TWENTY-FIVE

‘Sorry about this,’ said my father, although he hid his remorse well.

I said nothing. The Radio One Breakfast Show had just started and some annoying nerk or other was trying to persuade me that I should be happy, whilst all I felt was irritation and despair, made worse by his inane imbecility. Dad liked it, although I wasn’t sure whether that was a plus or a minus. Dad filled in my silence whilst I negotiated the tricky bit of driving that is represented by the Pond during the morning rush hour. There were thunder clouds in the sky, but I had little confidence that it was going to rain any time soon. ‘Bit of an emergency with the carrots.’

‘No problem,’ I said tersely as a milk float, driven by a man who clearly thought he had eaten invulnerability cereal for breakfast, cut me up from the left.

‘I think we might be wide open to carrot-root fly.’

‘Really?’

‘Something of an epidemic this year. Must be the heat.’

‘Probably.’

‘Got to nip that in the bud – or, I suppose, the root – or else you can lose the whole crop.’

‘Disastrous.’

‘Ada said the plants are looking really good, but I doubt she knows what to look for. It can be very subtle in the early stages.’

‘Can it?’

‘Oh, yes. You need experience in these matters.’ A bus pulled out away from the stop without indicating, as buses do. I swore, and Dad said in the knowing manner that I knew so well, ‘I thought he’d do that.’

It was half-past seven, the temperature well up to speed already. I had spent the night at Max’s in a state of paranoia; it was one that had become intense as I left her that morning. I had tried to sound ultra-nonchalant as I had suggested that she should take care, and I had scanned the street as I went to my car; of course I had seen nothing, and I fervently hoped that it was only because there was nothing to see. We drove along Thornton Road in relative peace and at a relatively good speed, then turned left up Keston Road.

‘This was where Yvette Mangon lived, wasn’t it?’ he asked.

‘That’s right. Up there, on the left.’

‘Ada says the whole school staff is in turmoil.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘The favoured theory is that it’s an old pupil with a grudge.’

‘Not many suspects, then.’

He didn’t get the joke. ‘I wouldn’t know. She says that Inspector Masson interviewed her. She said he was the epitome of charm.’

I nearly ran a pedestrian down on the zebra crossing, so shocking was this news. ‘You’re joking.’

‘No. Apparently, he was kind and gentle with her. Very understanding.’

‘Is she sure it was Masson? Did she see his ID?’

‘I know. Interesting, isn’t it?’ He thought for a while. ‘I wonder if he’s got his eye on her.’

I did well; I didn’t laugh. My voice was ever so slightly strangled as I replied, though. ‘Now there’s a thought.’ I was thankful that this concept was sufficiently unsettling for my father to be completely immersed in a pool of deep, dark gloom until we reached the school. I parked where I wanted, then waited for him to get out so that I could be on my way but, my father being who he was, suddenly grasped my arm and said, ‘There’s Mr Silsby.’ I could not argue with this ejaculation. The tall, thin and slightly austere figure that was standing outside the arched main entrance to the school, some fifty yards distant, did indeed belong to that beleaguered headmaster. It appeared, moreover, that he was for the moment doubly beleaguered because he was being accosted by a short individual in rather florid clothing, even given the year and its prevailing tendency for fashion eyesores; he had a green velveteen jacket, light blue trousers of an indeterminate material, a grotesque black Stetson and shoes that, although not curled at the toes, were clearly far longer than the gentleman’s feet; because he was not only short but somewhat rotund, the name ‘Little Tich’ kept recurring annoyingly to my mind. So egregious was his attire that even a person of perfect bodily proportions would have looked a bit – even a large bit – of a prat in it.

He was clearly animated, in that he waved his arms around a lot and did his best to get into Mr Silsby’s face, an impossible feat given the disparity in heights. His face was red, too, although it was conceivable that this was either its natural hue or the heat of the morning. Mr Silsby, to be fair, was giving as good as he was being given; his features were set and he kept shaking his head in what can only be described as a determined manner; occasionally he would make small hand gestures, all of which were clearly dismissive or negative.

‘Who’s the little chap?’ I asked.

‘One of the teachers,’ said my father, his voice hesitant and slightly high with uncertainty.

