Death in the Opening Chapter Page 2

  ‘Cow stuck on beach in the Guardian,’ said Bognor, through toast. ‘Must have been a very slow day for a cow stuck on beach to make the Guardian.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his host, genially, ‘cows stuck on beaches seem grist to the Guardian mill. Ecologically sound. Presumably we are all on the side of the cow? Does George Monbiot have a view on cows? Or Simon Jenkins?’

  ‘I don’t think you could run an anti-cow piece in the Guardian,’ said Monica.

  ‘Unless,’ said her husband, ‘they’d been cloned or genetically modified in some way. I mean, if the cow stuck on the beach could be shown to be some sort of by-product of international corporate greed.’

  ‘Not cow in the accepted sense,’ said Sir Branwell.

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor. ‘If the cow was not really a cow, but some sort of counterfeit cow in cow’s clothing, then you’d expect the Guardian to be against it.’

  ‘You two are being silly,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘This sort of conversation may be acceptable in the junior common room at Apocrypha, but it won’t do here.’

  The two Apocrypha men exchanged sheepish glances and acted as if chastened. Sometimes Bognor felt as if he had never really grown up. This sense was most acute when he was with people he had known in the days of his youth. At work, among those who, like him, passed themselves off as adults and generally behaved in a fashion associated with the grown-up, he too became mildly self-important and serious. He didn’t do jokes, or facetiousness of any kind. He managed to become, frankly, a bit of a bore. This was what seemed to be required among the seriously grown up.

  ‘What about a cricket match?’ said Monica, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You could have authors against publishers.’

  ‘Writers don’t play cricket,’ said Bognor, swiftly, ‘and publishers don’t play games outside the office. At least, that’s what I’m told.’

  ‘Festivals,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘are about people droning on. Some drone more effectively than others, but droning is what everyone feels comfortable with. We don’t want innovation. Heaven forfend. Droning is what audiences expect and what authors give them. We do one big drone. Jolly effective and nobody has to do anything tiresome and original.’

  ‘Like think,’ said his wife, crunching toast as if it were yesterday’s numbers.

  ‘I always think,’ said Lady Fludd, ‘that cricket is a bit like an author’s drone. Interminable tedium during which the audience sleeps or talks among themselves, punctuated by sudden moments of unanticipated excitement when the speaker’s trousers fall down or he insults them or something.’

  ‘Not much unanticipated excitement in any authorial drone I’ve ever slept through, eh, Simon,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘and as patron of my own lit fest, I’ve slept through a good few in my time.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor, not wishing, characteristically, to give offence and sitting on the first one available. Fence, that was. He had an uncomfortable habit of wordplay and double entendre, which had got him into trouble when not intended. Nevertheless, Bognor enjoyed weekends, especially in other people’s houses. Weekends were good anyway, because on the whole – with reservations and disturbingly less as he grew older and the world round him became more pointlessly frenetic – weekends were times when he was undisturbed by what was laughably described as ‘work’. He had never really got the hang of this work thing which so captivated his successful contemporaries. His apparent insouciance regarding the occupation seemed to annoy them, but he couldn’t really see the point of what other people described as work, and seemed on the whole to be a disagreeable activity whose only point seemed to be to generate sufficient funds to enjoy oneself when not working. During his lifetime, the amount of time most people needed to spend on ‘work’ in order to be able to enjoy their ‘leisure’ seemed to be increasing. He had read somewhere that this increase was ‘exponential’ and he had no doubt that it was. Indeed, he suspected that there was a rule lurking there. He had an uneasy feeling that one could learn the rule from teachers at business school. He, however, on the other hand, could not be bothered. Other people, more serious than he, were disparaging about this, but he just got on with life and savoured weekends such as this. Lazy occasions when all effort, however minimal, was expended by other people.

  ‘Well,’ said his wife, who was given to sudden bursts of energy which he generally discouraged, ‘what exactly do we propose that we do today?’

  ‘How do you mean “do”?’ asked Sir Branwell, not looking up from his newspaper. He was also engaged with toast, so his words sounded furry and coated in crumb.

