Mr. Chartwell (22 page)

“Yes,” said Churchill. “Good.”

The speech took up again and stalled as he registered what she’d said. “Provoking?” Then, understanding it, he didn’t wait for an answer. “Yes, provoking. Good.”

He was encouraged. She was provoked; it was a positive in a void of negatives. Churchill’s mind went again to the others who had been exposed to these negatives, to those dearest people in his family. And his heart projected images of darling Diana, his oldest daughter, driven to the night’s depth last October. The cruelty of this malediction and its fanged hangman was enough to tear holes in the psyche. But there were poultices to fill these holes, tricks to stay afloat. Churchill, his eyes on the H.M.S.
Indomitable
, would jab at the provocation in Esther. He would stoke it.
Yes
, he thought,
keep drilling
. A duty, he would uphold it.

“Well, you know what they say,” Churchill said. “You know what they say if life hands you lemons.”

“Snack on the hand?” volunteered Black Pat.

“Lemonade,” said Esther, confident. “Make lemonade.”

“They say,” Churchill finished, “at least you are armed with tough-skinned lemons. Yes, strong yellow projectiles.”

Esther hid a laugh.

“And,” said Churchill, “if life hands you flies …”—a nod came
to verify it, reasonably amused—“make
stock
. And then fling it at your enemies.”

A remarkable attitude, but surely not feasible. Esther recalled the boxroom conversation with Black Pat, their twinned orbits, his blameless reaction to a reaction which originated from her. She said, “I don’t know if I have an enemy especially, because I feel”—she put an emphasis on this word, emphasising that it wasn’t her feeling but an instruction—“I
feel
that I’m the instigator, if you like, of any …” How to say this? “Of any handed lemons, and so I’ve got to accept it.”

“Never.” Churchill’s words were fast and stern. “You must hurl yourself into opposition, for you are at war.”

“No, Esther.” Black Pat pawed her shin.

She moved the shin tightly behind her chair. “A war?”

“Not a war, Esther,” Black Pat murmured at her.

Churchill said, “On that you must trust me. From your withering depths to your wuthering heights, you are at war.”

“We are fighting on the same side,” Black Pat said in a pledge. “Fighting together.”

“And,” said Churchill, hearing, “you must trust me that you are fighting alone. Esther Hammerhans,” his urgency was a prayer, “do not consent to the descent.”

For a moment Black Pat was silent. Then he recovered, speaking to Esther and malignant.

“Very stirring,” he said softly. “It reminds me of a joke I just invented on the spot about this exact situation.…” He smirked at her and it was ugly. “There are two men on a sinking ship and one man says to the other, ‘Do you know how to swim?’ The second man replies that he doesn’t, so the first man says, ‘Neither do I, but I’ll hold your head up if you hold mine.’ ”

“Disregard it,” said Churchill. “Disregard all the propaganda, it’s a quicksand strategy.”

“Except that it’s the truth.” Black Pat’s snout went to an area near her foot, and then on it. “Ahoy,” he said from the pillow of her shoe. “Ahoy.”

A knock on the door. Howells, keen for Churchill not to tire himself, tactfully enquired about whether Churchill would require a place to be laid at the table.

Howells had a list of questions about dinner. Friends were visiting and would be here shortly. Esther sensed Howells’s frog-marching eyes on her and obediently started packing to leave. The speech was passable, it would suffice. Churchill folded it into quarters to be stowed in his breast pocket, Howells returning back downstairs. Esther walked to the door. There she went, now stopping to make a courteous comment about a Swiss clock placed in the bookcase at the door. Esther admired its delicate machinery, impossibly miniature mechanisms swinging highlights on their brass edges.

“A gift from the people of Switzerland. It’s a perpetual-movement design by Jaeger-LeCoultre.” Churchill’s expression was wistful. “It’s a funny thing, the objects that resonate in your life. Not always the ones you expect, and not always in the way you expect.”

Esther saw he was circling a strip of metal in his hands, an item picked from the windowsill museum next to his desk. A thumb swept over the engraving, polishing it.

