must hurry if I am to get there, exploit them and return in time for Pip’s eighteenth birthday in six years’ time. Come, gentlemen!’

My father ushered his business partners from the room. As the still seething Mr Benevolent passed, he tried to flick me on the ear and administer a Chinese burn, but he saw my father watching and, at the last second, tried to pretend he was going to shake my hand, missed, stumbled and tripped awkwardly over a previously unseen footstool.

‘I meant to do that,’ he muttered, as he left the room, pausing only to take a glass water-jug from its stand and dash it shatteringly to the floor. ‘Whoops.’

I did not feel his actions were entirely accidental, but further reflection was denied me as my father knelt to bid us farewell. ‘I go now, dear Pip, Pippa and Poppy . . .’

My sisters immediately blubbed with emotion; I malely held my feelings inside, though I think I heard my left kidney stifle a sniffle.

‘But do not be sad! For soon my business shall be complete, and I shall return for good.’

‘When, Papa?’ asked Poppy.

‘Why, in a mere thirty or fifty
¹⁰
years. So, you see, not long at all!’ With this he kissed us all goodbye, and attempted to do the same for my mother but – alas – her hat chose that precise moment to slip down again, leaving poor Papa with a mouthful of badger snout.

Oh, cruel Fate! For little did we know how much that failed kiss would haunt our mother in the future. Oh, wretched Destiny! For meetings made that day would resonate through the years ahead and not with an uplifting, cathedral-like echo but with a sinister, fearsome echo, such as that in a miserable underground cavern of pain. Oh, dismal Providence! For magnificent munificence was soon to be replaced with malicious malevolence – but no, I must restrain my tremulous pen for, as I wrote before, this is the happy part of the story, and pain and misery must wait until properly invited into the narrative.

¹
One of a number of nineteenth-century adages we now know to be wrong. Others include ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who make vases’, ‘In the Kingdom of the Blind the one-eyed man has the best-looking wife’ and ‘Money can’t buy you gloves’.

²
In modern terms equivalent to several hundred snacres.

³
More familiar to us as croquet, cricket and spling.

⁴
More familiar to us as darts, snooker and splung.

⁵
Chapter 3
is pretty wretched. Or for truly harrowing stuff, why not try a modern-day misery memoir, like the series of horrible-relative books:
Ow, Daddy, Ow
,
Keep Your Hands to Yourself Uncle Lionel
and
There Were Three in the Bed and the Little One Said, ‘Stop Hitting Me, Mummy’
.

⁶
Cf
nineteenth-century redcoat song: ‘Oh, the sight of blown-out guts was horrible, but they were French so we did bollible’.

⁷
Note that even though a boy, Pip also curtsies. Child–adult greeting etiquette was thus: if more girls were present than boys, the curtsy took precedence; if more boys than girls, the formal bow and handshake. If equal numbers of both were present, the ugliest child was sent to its room and the previous rules applied.

⁸
What we know as a
chaise-longue
. With the Napoleonic Wars barely over, it was illegal to use French at this time.

⁹
Bonsai horses had been popular since their arrival from Japan in the seventeenth century. They were bred from normal-sized horses, which, when pregnant, were housed in stables thirty times larger than normal. This change of scale made the horse think it was much, much smaller than it really was, leading to the birth of a tiny foal. Owners then often grew the tails to incredible lengths and used the animals as rudimentary equine brooms.

¹⁰
The number forty had yet to be invented.

A year passed. Then another, then two more, quickly followed by another seven, and I was twenty-three years old. No, wait, the events of this book take place between the ages of birth and twenty-one years old, so that can’t be right.

Imagine if some of those years I have just mentioned have not yet passed, that they are fresh and gleaming with hope in an undetermined future. Imagine you have recovered some seven or so of them, and I am but sixteen years old, part man, part boy, rigid with potential and humming with possibility.

Actually, nothing much happened when I was sixteen, so forward one more year and I am seventeen, striving towards manhood with head held high and arms held low for balance. Pippa is but sixteen, blooming like a lady-rose, only without the thorns as she is a kind and generous soul. Poppy is fifteen years old, curious and questioning, all girlish enthusiasm and frills. Our mother is still our mother, our father is still abroad, having visited once in the intervening years for a period of some eight minutes, Bin Manor is still a happy house, and Britain is still great, mighty and Imperially delicious.

Now, picture a drawing room. In it is a pianoforte at which sits Poppy. She is repeatedly striking a single key: under instruction from her teacher Mr Humswell, she is learning the noble instrument one note at a time. On a sofa sits Pippa, completing her tapestry of the battle of Waterloo, a noble scene of gory patriotism. And who is that on a chair opposite her? Why, it is me, Pip Bin. And what is that I am reading? Why, it is a book entitled
Manliness for Boys
, for I am working hard towards my future man-dom. I have recently bathed, but have not dried myself properly and hence there is a small blob of jam on my ear. Not a man yet, Pip Bin! Because men do not have jam on their ears, they have hair.

