What a Carve Up! (23 page)

Joan and I would often ride out to Mr Nuttall’s farm together. It was a short ride, not much more than ten minutes, and contained a fabulous stretch of road – downhill but not too steep, just enough to get a bit of speed up, take your feet off the pedals and coast forward with the wind skimming your face and rushing through your ears, sweet tears of excitement welling at the corner of each eye. Of course, riding back was a different matter. We usually had to get off and push. Being conscientious children – unnaturally so, I would think now – we knew that our parents would begin to worry about us if we were gone for more than a couple of hours, which meant that our visits at first tended to be breathless, episodic affairs. We’d take books and pens and paper and things to eat, but usually, through lack of industry, would end up spending most of our time with Harry and the animals. That’s my recollection, anyway, of how things were in the spring and early summer of 1960: before Joan and I took the momentous step of setting up house together.

A word of explanation, at this point. For some weeks now I had been keeping my eye on a cowshed which stood empty in one of the outbuildings and which was, as far as I could see, going begging. I nagged my mother about this with some persistence, until finally she caved in and made a polite inquiry as to whether it would be possible for me to use it. ‘He’s writing a book,’ she explained with reluctant pride, ‘and needs somewhere where he can get peace and quiet.’ Clearly Mrs Nuttall was quick to pass this information on to her husband, who was so impressed that he took personal responsibility for the matter: and when I next rode down to the farm and opened the heavy, rust-hinged door on to the cowshed’s dark interior, I found that my new retreat had been supplied with a desk (actually, I think, an obsolete workbench) and a little wooden chair, and that the naked bulb which hung by a wire from the roofbeams was now tastefully veiled with a faded green lampshade. And that was just the start. As the summer went on I moved all my favourite books and ornaments out of my bedroom and into this gloomy haven; Mrs Nuttall provided me with two vases and a regular supply of irises and chrysanthemums; and Harry even managed to fix up a makeshift hammock, attached to the wall in a corner of the shed by two sturdy nails which were presumed (rather cavalierly, if you ask me) to be capable of bearing the weight of my recumbent body. I had, in short, acquired a new home, and it seemed to me that no happiness could be more complete.

But I was soon to find out that it could. One morning, early in the school holidays, I arrived at the shed to discover that a white envelope had been pushed underneath the door. It was addressed to me, in my father’s handwriting. It was my first letter.

∗

The Nuttall Farm Residents’ Association,
Poultry Place,
Much Clucking in the Yard,
Cropshire.

19 July 1960

Dear Mr Owen,

May I just say, on behalf of all my fellow-residents, how delighted we are that you have decided to take up the tenancy of Mr Nuttall’s vacant cowshed.

This news has caused general rejoicing all over the farm. Some of the animals have even come out in goose-pimples, and can’t wait to come and have a gander at your new house, while the cows are simply over the moon. As for the horses, they, of course, are especially pleased to have acquired a new neigh-bour.

You may find at first that some of the smaller birds have a tendency to grouse, or even snipe. But you must bear in mind that many of these animals, far from being as educated as yourself, can only be described as pig-ignorant. In short, I hope that you won’t be cowed by any of the remarks you may have herd.

Don’t hesitate to drop round for a chat whenever you like, as my wives and I are always happy to receive visitors. We get sick and tired of being cooped up in here, as the atmosphere is positively fowl.

Yours sincerely,

Bertie Rooster

(Cock of the Walk).

∗

The next dream that I remember is the briefest of the three, but was so vivid and frightening that it had me screaming at the top of my voice until my father came running from his bedroom to quieten me. When he asked me what was wrong, all I could say was that I’d had a nightmare, in which a man had been bending over my bed, staring into my face so intently that I was sure he was going to kill me. My father sat down beside me and stroked my hair. After a while I must have fallen asleep again.

There was one other thing I might have told him – except that I didn’t really grasp it myself at the time – to explain why the dream had been so terrifying. The truth is that I had recognized the man bending over the bed. I had recognized him because it was me. It was me, as an older man, staring back at my own young self, and my face was now ravaged with age and grooved like an ancient carving with the traces of pain.

