Mr. Chartwell (23 page)

“It’s not often I get invited to go for a drink with a socially inept dancing crier,” Esther said to Corkbowl.

“Didn’t think so,” Corkbowl answered. He had this to add: “Which is lucky, because I was relying on the allure of novelty.”

8.30 p.m
.

T
he front door slammed. A precise slam, it was a signal. The hall filled with expectant silence. Conspicuously empty, the house was taut. Esther sidled to the front room. Evidence of Black Pat was everywhere—a sofa cushion thrown off and shaken around the floor, the sofa shoved from the wall, a frayed newspaper, a stick methodically snapped into sections and then chewed at. In the middle of the room she put her bag on the carpet and felt the calmness of nostalgia. She pulled the corduroy cushion back onto the sofa; she piled the shredded newspaper with her feet. She kicked the ruined stick and then left it as a job to do later. He would be here soon. She started for the kitchen.

“You were a while.”

On elbows and stomach he bumped out from behind the sofa and was lying there behind her, his face buried in her bag. A
crunch. His hidden jaws worked. She was trying to conceal her mood with all the same behaviour but Black Pat sensed Esther was remote from him. For a moment they were both strange to each other, a frost of unfamiliarity over them.

“The drive took longer than expected,” Esther answered. “The traffic was quite bad.”

Black Pat’s chewing face emerged. “You didn’t go for a drink?” He said this and something shiny dropped from his mouth, then a piece of red plastic. His voice was carefully bored.

“No, we weren’t going to go today, just one day in a week or so. It’s only an idea.” She realised she was apologising. “Have you eaten my pocket mirror?” She said it as a casual observation. It was the wrong reaction, a confirmation. Black Pat responded with determined destruction, very active in his annihilation of a paperback book pulled from the bag. The paperback was butchered into several smaller ones and then violently enjoyed.

This was reasonably annoying, the book only half read. She took a step forwards and Black Pat’s eating became faster, becoming gobbling, relieved to have annoyed her. She took another small step. He gobbled in victory, a jabbering narration coming with it:
“Hab-ab-ab-ab-ab! Hab-ab!”

Esther strode towards him and Black Pat wasn’t lying on the floor anymore. Now he was braced against the floor, ready to leap. The silk lining of her bag was liberated at one corner. Strong jerks persuaded it free with a loud tearing sound. Esther reached for the bag and Black Pat snatched himself away, gobbling great holes in the leather. Lowered into his bracing sprawl he waited for a chase. Black Pat tightened his legs, about to bounce off in escape. In this position he pretended to be uninterested. The end of his tail hovered in hysterical anticipation and ruined the illusion.

Esther stopped the game, surrendering.

Down sagged the tail as she left the room, leaving her bag to be sacrificed. Black Pat’s neck rose in a straight stare, ears low and then lifted as he heard her walk to the kitchen. He listened with his ears pitched up, the tips in hard points. He stood quickly and listened. He paced out to the kitchen and his foot caught in the bag, emptying its contents in a trailing mess.

Esther was pouring boiling water into a teapot. She turned and Black Pat was standing in the doorway. On two feet he rested a shoulder on the wall, his size filling the space. He watched her with a sloped head, his head and shoulder leant against the doorframe. She moved around the kitchen, fetching the milk, fetching two cups. Black Pat’s yellow eyes went with her, examining the shape underneath the clothes. He knew the curve of Esther’s knees with those delicate ligaments, relished the swell of her skull; bones in her elbows and wrists were a hymn, that network of veins in her feet a poem of circulation. The lust of custody lingered on the cartilage of her ears, on the skin of her neck. Esther fished the tea leaves around with a spoon and his eyes waited. He pressed his head to the doorframe and stared with exploitative patience, his patient waiting a savage assault.

“I’ve eaten part of your bag,” Black Pat said, slightly hopeful, slightly provocative. “Most of it, actually.”

“It’s okay,” she replied, her mildness making dread spring in his chest. “I’ve got others.”

“Where?” Black Pat demanded.

She didn’t answer, busy stirring a teaspoon. She felt him watch with his jealous eyes.

Black Pat’s sloped head stayed against the doorway in its magazine pose. A complex silence ran with undertones.

Esther’s cheeks blazed as she poured out a cup of tea. She forced herself to speak with cheerful innocence. “Do you want one?”