‘He certainly dresses flamboyantly.’

Dad frowned. ‘I’m fairly sure he’s an art teacher.’

Which made sense.

The performance lasted a few more minutes whilst we, an unbidden and unexpected audience, looked on; Demis Roussos warbled through the car speakers whilst we did so, a ghostly yet huge metaphysical apparition providing a bizarre soundtrack. Eventually, just as Demis’s respiratory system gave up gasping its way through ‘Ever and Ever’, Mr Silsby turned and walked away from his strange gnomic aggressor. He walked in an upright and stiff gait with something of the military about it; he carried with him a sense of offended dignity that was evinced by a slight nodding of his head as he walked. I felt for him but, whilst I was ready to utter private sympathies concerning his plight, I did not expect my father to erupt from the car and call him over. Mr Silsby hesitated but eventually did as he had been bade. As he approached, I judged from his expression that he would rather have retained a little privacy of his own at that moment.

My father said, ‘My son, Lance. You’ll remember him. He took over in the practice.’

Perhaps Mr Silsby did, and perhaps he didn’t; his faintly strained expression suggested that he didn’t particularly have the urge to bother trying. He said, ‘Yes . . . of course.’ The headmaster’s handshake was firm but slightly damp; perhaps it was the climate, although perhaps it wasn’t. ‘Your father is proving of great help to us, Dr Elliot,’ he said, but everything about him told me that his heart was elsewhere. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the spheroidal figure of his erstwhile combatant stalking off to his car.

‘That’s good to hear.’

There was a pause, one of the type that concerns a gorilla in the corner of the room. It demonstrated the inescapable truth of Einstein’s revelation that there is no universal time, for whilst the world at large went on as usual, our little trio seemed embedded in a reality that oozed rather than flowed. My father broke first. ‘How are things?’

I knew that this came from his training and years of practice; some patients walk into the surgery and never get around to telling you stuff without a bit of prompting. Mr Silsby, though, looked as if one of his pupils had just passed wind in his assembly. ‘What?’ he asked, showing some shock at my father’s lack of etiquette in not avoiding the subject that we were all thinking about. ‘What?’ he then repeated in exactly the same tone, timbre and volume; it was just emphasis, I supposed, although I held a diagnosis of deafness in reserve.

Dad did his ingenuous act; it was the way that he said the most outrageous things or asked the most gauche questions, and then got away with it. ‘It must be difficult to cope at the moment?’

Mr Silsby goggled at him for a moment, clearly containing a raging internal debate as to whether or not my father was taking the proverbial, then replied weakly, ‘Yes . . . yes, it is.’ I saw his eyes twitching towards the retreating figure.

Mr Silsby smelled of tobacco and he had about him an air of dehydration, the weather notwithstanding; when he spoke he did so through his nose whilst smacking his lips and tongue. I began to appreciate that the more stressed he got, the more he did this smacking. Dad sailed on. ‘A colleague of yours, was he?’

‘Eh?’

‘That gentleman.’ He indicated the distant corpulence.

‘Yes. What of it?’ Mr Silsby replied, a tad defensively.

‘Seemed worked up. He should avoid undue exertion in this weather. Even at this early hour, it’s starting to get warm, and there is a definitive increase in the incidence of cerebrovascular accident when the temperature is high. Ask Lance.’

Mr Silsby failed to do as he was bid, however. ‘Why are you here, Dr Elliot?’ he enquired of my father tiredly; I had heard a similar tone used before when my father got into his stride.

Dad reacted with astonishment, perhaps because he was surprised that Mr Silsby evinced little interest in his titbit, perhaps because his schemes and stratagems were not working. ‘To tend to the allotment. I fear we may be prone to an infestation of carrot-root fly and that, as I was only just explaining to Lance, can be . . .’

‘Well, I suggest it would prudent of you to attend to it as soon as possible. The sooner you tackle it, the less damage will be done, presumably.’

Dad was surprised. ‘Oh, yes. You’re right. There are several pesticides we could turn to, but I was hoping . . .’

‘Good. Now, if you will excuse me, gentlemen, I have work to perform.’

He turned on his heel in what was really quite a balletic manoeuvre and marched off in his military gait, into the shade of the school’s entrance hall.