  Sir Branwell, reflected Bognor, was one of him, and increasingly so. He was not much given to envy and wishing that he were other people, but in those rare moments when he played this game of make-believe, he found himself more and more wondering if it might be quite fun to be Sir Branwell. He drew the line at Lady Fludd however. Whereas Monica flirted dangerously with energy and enthusiasm, Lady Fludd appeared to subscribe to both with a passion. Bognor did not wish to be married to her. Life-swapping was one thing, and an idle hobby to be happily indulged. Wife-swapping, however, was something else altogether.

  ‘Actually,’ said Sir Branwell, looking around the table in a breakfastly, blurry sort of a way, ‘I don’t think there is an awful lot to do, if you see what I mean. Everything is more or less taken care of. And, in a manner of speaking, and up to a point, er . . . done.’

  He smiled affably and bit into his toast with more enthusiasm than he had spoken. If he had a consuming passion, which was not really his style, it was more for toast than for talk. This, reflected Bognor, was what life was about. A business efficiency expert, a visitor from Health and Safety or some similarly worthy quango, a government inspector, a jobsworth of whatever description, would have been appalled by this apparent inertia. Nothing was happening; nothing much seemed to matter. The females of the species displayed a slight sense of restlessnness, but this appeared to be easily quelled by their surroundings, if not by the somnolent, but presumably dominant, males. The males for their part resembled ancient lizards basking on warm stones in subtropical sunlight. They did not even spin. They did not even, like the lilies of the field, look good. They seemed completely devoid of purpose. There was no point to them.

  Bognor sighed with profound satisfaction. Pointlessness was something to which, in his few introspective moments, he aspired. As he grew old he was getting better at it. He wondered if he should have another slice of toast, or a cup of tea; he was pleased by his indecision and reflecting on how an entire weekend could be spent contemplating such decisions, when the bell rang and his dream was destroyed.

  They put up a fight against the intrusion.

  ‘Rats!’ said Sir Branwell, putting down his paper and his toast. ‘I’ve told Brandon to fix that bloody bell.’

  But Sir Branwell was wrong to blame it on the bell and it rang a second time, suggesting that the first ring was not haphazard and was caused, like the second, by a human agency. Someone had rung the front doorbell of the manor. On a Saturday morning. During breakfast. Unthinkable. But it had happened. It was a clear infringement of an unwritten rule. No one had rung the front doorbell on Saturday during breakfast during living memory. Yet it happened. Someone had.

  The four looked at each other in shock and incredulity. One was not expecting the unexpected. One never was.

  The bell rang a third time.

  ‘Well cut along, darling,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘See who it is.’

  Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The staff, just the Brandons now, alas, always had most of the weekend off. Unless there was some sort of emergency. But when there was some sort of emergency, as now, they were never there. It was a rule of staff and there was nothing for it. Sir Branwell would have to open his front door himself.

  He rose clumsily to his feet, grumbling in an incoherent rebarbative way, consistent with the occasion and with the disruption of well-established ritual.

  Seconds
later, he was back, energized, if such a thing were possible, and resembling the rural, aristocratic extramural equivalent of an action man. This was not particularly virile or particularly active, but it was a great deal more so than its virtually comatose predecessor.

  In his wake, the baronet towed a woman, middle-aged, and middling in every visible sense except for her distress, which was extreme.

  She seemed, for a moment, to be aware of the enormity of what she had done, but then, evidently, remembered why she was there and the reason for her distress.

  ‘It’s Sebastian,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. Extremely. I mean he really is. Dead. He was all right when I last saw him but now he’s dead. Gone. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I wanted to hear and now I can’t, shan’t. He’s gone.’

  Sir Branwell had produced brandy. His remedy for everything had been conjured up in a balloon on a silver salver that was originally presented to a great grandfather after some regimental triumph in the tug of war competition in Poona in the late nineteenth century. He always knew it would come in useful one-day. The present Sir Branwell that is, not the long-dead lieutenant with the electric whiskers and the faraway expression, who had been killed leading a charge against Boers in Africa.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said, as he had seen generations of stiff-lipped English actors order in innumerable not very good movies. He thought of adding that it would do her good but decided he was muddling the movies up with the ads.

  ‘Dorcas, how dreadful,’ said Lady Fludd, laying down her paper and rising to her feet. ‘You poor sausage. How dreadful.’

