An Awfully Big Adventure (19 page)

Shortly three carloads of young women arrived, followed by the limousine carrying Long John Silver. The girls tumbled out and began to teeter up the path towards the field. There was a glitter of frost on the patchy grass and a cold white sun high above the poplar trees beyond the boundary wall of the cemetery. Unsuitably dressed and squealing in the nippy air, the girls ran round like chickens before fleeing back to the cars. The comedian waited were he was, swigging from his hip flask.

When the coach arrived it took some time to organise the teams. Having inspected the club-house Bunny pronounced it unsafe. Even the wooden steps leading up to the door were rotten.

‘Back, back,’ he cried, as the pirates ran towards him.

‘Think of your ankles, boys,’ shouted the stage-manager of the Empire Theatre, standing his ground and shooing them away.

The girls, coaxed from the cars and persuaded to sit on the bottom row of the stand, were heaped with the players’ coats and scarves and warned not to fidget. The stand swayed alarmingly under their weight and one or two screamed nervously.

Vernon was bewildered at first. The teams weren’t even dressed properly. Many of the players refused to get into shorts, and the Empire goalie wore cricket pads over striped long-johns. The celebrated comedian had a cigar clamped in his mouth. His chauffeur kept pace with him on the sideline, carrying a flask which glinted in the chilly sunlight. It was obvious it wasn’t going to be a serious game.

Vernon regretted giving Harcourt the cold shoulder; he would have been someone to laugh with. He recognised no one apart from Stella and Potter. Stella stood in the middle of the field talking to the only chap properly attired in shorts and jersey. He had his hand on her arm and was evidently asking her to do something. Whatever it was, she wasn’t amenable. Vernon was ashamed of her. She wore a naval greatcoat with brass buttons and some sort of goggles on her head. The coat was far too large for her and trailed the ground as she stalked off; she didn’t bother to hitch it up.

Just before the whistle blew Vernon thought she had seen him; at any rate she was looking in his direction. He half raised his arm to draw her attention, and thought better of it. There was no rush. She’d probably join him later. If he was careful she might even allow him to travel back with her on the coach.

Meredith acted as referee. Stella was disappointed he wouldn’t be taking a more active part. She knew little about football, but it was immediately obvious even to her that Geoffrey and O’Hara were superior to the rest of the field. On the coach Geoffrey had stared morosely out of the window; now he stormed along the wing with ferocious determination. Within the first minute he scored a goal, and another a quarter of an hour later. He didn’t seem particularly pleased with himself even though he was patted enthusiastically on the back by the rest of his team and applauded by the spectators.

Much of the game took place in mid-field, or in front of the
Treasure Island
goal, and Meredith had his back to Stella most of the time. She had gone to stand at the cemetery end after spotting Uncle Vernon on the touch-line in front of the club-house.

Soon she grew bored with watching and wandered away down the path towards the road. There was a hearse parked at the kerb outside the church and a man in a black bowler hat polishing the bodywork with a yellow duster. ‘They’ve begun,’ he said, and she nodded and quickened her step obediently.

The door made a terrible creaking sound when she pushed it open. She saw a coffin on trestles below the altar steps and a vicar in a white surplice with his back to the aisle. The window behind the altar had been replaced with a piece of board across which someone had scrawled in black paint ‘This side up’. A single light burned unshaded above the communion table, turning the scene into a badly lit play. She would have backed out again if the mourners, disturbed by the noise of the door, hadn’t swivelled round to look at her. There were three of them, two women and a man, all old and white-haired, each with a shepherd’s crook of a walking-stick propped against the pew in front. There was no one else there save for a hidden organist who presently began to thunder an untuneful hymn.

It was a short service. The church was so vast and empty that the vicar’s words rolled away into the gloom. One of the old ladies blew her nose and the explosion echoed round the walls to fade like the barking of a dog.

Stella pretended it was Uncle Vernon in the coffin. She concentrated but felt nothing. Dying wouldn’t be such an awfully big adventure for Uncle Vernon – he was too old. She substituted Meredith. Still she couldn’t feel sad; if anything she was angry at his deceitful slipping away. She imagined herself lying there, the life gone from her. Uncle Vernon and Meredith were weeping. She was beginning to feel quite mournful when she remembered that Meredith was a Catholic and wouldn’t be allowed in the church.

