A Ghost in the Machine (8 page)

He remembered vividly the moment this sprang into being. He was fourteen and until then had shown no genuine interest in anything at all. He played no sports and had no friends – at least none he brought home. Eventually, somewhat shamefaced, his parents admitted to each other that their only child was as dull as ditchwater.

There was only one TV set in the house and Dennis's father kept a firm eye on the control knob. So Dennis read, simply because he could and it was something to do. As her son seemed indifferent to subject matter his mother changed his library books when she changed her own. She tried to select an interesting mixture: teenage fiction, true adventure – sailing, mountaineering and so on – biology and the natural world, or history. It was in this section she had come across a work entitled
The Soldier's Armoury: Twelfth to Sixteenth Century.

Dennis opened it, sucked in his breath and cried, “Wow! Just look at this!”

The page in question showed a contraption for breaking knees, elbows and neck, then screwing the captive's head round till his spine snapped. Mrs. Brinkley had barely drawn a protesting breath before her son, tightly hugging the book, rushed to his bedroom and, unlike the unfortunate man in the illustration, never looked back.

Over the next twenty years Dennis rooted out every scrap of information extant on the period in question. His shelves were crammed with relevant books. Holidays were spent in museums all over the world poring over manuscripts describing battles and photographing weaponry, armour and all the cumbersome but lethal machinery of early war-making. The artefacts were very fragile and only once, in a library in Verona, had he obtained permission to trace a document. This was a map showing the Battle of Montichiari (one thousand lances, seven hundred archers). As Dennis touched the faded, ivory parchment he felt the warm golden earth, running with the blood of warriors, incarnate beneath his fingertips.

Gradually he built up a small collection: a sheaf of exquisitely balanced longbows; a gun carriage supporting a vast crossbow so heavy that two men were needed merely to handle the bolt; a rusted helmet with a horsehair crest and hinged side pieces.

He was almost forty before it occurred to him that there was nothing to stop him owning a facsimile of one of the great early war machines themselves. He drew up precisely detailed plans, even though they would never be put to any practical use. He started with the trebuchet, a giant leather catapult on a winch mechanism in a frame thirty feet tall, used for hurling rocks and boiling liquids over castle walls. Dennis followed this with a belfry, a movable tower capable of holding over a hundred men, and began the search for a craftsman with the necessary skills to build them. As this was being done he began looking for a suitable property to house his new treasures.

Dennis had been delighted with the purchase and eventual transformation of Kinders. Now never an evening passed but that he did not enter the vast space holding the war machines. He especially liked to be there at dusk, when their grotesque shadows met and mingled, spreading like grey mist beneath his slippered feet.

As he moved about he would hear, in fancy, the whistling rush of a thousand arrows. Or the strain and creak of a cable as the trebuchet's vast leather sling was winched into a hurling position. Gradually, over the years, these scenes became more and more vivid, incorporating not only an increasingly large amount of grisly detail but also the sound and lately even the smell of carnage.

For a long time these extraordinary historical recreations occurred only when Dennis was confined within the parameters of the war room. When he closed the door to go about his business the sound and fury immediately vanished. But lately his mind had been breached at other times. Once, to his great alarm, this happened in the office during a discussion with two of his staff. Sometimes, even when asleep, the groans of wounded men and screams of terrified women and children disturbed his dreams.

Naturally Dennis kept these frightening experiences to himself. Eventually, however, the daily memories of nighttime horrors began to wear him down and he decided to seek help. Loath to visit a psychiatrist – he was neither unhappy nor inadequate in the matter of conscious day-to-day living – Dennis finally settled on a dream therapist. Embarrassedly he told his tale. The woman listened, then suggested various interpretations that all seemed pretty daft to him. As was the suggestion that, every day for a month, he should write the dreams and visions down. But Dennis decided to give this a go and, to his surprise, it worked so well he never had cause to visit her again.

 

Mallory remembered speaking to his aunt once about the friendship between her companion and Dennis Brinkley. Like most people he found it surprising, even faintly humorous, and was unwise enough to say so. Carey had been angry at this implication that the unattractive and socially inept did not deserve friends. Or, in the unlikely event that they made one, that this friend should be as plain and clumsy as they were themselves.

