English Monsters Page 2

  The Hall had been stripped of its assets after the war by a succession of unscrupulous owners. When the roof lead was sold it became derelict fast. It might have been torn down and replaced with an optimistic housing estate. Instead the hulk and its gardens were acquired by a London stockbroker who used the ruin as a backdrop for one garden party a year, and paid my grandfather and an old man called Tom Slingsby, who’d worked there as a stablehand in the 1920s, to maintain the grounds. For several years the two of them kept the garden immaculate while the house decayed sweetly behind them. Then the stockbroker grew tired of his toy. A developer made him an offer and converted it into luxury flats. The Hall was sanitised and subdivided, but standing.

  So there was Grandad, having made enough of himself to buy his own land, only to be looked down on by a bunch of weekend squires who thought of the countryside as a plaything. They pretended to like him, and let him fix their lawnmowers, but even at ten I knew what they were saying behind his back. It particularly enraged them that my grandfather still owned the park, which he refused to prettify and rejected all inducements to sell. They wanted estate fencing and a herd of ornamental deer. Instead they got mud and bullocks, and him capering around in his Renault 4 van, Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller jumping within. Bits of farm machinery were dotted around in varying states of disrepair. In summer, thistles grew in outrageous clumps, which he decapitated as he drove, taking aim at the clouds of down that clung to the tops to propagate them far and wide. In winter, he fed his beasts on waste matter from the McCain oven chip factory, a pungent slop of fermenting potato peelings he called splodge. I still like to picture the aroma drifting up to the Hall and offending its occupants as they sipped their sherry and lamented the squalor.

  In photos taken before retirement he is a different person. Whip-thin, pipe on the go, and a mouthful of his own teeth. He’d always loved sweets. At some point, which probably coincided with the acquisition of extra weight, he got bored of all the dentistry and had the lot removed. The man in the pictures looked wrong. The teeth seemed overemphasised. He looked like a boxer with his gum shield in. By the time I knew him his build had settled into something comfortably Churchillian, with a bullish neck and a full head of greying blond hair. His wisdom had nothing to do with education and everything to do with experience. Idleness infuriated him, but nothing disgusted him more than those who lived meanly, or with a deficit of grace. Such people, he would say, wanted shooting out of a cannon.

  Modernity had pursued him all his life, but he’d seen it coming and evaded capture every time. The farm he’d run with his father was by this time an industrial estate in the Coventry suburbs, the house to which it had been attached a wedding-venue hotel. But that didn’t matter to him any more than that the Hall had become a condo for stately-home fantasists. He was from this mid-land and knew it far too well to let a bit of change affect him. In other words, he was as from one place as it is possible to be, which is not something I have ever been able to say for myself. I had none of the security of a tether. But no tether either.

  You’ve got to go like hell.

  I would hear the refrain for years, especially in my twenties, when he worried I was pissing away my life. However many drunken nights there were (and in time I would be participating myself), I was always made aware of how hard he and my grandmother had worked for them. He never even drank that much before, he claimed, though his best stories always involved booze and you don’t acquire a facility like his without practice.

  ‘Drinking and driving never used to matter,’ he told me once when she was out of the room. ‘I remember sitting in the back of a Ford Eight with Jim and a girl called Minnie and a bottle of port wine. He’d have a snog and I’d have the bottle, then I’d have a snog and he’d have the bottle. Marvellous.’

  Another summer evening and more animals to feed. At the chalk pond behind his workshop I held the bucket of grain while he flicked scoops of it in ribboning arcs that brought ducks batting across the water. When the last of it had drummed into the grass we settled ourselves at a table by the water’s edge. Beside him was one of the bin bags of unsold stock he got for nothing from a local baker. He reached inside, took out a loaf, and began breaking it into pieces. The first dropped crust idled in the water before a gaping orange mouth rose to suck at it. The black backs of other carp arrowed in as more baked goods hit the surface. I opened the bag wider, inhaling a bouquet of éclairs, doughnuts and Chelsea buns.

  ‘A lot of this stuff isn’t stale at all,’ I said, licking my fingers between throws.

