Notwithstanding (10 page)

Colonel Perry Barkwell became livid beyond all reckoning. ‘Sheepshaggers?’ he spluttered, outraged by this ancient but ever-hurtful slur. ‘Sheepshaggers? You’ll answer for this, sir, you’ll answer for this.’

The two elderly giants were by now eyeball to eyeball, their faces puce, their white clipped moustaches quivering, and it took their respective wives to intervene. ‘Get off me, woman,’ they both cried, but
allowed
themselves to be prised apart. The Major and his wife were hurried through the front door by the Rector, followed by the Colonel’s bellows of ‘You shall be answerable, sir, you shall be answerable’. At the gate the Major turned round and intoned ‘Baaaa, baaaa’ and thus he continued his derisive bleating until well out of earshot while the Colonel trembled with implacable ire.

In the car, on the way to hospital, Mrs Barkwell reflected that there would not have been room for all of them anyway, and she hoped that the Major and Joan would be all right. ‘Damn them both,’ exclaimed the Colonel fiercely, and no more was said on the subject as he drove, in the grip of an ecstatic rage, pell-mell through the sinuous country lanes towards the little casualty unit at Haslemere hospital. The other four did not know whether they felt sick from the salmon, or from the terrifying and vertiginous speed of their journey, or from being crammed together like dates in a box, or from retrospective horror at the viciousness of the quarrel that they had just witnessed. They were flung against each other unmercifully as the old Rover skidded and screeched around the corners, and the Rector prayed aloud, his left upper arm forced against the copious but unmaternal bosom of the resolute Polly Wantage, whose overpowering aroma of wet tweed, dogs and bitter pipe dottle contributed generously to the general feeling of sickness and nausea experienced
by
all the passengers in the bucketing car. Polly’s companion whimpered softly to herself, and Leafy Barkwell, white-faced in the front seat, closed her eyes and tried not to think. She realised suddenly that they had forgotten poor Nanna altogether, and that Nanna had also eaten the salmon, but somehow she lacked the will to tell the Colonel to turn back for her. A wave of unhappy fatalism overcame her, and she decided to try not to think about what it would be like to die by overleaping a ditch and crashing into an oak tree.

When the car left the twisting lane and reached the main road from Brook to Haslemere, everyone felt relief tempered by the knowledge that the Colonel’s wrathful driving could still easily leave them dead. Polly Wantage realised she was longing to know about the origins of the ‘sheepshagger’ jibe, but even that formidable lady baulked at the idea of raising the subject when the Colonel was still in an incendiary state of vexation. She would keep a straight bat on this exceedingly sticky wicket, and hope that it would see her through. Certainly she had not felt such trepidation since she had faced the fast bowling of Tricky Trent-Donovan in that memorable match in which she had almost been caught in the slips for a duck before going on to get fifty-six not out.

At last the Rover slewed to a halt in the hospital car park, and its occupants staggered out, bewildered,
sick
, but relieved to be alive. The Colonel corralled them together and shushed them towards casualty like particularly troublesome sheep. ‘Get a move on, that man,’ he said curtly to his wife, and ‘Jump to it’ to the Rector.

It was not a busy night in Haslemere hospital, and in the waiting room there was only a doleful man with a fish hook embedded in his forefinger and a diminutive nun from the hilltop convent in Notwithstanding, who was suffering from superficial abrasions because she had been dragged a short way along the lane when her habit had caught in the door of Sister Concepta’s minivan. The Colonel’s party was met by a small, plump Asian doctor, who came from behind the partitions and wished them ‘Jolly good evening’.

‘Bloody awful evening,’ riposted the Colonel, who then pointed his finger at his unfortunate knot of dinner guests. ‘Food poisoning. Stomach pump,’ he declared. ‘Chop-chop.’

The doctor bridled; he had always resented the way in which a certain kind of person tried to push him around as if he were a mere orderly. Knowing that the stomach pump was invariably unpleasant and humiliating and could even be painful if passed down the gullet with sufficient lack of sympathy, he squared his shoulders, looked the Colonel in the eye, and said firmly, ‘Very good, sir. You first.’

