The Perils and Dangers of this Night (10 page)

I winced, put the feather down and blew on the palms
of my hands, one after the other. There were three welts
on each palm, red and very sore. Not the quickly fading
signs of a nightmare I'd had, but harsh and painful
reality: the marks of the headmaster's cane.

Anointing the point of the feather with glue, I took it,
and the lantern, across the stable to the jackdaw. To
quieten the bird, all I did was blow gently on its whiskery
face. And it settled immediately, angling its head this way
and that for the waft and warmth of my breath, blinking
at the lamplight. Without the slightest fuss, finding my
tiny target first time, I imped the newly sharpened quill
straight into the round socket left after the removal of the
damaged feather. I held it a second, made a minute
adjustment and stood back.

'There,' I said. 'Soon you can fly.'

I blew little kisses of air into the bird's face, and it
bristled at me, shivering its wings around its body like a
cloak. Then it swivelled its head and started to rearrange
the tail feathers the way it liked them. I looked on
intently, concerned that my handiwork would be undone.
And I was watching, unconsciously blowing on the palms
of my stinging hands, when I heard a sound outside in the
stable-yard.

Wagner heard it too, and started a long, low growl. He
stopped when I bent and touched his muzzle. There were
footsteps and voices. Turning down the wick of the lamp
until it was snuffed in a plume of smoke, I peered over
the door into the yard.

The sky was dark. Big flakes of snow were whirling
like a million moths. The moon, round and faint behind
a smothering cloud, threw a feeble light – enough for me
to see Pryce and Sophie crossing the yard towards the car.
Their footsteps crunched to a standstill.

Pryce made a desultory swipe at the bonnet. The snow
had frozen hard. He rubbed his hands and looked
around. Sophie was shivering in her coat and scarf,
wobbling on her high heels.

'She'll go in one of the stables,' he said. 'They're all
empty, I think.'

'So s-s-s-sad,' she said. Her shivering made her stammer
worse. 'The whole p-p-place is so empty . . .'

'There hasn't been a horse here since Mrs Kemp had
her accident,' Pryce said. He made a pistol shape with his
fingers, fired an imaginary shot and blew away the
smoke. 'Not since Dapple got his
coup de grâce
. Here,
let's try this one.'

He went to one of the stables and tried to pull the door
open. The snow had banked against it so he kicked it
clear with his boot. He kicked and kicked, because the
snow had crusted into ice, until at last when he wrenched
at the door it grated ajar. It was a wide, double door, and
over years of neglect and lack of use the hinges had rusted
and sagged. Cursing, straining, Pryce had to lift the door
and swing it clear of the snow, so that it yawned open
and revealed the dark space inside.

'All right.' He was breathing hard. 'Now help me,
Sophie. We can do it together!'

He leaned into the car and released the hand-brake.
They both bent to the bonnet and strained with all their
weight, to try and push the car backwards. It didn't
budge. The flattened tyre seemed to be frozen to the
ground. Again they shoved, their boots slithering hopelessly,
until at last there was a splintering of ice and the
wheels broke clear. They stood up, heaving, their breath
billowing around them.

'For fuck's sake, Sophie, are you pushing or just
sticking your fat arse up into the air? You've got to help
me!'

'I'm p-p-pushing the stupid thing!' she retorted. 'It's
not my f-f-f-fault we're here and . . .'

'It
is
your fucking fault! If you hadn't been screwing
around with Jeremy . . .'

'That's what you w-w-wanted me to do!' she spat at
him. 'That's why you t-t-took me to see him! It was all
your idea! I did what you w-w-wanted me to do, and
then you went c-c-crazy . . .'

'You were the fucking final straw!' he hissed at her.

Maddened, she stood away from the car and hissed
back. 'You couldn't s-s-stand it, could you? Seeing him
happy! You had to go and t-t-tease him with me, you had
to remind him of all the sh-sh-shit you'd given him! Now
there's no chance for him, and no chance for us, just this
m-m-mess, this bloody mess!'

He lunged at her, grabbed her shoulders and shook her
to silence. He blew the words into her face, a fume of
steam in the freezing air. 'Listen, Sophie. Right now, at
this moment, you're here with me. Here, now, with me.
That's all there is, nothing else. Now push!'

I'd steeled myself to go out of the stable and help them,
but at the angry exchange I hid behind the door. I
watched as they bent and pushed again, and every inch
they won was an exhausting effort, for the snow in the
yard was deep and hard. At last they shifted the car back
and back until its nose was angled towards the door of
the stable that Pryce had opened.

Sophie squatted with her head between her knees, as
though she would retch. Pryce, with his hands on his hips
and head thrown back, lurched into the stable and
clattered around inside, emerging a moment later with a
spade.

