The Summer Isles (18 page)

There I go. It’s almost impossible not to be swallowed up by the myth of John Arthur. But then, the myth probably tells us more about the man than the truth ever could. I’m starting to wonder, in fact, if the truth is ever worth telling.

One evening, my college principal Cumbernald comes to my rooms unasked. He stretches out in one of the two chairs facing the fireplace and companionably beckons me to join him in the other.

“Sorry to hear you’ve been ill,” he says. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

“It’s really just a recurrence of the thing I had before.”

“Hmmm…”

Cumbernald steeples his fingers. I wait for him to say more.

“Well, that’s good. Problem with Scotland is the damn rain. Worse than Oxford. Still, a holiday’s a holiday…”

“I imagine Tuscany was a little different.”

“Quite marvellous, actually.” He smiles at the memory. Cumbernald was brown before he went. Now, he runs the risk of being mistaken for an Indian—which is not to be taken lightly these days. “Can’t say I’m glad to be back.”

I study him as he brings me up to date with what’s been going on here at college, which is all the usual back-biting midsummer rubbish.

“So we’ll fade out most of the stuff about the French Revolution.
Definitely
no question in Mods this year…”

Faced with the body of an actual human adult male, my resolution to kill John Arthur seems less simple. People are such big beasts when you look at them—Cumbernald probably weighs as much as a stag. Poison, even as Cumbernald sips the tea I’ve poured him, would be technical and messy even if I were able to get hold of the necessary chemicals. And a bomb requires know-how, the help of an experienced group. A knife appeals to me because of its simplicity and theatricality—I’ve always had a soft spot for Charlotte Corday—but I’m not even very good at carving chicken. Or I could use a gun.

“—by the way,” I say, interrupting, “you’ll have to do without me for the first week or so of Michaelmas.”

Bang bang.
Scurrying KSG officers. The salty drift of cordite and smoke. Not Charlotte Corday as she plunged her knife into Marat whilst he bathed, but Gavrilo Princip and the Archduke Ferdinand, John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln.

“Oh really, Brook? Well, as you know we’re quite generous with time
out
of term. So I’m not sure that—”

“—I have a personal invitation to the Trafalgar Day celebrations from John Arthur.” I reach for the wad of papers that arrived soon after his letter with detailed itineraries, a gold-leaf embossed invitation, confirmation of four days booked at the New Dorchester. “Of course, the actual day itself is also his fiftieth birthday…”

“Yes? Indeed…” Cumbernald studies the papers. He swallows audibly as he hands them back. “I’m sure that we can manage without you for a week or so, Brook. In fact, I’m certain you’ll have a splendid time. No problem. No problem at all.”

He stands up, laying a hand on my shoulder before I can pull away. “But you’re
still
looking a bit peaky. My theory is that with all the stresses and strains of Varsity life these days, one holiday in a summer simply isn’t enough. To be honest, I find the Italians rather greasy…” His fingers squeeze my thin flesh as he gazes at me. “So Eileen and the children and I, we have a chalet at this place outside Ross on Wye. It’s very clean, very friendly, very smart. All very modern. We’re always saying there’s room enough to fit in at least one
interesting
guest. Anyway, we get bored on our own—married life, you know… So I was wondering, Brook… I’ve been meaning to ask… If you might not fancy…?”

Walter Bracken is also back from a summer holiday of sorts, which consisted of trudging up and down various hills in the Lake District in dubbined boots. There, apparently, even on this of all summers, it’s been raining. His sister came around to my rooms one morning to advise me of his return, picking up things and laying them down again as if looking for dust whilst she reminded me of my promise to be a friend to him—especially as she’s off to York for a few weeks.

I’m more than happy to agree: now that my plans have begun to crystallise, I’d be glad for any excuse to contact Bracken. When I speak to him on the phone, he suggests we meet at his college, but I steer him back towards the cottage at Old Marston, and that long shed.

As we sit playing cribbage in the nearby Bricklayers Arms, Bracken seems pale, quieter and glummer than ever. Perhaps, I think, he really does share my vice, my curse, my attraction. Perhaps in some other world, in some different time and place, he and I might have found ways of physically consoling each other. But this is here. This is now. When I mention I’m going to London in October, he tells me I should visit the Shot Tower at Woolwich before they pull it down, then shakes his head and splits a matchstick with his thumbnail as if struck by a sense of pointlessness.

