The Perils and Dangers of this Night (3 page)

After closing the window, I crossed to the door and
switched on the light. The dormitory was bare and
empty. There was a row of nine beds, each one stripped
to the mattress, the blankets and sheets folded neatly, the
pillow slips folded on top of the stained, stripy pillows.
But in the corner, one of the beds was still made up. On
the iron frame, a piece of paper stuck with sticky tape
said
SCOTT A
.

I moved to the bed and sat down. I took a deep breath
and prised off my heavy black lace-up shoes without
undoing them, and dropped them,
thud thud
, onto the
floor. I shuffled to the wardrobe, my stockinged feet silent
on the bare linoleum, and opened it. There was a row of
wire coat-hangers, all empty except one. It had a tag,
SCOTT A
., on it, and it was still hung with clothes.

I stripped to my vest and pants, my body thin and
mottled white as I shivered and shivered and reached for
the corduroy shorts and grey flannel shirt and grey
woollen pullover from my coat-hanger, and I dressed as
quickly as I could.

I thought that my heart would burst with sadness.
Alone in the great rambling house of Foxwood Manor
School, alone with Dr and Mrs Kemp. All the other boys
had gone, settled into the warm interiors of softly lit
saloon cars, breathing the scent of leather upholstery and
the familiar perfumes and colognes of their mothers and
fathers, cuddling with little brothers and sisters.

I had no brothers and sisters. My mother wasn't
coming. My father would never come.

I felt as though my throat would burst with aching. I
sniffed very loudly. When I felt for a handkerchief in the
pocket of the suit I'd flung onto the bed, I found the tiny
transistor radio I'd had in the chapel.

I settled the ear-piece into my ear, cupped the radio in
my hand and switched it on. It fizzed and whined. And
in the second it took me to adjust the tuning, I caught a
movement in the corner of my eye and spun round in
horror as the dormitory door creaked slowly open.

I froze, with the ear-piece in my ear and the radio in
my hand. The door fell wide open.

But there was no one. An empty blackness, the tunnel
of the corridor yawned into the far distance. No one. An
icy draught had fingered its way through the school, as
though feeling for any residual warmth from all the
bodies that had recently vacated it – and, pushing open
the door of the dormitory, it had found me, the only
living and breathing body left behind.

With a sigh of relief and another glance over my
shoulder at the empty doorway, I stuffed the radio under
my pillow. I hung my suit in the wardrobe, kicked the
black lace-up shoes inside and slipped on my indoor
shoes. I clicked off the light in the dormitory and padded
from one end of the dark corridor to the other: past one
of the lifts, past the other dormitories, past the bathroom
and another dormitory and then the other lift, to the
landing at the top of the stairs.

Music, I could hear the music before I reached the
landing. Someone was playing the piano, down in the
great hall. No, not someone. I knew it was Mrs Kemp.
Quite different from the ease and swagger of the
headmaster's touch, Mrs Kemp played as though the
music were a kind of delicate, difficult jigsaw puzzle she
was trying to make sense of. She was playing softly to
herself, strumming really, the first few lines of 'While
Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night', and it was
beautiful, the sound of Christmas and a feeling that the
holidays had come and there was a release from the
humdrum business of running a school and the lives of
forty-nine small boys. Beautiful, although for me, as I
involuntarily cupped a hand behind my right ear, there
was a tiny imperfection in the tuning. In spite of that,
or maybe because of it, the music eased the sadness in
my heart, and, without thinking that I should not, I
started down the staircase, down and down towards the
hall.

Where I paused. Just as I arrived at the foot of the
stairs, as I caught a glimpse of Mrs Kemp's head bent
over the keys of the piano, her hair bright in the firelight
and the glow from the coloured bulbs on the Christmas
tree, Dr Kemp stormed out of his study.

'Stop!' he bellowed. 'Can't you hear it? Stop, for
heaven's sake!'

She stopped immediately. He stomped across the hall
towards her. 'Can't you hear it?' he hissed. 'Don't you
listen?' And as she shunted her chair away from the
keyboard, he leaned across her and banged a series of
ugly chords.

