Last Writes (18 page)

‘Not exactly,’ said the boy uneasily.

‘Come on, tell us what it is.’

‘Surrender,’ the boy whispered.

Into the shocked silence which followed the word, the second mate eyed him up and down and then said, ‘Never. What you’ve got to understand, pretty boy, is that whatever they told you on that course this is a rough trade …’

There was the slightest of squeaks as the lad hit the deck in a dead faint.

The colonel had never dealt in such trifling matters as New Year Resolutions before but he’d taken one earlier this year and he had every intention of keeping it. It was never to spend a Christmas with his son and daughter-in-law ever again.

There was nothing wrong with his son except that he worked too hard and was given to doing his wife’s bidding without complaint. The colonel’s late wife, Mavis, had never ordered him about in the way that Peter’s wife did. Of course he, the colonel, had naturally always done what Mavis wanted but that was different.

Quite different.

The festivities last Christmas at Peter and Helen’s house had been a real penance. The noise and the confusion and the cold had been almost unbearable. The house itself was cold because his daughter-in-law, who was cold in other ways as well, was bent on saving the planet: the colonel
suspected it was a way of cutting down on the heating bills. The food was awful, too, because Helen was a vegetarian and only served flesh and fowl with a visible repugnance as a concession to old established custom. The colonel, who had endured something only a mouthful short of starvation in a prisoner-of-war camp and had taken a resolution at the time never to go short of a good meal ever again, had tackled turkey cooked by an unpractised hand without pleasure.

Worse than the food and the cold though had been the parties given there: for friends on Christmas Eve and for neighbours on Boxing Day. Disparate groups as they were he still didn’t know which collection of guests had been the least likeable. Both were noisy and comprised people he neither knew nor liked. Some of those there on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day couldn’t hold their drink. This was something the colonel had always viewed with displeasure in the mess and in civilian life afterwards.

True, he liked a whisky himself in the evenings but that was all. The colonel only ever drank in moderation and never swayed about like those people did, clutching their fourth drink, skin glistening, boasting to complete strangers about their latest successful deal or the defeat of a rival. Not that the colonel didn’t know all about defeat. He did. He’d been in Crete in May, 1941, which had been a defeat all right and was when he’d been taken prisoner.

So once back in his own home he began to plan his strategy for next Christmas. The first thing he had been taught as a young subaltern was that strategy came well before tactics. His strategy now was that he was going to say that he was going away himself next Christmas and
therefore couldn’t go to his son’s house for the festivities.

He wouldn’t actually go away, of course, because all he really wanted to do was to stay in his own home in peace and quiet by his own fireside with a decent whisky within arm’s reach.

He would pretend to go away.

That was it.

Reminding himself of the old army maxim that time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted, he set about deciding where he would say he was going. Marrakech was his first thought – the image of the souk there had always appealed – although Switzerland beckoned, too. In his mind he soon discarded both putative destinations – Marrakech because it would be pretty obvious that he was just going away to avoid Christmas with Peter and Helen, and Switzerland because everyone would be bound to insist that it would be too cold in winter for a man of his age. He toyed briefly with the idea of saying that he was visiting the West Indies but thought it would be too long a flight to seem plausible.

The ideal destination came into his mind one evening as he was going up to bed. Climbing the stairs took no little effort and a lot of concentration these days and he marvelled as he did so each evening how quickly he had scaled some high ground near the regiment’s position near Rethymnon on Crete in 1941.

Not now.

Now every individual stair had to be negotiated separately, the physiotherapist’s advice to put his feet on each tread as if it was new ground echoing in his mind as ever.

He often wondered how quickly he would scale his own staircase these days if he was being shot at as he was at Rethymnon. It would probably, he thought wryly, loosen up his arthritic hips better than anything the doctor gave him.

That was it, he thought, as he got to the upstairs landing, panting slightly. He would tell everyone he was going to go to Crete. And not for a holiday. He would say he was aiming for the military cemetery at Suda Bay to visit Peter’s grave. That was the Peter after whom his son had been named; the Peter who had been killed at his side; the Peter who had been his best friend.

Nobody could argue with that.

Satisfied with his strategy, he went happily to bed. Tactics, which came a long way after strategy, could wait until the morning. Next day he started to scan the advertisements for holidays in Crete, noting the name of any firm who specialised in that destination. He found two or three and sent off for their brochures, enjoying a frisson of excitement that he hadn’t felt in years.