The door behind her cranked open. She turned and saw the man in the bowler. He looked beyond her and lifted one finger in a beckoning gesture. Four undertaker’s men slid out of the shadows of the vestry and, picking up the coffin, bore it up the aisle. The vicar paced behind, holding his prayer book, his hair floating up and down in the draught from the door. Stella would have fled if she hadn’t thought it sacrilegious to race ahead of the dead. She stood with closed eyes, listening to the measured footsteps.

When she opened them again one of the elderly ladies had drawn level with her. Her stick slithering on the flagstones, the old woman halted, swaying. Stella put a hand under her elbow to support her. Together they tottered to the door. As they came out onto the path a muffled roar sounded from the football pitch.

‘Thank you for coming,’ the old woman said. ‘He would have been pleased.’

When the coffin had been lowered into the hole and the suitable words uttered, the vicar searched for Stella’s hand in the overlong sleeve of O’Hara’s coat.

‘Did you know the deceased well?’ he asked.

‘Yes and no,’ she said.

‘Put your trust in the resurrection,’ he told her, and hurried away, face purple with the cold.

Stella walked to the poplar-trees and peered over the wall into the field. She saw a figure lying on the ground and O’Hara holding Geoffrey’s arms behind his back. Everybody was shouting.

O’Hara and Freddie Reynalde dragged Geoffrey from the pitch and marched him out of sight behind the clubhouse. Exhorting him to breathe deeply they paraded him up and down beside the wire fence. He was trembling and so drenched in sweat that his hair lay like streaks of black paint upon his forehead. In bursts he wept, angrily.

The spectators began to leave the field. Chivvying his players into their coats and scarves, the Empire stage-manager herded them back to the coach. Within Dotty’s hearing a home pirate remarked that he thought it had all been a storm in a teacup. She prodded him fiercely in the buttocks with the tip of her brolly, accusing him of disloyalty.

‘Nothing excuses violence,’ she shouted. ‘It was a disgraceful outburst.’

The pirate looked unrepentant. Desmond Fairchild gave him a sympathetic wink.

Meredith sat on the grass with his chin tilted to the sky as if sunbathing. Bunny waved aside the comedian’s offer of a little nip from the hip flask.

‘It might do more harm than good,’ he said, alarmed at the amount of blood running down Meredith’s face.

‘For God’s sake,’ choked Meredith, ‘I’ve a nose-bleed not a stomach wound.’

‘You were knocked out,’ Bunny protested.

‘I fainted,’ corrected Meredith. ‘The pain was excruciating.’

‘You’re going to have to get rid of dear Geoffrey,’ cried John Harbour, flushed with excitement. ‘He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with such vile behaviour. You must tell Rose to send him packing.’

‘What a brilliant idea,’ said Meredith. ‘Just the ticket when you think about it.’ He got to his feet and pushed Harbour contemptuously aside. ‘My coat,’ he told Bunny. ‘I want my coat.’

Harbour, having scanned the field for Geoffrey – he had some notion of rushing him from the rear and felling him with a rabbit-chop – ran off to compare notes with Dotty and the others.

Meredith was unthreading his monocle from its bloodstained ribbon when Vernon approached. Together they strode towards the path. ‘I like these sort of mornings,’ said Vernon. ‘A hint of frost, a touch of sunlight.’

‘It’s invigorating, isn’t it?’ agreed Meredith. ‘A man can stand upright.’

Vernon was nodding his assent when he tripped. For an instant, startled by that snapping sound, he thought he had trodden on a twig. He fell down, felled by a white bolt of agony.

‘Stella,’ he cried out, ‘where’s our Stella?’

Stella watched from behind the poplars as the comedian’s limousine bumped up the path to where Vernon lay. She wanted to climb the wall and run forward to comfort him. He was quite close. His trouser-leg had fallen back, exposing the elasticated suspender circling his diamond-mottled calf. ‘Stella,’ he called again, as if asking for the only person he needed. His hat tipped off and began to bowl away in the wind. She closed her eyes and stuffed her fingers in her ears. She hummed a song in her head.

That evening, responding to a note from Desmond Fairchild, O’Hara went to Grace Bird’s dressing-room at the quarter hour. Dotty and Babs were there.

‘Look here, Squire,’ said Desmond, ‘we were wondering if you would have a word with Potter.’

‘Geoffrey’s behaviour was inexcusable,’ Grace said. ‘But it does seem like a cry for help. And he’s been saying some very wild things to George. The prop-room’s a positive nest of intrigue.’

‘Thing is,’ Desmond reasoned, ‘it would be best coming from you. You’re off at the end of the run. We’ve got the rest of the season to get through. Besides, I gather you’ve tangled with Potter before.’

