Mr. Chartwell (20 page)

“Yes.”
Beth misinterpreted the statement. Her warm hand was affectionate, gentle squeezes convincing Esther’s arm. “We can sort it out. You stay here with us if you’d rather.”

“You should go home.” This boiled down her ear.

“Perhaps I should go home.”

“With me, Esther.”

“You want to be on your own today?” It worried Big Oliver. “Wait, you want to be on your own?”

Beth went to follow as Esther left the room and was restrained by Big Oliver. They bickered animatedly between themselves, a hushed argument over what to do. It was interrupted by a bang of knees on the table legs, Corkbowl on his feet. Two blank faces stared at him.

“Let me go after her,” he said softly.

Their stares pursued him into the hall.

Esther was pulling on her baggy cardigan.

“Hi.” A step took Corkbowl closer. “Do you want to talk more about it?”

Black Pat had cornered her by the front door. Corkbowl agitated him, making his hackles spike. Esther’s reply was pathetic. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t want to bore you. I’d better be off.”

Corkbowl ran a wrist over his mouth, checking for ice cream. No, it was found to be clean so he asked if she was sure.

“I don’t know.” She slung her bag on a shoulder and it fell. “I wish I knew.”

“I’ll tell you what I know. I do know this.” Corkbowl braved another step.
Go on
, he thought,
go on, say your stupid embarrassing quote
. He rushed it out: “ ‘Those friends thou hast … Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’ ”

This Corkbowl … Black Pat was sickened. He threw a look of ridicule at Esther and noted no similar sneer.

“Right,” Esther said to Corkbowl, politely confused.

Corkbowl blushed over an explanation. “It’s basically an incoherent way of saying that I’m your friend.…” A bit presumptuous; he corrected it. “I hope we can become friends … umm.” He said honestly, “I’m ready to do anything I can to help.” Corkbowl slapped his thigh—a sign the next statement would mortify them both. “I suppose, in essence, I’m trying to steel-hoop you.”

It didn’t just mortify Esther and Corkbowl. It also marked a shift in Black Pat, rousing a possessiveness in him. Esther, he realised, would be a more strenuous win than he had assumed. Fine, the result would be the same. But there was rivalry in Black Pat’s voice as he asked Esther, “You like Shakespeare? Here’s a bit of Shakespeare: ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’ ”

Corkbowl’s steel-hoop comment had found a curiously receptive audience in Esther. Black Pat’s worm comment was a mystery.

“It’s basically an incoherent way,” Black Pat said, imitating Corkbowl in a lunatic pitch, “of saying that …”—he curled his face—“I’ll not be exorcised so easily. Now
that
you know.”

An inaudible countdown was going on in the kitchen, counting
down to Beth and Big Oliver coming to investigate. The group in the hall understood this. Black Pat reminded Esther of her orders to return home with a shin-kick of his muzzle and was rewarded with complete rebellion.

“I don’t want to go home,” she told them in a sudden blurt. “I don’t want to go there.”

“Where do you—”

Esther’s solution was immediate: “Well, I guess we did agree to go to Kent.…”

Corkbowl’s face registered his surprise. “Yes, of course, Kent.”

The car keys were in his pocket, warm from his leg. He rummaged to release them.

“You won’t come home?” A spark of acute rejection. Black Pat’s muzzle flickered in a grimace. “Not that it matters either way.”

Esther opened the door, she was leaving. The dog trailed behind as they went to the car. “Because I’ll be wherever you are, Esther.

“See you later, alligator,” Black Pat called after her, his showmanship slightly compromised. He watched Corkbowl’s car, nearly glum as it disappeared. “See you in a tick, tick,” he called experimentally to no one.

3.40 p.m
.

I
n his bedroom, a small, plain room annexed from the study, Churchill was asleep in bed, hands drawn across his waist, cradling his round tortoiseshell spectacles in a loose handshake.

Black Pat went over, putting out his head, sniffing tamely. The smell of cigars mingled with the palette of a large elaborate lunch. Port and French cheeses had been involved. What else? He leant closer, decoding the scents of consommé, Dover sole, champagne, and the deluxe personality of chocolate éclairs.

Suddenly Churchill was awake, glasses hooked over his ears in an instant. He shouted out to find the dog hanging over him and then pulled himself into a sitting position, heaving up the pillows.