He duly studied the options in glorious colour presented by the tour operators, finally selecting a tour that left on Christmas Eve and was scheduled to come back the day after New Year. That should do him nicely. He noted all the details carefully and committed them to memory, which was what he thought of as ‘military precision’ although for the life of him he couldn’t see why the two words had ever come together. Not after the landings in Crete.

Then he left the brochure around in a conspicuous position should anyone call.

The first person to do so was the vicar. That cleric asked
in his usual airy way if there was anything he could do for him, expecting the usual answer of ‘Nothing, thank you’.

‘There is, actually,’ said the colonel this time. ‘Could you get your son – he’s computer literate, isn’t he? – to find out the flight number of this tour for me?’

‘Of course,’ said Vicar readily. ‘He’ll enjoy doing that. Have a good trip, won’t you? I take it you’re quite sure you’re really up to that sort of thing these days? The years take their toll, you know.’

Mrs Beddoes was not so easily convinced that he was. Mrs Beddoes came in and did for him twice a week, doing his shopping and washing. She checked up, too, on the home-delivery company which brought him a hot lunch every day. ‘I’ll cancel your order for the days you’re away,’ she said, giving him a dubious look. ‘And the milkman.’

This was something he hadn’t bargained for and, applying his mind to the problem, he started to secrete food in corners that Mrs Beddoes didn’t clean too often. This brought the prisoner-of-war camp back to his mind very quickly. It was what they had done when a man was planning a break-out. The places, though, where little parcels of food could be secreted away in a camp regularly searched by hostile guards were different from those in a house only dusted intermittently. Nevertheless he gave his mind to the problem in proper military fashion and soon caches of food were being hidden away by him in improbable places.

‘I’d better stop the newspapers, too,’ Mrs Beddoes said before bustling back to the washing machine.

The colonel’s son was not easily converted to the thought of a journey to Crete in midwinter.

‘Of course I understand, Dad,’ Peter said when he was told, ‘but are you quite sure you’re fit enough?’

‘Quite sure,’ said the colonel firmly. ‘And if I should happen to die over there, don’t you worry.’ His voice quivered a little. ‘I shall be among friends if I do.’

‘We’ll miss you at Christmas,’ said his son awkwardly. ‘Helen will be really disappointed and so will I.’

‘If I don’t go now, it’ll be too late,’ mumbled the colonel. ‘Your mother would never let me go there, you know. She was worried that it might bring it all back.’ Mavis – his dear Mavis – had waited long years for him in war and would never have his peace of mind disturbed by revisiting the scene of that unhappy campaign.

‘Fair enough,’ conceded Peter in the end. ‘Now, what about you letting me take you to the airport?’

‘Not on Christmas Eve,’ retorted the colonel crisply. ‘Too many bad drivers about. Besides I’ve already fixed up a taxi. Both ways,’ he added hurriedly.

‘I’ll have a note of the flight number, though, Dad, just in case.’

The colonel handed it over with an inward smirk. He’d always thought that they ought to have had him in Intelligence in the war and his masterminding of this little campaign proved it. He felt a warm glow of victory over his daughter-in-law who had somehow been subconsciously transmogrified into the enemy.

The person who wasn’t at all sanguine about his going to Crete was his doctor.

The colonel, who had got used to a series of army doctors, (whom he had always mentally categorised as no good as soldiers in the army and no good as doctors in
the civilian world), had been surprised by how well he had taken to the young woman who had looked after his Mavis so well when she was ill and dying.

‘What’s this I hear about your flying off somewhere without asking me?’ she said when he went to the surgery for his routine check.

One of the things that being in action had taught the colonel was who to trust. He gave her a straight look and told her the whole truth, pledging her to secrecy.

‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ she smiled. ‘Your heart’s in no state for an air trip. Stay at home and keep warm. And don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

He trotted home happily and went over his plan for the hundredth time, thinking it through for possible snags as he struggled upstairs every night. ‘I’ll fool ’em all,’ he said to himself time and again.

It was a week later when he realised he had been basking in a false sense of security. He had forgotten all about Bob and Lorraine Steele. They were the good neighbours who lived opposite the colonel’s house. They had a long-standing arrangement with him that unless his curtains were drawn back by nine o’clock in the morning that they would alert his doctor.

Reminding himself that the Duke of Wellington had also encountered unexpected reverses in his many campaigns and had not been daunted by them, the colonel applied himself to thinking of a way round this.

