The Broken Chariot (42 page)

‘Because I can't live within spitting distance of a lie, or allow you to do so. It's rather curious, but I still look on you as a friend.'

‘You poor little worm who never grew up. You'd be an informer, would you? A nark. A sneak. You'd shop your own grandmother for that little
frisson
of school-prefect honour. Don't you know that that kind of thing is on the way out?'

Dominic winced. ‘It's not. You're premature. I'll never believe it. The fact is, I'm leaving the firm.'

‘Are you?'

‘I'm going into the Foreign Office. I've always wanted to. Well, my parents never stopped hoping while I was at Cambridge. It'll be a far better job, so I must clear matters up before I go.'

‘So that's your nasty little game? Want to go out with a bang, do you? Do you remember your last words to me when I lit off from school that night?' He looked at him with the most candid and intimate expression possible. ‘I remember, if you don't.'

‘What were they?'

‘You said, “I'll never betray you.”'

‘Maybe I did. And if I did, that's why I want you to own up. Don't you see?'

‘You'll do well at the Foreign Office. I will own up, though, in my own good time.'

‘No, Herbert, it has to be in my time.' Dominic's expression was that of a satisfied cat with a half-dead mouse at its feet. ‘I can't let you play false to yourself any longer.'

Herbert laughed at his language, and his sentiments from a dying age. He endured the silence, determined not to speak. If he'd had a cricket bat handy Bert would have broken it over the smarmy fuckpig's loaf.

‘There's only one thing which will stop me blowing the gaff.' Dominic put on his sickliest face. ‘Shall I tell you what it is?'

Herbert's ears were stopped as if by the noise of the factory, but through the roar of engines he choked out: ‘Go on, then, Slime.'

‘What I want to say is that I'll tell Humphries the truth, unless you stop seeing Deborah. I'm in love with her. Always have been. I want to marry her, if she'll have me.'

Herbert had never known there were words which could shock and oppress him to the extent that they would bring him close to fainting. He leaned against the desk. ‘Have you asked her?'

‘No, but I will.'

The poor honourable fool, not having the guile or gumption to lie and say she'd accepted him. He'd often wondered whether or not Dominic was his rival, and Deborah hadn't bothered to settle the matter, though he was hardly in a position to cavil about somebody keeping their past to themselves. ‘Well, I have asked her, and she's said yes.'

‘I don't believe you,' Dominic said with trembling lips.

Bert stood, thumbs wide-angled in the arm holes of his waistcoat, where they were safer than being free to punch Dominic's face in. ‘Believe what you like, but it's true. You can do what you like, as well, but let me tell you this, you blackmailing runt: if you aren't out o' this flat in three seconds – no, two – I'll give yer the sort o' kicking' yer'll never forget. And if yer do blow the gaff I'll cum after yer wherever you are, even if ye're dyin' from malaria in the middle o' Borneo.' He freed his hands from the waistcoat, and smiled. ‘Understand, old boy?'

He wouldn't bother, but let him worry. The door slammed, and he picked up the phone so that he could pop the question to Deborah. In love with her more than ever, the wonderful word yes came into his ear.

Twenty-Three

The telegram said: ‘Father died of massive stroke in middle of night. Devastated. Mother.' Herbert thought him luckier than Mrs Denman, to go in such a way. The bullet zigzagging around the Arakan jungle nearly twenty years before had hopped on a plane and found its mark at last. So many people were dying it seemed as if God had got his hands on a machine gun.

He settled into the car, regretting he hadn't been there to see him go. Headlamps burning, he threaded the needle between trucks and the offside green verge, overtaking with a screeching hooter where no sane person would, but slowing down at the latter part of the journey because he didn't want either the shame or inconvenience of following his father so soon.

Maud stood by the window, gazing into the garden at the antics of the housemartins flying up and down to feed their young under the eaves. You won't see him stumbling around clipping the bushes any more, Herbert thought as he placed himself by her. ‘I came as soon as I could, Mother. I'm very sorry about it. And sad, too.' Nothing else to say, though it was obviously the right thing.