'There! There! There!' he grunted, with each heavy
handprint on the keys. 'If you can't hear how horrid it is,
then you've learned nothing after all these years!'

I froze in the shadows. I held my breath and watched
as Mrs Kemp put her hand on her husband's hand. Dr
Kemp pushed it away and brushed the flopping hair from
his forehead, panting a bit.

'Mr huffing and puffing headmaster,' she said very
softly. 'I'm not one of your little boys, you know. What
are you going to do to me? Swish me with your little
cane? Put me in detention? Try to be nice. It's the holiday
. . .'

The man pulled himself together. With an odd, embarrassed
movement of his shoulders and an awkward hitch
of his trousers, he was all of a sudden like a child who'd
made a fool of himself in front of a grown-up. Not man
enough to apologise, he blustered a bit more. 'The keys,'
he said, 'for heaven's sake, where are the keys?' and he
reached into the piano stool and took out a wallet of
tuning keys, lifted the lid of the piano and started to busy
himself inside it, like an irritable surgeon botching an
operation. From inside the piano, he produced a few
random, plangent notes by lifting and dropping the
hammers, peering sideways at his wife and muttering,
'It'll need the tuner, we'll call the tuner, he can come and
do all the pianos while he's here.'

'Huff huff, puff puff,' the woman softly said. 'I'll call
the piano tuner tomorrow.'

The headmaster emerged from inside the piano, red-faced,
his hair flopping again. Again she took hold of his
hand, his left hand, where his third and fourth fingers
were curled hard into his palm. She brought it to her face
and kissed the stiffened joints.

'Your war wound,' she whispered. 'Don't always take
it out on the boys, or on me.' She smiled up at his
blustery, flustered face. 'And it's the holiday now.
They've all gone home.'

At that moment the stair creaked under my feet. They
both looked up and saw me standing there. 'Not all of
them,' Dr Kemp said. 'Not yet.'

I tiptoed from the foot of the stairs to the corridor leading
from the hall. Like a rabbit plunging to the safety of its burrow, I hurried
into the darkness. I could hear the tinkle of Mrs Kemp's laughter fading into
the distance behind me.

Like a rabbit, but not scared.

I was hurt and angry, and all I wanted to do was to get
away from the two people with whom I'd been abandoned.
I knew every inch of the building, after nearly five
years as a boarder there, and now I padded round corners
without slowing at all, up one ramp and down another,
past the dark cavern of the library and the forbidden,
fuggy den of the staffroom. The school was in darkness,
but I needed no light to guide me through the downstairs
corridors and into the changing-room at the back of the
house. I paused there, struck by the strangeness and
emptiness of the place which was usually so noisy and
smelly, where sweaty small boys stripped and showered
and tumbled and fought, where dozens of pairs of socks
and muddy boots were tangled and jumbled together.

Now, in the gloom, all the lockers were empty, and all
the pegs were bare – except one, where my own outdoor
coat was hanging.

I slipped softly through the changing-room, which had
already been swept out and mopped with disinfectant
and smelled, to me, so oddly, boylessly clean. I slid back
a puny bolt, pushed open the door and stepped outside,
into the cobbled stable-yard.

To my surprise, as I crossed the yard I saw a glow of
light from inside the furthest stable. I approached as
quietly as I could, unable to believe that I could have left
a lamp burning the last time I'd been there. The door was
ajar. I peered through. There was a man moving slowly
in the corner, throwing an enormous black shadow into
the rafters. I could smell him too.

'Roly?' I whispered. The man spun round, and I
slipped into the stable. 'It's me, it's Scott.'

The man, startled by my unexpected arrival, squinted
at me. He was lean and wiry, with the leathery, raddled
look of an old jockey: his face reddened by the cold, a flat
cap pushed back on a head of thin grey hair. He was
wearing green corduroy trousers over a pair of heavy
boots, and a waterproof coat which filled the air around
him with a whiff of wood smoke and damp soil – not an
offensive smell, not to me at least, for it was the smell of
the woodland I knew so well, the smell of a wild
outdoors and the creatures that lived in it. A double-barrelled
shotgun leaned in a corner of the stall. Roly was
the gamekeeper, who lived in the woods, in an old
caravan a couple of miles from the school.

