The very next day after Driver drove through Fenedge and Bernard Bellamy looked into Carmen’s eyes, I received a letter. Now it’s a known fact that where there are devils there are angels too, and vice versa, so I couldn’t be sure whether the letter was sent by the agents of heaven or hell. It came from a transplant surgeon in a large Chicago hospital who offered to operate on me free of charge, in an attempt to reinstate the flow of blood to my spinal column – by either a kind of backbone bypass or, better still, the clearing of blocked veins by miniaturised balloons – and thus return to me the use of my legs. (Accounts of my condition get written up from time to time in the medical press.) I replied by return yes, of course he was welcome to try, rather to the discomfort of my own local Fenedge general practitioner, Dr Grafton, whose belief it is that his patients deserve whatever afflicts them, and that they shouldn’t struggle too hard to be rid of it. This in turn may be why Mavis Horner has so many patients lining up to visit her. I flew off to Chicago within the week.
I shan’t dwell upon the ins and outs of catheters, the fancy drugs and startling lasers that contributed to my treatment; indeed, I can’t remember much of it, I swallowed so many rough large red forgetfulness pills. I only mention the event to explain that I was away from my window for six months or so, and that when I returned to my watching post, my legs no better and no worse, it became apparent that there had been an exciting development or so in my absence. Exciting, that is to say, in Fenedge terms, if not Chicago’s.
Sealord Mansion had been bought by Bernard Bellamy, who was now Sir Bernard Bellamy, knighted for services to industry, struck on the shoulder by a sword wielded by the Queen herself. It is a fact that to be made a knight you have to be able both to kneel and to bend your neck, and that on occasion certain individuals, too old and stiff to do such things, have had to decline the offer on account of their infirmity, but Sir Bernard Bellamy had no such problem. He looked these days as Elizabeth Taylor looked after three months in a health hydro – younger, skinnier and fuller of future than ever – now that Driver drove him everywhere.
Sir Bernard, it appeared, had diversified out of catering – he made his initial fortune selling chicken patties in the Chick-A-Whizz franchise concern – into the hotel business. Sealord Mansion, that mecca of the naturalists, had at the stroke of a pen become Bellamy House, and the builders been moved in to strip both the inside and the outside of the building to make it look less like what it was, an admiral’s folly, and more like an hotel, American style, and one fit for the rich and famous. A Save Sealord group, composed mostly of botanists and bird-watchers, had risen and fallen in my absence; been defeated in their struggle to permit the house, in whose attic bats bred, and in whose grounds rare heathers and ferns grew, to remain undisturbed.
‘Can all these people be wrong?’ Bernard had enquired of Driver, ‘and only me be right?’ That was when Driver was nudging his way through a crowd of some eighty placard-bearing people, whose hearts were clearly in the right place, and whose spelling was excellent, which is not necessarily the case with the protesting classes. ‘Save the Hippuris vulgaris!’ they read. ‘Protect Our Typha latifolia!’ ‘Our Whincnat Is Precious To Us’, ‘The Wheatear Shall Not Perish’, ‘Long Live Sealord, Home To The Hooper Swan’, and so on.
‘Very easily,’ Driver had replied. ‘For every man who wants to achieve something, there are at least a hundred who try to hold him back. And just look at the Adam’s apples of these particular folk; how they jerk up and down in their scrawny throats in rhythm as they chant! Hard to take them seriously.’ And Sir Bernard Bellamy looked and laughed, for what Driver said was true. The Devil is often right about things: it helps explain his power over the hearts and minds of men.
And the other sad truth was that Sealord Mansion, built by an admiral for a child mistress a couple of centuries back, had in the first place been a bodge job dedicated to an unholy purpose, and had caused outrage when it was built, so that the outrage which attended its change of use, to use the planners’ term, was thereby undermined.
And so when Driver drove over the foot of one young bird-watcher and lamed him for life, the protest fizzled out, instead of gaining force as could have been expected. But then again, though it is in the nature of bird-watchers to endure great discomfort in pursuit of their ends and think nothing of cold and damp and shortage of sleep, they perhaps see too much virtue in stillness and silence: they are simply not the kind to persist in aggro.
To get to Sealord Mansion in the days before it became the Bellamy House Hotel, the proper way, the walkers’ way – or so I am told: I must rely upon others in this instance – you would scorn the main road. You would walk inland in a northerly direction from the sea wall at Winterwart, leaving behind you the tidal flats, where the waders and wildfowl abound; you would crunch across the shingle stretches where the yellow-horned poppy grows, and the hound’s-tongue and the curled beet too; you would skirt the flooded gravel pits, which the sticklebacks so love, and where a bittern was once sighted, and so reach the heather-clad dune slacks, where the ling and the rare cross-leaved heath abound. A little further inland and you would pass the habitat of the rare natterjack toad – that strange burrowing creature with its unnaturally short back legs, whose habit it is to utter such eerie cries of a summer evening as to scare the unwary out of their wits — proceed further still, into the woodlands, down the banks of the reed-lined stream and then, finally, under the green arms of the willows, you would come to Sealord Mansion itself, shuttered, dilapidated, but beautiful enough in its disorder, its grounds so richly rewarding to the botanist – anyone searching for the rare royal fern, the Osmunda regalis, or the even more rare crested buckler – and an excellent and undisturbed breeding ground for the siskin, the redwing, the redpoll and the brambling and every warbler you can think of. What did they care if Sealord was the Devil’s safe house; what do flora and fauna need to know about these things?