  ‘I know. They’re spoilt rotten, these fish. And you can’t even eat them. They’re bottom-feeders. They’d taste horrible. But my God they can breed.’

  We stopped flinging a while and sat back to watch the surface churn. He poured himself a glass of wine, then cracked a Coke and slid it in my direction. There were two earthenware pots on the tray, one of chicken pâté and one of tapenade, both made by him.

  ‘Early night tonight,’ he said. ‘Market day tomorrow.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘Your grandma says you can’t cos she’s got to take you up for this interview at lunchtime.’

  This I had forgotten.

  ‘What time’s the interview?’

  ‘Twelve. You’d be back in time easy, only she thinks you’ll be tired.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Right you are. I’ll get you up. And if you don’t leap out of bed I shall put a dog up your sheets.’

  As if on cue, a ruckus of barks kicked off by the house, alerting us to the arrival of Tom Slingsby, who had puttered up in his grey Fiesta. He climbed out slowly, reaching for his stick and planting it before standing up. He saw my grandfather’s raised arm, lifted his own leathery hand and started advancing.

  ‘Jump up, boy. Give him a steer.’

  I ran to Tom and fell into step so he could hold my shoulder.

  ‘Good lad, Maxy,’ he breathed. He had white hair and a round, wrinkled face that combined with his stoop to make me think of a kindly ape.

  My grandfather called out ‘How do’, then angled out the chair I had been sitting on to offer it to Tom. ‘Fetch the old bugger a glass,’ he said to me.

  ‘I don’t want to hinder you, Bob.’

  ‘Shut up and sit down.’

  When Tom was settled we got on with tossing the rest of the bakery into the water.

  ‘Miss Bandy’s in a right state about that spaniel of hers,’ said Tom. ‘Says she’s no idea how it happened.’

  ‘I bet she is,’ said my grandfather. ‘Hell of a thing to be dealing with a litter at her age. I told her: that bitch is in pup. She’s bagging up. Only she didn’t believe me.’ A carp was struggling to suck a chunk of bread off a patch of blanket weed, so I knelt down to knock it off. ‘Course, I had a fair shout knowing in advance.’

  ‘Bob,’ said Tom in a low voice, ‘what do you mean?’

  Now his giggle was uncontrollable. ‘Jack gave that bitch a damn good fucking. I watched it happen while I was deadheading Miss Bandy’s roses.’

  Tom had gone. The laughter had claimed him.

  ‘Who was I to get between them?’ said my grandfather. ‘I wasn’t going to stop him having a good time.’ Then he remembered me and corrected the conversation. ‘This one’s got a big day tomorrow. It’s his interview up at the place on the hill.’

  ‘What have you got to do?’ said Tom, wiping his eyes.

  ‘We’ve no idea,’ said my grandfather. ‘Can’t be much. Especially given how much his dad’s company is paying them to take him. He reckons he’s going to market with me all the same.’

  ‘You know what time he gets up, don’t you?’ said Tom. ‘You’ll get a fright when he comes in.’

  The old man and the older man carried on laughing as carp slopped in the milky water, apparently insatiable.

  Ripped from a dream of hot beaches and jellyfish by the feeling of claws on my ankles and breath on my skin as he sent the terri
er scrambling up my bedclothes.

  ‘Get out of it, you rubbishing bugger!’ His staged anger, full of joy. ‘It’s quarter to five.’

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ I groaned.

  ‘You’d better be else I’m going without you.’

  He was off, whistling the opening bars of ‘Hello, Dolly’. Muffled movement downstairs. The kettle’s reedy whistle. Total darkness at the windows.

  When I made it to the kitchen I found him standing at the stone urn which contained his home-made cider vinegar. He plunged a tin mug inside, drank a shot, refilled the mug and passed it to me.

  ‘Do it in one or you’ll never do it.’ Too tired to disregard the instruction. Electric jolt. Scalp ripple. Stomach fire. ‘Good health. That’ll get you going, boy.’

  Dawn leached up the sky as the van reached the outskirts of Leicester, where street lights were flickering off one by one. Near a nightclub we passed a young couple arguing in the street.

