Bleak Expectations (9 page)

We may have been opposed in many ways, but we could at least agree on the inefficiency and plain wrongness of the French, in particular their notoriously inefficient and government-subsidized soup industry. Reassured, I took the tin from him.

‘So, around three o’clock tomorrow, you guzzle that down and then Bob’s your uncle and Benevolent’s your father. Albeit very briefly. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha!’

He began to laugh and continued for some minutes, pausing only for breath and to motion between the tin of soup and myself before bursting into guffaws again. It was a strange sense of humour that found such fun in the idea of a boy eating soup, but then I was young and couldn’t possibly know the mind of my elders. After a while, the headmaster joined in as well, his deep, mocking laughter mixing with Mr Benevolent’s into a harmony of hilarity, which, despite the horror of my circumstances, I somehow found as contagious as funny cholera or chucklesome typhus, and, without really knowing why, I, too, ventured a laugh.

‘Ha . . .’ I began, but instantly the other two stopped, leaving me laughing into a hollow silence as they stared at me.

‘Nothing funny here, boy.’

‘Right.’

‘Now, you run along . . . son.’

‘No! Never!’ Again I flew at him. Again the headmaster seized me, thus preventing my assault, only this time he also hurled me through the door of his study – which was fortunately still open or it would have hurt much more than it did, though the amount it did actually hurt was still a lot as, even though my fall was broken by a passing schoolmate, he was so thin from hunger that his boniness provided a distinctly unsoft and poky landing, possibly more painful than simply landing on the stony floor might actually have been, though I would never really know, as I did not want to re-enter the room and ask the headmaster to throw me out again only this time straight on to the corridor floor as some sort of control experiment.

As I lay on poor, uncomfortable Jaggery minor, the mental livestock began their noises again, a bestial thought cacophony that took Pippa’s imminent Joan of Arc-ing, Harry’s impending and deadly birthday and now Mr Benevolent’s forthcoming nuptials to my mother and blended them together into one animal roar that screamed: Escape!

¹
No, they don’t.

²
Yes, they are.

³
The Georgians and the Victorians tried to hold nature to human standards, including dressing animals in clothes. They put fish into striped bathing costumes, made dogs wear top hats and once dressed the elephants at London Zoo in three-piece suits – an idea abandoned when one escaped and set up his own accountancy firm, thus leading to the famous myth of the Elephant Man.

⁴
The author is clearly mistaken as the Gladstone and Disraeli bags were not invented until much later, in accordance with the law of the time that all Prime Ministers should have luggage named after them. Most have now fallen out of use, with the exception of the Gladstone bag and the ever popular Palmerston sack, with its two separate compartments for simultaneously transporting scrambled eggs and legal papers – the so-called barrister’s breakfast bag.

There are many forms of waiting. The waiting that is for a longed-for and joyous event and therefore drags on agonizingly but is tinged with anticipatory excitement; the waiting that is for a dreaded and wretched event and therefore glowers sullenly through the hours; and, of course, the waiting that is taking plates of food to people in restaurants.

My wait to visit the servant and learn what hope of escape she offered was none of those, but maybe a sort of mix of the first two. The hours moved slowly, like a laudanum-addicted sloth, or treacle that has been handcuffed to a rock.

Finally, as the clock ticked round towards midnight, Harry and I crept out of the dormitory, stepping round the sleeping forms of our schoolmates whose sleepy snores and somnolent snuffles were punctuated with whimpers of ‘Mother’, whispers of ‘Help’ and wails of ‘Aaarrrgggh!’

We crept creepily towards the dining hall and, as we arrived outside, the school bell tolled twelve – we were on time. But of the mysterious servant there was no sign.

‘Hello . . . ?’ I whispered hopefully into the pitch-black and dark-horse dark hall, to no response.

Harry and I took a step inside, the gloom enveloping us, and I tried again.

‘Hello . . . ?’ I re-whispered, again to no response.

We took a further step inside, and I re-re-whispered, ‘Hello . . . ?’

