Whitstable (5 page)

Corrupted. Precisely.

He knew many films where the house outside town harboured inconceivable evil, and had starred in quite a few where the villagers marched up to it demanding justice or revenge, but in this picture fear has the upper hand. The family is powerful. The hero, weak. The community knows how old Mr Olderberry “can’t keep his eyes off children”, but the townsfolk choose to keep their heads firmly in the sand. Even the police think it must be the girls’ own fault.

The child’s own fault.

The very concept was odious. As odious as the sight of gummy old Felix pursuing the girls through the woods, staggering like Boris Karloff after the one in pigtails, stepping over the overturned bicycle. Wordlessly pulling the rowing boat containing the two children back to shore by its slimy rope…

***

A girl sat up in the tree and it didn’t seem at all peculiar but it worried him. It was an oak tree, old and sturdy, with deeply wrinkled bark. The little girl didn’t seem distressed but she did seem determined, a strong-willed little soul. She wore a frilled collar like a Victorian child and he thought she was clutching a toy or teddy bear but couldn’t make it out clearly through the leaves and branches. “Come down,” he called to her. He looked around but there was no-one else about. Only him. So it was down to him to do something. “Come down.” But the girl wouldn’t come down. She just looked down at him, frowning seriously. “Come down. Please,” he begged. But still she didn’t move. A man came along. A man he didn’t know. The man said to him: “What are you doing?” He couldn’t answer. He got confused, he didn’t know why, but before he could answer anyway, the man stepped closer and went on: “You know exactly what you’re doing don’t you? Don’t you?” Rage and aggression built up in the man’s face and his tightly pursed mouth extended to became a vicious-looking yellow beak. And this beak and another beak were prodding and poking at a boy’s short trousers, snatching and tearing out gouts of underwear. The underwear was made of paper. Newspaper. And somehow he was upset that what was written was important, the words were important.

He woke to the sound of seagulls snagging and swooping above his roof.

At the best of times, he despaired at their racket. And these were not the best of times. Now the noise was no less than purgatory. As a child in Surrey he’d thought they were angels, but now he held no illusions about the species. The creatures were the very icon of an English seaside town, but they were relentless and without mercy. He’d once seen a large speckled gull going for a toddler’s bag of chips, almost taking off its fingers, leaving it bawling and terrified in its mother’s embrace. They were motivated by only selfish need and gratification, thought only of their own bellies and their own desires. It seemed almost symbolic that we never ate sea birds, knowing almost instinctively that their insides would be disgusting, inedible, rank, rancid, foul. It seemed to Cushing that their screeching was both a bombastic call to arms and a cry of pain.

He sat up, finding himself on the living room sofa.

He looked at the clock and saw it was four o’clock. Since it was sunny beyond the drapes, he deduced it must be four o’clock in the afternoon. He was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown and still too tired to care.

He’d hardly slept a wink all night. In fact, the short, shallow period of sleep broken by the dream had been by far the longest. Perhaps an hour. The rest, when he could, had been spent at most in a fitful doze, and that only occasionally, interspersed as it was with shambling wanders round the house or up and down stairs in the dead of night. That darkness inculcated fears was a truism, but such knowledge did nothing to abate it. Fears multiplied as he’d curled up wide-eyed, turning circuitous thoughts over in his mind, multiplying still more while he’d walked aimlessly from room to room, in a futile search for distraction, illumination, resolution or peace of mind. All evaded his grasp.

He had lain in his bed thinking of Carl Drinkwater lying in his. The boy’s words, the whole encounter, replayed in his ears. What did he hear? Was he misguided? Did he take it all at face value when he shouldn’t have? Was the mother right? All kinds of doubts set in. Most of all, that he was mentally accusing a man he’d never met of the most despicable act, the vilest
crime
imaginable—based upon what?

He had woken, walked round like a penitent, unable to sleep, as these questions went round and round in his head. Who was he to pronounce? Who was he to judge? Who was right? Who was wrong? Who was good? Who was evil? He wished he could talk to somebody, but who would listen to the silly gibbering of a recently bereaved man whose very job was spinning a preposterous yarn and making it seem true?