Black Pat didn’t, wanting something else. What he wanted sang out in the language of his massive bestial body. That animal physicality resonated through the kitchen with its wild driving appetites and its brutal passion.

Esther sat on the counter, the Formica warm through her skirt. She swung her heels against the cupboards and it was a clumsy disguise. The cause for their strange reserve, for her awkwardness, made a coward of her. Esther stuck to her mute act, heels thumping and placid on the cupboards, just a woman relaxed in her kitchen. But Black Pat could smell the adrenaline reactions in her system. He examined this hormonal recipe and knew the truth.

“Are you all right?” Esther eventually asked. “You seem a bit—”

“Philosophical? Yes, philosophical.”

No, this was wrong. Esther didn’t correct him. “Is there a particular reason?”

Black Pat gave her a lingering look. “… Acutely.”

Esther swallowed a big mouthful of tea. “Me?”

Black Pat answered no in a way which wasn’t. “I don’t like Corkbowl.”

“That’s extremely obvious,” said Esther.

“I’m liking him less.” Black Pat mooched down at his hind legs and the floor. “Less and less. Less than less.”

Esther said cautiously, “You want to talk about Corkbowl?” She put the cup on the counter and blew on her fingers.

“You know what I want to talk about.”

A silly performance of denial from Esther: “I don’t.”

This started a standoff between them. A breeze came from
the open back door, a breath from the oven of the evening and muggy. Under her bangs her forehead felt damp. She took a clip from her pocket and pinned the bangs up in a weird tuft, trying to end the quarrel. She expected him to ridicule the tuft, wishing for it. With slightly raised eyebrows she saw Black Pat’s face sober, the tuft ignored. His sober face became sullen, the look of a heartbreaker scandalized to find himself spurned.

“Please don’t,” he said to Esther.

So it had begun. She gave long enough to pretend at confusion. “Do what?”

“Let me stay.”

A heavy, uncertain stare from Esther. Above the orange light and the chaos of heat the kitchen grew a thin sadness, the empty sadness of a dying relationship. Here it was, unstoppably. Black Pat fawned his chops against the wall with a moan.

Esther said, “Sorry?”

That old Romeo, what he said next was shameless. He said it slowly and full of clues. “If you let me love you it will be the longest love of your life.”

“You love me?” Esther was shocked to hear her own voice, immediately doubting she had heard him right. As a grotesque experiment she said, “Black Pat, you don’t love me.”

The answer was brazen: “Oh yes I do.”

“I’m not sure it is love.” She was shy talking like this. A shy little explanation came. “Because I’ve had love and I remember how it was.”

“Double it,” said Black Pat. “Double it, double it. You’ve got no idea.… It’s a love with a capacity you have no concept of.” Black Pat said with a hot voice, “It’s a love that would endure beyond the precincts of your days with a ferocity you can’t hope to equal.”

“Wait … ferocity?”

“Boundless, endless, friendless ferocity.”

“No,” Esther said after a speechless period, her eyes dark holes. “That’s not love, it’s possession. It’s what you did to Michael, you possessed him.”

“I was loyal to him, devoted,” countered Black Pat. The words came through an unusual smile. “And I’m devoted to you.” The desire was alcoholic, making him teasing. He hammered a paw to his chest. “I’m devoted. Esther, this …”—his paw pounded at the chest in demonstration—“this is devotion.” That coaxing, the animal masculinity of him, they urged her relentlessly. “Come on,” Black Pat pleaded, “I’m here now, Esther. Let me stay.”

A great drowsiness, it was the lull of submission, a call from the elephant graveyard of defeat.
Then let it take me
, thought Esther. She started her weary response and something caused it to lodge unspoken. There was an obstacle, a block stationed in the road. Churchill, with his defiant speech; the agony of Michael; the barracks of Beth and Big Oliver; and Corkbowl, a little light on the shoreline: These sums equated and rose up in a fist of indignant survival. It wasn’t a question when she asked, “Did you ask Michael if you could stay?”

“It was different with Michael, a different arrangement.” Black Pat made a small noncommittal shrug, not wanting to get into this subject. “He didn’t have an option. Neither did Churchill. Because there’s not always an option. I was built into the fibre of their lives in a way I’m not …” He deliberated. “With you I’m not as …” Black Pat smashed through the finer details. “… I’m not immersed in you in the same innate sense.” He added smoothly, “At this point I’m not, not yet.”