'Scott,' he said. His smile was quick and weaselly.
'You're still here.'

I crossed the room towards him. I edged past the
shotgun, for the dull gleam of it and its fume of oil and
burned powder were repugnant to me. I moved into the
stall and saw, with a twinge of relief, that the jackdaw
was calm, just bobbing a bit and staring to see me come
into the circle of lamplight. The bird was calm, but as I
stepped up to the man, something wild and strong
erupted inside his pungent coat, something kicking and
lunging hysterically.

'I came with this,' he said, 'for the bird.'

It was a rabbit. Roly pulled his coat open and expertly
grabbed the terrified animal. 'I was going to finish it off,'
he said, 'but then I brought it like this, to show you how.'
He held the animal out towards me. 'Go on, young man,
do you want to do it?'

It had a gunshot in its haunches, a lot of blood where
the pellets had blasted it as it weaved and jinked through
the undergrowth. And then Roly must have caught up
with it as it tried to drag itself away, tromped it under his
boot, and he'd stuffed it under his jacket, securing it with
his belt so that, paralysed by shock, it was strapped
against his body – until, just then, in a trauma of
darkness and strangeness and slow suffocation, the rabbit
had burst alive again.

I took it, and it kicked and squealed, possessed by an
extraordinary strength: every muscle, every tissue expressed
defiance and rage in the face of death.

Roly was calm, expert, a good teacher. No fuss, no
hurry, he moved behind me and adjusted my hands to the
squirming body. I remember the smell of his clothes, his
beery breath, the heat in his fingers. He whispered, 'One
pull and it's done.'

I pulled. There was a click. I felt the slippage of bone,
and the rabbit was limp in my hands.

'Good man,' he said, standing away from me. 'Nice
and quick, no pain. Here, use this, you can do the rest
yourself.'

He took a knife from his pocket and handed it to me.
I lifted the rabbit to the workbench in the stall, and Roly
watched approvingly as I started to skin it, as he'd
already shown me, slitting and opening and peeling until
the flesh of the dead animal, still warm, still twitching
here and there like the body of an exhausted athlete,
shone in the lamplight.

'I saw all the cars,' Roly was saying. 'Posh, some of
them. I can't be doing with all that nonsense. I waited till
they'd gone before I came through the wood. What about
your folks? Are they coming?'

But all my concentration was on the skinning and
cleaning of the rabbit, and the watchful presence of my
bird. I was half-listening while Roly went on, 'I don't
envy you staying in the big house all on your own, just
you and the Kemps, I reckon she's all right but I'm not
sure about him . . .' For me, the bird and the warm flesh
of the rabbit were all that really mattered, that existed
just then.

Indeed, as I sliced the leanest strips of meat from the
dead animal and held them to the jackdaw, Roly picked
up his gun and made for the door. I was lost in a kind of
worship. I didn't see a shabby crow with dusty feathers
and a brittle, skeletal frame. To me the bird was an imp,
damaged but not beyond repair, delivered into my care
by some mischievous spirit of the forest. It took the meat
from my fingers with grace and tenderness, obsequious,
as though mocking my silly, boyish reverence. I stared
deep into its eyes and it stared into mine.

I heard the door creak behind me, heard the heavy step
of boots on the cobbles outside. Still I didn't turn from
the bird.

'Roly?' I called over my shoulder. 'Thanks, Roly.' I
waited, and when I knew that the man had disappeared
into the night and left me alone in the stable, I whispered
to the bird, 'You're mine, you're mine . . .'

Too late, I realised that Roly had left his knife. I
hurried to the door and looked out, but he'd gone. I
cleaned the blade with my fingers, flicking the blood onto
the stable floor.

Flint and slate, Foxwood Manor gleamed in the
moonlight.

