Maxwell's Island (5 page)

‘Don't “hmmm” me, young man,' Jacquie said, nevertheless. ‘It will be nice for Mrs Troubridge to have Metternich for company, though, you're right.'

‘Mrs Troubridge doesn't like it when Metternich brings her voles,' Nolan volunteered.

‘No, darling,' Jacquie agreed.

‘Or mice. Or birds. Or those false teeth, that time. She really,
really
didn't like that.'

Jacquie fixed her gaze on the horizon and tried not to laugh. It had been a wonderful moment, though. Mrs Troubridge had been quite angry at the Count when he deposited the teeth at her feet.
Much angrier, though, when she discovered the hard way that they weren't hers.

Fortunately for Jacquie's parenting street cred, their conversation was interrupted by a resonating ‘bing-bong'. They looked at each other in excitement. A disembodied voice rang out.

‘Will all drivers and their passengers please return to their vehicles as we shall shortly be arriving in East Cowes. Please take care on the stairs and may we remind you that all car decks are no-smoking areas. Please refrain from using mobile phones on the car deck and drivers are requested not to start their vehicles until requested to do so. Thank you for travelling with Red Funnel, and the captain and crew would like to wish you a safe onward journey.'

‘That's nice,' Nolan remarked.

‘What is?' Jacquie asked him, shepherding him down the precipitous stairs.

‘Wishing us a safe and ward journey.' It was anyone's guess what he thought a ward journey was, but he had obviously grasped the general goodwill. ‘Are we going to go far, now?'

‘No, sweetie,' Jacquie said. ‘I think it's about twelve miles. The whole island isn't very big. It won't take us long.'

‘I wonder where Dads is,' Nolan said, meditatively, as he buckled himself into his car seat. ‘Will he be here soon?'

‘I'm sure he isn't far behind,' Jacquie said, hopefully. A sudden jerk signified that they had
reached land and engines started all over, requested or not. ‘Anyway,' she added, ‘we'll be at the hotel soon and then we'll go out for lunch.'

‘
Lunch
?' Nolan wailed. ‘I don't want
lunch
! I want hot dog and ice cream.'

‘It's a deal,' Jacquie said and, engaging a tentative first gear, drove off down what looked like a Meccano footbridge and onto the Isle of Wight.

‘Holidays!' Nolan called. ‘Hooray!'

Jacquie smiled at him in the mirror. For a child who had completed all of one week at school, he must be ready for a holiday if anyone was.

‘Holidays!' she carolled back and switched on the satnav, which was having a minor nervous breakdown, not having really understood the ferry.

Tom Medlicott was getting a trifle testy. Maxwell seemed to have mislaid a child. Count though Medlicott might, he couldn't make the numbers add up. Why on earth had the mad old bugger taken them for a walk anyway? Why didn't he just keep them on the coach? They could have sat still for half an hour, surely. He spun round, clipboard in hand as Maxwell and Sylvia watched him indulgently.

‘Bless,' Sylvia muttered.

Maxwell smiled. ‘He'll learn,' he said. ‘Eventually. Until you grow eyes in the back of your head, you're always going to be one short. But enough of this tomfoolery.' He stepped forward and grabbed the child who had been circling with
Medlicott by the back of his anorak. ‘Right. You. Name?'

The child froze. Then the barrack-room lawyer which is inside every kid, fat or thin, rose to the surface. ‘You can't touch me. I got rights.'

‘Human rights, would they be?' Maxwell enquired in an avuncular tone. ‘We've all got those, not least Mr Medlicott, who had been trying to do a headcount. I don't do headcounts. I just make heads roll. Now, stand still over there, but first, I'll have your name.'

‘I got …'

‘Name?' As usual, Maxwell didn't need to shout. The tone was one which went straight through the backbone and tingled up the spine, like biting on an ice lolly with a sensitive tooth.

‘Nathaniel. But all my mates call me Nate.'

‘Right, Nathaniel. Go and stand over there. And believe me when I tell you, I will be watching you. All the time. Now, apologise to Mr Medlicott for being an annoying little twerp and let's get on.' Maxwell inclined from the waist to the Art teacher, who was uncertain as to whether he was grateful or furious. ‘As you were, Mr Medlicott.'

Marshalling his dignity, the man stepped aside and counted the children on to the bus.

‘
Now
he learns how to do it,' said Sylvia and sighed. ‘It's going to be a tough week.' She would look back on that phrase, on that moment in the car park in Southampton, as a haven of peace and normality before the world turned upside down.

