A Pack of Lies (18 page)

Father and son stared at him.

‘A war game! A game of strategy!’ cried Uncle
Charlie, jumping up and heaving aside the furniture until an area of Turkey carpeting emerged, patchy with fading. He pushed Wellington off the hearthrug and threw this in a heap in the middle of the area, declaring, ‘Higher ground!’ He took off his smoking jacket and flung that down, too, in a bundle. ‘Where’re your lead soldiers lad? Fetch ’em down!’

Slothful Uncle Charlie had been a source of despair and disappointment to Wellington: Uncle Charlie in braces and high-waisted trousers and shirt unbuttoned at the cuffs, pulling the furniture about the room, was downright alarming, especially since he was, in effect, suggesting a further humiliation for his godson. How could Wellington, at thirteen, beat his esteemed officer father at a game of strategy? There was an element of luck in a war game, but not one large enough. Never. Wellington looked pleadingly at his godfather, hoping to be spared the game. But however hard he tried, he simply could not catch Uncle Charlie’s eye. He fetched his box of lead soldiers. It was the first present his father had ever given him, when he was two, saying, ‘One day, Wellington, you’ll be a smart soldier like these fellows!’

‘I’ll call the shots!’ cried Uncle Charlie excitedly. To him it all seemed a great joke, and yet it was Wellington’s future they were playing for!

Lying on their faces, head to head across the Turkey carpet and rumpled hearthrug, father and son took up the role of enemies. Wellington’s toy soldiers were ranged between them, conscripted and forced into the strangest of all battles. The firelight flickered on the flecks of gold paint which made one a major, one a general, and on the unnatural pink of their painted lead faces and on the shiny brass artillery with which Wellington had never played.

‘Good! Very good! An excellent idea of yours, Charles,’ said the General. ‘A battle for self-determination, eh lad? Like some damned Balkan uprising.’

Wellington felt at a further disadvantage being half wedged beneath the sideboard. He struggled to remember the elements of battle plan they had already taught him at school, but his mind was a blank. He could only hope that the dice were kind to him.

Luck gave no quarter. Luck showed no mercy at all.

The General’s troops advanced across the Turkey carpet to the foot of the hearthrug, their progress determined by rolls of the dice — three, five, six. They had the mountain to shelter them from Wellington’s artillery now, and soon they would take the high ground and pick off Wellington’s men with throws of five and six. His troops scurried to the shelter of the smoking jacket, and a sorry, demoralized crew they seemed to Wellington. He could almost see the fear etched on their misshapen lead faces. Beyond the battlescape loomed the huge, fire-bright face of his father, its whiskers as menacing as dark clouds gathering around a setting sun. There was no body — only face: grinning, complacent face.

‘Dysentery!’ cried Uncle Charlie suddenly and startlingly.

‘What?’ snapped the General. ‘What d’you mean, “dysentery”? Who put dysentery in the rules?’

‘No rules in this game,’ said Uncle Charlie cheerfully, patrolling the edge of the battlefield on hands and knees. ‘No favouritism! Dysentery strikes both sides. What do you do?’

The General herrumphed and reared up off the carpet. He had seen plenty of dysentery on active service. It killed men surer than bullets. But
do
? What
do
about it? ‘Don’t catch your drift, man. Dig latrines, of course. Dig plenty of latrines.’

‘Still, shall we say a twenty per cent mortality?’ said Uncle Charlie, knocking down one in five of the General’s men. ‘And you, Wellington? What would you do?’

Wellington too was confused. He scowled with
bewilderment but he said, ‘Set up field hospitals. Give daily equal parts of salt and sugar in boiled water, and dig separate latrines for the men affected and for the men not.’

‘
Sugar and salt
? What are you now — a chef?’ bawled the General over the summit of the hearthrug.

‘Sound medicine. Sound medicine,’ Charles interrupted. ‘Shall we say five per cent mortality?’ and he picked off just two of Wellington’s troopers. ‘Carry on.’

The set-back soured the General’s mood. He ploughed doggedly on up the hearthrug and took the high ground, dominating the battlefield. Charles threw the dice. ‘Six!’ he declared, and six of Wellington’s men lay down to an everlasting sleep on the turkish plush of the plain, far distant from the comforts of their green baize beds in the wooden toy-box. Wellington (who was overblessed with imagination) could almost hear their groans and smell the cordite on their singed and gory jackets. Poor men. To die in such a very poor cause as the wilful disobedience of Wellington George Armstrong, thirteen. Halbeard, the dead, stuffed mascot, grinned down at him with his bared teeth. The noise of the dice rolling sounded as loud as cannon roar.