It was eight o'clock that night. The house was a block
of blackness, surrounded by deep woodland, and the
moon, full and round but embedded in cloud, gave only
a milky light – enough to catch a gleam from the walls
which were faced with shards of flint and from the slates
of the roof. As I crossed the lawn to the front door, there
was one light in the building, from the windows of the
great hall on the ground floor. Upstairs, the windows of
the dormitories on the first and second floors were black.
The old house was all but empty. No one moved along
the corridors, upstairs or downstairs: no cries or laughter
or boyish complaint rang from the changing-rooms or
bathrooms; no one was reading in a secret corner of the
library; not even a bored and lonely teacher was gawping
at the television in the staffroom or drinking beer in his
garret.

The light which shone from the hall was the only light
for miles and miles. The nearest road – apart from the
lane which wound like a worm through the school park
– was a twenty-minute drive away, and then the nearest
village or pub or telephone box was further still. Maybe,
in the darkest corner of the woods, a lamp was lit in
Roly's caravan. But that would be all. Foxwood Manor,
once the grand and opulent hunting lodge of some
reclusive gentry, now a decaying boarding-school, was
cut off from the world by acres of deciduous Dorset
forest, some of the oldest and densest in England.

An owl hooted. For a moment, the clouds thinned and
parted and the moon was bright as daylight. Then the
flint and the slate of Foxwood Manor shimmered like
diamonds. The dead dry leaves of the ivy which had
crawled up the walls and round the windows shivered in
a cold wind. The woodland creaked and rattled.

The cloud fogged the moon. Suddenly, at the same time
as the house became black again, the bright light in the
hall went out.

Dr Kemp was closing the shutters. He moved from
window to window and pulled the wooden shutters shut.
Then, from outside, the building was in total darkness, as
though nobody was inside and it had been abandoned for
years.

I went in and sat by the fire with Mrs Kemp and the
old dog. It was dismal, the long, oak-panelled room,
which had looked and sounded quite festive when all the
parents and boys had been bustling there just a few hours
before. Now it was revealed in all its shabbiness. It was
a poor fire, a few spitting and smouldering spars of fence
posts and gnarled timber. The Christmas tree, which
almost reached the ceiling in the far corner, was sparsely
lit by a few coloured bulbs and draped with tarnished
tinsel. Along the walls, the photographs of boys and
teachers who had been and gone years ago were faded
and fusty, as blurred as the memory of the faces
themselves. There was a trophy cupboard, but the cups
and shields were nothing much, simply the in-house
prizes for tennis or cricket or soccer or shooting contested
every year by a dwindling number of Foxwood boys. The
honours boards had pride of place, for the school had a
history of real achievement under the rigorous instruction
of Dr Kemp. There was a roll of names going back
through the twenty years he'd been teacher and headmaster
at Foxwood, boys whom he would never forget,
whose talent for music, whose self-discipline and, above
all, whose perfect ear had won them scholarships to
many different and famous schools.

But the hall was dingy and cold. Worse, somehow,
because it was so grand. The size of a tennis court, with
an enormous stone fireplace and great tall windows with
oak shutters, it had been the warm heart of a lovely
country house. With a splendid fire and warm lighting,
with the heads of gallant beasts displayed around the
walls, with a host of ruddy-faced people, with brave,
sweet-smelling dogs asleep on fine rugs, with good wine
and hot food and maybe some music, it would still have
been the grandest hall in all the county.

But not now. There was a dog, Wagner, an eighteen-year-old
black labrador, who was just then snoring
sonorously at his mistress's feet: once a fine, strong,
handsome beast – his name pronounced the English way
in reference to his tail – he was fat, with bad hips, a
sagging belly and a malodorous mouth. There would
have been music, from the grand piano in the far corner
of the room, but not now. There was an excuse for a fire.
No laughter, no wine.

As for food, Mrs Kemp said to me, 'Alan, have another
biscuit.'

I had a glass of milk in one hand and a chocolate
biscuit in the other. On a little table in front of me there
was a plate with another chocolate biscuit on it. I sat
awkwardly upright on a threadbare sofa. I'd never sat in
the hall before – it was out of bounds except during
music practice – and I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed.
I managed to say through a mouthful of biscuit,
'No thank you, Mrs Kemp.'