It seemed impossible but finally the grown-up element of the Leighford High School Year Seven Getting To Know You School Trip were sitting on the deck outside the hotel, drinking grown-up drinks and having a grown-up conversation.

The coach had finally caught up with Jacquie and Nolan and the hysterical children had been divided up into groups for the subsequent day's activities. All the girls had wanted to be with Maxwell, because of Nolan. Failing that, the rather more sophisticated girls had wanted to be with Sylvia, because of Guy. All of the boys wanted to be with Tom Medlicott, because of Izzy, except one rather precociously sexually aware lad, who wanted to be with Tom Medlicott because of Tom Medlicott. No one wanted to be with Pansy Donaldson.

Using the time-honoured method of ‘one potato, two potato', Maxwell had sorted them out, using a system of sleight of hand and subtle winks
to Sylvia, who was compiling the list. In the end, he had the bright ones, Sylvia had the nice ones and the Medlicotts and Pansy had the rest. Pansy also had the vegan. She also had the vegetarian and the vergetarian, who would eat fish and chicken which had lived a fulfilling life before dying of natural causes. Well, somebody had to. There had been mutterings, of course. But the beach cricket had gone down well, the evening meal had been surprisingly good and within an amazingly short time and with a minimum of whingeing, everyone was bedded down for the night. Nolan had conked out halfway through and halfway across his banana sundae and was lying across the double bed in the family room they would be sharing, sticky and sandy, but happy and quiet. There would be time enough tomorrow to hose him down.

So now, they were all making the most of a balmy late summer evening to unwind. The coach driver, invited to eat at the hotel with them, had pleaded an auntie nearby, so had absented himself. He was a nice enough chap but Maxwell had taken the precaution of relocating the satnav from the car; the man could clearly not find his arse with both hands, to quote Pansy's rather surprising but totally accurate summing up. She was getting outside her third drink and was loosening up to a rather worrying degree. Although there was an awful lot of her to absorb the alcohol, she was still putting it away at an alarming rate. Perhaps the coach driver had at least been able
to see the way the wind was blowing and the auntie had been a bit of quick thinking on his part.

The season being almost over, the seafront was quiet by this time in the evening. The faint strains of live music wafted along from a pub further down, but it was underscored by the whisper of the tide coming in and the soft scrape of the shells being dragged over the shingle and sounded quite tuneful. Maxwell lay back in his chair, nursing his Southern Comfort, and felt so at home that he could almost feel the weight of Metternich, sprawled out in his favourite position along the back of the chair. He could even feel the brush of his tail against his cheek. He brushed it away but it was unusually persistent.

‘Max! Max! Wake up. You're snoring.'

‘Mmmm?' He tried to turn over, but met an obstacle so didn't bother. ‘Soz.'

Someone shook him by the shoulder. ‘Max. Wake up. You're asleep.'

There was a strange logic there with which, had he had a mind to, he could have dazzled them all. Instead, he thought he might as well just go to sleep.

‘Sorry,' he heard a distant voice say. ‘He does sleep quite deeply, sometimes.' For some reason, there seemed to be chickens nearby. He could hear them clucking. Then, suddenly, there was no oxygen. None at all. He surfaced, struggling for breath. He squinted along his nose to find that Sylvia had a firm hold of his breathing apparatus. He knocked her hand away.

‘For God's sake, Sylv,' he gasped, rubbing the
pinch point. ‘You could have killed me, there.' He looked around and saw four amused faces and Pansy. He grinned. ‘Sorry. I must have dropped off.'

‘You looked quite cute,' Guy said. ‘Apparently, I look like a fish when I'm asleep.' He turned his eyes up and the corners of his mouth down. ‘You looked like the dog does when he's chasing rabbits in his dreams.'

Jacquie smiled at him. Not only was it hard to imagine Guy looking unattractive, but it was good to feel that they were friends enough for him to call Maxwell cute. It wasn't a description usually applied to the grizzled old git. ‘You were doing the leg thing,' Jacquie told Maxwell, shaking hers in the air to demonstrate. She looked around the group. ‘I'm always amazed he can still do that.'

‘Oh, yes,' Maxwell said, sitting up a bit straighter and trying to wake up properly. ‘Dreaming's a young man's game, all right.'