After he had said he was sorry Carey had unbent enough to discuss Benny's situation a little. As she saw it the relationship was grounded not only in liking, though there was that, of course, but in a tender stability arising from the mutual understanding that neither would ever do the other harm. Benny's anguished shyness, hidden behind her blundering and rushing and general overeagerness to help was perfectly balanced and gentled into quietude by Dennis's patient manner and genuine interest in her wellbeing. They were comfortable with each other. Once, Carey explained, she had needed to talk to Benny when Dennis was visiting and had discovered them sitting in wing chairs on opposite sides of Benny's fireplace with all the calm and gravitas of an old married couple.

Benny knew nothing of this conversation but now, as she hurried to the front door of Appleby House, the expression on her face completely bore it out.

“Come in, Dennis. It's so good to see you.”

“I did hesitate…a bit soon after the funeral. But I saw Kate's car drive away and thought you might be in need of a little company.”

“You're right, as always.”

“Are we in the kitchen?”

In no time they were settled at the scarred deal table. Benny threw away her stewed Earl Grey and made what Dennis always called “some proper char.” She set out the big Mason's ironstone cups and saucers, yellow and blue with lovely flowers. Really they were breakfast coffee cups but Carey had believed in using anything and everything in whatever way suited you. She would cut ice cream with a fish knife if it was to hand and had once served oysters, complete with lemon slices, shaved ice and seaweed, on a three-tier cake stand. Why, Carey wouldn't give a fig if…

“Oh, Benny. My dear.” Her tears were falling like rain. Dennis produced a large, white linen handkerchief, shook out the immaculate folds and laid it close to Benny's saucer. “I'm so very sorry.”

“Hnuhh…hnuhh…” Snorting and sobbing Benny wrapped her arms across her chest as if in a strait-jacket, clamping them fast. She gripped her shoulders against the pain. “I was all right…when everyone was here…”

Dennis waited. He didn't speak again and Benny was grateful. So many people had said so many things to her during the last few days. Their intentions were sympathetic but the pious generalities meant nothing. Worse, they were an irritation. What did they know of the real, true Carey? Of her relish for jokes and occasional crossness, her raucous laugh and sharp mimicry of various village worthies once their unsuspecting backs were turned. Her love of gossip, good wine and rich tobacco. Recalling all these things aloud and adding to them took so much time the tea got cold.

“Shall I make some fresh,” said Dennis. A statement rather than a question. He filled the kettle and by the time it started to whistle and shriek again Benny had stopped crying.

“Is there any cake?” Dennis asked. Not out of greed, though he did have a sweet tooth, but to distract her.

“Oh, yes, yes.” Benny started bustling about, pulling tins out of the cupboard. One fell and rolled across the floor. Then she remembered that Polly had taken home all the leftover cake from the funeral. “There's only Battenburg.”

“My mother's favourite.” Dennis got out some clean cups. “Though she didn't like marzipan.”

“It isn't home-made.” As Benny put slices of the cake on an almost translucent plate with a worn golden rim the anomaly sank in. “Didn't like…?”

“She'd take it all off and just eat the other bits. I used to say to her, why not buy angel cake instead? That was pink and yellow if you remember, Benny?”

“Oh, yes. Stuck together with sugary grit.”

Dennis talked on. He moved from his mother's idiosyncratic eating habits through other family stories, with one or two of which Benny was comfortably familiar, then introduced some strange neighbours who had lived next door to the Brinkleys at Pinner.

“They had a stuffed armadillo. After dark, when no one was about, they used to take it for walks.”

“How wonderful!” Benny clapped her hands with pleasure. “Was it on wheels?”

“They carried it.”

“You can't take something for a walk by carrying it!”

As Dennis extended and embellished this entirely imaginary family, Croydon jumped on to Benny's lap and started to purr, the first occasion for a long time. She sank her fingers into his cream and orange ruff and massaged his neck. The cat stretched out his chin to facilitate these caresses. Gradually, soothed by the gently meandering conversation, its restful pauses and the rumbling vibration beneath her fingertips, Benny's heart became less troubled. Her earlier anxieties now seemed fanciful in the extreme. She really must try and put some sort of brake on her morbid imagination.

