The Perils and Dangers of this Night (9 page)

'Don't worry about her,' Pryce said. 'We'll do what we
came to do. There are a few loose ends I need to tie up,
then we'll get out of here. Trust me.'

He looked up again at Mrs Kemp.

'Revenge is a dish best served cold,' he muttered, 'and
it doesn't get much colder than this.' The woman
withdrew from the window.

He tried again to pull the girl close, and this time she
relented, quite wooden as he folded her into his arms. I
watched him closely, and the momentary joy I'd experienced
in the snowball fight dissolved into a shudder of
anxiety. I held my breath as they kissed, and, without
realising I was doing it, I clenched my fingers so tightly
that the skull of the shrew popped in my fist. For a
second, Pryce turned his eyes and stared at me.

Dusting the remains of the pellet into the snow, I led the
dog across the lawn and back to the house.

Dr Kemp was working in his study. Mrs Kemp was there
too, keeping him company with tea and fig rolls which
I'd helped her to bring from the kitchen. While he was
shuffling accounts, deciding which bills it was best to pay
and which could be put aside a little longer, she leafed
through a riding magazine she'd already read many times
before. Wagner lay sleeping at her feet. The study was a
fine, tall room with panelled walls and a corniced ceiling.
There were books everywhere, and stacks of sheet music
on the mantelpiece of a grand fireplace. The hearth itself
was heaped with papers. The formidable faces of the past
headmasters of Foxwood Manor peered gloomily down
from a row of oil paintings.

Sunlight fell through a high window, reflected from the
snow outside. I was moping in a corner, nibbling a
biscuit. The only sounds were the steady rhythm of the
dog's breathing, the scratching of the headmaster's fountain
pen and the flick-flick-flick of Mrs Kemp's fingers on
familiar pages.

They both glanced up at the tromping of footsteps in
the corridor above their heads. Wagner cocked an ear
without opening his eyes. A heavy tread and a lighter,
softer footfall: the movement of other people elsewhere
in the house was strangely unsettling for Dr and Mrs
Kemp. He sighed with exasperation and cleared his
throat to say something, but she quickly put in, with a
smile in her voice to try and keep him sweet, 'He's
revisiting his childhood, that's all. There's no harm in it.'
Then, when they heard the rattle of a door and the clank
of the pulleys as one of the lifts started to move, as Dr
Kemp tutted and puffed to himself, she added, 'It says
"No boys to use the lifts". Martin Pryce is not a boy, and
nor is the sweet little Sophie. Try to ignore them, dear,
they'll be gone in a day or two.'

'How will they be gone?' he snorted. 'The lane is
blocked, the telephone is out of order, his swanky car has
a flat tyre and a flat battery. How will they be gone?' He
made a great play of tossing a sheaf of bills into the air,
so that they fell back onto the desk in an untidy heap. 'I
had the lifts installed for you, and for nobody else.'

'Please, dear, try not to get worked up,' she said, and
she reached to him and squeezed his hand. She turned to
me, a bit embarrassed that I should hear them wrangling,
and said, 'We must remember it's Alan's Christmas
holiday too. We should let him try to enjoy himself a bit.'

Pryce had been touring the school, revisiting the
half-remembered corners of his childhood. He had Sophie
in tow; with nowhere else to go, she was a helpless
satellite. And I too had been in his thrall, following him
from dorm to dorm, where he'd trailed his fingers along
the frames of bed after bed and recited the names of the
boys who'd slept there, a list of half-forgotten names like
the mumbled words of a prayer. For a while, I'd tagged
along as he mooched through the bathrooms, watched
him lie down in one of the baths – in all his clothes, of
course, so that he looked like a corpse in a deep, white
coffin – and do a clownish reminiscence of long-ago
matrons and masters-on-duty. At the further end of the
top corridor, he'd pulled open a tiny door and peered up
a narrow staircase to the attic in the roof of the house –
a mysterious place traditionally out of bounds to the boys
on pain of dreadful punishment, but which, according to
Foxwood legend, had once or twice been visited in the
dead of night by the daring and foolhardy.

I'd said I'd never been up there. Pryce said that
he
had,
but shrugged and looked away when Sophie scoffed.