Izzy stirred her drink with a plastic swizzle stick. ‘Tom sleeps like the dead. Honestly, sometimes I think he actually has died and have to give him a kick. He's all over bruises.'

‘That's true,' her husband agreed and reached down to pull up his trouser leg. Despite the muttered demurs of his colleagues, he pushed down his sock and there, true enough, were a series of small bruises, ranging in colour from recent to the back end of last week.

‘Ouch,' Guy said, sympathetically. ‘I think I'm glad I just look like a fish.'

Sylvia poked him. ‘You'll wake up with half a lemon in your mouth one of these days and a sprig of parsley in your ear.'

‘Do fish have ears?' Pansy suddenly asked, in the unexpectedly loud voice of the drunk.

‘Pardon?' Tom Medlicott said, who had been rather startled by it. He had forgotten she was there, just by his right elbow.

‘Do fish have ears? Sh'said she would put parsley in his ear. Sh'meant it would make him look like a f'sh.' She smiled beatifically around. ‘S'peck thas what sh'meant.' She leant over Tom. ‘D'you think thas whash'meant?'

His eyes widened as the gin hit him in an almost visible wave. Pitching his voice in the calming range commonly used to an unknown dog he said, ‘How many G&Ts have you had, Pansy?'

She looked horrified. ‘None!' she declared and drew herself up. ‘I hate tonic. Yeurghhhh!' She pulled a face. ‘S'very nasty. Jus' gin. Thas what I drink. Gin and a spot of gin.' She giggled and it wasn't a pretty sight. She leant forward to include them all in the joke. ‘An' it looks like water, so Mr Donsal … Mr Donda … my
hubsband,
' she finally said triumphantly, ‘doesn't know I drink
at all
!' And with that she fell out of her chair and lay at Tom Medlicott's feet.

Maxwell smiled sleepily at Jacquie. ‘I knew this week was going to be fun,' he said, and closed his eyes.

‘Wakey, wakey! Rise and shine. Hands off … Rise and shine!' Maxwell decided that the time-worn army call was perhaps not too appropriate in this particular context. He contented himself with, ‘Get your socks on, those who wear them. Breakfast in fifteen minutes.'

He walked briskly along the corridor, knocking on doors as he went, to the disgruntlement of a salesman, travelling in underwear, whom Reception had inadvertently put between two cohorts of Seven Why Sea.

Back in the family room, Nolan had been destickied and de-fluffed and now was waiting with barely concealed hysteria, pink and sweetly smelling.

‘Dads, Dads,' he carolled as Maxwell came through the door. ‘Where are we going today? What's on the itinerarararary?'

‘That's a big word,' Maxwell said approvingly. ‘Rather bigger than necessessessessary, in fact, but a good shot.'

Jacquie giggled in the bathroom and said, through a mouthful of toothpaste foam, ‘A bit like banana. It's hard to know when to stop.'

At the mention of banana, Nolan looked around, puzzled. He licked his lips. ‘What happened to my 'nana sundae?'

‘You fell asleep in it, mate,' Maxwell said, holding out his arms for his son to jump up. He gave him a squeeze. ‘Have you got a half-a-nana-sundae-sized hole?'

The boy nodded. ‘What's for breakfast, d'you think?'

‘Hmm.' Maxwell sniffed extravagantly. ‘Full English, unless I miss my guess.'

‘My favourite,' Nolan yelled, flinging himself backwards in Maxwell's arms.

‘Not for every day,' Jacquie reminded him, coming back into the room. ‘Just today.'

Nolan patted his stomach. ‘I won't get fat, Mums,' he said. ‘Not like Pansy.'

‘That's Mrs Donaldson to you,' Maxwell said, tapping him softly on the top of his head. ‘And she's not fat.'

Jacquie raised an eyebrow at him.

‘She's just big-boned.' Maxwell grunted as he hefted Nolan higher in his arms. ‘Are you going to walk now, sunshine, or are you so “on holiday” you don't have to?'

Nolan jumped down. ‘I don't need a carry,' he said. ‘Not now I go to proper school.'

‘Tell me that this evening after Blackgang Chine,' Maxwell said. ‘Perhaps Mums can carry us both.'

‘Ah,' Jacquie said. ‘The famous Policewoman's Lift.'

‘Woman Policeman's Lift,' Maxwell corrected, automatically. He cocked an ear. A sound had been growing outside in the corridor. It was as if an army muttered. And the muttering grew to a grumbling; and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling, as out of their rooms Year Seven came tumbling. ‘Hey
up, Maxwells. The kids are on the march. If we're going to get so much as a sausage, I suggest we get a wiggle on.'

