Mr. Chartwell (17 page)

Esther tried to push him to the floor and he retaliated by rolling on her arms. She rescued her arms and gave him a cross jab with her toe. The toe snatched away as his mouth came to challenge it.

Black Pat lifted his head. “Your side is much more comfortable.” His lifted head showed her a smiling profile. “What’s orange, purple, the colours of the four humours, a type of grey, and brown?”

“I don’t know.” Esther waited. “What is?”

Black Pat’s paw made a flop in the area around her knees, a feeble shake.

Esther searched for the answer and couldn’t find it. “What is?” she said again. “What’s your stupid punch line?”

“That’s the punch line. That fruit salad.” The paw joggled on its wrist in the direction of her bowl. “It stinks.”

Ridiculous. Esther ignored him, finishing the bar of chocolate. Black Pat watched her, his stomach expressing itself with a sound of bubbling mud. Unmoved, she sat cross-legged on her tiny corner of the bed. Black Pat punished her selfishness by abusing the division of the mattress. Rudely he budged his way
over. Her muscles were indignant at the pressure of his body. But she wouldn’t be chased from her own room. All attempts to force him back only made him more enamoured of the game. The bowl was toppled and soaked the bed with juices. A grape escaped Esther’s hurried efforts to clean up the spilled fruit. Interesting, a grape. Black Pat chewed it and then wiped his horrified tongue down the length of a foreleg. A short period of inactivity occurred and ended as he bulked his massive hips, knocking Esther. He said insincerely, “Oops!”

Esther pleaded with the wall. “Could you please get out of my room.”

“You get out. I can’t.” Black Pat caught a hiccup in his throat and then made a foul frazzled rasp. His ear felt a fleck of something and performed a whip.

His eyes were turned aside, but she felt him studying her indirectly, studying her with his other senses. “Black Pat, I can never understand what you’re … Why do you always talk in riddles?”

Black Pat lay calmly. “Riddle sticks.”

Esther was confused at his grannyish oath. “… Fiddlesticks?”

“Riddle,” a sarcastic gap was inserted, “sticks.”

“That’s such rubbish.”

“Fiddlesticks,”
Black Pat said with a wide grin. Then he thrust his neck onto Esther’s pillow, which bunched by the headboard. He tested the durability of cotton with his jaws, feathers appearing at a new hole. Dirt from his paws made brown stripes on the sheets and bedding, his dirt and pungency turning the bed into a hideous place. He caressed the corner of her book with his mouth to analyse the texture. She swiped the book from him and felt pulp in her fingers.

“Black Pat! You’ve got the manners of an animal.”

A triumphant expression: “I am an animal.”

Esther examined the ruined pages. “You’re supposed to be my lodger.”

“I think you recognise what I am.”

She looked from the book; Black Pat was watching her with the gaze of a predatory animal. He said, “I am given my assignments and I follow them without deviation. Esther, you should recognise that I do not deviate in my residence here.” He said in a horrible coax, “Come on, you know that.”

So she was part of his assignment. It was the crescendo of a piano heaved from the top of a staircase. The piano hit the floor and detonated with all chords. Yes, she supposed she had known. Why hadn’t he told her this before?

“Because it was inappropriate.”

Esther perched on her small corner of the invaded bed, in her invaded house. She thought of Michael and those days. Thoughts swarmed in droves to the boxroom study. She closed her eyes to find Michael in her library. He appeared automatically, wolf-whistling at Big Oliver’s new wellington boots. Another memory was selected, Michael with a messy smile, waking up in this bed and denying that he snored. Here he was standing in the front room, posing with a Christmas tree. Here he was, running away from her snowball and not getting far. The camera shutter went down and came up on Michael burning an omelette, lifting one end with a spatula and blaming the frying pan. The shutter went down and came up on Michael looking awestruck and kissing Beth at the hospital after Little Oliver was born. And there were the other times when he was sitting in exhausted solitude in his study. There he was sitting bent in the garden with his elbow on the bench. There he was—a deathly silence on him, binding him. These places where Michael had sat alone, Esther saw them. Yet not alone, for every minute of that
time Black Pat had sat with him, his body wearing out a sandy trench in the garden, wearing the carpet by the desk into a patch.

