Now that gets me really worried, I don’t know why, but it does, so I hurry round to the stage door and Mr Payne, he must already have gone in, so I go in. Almost the first thing I hear when I’m in is this sort of crash and coming from the stage, it sounds like. Well, like a fool, I try to switch on a light and I’ve forgotten that I threw the mains switch to the building at the prompt corner. Still, I should know my way by now, so I feel hand over hand along the wall to one of the pass doors onto the stage. By God, it’s black as the ace of spades in there. I can’t see a thing, but I can hear. My Christ, I can hear. It’s someone screaming out in agony, like you can feel the pain yourself. It’s coming from somewhere near the stage, but there’s an echo, hollow like. And it goes on, this screaming. It’s Mr Payne, I know the voice, and now I’ve worked out where he is. He’s in the orchestra pit because it’s deep and hollow. I feel my way round the back wall and then the prompt side wall towards the corner, and all the time there’s this screaming going on. But now it’s getting weaker and mixed up in it is a sort of coughing and what I call a gurgle, like he’s choking on jam or something thick and sticky. Now I’ve got to the prompt corner and I stop dead still. Then there’s this great big choke and it stops. Everything’s quiet for a second — silence — and I’m just reaching up to where I think the mains switch is going to be when I hear this other sound. It’s like tap, tap, tap of a stick on the stage and the patter of paws and the breath of a dog. It’s coming my way towards the prompt corner but I can’t see a thing. Everything’s as black as bloody hell. He’s coming closer. I hold my breath. I say nothing. He’s three, four feet away and I can almost smell him. Wisper gives a little low growl, like she does, and he says: “Pegley, are you there?” I say nothing, and again he says “Pegley, are you there?” That’s when I run, bumping into him as I go and he’s wearing this long overcoat of soft cashmere like, soft and cold. I don’t know how, I find my way to the pass door and then I’m out of there. Then I forget but I know the wife, she lets me in three or four in the morning, and I’d got through a bottle of Bell’s by then, so she thinks she knows the reason, except I’m not usually a big drinker. Later that morning I have to go back to the theatre, though I don’t usually go in on a Sunday, because I know what’s going to be there and I have to report it. Then a few days afterwards Mr Marlesford and I have a talk, and he says he’ll see me all right. But I’m making sure he does, so when you hear this I might be dead; and if I’m dead and Mr Marlesford — Sir Kenneth, I should say — is still alive, then you know what to do.’
When I had transcribed the tape, and read it over, I opened the letter that was with the tape. It was addressed to Mr Pegley from a firm of London solicitors:
Parkins, Wraxall & Worby, Solicitors
1 Lupton Court
Gutter Lane
Cheapside
London E.C.2.
Dec. 5th 1971
Dear Mr Pegley,
We have been instructed by the Estate of the late Sir Kenneth Marlesford and under the conditions of his will to charge you with the following task.
You are to come to these offices at the above address and collect from us the urn containing the late Sir Kenneth’s ashes and take them by train to Seabourne. There you are to gain access to the Grand Pavilion Theatre and place or scatter those ashes ‘Where,’ in the words of Sir Kenneth’s List of Instructions signed and dated 23rd December 1970, ‘Mr. Pegley knows I wish them to be so placed or scattered.’
For this task you are to receive the sum of £500 plus expenses. Should you reveal the nature of this task, or any of the contents of this letter, to any person whatsoever (family members included) you will at once forfeit the pension which Sir Kenneth has allowed that you should continue to be paid under the provisions of his last will and testament signed, dated, and witnessed, 23rd December 1970.
We await your response at your earliest convenience,
Yours etc,
Sydney Wraxall
I asked Tom whether his father had fulfilled this obligation. Tom says he doesn’t know, but he thinks he remembers his father going up to London (a thing he rarely if ever did) at about that time. ‘Anyway,’ said Tom, ‘our dad was never one to pass up the offer of a bit of extra cash.’
I did not ask Tom precisely how his father had died, but, as it happens, he volunteered the information. It happened in November 1991. Pegley was alone in his house, his wife having died three years previously, and he was sleeping in the first floor bedroom. At some time in the early hours of the morning he got up, presumably to answer a call of nature. He switched on the passage light, but the bulb blew and fused all the lights. One can only speculate what happened next, but it was probably in the confusion which followed this minor mishap that Mr Pegley took a step or two in the wrong direction and ended by falling down his own stairs and breaking his neck.
There had been an inquest, but the jury brought in a verdict of accidental death.
Wednesday 11 July 2006:
Today I managed to gain access to the theatre and stayed there just long enough to testify that the interior is indeed a splendid example of Frank Matcham’s art. I don’t want to write anything further about my experiences in the Grand Pavilion, Seabourne, except this: my quest is over, but what I have found will remain with me.
* * * * *
This is where George Vilier’s diary ended. A few days later his body was found on the rocks below Beachy Head some miles further down the coast. No indication can be found — apart, perhaps, from that ambiguous last sentence — that he was suffering from depression, or that his mind was unbalanced.
Shades of the Prison House
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy . . .
Wordsworth,
Intimations of Immortality
I
FORGIVE ME, I can only talk in fragments. The memories are returning, but in bursts, like the sudden flowering of fireworks in a night sky. This is the way I remember now, ever since the blow to my head — when was it? — two days ago now? Everything up to the age of thirteen and then — nothing until I wake up here at the age of sixty . . . three, did you say? Dear God; and why am I here? No! Don’t tell me! I must have been well educated in that black and empty interim because I express myself well, do I not? So the rest of me is still in there somewhere, but I know nothing of it. Why, therefore, should I accept responsibility for whatever it is I am supposed to have done? No! Don’t tell me! I am trying to concentrate. Here comes another memory shooting up out of the darkness: I must get it down.