'N-n-n-nice timing,' she wheezed. 'We move the sodding
car and then you f-find the sodding shovel.'

He attacked the snow in front of the door and around
the wheels of the car. He flung the spade with an
enormous clang back into the stable and they rested
another minute. I watched, and all this time Wagner
leaned his hot, heavy head against my thigh, his body
rumbling and ready to go. Pryce and Sophie braced
themselves for the final awkward manoeuvre. He grappled
the steering wheel and shoved at the same time,
wrestling the car as though it were a reluctant steer, while
she applied her puny weight to the rear bumper. The flat
tyre flapped and squelched. And that forbidden word,
which I'd thought so rare the day before, was hissed and
stuttered and grunted so often in one fraught minute that
it was just a meaningless noise of fluster and frustration.

The car rolled into the stable. The two people who'd
fought so hard to get it there stood and stared at it with
resentment in their eyes. A long slab of snow slid off its
nose and onto the stable floor. And once more, as I
peered from my hiding place, the car was an animal,
shivering the ice from its pelt, revealing its reddish, filthy
flanks.

Pryce came out with the spade. He made a few
tentative raking movements at the mess of footprints and
tyre marks, then looked up at the sky. The snow was
falling heavily.

'No need,' he said. 'In a few hours there won't be a
sign that anyone's been here. It'll give us time. Here,
Sophie. Help me, the last thing . . .'

Together they lifted and closed the door of the stable.
Without speaking, with hardly the breath to speak, they
crossed the yard and went back into the school.

Dr Kemp bent to the walnut cabinet, opened the lid
and put a record on the turntable. No one spoke as
he set it turning and gently placed the needle on it. There
was a crackle and a hiss, and we all waited for the music
to begin.

It was nine o'clock in the evening. Mrs Kemp was
sitting by the fire in the great hall, with Martin Pryce and
Sophie and me; and Wagner, of course. Despite the fact
that the humans were eating bacon sandwiches from a
tray balanced precariously on a table I'd been ordered
to fetch from the headmaster's study, the dog lay very
still and kept his eyes closed. He'd been trained from
puppyhood not to beg for food, indeed, to avoid eye
contact with humans who were eating. So now,
although the smell of the bacon was tantalisingly good,
he feigned sleep at his mistress's feet. I could tell,
however, from the twitch of an ear at every word that
was spoken, that the dog was wide awake and hoping for
a treat.

The fire spat a spark onto the hearth rug. Dr Kemp
rubbed it out with the sole of his shoe. In the far corner
of the hall the lights on the Christmas tree were flickering
– not by design, but probably because one or two of the
bulbs were loose. We all listened to the hiss of the needle
on the record and waited.

'No prizes for guessing,' Pryce said, one beat before the
music started.

Smooth, swirling strings, a sweet melody and a surge
of muscle. The lazy power of an orchestra filled the room.
Sophie nodded her head and raised her eyebrows at Mrs
Kemp. 'I think I know this – what is it?'

Before she could speak, the headmaster gestured towards
me, to indicate that I should answer the question.
'It's Fauré's Requiem, sir,' I said. A bit of salt from the
sandwiches had got onto the palm of my right hand, the
grains burrowing into the welts. In a free world I could
have leaned over to the dog and let him salve the
irritation with his tongue. But I sat as still as the dog and
endured the stinging by clenching my fist.

'Like I said, no prizes for guessing,' Pryce put in. 'I
think I heard this every night of my years at Foxwood.'
He directed himself to Sophie. 'Every night, after Dr
Kemp had been round the dorms and said the prayer and
turned all the lights out, he'd come downstairs and put
on this record. We'd hear the music creeping up the
stairs, crawling along the corridors, slithering under the
doors and under our beds and . . .'

'That sounds horrible,' Mrs Kemp said. 'We used to
play it often, we still do. But I didn't know that the boys
could hear it upstairs in the dormitories.'

Pryce pulled a teasing, doubtful face at her. 'That was
the whole idea, wasn't it? Wasn't it, Dr Kemp?'

The headmaster had taken his ivory baton from the
mantelpiece and was conducting as the record played. 'A
requiem is for the repose of the dead,' he said, 'not a
lullaby.'

'I know that,' Pryce persisted. 'I mean, you intended it
to be part of our schooling. Even at night, you were
dinning the music into our heads.'

'Dinning?' the headmaster said. He closed his eyes as
he swished the baton up and down, from side to side. 'I
teach music at Foxwood Manor. I instill music, and the
love of music, into the boys. I have music in my head all
the time, waking and sleeping . . .'

'And you make sure the boys do too.' Pryce leaned
back, smiled, and conducted airily with a bacon sandwich.
'These days, teenagers like a different kind of
music.'

