What a Carve Up! (5 page)

It was getting to the point where I didn’t feel I could wait much longer for the promised swim, but she told me I would have to let my food settle first. Hoping to walk off my impatience, my father took me out to the sea, which was at low tide, with a grey expanse of muddy sand stretched almost to the horizon and a few dogged toddlers trotting out like fledgling explorers, a shrimping net in one hand and a reluctant parent in the other. We wandered pointlessly for about half an hour, and then at last we were allowed to go to the swimming-pool. It wasn’t very crowded. There were a few people lying or sitting on deck-chairs and sun-loungers next to the water: the minority who had chosen to swim were doing so very vigorously, with much splashing and shouting. There was a confusion of different musics. Watery orchestral pieces leaked out over a tannoy system, but they were in competition with a number of transistor radios, playing everything from Cliff Richard to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. The water shimmered and sparkled irresistibly. I couldn’t understand why people preferred to lie flat on their backs listening to the radio when faced with the prospect of such liquid happiness. My father and I emerged from the changing cubicles together: I thought he looked easily the strongest and most handsome man at the poolside that afternoon, but to my memory’s eye our thin white bodies now seem equally childlike and vulnerable. I ran ahead of him and stood at the water’s edge, relishing a tiny but priceless moment of expectancy. After that I jumped; and after that, screamed.

The pool was not heated. Why had we thought that it would be? A bolt of ice shot through me and at once I was numb with shock, but my first response – not only to the physical sensation but to the higher agony of pleasure anticipated and then denied – was to burst into tears. How long this continued I don’t know. My father must have lifted me from the water; my mother must have run down from the spectators’ gallery where she had been sitting with Grandma and Grandpa. Her arms were around me, everybody’s eyes were upon me, and still I was inconsolable. They told me afterwards that it felt as though I would never stop crying. But somehow they got me changed, dressed and shepherded into an outside world which was by now dark with the threat of heavy rain.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ Grandma was saying. She had given one of the pool attendants a piece of her mind, not something to be wished upon anybody. ‘There ought to be a notice. Or a chart, telling you what the temperature is. We ought to write a letter.’

‘Poor little lamb,’ said my mother. I was still snivelling a little bit. ‘Ted, why don’t you run back to the car and fetch the umbrellas? Otherwise we’re all going to catch our deaths. We’ll wait for you here.’

‘Here’ was a bus shelter near the sea front. The four of us sat there listening to the rain hammering on the glass roof. Grandpa muttered ‘Dear heart alive’, and this – a sure sign that the day was, in his estimation, taking a nose dive into disaster – was the cue for me to resume my wailing with twice the energy. When my father returned, carrying two umbrellas and a tightly folded plastic headscarf, my mother looked at him with silent panic; but he had clearly been giving the situation some thought and his resourceful suggestion was, ‘Perhaps there’s something on at the cinema.’

The nearest and biggest was the Odeon, which was showing a film called
The Naked Edge
with Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. My parents took one look at this and hurried on, although I lingered yearningly, catching the exotic scent of forbidden pleasures in the title, and intrigued by a card which the cinema manager had placed in a prominent position beneath the poster:
NO ONE, BUT NO ONE, WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATRE DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MINUTES OF THIS FILM. FLASHING
RED LIGHT WILL WARN YOU. Grandpa took me roughly by the hand and dragged me away.

‘What about this one?’ said my father.

We stood in front of a smaller and less imposing building which announced itself as ‘Weston’s Only Independent Cinema’. My mother and Grandma bent down to peer closely at the lobby cards. Grandma’s lips formed into a doubtful pucker and a gentle frown creased my mother’s brow.

‘Do you think it looks suitable?’

‘Sid James and Kenneth Connor. Should be funny.’

Grandpa said this but his real attention, I noticed, was on a picture of a beautiful blonde actress called Shirley Eaton, who was the third star of the film.

‘Certificate U,’ my father pointed out.

Then I shouted, ‘Mum! Mum!’

Her eyes followed my pointing finger. I had found a notice which announced that the supporting film told the story of the Russian space programme, and was called
With Gagarin to the Stars.
Furthermore, the notice boasted, it was ‘in colour’, although I for one didn’t need this extra inducement. I launched into a routine of wide-eyed supplication, sensing even as I began that it wasn’t really necessary, because my parents had already made up their minds. We joined the queue to buy tickets. When the woman at the ticket desk took a dubious look at me from her lofty enclosure, my hand gripping anxiously on to my father’s, she said, ‘Are you sure he’s old enough?’, and suddenly I experienced the same plummeting misery, the same emotional nausea that I had felt the second I jumped into the unheated swimming-pool. But Grandpa wasn’t having any of this. ‘Just sell us the tickets, woman,’ he said, ‘and mind your own business.’ Someone in the queue behind us giggled. Then we were filing into the dark, musky auditorium and I was sinking deeper and deeper into my seat in a heaven of contentment, Grandma to the left of me, my father to the right.

Six years later, Yuri would be dead, his MiG-15 diving inexplicably out of low cloud and crashing to the ground during an approach to landing. I was old enough by then to have imbibed some of the prevailing distrust of all things Russian, to take notice of the dark mutterings about the KGB and the displeasure my hero may have incurred in his own country for having so charmed the cheering Westerners. Perhaps Yuri really had condemned himself the day he shook hands with all those children at Earl’s Court; and yet it had been them that I wished dead at the time. Whatever the explanation, I can no longer recapture or even imagine the state of innocence in which I must have sat through that afternoon’s artless, stentorian celebration of his achievement. I wish that I could. I wish that he had remained an object of unthinking adoration, instead of becoming another of adulthood’s ubiquitous, insoluble mysteries: a story without a proper ending. I was soon to find out about those.