* * *

It was an hour and a half before Colonel Perry Barkwell and Leafy returned to their house, pale and weakened after their ordeal, crushed and tired beyond all reckoning, almost too overwhelmed by the awfulness to be able to speak to each other. Leafy Barkwell was sure that never again would they be able to give another dinner party, and the Colonel could still feel the pain of the prolonged and energetic sluicing that his guts had had to endure. He felt unsteady on his feet, and all his imperial bravado had vanished. He leaned on his wife’s shoulder for support and wiped his white moustache repeatedly with a monogrammed handkerchief, repeating, ‘Oh God, oh God.’

The pallid couple were met in the hallway by Nanna, who was clearly perfectly well, albeit still tearful about the untimely demise of the misadventurous Troodos. ‘Oh Nanna,’ exclaimed Mrs Barkwell, her voice trembling with horror, ‘it was simply dreadful.’

Nanna held out her hand, in which she was holding a small piece of paper. ‘
Der Kater
,’ she said. ‘
Eine Nachricht
.’

Mrs Barkwell took the note and eased herself wearily down on to the chair beside the hall chest. She began to read it, and then said, ‘Oh God, oh my God, oh God …’ She looked up at her much-diminished husband, who was holding himself upright by clutching on to the banister ball that
Nanna
loved so much to polish. ‘It’s about the cat,’ she said. ‘It’s from Totty Banks.’

The Colonel took the message and read the first lines. ‘“Dear Leafy and Perry, I am so dreadfully sorry about poor Troodos. I do believe that I was almost as fond of him as you were …”’ The Colonel raised his eyebrows. ‘Damned curious,’ he said. ‘Letter of condolence already. Rum do.’

‘Read the rest of it,’ said Mrs Barkwell softly, and the Colonel continued, reading aloud, ‘“He was a very great character, a real personality in the village, and, if it wasn’t an insult to such a fine cat, I would have said that he was almost human.”

‘Quite. Quite,’ agreed the Colonel, and then he continued once more. ‘“I dearly wish that I could turn the clock back, believe me, and I am so desperately sorry that I could do nothing about it. I suppose that Troodos was crossing over into the field to look for voles. I do hope that you will be able to forgive me, but I just didn’t see him at all until the last minute, when it was too late to swerve …”’

ALL MY EVERLASTING LOVE

HE SPENT THE
morning shooting at daffodils with his air rifle. To be more exact, he was trying to shoot through the stalks so that they keeled over. He would not have tried shooting through the flower heads, since he was not insensitive to their beauty, and, in any case, that would have wrecked his mission. His mother Joan had sent him out to pick daffodils for a dinner party that she was having in the evening.

When she had asked him, he had grimaced and his heart had sunk. This was a girl’s job. His jobs were to empty the waste-paper baskets and burn the rubbish, chop wood, prune the fruit trees, rescue birds and mice from the cats, walk the dog, scoop up pet vomit, dig trenches, cut the hedge, go up ladders to clean out the gutters and roam around the countryside with his catapult and air rifle. The only girl’s task
he
ever did was to make the coffee after supper. His sisters had to clean and tidy inside the house, activities from which he was exempt, apart from emergencies that required the use of the Hoover. His father washed up after supper and also hoovered in emergencies. It was an enlightened household, in which it seemed as though the women did all the work, but in which anything very unpleasant or strenuous always fell to the men.

Peter would not have had it any other way. He had just turned thirteen and had only recently left behind his shorts and become eligible for jeans. He loved his jeans, as the whole country loved jeans. They were the epitome of comfort and modernity, without being either modern or comfortable. It was the late sixties; disreputable people had taken to wearing them. They were raffish and daring and they proclaimed the beginning of a more casual age, when the platoons of commuters walking to the station suddenly gave up wearing bowler hats. Even his father, the Major, had taken to wearing jeans at weekends, and even the Major’s hair had become fractionally longer owing to the subversive influence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Major and Joan disapproved strongly of the Beatles and the Stones, even though they had once had a soft spot for Elvis, and so it had been Granny who had taken all the children to see
Help!
and
A Hard Day’s Night
. Granny thought that George
and
Paul were sweet. The Major used to say that those bloody pop stars (who couldn’t even sing, with or without a fake American accent) should serve some time in the forces; that would straighten their ideas out. It was discipline they were short of. What he really wanted was to tie them down, gag them, cut their hair off and then shoot the lot of them, along with George Brown and Harold Wilson. But his hair became longer nonetheless. One day, perhaps five years hence, he would even sport sideburns in the wake of his wife’s crush on Engelbert Humperdinck, and he would wear, briefly, a kipper tie with paisley swirls. But he would never sink so low as to wear brown shoes with a black suit.