Mrs Kemp countered, seeing that her husband had
deliberately shut his eyes and ears from Pryce's playful
provocation. With a charming smile at him and Sophie,
she said, 'Well, the boys at Foxwood aren't teenagers. So,
in the meantime they listen to the music we . . .'

'How old are you, Alan?' Pryce's question was so
abrupt that it stopped her in mid-sentence. It surprised
me too, having assumed I was excluded from the
grown-ups' conversation.

'Twelve,' I said. Before Mrs Kemp could butt in and
make her point, I added, 'I'll be thirteen on Christmas Day.'

Honours were even. Pryce and Mrs Kemp held each
other's eyes and held their smiles. In a final thrust she
shrugged and said, 'Twelve or thirteen, it makes no
difference.'

He parried with, 'He'll be a teenager, like Sophie, and
that makes all the difference.'

Sophie was drawn into the conversation by the use of
her name. She asked Mrs Kemp if she was a musician too,
like her husband, and the woman replied that Dr Kemp
had tried his best to teach her, but without much success
– not, of course, because of any limitations in his ability
as a teacher, but because of the paltriness of her talent.
The music swelled around us, moody and moving and
somehow tremendous, and Dr Kemp swayed with it, as
though mesmerised. It was odd, as I'd remarked before,
to see someone who looked so everyday, so ordinary, so
commonplace, absorbed so utterly by the music. The
headmaster was a part of it, he was lost in it.

With a nod in his direction, as he continued to conduct
with his eyes closed, Mrs Kemp whispered to Sophie,
'Music is the life-blood of the school. It runs through the
building.'

Pryce had heard her say it before. He must have
done, it was a kind of mantra at Foxwood Manor.
He sighed and let it go by, unworthy of comment.
Mrs Kemp saw the disdain on his face, and she suddenly
looked enormously, almost unbearably tired, as if she
could have wept with tiredness. Her eyes prickled with
tears as she looked at her husband, whom she loved so
much despite the suddenness of his moods, who cared so
much for the music and for the boys he taught.

She turned to me, and I could see the gleam of her
tears. And she could tell from my face that I understood
her, how Pryce's unconcealed contempt made her heart
ache for the man she loved and honoured despite all his
shortcomings.

To disguise her feelings from Pryce, she whispered,
'Alan, my dear, would you do something for me, please,
before you turn into a teenager and get too grown up to
pay attention to an old thing like me? The lights on the
Christmas tree, you could tighten the bulbs and stop
them from flickering . . .'

Glad to oblige, to have any excuse to leave the fireside
and the bickering adults, I got up and moved into the
shadows in the corner of the hall. Dr Kemp must have
sensed my passing, because he opened his eyes, emerging
as though from a trance. He put down the magic wand
of his baton, exchanging it for the mundane reality of a
bacon sandwich.

As though he'd never been away, he said to Pryce, 'Did
you really mind? I mean, did you mind listening to this
up in the dorm at night?'

'It's too late to mind,' Pryce said. 'The music is in my
head.' He held up his hand, as he'd done once before. 'It's
like the scar I got from Wagner, I've got it for life
whether I mind or not.'

I was having no success with the Christmas tree. In
fact, after I'd tried all the bulbs and tightened them one
after the other, they were flickering more spasmodically
than before and fizzing in their sockets. But the look I got
from Mrs Kemp, when I glanced to her for advice or help,
warned me to stay where I was and say nothing: a look
that said in an instant that sometimes it was better to seek
out the shadows and the safety of darkness.

'It's c-c-c-creepy,' Sophie said. 'A bedtime requiem.
"
Grant them, O Lord, eternal rest
." Do the boys know
what it m-m-means?'

Pryce ignored her. He said disarmingly, as the music
from the record player soared and his greasy-bacon
fingers moved with the rhythm, 'The strange thing is, I
really don't know if I love it or hate it.'

Dr Kemp acknowledged the remark with a graceful
smile, as though he too were prepared to give ground,
and he said warmly, 'My boy, how could you hate this?
Just listen . . .'

So we all listened together, Pryce and Sophie, Dr and
Mrs Kemp, Wagner aquiver for a lick of fat or a sliver of
rind, and me, furtively at work on the festive lights. The
longer we listened and said nothing, after the ugly
confrontation of the morning and the ensuing punishment
that the headmaster had meted out to me, the more
likely it would be that we could spend a civil evening
together. Mrs Kemp was counting the seconds. The music
was lovely, a kind of healing.

But then Pryce glanced across the hall to me. Unaware
that anyone was watching me, I'd been licking the palm
of my right hand and then blowing on it. I looked up and
met his eyes. Mrs Kemp saw that Pryce was looking, and
she saw what I was doing. And in the grey coldness of the
man's eyes, she must have known that the time for
healing had run out.