‘Darling, it's terrible. I can't believe it.' She could barely speak through her tears. ‘I thought he'd live forever. He always joked he would. Longer than me, I hoped. I suppose everyone says that. The day I first saw him on the beach near Lowestoft seems only last week.'

He felt out of place, but told himself that nothing could be as affecting and important as the death of your father, especially to your mother. He tapped the black cat away when it pushed against his leg. ‘Poor old Hugh!'

Maud looked askance at his use of his first name. ‘He loved you more than you'll ever know, probably because you gave him more heartache than he ever deserved.'

It was as well Bert had no say in this, for he might swear at the notion that Herbert had made his father's life a misery simply by living as he'd wanted.

A plate of cold mutton and pickles was set before him at the kitchen table. ‘You must be starving. There's a bottle of beer in the refrigerator if you want it.'

‘I'll get it.' He couldn't deny that she looked handsome and forlorn in her black skirt and black jacket, black beads, and a black band across her hair, above a lined and pallid mask of loss. Such a hurried dressing into the part stopped her going to pieces. Fresh tears down her cheeks avoided the obstacles of those which had dried a few minutes ago. ‘I think I'll go up to his study for a while.' Trying to find pity for this old woman, he hoped she would take his intention as a chilling sort of remorse, which he couldn't feel, though supposed it would seep into him during the next few months.

‘Don't go in there yet.' She didn't want to be alone. No longer had to be. Impossible to say why he lifted her hand to kiss. She forced him to stand, and drew him between her arms, all bones, ardour and grief. ‘Oh, Herbert, my life's finished. I can't tell you how it feels. My heart's breaking.'

It isn't, and won't. Grief doesn't last, he wanted to say. Everybody recovers. Live for me. I won't mind. I'll look after you as much as I'm able. We'll be closer from now on. He stood aside without speaking.

What madness, to talk about life being at an end. She wasn't much over seventy, and looked younger. Still, the old man had died, and they'd been nearly forty years together, ten more than he'd been alive. ‘You'll be all right.' He held her, feeling pity, tears checked because a grown man didn't blubber. He forced the smile from his face: hadn't yet written about tragedy so close, could have felt worse if he had seen the old man die. On the other hand he might have been less disturbed. It would have been interesting.

‘He was so honest. Such an upright person. I hope you find comparable love and devotion in your life, Herbert.'

In harness from the cradle to the grave, he'd had nothing to be dishonest about. Nothing important, certainly. ‘I'll go into his study' – anything to get out of her way. ‘I want to look at where he was happiest' – or to see if there'd be a clue as to what kind of a man he was now he's dead.

‘No, Herbert, it'll take a while to get tidy.'

They'd lived such a neat life. If a single bibelot was out of alignment on shelf or table it had to be put back in case a hair's breadth of their life was going astray. Everything ordered and pre-ordained, a charmed but restricted existence he could never fall in with. Yet he envied them, and regretted that he couldn't live in the same way, though the barrack-room tidiness of his own flat suggested he might be on the way to getting there.

He couldn't care at all whether or not he saw the old man's study. It was a ploy to be alone, but his mother needed him every minute in her sight, and her overpowering sorrow was like warm mud too thick to swim from. ‘Your father is in the living room. They'll be coming for his – him, at two o'clock.'

She was halfway to being dead herself, and wanted him, who couldn't recall when he'd been so much alive, to comfort her and coax her back. On the other hand he had never known her to be so vibrant. Before leaving London there'd been neither time nor thought of phoning Deborah. He wanted her with him now, to commiserate and hold him, to say she loved him, to lick his ears, anything to space out the millibars of such a bleak atmosphere. She would shield him from a sensation he shouldn't be exposed to, feelings only real if written about from the imagination. He didn't know what he wanted to be kept away from, since the experience must surely be good.

Deborah would know how to comfort his mother, or would try anyway. He saw them melting together, a very sexy scene, anger as he brushed the picture out. He would show her the house, walk her through the gardens, and take her to the orchard where he had once stood in the rain hoping to find out who he was, so long ago that he couldn't imagine the man he had been. Trying to find his true self – poor fool – he hadn't known that if he did nothing about it his self was sufficiently strong and centred to come out of the shadows and find
him
. He took his mother's hand. ‘Let's look at him, then.'