It was Sunday but he didn’t want to go to church. Too many people. Too many eyes. In fact he hadn’t been to church since Helen’s funeral. Afterwards the young vicar at St Alphege’s had told him: “If you ever want to come and talk, Peter, for any reason, you know where I am.” He’d said: “My name’s Godfrey. You can call me God.” Then he had nudged Peter’s arm with his elbow. “I’m joking.” Peter didn’t want to hear a joke and he didn’t want to laugh. He didn’t want to go back for a chat with ‘God’ either. ‘God’ could find other people to chat to. He’d rather have a good actor like Peter Sallis or Miles Malleson playing a vicar than that young fake who was acting the part anyway. As Olivier had said, “Be sincere, dear boy, always be sincere—and when you’ve faked that, you’ve cracked it.”

But if you cannot do good, he thought now, where
is
God? Where?

Unable to turn without a painful reminder confronting him—the furniture was all Helen’s choice from her favourite antiques dealer, and every piece of it held a story—he dragged his feet up to his studio, the ‘playroom’, at the top of the house. For five or ten minutes he sat and gazed up through the windows along one wall at the darkening sky above. The far table was strewn with art supplies, palettes rainbowed with dried paint and uncapped tubes of aquamarine and burnt sienna gone hard as concrete. The miniature theatre sets he’d made to the original Rex Whistler designs sat like frozen moments of time waiting patiently to be awakened. Model aeroplanes dangled on fishing line, Lancaster bomber, Spitfire, Messerschmitt: a veritable Battle of Britain suspended in the air. Frozen in time, like he was in so many ways. A child with his toys. A boy playing at being a man. What was a ‘play’ anyway but ‘playing’? He thought of Captain Stanhope in
Journey’s End
, the part he never got a chance to do. In glass-fronted cabinets the length of the room stood hundreds of model soldiers, the British Army through the ages: the Scots Greys at Waterloo; Desert Rats at El Alamein; Tommies at Normandy. In days gone by he’d get them out and solve international problems on his knees on the carpet. His men were clever, bold, indefatigable, strategic, victorious—always. But they were no use to him now. They’d fought all those battles, but what could they do to fight this one? Now they were as useless and impotent as he himself. He suddenly wanted to give the boy all those toy soldiers. He wanted to give him all the toys in the world.

Helen gazed out at him radiantly from a pastel drawing pinned to the wall.

He slid a record out of its sleeve, placed it on the gramophone and slumped in the threadbare rocking chair letting Symphony Number One by Sibelius wash over him. It always had the effect of reminding him of the wonder of human achievements, the humility with which we should revere, in awe, such pinnacles of artistic endeavour, but it struggled to do that now. He cast his mind back to being on set singing Giuseppe’s song from
The Gondoliers
to Barbara Shelley, competing with Chris Lee to see who could sing the nightmare song from
Iolanthe
fastest without missing a word. He tried to think of singing and old friends laughing, whilst knowing a child somewhere wept into its pillow.

The door bell rang.

He opened his eyes. Rather than lift the needle and risk scratching the LP, he let the music play as he went downstairs to answer it.

A figure stood outside in the dark. He could make out the distinctive square shoulders and upturned collar of a donkey jacket. He could see no face, just a man’s outline and the collar-length hair covering his ears backlit by the almost iridescent purple of the night sky. He had not replaced the light bulb in the conservatory, which had blown weeks ago, nor had he switched on the hall light in his haste to open the front door. Now he wished he had done both.

“Mr Cushing?” It was a light voice and one he didn’t recognise, or had reason to fear, but some part of him tightened.

“Yes?”

Instinctively, Cushing shook the extended hand—calloused, dry as parchment from physical work, not the hand of a poet: an ugly hand—and gazed into the face of a man in his thirties with sand-blond, almost flesh-coloured hair and beard.
Thirty three
, the older man thought, peculiarly, unbidden. The age Jesus was when he died:
Thirty-three
. The long hair and beard was ‘hippie’-like, the style of California’s so-called ‘flower children’, but now ubiquitous, of course. Under the donkey jacket Cushing saw a red polo-neck jumper and blue jeans, flared, faded in patches from wear—a working man, then. No. He corrected himself from making any such assumption: threadbare jeans were, inexplicably to him, the fashion of the day. Students at Oxford wore jeans. Jeans told him nothing.

“Hello, mate. My name’s Les Gledhill…”

Les loves that boy.

“First of all, I’ve got to say I’ve always been a massive fan of your films. I know, I know probably everyone says that. You probably get bored with hearing it. But I really mean it, sir. I feel quite nervous talking to you, in point of fact…” Realising he had not released the actor’s hand, the man now did so, laughing and holding his hands aloft, pulling faces at his own crassness and ineptitude.