When he went away in the ordinary way to his son’s house he left the curtains drawn together and the lights on a timer that switched them on when darkness fell. If the curtains remained open all the week – he could hardly
draw them nightly if he wasn’t supposed to be there – he would not be able to put a light on in the evening without being seen and that would never do either.

If the curtains remained closed all the time he was away – his usual practice – then he would have very little light in the day. He thought about this for a while and decided that creeping about inside the house in the half-dark in daytime and having electric light in the evening was the better option.

Breathing more easily again, he sat back and reviewed his plan. Logistics came some way after strategy and tactics but he thought he had that side of things properly buttoned up now. With some satisfaction he decided that he had covered all eventualities and that it would defeat the enemy nicely.

In the way of all military master plans he had given his a name. He was pleased with that, too. It was a phrase he’d picked up from the television: ‘Operation Virtual Reality’.

It was three days into his seclusion that proper reality set in. One morning as he was coming down the stairs with only half the light he was used to, he stumbled and fell headlong to the floor, hitting his head hard.

And no one knew.

Not, that is, until the day after he had told everyone he was due back home.

And that was too late.

Miss Millicent Pevensey pushed her food about on her plate without enthusiasm. And, when she came to think about it, no wonder. A famous cookery writer had once declared in print that the first bite of a meal was taken with the eye and now she had found out for herself – the hard way – how right that particular author had been. The trouble was that these days she could no longer see the plate on which the food had been served, let alone the meal itself or even – sad to say – read cookery writers any more either.

Miss Pevensey was blind.

So she couldn’t taste the first bite with her eye any longer. Either eye, actually.

The consultant ophthalmologist had been very kind when he broke the news that this was going to happen to her. ‘You’ve got the wrong sort of macular degeneration,’ he had said.

‘Like the wrong sort of snow,’ she had commented tightly at the time.

‘I’m very much afraid so,’ he said, grateful that she hadn’t broken down.

So now she had physically to take her first bite of the food from the plate before she could even decide what it was she was eating – and that in spite of some officious carer announcing that it was Irish stew once again. Actually it was nearly always Irish stew. Before taking her first mouthful, though, Millicent Pevensey had to establish the whereabouts on her plate of each of the constituents of the meal. And, if the main one was meat, to locate the gravy as well as the vegetables.

Cutting the aforementioned meat could be a problem, too, which accounted for the frequency on the menu of Irish stew. When other cuts of meat did happen to be served, the helper on duty – usually the one whom Miss Pevensey most disliked – would, unbidden and unannounced, come up behind her and cut it up for her. This was before she could protest that meat tasted better if you had cut it up yourself. Not that there would have been any use in explaining this in atavistic, developmental terms to this particular woman.

The name which Miss Pevensey had privately bestowed on this least-liked member of staff was ‘Magpie’, although it was neither her nickname nor her official title. The latter was probably ‘Carer’ but this Miss Pevensey could never bring herself to call her because the woman patently didn’t care. Magpies were, to say the least, unattractive birds, given to preying on the nests of smaller, defenceless members of the avian species and this was how Miss Pevensey had come to think of her.

‘We’ll have to wear a bib, won’t we,’ the Magpie had said the last time Miss Pevensey had unwittingly splashed gravy down her blouse. ‘All those stains on your front …’

‘Gravy stains are the medals of the kitchen,’ Miss Pevensey had rejoined, but the woman had not understood.

‘I’ll get you one with a little drip tray at the bottom,’ said the Magpie. ‘That’ll catch anything you let fall.’

And before Miss Pevensey could utter a protest a plastic breastplate with a little trough at the bottom had been hung round her neck.

She had conveyed her indignation, though, to her next visitor. ‘I call it my albatross,’ she said, adding wryly, ‘and try to think of myself now as the Ancient Mariner.’

‘Rotten,’ agreed Meg Ponsonby, her one-time deputy at Ornum College at the University of Calleshire. ‘Haven’t they got any respect?’

‘Not for what one once was, I’m afraid,’ sighed Millicent Pevensey, sometime principal of that college. ‘Of course, rationally it’s not relevant. What one once was, I mean. We’re all just the old, the blind and the infirm here. One’s past doesn’t matter in these places.’

‘Well, then, it jolly well ought to be relevant,’ said Meg stoutly. ‘By the way, have you heard the latest about the vice chancellor?’