∗

Photography was one of my father’s hobbies. He had a little, leather-cased box camera and a home-made flash unit, and in lieu of a darkroom he would cover up the bathroom windows with black paper and fill the bath with developing fluid until one day he miscalculated and burned off all the enamel and my mother forbade him to use it ever again. Before that happened, though, he came down to Mr Nuttall’s farm to make a photographic record of Joan and me at the height of our domestic bliss.

Yes, we were now living together. Or at least, writing together – for I had warily agreed to embark upon a collaboration, in which my Victorian detective was to be transported back to the Tudor period in order to solve a murder mystery at the behest of Henry VIII himself. (This whole scenario, I seem to recall, was largely inspired by
The Time Machine,
which my father had been reading aloud to me at bedtime.) For this purpose another chair had been obtained from Mrs Nuttall, and we now sat opposite each other, writing alternate chapters and passing them back and forth along the workbench, in between breaks for refreshment and inspirational walks around the miniature garden. Needless to say, the venture was not a success: we never finished our story, and when we found ourselves reminiscing about it more than twenty years later, neither of us could remember what had become of the manuscript.

None the less, it was during our brief period of creative partnership that my father took his photograph. It caught us in characteristic poses: Joan sitting eager and upright, a trusting, toothy grin lighting up her face, while I half turned away from the camera, a pencil held to my lips, my head inclined at an introspective angle. My father made two prints from the negative, and gave us one each. For many years, she told me, Joan kept her copy in a secret drawer, where it occupied a special place even among her most prized possessions. But I chose to have it on show in my bedroom; and before very long, as so often happens with these childish treasures, it was lost.

∗

Barkers Bank Ltd,
The Counting House,
Lucre Lane,
Shillingham.

23 July 1960

Dear Mr Owen,

We were most interested to hear that you have recently received a rise in your pocket money to the tune of 6d a week. With your weekly income now totalling 3s, we thought you might like to hear of some of our new savings opportunities.

May we recommend, for instance, our Bonanza Budget account? This package combines minimum investment with maximum growth. In fact one of our customers, who only opened his account last month, has already shot up to more than
6′ 6″.

Failing that, as a farm-dweller you may like to consider our Piggy Bank Special. We supply the pig, you supply the cash – and you might end up saving more than your bacon! At the end of the year, you could find yourself with a lump sum of more than £1
IS
(or a ‘guinea pig’, as we like to call it) simply by depositing sixpence a week: we wouldn’t suggest anything rasher.

Incidentally, as one of our most valued customers, you are now entitled to join the bank’s social club, which meets every Tuesday at ‘The Quids Inn’ for an evening of capital entertainment and first-class cuisine: whether your taste runs to bags of dough, some royal mint or just the occasional bit of lolly, we’d be glad to have you along.

Yours in the pink,

Midas Touch,

(Manager).

∗

There is one other dream that I can remember clearly, and it dates from several years later, when I was fifteen. On Wednesday March 27th 1968, in the early hours of the morning, I dreamed that I was flying in a small jet plane which suddenly and for no apparent reason began to plummet to the earth. I can still hear the quiet hum of the engine turned to a throaty splutter, and see the wall of dense grey cloud appear out of nowhere. The window shatters loudly and in an instant there are shards of glass hurling themselves at me, spearing my arms and shoulders, and now there is a mighty rush of air, throwing me backwards into bruising collision with the fuselage, and now we plunge, hurtling downwards at unthinkable speed, and I am hollow, my body is an empty shell, my mouth is open and everything that was inside me has been left way behind, way up in the sky, and the noise is deafening, the terrible whine of engine and airstream, and yet above it all I can still hear myself talking, for I am repeating a phrase, either to myself or to some absent listener, evenly and without emphasis, I repeat the words: ‘I’m going down. I’m going down. I’m going down.’ And then there is the final scream of metal, the piercing laceration as sections of the fuselage start to tear themselves apart, until at once the whole plane breaks up and shoots off in a million different directions, and I am in freefall, diving, unshackled, nothing but blue sky between me and the earth which I can see clearly now, rising up to meet me, the coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, big surfaces of water. I am no longer in pain, I am no longer afraid, I have already forgotten what it means to feel these things: I merely notice that the shadow of the earth has begun to swallow the delicate blue of the sky, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.