Now, from the headmaster's study, we heard them
come down in one of the lifts. Mrs Kemp signalled to me
with a little smile that I was excused, so I picked up
another fig-roll and hurried along the bottom corridor –
to rejoin the tour, for something to do, to be with anyone
else for a change from the Kemps. The three of us veered
in and out of the classrooms, where Pryce went opening
and slamming all the desks before he found the crude
carving of his own initials. He rattled the door of the
gun-room, which was always locked, and recited the sign
in a pompous, headmasterly voice – no boys to enter
without a member of staff. We went through the
changing-room, where Sophie grim-aced at the residual
smells of wet socks and muddy boys, past the door to the
stable-yard and into the chapel.

Pryce paused as soon as he stepped inside. It was as
though, somehow, the room sucked all of the bombast
and truculence from him and pulled him back, really
back, to the days when he'd been a choirboy at Foxwood
Manor. He fell silent. He gazed at the rows of pews
where generations of boys and teachers had sat, at the
stained-glass windows with the crest and motto of the
school frostily lit by a gleam of snow, at the cassocks
hanging on pegs at the vestry door. A small private
chapel, built into the house long before it became a
school, it might have seated fifty or sixty at most – the
family and estate workers and a few parishioners from
scattered hamlets – a place of worship and music and
close-togetherness in such an isolated location. Now,
quietened by the stillness of the room and the feeling that
so little had changed within it for scores or even hundreds
of years, Pryce walked up the aisle to the choir-stalls. He
found the place where he used to sit, the very spot where
he'd rested his hymn book and his psalter and the
anthems and carols he'd sung, and he touched the
polished oak with reverent fingers.

So much dust. He ran his thumb through it, the specks
of skin and hair of all the people who'd sat there: even,
as he examined the powder on the tip of his nail, even of
himself, the minutest remains of himself as a boy at
Foxwood Manor.

A cobweb drifted past us. It wafted through the air,
dislodged from a dark corner by the sudden intervention
of three warm and breathing bodies into the room. And,
for an oddly holy moment, I thought of the generations
of spiders which had lived their lives in the chapel, their
lineage as long and as noble as any of the gentry who had
passed this way and whispered their futile prayers.

Pryce was quiet, as though entranced. Until his eyes lit
on the piano.

'I'll play,' he said. 'And Scott, you can accompany me.'

As Sophie sulked in another corner of the chapel,
scuffing her boots at a dapple of red and blue sunlight on
the floor, Pryce sat at the piano and flung open the lid.
He blew a cloud of dust from the keys. Very softly and
beautifully, he started to play 'While Shepherds Watched
Their Flocks by Night'. No mockery, no tomfoolery: he
played the carol with grace and simplicity, so that Sophie
sat down in the back row of the pews and I stood silently
in the aisle. It was lovely. It somehow made the room
complete, suffused with a holiness beyond the ken of a
million spiders.

At the end of the verse, Pryce stopped and left the final
chord humming in mid-air. Then he looked archly at me.
'I thought you were going to accompany me. What's up?'

'You mean . . .?' Confused and embarrassed at the
thought of singing for the visitors, I stepped towards the
piano and cleared my throat.

'No, I don't mean your precious fucking tonsils,' Pryce
said. 'I mean . . .,' and he gestured into the shadows
where the cassocks were hanging, by the open door of the
vestry 'I mean the fucking bell. Give it a few tugs, in time
with the music.'

I turned and hesitated. I could see the bell rope hanging
like a noose inside the vestry. I'd rung it many times,
whenever my turn came to ring it for the beginning of
Sunday morning service. Now I glanced from Pryce's
wolfish smile to Sophie's bleak, ashen face.

'Go on, Alan,' Pryce said, and he started to play again.
'Dr Kemp won't mind. I'm playing a Christmas carol,
that's all.'

So I stepped into the vestry and took hold of the rope.
Pryce was playing another verse, with perfect reverence.
I essayed an experimental tug and the bell in the roof of
the chapel sounded a single muffled note. It was soft, it
was pure, it was in keeping with the carol, on a sparkling
snowy afternoon a few days before Christmas. I tugged
again, and again, and Pryce played up.

The sound of the piano carried through the building.
The tolling of the bell, clear in the cold air, carried there
too. Where Dr Kemp would hear it in his study.

