A Pack of Lies (20 page)

‘You mean to say that you have never heard of the evil Baron Greefenbludd?’ exclaimed the subaltern around whose waist Amelia clung. ‘I don’t wish to frighten you, Fräulein, but your poor dear relations could not have fallen into fouler hands, if they are indeed prisoners at Bäddeschløss Grange.’

In the shadow of Bäddeschløss’s mildewed, gloomy walls lay the tombs and vaults of the Baron’s ignoble ancestors. The gravestones leaned at crazy angles, and the marble charnel-houses were noisy with starlings. At the sound of hoofbeats, a distracted figure ran up from a vault and clung piteously to the black railings. In one hand was a bright yellow duster — otherwise the riders might never have seen her through the turbid mists. As they drew closer, they could make out the details of her dress and her large, looming nose. ‘It’s Evelyn! We have found her!’ cried Amelia. ‘Thanks be to . . .’

Just then they came across the kindly Reverend Lovegood Divine who had been set to dig graves. He had been digging graves for some ten or twelve hours now, and had achieved quite an entrenchment across the foggy graveyard. Into the hole fell the galloping rescuers. Amelia and the two officers joined the reverend gentleman, in the twinkling of an upended
horse, and lay quite stunned and winded. Evelyn looked on in dismay, helpless, and her large nose dripped with sorrow. Her bright yellow duster fluttered sadly down from her hand, as she saw the owner of the Grange totter sleepily out of the house. He had a window-box cradled to his breast, but more remarkable, perhaps, was the large bedstead he lugged along behind him, complete with silk sheet and four trailing chains. Two hounds bounded at his heels.

‘Aha!’ he exclaimed, standing at the end of the hole in which Amelia lay. ‘You came at last, in time for your wedding day, my dear! As soon as I can free my arm from this confounded bedspring, your kind father the vicar shall join our hands in marriage.’

‘Never!’ cried the vicar.

‘Never!’ cried the unwilling bride.

‘Ah! You will think differently after an hour or two in my charming torture chamber! Or should I feed these pleasant young officers to my faithful hounds.’

‘Oh no!’ cried the vicar, though whether he was thinking of the torture chamber or the young men, he did not say.

‘I submit,’ said Amelia, who was of course thinking of the young men. ‘I shall marry you — whoever you are — but you must set free my big-nosed sister and my kindly father and these two pleasant young men.’

‘Ach, let them go, but let them leave on foot — and may the great Grinwald Beast of the Transylvanian Plain crunch on their bones. You, wife, are the only one who interests me. Devil take me, woman, but you fire me with an insane passion. Let me get a taste of that frock!’

But as he seized hold of her bodice laces and wound them around his fingers like spaghetti, a pawing hand emerged from the moat behind him and patted the grassy bank, feeling for a handhold.

Out of the water came Fowlstrangler — a Fowlstrangler somewhat altered in appearance, however, for
some important parts were missing. His hair was straggled with pondweed, and his pockets were full of fish. His silty crutch dripped slime. ‘Baron Greefenbludd, I’ve been thinking,’ he said, as he pulled an eel from his lederhosen.

‘Ah Fowlstrangler! Make yourself useful,’ the Baron interrupted him. ‘Disentangle this bed from my arm immediately and fetch up my bride out of that hole. Our marriage is about to begin!’

But Fowlstrangler was not feeling useful, for Fowlstrangler had been
thinking
. ‘My eyes don’t see well by candlelight. My ears don’t hear well in the dark. These brains of mine can’t tell a maiden from a window-box. When you put me together, sir, in your ancestral workshop, begging your pardon, sir, but it seems to me that you used some very inferior materials . . . In fact I say you’re a cheapskate, second-rate builder of monsters, sir, and I’ve a mind to be avenged on you for making me with poor eyes and poor ears and poor brains. If it pleases you, Master.’ And so saying, he fell on Baron Greefenbludd and, seizing him by the bedstead, picked him up and ran with him towards the moat.

But if you think that they fell in and drowned, weighed down by the bridal bedstead, you are sadly mistaken. For as master and servant struggled and tore at one another with teeth and claws and horrid curses, the Grinwald Beast came lumbering off the Transylvanian Plain and ate them, blood and bone. It left the indigestible bedstead standing on the drawbridge. Later, a peasant stole it and sold it as a souvenir to a passing tourist, along with Bäddeschløss Grange.

