Wicked! (89 page)

Dicky had a passion for Bianca Campbell-Black, but appreciated the competition was too stiff. He was confused because he’d had a wet dream about Paris the other night. He also idolized David Beckham and back in February had written a letter to Beckham commiserating with him for being hit by Alex Ferguson’s boot. Beckham hadn’t replied.

Dicky had been even more devastated than Dora by the death of his father but, unlike Dora, loved his mother. He tried to overlook her deficiencies and prayed for her in chapel:

‘Make my mother marry again, but someone very kind and very rich, who likes me and Dora.’

Like Dora, however, Dicky was a pragmatist, and lionhearted. Running his own shop at Bagley, he did a roaring trade in drink and fags. Wearing one of his mother’s wigs, he would make sorties into Bagley village, returning in a buckling taxi, which the more louche and lustful house prefects helped him unload.

Anthea, noting so many pupils hailing Dicky on Speech Days, was always boasting that her son got on with all ages. Little did she realize most of them were customers. One of Bagley’s punishments for bad behaviour was having to run ten or twenty times the two hundred yards down to the boathouse and back. Dicky hid a stash of booze in the boathouse. It kept both vodka and white wine cool.

Because his housemaster Alex Bruce was devoted to Anthea, he tended to leave Dicky alone. Not so Xavier, whom Alex had asked Boffin to spy on and who, that Friday evening, was in an explosive mood, fuelled by fast-diminishing supplies of drink and drugs. How dare Cosmo call him a no-hoper and black shit in front of the class?

It was only a week into term and Xav had run out of money. He couldn’t help himself to Rupert’s cellar or his cocaine stash any more. He was heavily overdrawn at the bank and had gone back to school in such a rage that he’d forgotten to ask for a top-up. He already owed Dicky Belvedon a hundred pounds from last term. Dicky was too frightened of Xav to press for it, but when Xav came storming into his dormitory after supper that Friday night and demanded a bottle of vodka, Dicky stalled.

‘You owe me a hundred.’

‘So fucking what? D’you want to make an issue of it?’

Dicky didn’t. There was something so mad, Neanderthal and truculent about Xav. Dicky extracted a half-bottle of gin from under his mattress. ‘You can have this, but it’s the last you’re having till you’ve paid up.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ Xavier lurched off.

Dicky sighed. He’d promised the gin to Amber for a midnight feast. He’d better sneak down to the boathouse and get some more. Unfortunately Mr Fussy and Poppet were in the garden celebrating yet another ghastly brat on the way with a supper party, to which Boffin, as Charisma’s boyfriend, had been invited, so Dicky didn’t manage to escape until after eleven.

It was very dark; only a sliver of moon was mirrored in the depths of the lake as Dicky ran past. The boathouse formed a covered link between the lake and the river. Boats, which could be pushed out into either, floated in rows: long ones known as eights in which the school eights competed at Henley; Biffo’s dinghy; and little rowing boats in which juniors occasionally paddled round the lake and where, under a tarpaulin, Dicky hid his booze.

It was spooky inside, just the slap of the water against the boats’ sides and a snatch of distant song from the Junior Common Room.

As Dicky emerged with a bottle of gin under his pyjama top and tweed jacket, three figures emerged from out of the curtains of a willow tree and grabbed him. ‘Come here, you little bastard.’

Dicky’s blood froze. It was Cosmo.

Earlier in the evening, as part of a fiendish plan, Cosmo had pretended to make friends with Xavier.

‘I’ve got some crack,’ he lied. ‘It’ll take your mind apart. And some Charlie – we’ll have a party to make up for calling you “black shit” earlier. I was only joking.’

Xav, who had already demolished the half-bottle of gin or he might have been more suspicious, was absurdly flattered.

‘Why don’t you get some booze from Dicky Belvedon?’ suggested Cosmo.

‘He refused me any more earlier,’ grumbled Xav, ‘but we’ll see about that.’

‘We certainly will. High time Master Belvedon was done over. He’s in your house, Xav, you’ll have to lure him out.’