You have pictured the room, imagined the people within? Good. Then we may continue.

‘That note you are playing is a jolly one, Poppy,’ I commented.

‘Thank you, dear brother Pip. Mr Humswell insists on starting with the happiest notes.’

‘Then he is a capital chap.’
¹

‘Finished!’ Pippa laid aside her tapestry and took up her anvil. In the years since Father had given it to her, she had ceased resenting the heavy impracticality of the gift and had instead embraced its purpose. She struck it with her hammer and the sharp tinking sound it made echoed round the room in counterpoint to Poppy’s piano playing.

I read on in my book, studying how men shaved their manly beards and stubbles: coarse, common folk used a simple table-knife, scraping at their faces between bites of food; gentlemen used a badger-hair brush and cold steel razor; and nobility used a badger-hair brush where the hair was still attached to a live badger and a hot steel razor, which seared the top three layers of skin off simultaneously. This was to be followed by a manly splash of sulphuric acid and a spell administering a colony. I could not wait to be a man if such delightments awaited!

Pippa’s metallic tinking stopped and she held up the fruits of her anvilly labour.

‘Why, Pippa, you have made a tiny horseshoe!’ I said, for that was indeed what she appeared to have made.

‘You are wrong, dear brother Pip,’ she rebutted. ‘For it is not a tiny horseshoe, it is a normal-sized dog-shoe. For Poppy’s puppy.’

As if it had heard mention of itself, Poppy’s puppy chose that moment to enter the room with a high-pitched yap. Though it was now five years old, it was no bigger than it had been on first arrival and, indeed, was actually somewhat smaller and more puppyish. For it was that rarest of breeds of dog, the Austrian Shrinking Spaniel, an animal that, over time, grew smaller and smaller until it finally dwindled to an infinitesimal tininess and ceased to exist.
²

‘Oh, a shoe! For my puppy. How kind of you, dear Pippa’.

‘Dear sister Poppy, it is kindness that comes from a higher moral authority. For why should the horse be the only animal to have shoes? It is barbaric that other creatures go barefoot and are therefore at risk of pain from small stones, thorns and sharp grass.’ She paused, panting slightly: her commitment to goodness often left her breathless.

‘Thanks to you and your anvil, one day all the creatures of the world will be properly shod.’

‘That is my intention. Now, come here, Wellesley.’

Poppy’s puppy eagerly reacted to its name and ran to her. She took him upon her knee, and proceeded to affix his new shoe to one of his old feet. All it took was five red-hot nails being driven through the shoe and into his soft puppyish paw, and he barked and yelped with absolute delight as it was fitted. Indeed, he was so overjoyed that he fainted with doggy delight and lay in a happy, bleeding heap.

‘You are so kind to the animals, Pippa. And to their feet.’

‘Why, thank you, dear brother Pip. But kindness must not tarry. Could you fetch me that pile of unfinished horseshoes from the corner?’

‘Of course, dear sister.’

Pippa’s horseshoes were piled between a ladder and a large mirror. On top of them rested the other family pet, Bonaparte, a black cat. Alas, at that moment, dear puppy Wellesley chose to awaken from his post-shodding slumber. He instantly spied Bonaparte and, as if their human namesakes had spotted each other, battle ensued.

The black cat raced across my path, causing me to stumble. I slid along the highly polished wooden floor, passing under the ladder and arresting my progress only by crashing into the pile of horseshoes at great speed. In a storm of clinking they plunged into the mirror behind them, instantly shattering it. I fortunately remained uninjured, though I had broken the rabbit’s foot I habitually carried with me, and also pulled one leaf from the four-leaved clover I wore as a buttonhole.

‘Oh, Pip, what have you done? Surely now our luck will run out and things will turn horrid!’

I had no truck with Pippa’s superstitious fears. ‘Nonsense,’ I riposted. ‘We shall remain as lucky as ever.’

At which point there were footsteps in the corridor, the door to the room burst open and there was my mother, hair wild with panic, eyes wide with shock and ears flapping with anxiety. ‘Children! I have terrible news! Your father is dead!’ She slumped to the floor, weeping.

My sisters looked at me accusatorily.

‘Ah . . .’ I began, but no more words would come. My recent acts had produced omens of terrible luck, and now this. Was it merely a coincidence?

Yes.

And yet . . . was it more than happenstance?

No.

Although . . . could it all be connected?

Definitely not.

And then I realized that nothing mattered other than the dread news my mother had brought: my father was dead. Cold shock and hot tears fought for control of my young body, then shook hands, called it a draw, and I began to both shiver and cry.