“You were here in this house.”

“Not just here.”

Then where?

“In a lot of places, almost all of them.”

Something terrible flowered. “Black Pat, did you make him do it?”

Black Pat fawned in his loathing of this question. “No.”

“Were you with him?”

No answer. Low sunlight through the window, the sky lilac. It would go from lilac to indigo, from today to tomorrow. The room had the moist heat of compost.

“Black Pat, could you have stopped him?”

An answer of sorts: a paw coming closer and sorry.

“You didn’t even try and stop him?”

“Esther,” Black Pat’s words came pensively, “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I mean I can’t. Esther, you must understand what I am.”

Yes she knew what he was, she told him. No she didn’t, he explained. Let me tell you, Esther.

“I’m only the grease in a crease,” he said. “A kink in the link.”

What did that mean? His reply was complicated and elusive. It was useless. He was so meek: “There’s a reason why I’m a dog, with the desires of a dog. If I could have resisted the compulsion and left Michael I would have lain in the grass like a bonnet monkey and searched for nits.” Black Pat became taken by the poetry of this fantasy. “I would have picked for nits, a harmless nanny goat with a bell on her collar.” Out came a bellyaching moan. “But I am not benign. I’m a dog with the hunger of a dog and I am compelled by it.”

He was desperate for her to understand: Listen, Esther, the strength of the compulsion is terrifying; a violent and depthless appetite. It’s a lust from a cosmology of carnivorous instincts, all those instincts channelled into one incinerating white-hot heart streaming with smoke and magnesium.

Esther listened. She pulled a loose thread on her top. She listened to Black Pat, letting him explain without interruption. “So you see,” he said, “I don’t have a choice.”

Was Michael given a choice? No. It wasn’t a matter of choice. Black Pat spoke of the photograph in the drawer. Look at it, Esther. Look at it again, take it from the nail and pore over it.

Off the bed like a hawk and into the boxroom, the photograph in her hands. Their wedding day, hers and Michael’s. She scrutinised the familiar landmarks: the wedding guests, her head back in laughter, Michael turning to smile at someone. Petals of confetti. The car door open to show a bottle of champagne. Behind them the church. Flagstones and rose bushes; a committee of stones in the graveyard. Esther searched the photograph. All was the same. She kept searching. And she found it.

The car door was open and the window mirrored the church. Wedding guests applauded, gloved hands clapping, a baby in a white cap. But there behind them in the window of the car, in the mirrored image of the church steps. A shape captured amidst the distractions of flapping dresses and corsages. Just visible, just a small irregularity in the reflection.

His ears were in lax salute, two black tips. The reflection captured the curve of his bullish shoulders. Too small in the mirroring window, his features were lost. The angle of his head gave away his attitude: a relaxed ownership, watching Michael and covetous. An observer at this event, Black Pat set himself
away on the steps:
You can go, Michael. But back you’ll come. Off you go, but not for long. Back you’ll come because I’ll bring you back
.

“I met him a long time before you did. He took the photograph down towards the end because he didn’t want to be reminded of this. It got worse.” Black Pat had followed her to the boxroom. Sulking with guilt, he looked for a distraction. Good friends with the corner of the desk, he gave it a gnawing.

Esther shoved his head from the desk. “Why didn’t Michael tell me about you?”

Black Pat was on the worn patch of carpet by the desk. “Why haven’t you told anyone about me?”

She sat on the edge of the desk and floundered for a reply. “How can I?” She asked him genuinely, “How could I begin to talk about you? When I tell myself it sounds impossible, and that’s with you sitting opposite me.” She said, stumped, “I thought about telling Corkbowl, and then I realised that even if I did he wouldn’t know how to believe me, would he? It’s absurd.”