Dicky wasn’t in his dormitory and Poppet, Alex, Charisma and Boffin were still squawking away singing madrigals, so Xav had crept out of the house again and he, Cosmo and Lubemir, after a line, had walked in the direction of the boathouse. Meeting Dicky creeping back along the edge of the lake, they had relieved him of his bottle.

‘We’ve other plans for you,’ said Cosmo softly. ‘We’re going to stage your funeral and send you down the river, Dicky.’

‘No, please,’ begged Dicky, frightened witless, gibbering with horror as they tugged off his clothes and tied his hands behind his back. ‘You can have all my booze, it’s stored in the last boat under the tarpaulin.’

‘We’ll have it anyway,’ said Lubemir, roping together Dicky’s frantically kicking feet, before tying two scarves tightly over his mouth and his eyes. ‘This is to punish you for cheeking Xav earlier and refusing to give him any more credit.’

Xav was confused. None of this was quite right, but he was so flattered to be in league with Lubemir and Cosmo.

‘Come on, Dicky, into the boat,’ said Cosmo. ‘Great warriors were buried in eighty-nine-foot ships. Wimps like you don’t need anything that long.’

As he identified seats, slides and shoe fastenings beneath his naked back and felt the boat rocking in the water, Dicky realized he was in one of the eights and wriggled and bucked in terror.

‘Look at his tiny little dick,’ mocked Cosmo, giving it a vicious tweak. ‘You don’t deserve to live with a cock that tiny, Little Dick. You’re in the river now; off you go.’

Panic-stricken, totally disorientated, drenched in icy sweat, Dicky felt the eight give and sway as it slid into open water and moved away.

‘Bon voyage,’ murmured Cosmo, ‘or rather, farewell.’

Then there was silence.

Dicky tried to scream through the scarf as the cold wet fingers of a weeping willow stroked his bare body. In a few minutes the boat would reach the whirlpools and the weir. With his hands and feet bound, he couldn’t swim. He couldn’t breathe. I’m going to die, thought Dicky, I mustn’t shit myself.

89

Charisma Bruce had fallen in love with Boffin after he caringly held her long mousy hair out of the way whilst she threw up into a flower bed during a teenage party.

Now, humming madrigals, she and Boffin walked hand in hand round the lake.

‘“A maid and her wight Come whispering by”,’ quoted Boffin sententiously. ‘“War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.”’

Charisma was wearing a new floaty dress. Her long face looked rather lovely in the moonlight. She and Boffin could hear the croak of frogs and compared notes on the dissecting of other frogs and on future A levels.

‘I enjoy
Cracker
,’ confessed Charisma. ‘It’s popular television, of course, but, like Mother, I’m a people person, so I’m going to take psychiatry as one subject.’

When Boffin kissed her, she tasted of cider and her mother’s prune and fig sorbet. As a black cloud, indistinguishable from the ebony trees, edged over the moon, Boffin turned on his torch and in its beam, caught sight of one of the eights in the middle of the lake. On closer inspection, he found it contained a wriggling, moaning, naked body.

Charisma, who’d obtained all her life-saving medals, flung aside her shawl and plunged into the water in her floaty dress, which Boffin, diving after her, found floated up most excitingly. Together they towed the boat to the shore.

‘Why, it’s Dick Belvedon,’ said Boffin as Charisma untied the black scarves and wrapped her own shawl round Dicky’s frozen, shuddering body.

‘Poor little boy, who could have done this wicked thing?’

Cosmo and Lubemir, lurking inside the weeping willow, made a successful run for it, but Xav, off his face with drink and drugs, tripped over a log and went flying.

‘Stop,’ cried Charisma. As Xavier, trying to struggle to his feet, was caught in the light of Boffin’s torch, she picked up her mobile. ‘Dad, Dad, come down to the lake and alert the sick bay, Xavier Campbell-Black’s tried to murder Dicky Belvedon.’

Rupert and Taggie were in Provence. As neither of their children were speaking to them, they had decided to get away for the weekend and had just enjoyed a most delicious dinner, for once not cooked by Taggie, and reeled upstairs drunk and happy.