Dr Kemp was closing the shutters, with his back to me
and his wife, half a tennis court away. But when Mrs
Kemp leaned closer to me and whispered, 'Give it to
Wagner then', and even as the dog stirred and started to
struggle to his feet in anticipation of a treat, the man said
loudly, without even glancing over his shoulder, 'No you
don't. We've had him all this time and never fed him
from the table once. We're not starting now.'

Mrs Kemp raised her eyebrows, winked at me and
back-handed the biscuit to Wagner, who crunched and
swallowed it horribly just before Dr Kemp crossed the
room towards us.

He stood with his back to the fire, as though he were
warming his legs on the flames. As always, he was
wearing grey trousers and a chequered tweed jacket, a
white shirt and a flannel tie; suede shoes with shiny toes.
Fifty-five, he had the build of a man who'd been a
sportsman in his youth, stocky and well balanced like a
scrum-half, and the disgruntled look of a poor loser. Odd
– I remember thinking, although I was only twelve and
had known the man for five years and watched him with
great caution for all of that time – odd, that a man in
such a strong squat body, who looked like he'd been a
rugby player or a handy boxer, should be so alive with
music. Odd, that someone suffused with a love of music
and its beauty should be so testy, so ill at ease with
everyone else around him, even with his wife, as irritable
as an oyster with a grain of sand pricking and prickling
inside it all the time.

Looking at him, I felt a sudden squirming of dislike for
the man. And just then Dr Kemp turned such a peevish
eye on me that I ducked my mouth to my glass and
swallowed long and hard. When I surfaced I had a milky
moustache.

'So,' the headmaster said. 'So, Scott, what am I going
to do with you?'

I knew I wasn't supposed to answer. It was what Mr
Bradfield, my English teacher, called a rhetorical question.
But Mrs Kemp, who either didn't recognise the form
or had acquired some kind of waiver from years of
marriage, said, 'You are not going to do anything with
Alan. He's going to spend a couple of nice days with us
before his mother comes and takes him home for
Christmas.'

'I spoke to his mother on the telephone,' Dr Kemp said.
'She called from Switzerland, said she'd been held up.'

'And you had a letter, didn't you, Alan?' Mrs Kemp
put in. 'Did she tell you when she was coming? By the
way, could you give me the stamps, for the school
album?'

I glanced from one of the faces to the other: from the
grey gull's eye of the man to the woman who was trying
so hard to be nice. I thought for a moment of the piece
of air-mail paper and the crumpled envelope with its
bright, Christmassy stamps, lying soiled and sodden
somewhere in the woods – of my mother's sweetly
childish, loopy handwriting smudged with the damp of
the earth and the cold night air.

'Austria,' I said. The word seemed to stick in my
throat, with the crumbs of the chocolate biscuit. 'She said
the snow was especially good and she might stay another
week.'

I saw the look exchanged between the man and the
woman, how she tried with a tiny frown to prevent her
husband from expressing his exasperation. And quickly,
to forestall him, she said, 'Well, you can always take
Wagner out with you, for some nice long walks in the
woods. And there's the bird, of course. I suppose there's
lots for you to do?'

'What about the bird?' the headmaster said. 'What is
it, a crow or something?'

It was
my
bird. The idea of describing it, of trying to
describe it to Dr Kemp, filled me with a kind of numb,
helpless anger. Maybe to Mrs Kemp, I could have told
her something – that I'd been out in the woods on a
Sunday afternoon in November, when the other boys
were doing scouts with Mr Furness or stamps with Mr
Newton or raking leaves off the lawns with Miss Hayes
and Mr Buxton; that I'd escaped alone to wander the
woodland I knew inch by inch after years of exploring,
and I'd heard a commotion in the bramble beds – in the
tangle of brambles in the deep ditches round the barrows
and tumuli now overgrown in the forest. I'd burrowed
inside, like a prisoner of war bellying through rolls of
rusty barbed wire, snagging and tearing my coat, scratching
my face and hands, and found the bird struggling in
a straitjacket of thorns.

