Mr. Chartwell (8 page)

Muzzle back against the floor, nose leaching a moist patch into the pattern on the rug, Black Pat said, “You will retire on the twenty-seventh of this month.”

“Yes.”

“… The termination of your career.”

“I’m bloody well aware of it.” A gap and then Churchill’s tone was of grim amusement—“You know, I’ve thought about my retirement on many, many occasions. And although I never doubted that you and I would meet at this time in my life, on some level I’ve never lost the forlorn hope that we wouldn’t.”

Black Pat closed his eyes, the look of headstone angels.

Churchill continued. “But here you are as always, bringing with you the crushing torment I can never defend myself against.” His hands meshed, resting on the animal’s whiskery back, a back which rose to his collarbone.

“Oh.” Churchill pinched the meat at the bridge of his nose,
forcing out the knur of an approaching headache. “Oh, it’s so dire and tedious and so mucksweatingly mundane.” He removed his hand, returning it to nest with the other in the fur. “I’ve asked myself countless times why I get stuck, going over and over the years, when I can’t change anything. The answer is I don’t know. I am powerless to stop it. And each time you come here I am again thrown to the jaws of the past.”

The dog’s guts rumbled. An embarrassing noise came from his stomach.

Churchill said,
“Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni.”

“Is that Greek?”

“Latin, you bastard. It means, ‘Alas, the fleeting years glide by.’ ”

Black Pat’s guts moaned.

Churchill studied a relief model of Port Arromanches in Normandy inset into the bookshelves, its plastic sea a vivid turquoise. “But I hope you realise that this particular visit of yours is different, that
this
visit is especially cruel …”

No response. Black Pat felt the cruelty of his timing in waves of heartache.

“… because I don’t have the opportunity to assuage the fears you bring with you anymore. I’m about to retire, my work is over. I don’t have future work to look to, something I’ve always relied on to carry me through—the promise that I will do better; that I will mend mistakes; that I will eventually defeat you. Not any longer. This time I am out of time. It is surely a savage thing to do to a man.”

The dog declined from answering this. He was uncharacteristically short of sarcastic comebacks. Eyes opening, he murmured into the pile of the rug.

Churchill pressed a thumb on his forehead and leant into it, lost in thought.

Black Pat murmured again, barely a whisper, “The work you have done is a measure of you as a man—”

“I know what you’re scavenging for, vulture.”

“—and you will be quantified accordingly.”

A deep blast of emotion came from Churchill. “I admit I feel such doubt about how I will be judged for the work I have done in my life. And now, as I prepare to leave it behind, I feel the uncertainty bearing down on me.”

Black Pat was motionless.

Churchill tapped the dog’s fat head. “Are you listening, you rustic ignorant?”

The fat head didn’t move. Churchill stayed quiet for a moment. His voice was fractured when he spoke again.

“Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard I am not sure that I will be held to have done very well.”

“No one can help you with this,” said Black Pat.

“What are you insinuating?”

“It is not an insinuation.” Black Pat lifted his face. “It’s an instruction. You know you will not find sanctuary in the answers of others. No peace lies there.”

Churchill said, “Then let me go to bed.”

The dog’s voice was emotionless. “Have another drink. It’ll clear your head.”

Reaching for it, Churchill drained the last of his whisky in retaliation, banging the glass down on a small circular table next to him, the bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt shuddering.

“There!”

His head was far from clear, it felt woolly with alcohol and fatigue. The room rocked with the fluidity of oil on water. He blinked to control it, but it rolled on. “… Now
leave.
”

“Not yet,” said Black Pat.

“I’m telling you to leave.”

“Not yet.”

“Then I’m begging you,” said Churchill.

Black Pat’s head dropped back to the floor, his muzzle stubbed against the Persian rug. “I know you are.”

4.00 a.m
.

T
he front door closed gently, weight cautiously applied until the lock made a slow snap. Under a powder of sleep in her bedroom Esther was immediately awake. Her eyes swerved to the bedroom door, open a few inches. The stairhead and landing outside formed a construction of dim shapes.

Noises came from down in the hall, the sound of a lumbering bulk trying not to be heard. There was a dull thud as a shin met the edge of a table hidden in the dark, followed by an ago-nised pause, the sound of a knuckle bitten to keep from crying out.

Esther lay there as if waiting for an atrocity, a motionless ball.

In the hall there was a tight crack, something plastic being shattered, then a slew of paws, a heavy lurch into the front
room’s doorframe, and a filthy obscenity. Esther shot upright in bed, the sleeves of the dressing gown locked around her elbows, hair thrown over her face. Fighting through the sleeves, she remembered the escaped pepper pot. It would have been funnier, but still funny enough.

Scrabbling claws signalled that Black Pat was scratching at the carpet, the instincts in him to carve out a den. Something ripped. A pounding of paws in a circle was followed by the gradual crash of a body dumping itself onto the floor. Then a sigh came, a peeved one, the head shifting in small posture changes to find a tolerable spot. Bangs came from the head as it lumped around, nothing comfortable.

Esther listened with satellite ears, sitting cross-legged, the bedcovers in chaos. She started to speak and changed her mind. She changed it again and spoke in an emergency hiss.

“Black Pat?”

Another sigh, this time impossibly annoyed. “What?”

“Are you going to stay down there?”

“Yes.”
It was the tedious tone of an unresolved argument.

Anxious that Black Pat might invade the upstairs rooms, Esther said, “You’ll definitely stay in the front room?”

“Ock.”
A snort of contempt. “Shhh!” A firm demand.

“You’ll be there all night?”

“Could you keep your voice down? I’m trying to sleep.”

She did keep her voice down, speaking in a booming whisper. “Sorry.”