Alas, as I stepped forward this time, I knocked into a pile of stacked plates, for though our food was mimed our crockery was not, and they wobbled, wibbled and in the end wabbled
¹
on to the ground with a huge, platey smash, which rang out sonorously and definitely not quietly in a huge echo that seemed to say, ‘We’re here, we’re trying to escape, someone come and catch us, we’re here.’

Yet still there came no response.

Though after a few seconds there now did come one.

‘Ssssh!’ hissed a voice. Then a lantern flickered to life in the darkness and approached, and lit by its glow there appeared the face of the servant, a gnarled, hairy visage so dotted with warts that it was reminiscent of nothing so much as a stale Chelsea bun with a beard. ‘All that noise. Do you want to escape or disturb the headmaster and die?’

‘Ooh, I know this one!’ An excited Harry danced around with his hand in the air. ‘Is it wake the headmaster and die? No, hang on . . .’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, a tremor in my voice for truly her ugly face was, if not impossible to behold, certainly a bit tricky to look at.

‘I already told you, I’m a friend.’ She swung her lantern in Harry’s direction. ‘And who’s this you’ve brought with you?’

‘He is my friend.’

‘So he’s a friend of a friend. That’s good.’ She stroked her beard thoughtfully.

‘Do you have a name, mysterious bearded crone?’

‘I have many names. There are those who have called me Bearded Brenda.’ Again she stroked her beard. ‘Others have called me Hairy Harriet. Others yet know me as Goateed Gretel, Whiskered Wanda or Face-fuzz Fiona.’ Each mention of a name was accompanied by a beard-stroke, as if names and beard were inextricably linked, which, I realize as I write this many years later, they obviously were.

Der.

Now she took her hand from her beard and continued: ‘There are also some who know me ironically as Smooth-faced Susan. But to you I am just . . .’ here she paused as if on the verge of great name-revelations ‘. . . a friend. And I have been sent to help you, Pip Bin.’

‘By whom?’

‘By a friend. I am just a friend sent by a friend to help a friend and his friend,’ she said friendlily.

‘How do I know I can trust you?’

‘Perhaps this might convince you.’

She reached beneath her filth-encrusted skirts and I felt a shudder of fear at what possible hideousness therein she might be about to show us. Harry clearly shared that fear because he blurted out, ‘Oh, God, don’t let it be her pants!’

To our relief, it was not her pants. Instead she produced a gold locket – one that looked strangely familiar. I took it from her, being careful not to touch her foul hands as they appeared so flaky and diseased that I feared both personal contagion and maybe accidentally knocking one of her fingers off, and opened it.

Within there was a tiny oil painting of my mother that made me both weep with emotion and think, ‘Gosh, what small paintbrushes they must have used’.

‘This is my mother’s locket!’ I said. ‘Where did you get it? Did Mama give it to you? Is she well again?’

‘I was given it by a friend. Not the same friend as sent me to help, a different friend, but a friend all the same. As to your mother . . . she is quite mad.’

At this news, joy flooded me. ‘But that is marvellous! She was totally mad the last time I saw her, so only quite mad is a real improvement.’

‘Ah.’ Did I detect a glimmer of sympathy in the crone’s eye? ‘I’m afraid I’m using the word “quite” as in “completely” rather than to mean “a bit”. Sorry.’

This deflated me quicker than a dirigible crashing into a needle and spike factory. ‘Oh. Not such marvellous news after all.’ I stared at the picture in the locket, tears pricking the backs of my eyes like tiny emotional forks as I found myself adrift in a swamp of sadness, the true horror of my broken-familied plight settling on me like a forlorn fog.

Fortunately no such fog had settled on the perennially optimistic to the point of you-worry-he-might-not-actually-understand Harry.

‘Are you here to help Pip escape, beardy crone lady?’

‘I am sworn to get him away from here and to safety,’ the crone said, which cheered me right up again, dispersing the fog in twelve easy words, for the emotions of adolescence are passionate but shallow, like a gentlemen’s all-nude bathing pond.

‘And my sister Pippa? Are you to help her as well?’

‘If I knew where she was, aye.’

‘But she is next door to here! In St Bitch’s!’

‘I see. Though that is geographically convenient, it does complicate things.’

‘And she is due to be burned at the stake tomorrow on Joan of Arc Day!’