Nothing but a bit of black rag, waterlogged, spluttering.
But to me it had seemed so marvellous in its rage,
exquisitely mad, although the struggle had left it exhausted
and the tail feathers damaged so badly it would never
have flown even if it had managed to tear itself free.
Indeed, in its fury, the bird had pecked at its own foot,
which had been entwined by the unbreakable bramble
wire, and tweaked it off, leaving a raw stump from which
the bone protruded. I'd freed the bird, although it jabbed
at my hands with its beak, and even when I'd secured it
in a firm grip it had pecked and pecked until my wrists
were raw. I remember the beat of its little heart between
my hands, the heat of it, the force of its life – and I'd
carried the shattered, terrified creature back to the
stable-yard, where Roly, who'd bump-ed into me by
chance on his way back from the woods, had helped me
to settle it safely, without panic or commotion, onto the
manger in the abandoned stall. Yes, it had trembled and
shrieked for a while, so crazed by the trauma of its
entanglement and the strangeness of the smells and the
alien handling it had experienced that it had flung itself
off the perch and dangled by the thong which I'd
attached to the intact leg. Upside down, squawking,
beating its wet wings until the air of the stable was a
whirl of dust and chaff – until I'd eased it back onto the
perch and it had stared at me, panting. A wild spirit with
wild black eyes.

'A jackdaw, sir, a young one. I found him in the
woods.' That was all I said.

The headmaster could hardly suppress a snort of
derision. He would have snorted whatever I'd said, this
boy who'd been foisted onto him when all the rest of the
boys had gone home. 'That's what I said, isn't it? A crow,
a jackdaw, what's the difference?'

'A kind of crow, yes, sir. A bit smaller than a carrion
crow or a rook and . . .'

'Yes, yes,' the man said. It seemed to annoy him –
indeed, it was almost beyond the bounds of possibility –
that a twelve-year-old could presume to know something
that he didn't. 'Don't you think you should have left it
where it was? It'll die, won't it, tied to a perch in a dusty
old stable?'

'It would've died in the woods, sir,' I answered,
imagining its inevitable end as a sodden, feathery rag
enmeshed in thorns. 'I think I can mend it, sir. I've read
about it, in one of the books in the library. I can mend
its tail feathers and it'll be able to fly again.'

'Well, that's nice, Alan,' Mrs Kemp said, again to
forestall her husband, who would have countered in one
way or another, unable to defer to a white-faced,
red-haired, skinny child sitting in front of him. 'Here, let
me take these away from you.' And she reached for my
glass and plate, wheeled herself away from the fireside,
towards the foot of the staircase at the far end of the hall,
and disappeared into the headmaster's study.

Dr Kemp sat on the sofa, so close to me that our knees
touched. 'You know, we can turn the situation to your
advantage,' he said conspiratorially. 'This is a good
opportunity for us to do some work together.' He
gestured at the honours boards. 'They all had the gift that
you have: Stuttaford, Radcliffe, Pryce, Maundrell, Inkin,
Barry-James – a rare gift, the gift of perfect pitch. And
that gift conferred on them a duty, a responsibility, which
they undertook and fulfilled under my guidance and
instruction. When I was a boy a good teacher found the
gift in me, and worked me and pushed me and guided me.
Unfortunately, I could never fulfil my promise, but now
they are yours, the gift, the duty . . .'

And, exactly as I knew and dreaded he would, the man
stood up suddenly and said, 'Now, I want to hear you
sing. Come along' and he strode away from the fireplace
to the piano in the corner.

I felt my whole body, my whole being, go rigid with
hatred of the man. Not just hatred, which might have
been a manageable, single emotion, but also a colossal
crash of boredom: that the man should do and say just
what I knew he was going to do and say; and anger at
the injustice that I should have been abandoned there,
in the gloomy great hall at Foxwood Manor, on that
night.

'Please sir. No sir. I . . .'

Mrs Kemp emerged from the study at that moment.
She had heard what her husband had just said, and she
must have seen the flush of anxiety on my face. 'Oh dear,
Alan doesn't want to sing tonight,' she said. 'Of course
he doesn't, he's tired and a bit fed up and . . .'