Then I wake up, not shaking or sweating or shouting for my father, but registering, with a sense of anti-climax, even regret, the fact of my familiar shadowed bedroom and the unresponding night outside. I turn over and lie awake for a few minutes before falling again, this time into a dreamless and pellucid sleep.

It was two days later, over breakfast on the Friday morning, that my father passed me his copy of
The Times
and I learned that Yuri Gagarin was dead, and his co-pilot too, their two-seat jet trainer having crashed at Kirzhatsk just as I was having my dream. The last that anyone had heard from Yuri was the calm announcement ‘I’m going down’ as he tried to steer his aircraft away from a populated area. I didn’t believe it at first, not until I saw a photograph in the next day’s paper which showed the building where his ashes had been put on display, the Central House of the Soviet Army; and coiled around it, threading through the blackened streets, a queue of mourners six deep and three miles long.

∗

…
Si vous dormez, si vous rêvez, acceptez vos rêves. C’est le rôle du dormeur …

The envelope dropped to the floor. Immediately, roused by its arrival as nothing else could have roused me, I swung my legs out of bed and rushed into the hallway to retrieve it. It bore a first-class stamp and was addressed to ‘M Owen, Esq’ in elegant, spidery handwriting. Too impatient to go into the kitchen for a knife, I opened it roughly with my thumb, then took it into the sitting room and began to read the following communication, my astonishment mounting with every sentence:

Dear Mr Owen,

This brief, too hastily written notelet is by way of apology, and by way of a proposal.

Apologies first. I have, let me be the first to admit it, been the perpetrator of several crimes, against your property, and against your person. My only excuse – my only claim, in fact, upon your mercy and forgiveness – is that I have always acted out of motives of humanity. For many years now, I have been deeply interested in the case of Miss Tabitha Winshaw, whose long and unwarranted confinement I regard as one of the most shocking injustices I have ever encountered in my professional career. Accordingly, when I learned, through your advertisement in
The Times,
that you were engaged on an investigation into circumstances not wholly unrelated to this matter, my curiosity was at once excited.

You must pardon the eccentricities, Mr Owen (or may I call you Michael, for I must admit to feeling, having read your two excellent novels, that we are already the oldest and dearest of friends) – you must pardon the eccentricities, as I said, of a wayward old man, who, rather than approaching you direct, preferred to sound out the territory in advance, according to his own tried and tested methods. I must confess that it was I, Michael, who broke into the office of your remarkable publishers, and pilfered your manuscript; it was I who followed your taxi home the very next day; it was I, wishing to make personal contact with you, in order to assure you of the honesty of my intentions, who approached you outside a restaurant in Battersea, and was privileged – if somewhat surprised – to receive a gift of twenty pence from your charming companion (a cheque for which sum you will find enclosed with this letter); and it was I, you will have guessed by now, who followed you both home from the restaurant, my aged legs struggling to keep pace, and finally, through a sad miscalculation on my part, gave said companion a most regrettable shock at the very moment – if my reading of the situation is to be trusted – that you might have been about to progress to terms of the most delightful intimacy.

Can you forgive such a sorry record of reprehensible behaviour? I can only hope that my present candour, at least, will be partial atonement.

Now, Michael, for the proposal. It seems clear to me that, as independent operators, we have both proceeded as far as we can with our inquiries. The time has come for us to join forces. Let me assure you that I have in my possession a great deal of information which would be of assistance to you in your work, and that I am willing to share it all. For my own part, in return, I request sight of only one item: namely, a scrap of paper mentioned in the early stages of your fascinating history, a message jotted down by Lawrence Winshaw, which you describe – with an elegance and concision entirely characteristic, if I may say so, of the whole narrative – as a ‘scribbled note to the butler, asking for a light supper to be sent up to his room’. I believe that this scrap of paper – which I once made my own unsuccessful efforts to retrieve, but which now seems, through some obscure caprice of Fate, to have fallen into your possession – will be of vital importance in establishing Miss Winshaw’s sanity and innocence; that it must contain, in short, some coded meaning or clue which may well have proved elusive – you won’t take this the wrong way, I trust – to someone who is perhaps lacking in my wide and varied experience of these matters.