It was unfortunate that Dennis was preparing to deliver some information calculated to banish all this hard-won tranquillity. Gossip and the local paper made it inevitable that Benny would hear this awful news one way or the other. Knowing her so well, understanding her wildly nervous temperament, Dennis wanted to be sure it came from him.

The facts were these. At the village of Badger's Drift, just a few miles away, an elderly man had been found battered to death in his council bungalow. His seventeen-year-old grandson, who had been living with him for the past five years, had disappeared. Neighbours testified as to ongoing rows, and the youth had already been in trouble for vandalism and fighting. The police were asking for any information as to his whereabouts, and a poster with an up-to-date photograph was already in circulation.

Benny listened, her face gradually draining of colour. When she could finally speak she cried, “What if he comes here?”

“There's no chance of that,” said Dennis firmly. “A crime like this is what the police call a domestic. That means only the family of the mur – perpetrator is at any sort of risk. And in any case, the police seem to think the lad's already in London.” This last sentence was pure inspiration.

“I'm all by myself.” Benny had jumped to her feet and looked ready to fly away.

“Benny, look – where do you want to stay tonight? Over here or in the flat?”

“At home. This place is so big.”

“So what we'll do is go and check it out right now for security, all right? And then we can go and buy anything we need – window locks or whatever – and I'll fit them straight away.”

“Oh, Dennis.” Benny sat down again. “What would I do without you?”

A long time ago, nearly eight years to be exact, though it seemed several lifetimes to him, Mallory Lawson had been a stable, healthy and contented man. He had always wanted to teach and, after leaving Cambridge with a 2:1 in Biological Sciences from Downing College, had obtained a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Homerton and promptly set about it. He applied first for a junior teaching post in a comprehensive school in Hertford but, to his surprise, did not even get an interview, so took a position at an excellent middle school in the Fens, near Ely. He had already fallen in love with a beautiful girl, Kate Allen, then reading English at Girton, and by the end of his first term in the new school they were married. Kate managed to get her foot in the door of a major London publishing house – the first step towards her ambition to become an editor – and commuted to London every day.

Young, childless and with only themselves to please, instead of getting lumbered with a mortgage the Lawsons rented a small flat in Cambridge. They entertained friends, went to concerts and theatres, took long, expensive holidays and generally had a wonderful time. While Mallory was at Little Felling he continued to write and research, publishing several papers including “The Transmigration of Whooper Swans” in
Nature
magazine, which was especially well received. It was at a conference that he met the head of a direct grant upper school at Cheltenham, who suggested he apply for the position of Head of Science there when the vacancy arose at the end of the current term. Mallory did so and, after a nail-biting two weeks on a short list of three and a second interview, was successful.

At this point in their lives Kate was pregnant. Both of them, tremendously happy at the news, became suddenly and seriously aware that it was time to settle down. Time to do all the responsible things. Buy a sensible family car (Mallory sold the Morgan quickly, even at small profit) and, of course, a house. Three bedrooms and probably just a semi to begin with. Leaving their Cambridge address with estate agents, they were astonished at details of the local property that started arriving through the post. In Cambridge they knew prices had tripled over the past ten years but that was a university town. Oxford was the same, if not worse. But this was the country, for heaven's sake.

In the end, as both wanted to live in Cheltenham itself, they chose a Victorian terraced house, took out a hundred per cent mortgage and used their combined savings to decorate, rewire the place and buy more furniture. Kate gave up her job to freelance and, first-class copy-editors being extremely rare birds, continued to find work. She eased off somewhat after Polly was born and began reading as well as editing manuscripts. This was much less demanding, and easier to pick up and put down when a fractious child needed attention. Not so well paid but you couldn't have everything.

And so the Lawsons lived and modestly prospered. Kate fed the family. Mallory paid the heavy mortgage, all the other bills and kept the car on the road. Polly, intelligent, self-willed, secretive even then, thrived. She proved to be good at science, outstanding at maths and very good indeed at games, both on and off the pitch. Everyone wanted Polly on their side.

When Mallory had been at the Willoughby-Hart School for almost ten years the deputy headship became available and it was discreetly suggested that an application from himself would not be unfavourably received. And so it proved to be. But then, barely a year later, something happened that changed all their lives, and immeasurably for the worst.