“Absurd, yes,” said Black Pat, “totally absurd!” He had sunk to the floor.

Esther thought about Michael in here with this dog, trapped with him, already trapped when they first met. “And you’re going to trap me too.” She recalled the day he moved in, her gullibility. “This is an ambush.”

“No, it’s an affinity. I didn’t initiate it.” From behind the desk Black Pat said, “The magnet that keeps me here is the magnet which brought me here. We are twinned by the same orbit and I’m all yours. Esther, I’m all yours.” He said hopefully, “Don’t you like me even slightly?”

“I—” Esther was smothered by a weight of contempt, hating herself because she hated her answer. “I suppose I do. I suppose I don’t really have an option.”

His answer was a version of the truth. “You don’t. We have an affinity and it chains us.” He wanted to soothe her though. “Cosy chains,” he said, willing her to be soothed, to be resigned.

Esther shut her eyes. Her response to this was no response. But it wasn’t entirely the lapse into resignation he had wanted, a glimmer of defiance remaining beneath.

Black Pat’s face came up above the desk, just half of it, the top of his big domed head peering over. Was she crying? It seemed so by the way a rough sleeve swept at her cheeks.

And then penitence came on him like an illness. Watching Esther cry stripped him of his usual mockery. Here was the remorse which intermittently touched him. Embarrassing when it happened; he railed at it now. A sentimental thing had been roused, making a mouse of him.

A time passed silently.

Black Pat spoke to her in soft adoration. “One of those happy souls which are the salt of the earth, and without whom this world would smell like what it is—a tomb.”

Esther’s voice was puffy. “Do you mean Michael?”

Black Pat jockeyed himself, needing to take back his professionalism. He seethed at his vulnerability and the chump it made of him.

“I mean me.” He didn’t. “No, I mean you.” Hopeless, he was still clenched with it. So he struggled to clarify, the sorrow in his pulse. “For what I can regret, I do. And I will regret you, Esther.”

Her sleeve wiped at her cheek and then her chin. “Who wrote that?”

He nodded gravely. “I did, I wrote it.” Seeing her complete cynicism he wasted a few seconds, blowing something off his nose, a piece of fluff, his bottom lip extended to aim air at it. He confessed, “Or perhaps Shelley did.”

10.05 a.m
.

C
lementine had elegant handwriting which looped across the page. She was writing to Randolph at the mahogany desk in the centre of her bedroom, a peaceful figure in a taupe blouse. A photograph of Marigold was positioned on the desk corner. The small white figurine of the maternal goddess Kwan Yin stood on a low shelf above a radiator. From the centre of the mantelpiece, a Louis XVI clock, once belonging to Clementine’s mother, kept time with its star-shaped pendulum.

Apart from this ticking and the sound of Clementine’s hand moving in fast, irregular bursts over the paper as she wrote, the room was silent.

Next to a box of Italian pencils and a Chinese inkwell on the desk was a glass paperweight in the shape of a pear. A tiny reflection in the pear shifted as something behind Clementine stirred,
entering the room. Clementine’s eyes had it, steadily holding the reflection, but she didn’t move. Her writing slowed fractionally.

There was the cool, smooth sound of a cumbersome leg being put on the salmon-red moiré silk spread of her four-poster bed, then another one. Observing the reflection, Clementine’s eyebrows flickered as the intruder jumped its hind legs on the bed and turned round several times, trampling the silk. The intruder’s back and humped shoulders brushed the gazebo roof of the four-poster as he moved, then keeled over, covering the mattress. A sloshing started up as the intruder gave the pads of his paws a hot wash, lost in the task, the tongue moving in a rhythmic trance.

“You are distracting me from my writing, I hope you know,” said Clementine.

There was a startled quiet. Then another experimental tongue wipe.

“And I want you to get off my bed immediately,” she said.

The tongue slid back into the mouth with trepidation.

“Off the bed, thank you.”

Black Pat spoke faintly, in shock. “Can you hear me?”