There was no reply, an awkward peace as both of them lay in silence. Esther felt the embarrassment of trying to sleep in the company of acquaintances, that squeak of adult humiliation at talking in pyjamas and then very consciously not talking and lying there in the blackness.

Unable to bear it, she turned on one elbow, twisting to clump the pillows. Her striking fist made a furrow. A few minutes chipped away. From below came the sound of the dog’s face lifting to lick at his foreleg with a brusque tongue. Black Pat hummed quietly as he attended the leg. He gargled through the sweeping tongue and it was dramatically unpleasant.

Esther eavesdropped from her bedroom. More repulsive humming. She was reassured. A very tentative reassurance, which strengthened into mild confidence. She experimented with shut eyes until her eyes allowed themselves to remain shut.

“… God.”
Black Pat had stopped, the thing on his leg forgotten. “I can hear you snoring, you know.” He had something else to add. “It sounds like a tractor driven by pigs.”

Esther’s eyes boggled open, now open forever. She took sipping breaths with a straw-hole mouth and tried to be noiseless.

Black Pat snickered at the floor and rolled as a horse rolls, heaving his body from the neck. The momentum rocked him over to his other side. With a bluesy grunt he relaxed his muscles into sleep, his ear creasing back to reveal its beef-pink lining.

7.30 a.m
.

E
sther peered over the banister and looked for Black Pat. Not seeing him, she stood on her toes, leaning farther, the weight on her stomach. Then, envisioning her death from a collapsing banister, dead on her own stairs, Esther dashed to the bathroom. Locking the door, she went to do the morning analysis of her face. The mirrored cabinet above the green sink described a worried face drawn around a dark migrainous point in the centre. Without ever having worn earrings, Esther imagined earrings and wondered if this would improve things. Now she tried out a grin, grinning at the mirror, changing the angles of her neck.

The grin died in a frown. She noticed an object balanced on the sink’s ledge, a stick bound with one of her tea towels. The unbound stick was a wooden spoon, also belonging to her.
Esther looked over at the door. The bathroom was suddenly infected with the mysterious and foul habits of Black Pat.

An ear to the door, she heard silence. Maybe he was still asleep? Another problem arose. With clothes still in the bedroom she would have to chance a wet sprint in a towel.
Better to get the clothes first
, thought Esther.
Yes, get the clothes and do the whole procedure in here
.

Seconds later she returned hugging an armful of clothes: a mustard cardigan and a cream-and-blue day dress patterned with kaleidoscope fractals. Screwed up in one prim fist she held a pair of underpants. Black Pat turned from the sink. With a thump of cloth everything fell to the floor. Up came his paw, a merry salute. Esther mutely debated the right response.

A patch of the mirror had been wiped clear. Black Pat was holding the wooden spoon, rewrapped with the tea towel. Rubbing his teeth with it, he worked against the enamel, pushing it around the gullies of his mouth. Cheeks stuffed, he said something unintelligible.

“What?” Esther bent and scraped together her clothes.

He did it again, a string of vowel sounds, an interpretive paw swinging between the sink and the bath. Then he let out a towel mouthful of laughter, a spray of froth landing over the tiles.

“That’s my tea towel, I hope you know.” Esther’s clothes were in a bundle around the humiliating pants. “And that’s my spoon.” Moodily she said, “I cook with that spoon.”

He removed it. “Not now it’s my toothbrush you don’t.”

“Your toothbrush.” Esther talked disapprovingly to her ankles.

Black Pat developed a disapproval of his own. “Dental hygiene is important. I aspire to have the smile of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”

This was intriguing enough. Esther forgot her ankles. “Tess of the what?”

“The D’Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy wrote that she had a smile like roses full of snow.” He shuffled his head about. “I paraphrase. It was something similar, perhaps that. Either way, a nice smile.” He lifted the skin of his muzzle to show her, flaunting hooked fangs in a mossy mass, some damp grey, some dappled brown, a few in curving tusks.

Esther took in the exhibition of teeth. No roses of snow, it was a split haggis stuck with shards of coconut bark.

The teeth were put away, the paw repeating its journey from sink to bath, an invitation to use them. “And if you’re going to be late for work please do carry on. I can take a bath later.”

Take a bath in her bath? Esther stared at him with disgust. She stood with a shoulder to the tiles and a solution came to her.

“If you want to wash I’ve got a hose in the garden, I could turn on the hose … wouldn’t you rather—”

“Pardon?” said Black Pat, pretending at ignorance.

“With the hose, you know … a wash. With the—”

“Pardon? You’d suggest this to all your lodgers?”

Esther was careful with her words. “No, only if they were—”

Black Pat cut her off with a bitchy slant of his eyes. He did it again, a very unsavoury dismissal. A few beats passed and he spoke, the voice patronising. “Are you going to take a bath now?”

Esther fidgeted with her bundle of clothes, shifting them around. Black Pat wedged the spoon against his gums. She hadn’t answered, so he said the word “Okay” through shut lips. Through shut lips he said,
“Fine.”

He walked to the tub and manipulated the taps easily. The
bath plug was fumbled into place and water began to collect. He squirted a string of shampoo into the rolling water and it foamed. Black Pat squashed himself in, lowered into a torpedo, and lunged at the ends of the bath, his front legs flattened, his face thrown over with soap. Colliding with one end, he struggled round and lunged at the other. Water came spilling over the bath sides and collected in lagoons on the floor. Esther refereed silently from above her clothes.

Black Pat tried to clean his back. He overturned and flailed, mouth flooding, his head knocking against the sides. He stood up, looked round at his back, was unsatisfied, and overturned again. Then he flipped onto his front and made a few more lunges.

The sight of him there was strangely endearing, working an odd little spell on her. “Do you need any help?” asked Esther.