I knew what would happen: the headmaster would
lumber from his desk and down the corridor, and his wife
would try, unsuccessfully, to soothe him, to stop him –
and I knew that, by tugging the rope the very first time
and sounding a single note, I had aligned myself with
Pryce and now it was too late, impossible, to stop and
realign myself with Kemp.

There was a shift in the music. Pryce's playing was
changing, blurring, and I tolled faster to keep up with the
beat. Somehow, with skill and stealth and sleight of hand,
Pryce was transposing 'While Shepherds Watched . . .'
into the doomy dirge of 'Paint it Black'. I recognised it,
it was always on my transistor radio, or had been until
the headmaster had broken it. My stomach turned over
at the sudden realisation of what he was doing. But by
now the bell was tolling a regular, faster beat which I
couldn't stop, and Pryce was playing louder and louder,
with a deadly insistence, repeating the same menacing
monotone over and over . . .
I see a red door and I want
it painted black – no colours any more I want them all
turned black
. . .

Dr Kemp burst into the chapel.

Too late, Pryce shifted in a split second back to the
carol. It made it worse. By the time the headmaster was
halfway up the aisle, Pryce was smiling like an angel and
playing with utter loveliness. Dr Kemp was unstoppable.
He bore down onto Pryce, his face purple, his hair
flopping, his lips flecked with spittle, and he shoved him
right off the piano stool onto the floor.

The bell rang three more times. I was powerless to stop
it. Pryce scrambled to his feet and thrust his face into
Kemp's.

'Don't you touch me!' he yelled. 'I'm not one of your
little boys!'

'How dare you?' the headmaster bellowed. 'Here, in
this place! In my house!'

They stood chin to chin, panting: a handsome boy of
twenty, his smooth complexion flushed with anger; a
florid, middle-aged schoolteacher, the veins popping in
his temples. The only sound in the chapel was their
breathing, because the final notes from the piano had
faded to nothing, the bell was silent, and the girl and I
were holding our breath.

Dr Kemp found something to say. Struggling to control
himself, he took a step backwards. 'You are a guest in my
house,' he said very slowly. 'I'd be obliged if you would
forbear . . .' His sentence dried up, shrivelled and died.

Pryce stepped back too. Theatrical, he ran a hand
through his hair. 'Forbear?' he said. He pondered the
word, as though he'd never heard it before. 'Of course,
Dr Kemp, we're grateful for your hospitality.'

He turned back to the piano and closed the lid. He
made a tiny, courtly nod of his head, the closest he could
come to an apology, and proffered his hand. Dr Kemp
ignored it. So he moved past the headmaster, towards the
back of the chapel.

'And Scott, as for you . . .' Dr Kemp let the words hang
in the air. I came out of the vestry. Behind me, the rope
was still swinging. 'As for you, I'm disappointed, and you
know what that means.'

Sophie spoke up. She'd watched the confrontation,
speechless, aghast, but now her voice, despite the stammer,
cut clearly through the room. 'It wasn't h-h-his
f-f-f-fault – he only d-d-did what M-m-m-Martin . . .'

'Please don't interfere,' the headmaster said. 'At least you
could allow me jurisdiction over my own house.' He signalled to me with a
lift of his eyebrow and marched out of the chapel. I followed him.

It was twilight at four o'clock. I was in the stable; I'd lit
the lantern and was bending close to the flame, to see
what I was doing. The rest of the room was in darkness.
In the far corner, the jackdaw hopped from one end of its
perch to the other, with a rhythmic rattle and click of its
claws. I didn't look up to watch, and in any case, the task
in which I was so deeply engrossed would shortly take me
back to the bird. As ever, Wagner was in the stable with
me. He'd wolfed the remains of the rabbit which I'd fed
to the jackdaw, and now he was dozing on the cobbled
floor.

I was whittling the tip of a feather with Roly's knife.
The feather was from the bird itself, one of its tail
feathers which had been bent almost ninety degrees when
it was tangled in the brambles. I'd carefully cut it off, just
below the fatal kink, and now I was whittling the tip into
as sharp a point as I could.

I held the feather close to the lamp and flicked the dust
from it. Perfect. I thought for a moment how good it
would be to keep it and use it as a quill, to dip the point
into an ink-well and write with the magical blue-black
feather of an imp I'd rescued from the forest. I held it like
a pen and wrote my name in the air.