Not too long after this catastrophe occurred, when they were already edging towards what proved to be a bottomless pit of despair, Kate looked back at their happy days in Cheltenham and wondered at her own complacency. But wasn't everyone like that until something dreadful happened to them? Tutting and sighing and shaking their heads at someone else's tragedy on the news; enjoying
Crimewatch
as if it were a drama series but with the added spice that the enactments had once happened for real. Voyeurs one and all, comfortable with the knowledge it would never happen to them.

This downward spiral started with a television programme caught late at night and quite by accident. Mallory was on the point of switching off after
Newsnight
and going to bed when his attention was fatally caught by the opening credits of a documentary. The programme itself would show a secondary modern school in a desolate and deprived area in the North-East of England. Scarred buildings in a scarred landscape struggling somehow to contain and even attempt to teach scarred children. What the media called a “sink school.”

Mallory recalled that, only the other day in the senior master's common room, frivolous attempts had been made to define this term. The overall favourite, “the rubbish that's left behind when the plug's been pulled,” got several laughs and a round of un-ironic applause.

Mallory sat for a long time, through the night in fact, after the programme had finished. He could not put the pinched, bitter, hopeless faces out of his mind. A sense of guilt, of shame even, began to pervade his thoughts. He remembered his youthful idealism, recalled the ferocious arguments with fellow students who had thought him mad wanting to teach at the rough end of the market. A waste of a Cambridge degree. Angrily he had demanded to know how it could ever be a waste to open windows in the minds of disadvantaged children, admitting light and hope, transforming their lives. This provoked both tears and jeers and the sincere hope that, when the film was made, Tom Hanks would get to play Mallory.

How would his life have gone, Mallory wondered now, if he had got the very first job he had applied for? The one in the comprehensive. From the beginning Kate had understood and sympathised with his ambitions; they would have been just as happy. There would still have been Polly. And he would have been of some real use in the world.

It was this observation that truly struck home. For Mallory was aware that, if he left his present job, no child would lose out by one iota. The school's reputation was such that he would be quickly and easily replaced by someone at least as good, if not better. But there were places where his presence could make a huge difference.

Understanding this Mallory immediately saw himself embroiled in situations of high drama where not only his teaching skills but his heart, soul and every scrap of his considerable energy would be tested to the limit. Suddenly, at three o'clock in the morning in an empty, totally silent room, he felt the reawakening of a faith that he had almost forgotten had ever existed. Once more fizzing with ambition and feeling incredibly alive, his mind became crammed with exciting possibilities.

Later, cooking breakfast before the others were properly awake, Mallory started to think things through. It would be a hell of an upheaval, an awful lot to ask of his family. In fact, looking back at the ease of their life so far, he recognised that this would be the first time really serious demands had been made on any of them, including himself.

The Ewan Sedgewick School in South-East London was always advertising in
The Times Educational Supplement
and
The Guardian
for staff. Presently they were not only seeking teachers in nearly every department but also a headmaster. Mallory sent away for an application form. After all, it committed him to nothing. When he had filled it in and sent it back he tried to feel detached. In any case, such brief experience that he had as a deputy head would hardly qualify him to take over and run a large inner-city comprehensive. But within a fortnight of his application he was invited for an interview at which the board politely attempted to conceal their bafflement at his application in the first place. Barely a week later he was offered the job.

Kate, previously a source of support and encouragement for anything her husband and daughter undertook, struggled to conceal the depths of her dismay at the seriousness of this new situation.

Polly surprisingly, given the friendships she had made and her enjoyment of several aspects of country life, was immediately enthusiastic. Everyone knew London was cool and where it was all at. With the confidence bordering on rashness that was to lead her into so much trouble in later life she could not wait to get down there and start hanging out.

Money was going to be the real problem. Their current mortgage was by no means paid off and they knew that prices in the capital were horrendous. A pathetic London weighting allowance of just under three thousand pounds showed as nothing more than a blip on the Abbey National screen. To make matters worse, Kate insisted that Polly would not pay the price of her father's sudden resurgence of idealism by attending a bottom-of-the-league school. This meant the few comparatively cheaper areas were out of bounds. Mallory, ashamed of cutting his cloth before even starting his new job, brought up the time-worn argument that poor schools would never improve if the middle classes abandoned them. Kate would not budge. For the first and last time in their marriage the Lawsons came close to out-and-out war.