“Has your principal been on to you about this project of ours?” he asks eventually.

“Not really. Has yours?”

“I think that’s probably an end to it. Anyway, I won’t be around for much longer…” He suddenly sinks his pint. “I’ve been asked to move. Well, asked isn’t quite the right word.”

“Is it what you were saying before? This thing in Australia?”

“Basically…” He suppresses a belch. “Yes.”

“That can’t be so bad, can it?”

He gives me a look, then trips on my walking stick as he heads off to get us both another pint of lukewarm Wadworths.

“What does this mean for your other work?” I ask, steering him back from the glum silence that has descended over us a pint or so later, and deeply conscious of the weight that I’m carrying in my inside jacket pocket. “The Humane Bullet.”

“That’s nearly done.”

“Can I take a look? I mean, this afternoon…”

He shrugs, rocking the table with his big body, half-spilling his beer. For our own separate reasons, we both seem to be intent on getting slightly drunk today.

“Let’s go then, shall we?”

I follow him out. After the darkness of the bar, it’s a surprise to return to this summer afternoon where the air is specked with tiny black flies disturbed by the harvest and an informal cricket match is in progress on a field beside St Nicholas’s church.
No run!
Mannish laugher. The rap of wood on leather.

The cottage is in the kind of mess I’d imagined Bracken would create in Ursula’s absence. There are socks strewn in the hall, and an uneaten lump of bacon lies glued to the frying pan in the kitchen. As he opens the back door, I notice a stack of unopened long brown envelopes stuffed beside a dead begonia on the window ledge. HMSO. One of them looks like a telegram.

Still, I admire his blank gaze as he adjusts the gun vice in the long shed with his warty hands, then drags a piece of pig out from the fridge. After all the vagaries of history, I envy the certainties of his graphs and figures.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this,” I begin, “but I still don’t understand what your objection is to taking this new job. After all, Oxford these days really isn’t the place for someone who’s interested in facts.”

He pulls a wire he’s rigged up now to work from a longer distance.
Blam.
The blue pig at the far end rocks back and forth. The teletypes chatter.

“I suppose,” he says, “that you imagine one device for killing people is much like another? You think this work here is bad enough, so I really shouldn’t have any problem with doing something similar? After all, that’s what we scientists are about, isn’t it? Making bigger bombs. Look at Alfred Nobel…”

I gaze back at him through the smoke, my ears still ringing from the shot. “I just don’t understand what you’re afraid of.”

“The future, I suppose.”

“It’s there, anyway, though, isn’t it? Whatever it is, it’s waiting for somebody to take hold of it.”

“I used to think that,” Bracken says, writing numbers as he speaks, then suddenly pressing his pencil down hard enough to splinter the tip. “I used to believe that my work with the Humane Bullet was something someone else would do anyway even if I didn’t. It’s the prostitute’s old excuse…”

“You don’t see it like that now?”

He gives the paper one last jagged dot. “The Humane Bullet is new research as far as I can tell. It’s all been battle reports and autopsies before now. And it’s there, I’ve found the Humane Bullet—a thousand different ones, anyway. And at the moment, I’m really the only person who understands what it is. Of course, I have to file reports with assessors and the War Office to justify the grants, but that’s just paperwork. Nobody reads them. Now I’ve done it, now it’s there, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some way to unmake it.”

Silence hangs between us. Even the pigeons on the roof have stopped cooing.

“Of course,” he adds, clattering around in his toolbox. “That’s probably unlikely…”

The afternoon slips by, and I begin to get a headache from the noise and the bad air and too much lunchtime beer. As the smoke finally starts to clear and he begins to sweep up the cartridges, I know that I must seize my moment.