Just now, however, young Peter had been told to go and pick daffodils, at the very time when hormones were bursting to life in his body and there was nothing more important in life than not being a girl.

Adolescence had already damaged him. Nowadays his psyche had degenerated into a whirlpool of resentments, longings and animal impulse, but a couple of years before he had been so bright and intelligent that he had been able to memorise a poem in three readings. At Guildford Grammar he had regularly achieved 100 per cent in several subjects during end-of-term exams. He had won double-plus marks for his French composition. Joan used to boast that he had got his brains from her side of the family,
from
her father, a mathematician who even understood relativity and could calculate the dimensions of circles in his head, using pi to three decimal places.

Above all, the twelve-year-old Peter had been happy. His mind had buzzed with energy, his religious faith had been instinctive, and he had lived unquestioningly in his little universe of Latin verbs, punch-ups at school, edifying parables, catapults, yo-yos and marbles.

Like everyone else he had eagerly awaited the arrival of his first pubic hairs, without realising how much they would hurt him. He had thought that the first one was a stray hair floating on the surface of the bathwater, and had not realised that it was his until he had plucked at it in order to drop it over the side of the bath. That sharp and astonishing twinge, however, was as nothing compared to all the psychological agonies that followed.

Peter started to wonder why life was meaningless. Given his Anglican inoculation, it was perhaps strange that this should have happened. But it wasn’t that he knew life was meaningless; it was that, deep in his bowels, he began to experience it. His bones and blood began to tell him that one day they would be nothing but earth or ash.

What was it that would make the world seem like the fresh, uncomplicated place it had always been before? What was it that would restore the purpose
in
life that puberty had removed? He began to feel unhappy. Fits of horrible violence came over him and he wanted to go out and kill. He felt that he wanted to fight, and not stop until he was dead or victorious. He began to play furious games of football with his friends that would go on for three hours or more, because afterwards he felt purged enough to be equable for a while, to sleep peacefully. Recently he had been unable to turn his mind off at night, sweating in his sheets, tormented by everything in general and nothing in particular, a detainee and plaything of his own whirling brain and dissatisfied heart.

Nothing would have sorted Peter out except for the arrival of a large platoon of indulgent nymphomaniacs, an eventuality of little likelihood in Notwithstanding. It might at least have quietened the canker of physical longing that gnawed in his throat and guts. Even that would not have been enough, for Pandora’s box had opened more completely than that. Not only did he crave incessantly a satisfaction he could barely imagine and could not have, but he had fallen in love.

He had been in love as a child, it is true: with his hamster, with a little blonde girl at primary school, with the picture of his father as a young man, with Diana Dors and Valerie Singleton on the television, with the family dog; but these kinds of in-love did not hurt and grieve.

Now he was in love with a friend’s sister, and he
was
in a state of spiritual pain. She was chestnut-haired and freckled, skinny and bouncy. In the summer her freckles joined up. She was slightly croaky in the voice, and she was a Methodist, which didn’t seem to matter now, because love had made him broad-minded. He knew nothing about Methodists apart from the fact that they didn’t burn people at the stake, were opposed to enjoyment and might not be proper Christians. Because of her voice, everyone called her Froggy. She was twelve, she lived half a mile away up the hill, and she and Peter’s little sister spent much of their time together, giggling a great deal and conspiring in hushed voices. One of their favourite topics was discussing what it might be like to have periods, how big their breasts were likely to grow once they got started, and how relatively ‘developed’ were the various friends they knew. They were fascinated by sex, but knew that it was immoral and that any girl who had it was a tart. Peter knew, contrariwise, that any boy who had it was inconceivably lucky.