“It’s a piece of shrapnel,” Churchill explained. “Part of a twenty-pound shell from the First World War.” The fond thumb rubbed. “Would you believe this dropped between my cousin the ninth duke of Marlborough and me.” He paused at the memory, amazed. “We could have been extinguished, easily
scrubbed from existence.” A sage smile aimed at Esther. “But we were able to decline that particular invitation to take a seat in the kingdom. And later my cousin gave me this shrapnel, inscribed, ahhm”—here Churchill adjusted his spectacles, peering at the faint silver letters—“ah yes … ‘This fragment fell between us and might have separated us forever, but is now a token of our union.’ ”

The shrapnel was placed on the desk. “That is as it may be. However, on occasion I consider the phrase apt for other reasons.”

A goring, hate-filled glare surprised Black Pat, still sprawled across the floor.

“For it occurs to me,” said Churchill, “that this phrase applies to the cohesion I seek in myself.” A second glare was held and then dissolved. “It can appear to me that my life is splintered into disparate sections, Mayday afternoons and gloaming banishment. Such a cycle cannot be broken, and the battle is not with fighting to accept, but with accepting to fight. It is in doing this, to use a phrase I have used before, that we still are captains of our souls.”

He said to Esther as she stood in the doorway, his final mission statement, “My endurance of the buckle-end welts which existence has dealt me is a token of union with myself. You see, I unite my past and present, and I therefore survive intact.”

Esther nodded, uncertain, then nodding and sure. “I do see.”

Churchill smiled at her, seeing her steel. “Magnificent, ah, Hammerhans. Let us be beaten and jump up nonetheless, giving the Bronx cheer.”

6.35 p.m
.

C
hurchill selected a cigar, and pierced the end with a match. He didn’t give much notice to the voice speaking from the floor.

“Leaving her isn’t something I can do.”

Churchill put the cigar between his teeth and lit it. There was the tiny sound of tobacco flakes catching and smouldering in orange crumbs. He took some enquiring puffs and exhaled. The smoke made a jet through the air. He said to Black Pat, watching as the smoke melted, “There is a chance she could leave you, though.”

“Not now.” Black Pat heard a car starting up in the driveway at the front of the house. He went to the window, looking down at Corkbowl’s Morris Minor reversing and then arching to the lane. “Despite your Sermon on the Mount she’s—”

Churchill interrupted. “Not the Mount, it was a sermon from the front. You make us soldiers in arms, she and I.”

Black Pat answered from his window, “She doesn’t know that.”

“You underestimate her.” Churchill admired the embers. “And it’s to her credit that she underestimates you.”

6.45 p.m
.

“W
ell?” Corkbowl ducked in his seat to see Chartwell House disappearing behind a curtain of forest, the road in a curve. “How was it?”

The evening lit everything in cinema colours, the car in a ravine below the risen banks of tall beech and oak trees. Red dried earth showed in patches through the trunks, ivy draped in sheets over fallen logs. Corkbowl had opened the windows, letting the heat escape from the baked car.

Esther wafted her neck, wafting her forehead, a futile breeze from the wafting. “It was okay, yes. It was …”—she spoke profoundly to her handbag, talking to it as she wedged it in the foot well—“enlightening.”

“Excellent,” said Corkbowl.

A beat of silence. Both voices came at the same moment. Corkbowl insisted she go first.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she smiled, “for driving me here today.”

Corkbowl did one of his speciality sidelong glances, a hairy little look. “It’s been my pleasure.”

“Devoting your Sunday to chaperoning me around? You’re easily pleased. I don’t think many people would be crazy about the idea.”

“Then I’m crazily pleased,” said Corkbowl. He tried out an alternative. “I’m easily crazed.” This didn’t work. “I think I’ll stick with the mortifying steel-hoop statement from Beth’s hallway.”

Esther remembered it. She stared out the window, ferns sending bright young growth from nests of desiccated fronds.

“It’s a lovely thing to hear, if a little unusual considering that I’m not exactly at my most …” She was unsure how to explain it. “I don’t have much of a capacity for …” It trailed into nothing again.

Corkbowl stepped in. “All friends are a luxury.”

“I’m afraid my friendship is a bit of a strange luxury.”

“So are oysters,” Corkbowl said immediately.

Shades of dark green and red, the ivy covered in red dust at the edges of the road, this area unchanged for centuries. Rounding a corner the small road straightened, a view of more trees ahead before another corner, shadows between the branches revealing slim channels into the woods. And there, a dark shape.

“I doubt it would be classified in the same league as an oyster,” Esther said. “If we’re using those terms then I would probably have to admit to being a bad substitute.”

“Like a vegetable oyster,” Corkbowl answered, with a bizarre answer for everything.