Some pleasures are no longer. Sealord Mansion is now Bellamy House Hotel, and a breeze-block wall bars the rambler’s way from the sea, and bright green lawns roll neatly over the levelled high dune ridges; the gravel pits are filled the better to fashion a golf course, so the red-breasted merganser calls no more, and only the natterjacks remain, their voices, unloving and unloved, calling through the summer nights. But that’s enough of all that nature talk. What’s gone is gone.
I never saw any of it anyway.
While I was away in Chicago trying to grow a new backbone, Sir Bernard Bellamy spoke at Fenedge High School for Girls. Driver encouraged him so to do. The event was not a success. Perhaps Driver had his reasons for wishing it thus to turn out.
‘But this really is the back of beyond,’ complained Sir Bernard as the BMW took the road from the new improved Bellamy House Hotel, with its mock Tudor facade and grand new steps flanked with an imported palm tree or so to add a touch of the exotic. Workmen were still at work: the grand opening was yet to come. The helipad was being built where once a little colony of the rare pasque flower grew. ‘Are you convinced it’s ripe for development?’
‘The back of beyond,’ said Driver, ‘normally provides a pool of cheap labour for men of vision such as yourself. That is to say, people content to be happy in their own way, which is not ours. Fenedge may not be sin city, but nor do we want it to be.’
‘I’ve never spoken to schoolgirls before,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Just deliver the speech we agreed upon,’ said Driver, who seemed a little irritated. ‘Say the lines and leave the stage; have your cup of tea afterwards, a piece of the cake baked by the Home Economics class, be pleasant to everyone, and they’ll all be lining up for jobs at Bellamy House Hotel. You’ll see.’
‘I may throw away the prepared speech and speak from the soul,’ warned Sir Bernard. ‘It’s what I usually do and it’s always worked to date.’
At the very mention of the word soul, Driver lifted his handsome head and sniffed the air, like a fox trying to pick out chicken.
‘You have quite a snuffle there again,’ said Sir Bernard, who knew that Driver was after his soul, but being unconvinced that he had one, felt that selling it was a risk well worth taking. Sir Bernard was accustomed to selling things that did not exist – eternal youth, perfect health amongst them — having a strong financial interest in one of the nation’s leading health food chains. There was a slight bump, as if the car had run something over.
‘That wasn’t a cat, I hope,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Good Lord no,’ said Driver. They drove on in silence.
By the time they reached the uncompromising square brick building which was Fenedge School for Girls it was raining: the kind of sweeping misty drizzle which so often affected the area, although no doubt it helped the wild flowers grow. (Plants can absorb moisture through their leaves as well as their roots.) A small group waited under umbrellas to greet Sir Bernard. Mrs Baker, Head of English, was there: a woman in late middle age with a beautiful Renaissance face perched on an overflowing body, which she had clothed in layer upon layer of dusty black, in a way that was almost Islamic. Sharing her umbrella were Carmen, Annie and Laura, the three of them making one of her.
‘Welcome, Sir Bernard,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘to Fenedge School. We have been so looking forward to your visit. These days we depend so very much on the support of local enterprise.’
Driver stood to one side; he did not need an umbrella: the rain fell all around but not on him. He held his over Sir Bernard’s silvery head, a model chauffeur, always there but never ostentatiously so.
Mrs Baker introduced Laura, Annie and Carmen to Sir Bernard. ‘These are my best girls,’ she said. Mrs Baker’s best girls! By that she meant the girls least likely to succumb too soon to the local boys; girls who would go out into the world and show just what a woman could do, unburdened by domesticity; girls who would pass their exams without trouble. And the exams were only a month away. Annie was Head Girl; she meant to follow in her family’s footsteps, and go into the healing arts, that is to say, nursing. Laura was Head Prefect; she planned to go to the University of East Anglia, and Carmen was to do Art & Design at the local Polytechnic. All this Mrs Baker told Sir Bernard, careless of the weather.
But no one was listening. It was raining too hard, and the wind blew the words back into her mouth, and as for Sir Bernard, he was staring hard at Carmen. Rain glistened on her eyelashes; she was, as my grandmother used to describe it, ‘in good face’ that day, and when she saw Sir Bernard staring she blushed, and looked more enchanting still.