Amelia and her large-nosed sister, Evelyn, were married to the two young officers, of course, by their kindly father, the Reverend Lovegood Divine. They left Transylvania on the Orient Express, which in those days went out of its way to oblige.

Alas, such days are long gone.

* * *

‘You think I’m going to fall for that one, fella?’ said Virgil, sheltering his wife in a bear-like embrace. ‘That’s a wagon-load of hooey you been giving me.’

‘Don’t take my word for it, please,’ said MCC, heaving the modern mattress off the bedstead’s base of springs. ‘If you would care to extract the bed-key — that’s a sort of spanner, supplied for the adjusting of the springing, don’t you know. Have you found it?’

Unwilling to be made still more a fool of, Virgil groped among the springs suspiciously, and the bed resounded like a harp plucked out of tune. With a clatter, Virgil found the bed-key.

‘Note the words
Facut in Transylvania
which, being translated, you will find means “Made in Transylvania”. The maker’s name you will find stamped on the angle-iron securing the bed-head to the frame.’

‘Virgil, think of it!’ cried his wife, going down on hands and knees to sneeze among the fluffy dust. ‘Make the man sell you the bed, Virgil! We can put it in the shop and . . . gosh all-mighty, honey! See here where the chains were joined on! See where they just been nipped off short?’ (In her astonishment, Ailsa too went down on her hands and knees to look.) ‘Buy the bed, Virgil! Gosh knows, you don’t got to sleep in it!’

‘I don’t?’

‘No! Just put it in the store with the story wrote out real nice — like on the Dracula film posters. And maybe we could get wax-works. D’you think we could get wax-works, honey?’

Virgil and MCC were, by this time, poring over the telephone directory for the name of a shipping company which would transport the bed from Povey’s Antiquary to the comic shop off the Chicago freeway.

Ailsa wrapped the bed-key in tissue-paper for the couple to take away with them, and Virgil and Lindy-Ann left arm in arm shortly afterwards, laughing
raucously and discussing the possibility of opening a museum of horror in the basement. MCC squared up the mattress, then dusted off his hands and shirt and said, ‘Well, that’s me out of a bed. I’d best find somewhere else to lay my head. Thanks for the job. Thanks for the cheese sandwiches. If I were you, Mrs Povey, I’d open up the books side of the business. Fiction, that’s what they want. That’s what everyone wants really. Isn’t it?’ And he headed for the door.

‘Mr Berkshire, wait!’ called Mrs Povey. ‘The shipping company won’t be coming for the bed till Wednesday. You could maybe stay till . . .’

‘Oh but I couldn’t sleep in it now. It’s someone else’s property. Paid for. That would be dishonest.’

‘MCC!’ called Ailsa, but though he turned back towards her, she could not find anything to say.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, as if reminded by the sight of her. He felt in his breast pocket and held out to her the lead soldier from the bric-à-brac shelf. ‘Take it. Keep it,’ he said brightly. ‘A souvenir.’

‘I don’t want it!’ she replied, with as much rudeness as she could muster. He shrugged, put it back into his pocket, and hurried off down the street in the direction of the library. Now and then, he broke his stride with an overarm googly or off-break or spinning delivery of some imaginary cricket ball.

Ailsa ran and stood on the edge of the pavement and watched him out of sight.

Chapter Thirteen

The Only Answer

After a while, Ailsa went back into the shop and sat down on the
chaise longue
. Her mother clearly wanted to say something helpful, something comforting, for she kept clearing her throat and dusting pieces of furniture with the palm of her hand. Knowing it would not help in the least, Ailsa turned and, at random, pulled a book off the shelf so as to be unapproachable. It was a trick she had learned from MCC. The book had a green, cloth-bound cover stained black by all the hands that had held it. The spine was torn down at the top so that the title was completely obliterated and she had to open it at the title page to read,
The Man who came from Reading
. With her heart pumping the blood a little too fast through her head to make reading easy, she let the pages fall open where they would, and found herself looking at a dull page — no action, no dialogue — just a description.

H
E HAD ON
a green corduroy jacket worn bald in all the creases of elbow, armpit and round the button-holes, and an untied green bow tie snaked from under his collar. His white cricket flannels were colour-matched to his jacket by the long, oval grass stains on both knees. His suede shoes, too, were like a badly worn wicket, with a lot
of dark, bare patches showing. His dark, curly hair had receded to that point which makes men look extra-intelligent and shows the veins in their foreheads when they are excited, and it curled directly into a short, dark beard which isolated his face from the paler skin in the open collar of his shirt.