In the end Kate won. They found an excellent all-girls school, the Lady Margaret, at Parsons Green, and bought a two-bedroomed terraced house in the area by putting down the modest profit made from the sale of the Cheltenham house, borrowing double Mallory's annual salary and an extra fifty thousand against Kate's earnings, which left them with a combined mortgage of a hundred and seventy thousand pounds. Kate returned to work full time and, early in September, Mallory took up his post at the Ewan Sedgewick.

His appointment coincided with a modest lottery grant. Repairs had been carried out, buildings were painted, new desks arrived. The gym was refitted and some musical instruments had been bought. Five new teachers were appointed to join the weary cynics on the permanent staff. Many of these, due to their rackety state of physical and/or mental health, were frequently absent. Not infrequently, supply staff outnumbered the regulars.

Gradually Mallory came to understand what he had taken on. Bullying, present to some degree wherever he had worked, had at the Ewan Sedgewick an organised savagery that was truly frightening. Drugs were everywhere: bought, sold or swapped with a defiant lack of concealment. The previous term a teacher had tried to interfere. The next night her teenage daughter had arrived home covered in bruises, her clothes ripped apart. Shortly after, petrol was poured through their letter box followed by some matches with the words “Next Time” scrawled on the box.

All of this Mallory gradually discovered. He discovered violent children, children who were mentally ill, children who sold themselves, pregnant children, children who were not children at all – who perhaps never had been. Frequently he confronted one or the other of the parents and marvelled that their offspring were still alive. He talked to more police officers during his first month at the Ewan Sedgewick than in the rest of his life put together.

Other pupils – the majority, though it often didn't feel like it – struggled on, taught by worn-out, disenchanted teachers or visitors who knew nothing about them, didn't wish to and disappeared almost as soon as their faces became vaguely familiar.

Mallory got himself dug in. For the next four years, although the hope took a tremendous battering, he somehow found the willpower and energy to continue. Not to succeed, not even to cope, but to go in day after day and wrestle with the job. Overwhelmed by floods of nitpicking paperwork, quarrelling teachers, incompetent administration and inadequate finance, he somehow held at bay the great flood of despair that constantly threatened to overwhelm him. And struggled to remain open to the troubled children in his care, even the one who had plunged a screwdriver into the back of his hand. But then something truly dreadful happened.

Two men, one describing himself as the uncle of a twelve-year-old boy at the school, had turned up saying the child's mother had had an accident. The uncle explained they had come to take him to the hospital. The Office let the boy go. When he did not arrive home his mother contacted the school. Mallory rang the police. Later that night the child was found wandering at the side of the road several miles away, traumatised, naked and bleeding.

Mallory took full responsibility for this appalling incident even though he was not on the school premises at the time. It was right that he should but the effect on him was profound. He felt he could not bear to continue in his post yet knew he must. He had uprooted his wife and child, dragged them halfway across the country and plunged the family into heavy debt on the strength of what seemed to him now a maudlin, sentimental dream. Bitterly he recalled how, buoyed up by waves of naïve vanity, he had seen himself fighting for and transforming a school supposedly beyond hope of reclamation. Had even pictured himself addressing conferences at home and abroad. Becoming famous as the man who…

Sickened now by this former posturing Mallory started to apply for other posts: headships, for he could not afford even the smallest decrease in salary. His applications were acknowledged but that was usually the end of it. The two interviews he did obtain were fairly quickly concluded, for the truth was by then he stank of failure and neuroticism. And so Mallory was forced to stay on at the Ewan Sedgewick. To keep sane he withdrew from all but the minimum contact necessary to do the job, hardening his heart against any emotional involvement with either staff or children.

But the cost of maintaining this stance was high. Aware always of what was pressing against the prison walls Mallory could never relax. Soon he was unable to sleep without medication. For the first time in his life he had violent headaches and intense back pain. Sometimes he felt unable to breathe. He was prescribed tranquillisers, drank too much and his libido sank without trace. Recently, in the middle of the night, his whole body had gone into spasm and he was unable to move. Unaware then he was merely days away from delivery Mallory had wept with fear.