  ‘Bloody hell, look at these two, they haven’t been to bed.’ As we slowed, the boy must have said something that crossed the line, because the girl dropped her kebab-van chips and clocked him on the cheek. ‘Look out! That’s it, girl. Give him another.’ He almost ground to a halt to watch the scene play out in his rear-view mirror, loving the life of it. ‘Dear oh dear. She didn’t half set about him.’ He was still enjoying it when we reached the market. It was a momentary respite from life not living up to his standards. Whatever else might disappoint him today, he’d have this to fall back on.

  We entered the strip-lit cavern of earthy smells and beeping forklifts and he started loading his sack barrow with fruit and vegetables. He bought so much stock that many traders assumed he was a grocer. Those who knew him better understood his predilection for wholesale, and for supplying to family and friends. Their ongoing joke was that it was all for my grandmother.

  How is she then, Bob? She needs another sack of shallots, does she? Righto.

  We returned to the van with laden barrow several times before he’d bought enough to stop for breakfast. I grappled with the nausea of tiredness while he ordered sausage and chips twice and two mugs of tea at the on-site greasy spoon.

  ‘Summer’s on the wane,’ he said, looking at the clock on the wall and noting the time of the sunrise. He was prone to melancholy about things like this, to a Falstaffian sadness at the ending of the revels. But it was offset against his farmer’s understanding of the wheel turning, of there always being something to appreciate if you knew where to look. ‘I bet that poor bugger’s still rubbing the side of his head somewhere,’ he added, smiling. He set down his fork and drained his tea. ‘Right. Better get you home and present you for inspection.’

  Before the interview my grandmother dunked me in a shallow bath, handed me a clean shirt and brushed my hair in the reflection of the oven door. She wound her own waist-length grey hair up into a bun and we set off in their Citroën estate. He had unloaded his produce and gone to work, and as we drove down the lane that skirted the edge of the park we passed him cutting hedges in a tractor. When we slowed, he wished me luck and dropped a ripe peach through the sunroof, which she said I wasn’t to eat until later in case I got juice down my shirt.

  We crossed the humpback bridge in the base of the valley then climbed the opposite side through unfamiliar ironstone villages. The road steepened sharply then proceeded through a pair of pillars topped with stone bulls’ heads. We passed a thatched lodge on the left-hand side then swept down a long avenue of ashes and oaks. A groundsman chugged round the outfield of a cricket pitch on his sit-on mower.

  I saw it first at its most seductive. Battlements against a fierce blue sky. Honeyed stone in full summer light. The church with its crippled, leaning steeple. The resplendent, clock-towered stable block. A balustrade of urns bursting with flowers. The fragrance of cut grass. A Border terrier and a black Labrador lazing on the lawn. There was a surreal sense of ascension, of having risen from arches and market grime to this plateau of ancient walls and scented gardens. It felt like a different life.

  We got out of the car, footsteps sinking into deep, grey gravel. While my grandmother looked for the way in, I stared into the roses that grew over the porch, lost in their folds and creases. Above the front door was a carved stone crest in which another bull’s head glowered sideways under a jagged crown. My grandmother opened the door and we entered what I would come to know as the Great Hall. Swords and shields mounted in velvet pads. A walk-in fireplace with blackened walls. Tapestries, panelling and silence. I picked up on my grandmother’s unease.

  A woman in a waxed jacket with raked-back blonde hair and a slash of red lipstick came out to greet us. In the years that followed I rarely saw her looking any other way, or experienced any warming in her manner. She was one of those Englishwomen whose pride is indexed to their acidity.

  ‘Fiona Sutton. Or Mrs Headmaster,’ she added to me.

  She seemed disappointed in my grandmother from the off. Too earthy. Too real. The country lilt to her voice, the deafness, the corduroy skirt. She took my grandmother’s arm and led her away as if she were an unwanted animal, leaving me standing by the door with a tall, stammering man who, after a few false starts of speech that made his leg jiggle, said enough for me to understand that he was her husband. So, I would only later realise, began the interview.