‘So soon? That complicates the complication.’ The servant turned and started pacing up and down, frantically beard-stroking. ‘To escape with both of you will not be easy. Indeed, there are those who would say it will be . . . difficult.’

‘And Harry. I’m not leaving without Harry.’ Though I had known him but a short time, in no circumstances could I imagine myself abandoning my best friend. Except, you know, unless I really had to. ‘It is his birthday tomorrow, and you know what that means.’

‘I certainly do, Pip Bin,’ said Harry. ‘On the one hand there will be presents – hurrah, I love presents – but on the other hand there will be almost certain death – boo, I don’t like death.’

The servant stopped her pacing and stared at us. ‘Three of you? To get three of you out of here is so hard it makes the people who would say that getting two of you out will be difficult look like blind optimists. Indeed, there are those who would say that getting three of you out by tomorrow is impossible. And those are people who are generally quite positive, glass-is-half-full-type people.’

‘Well, if we have to leave Harr—’ I began, but was cut off.

‘Nevertheless, we shall try. You two wait here. For if I am to help all three of you escape, I need to get some things.’

The servant left the dining hall with a speed and grace that belied the shuffly movements I had previously seen her make – who was this mysterious woman? Who had sent her? And why had she taken her lantern with her, leaving Harry and me in the scary darkness?

Surrounded by the miserable sounds of the school, I began to fear and, indeed, think the worst: Harry and I would never escape; I would never save my sister or stop my mother marrying Mr Benevolent; and soon my ineffectual little life would end in this awful place, with me alone and weeping.

Then I felt Harry’s hand on my arm and heard his voice in my ears. ‘It’s all right, Pip Bin, that’s not going to happen. It will all be fine. And if it’s not, well, how ineffectual or little can a life be that has had friendship such as ours in it?’

And so I realized that I had actually spoken my fears out loud, and that the penultimate paragraph before this one should have had the words ‘I said’ within it and some inverted commas.

‘I’m sorry, Harry. I’m just nervous.’

‘No need to be sorry, Pip Bin. And if you’re nervous, would it help if I let you hit me on the nose again?’
²

‘No, Harry, of course not.’ But in case it offered relief, I did hit him on the nose again. It didn’t really help me, and certainly didn’t help Harry, but just the thought of having a friend so loyal, decent and daft as to offer such a thing calmed me greatly.

We sat in silence, bar the odd whimper of nose-pain from Harry, and waited for the servant to return. It was a long wait. The school bell tolled many times before her return, and when a wave of smell announced her imminent reappearance, the cold grey light of dawn was starting to spread across the floor of the dining hall like grim margarine.
³
In one mottled hand she was clutching an object that seemed to me something which boosted our chances of escape enormously: a large key. How could an escape go wrong if a large key was involved?

‘The key to escape is this key,’ she said, moving towards the back wall of the dining hall where a heavy curtain hung down. ‘Behind this is a door that leads to your sister’s nunnery, locked these past decades since the Schoolboy Nun Segregation Act of 1752.’
⁴

She drew back the curtain and there, as she had said, was a door, a providential portal of potential pescape. Sorry, escape. It was a huge studded thing, all thick wood and metal, with one large, solitary lock and multiple signs saying, ‘Keep out’, ‘Go away’ and ‘No’. The servant inserted the key, pushed it into the lock and, with a surprisingly small ‘snick’, turned it.

‘Now, we simply have to hope the door hasn’t rusted shut over the years . . .’

It had not: as she reached for the handle and turned it, the door swung soundlessly open, revealing a long, dark corridor. But I saw it as more than that, much more, instantly knowing that it was my longed-for path to sister-saving, escape and freedom.

Or, of course, discovery, recapture and death.

Which would be much less fun.

¹
Olde Englishe for ‘to fall’. Not that you needed me to tell you that. I mean, it’s pretty obvious from the context, isn’t it?

²
It was believed at the time that all male emotions should be repressed and could only be relieved by physical violence. To that end, the job of ‘Punch-nose’ existed, men who would offer themselves as the targets of an emotion-relieving punch, an equivalent to our modern psychotherapists.

³
Margarine was actually invented in the nineteenth century. I know, who knew?