Nolan flung open the door, to a chorus of coos and aahs from various girls. He was swept up into the throng and was just a tousle of curls at the head of the stairs as Year Seven took the corner on the lam and were gone. Jacquie and Maxwell stood in the sudden echoing silence for a moment. Behind them, a door opened and the ghost of Pansy Donaldson peered out, blinking.

Maxwell looked around for a wandering child and, seeing none, hailed her. ‘Pans! How the devil are you?'

She winced at the sound and then winced at the muscular effort of the wince. She raised a hand and tried a smile.

‘Excellent!' boomed Maxwell. Jacquie had often been impressed at his vocal dexterity. He appeared to have become James Earl Jones doing an English accent. He walked up to the woman. ‘Come along with us,' he cried. ‘Nice full English fry-up with all the trimmings, that's what you need. Nice runny egg. Black pudding. Fried bread. Yummy!' He swept her down the corridor, her slightly green face pressed firmly into his shoulder. Jacquie, stifling a giggle fell in behind. She could just hear Pansy's protestations and felt, not for the first time, that she was glad she wasn't her right now.

The dining room was like a madhouse. The hotel had decided that it would be a help if they set up a buffet instead of table service and so one end of the room looked like a rugger scrum. Some tables had occupants, heads down in their plates, elbows out for speed, tomato sauce the predominant colour. The Maxwells looked around for Nolan and saw him tucked between two girls, getting outside a cooked breakfast which consisted of his usual weekly intake of grease. Then they looked around rather more anxiously for a table out of the way of the flying bacon fat and were relieved to see Sylvia's hand waving from the safety of a table in the bay window at the far side of the room. Maxwell steered Pansy over as Jacquie peeled off to elbow her way into the melee and get them both some food.

‘Mrs Donaldson,' said Sylvia brightly. ‘How are you feeling this morning?'

‘Not too good,' the woman mumbled. ‘Bit of a … headache, actually.' She swallowed with an effort. ‘Coming down with something.'

‘Never mind,' Guy smiled sweetly and leant across to her to pat her hand. ‘Nice bracing walk along to the Needles and you'll be fine.'

She looked up, but moving her head very slowly. ‘Needles?' she whispered. ‘Bracing?'

Guy whipped out his list of activities and traced a finger along a line. ‘Yes. Mr and Mrs Maxwell are visiting the fossil coast, followed by early
evening at Blackgang Chine. Sylvia and myself are taking our group to Parkhurst Forest looking for red squirrels, followed by a town trail. Mr and Mrs Medlicott are taking their group sketching at Carisbrooke Castle. As you have the smallest group, you will be dropped off last and the coach driver will be your health and safety backup.' He turned his radiant smile on Pansy, with no effect. ‘That's right, isn't it?' he asked Maxwell.

Maxwell had no idea. Lists were for other people, but he thoroughly approved of the fossil coast idea. What he didn't approve of was Guy's use of the word ‘myself', but they were all on holiday and standards could be allowed to drop a little. He smiled and nodded, as if he knew what was going on. He looked around the room. ‘Has anyone seen the Medlicotts, while we're listing people?'

There was general head shaking, except from Pansy, who was sitting as totally still as she could manage, with her eyes closed. A child on the nearest table who had been frantically earwigging hoping to hear something to her advantage leant over.

‘Mr and Mrs Medlicott went out for a run,' she volunteered. ‘I just saw them come back up the front steps.'

‘Thank you, Jazmyn,' Sylvia said. She turned back to her colleagues. ‘Ears like a bat,' she mouthed. ‘Watch what you say in front of her.' She
looked anxiously at Pansy and then at Guy. ‘Do you have the group lists?' she asked him.

He foraged in his bag and handed them over. She looked down the lists and then handed it across to Maxwell, pointing pointedly at a name.

‘Point taken,' he said. ‘We'll move her. As long as she isn't the vegan.'

They looked across at the child, who was eating a sausage thick with brown sauce.

‘Whilst allowing that a sausage isn't necessarily meat as we know it,' Maxwell said, ‘I think we can assume she isn't. Move her, then.' He looked again at the paper and made a few changes.

Jacquie, a little rumpled, got back to the table carrying a tray. ‘It's like … it's like …' She was lost for words.