Only when Rupert undressed his wife did he realize quite how much weight she’d lost over the summer, particularly on her breasts, which had not dropped because she’d never fed the babies she’d so desperately longed for. Instead she and Rupert had derived incredible happiness from adopting Xavier and Bianca, aware that both had lost parents, vowing to do everything in the world to make them feel happy and safe.

‘We will again,’ Rupert had promised Taggie over dinner. He found it much easier to forgive Xav now because Peterkin was nearly sound.

Rupert had ordered that on no account should they be disturbed, so the manager had to come upstairs and bang on the door.

‘Monsieur Campbell-Black, telephone, it’s urgent.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘It might be one of the children,’ said Taggie, wriggling out from under him. Rupert reached for the telephone.

‘It’s Alex Bruce here, I’m afraid I’ve had to exclude Xavier. He’s not only drunk and stoned but, desperate for a fix, he raided Dick Belvedon’s store of booze, then tried to murder him.’

‘How?’

‘Tied him up, stripped him naked and blindfolded him.’

‘All by himself?’

‘So it would appear, then put him in one of the eights’ boats and, telling him it was the river, sent him out on the lake.’

Rupert went cold.

‘Probably just a prank. Is Dicky OK?’

‘Far from it. He was in the middle of the lake hyperventilating. Luckily Bernard Brooks and our daughter Charisma were out for a midnight stroll and managed to rescue the lad. Trying to escape the scene of his crime, Xavier fell over a log, so drunk he couldn’t get up.’

‘If he was that drunk, he couldn’t have done all that on his own.’

‘Our daughter and Bernard saw no one else. Xav’s too inebriated to testify; we’ve locked him in the sick bay and will have to wait for him to sober up.’

‘Fifteen-year-olds don’t talk. Where the fuck’s Hengist?’

‘Our Senior Team Leader’s away.’ Alex nearly added, As usual.

Hengist was incandescent with rage when he got back next morning. Why the hell hadn’t Alex tried to sort it out internally? But by this time, Dora, equally furious with Xav for trying to kill her brother, had leaked the entire story to the
Mail on Sunday
.

Alex, who’d longed to kick Xav out for years, was in heaven, particularly over the publicity. At last, he was man of the hour who’d made the tough decision to rout out bullying. His photograph appeared in all the papers alongside G and T Charisma, Dicky’s courageous saviour.

The press, who loved any story about Rupert, proceeded to dig up all his past misdemeanours: drinking and drugging and particularly bullying fellow showjumper Jake Lovell on the circuit.

‘Chip off the old Campbell-Black’, said the headlines, accompanying a particularly evil photograph of Xavier, with monotonous regularity.

Almost the worst part was being in emotional debt to Anthea Belvedon, who was really milking it.

‘Thank God Sir Raymond is no longer alaive. My Dicky is such a plucky little fellow, he’ll bounce back. Of course I won’t hold it against you, Rupert, but I do feel, at the very least, we should take a holistic approach and get round the table for family counselling. I and Dicky wouldn’t want Xavier excluded. If we discover what happened and why, Dicky and Xav can achieve closure.’

Xavier, who was utterly mortified when he realized what he’d done, had written a letter of apology to Dicky, but he never shopped Cosmo or Lubemir.

Dicky was allowed a few days at home. On the Monday after his terrible boat trip, his mother, having tucked him up in bed, indulged in a little daydream. If Dicky had passed away, heaven forbid, she would have set up ‘Dicky’s Fund’ and campaigned to stop bullying in schools. She would have fundraised tirelessly and lectured in schools and to Government ministers.

‘Lady Belvedon talks such good sense and always looks so lovely.’

She could just imagine herself getting an OBE from the Queen, or, with a huge blow-up of Dicky at his most blue-eyed, blond and adorable behind her, talking to Dermot and Natasha on breakfast television.

Heaven forbid, she wouldn’t want darling Dicky to die. Dora was a different matter. Anthea had opened an envelope addressed to Dora from the
Scorpion
containing a cheque for three thousand pounds the other day. Dora could jolly well pay her own school fees in future. Perhaps Rupert could pay them for a bit – to make up to her for not suing. Rupert was so attractive – pity about Taggie.

Anthea’s musings were interrupted by the telephone and by such an exciting, intimate voice.