  She was thinking at the same time as she spoke, rather than planning ahead. This was a mistake. Her words did not convey what she really meant. She didn’t really think the event dreadful; nor had she really meant to call Dorcas a sausage. It just came out like that.

  Privately, she was thinking as she spoke, but the poor sausage was herself and even though she was commenting privately on the dreadfulness of the event, what she was actually saying was, ‘Bloody vicar. How incredibly inconvenient. And just before the festival. But then Sebastian always was a selfish little sod.’

  Out loud, however, she said, consolingly again, ‘You poor sausage! Sit down, sit down for heaven’s sake.’

  THREE

  Brigadier Horace was a barking brigadier but he had little or no bite.

  ‘All fang but no finish!’ said Sir Branwell, with whom he had been at school, or thought he might have been. He was too polite to ask. Or indolent. Or, more likely, uninterested. He neither knew nor cared with whom he had been at school. In any event, people were at school with him, not him with them. The difference was crucial. ‘Never seen a shot fired in anger, let alone pulled a trigger.’

  Contractor had done the work. He had done so at his master’s behest, his master being in the wrong place and, in a manner of speaking, on holiday. He had done so with flair, invention and assiduity. Contractor didn’t do competence. He obviously deployed sources, but he did not attribute his work in a conventional academic way, with footnotes and bibliography at the bottom of the page or the end of the book. Instead, he did so like a card sharp. Now you see me, now you don’t. He flickered magically with a sense of legerdemain, like a conjuror facing befuddled males on a drunken stag night. Here a rabbit, there a beauty in a bathing suit sawn in half, here a glass of water disappearing, only to re-emerge behind an ear or in a far corner of a room. Always the top hat, always the cane, always the fixed grin, but never anything conventional.

  This was why Bognor had hired him. His first in semiotics from the University of Wessex was neither here nor there. Nor was his race, parentage or sexual orientation. Bognor liked him because he was bright and quirky. Other people found this intimidating. In the unlikely event that they appreciated intellect and industry and the qualifications which were the inevitable result, they liked them orthodox. In a super competent world, those who believed that two plus two always equalled four were appreciated; only a genius or a poltroon would think they added up to anything else. Contractor wasn’t sure they did and he certainly was not a poltroon. Bognor liked this; and Contractor knew that he liked it, and as he grew older he realized that this appreciation of his intellectual eccentricity was unusual. It was one of the things that made Bognor different. It infuriated some, particularly if they were bright and successful. A minority, however, found the quality appealing. One of these was Harvey Contractor and he was very, very bright. Formidably so.

  Take Brigadier Blenkinsop. Eustace Basil Blenkinsop, aka ‘Basher’ Blenkinsop. Educated Wellington and RMA Sandhurst. The brigadier came from a long line of retired majors, though his father was a vicar in the Quantocks. Stogumber. St Mary’s. Red sandstone. The church was famous for its candlelit chandelier discovered by one of the brigadier’s father’s predecessors in 1907, languishing. It was now lit on high days and holy days and looked very beautiful.

  Bognor shut his eyes and thought of the candles in the chandelier at Christmas in St Mary’s Stogumber. He imagined the vicar clambering up into the pulpit and saying words that none of his congregation understood. Stogumber wasn’t exactly the centre of the universe even when Basher was growing up. There was a sister who was married to a vet on Vancouver Island and another sister who was a spinster in Letchworth and did good works. That was all. Bognor imagined what it must have been like growing up as the only son of a vicar in rural Somerset. Was the vicar embittered? A fire and brimstone man? A pacifist? Had his religion influenced the brigadier?

  After Sandhurst, Blenkinsop had gone into the gunners. Blenkinsop’s outfit was the 13th Mobile. Its proper name was the ‘13th Mobile Artillery’, because since Agincourt, and possibly earlier, they had been able to deploy lethal weaponry in the least expected places. There were no earlier twelve mobile artillery units, thus earning the 13th the unusual sobriquet of ‘the Lucky for some’ though they were usually known simply as the ‘13th Mobile’. Another nickname was the ‘Cautious Cauliflowers’, which derived from their habit of pinning a floret of the vegetable next to their cap badges every Dettingen Day. This was the anniversary of the battle of 1743, which was the last occasion on which an English – actually German – monarch had led his men into battle. This only happened because the CO of the 13th, Colonel ‘Biffer’ Lowe-Laugher, had stuck a prong of his tuning fork into the reluctant rump of the king’s horse. Hence the regimental custom of placing a gilt tuning fork on the Colonel’s right every night at the Dettingen dinner. The British army was full of such things.