Les loves that boy.

Cushing didn’t ask himself how the long-haired man had found his address. Everyone in town knew where its most famous resident lived—though most conspired in respecting his privacy.

Les loves that boy.

“Sorry. Sorry. Am I disturbing you? Only, it’s really important I have a word.” The visitor rubbed his hands together vigorously in the night air, hopping from foot to foot. “I, ah, think there’s been a misunderstanding. A really, really
big
misunderstanding, mate…” he chuckled, “and I really, really want to clear it up before it goes any further.” Still laughing, he pointed both index fingers to the sides of his head, twirling them in dumb-show semaphore for the craziness of the situation.

“I’m so sorry to be a bore…” Cushing’s voice retained its usual mellifluous charm. “It’s Sunday evening. This isn’t a very good time, to be perfectly honest. In fact, I’m expecting guests any minute…” On tip-toes he craned over the other man’s shoulder, pretending to be scanning the path beyond.

“This won’t take long. I promise to God. Just a minute of your time, mate. If that. Honestly…”

“I have food in the oven. I’m most terribly…” Blast. The pyjamas and dressing gown were a giveaway that he was lying, and he had to think fast. “I’m, I’m just about to get changed. This really isn’t convenient. If you’ll excuse me…” He did an excellent job also of covering up the fact that his heart was pounding thunderously.
When you can fake that, dear boy…

A hand slapped against the door. “Sorry, mate. Hold on. Hey.
Mate
…”

It stopped the door from closing but Gledhill, almost immediately embarrassed by his brisk action, quickly removed it and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, laughing again.

“Listen. Please. I really,
really
want to clear this up, sir. I swear, you have no idea what this is doing to me. You, a respected man in this, this community, I mean,
loved
in this town, let’s face it, Christ, thinking…” One cheek winced as if in momentary pain. “When she… that’s why I had to come over, see. I couldn’t let…”

Cushing wondered why he still felt afraid. Much as he hated to admit it, the man seemed reasonable. Why did he
hate to admit
it? What had he
presumed
the chap would be like? Here he was. Not an ogre. Perplexed, certainly. Bewildered, genuinely. It seemed. And—unless a consummate actor himself—shaken. The voice didn’t sound angry or vicious in the least, or beastly. Or
evil
—that was the remarkable thing. It sounded confused, and quite upset. No—
hurt
. Terribly hurt. Devastated, in fact.

“Of course, if you’re busy, sir, I understand. Blimey, I have no right to just barge over here, knock on your door, expect you to…” Running out of words, the man in the donkey jacket backed away, then turned to go. Then, as he reached the white-painted garden gate, turned back. “Look, the truth is… I’d hate you to think I’d done anything to hurt that boy. Or whatever you think. That’s just… Just not the case. Truly.” He made one last, haltering plea. “I… I just wanted to explain to you you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all. That’s what concerns me, more than anything. You’re a decent man. A perfect gentleman. You don’t need this. It’s not fair.” The front door had not shut and, this being so, he took this for some kind of invitation and walked quickly back into the conservatory.

Peter Cushing’s fingers did not move from the latch on the inside of the door. “I’d rather we discuss it here, if we must.”

Gledhill stopped, suddenly bowed his shaggy head and plunged his ruddy, working man’s hands deep in his jacket pockets, shuffling. “Yes, of course, mate. No problem.”

Letting the front door yawn wider in a slight act of contrition, Cushing retraced his steps and switched on the hall light, then returned to stand on the welcome mat whilst the man in the donkey jacket hovered in silhouette at the mercy of the shrill wind cutting in from the sea. It buffeted the door, sending an icy breath though the house, room to room, riffling paperwork like a thief.

Picked out of the darkness by the paltry spill of light from the hall, Gledhill shook a solitary Embassy from its packet. “Listen.” He rubbed one eye. “Carl is a good kid, a great kid. He’s quirky, a laugh, in small doses, don’t get me wrong. He’s a character. But he has problems, that’s what you don’t realise.” The lighter clicked and flashed, giving a splash of illumination from his cupped hand to his chin and upper lip. “He says things. Things that aren’t true.” A puff of smoke streamed from the corner of his mouth. “All the bloody time. Not just about me. About everybody. The school already has him down as a liar. And a bully. They have problems with him. He hurts other kids. That’s what kind of child he is, Mr Cushing. His mother worries about him day and night. So do I. Day and night.”