  We sat outside together on a stone bench. He told me about the school, using the first-person plural as if he and it were one and the same thing. He said how proud they were of the house’s seven-hundred-year history. Finally he asked me with great solemnity and further stuttering if I could spell the word Leicestershire. I don’t know whether or not I got it right.

  He gave me a tour. Floorboards shiny with polish. Shadows of the great cedar on the North Lawn. Ranks of iron beds labelled with surnames. Then he took me over to the stable block and showed me a few classrooms, and we re-emerged outside by a rectangular concrete pond.

  ‘This is what we rather grandly call the b-boating lake,’ said Tony Sutton. ‘And this,’ he said, pointing at a boy who was crouched down at the water’s edge, ‘is one of your future contemporaries. His m-mother works as my secretary, so he has the run of the p-place during the holidays. M-Max Denyer, meet Simon Drake.’

  He was tall for his ten years of age, with a peppering of freckles on either side of his nose, and hanks of light brown hair that got in his eyes. He stood up, extended an aerial on the radio controller in his hand and directed a small but powerful boat across the water.

  ‘It’s fast,’ I said, aware that Sutton had left us alone.

  ‘I’ve changed the gearing of the servos. They never give them enough power because they worry about motors burning out. Are you coming to school here?’

  ‘Maybe. What’s it like?’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess it depends on how much you enjoy being at home.’

  ‘My home’s a long way from here.’

  ‘Not really up to you, anyway, is it?’ He gestured abruptly towards the balustrade. ‘See that urn there? The one on the end? Do you see how all the other urns have flowers in but that one has a top on it? It’s got the ashes in it of the boy the old urn fell on. They buried him in a copy of the thing that killed him.’

  I tried to think of a reply, but my grandmother was calling me back to the car to say goodbye to the Suttons. I can’t remember what else was said or done. Only that as we drove away and the battlements fell out of sight behind us, I sank my teeth into the peach, leaning back in the seat to catch every drop of falling juice with my shirt.

  3

  THE CHURCH WAS at the end of a long footpath behind a door in the wall which skirted the coach-house lane. The door’s paintwork was scored with the claw marks of my grandfather’s dogs, whose scrabbling and whining would threaten to turn violent if you didn’t throw it open in time. As soon as the handle was turned and the door kicked away the dogs pelted off, leaning into the bend like greyhounds. He trudged alongside me bearing his heavy chu
rchwarden’s key.

  ‘What are we doing?’ I said.

  ‘Clock’s broken,’ he replied, the steady gravel crunch broken up by the panting of the dogs, who had already circled the church and returned. ‘That, and we’ve got to see about smartening the place up for the Domesday Book people.’ It was the nine hundredth anniversary, and notable buildings from the register were being refurbished in celebration.

  My grandfather pulled open the porch’s chicken-wire gates then unlocked the main door. The dogs sharked in ahead of us. He took a double palmful of holy water and leaned down to hold it for the pup, then gave the lip of the font a quick tap. Jack was up straight away, loudly lapping, then dropped with a sated crumple to the floor.

  He walked to the tower and called me over. ‘When I tell you to, grab hold of this,’ he said, taking a bell-rope. ‘And don’t let go.’ He gave the rope a downward jerk, let it fly upwards, then pulled it smartly down again. On the third pull he put his weight behind it, then released the rope and stepped away. ‘Now.’ A single bright clang sounded above. I clutched the rope and shot into the air, too scared to give vent to the joy. ‘I’ll get you to heaven in a flash, boy,’ he said when I was down. ‘Do you want a go on the organ?’

  ‘Not today.’ I looked at the altar. ‘Why do you never go up for communion?’

  ‘Because I think it’s a load of rubbish. When you’re dead, you’re finished. And I wouldn’t drink with that lot, anyway. The number of folks you see queuing up there of a Sunday to soss at the wine with streaming colds and I don’t know what else. You could be poorly all winter.’

  ‘You don’t believe any of it?’

  ‘It’s made up, isn’t it? By men. And what do they know?’

  ‘What about the sermons?’

  ‘I don’t need some bloke in a frock to tell me what’s right and wrong. Their shit smells the same as everybody else’s. Which I know for a fact, cos I unblock all the drains.’