  At school and the academy, Blenkinsop had boxed and he went on fighting with some success after joining the army. He was battalion welterweight champion and knocked out some sergeant who was much fancied in the ring. As Second Lieutenant Blenkinsop he competed in the army championship, but was defeated by a mad captain in the Irish Guards. Bognor wondered what the Vicar of Stogumber made of his son’s pugilism.

  The vicar of Stogumber had briefly taught at a public school – of which Bognor had not previously heard – in Warminster. He guessed it must have closed. The Queen’s School. Queen’s Warminster. Contractor had drawn a blank here because the school was long closed and all records lost or destroyed. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Reverend Blenkinsop had spent a relatively short time at the school before being translated to Stogumber. Again, there was no record. Why had Blenkinsop senior spent so short a time at Queen’s Warminster? Why had he been translated so swiftly to such a relative backwater? Bognor was suspicious. His wife, Muriel, was the daughter of a general, a friend and protégé of Field Marshal Haig in World War One. That too aroused Bognor’s suspicion, though he was not sure precisely why. Muriel had a posthumous reputation in West Somerset for prodigious snobbery, whereas her husband was known throughout the area as a man of the people.

  What was undoubtedly suspicious was the presence in the regiment of a young chaplain named Fludd.

  Forget brigadiers, thought Bognor. Life was full of people who had risen to the surface of
life like scum on stock, and Brigadier Horace was one such. Bognor regarded himself as a front-line soldier – the sort of man who, at the Battle of the Somme in the Great War, would have gone over the top in front of his platoon, been cut to pieces by enemy machine gun fire and won a posthumous Military Cross. Horace Blenkinsop, the barking brigadier, would meanwhile have been watching events, if at all, through binoculars in a requisitioned chateau, while stuffing his face with stolen champagne and plover’s eggs.

  Bognor recalled his grandfather, a veteran of this very campaign, gassed and now gone to God, telling him that in his battalion, as in others, they had something called HQ company. No one knew what men in HQ company actually did, except issue more and more pieces of regulatory paper with which the rest of the battalion wiped their bottoms. During the war, more and more people gravitated to HQ company, where they performed more and more meaningless rituals, whose only apparent purpose was to make life difficult to impossible for those who actually did the work. Life, said Bognor’s grandfather, was much the same: far too many people in HQ company getting in the way of men on the ground trying to do a decent day’s work, like him and his grandson.

  Thus Brigadier Blenkinsop. Yet, such was life that Brigadier Blenkinsop was widely regarded as a bit of a catch. He made programmes for television about battles in which he had not fought and of which he knew little. He opined in the Daily Telegraph and other public prints, telling his fellow man what to think about military warfare, but also everything else from greenhouse emissions (a fiction, fanned by leftist scaremongers) to railway trains (vanished due to that damned fellow Beeching) and gastronomy (days were when a celebrity chef was just a cook and garlic was something Johnny Foreigner used to flavour horse-meat).

  Bognor did not care for the brigadier or for his sort. Whitehall was rife with brigadiers, barking orders, strutting about and getting in the way. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, you had to hand it to him. Bognor was reminded of an elderly English rugby footballer, a cumbersome number eight, who, way past his prime, somehow survived, and indeed prospered, where younger, fitter, more agile and talented rivals came and usually went. This was achieved by stealth and what a dead journalist, much admired by Bognor, once described as ‘rat-like cunning’. This was possessed in spades by the ancient rumbling English rugby player. He read the game with deceptive ease and was able to anticipate its direction with unerring precision. So, without apparent effort or indeed movement, or endeavour of all but the most notional kind, he was always able to be at the centre of important play, where his strength and experience proved decisive. Others ran hither and yon, charging about like headless chickens, while the old bull elephant surged magnificently, and in an almost stately manner, through the wildest passages of the game.