Sarson and I are in the back of the Rolls. Have you ever been in a Rolls-Royce? There is a special smell which I can only describe as the smell of wealth, the smell of soft and yielding upholstery, of polished walnut accessories and, above all, the faint intoxicating whiff of Montecristo Cigars from the front seats where Sarson’s Uncle Rex sits with the chauffeur. What was his name? Mort. Rex always called him Mort: his full name is Mortimer Nodder, I believe. I can’t remember what Mort’s face looks like, but I can see the back of his neck. He must be a thin chap, because the muscles and veins in his neck are visible and his skin is white, its surface irregular, like the skin of a plucked chicken. His dull brown hair is cut short and he always wears a grey peaked cap. Mort smooths the Rolls out of the drive of Russell Court School with a gentle purr from its engine. Then Sarson jabs me with something: a pin, I think it is.
Wait! This can’t make any sense to you. I must try to start at what is absurdly called the beginning, because, of course, there really is no beginning, or end. Nor, for me, is there a middle, but we’re not going into that.
I’ll have to start with my mother, a widow by the time I was eleven. My father died in 1955, leaving us well provided for, and we moved from Surrey to a quite luxurious service flat in one of those big blocks just off Baker Street. Mother had never liked the country: she much preferred London friends, London shops, and everything done for her. I still hunger for the country. I can see the flat now, full of the things she loved and I hate. She collects nineteenth century bric-à-brac, which is just beginning to be fashionable. Perhaps I acquired a taste for these things later in life, but I have lost it again now. There are
papier mâché
tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a crowd of brightly coloured stuffed birds under a glass cloche, and that pair of Staffordshire China dogs on the mantelpiece. I loathe them because they don’t look like real, proper dogs to me. I want a proper dog, not the London lapdog Mother has acquired: a black and tan Pekinese called Fu-Fu whose bulging eyes stare at me with loathing out of its puckered, snuffling little face. Mother is telling me that she has ‘just met a Mrs Sarson — such a nice woman! — and, do you know, we were talking and it turns out that she has a son called Giles who goes to Russell Court, just like you, and the same age too! Do you know him? You ought to be friends. Perhaps you are already. You never tell me these things, Peter, you’re so secretive.’
I never tell her, because until now she hasn’t shown the slightest interest. Of course I know Sarson! He is the most unpopular boy in the school, but I don’t tell mother this. She seems so pleased with herself, as if she has made a delightful discovery which will benefit me enormously. The holidays are coming to an end, and no doubt she will insist on my making friends with Sarson the following term.
It is not immediately obvious why Sarson is so unpopular. He is tall, fair-haired, and unusually good-looking. Contrary to what some people think, you know, pre-adolescent boys are very susceptible to beauty. Well, I am, but I’m still not keen on Sarson, though mainly because nobody else is. He’s not specially clever at work, or good at games, though he’s not bad, but he always acts as if he’s incredibly superior. It’s nothing you can pin down except that he boasts a lot about how rich his parents are. His father’s something in oil and they live most of the time abroad. And he boasts of course about his famous Uncle Rex, but I’ll come to that later.
Ours is an old-fashioned preparatory school. I’m talking about the year 1957, fifty years ago — is that right? — so it must seem even more old-fashioned to you than it does to me. There’s a lot of petty regulations and a lot of beating. Does that still go on? The Headmaster even has names for his canes: they’re called Scipio Major and Scipio Minor, after the Roman generals who tamed Hannibal, you know. I suppose one of them is supposed to be less painful than the other, but I could never tell the difference. Well, Sarson is always getting ‘Scipio’d’, as we call it, though it doesn’t seem to worry him. What for? Oh, all sorts of things, but mostly for things he does to the smaller boys, like putting ink in their geometry boxes, or glue on their hair, or drawing pins on their seats. That’s when he’s caught, but mostly he isn’t caught, so he is feared as well as hated.
Am I painting too grim a picture? I do not intend to. I think I am happy here. The Head Master, The Reverend Richard Cowdray, always known as R.C., is pretty decent, in his intentions anyway. Russell Court is in Kent, situated a few miles inland from the Channel Coast on the edge of a little town called Northgate, one of those quiet, respectable places where elderly spinsters go to fade away in pairs, and retired Majors play golf and bridge. I am a solitary boy, which does not mean that I have no friends, but that I take them or leave them at a whim, and in between I walk alone, like a cat. I am not noticeably bad at games, but I never shine. I dream and wander whenever I can, and the grounds offer many places of solitude. In the summer the shade of trees beside a playing field is what I like best. There I can hide myself with a book or two until across the evening air the Master On Duty calls: ‘All In!’
Summer evenings on a Saturday or Sunday are my favourite because they are a time of no obligations or duties: no games, no work. You cannot be got at: being got at by people with intentions for me is the thing I dread. Those evenings are long, like the shadows that stretch across the cricket fields. I have a spot where I go on these occasions because it is where no one else goes. It is the Second Eleven Cricket Pavilion on Lower Field. Its quiet, self-proclaimed mediocrity soothes me and appeals to something deep within. I cannot tell you what it is; perhaps I discovered that later in life, but I don’t know, you see. There is usually an old deck chair on its verandah where I can sit and read unmolested.