‘Mutiny!’

‘Oh now look here, Charles. Don’t louse up the game.’ The General sat up, his clothes straining, too tight for lying on the floor in comfort. ‘Mutiny? Mutiny ain’t in the rules.’

‘But this ain’t a game, General,’ said Uncle Charlie, getting to his feet. ‘This is the matter of a lifetime. Mutiny. One quarter of your troops mutiny, General. However, they are seized on by the remaining loyal troopers and chained to the munition carts. How do you handle the situation?’

‘Shoot them like the dogs they are,’ said the General, and it was plain that he too could smell the cordite and hear the rattle of the chains. He picked out his own soldiers as if he were picking maggots out of cake, and
threw them disdainfully into the seat of the armchair. ‘That’s how to deal with a mutiny, lad,’ he murmured towards Wellington, having for the moment forgotten that his son did not thirst after such knowledge.

It was Uncle Charlie who seemed now to be holding the only high ground in the living room, for he was standing up and they were lying on their faces at his feet. ‘And you, Wellington?’ he said.

‘A mutiny, too?’

‘Don’t try to be clever, lad. Just say honestly what you’d do.’ Uncle Charlie had stopped smiling.

Wellington was startled by this sudden ferocity into answering truthfully. ‘In the middle of a war, sir? I suppose I’d promise to look into their grievances as soon as we got home and beg them to trust and serve me until then.’

‘Pah!’ The General struck his fist so hard against the floor that Wellington felt the other end of the floorboard lift under his thigh. But Uncle Charlie cut short any tirade by recommencing the battle. ‘Wait! Wait!’ protested the General. ‘You’ve forgotten to penalize the boy for the mutiny!’

‘But he shot none of his men. You shot yours,’ said Charles in a quick, businesslike voice. ‘Shall we go on?’

Wellington had more men. The General held more ground. The scene was set for a war of attrition dragging on and on, death by death, until a handful of men were left triumphantly huddled on either Hearthrug Hill or Jacket Bluff.

His father’s blood running in Wellington’s veins began to quicken. A few lucky throws of the dice, another advantage tossed his way by Uncle Charlie, and perhaps he
could
massacre his father’s troops and still be left with a man or two standing. He realized, from a pain in his jaw, that he was grinding his teeth hard together. The reason for winning the battle slipped little by little out of his mind. The desire to win, the desire to
kill, the desire to humiliate his tyrannical enemy rose up like lava through the seams of a volcano.

‘Hostage taken,’ said Uncle Charlie.

‘Oh d**n you, Charles!’ The General uttered an oath Wellington had never even thought he knew. ‘More trickery?’

‘War’s full of trickery, General. You don’t need me to tell you that.’ Charles had retired to the fireplace and was smoking another cigarette and casually leaning against the mantelpiece, his eyes fixed fast on the battlefield. He was deaf to entreaties, this aloof god of war. ‘Your son, General, has been taken hostage. Give up the hill. Surrender. Or his throat will be cut at dawn.’

The General began to cough — huge, convulsive coughs intended to disguise a complete loss of self-control. Across the jagged peak of Hearthrug Hill, he saw the wide, blue, ingenuous eyes of his son watching him, watching him. He must not show the boy an example of weakness. Valour was the very thing at issue. Cowardice was the very crime which had come between father and son. He must give his boy some example of strength — show him the stuff of English pluck. He had to prove how infinitely finer was the profession of a soldier than that of a doctor! ‘A British officer’s first duty is to his Queen and Country, no matter what the personal cost,’ said the General, overloud.

Uncle Charlie cut his speech short and summed up briskly: ‘Your son’s throat is cut. The hill remains in your hands.’

The General gave an involuntary smile of relief: that hill had come to mean so very much to him.

Uncle Charlie called across the room in a sharp, imperious voice. ‘You, Wellington. Your father has been taken hostage. What do you do?’

Wellington lifted his forehead off the carpet. Tears were running down his cheeks and splashing on to the
pile of discarded — (dead) — lead soldiers heaped up beside the battlefield. He rested on his father the same look of bewilderment, hurt and reproach that the General had seen in the eyes of young men dying in field-hospital hammocks under fly-blown foreign skies.

‘Answer honestly, Wellington!’ shouted Uncle Charlie.