‘Shall we go inside?’ suggested Driver, because he did not at that time include a chit of a girl like Carmen in his plans. She was not the Marguerite he had in mind for Sir Bernard. Her soul was far too firmly hers; and what’s more it swam around in the sphere of Mrs Baker, a woman he disliked on sight, for all she wore layers of black. He could not abide a plump woman, and that was that; a plump good woman was anathema to him.
Sir Bernard stood on a platform in front of two hundred and fifty-three girls and listened to Mrs Baker’s introductory talk, or half listened, because Carmen was standing at the very back of the hall, just by the back exit. He would rather she had sat in the very front, but at least he could see her. She is my Marguerite, he thought, and it’s up to the Devil to provide her. Mrs Baker was speaking about the transition from the world of school to the world of work, and the usual guff about equal opportunities and women making their presence felt in business and politics, so he paid no attention to his notes and spoke from the soul.
‘I reckon all your noses,’ he said, ‘are too pretty to be kept to the grindstone. I reckon too many people spend too much time telling the young what they ought to hear, and not what they need to hear. Which is this. What this nation needs, to solve its employment problems, is for women to return to the home; to stay out of the workforce once they are married. What’s so bad about staying at home?’
Mrs Baker shuffled discontent and disapproval beside him, but he took no notice.
‘It’s our experience,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘that throughout the Bellamy Empire the most efficient executives are the ones with stay-at-home wives, the ones who create happy families, healthy children, and give a man something worth fighting for. A man’s duty is to support a family; a woman’s duty is to make a home he’s happy to come back to –’
He could see Driver at the side of the stage. Driver was shaking his head at him. Sir Bernard carried on.
‘Book-learning,’ said Sir Bernard to the girls, ‘is not much use to a girl, and don’t let your teachers tell you otherwise. I left school at fourteen; I never passed an exam in my life –’
The stage was lined with curtains allegedly fireproofed. But now a little flicker of flame ran up them. Perhaps it was the fierce focusing of Driver’s eyes that set it off, and it was then fanned by Mrs Baker’s flush of outrage – though of course it might have been the caretaker’s cigarette, discarded but not stubbed out as he entered a No Smoking Zone – but, whatever the cause, Carmen at the back of the hall was the first to see the flames. She shrieked, ‘Fire! Don’t panic!’ and the whole audience rose as one girl and filed neatly from the hall, well drilled as they were in proper emergency procedure, while Laura, Annie and Carmen counted them through. They did not believe in the fire, but they trusted Carmen to get them out of a boring situation if she could.
Sir Bernard and Driver left by the side entrance, made hasty goodbyes and drove off.
‘Why didn’t you keep to the script?’ said Driver.
‘I was speaking from the soul,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘I was speaking the truth as I know it,’ and Driver buried his head in his handkerchief and sneezed, and there was a bump as they ran over something.
‘That was a dog,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘It shouldn’t have been in the road,’ said Driver. ‘You must never swerve to avoid an animal: it can cost human lives.’
‘Shouldn’t we stop?’ asked Sir Bernard, but he didn’t press the matter, for his soul was so nearly not his any more, and the black BMW slithered on through the flatlands, where the alder trees abound, and ashes and the silver and downy birch, bowed low by bindweed, towards the oak woodlands of the heath.
‘Tell you what,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘you get me that girl for a wife, and I’ll follow whatever script you put in front of me.’
‘For a wife?’ asked Driver.
‘For a wife,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘I want her body and soul. I am a man of swift decisions. She is my Marguerite.’
‘Sir Bernard,’ said Driver, ‘Marguerites are in scarce supply these days. Busybodies like Mrs Baker put ideas in their heads. They pass exams, lose the knack of perfect love.’
‘Then see to it,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘that they don’t.’
If you treat the Devil like a servant, he tends to act like a servant, and do what he’s told, at least for a time.
The fire caught the wood above the stage; the entire school was evacuated, and the Fire Brigade called. The engines came promptly, but water from their hoses, rather than fire, damaged the structure of the roof, and the school was closed for two weeks for emergency repairs.
‘Annie, Carmen and Laura,’ said Mrs Baker to her best girls, ‘this couldn’t have come at a worse time for your exams. Already you’re falling behind with your studies. If you don’t get your exams, what will become of you?’
Laura said, ‘I’ll get married and have kids.’
Annie said, ‘Help my mother with her clairvoyance.’
Carmen said, ‘Be a call girl.’
And they all said exams weren’t the be-all and the end-all of life, look at Sir Bernard, who did well enough without, but they were only teasing Mrs Baker, or she hoped they were.
The local newspaper merely reported that a fire had broken out at Fenedge High during an address by Sir Bernard Bellamy, and the school had consequently been closed for structural repairs. It could not, said the Headmistress, have come at a worse time for girls now studying for public examinations.