‘Mother. Read this,’ she said, thrusting the open book at Mrs Povey and starting to pace up and down the shop in time to her heartbeat. It couldn’t be. He existed. She had touched him. He had to exist. Other people had seen him. Other people had had their lives changed by him. She struggled to recall the different customers who had bought or not bought at MCC’s bidding — the major, the engaged couple, the spoilt girl, the Americans, the man at the auction room. Where were they now? All gone? All untraceable? Who could she run to and demand proof of his existence? She bitterly regretted now refusing the gift of the lead soldier, for that, it seemed now, would have been some tangible evidence that just five minutes before a living, breathing man had stood in the shop and . . . A wave of panic deafened her for a while to the excited rattling of Mr Singh at the door. The catch had slipped and he could not get in, despite pushing against the glass with his forehead. In his arms was clasped the inlaid wooden box.

Trembling with an agonizing delight, Ailsa slipped the catch and Mr Singh tumbled into the shop. ‘I opened it! I did! I did! I opened it with a hairpin and oh-so-delicate probing, probing,’ and he prodded at the air with the very hairpin, as if it would open to them, all three, the secrets of the universe.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Povey quietly to her daughter. ‘I’m afraid poor dear MCC is found out. His “fictions” are about to be shown up for what they are.’

Immediately Ailsa dreaded the awful revelation of the
empty box and the complaints of the newsagent, cheated out of his money by a fast-talking storyteller.

But Mr Singh’s face was wreathed in smiles. He had seen into the box already and now he pushed his hand in under the lid and pulled out a dull, dangling object which he thrust so close to Ailsa’s face that she screamed. It was an old, decaying, half-wound plait of hair, its original colour lost . . . as were the markings of the dead snake coiled up in the bottom of the box along with a nib pen and some brown, crumbling sheets of writing paper. ‘The bicycle-riding young gentleman’s story was all true!’ he said, with a look which apologized for any slight doubt he had harboured. ‘Where he is? I want to show him inside this very delightful box.’

Ailsa turned triumphantly on her mother who had just read and thrown aside the green-bound book. ‘You see! He didn’t tell lies at all! His stories were all true, Mother! Look at the bed! “Made in Transylvania” and the chains just nipped off short! He didn’t tell lies. He just knew an awful lot, that’s all.’

‘No. That’s not it, my dear.’ Mrs Povey pointed at the book where it lay on the floor, the exact colour and texture of MCC Berkshire’s shoes. ‘MCC Berkshire doesn’t exist, my dear.’

‘But his stories!’

‘Are true. Yes. And if Mr Berkshire doesn’t exist but we know his stories for true, there is only one explanation.’ She walked away, too overwhelmed by the momentousness of her discovery to let them share it, and when she shut the door of the living room, her movements beyond it made not a sound. Ailsa turned to find Mr Singh gone too, the door sighing itself shut without a single ring from the bell under the mat.

She bent to look out of the window, and the oblong of April sky she could see had turned a peculiar white. Flocks of migrating birds arriving with the spring flew in dense, straight lines overhead like typed words on a
sheet of paper. She repeated what her mother had said, although the words seemed unable to escape her mouth as she spoke them, and a strange blankness seemed to be seeping into her brain. ‘If MCC doesn’t exist, but we know his stories for true, there is only one explanation.’

Realization fell on her not like a ray of light or a clap of thunder but like a white dust-sheet settling very gradually over a piece of old furniture.

Michael Charles Christie Berkshire drew the sheet of paper out of his typewriter with a shuddering sigh and laid it face down on top of the others, pinning it in place with a single lead toy soldier. Behind him, beyond the sun-filled open window, a shout went up — an appeal for lbw — and a polite patter of applause said that another batsman’s innings was over. Only a friendly village match, only the Reading Second Eleven, but the first of the season.

Not that Michael was ever asked to play. Oh, they told him he was ‘in reserve’ so that he sat all day in cricket flannels in his bedroom overlooking the pitch, but he was never called on to play. He wished people would not humour him like that. Of course they wanted players who could see the ball to hit it. And run.