'It's my turn.' Pryce's words were so sudden, so unexpected,
so out of context, that they seemed louder than
they actually were. The other grown-ups frowned quizzically
at him, as he knew they would do, and he said
again, 'It's my turn,' in the tone of voice a teacher might
use with a simpleton.

The headmaster leaned to the record player and turned
down the volume, in order to elicit some sense from what
Pryce had said.

Given the floor, the young man said, 'No one's asked
me what I do or where I work, although we've been
here a couple of days already, but I'll tell you anyway.'
He was charming, the firelight gleaming in his eyes.
'Funnily enough I'm in the music business too. A bit like
you, Dr Kemp, but different.' He paused and waited for
the headmaster to raise a questioning eyebrow. 'Like
you, I instill a love of music. I work for a record
company. The more sales I generate, the more records I
shift, the more I'm appreciated by the company and the
more money I get. You saw the car? Not bad for a
twenty-year-old . . .'

'That's marvellous, Martin,' Mrs Kemp said. 'So what
do you mean, it's your turn? Do you mean you just
wanted to tell us that? I'm so sorry we didn't ask you.
We get a bit absorbed with our own little life out here.'

'No, I mean it's my turn to play a bit of music. The
kind of music I like, and Sophie likes, and Alan likes. The
kind that millions of young people like. I've got some
upstairs. Shall I go and get it?'

Dr Kemp shuddered. 'Please no, not if it's anything like
the dreadful racket that was blaring out of your car this
morning.'

'Thank you, Martin, but I think it would jar a bit,' said
Mrs Kemp, attempting the difficult task of supporting her
husband and mollifying Pryce at the same time. 'In an
old-fashioned place like this, with a couple of fuddy-duddies
like us . . .'

'Thank you, but no thank you,' the headmaster put in.

'
You
would like it, Mrs Kemp, you're still young,'
Pryce insisted, leaning towards the woman with sudden
enthusiasm. 'It has energy. You'd feel the heat in it. I'll
go and get some.'

He jumped to his feet. At the same moment, Kemp
lunged to the record player and turned the volume as high
as it would go. The music blasted out, rattling the
speakers. He shouted, 'Remember this, Pryce? Remember?
You'll never forget it!' and he swished his arms up
and down, from side to side, conducting with exaggerated
passion.

The noise was deafening. They were face to face, jutting
their chins together. Straight away, Wagner was up and
ready for action. The dog wrinkled his muzzle into a
horrible mask, teeth bared, eyes wild, and went for Pryce.

'Jesus!' Pryce lashed out with his boot. The table
crashed to the floor. Wagner did a canine double-take,
saw the scattered sandwiches, and decided in an instant
that bacon was a higher priority than protecting his
master. He swerved away from Pryce's boot and snaffled
a sandwich as fast as he could.

Mrs Kemp laughed brightly, and Dr Kemp turned
down the volume to make a sarcastic remark about
Wagner's dubious allegiance. As I set the table upright,
Pryce salvaged the last of the sandwiches from the floor
and took a big bite out of it, more to thwart the dog than
because he wanted it himself.

Only the girl was not amused. Pryce said, 'Not funny,
Sophie?' because she was staring at him, incredulous, as
though nothing in her life would ever be funny again.

She tried to echo the word, 'F-f-f-' but it stuck in her
throat. She hunched her shoulders and heaved, like a cat
struggling to cough up a ball of fur, until at last she
regained her breath and wiped her mouth and eyes,
catlike, with the back of her hands.

I returned to the fireside, knelt and hugged the dog,
which was breathless from the exertion and slobbering at
the taste of bacon. Mrs Kemp seemed determined to keep
the mood light. 'Martin, could you have a go?' she said.
'Alan's been trying to fix the Christmas tree lights – could
you?'

Pryce smiled gracefully and drifted away from the
hearth, to the cool shadows at the end of the hall. The
music was softer now, and there was a perceptible lifting
of tension as he left the rest of us grouped around the fire.
He must have known that was why she'd asked him so
sweetly to do this unnecessary task: to make a little space,
to have a little peace without him. So, obligingly, he
wandered past the school photographs, paused, took
another bite at his sandwich and studied the rows of
serious faces. I watched him smear the glass with a greasy
fingertip as he moved to the Christmas tree.

From where I was kneeling, I saw him bend to the
skirting board, where the floor was carpeted with pine
needles. In the socket there was an adapter overloaded
with plugs, and the flex for the lights was so frayed that
some of the wires were bare.

He put down his sandwich and jiggled the adapter. The
Christmas tree lights went off and the music slurred
almost to silence. Another jiggle and the lights came on;
the music lurched and picked up again. 'Sorry,' he called
out, crouched on the floor behind the bole of the tree. 'It
isn't the bulbs, it's the plug. The connections are loose.'