Millicent leant forward eagerly, Meg, dear Meg, being her only link with what she still thought of as the real world. ‘No, I haven’t. Do tell me …’

When Millicent Pevensey had first entered the Berebury Home for the Blind she had resolved to apply all the logic that had been so much part of her working life to her present situation and treat her time there as a new and
different stage in her life. Unfortunately it hadn’t proved easy to adapt to it and this was largely due to the effect on her of the carer whom she had dubbed the Magpie. Once the woman had found out that Millicent Pevensey had been connected with the world of education, she had been treated by the Magpie with a great deal less than respect.

It soon transpired that the Magpie had disliked school and everything to do with it. Not only that but that she hadn’t done very well there either. Some primary-school teacher had once a long time ago failed this particular pupil – that much was evident – and Millicent Pevensey was paying the price now.

Defenceless as she now was she bore the petty slights the Magpie inflicted on her as best she could. But however patient and tolerant Millicent Pevensey was, the Magpie seemed to search out ways in which she could work out her latent dislike of teachers on the hapless resident. At least Millicent Pevensey hoped that this was the reason for her behaviour, the sinister Nurse Ratched in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
coming into her mind from time to time.

Whilst it had been agreed at the home that the blind woman should be addressed as Miss Pevensey, when no one else was in earshot – and only then – the Magpie always called her Millie. Miss Pevensey hadn’t realised she could still feel such insensate anger. She hadn’t been so cross since her young brother had broken her favourite doll and that had been very many years ago.

The Magpie’s behaviour was not the only cross Miss Pevensey had to bear. There was old Angela Pullen. Angela Pullen was not only old but what was kindly called
absent-minded
. Miss Pevensey, who had to sit next to her at
mealtimes, thought this was a serious understatement. The woman’s mind was not so much absent as entirely missing. The last occasion on which she had asked Angela – who still had some little sight – what the time was she had been answered by a high cackle and the words ‘Two freckles past a hare, eastern elbow time’.

Meg Ponsonby had frowned when told about this response, patently searching her memory. ‘I think,’ she said doubtfully, ‘that one of the folklorists at the college might have noted that expression.’

‘I would be very surprised if they had,’ said Millicent Pevensey with spirit. ‘The woman’s lost her marbles.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ frowned Meg Ponsonby. ‘In my experience you can never tell with folklorists.’

Then there had been the matter of Millicent Ponsonby’s breviary. ‘My little book. The one I keep by my bed,’ she said to the Magpie one day. ‘I can’t put my hand on it.’ This had been literally what she had wanted to do. Running her fingers over the little leather-bound volume as she went to sleep always brought the rubric back to her mind and soothed her.

‘I put it on top of the wardrobe,’ said the Magpie, ‘seeing as you can’t read it any more.’

The last straw – the one that led Millicent Pevensey to an entirely new course of action – had happened one morning when the Magpie had been called away in the act of helping her to dress.

‘It was quite insupportable,’ said Millicent, later that day to her friend, Meg. She was still palpably distressed. ‘She left me standing there in my shift, saying she wouldn’t be gone a minute. She’d been late coming in the first place – it was
halfway through the morning – and when she came back – that is,’ she corrected herself, ‘when I thought it was she coming back it wasn’t her at all.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Meg Ponsonby, never slow on the uptake. ‘And who was it then?’

‘Arthur Maple.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Meg again. ‘I don’t suppose our revered Professor of Moral Law at the University has ever seen a woman in a shift before, bachelor that he is. Didn’t he knock?’

‘Oh, yes, but the Magpie is supposed to knock, too. The worst of it was that he behaved as if everything was normal.’

‘Good for him,’ murmured Meg under her breath.

‘As if,’ went on Millicent Pevensey, unappeased, ‘I always received visitors in a state of undress. I don’t know if that was worse than if he’d run away like a frightened rabbit.’ She trembled with anger at the memory. ‘Quite insupportable.’

The words stayed with the blind woman. And so did the thought. Life really was beginning to be quite insupportable. And, now she came to think of it, there was no real reason why she should put up with life. She put her mind to what action to take as she walked round the indoor exercise room at the home – somewhere she always thought of as like a manège for schooling horses. There was a circular fence there with a rail at hand height for the blind to hold on to as they walked round and round.

She started on her plan the next time Meg came to call. ‘Do you think you could you buy me some more paracetamol, please? I’ve run out.’

It worked once. When she asked Meg the same thing on her next visit she got a gentle ‘No, Millie, I think not. You’ve got earth’s work to do first.’

So she waited until she had a letter delivered to her room and then asked the Magpie if she could borrow a knife from the kitchen to slit it open.