‘Yes,’ admitted O’Hara.

‘Not a word in front of John,’ warned Dotty.

‘O’Hara knocked on Meredith’s door during the first interval. Apart from a swollen lip Meredith’s face was unmarked. Rose was with him.

‘Another time,’ O’Hara said. ‘It was nothing important.’

Meredith came to him when he was changing into his Mr Darling costume for the final scenes.

‘Good of you to bother,’ O’Hara said. ‘It could have waited.’ He felt uncomfortable. Now that the moment had come he had no stomach for it. Plastering his face with grease and wiping away Hook’s villainous eyebrows, he said what he had to say. Several times he apologised for using what was perhaps the wrong word.

‘I’m not a narrow man,’ he concluded, ‘whatever you might think. God knows, I’m no saint.’

Meredith had remained silent throughout. Now he said, ‘It’s a wise man who recognises his own sins,’ and smiled. He opened the door to leave. ‘Before you go down to the nursery, he said, ‘may I remind you that it’s a criminal offence to consort with a minor.’

After the curtain call O’Hara waited in the band-room until Freddie Reynalde had played out the audience. Freddie poured a measure of whisky into a coronation mug. ‘He’s got you there,’ he said, when O’Hara had recounted the conversation. ‘She is under age.’

‘No one can prove anything,’ blustered O’Hara. ‘She’d be the first to deny it.’

‘You’ve been seen,’ Freddie said. ‘According to George, Bunny saw her coming out of your basement. And I shouldn’t wonder if Potter hasn’t been on his knees peering through the railings.’

‘Bunny’s a decent man. I doubt if he’d say anything to harm me.’ O’Hara’s hook caught the rim of the mug. It tipped over, sloshing liquid across the photograph of himself astride a motorcycle. He dried it on his sleeve and said, ‘I’ve a snapshot at home of myself aged ten wearing an Eton collar. It could be her.’

‘You’re obsessed,’ Freddie told him. He wanted to take O’Hara to the Beaux Arts Club to drink him into sleep.

O’Hara refused. They both knew why. ‘I can’t help it,’ O’Hara argued. ‘I just feel she’s a part of me.’

He was writing a letter when Stella tapped at the window. He wasn’t, after all, immediately pleased to see her. He was a little tired of coaxing her into being friendly. Talking to her was like hacking a way through a jungle.

‘Is your father all right?’ he asked. ‘Is it a sprain or a break?’

‘I haven’t been home,’ she said. ‘And he isn’t my father.’

She was vitriolic about Geoffrey. She couldn’t understand how he dared to show his face after what he had done to Mr Potter. Why, he was boasting about it in the prop-room. And after the curtain call, when he was going upstairs to the extras’ dressing-room and had bumped into Mr Potter – she wasn’t talking at second-hand but had actually witnessed the scene – far from showing remorse he had confronted him as though he was going to head-butt him for the second time. Mr Potter had flinched. His monocle had plopped from his eye.

‘Geoffrey has his reasons,’ said O’Hara. You don’t know the full story.’

‘He’s unbalanced,’ asserted Stella. ‘He was drummed out of Sandhurst for shooting somebody.’

‘Don’t talk rot.’

She flared up, shouting that Geoffrey came from the privileged classes. He was a protected species. Mr Potter was a wronged man, a victim.

‘You’re speaking through your hat,’ he said. ‘Potter’s spent the last fifteen years harming people like Geoffrey. Hilary was eighteen when Meredith picked him up at the BBC Club.’

‘Him . . . ?’ she said, her face blank.

‘He never stood a chance. And there’s been a string of others. Why do you suppose he got thrown out of Windsor?’

‘You’re just jealous of him.’

He laughed.

She told him she was going and she wouldn’t be coming back. Not ever. ‘Thank you for having me,’ she said, grotesquely enough. She had tears in her eyes.

‘For God’s sake,’ he cried, exasperated, and was relieved when she left, slamming the door behind her. He had his letter to finish. Yet ten minutes later he felt he had treated her unkindly and regretted not having gone after her. Perhaps tomorrow, before the matinee performance, she would go with him to the news-theatre for a sandwich. She liked going there. He’d open up his heart to her, explain how much he cared. Trouble was, she’d probably refuse to go unless he trapped her into it. If he called at her house in the morning on the pretext of enquiring after Mr Bradshaw and asked her straight out, in front of her mother, to walk with him to the theatre, she’d have to accept. It would look odd otherwise.