Black Pat lay down on his side, a black mass covering the floor. The weight of the giant body pressed on the lungs, driving
out a foul cloud. The dog’s head slipped round to the bed, vanishing beneath it.

Churchill poured himself a glass of whisky from a decanter on the bedside table, thinning it with soda water. He took a mouthful and his teeth bit together at the taste, whisky moving in a smooth stream to his stomach. Churchill sipped for a while and analysed a docile rasping noise. He realised it was the dog gnawing on a bed leg, its carnassial teeth sawing against the oak.

“Stop that!”

The dog’s lazy head appeared.

Churchill arranged himself in a more comfortable position, dragging the edges of his exotic red-and-gold Chinese-silk dressing gown around him. Thinking again of tomorrow, he let the crab claws of his imagination make exploratory nips over Monday’s agenda, investigating the shape of it. And it was as if the events of the day were already in the past, so perfectly could he envisage it: the view through the window during the car journey; the passing landmarks solemn with poignancy; Big Ben rising through the nearing skyline; the sound of shoes on gravel as they walked to the entrance. He heard the journalists’ retrospective questioning echoing across the bellying crevices of his mind, and talked roughly to his watery whisky.

“Stitch yourself together.”

“I see your thoughts.” Black Pat propped a shoulder against the bed, his head making a grave of the bedsheets as it sank in. “The eyes are a window to the soul and I see them all.”

“Hah, obnoxious clown,” Churchill said, turning to look at him, a defiant smile twitching. “In that case your eyes are a derelict staircase leading to a barren landing.” He drank from the glass, lip pushed whitely to the rim, draining the whisky. The glass went down with a firm clunk on the side.

“I remind myself continually not to perform autopsies on the future, but I admit I cannot prevent myself. It is an irremediable flaw.”

“You should treat yourself kindly,” Black Pat said from the sheets. “You should let yourself listen to the compulsions that drive you to do it.”

“Gammon!” Churchill reached behind his head to tug a pillow higher against the headboard. “I can’t bear the sound of my own voice, it won’t quiet. And it talks with such gloom, wanting to pauperise me. No, I won’t listen. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious.’ ”

He said this with an underlying sense of futility, looking at a vase of oxeye daisies Clementine had placed on his windowsill, put there with love and springing with life. He thought of Clementine’s hands picking them, dear hands among the leaves.

“Do you know what my wife says to me during these periods when you are around? She calls me a poor old thing.” A ripple of air caught the petals and they fluttered their tips with the draught. “Although sometimes I wonder which of us is really the poor old thing …” Churchill frowned. “It’s an enduring bruise on my conscience that our vile alliance has had such impact upon her. I worry about the sacrifices she has made for me, aware that I can’t hope to repay them, and the gratitude terrifies me. It devours me.”

The empty glass smoked with fumes, the scent of whisky drawing Black Pat to the bedside table, sidling there. His craving snout came within inches then ducked inside, wet against the deep glass base.

Churchill noticed. “That is Johnnie Walker Red Label, an exemplary blended Scotch. And not a drink I would offer to you.” He added, “I’d rather use it to kill my plants.”

Black Pat made a smooch of his mouth, amused. The glass
was released, banged across the tabletop and then left perilously on the edge. That hog from the quag! Churchill nudged the glass to safety with a finger.

Footsteps outside the door paused, a knuckle rapping before the handle bent and his nurse and factotum, Roy Howells, entered with a pot of fresh coffee.

Howells moved busily, the carpet an invisible network of circuits he had travelled every day for years: to the bedside table; to the wardrobe; to the bathroom; to the window.

“It’s nearly time for your afternoon bath, sir. Should I set the taps running?”

“Very good, Howes,” said Churchill, using the customary nickname. “Thank you.”

Howells disappeared into the adjoining bathroom, the taps blasting into the tub.

Jock had strolled in behind Howells. With a graceful bounce the cat landed on the bed, rubbing its head on Churchill’s arm. Catching sight of Black Pat, it jacked up its back and spat.

“Quite right, Jock.” Churchill smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

The cat was vicious, a small orange warrior. Caught by surprise, Black Pat whickered, his heavy head dodging the threshing claws.