The landscape opened up into a stretch of fields, closing again as the car met a wooded hill, moving up over the coiling road. Esther watched the trunks block and then break with short patches of the red earth, seeing further into the woods, into the evergreen caves, decaying trees lined with drifts of brown leaves. And up ahead, something.

“It’s another name for salsify.” Corkbowl laughed at his own oddness. “In case you’re wondering, I’ve got a million more bits of rubbish trivia, and I’m not afraid to use them to illustrate all my arguments.” Holding the steering wheel, he shrugged with an elbow. “Anything you say, I can mash on a confusing, irrelevant analogy.”

A quick glance at Corkbowl, a friendly taunt: “I had noticed that, yes.”

The figure at the edge of the wood ahead, plashing his jaws, the tongue stroking against the roof of the mouth and hanging in a pant; he waited for the car.

“Yep, thought you might,” said Corkbowl. “I’ve got the social dexterity of this.” He put his fist out and held it rigidly. Not rigid enough, he said, “No, of that,” and pointed to a stone wall.

Short laughter. “Oh, you’re not that bad.… I’d have placed you on a much higher social level.” Esther made a swimming fish with one hand to demonstrate the flexible level.

The car came past, driving in an easy crawl as Corkbowl chatted. Black Pat moved with a pack-animal gait, running alongside the car, now veering to probe a fallen branch, now back at the car. Esther kept her eyes away from him. Inspired to lick the half-open passenger window, the gruesome textures of Black Pat’s tongue swerved over the glass.

Corkbowl had seen Esther’s swimming hand. “Not even close, I’m afraid.” The next sentence had a secret woven into it: “Nope, if you came with me for a drink I could prove it to you.”

Esther’s head turned to him. She saw his profile very concentrated on driving.

The car slowed to a plod, navigating a shallow pit in the road. Black Pat had slipped behind, walking parallel with the rear of the car and dawdling. Esther checked him in the wing mirror and saw it was safe. “A drink?” she said quietly to Corkbowl.

Not safe. Black Pat leapt forwards. His fur rubbed against the car paintwork, pacing next to her now.

“Donkey see, donkey do.” A carnival of vapours. That enormous canoe of a mouth came over to Esther’s ear. “So don’t be an ass.”

She sat still.

“Don’t accept an invitation from this donkey, Esther.”

She wouldn’t give Black Pat the gratification of acknowledging his orders.

Corkbowl slid owlish eyes in her direction. He said, “I mean, if you were wanting proof of my social inadequacy … or a drink.” Here he was, hating himself as he said, “And it doesn’t have to be from a thermos flask either, in case that makes a difference.” He gave it up absolutely with a sigh. “For the record, all that should have sounded much more inviting than it actually did. It’s a classic example of something fun warping into something pathetic … a bit like when …” He didn’t know. Corkbowl hesitated. “Umm, I’m not …”

“Compostable?” Black Pat guessed for him. He finished, “Although yes you are.”

“I’m not having much success in thinking of another classic
example,” said Corkbowl, “but I’m sure there are hundreds, like for instance …” No, he didn’t have an instance.

Esther watched light stripe the windscreen, disappearing with the shade of the wood and then striping.

“Esther, don’t ignore me,” Black Pat said. “I can’t let you ignore me.” The whisper begged against her ear. “I can’t let you.”

Esther snapped her fingers, grinning at Corkbowl with the answer. “I know a classic example of fun and pathetic.” Her fingers snapped again with the victory of it. “Crying and dancing at the same time. Wretched.”

“Blimey,” Corkbowl said, “that is
wretched.
”

Esther said, “You don’t cry when you dance, do you?”

“Of course he does,” said Black Pat, disgusted by Corkbowl.

“Not since yesterday,” answered Corkbowl. “Be serious, Esther,” he said, nearly serious himself, “I’m too manly to cry, far too manly.” Very slyly he added, “And if you came with me for a drink I could prove it to you. At least, until the music starts.”

“This idiot,” said Black Pat, “is a revolutionary type of idiot.” He made a crumpled face, sickened. “He’s so idiotic it’s radical. I can’t—
God
—” A shudder moved across his huge body, then a wet retch. Another retch of rejection, a gassy gagging choke, Esther ignoring him utterly. He shunted away from her window, head forced as if punched back. Black Pat stood there on the road, shrinking with the distance. In the rearview mirror Esther saw his expression, a bereft one, a forlorn angle to his head. Dejected, he allowed the car to escape.