‘Not allowed,’ said the Magpie at once. ‘I’ll open it for you and read it out if you like.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Millicent Pevensey firmly. ‘My friend will do that for me.’

Clasping a glass of water while she swallowed her tablets one night put another thought into Millicent Pevensey’s still-agile mind. Blind she might be but she knew exactly where her wrists were – all she needed was some broken glass. This proved less easy than she had thought. Not only did the tumbler not break when cast with all her vigour to the floor but it rolled away and – without sight – she could not locate it.

Next she tried sending the Magpie away while she was having a bath but the Magpie would not be diverted. ‘It’s as much as my job’s worth to leave anyone alone in the bath here,’ the carer had declared. ‘You might drown and I’d get the sack.’

‘True,’ agreed Millicent meekly. ‘And that would never do,’ she added in case the thought of suicide had crossed the Magpie’s mind, too.

She tried to remember Dorothy Parker’s litany of the ways in which one might kill oneself – razors that pained you, acids that stained you, guns that weren’t lawful – none of which were accessible in the Berebury Home for the Blind. And now even North Sea gas didn’t kill any more.

She toyed instead with the idea of electrocution as she plodded round the exercise room the next morning. ‘It’s like being in a prison yard except that we can’t do it in pairs and talk,’ she complained to Meg on her next visit. ‘Bearing in mind,’ she added pertinently, ‘that prisoners can at least look forward to the end of their sentence.’

‘Life must have a reason,’ insisted Meg Ponsonby, an authority on Comparative Religions. ‘Nothing makes sense if it doesn’t.’

Millicent Pevensey, though, was undeterred in her search to end it. Electrocution had seemed simple enough at first thought – presumably one only had to take out an electric light bulb and stick one’s fingers in the socket instead. The only snag was that there was no reading lamp beside her bed.

‘No need, is there?’ the Magpie had said when asked about this. ‘Besides, there’s a perfectly good light in the ceiling for those of us that have to work in the room.’

Millicent sighed when she reported this remark to Meg. ‘That’s all that one has become reduced to nowadays – work for someone else.’

‘Cheer up,’ said Meg briskly. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison. And, anyway, the economists like people having work to do. Other people, that is.’

Millicent had managed a smile at this but had nevertheless gone on thinking. There was, she knew, a way of death popular in Balkan countries that could leave the general public unsure whether the victim – like Amy Robsart – had fallen or been pushed. Defenestration was the name of the game. That would be perfect. The only snag was that the Berebury Home for the Blind was only one storey high.

Salvation, when it came, was unexpected.

There was to be an outing for the residents from the home to the seaside near Kinnisport. Above the town was a beauty spot on the cliffs looking over the Cunliffe Gap with the added attraction of a broad walk and tea shop, to say nothing of the even greater attraction of a free public car park.

‘Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive, Millicent?’ asked Angela Pullen as they tumbled out of their minibus into a pleasant breeze.

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that, Angela,’ said Millicent dryly.

‘I can feel the sun.’

‘I can hear the sea,’ said Millicent purposefully walking towards the sound. The grass was rough but springy as she strode over it, her white stick a great help on the turf.

‘Millie, come back,’ shouted the Magpie, spotting her and thus diverted from her task of helping the other inmates out of the home’s minibus.

‘The sea, the sea,’ chanted Millicent Pevensey to herself, increasing her speed.

‘Millie, you mustn’t go any further,’ the Magpie shouted after. ‘Stop or you’ll go over the cliff. Just stand still.’

Millicent stepped up her pace even more as she heard feet pounding after her.

‘Don’t move,’ shouted the Magpie.

Millicent heard the woman panting behind her now and walked even more quickly over the grass in the direction of the sound of the sea, quite invigorated. She must be near the edge now. The sound of the sea was getting louder and louder. All she had to do was keep on walking as quickly as she could and keep ahead of the Magpie.

What was undeniable was that the Magpie had youth – and sight – on her side. She reached Millicent’s side just as the blind woman sensed the upward rush of air denoting the very edge of the cliff. The Magpie grabbed at Millicent’s arm but was caught off-balance by the white stick and it was she – not Miss Millicent Pevensey – who tumbled over the cliff edge.

The coroner was very kind when he heard that Miss Pevensey had really just been enjoying a stroll in the fresh air and had had no idea she had been so near the cliff’s edge. He dismissed everything Angela Pullen said as unreliable but placed on record the devotion shown by the carer, which was to be highly commended.