“Keep buggering on,” Churchill said encouragingly.

“Me?”

“Not you, you poltroon, I was talking to Jock. I would much rather you keep buggering
off.
” Churchill let out a sigh, adding, “But I know how empty that statement is.”

Black Pat’s expression was entertained and then broke, a deeper feeling in him lit across his face in a ghost. “I will be accompanying you tomorrow.”

“Yes.” The cat wound under Churchill’s hand and then twisted back. “It would trouble me if you didn’t.”

4.50 p.m
.

O
n either side of Chartwell’s front door was an elaborate eighteenth-century doorcase, carved wooden pillars decorated with overlapping leaves, two carved horns sending up a spray of wooden vines. It was a subtle introduction to the artistic investment made in the house by the owners. There on the doorstep were Corkbowl and Esther.

“You can do it, champ.” Corkbowl gave her a gentle smile.

She nodded at him, an anxious champ.

Howells invited them in and they stood in the narrow hall, quietly examining the giant visitors’ book placed on the walnut dresser. The book was guarded by a bronze of a Thoroughbred horse. A mahogany umbrella stand held a collection of walking sticks.

Esther received instructions from Howells: He would take
her to Churchill’s study presently. She was not to stay too long, as Churchill would need rest later. Corkbowl had his own instructions; he would be quarantined in Clementine’s study until required to drive Esther home. Both would receive tea if they wanted. Did they want tea? Then this would be arranged.

Up the stairs went Howells, Esther following. The staircase was a series of sharp corners, framed political cartoons over the walls, and photographs, Lord Kitchener in one of them, which seemed appropriate. On the landing, Howells cruised in front, his steps snatching lengths of precious carpet as he led Esther to the study. Esther tried to dawdle, to drag back some seconds. It was hopeless, Howells too efficient, already knocking on the study door. An inquisitive noise bid them enter, Churchill in his chair. He was the man she knew from newspapers and television, older than she had imagined him although she knew his age. That famous voice was still mostly unchanged and it would address her personally. Being starstruck was a flighty feeling, Esther a bit giddy with it.

“Esther Hammerhans, sir.” Howells heeled neatly and was gone.

Esther held her bag in a white fist.

“Ah, excellent.” Churchill indicated a small table set up near his desk. On it was a typewriter, made to be silent, and a ream of stacked paper. A straight-backed chair was ready for her.

Esther crept to the table. About to ask a question to ease the silence, she remembered Dennis-John’s instructions and didn’t. Instead she prepared the typewriter, a long procedure.

The arm of Churchill’s spectacles was in his mouth. Out it came. “You have completed your preparations?” He was keen to start. This was a difficult afternoon, pleasureless. He tasted the apprehension like chemical smoke in his throat, knowing they
would probably be joined by that maddening numbfish. It was more than probable. “Should we begin?”

She was ready, yes, smiling and pleasant. But something about Esther disturbed him. Hello, what’s this? There was a quality to her, a recognisable … Hmmm. His radar identified the property and monitored it. Yes, a strange energy about her, a dying star in the sky of her face.

Unaware, Esther sat at her small table. She privately toured the room from her chair. Above the door to the stairs hung a painting by John Lewis Brown titled
Two Cavalry Officers
. One officer in a cream jacket raised a strict arm at the officer in red, the red officer with his back to the viewer. Studying the painting, Esther emoted with the faceless red officer, seeing him there on his slovenly horse. A quick glance at Churchill saw he was looking at the gardens, looking away from her. Reassured, she started the tour of his study again.

Churchill was evaluating his thoughts. Unusual thoughts; Churchill dismissed them.
Pox-rot
, he chastised himself.
Bunkum
.

His mental focus returned to the speech, this abomination of a chore. The speech had to be aggressively approached; a task to throw over by the ankle.
Bah, start the thing
, he lectured his reluctant mood, and shuffled papers on his desk.

For a few silent moments Churchill thumbed through the card catalogue of his past, resolving an introduction. Esther poised at the typewriter and then he had it, the words found. A sentence was dictated.

Useless with nerves she typed out a string of nonsense. “Oh I’m so sorry, I’ve …” Perhaps if she used the correction fluid. She reached for it and was stopped.