So Wellington put out his hand and picked up a fistful of the soldiers from Jacket Bluff and hurled them clumsily, overarm, over the summit of Hearthrug Hill, at his father’s big, round, florid face. ‘Surrender, of course,’ he hissed between shapeless, quivering lips.

A silence filled the room that was broken only by Wellington’s quick, agitated breathing and the crack of walnut shells in the firegrate — a sound reminiscent of a cavalry battle over, as the horsemaster tours the field, shooting maimed animals.

Uncle Charlie stepped into the battlefield, his satin-taped trousers and soft leather shoes bringing the whole landscape down to scale. It was, after all, only a yard or two of carpet. He extricated his smoking jacket, letting the last of Wellington’s toy soldiers fall on to the carpet pile.

And with his jacket returned to his shoulders, Uncle Charlie returned to his slow, indolent, smiling former self, slouching into an armchair and luxuriantly lighting another cigarette. ‘You see what a scurvy soldier he’d make, Tom?’ he said conversationally to the man stretched out on the floor. ‘Something of the killing instinct missing, don’t you know? Gives in to mutineers. Surrenders out of sheer sentiment. Better let him be a doctor hadn’t we? He’d be a liability to the Queen.’

The General did not answer. He and his son looked at one another, face to face across the Turkey carpet. All lines of communication were severed, like telegraph wires brought down by shelling. The red glow of the dying fire cast a red gash of light across Wellington’s face and throat, and the eyes might just as well have been dead.

Wellington George Armstrong left military academy and ultimately studied medicine. He went to France as a volunteer surgeon at the beginning of the First World War and was killed at the battle of Passchendaele by a mudslide. His father died in bed not long afterwards — of a broken heart, some say.

* * *

Mrs Povey pounced on the conclusion like a cat on to a thread of wool. ‘His only son, eh? Died in the trenches? Unmarried? No children?’ MCC shrugged. ‘Your family tree seems to have died in 1917, then, Mr Berkshire! How extraordinary!’

‘I didn’t say it was my personal history,’ said MCC with one of his dazzling, momentary smiles.

Mrs Povey sighed. Her voice, when she spoke again, was weary and harassed. ‘So. Taking your story to heart, I am supposed just to sit back and let Ailsa . . . form an attachment for you.’

‘Why not?’ said MCC, slipping the toy soldier back into his breast pocket.

Mrs Povey sat forward in her chair and looked him squarely in his huge brown eyes. ‘Frankly, Mr Berkshire, because you don’t . . .’

Chapter Twelve

The Bed:
A Story of Horrors Unspeakable

Her sentence was never finished.

As dark as the void of Space, MCC’s extraordinary eyes, in flight from Mrs Povey’s, glanced up the stairwell and caught sight of Ailsa curled up behind the banister.

‘Go to bed, Ailsa,’ he said, and Mrs Povey swivelled angrily in her chair.

‘Go to bed, Ailsa.’

Ailsa withdrew. Below her, after a scurry of cleared coffee-cups, the clicking of light switches, the creak of stairs and the rattle of the great brass bed in the shop, the house settled into silence but for the ticking of the handless clock and the clicking of the basketware chairs.

Next morning, MCC was up and about early. He borrowed a coat that had once belonged to Mr Povey and went to the laundrette to wash his clothes. It was a bright spring day — the last day of April — and he came back sparkling white, his jacket hooked on one finger over his shoulder.

Mrs Povey had washed his clothes often, overnight, but never before had the grass stains entirely disappeared from his knees or his shirt dazzled so pavilion-white. To Ailsa he looked like a white-sailed yacht heeling out of a sunlit wave, black pennants flying and the green ensign limp. But then she had formed a very great attachment for him. For in such matters it makes
very little difference ultimately what mothers do or say. She ran to the door and hugged him, to make that much plain to everyone.

But MCC held her at arm’s length and looked at her strangely — much as Mrs Povey held a letter when she had not got her reading glasses on. ‘I’ve decided!’ he said. ‘Today I shall make a sale!’

‘And what kind of story will you tell?’ asked Ailsa, feeling the empty pockets of his jacket to see which book he was currently reading.

‘I haven’t decided yet.’ He went and stood in front of the bookshelves and read the shelves from left to right, left to right, ceiling to floor. ‘What shall it be? Science fiction? No, I loathe science fiction — all pseudo-scientific jargon and airlocks. A spy thriller? No, I’m not intelligent enough for a spy thriller . A Western? No, not for Americans.’