“Which means at this point I have an option as to whether you immerse yourself?”

“Immerse … ahm.” He didn’t like the term, needing a better word. “Immerse …” He searched for a less menacing word. “It’s more mutual—”

Esther wasn’t interested in his horrific jargon. “I have an option though, don’t I?”

“Right now you do.” Honestly he said this, the honesty problematic for him. “For a while you do. But it decreases and will pass.”

“It will become difficult?”

A convulsed flash of emotion: “It will become easier.” Persuasive now: “Esther, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

Esther looked around her at the kitchen, at the wreckage made by Black Pat. Shed fur lined the edges of the cabinets, chips in the veneer made by claws. Dry leaves and sticks in some places, and there a piece of broken glass. Soil and sand streaked across the tiles, tracking into the rest of the house, where patches of paint on the walls were grubbed with dirt. The shreds of material in each room, the mess of chewed wood. A door knocked from its hinges, the pervasive smell. A sheep’s pelvis splintered on the landing and then merrily dumped; the cemetery of her garden strewn with small skeletons, the lawn worn to sand. And then she thought of the irresistible advance, his steady progression through the rooms, up the stairs, the distance between them obliterated in five days. Just five days. So imagine what he could do in ten days, in a month, in a lifetime of campaigns. Her hair was in the voluminous style that occurs when hair is continually swept back with sweaty palms, the scalp also sweating.

Black Pat was speaking. “Believe me, it’s easy.” He explained it to her: It was similar to the seduction of sleep. If she stopped resisting it would take her in a lapsing opiate, a painless embrace. She focussed on him as he said, “Esther”—he was beseeching her—“Esther, all you have to do is consent.”

“Consent to the descent.” She used a toneless whisper. She repeated it to them both.

Black Pat ground his vexed teeth. That enraging, thwarting phrase. He dug his claws into the wallpaper as Esther listened to her memory:

“It’s not all you’ll have heard”: Churchill warning her. “You are at war.… On that you must trust me”: His warnings were buzzing propeller blades in an amp full of water. They played again.

Black Pat saw her expression, understood it. “Please … please, Esther …”

She wasn’t angry or demanding, she was unemotional as she said, “I can’t consent.”

“No, this is a transitional—”

Her interruption was gentle. “No, this is our good-bye.” Before he could argue she said, “I’ve realised I owe it to myself.” A pause. “Black Pat, this is good-bye.”

“You’ve realised you owe yourself? You realised alone?” Black Pat wore a resentful smile. It softened, it didn’t matter. “That prune Corkbowl didn’t exactly help. Neither did Churchill.” He considered smirking. Too morose, he couldn’t. “You three formed a sort of trinity of idiots and made a resistance against me.”

Esther grinned at her knees. “A trinity of idiots? As glamorous as that?”

“Not really.” His confession, it came with a sigh. “In fairness
you resisted quite well on your own.” A moment passed in silence. “I thought I had you.”

“Perhaps for a bit,” she answered. “Perhaps for a while.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“You were very close.”

“More than close.” Black Pat’s tone was soulful. “I was sure I had you.”

“So was I, for what it’s worth.”

“It’s not worth a dime.”

Esther recalled their first meeting. “Not a thousand pounds?” The answer was obvious; she said it anyway. “You don’t pay though, do you?”

“Only one of us would have ever paid.” He watched her with those lonely eyes. “And I can’t take anything less than everything.”

Esther sat there on the counter. She linked her ankles.

“Well …”—Black Pat pretended at acceptance, a handsome effort—“… you win some, you lose some. You skin some, you bruise some. You tin some, you juice some.” He scraped the fur on his chin into a neat Vandyke beard. “That’s me quoting myself, I hope you appreciate.”

Esther said, “You almost won.” She was bashful as she told him, “And to also quote you, it would have been the easiest thing in the world.”

“It’s either my way or the hard way.” Then Black Pat clicked his gums, acknowledging the con. “But in truth, in time, my way is the hardest way imaginable.” He stood in the doorway as a minute went by.

“So this is our good-bye.”

An amber haze of late sun fogged the left side of Esther’s vision. “Will you be back?”

“If you’re unlucky.”

Her cheek glowed in the sun, the sun over her head and dress in a bronze plate. “Will I be unlucky?”