“I haven’t been too well lately,” I say—I think—carelessly enough. But Bracken immediately stops and looks at me from over the handle of his broom. In the few long bands of afternoon sunlight that penetrate the room, with the ghosts of smoke, the deep brown shadows, the spoiled carcasses, the gleam of the cartridges and the grey of gunmetal, the scene already has a monumental quality. A painting that schoolchildren might look at on a day trip to the art gallery in some changed future. B
ROOK
A
ND
B
RACKEN
D
ISCUSS
T
HE
D
EATH
O
F
J
OHN
A
RTHUR
.

“The fact of the matter is, ah, Walter, that I’m dying. Hence this cough. Hence this bloody walking stick. It’s lung cancer, and it’s inoperable. I still don’t feel too bad really, all things considered. As long as I take the tablets…”

The few flies that have found their way into the shed have settled on the spoiled meat in busy silence. Outside, the pigeons are cooing again, the sparrows are rattling their feet on the roof. I can even hear faint shouts as the cricket match over on the green comes to its rowdy conclusion.

“But when my time comes,” I continue, “there’s no pretending it’ll be anything less than ugly.” Reaching into my pocket—slowly, deliberately, the way people to do in films—I produce Francis’s pistol. “I’d like to be in control of my own destiny,” I say as I begin to unwrap it from a grubby handkerchief. “There was a friend of mine. He died in the War. This came back as part of his belongings…”

I’d planned to say more, to concoct a story about how fitting it would be for me to kill myself with this particular weapon. And I’d expected some reaction. That—I don’t know—he’d be shocked, or knowing. That he’d care, or that he wouldn’t care. That, even, we might even hug, touch, if only briefly, and share our weary male humanity. But at this point Bracken simply leans his broom against the wall and takes the pistol from me. Metal clicks on metal as he spins out the wheel and inspects the barrel. His gaze is intent. Scientific.

“This hasn’t been used for a long time…” he says. “I’ll need to clean it.”

I watch in silence as he goes about wiping and rodding and oiling the pistol as simply as if it were just some bit of a car or a vacuum cleaner. Then he selects a brown box of cartridges, loads it, and places it in the vice facing the pig.

Blam blam blam blam blam

Even muffled by the lead-lined blanket he’s thrown over it, the air rings as he jerks the trigger wire. Startled flies cloud around the swaying meat.

“This is a Webley .45 Bulldog Revolver,” he says as he removes the pistol and cleans it again. “It’s pre-War. You probably noticed how it pulled off to the left, but it’s still in serviceable condition.”
Click.
“This is the catch. It’s a double-action, which means you can either pull the trigger all the way back like this.”
Click.
“Or you cock the hammer first and then squeeze. It’s a lot easier, if you’re not used to firearms, to cock it first. Otherwise there’s quite a lot of pressure on the trigger and you risk lifting the barrel up from the target.”
Click.
“Like that. Here…”

He shows me how to use the rod beneath the barrel to clear spent cartridges. Then, so intent that it’s him rather than the gun that now scares me, he makes me load the thing, and stand half-way down the cage, and hold it out, and aim at the blue pig and pull the trigger. Suddenly alive, the pistol tries to leap out of my sweaty palms, but by the fourth shot, the sensation of it going off is surprisingly ordinary. Guns, after all, are simply well-crafted bits of metal; it’s we humans who are strange and dangerous. Then he gives me a small box of cartridges. I count ten inside it.

“These are quite long. 200 grain. Snub-nosed, so they won’t travel as far as the ones you’ve just been firing, and they’re less accurate. But they’re especially, ah…”

I nod. He means lethal.

“You really must keep it locked away, Brook.”

I stare at Walter Bracken for a moment, still waiting for him to tell me that I should just hand the pistol back to him, and forget about ever using it. Still stupidly waiting for that touch, that sharedness, or for something to snap, for reality to intervene between me and my plans; for something to go wrong. But his gaze remains distant.

“I, ah, don’t know quite how to say this,” I begin eventually. “But when the time comes, I don’t want you to be implicated. You know. There’s bound to be some kind of inquest…”

“That’s alright,” he says, turning away from me as be begins to lock up. “I’ll be gone by then. The way things are now, I really don’t feel as though there’s any point in my resisting.”

I’m suddenly frail, damp, weak. Almost post-coital. The scene has lost all sense of monumentality. I need to get away.

E
GGS AND BACON, EGGS
and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips
…