∗

Just as the lights were going down for the second time, and the censor’s certificate appeared on the screen to announce the beginning of the main feature, my mother leaned over and started whispering across the top of my head.

‘Ted, it’s nearly six o’clock.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, how long’s this film going to go on?’

‘I don’t know. About ninety minutes, I suppose.’

‘Well then we’ve got to drive all the way back. It’ll be hours past his bedtime.’

‘It won’t matter just this once. It is his birthday, after all.’

The credits had started and my eyes were fixed on the screen. The film was in black and white and the music, although it was not without a certain jokiness, somehow filled me with foreboding.

‘And then there’s dinner,’ my mother whispered. ‘What are we going to do about dinner?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Stop somewhere on the way back.’

‘But then we’ll be even later.’

‘Just sit back and enjoy it, can’t you?’

But I noticed that for the next few minutes, my mother kept leaning towards the light in order to sneak regular glances at her watch. After that I don’t know what she was doing, because I was too busy concentrating on the film.

It told the story of a nervous, mild-mannered man (played by Kenneth Connor) who was startled in his flat late one night by the arrival of a sinister solicitor. The solicitor had come to tell him that his rich uncle had recently died, and that he was required to travel immediately up to Yorkshire, where the reading of the will was to take place at the family home, Blackshaw Towers. Kenneth went up to Yorkshire by train in the company of his friend, a worldly bookmaker (played by Sidney James), and found that Blackshaw Towers was situated on a remote edge of the moors far from the nearest village. Failing to find a taxi, they accepted a lift in a hearse, which left them stranded on the moors in the middle of a dense fog.

When they finally arrived at the house, they could hear the distant howling of dogs.

Sidney said: ‘Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?’

Kenneth said: ‘There’s something creepy about this place.’

The rest of the audience seemed to be finding it funny, but by now I was thoroughly scared. I had never been taken to see anything like this before: although it wasn’t strictly a horror film, the detail was very convincing, and the gloomy atmosphere, dramatic music and perpetual sense that something terrible was about to happen all combined to torment me with a strange mixture of fear and exhilaration. Part of me wanted nothing more than to run out of the cinema into what was left of the daylight; but another part of me was determined to stay until I found out where it was all leading.

Kenneth and Sidney crept into the hallway of Blackshaw Towers, and found that the house was just as eerie as it had looked from the outside. They were met by a gaunt and forbidding butler called Fisk, who led them upstairs and showed them to their rooms. Much to his dismay, Kenneth found himself not only being taken to the East Wing, far away from his friend, but being required to sleep in the very room where his late uncle had died. Soft, unsettling organ music could be heard in the corridor. They went downstairs again and were introduced to the other members of Kenneth’s family: his cousins Guy, Janet and Malcolm, his Uncle Edward, and his mad Aunt Emily, for whom time seemed to have stood still ever since the First World War. Just before the solicitor began reading the will, another woman appeared: a young, blonde and beautiful woman played by the actress Shirley Eaton. She was there because she had nursed Kenneth’s uncle during his final illness. There weren’t enough chairs for everybody to sit around the table, so Kenneth had to balance on Shirley’s knee. He seemed quite pleased about this.

The will was read and it transpired that none of the relatives had been left anything at all: they had been made the victims of a practical joke. They argued with each other bitterly as they began getting ready for bed. Then, suddenly, all the lights in the house went off. By now there was a terrible storm raging outside and Fisk suggested that the generator must have broken down. Kenneth and Sidney volunteered to go with him and investigate. When they reached the shed which housed the generator they found that the machinery had been smashed to pieces. They started going back towards the house, but were amazed to find Uncle Edward sitting on a deck-chair in the middle of the lawn, drenched by the pouring rain.

Sidney said: ‘What’s he sitting out there for?’

Kenneth laughed and said: ‘It’s unbelievable. He’ll catch his death of – death of–’

He gave a violent sneeze, and Uncle Edward fell stiffly off the deck-chair. He was dead.

Kenneth said: ‘Sid … is he?’

Sidney said: ‘Well if he ain’t, he’s a very heavy sleeper.’

There was a terrific thunderclap, and my mother leaned across to my father. She whispered: ‘Ted, come on, let’s go.’

My father was laughing. He said: ‘What for?’

My mother said: ‘It’s not suitable.’

Kenneth said: ‘Well I mean, we can’t leave him round here, can we? Look, let’s put him in the potting shed – it’s over there somewhere.’

There was more audience laughter as Kenneth, Sid and the butler attempted to pick up Uncle Edward’s corpulent body.

Sidney said: ‘Look, it’d be easier to bring the potting shed over to him.’

Even Grandma laughed at that. But my mother just looked at her watch again and my father, perhaps imagining that I might be frightened, ruffled my hair and laid his arm close by, so that I could take hold of it and lean against him.

Kenneth and Sid went back inside and told the rest of the family that Uncle Edward had been killed. Sid tried to telephone the police, only to discover that the line had been cut off. Kenneth said that he was going home, but the solicitor pointed out that the moors were impassable in this weather, and that if he were to leave now, he would be the first to come under suspicion for Edward’s murder. He recommended that everyone should go to bed at once and lock their doors.

Fisk said: ‘It’s only the start of it. There’ll be another one yet, mark my words.’

Sidney said: ‘Good-night, laughing boy.’

Kenneth and Sidney went back upstairs, but then, left to his own devices, Kenneth found it easy to get lost in the rambling old house. He opened the door to what he thought was his bedroom and discovered that it was already occupied by Shirley, wearing only her slip and about to put on a nightgown.

Kenneth said: ‘I say, what are you doing in my room?’

Shirley said: ‘This isn’t your room. I mean, that isn’t your luggage, is it?’