‘It'll be a big funeral. You can help send out the cards. Quite a few will go to his regiment.'

The idea pleased him. All the old buffers would come. A few young ones as well, maybe a platoon to fire a volley over the coffin. ‘So they should.'

Hugh's moustache was greyer than grey, and the flesh it sprang from as white as if he had never been east of Suez. He looked satisfied more than at peace, about right for a soldier. His saluting arm seemed alive and set to come up for a final gesture of farewell. Maud kissed the cold lips, weeping as if to bring him back to life and walk with him arm in arm into the garden, talking about vegetables and what to have for dinner.

Real life's about to begin for her, as it is for me. ‘We all have to die.' He regretted the callous remark, but its brutality calmed her: ‘I know. It's the only consolation I have.'

‘I would like to look into his study some time.'

‘Not till after the funeral.'

Such peculiar fancies should be allowed to someone in a state of shock. ‘Why ever not, though?'

‘He must have known a stroke was coming on. I heard this weird noise, but thought he was just reorganizing his books. He did, from time to time. In fact you might say he did it endlessly. It calmed him. And he liked the room to be tidy. But when I found him I saw he'd made a bit of a mess. I'll never know why.'

She didn't bother to stop him when he walked towards the stairs. The tobacco smell from years of puffing was strong but stale, and the door wouldn't open its full arc, some obstacle preventing it. Her tone set off an alarm in him: ‘I'm afraid you'll have to push.'

He slid through the gap, couldn't go right in for fear of increasing the wreckage. If his father hadn't found the maniacal energy maybe the stroke wouldn't have gripped him in such a vice. He might have halfway recovered and been in a wheelchair, the vilest horror to him. Or perhaps he sensed the inevitable, hoped it wasn't certain even so. He had tried to head it off by an animal rage against the injustice of death, or even against fear which had dragged out his utmost violence, giving him astounding strength.

Herbert found the curved pipe snapped in two behind the door, its bowl filled with slightly charred tobacco, as if Hugh's last wish had been to fill it and light up to face the end in familiar comfort. Finding the onset too quick, he had broken it before crushing half a dozen others underfoot and attacking everything else in the room.

Books and papers had been pulled from shelves, broken and torn. An orang-utan gone mad. Tables and chairs upturned, smashed, ripped, thrown, kicked, whirled about and trampled as if a fragmentation grenade had done its work. Not one piece belonged to any other.

He walked over paper and glass and set a chair on its legs, put the mahogany table back in place, awestruck at the damage yet lightheaded with satisfaction that in old age his father had shown there to be more than one part to himself. At the same time as immersing himself in this wilful mayhem he had stacked maps and notebooks in a corner and left them – for me, Herbert knew.

He smiled, as if within the one seam that mattered he knew the old man almost as well as he knew himself, and in some quirky way even better. In his fight to the death Hugh had been influenced by a barbarous dignity at the iniquity of having to die, but within it had left a final message saying that he also had lived his life as two people. Unable to give in to it he had waited till the last moment to make the gesture.

Maud stood behind. ‘Now you know. But it wasn't like his true self to do such a thing. He was never like that. Not in a million years. A week ago he told me about a pain at the top of his head. Only lasted a few minutes, while he was in the garden. He said it was like a small plate of steel pressing into his skull. Then it went away. I wanted him to get a check up, and he said he would if it came back.'

When everyone had gone from the funeral, a deadly calm set over the house. Lord of the manor – though his mother might dispute that – Herbert sat in the lounge. Two bottles of the best Languedoc had been finished at dinner, and he felt more than half drunk, while noting that his mother could soak it in like a trooper. ‘He couldn't have had a better send-off,' she said ruefully.

Some of the mourners had looked curiously at him because he wasn't in the army, thinking what a pity he wasn't made of the same stuff as his father. It was good that the old world stayed with us a bit to be written about. ‘Yes, it was quite impressive.'