The Shift Key (4 page)

‘Would you tell me what in heaven’s name you meant by writing this from the point of view of Montcalm’s soldiers? And, what is more,
in French?’

Someone at the back of the room giggled. Goaded beyond endurance, Victor roared, ‘You’re making mock of me, you little devil!’

Alarm crossed Harold’s face. ‘Sir!’ he protested. ‘That’s what you told us to do! Yesterday! I remember clearly!’

Brandishing the blackboard eraser, Victor stamped down to confront Harold, shaking with fury, wanting to beat him about the head until he moaned and blubbered.

‘I did nothing of the kind!’ he shouted. ‘Ask the rest of the class!’

Uncertainty supplanting his alarm, Harold said, ‘But, sir, I’m absolutely sure you told us yesterday …’

‘Did I?’ Victor rounded on the other pupils. ‘Well?’

Two or three voices confirmed that he had not.

‘I hadn’t even thought of your assignment before this morning!’ Victor bellowed, bethinking himself too late of the
risk that such an admission might further undermine his precarious authority. ‘For telling lies, and most of all for playing the smartass bastard, you’re going to see the Head! Come with me! The rest of you, carry on reading!’

Dropping the eraser, snatching up Harold’s essay, he marched the boy out of the room.

The meeting with the Head, of course, was a disaster. Brushing aside the question of lying to a teacher, he pronounced himself favourably impressed by what he termed Harold’s initiative and enterprise … but not by Victor, whose ears he made burn privately during morning break.

At which juncture Harold’s younger brother Paul was standing alone, very puzzled and increasingly angry, in one of the music-rooms, deserted at this time of morning. He was absolutely certain that he’d made a date last night with Eunice Hoddie, from his class, whom he’d long lusted after. They were to meet here and snatch an hour of bliss.

Well, fifteen minutes, anyway.

Shortly before the bell rang to mark the end of break, he lost his temper and marched back into the corridor. Spotting Eunice chatting with a group of friends, he rushed over to corner her.

‘What do you mean by standing me up?’ he shouted.

She was his age but, like most girls in comparison with boys, far more sophisticated. She tilted back her head, crowned with a punk-dyed crest of spiky hair, and seized the chance of sweet revenge for all the times in the past when Paul and his brother had disdained the company of their ‘inferior’ fellow-pupils.

‘Stand you up?’ she said, with a wink at her companions. ‘If you mean what I
think
you mean, I’m not sure I’d want to try. After all, you don’t look like you could!’

The bell sounded, and she and the other girls swept away
amid a gale of laughter. Paul was left white-faced and shaking.

Eunice had promised to meet him in the music-room! She had! She HAD!

But … when?

By lunch time, naturally, the joke was all around the school. The Ellerford boys being regarded as ‘snooty’, it became embroidered as it passed from mouth to mouth. During the afternoon it underwent still further transformations and elaborations.

Meantime, back in Weyharrow, sundry other events had come to light which those involved would have paid an arm or a leg to conceal. The village being, however, like all such small communities, a factory for gossip, they were public currency within hours, although nobody would ever have admitted passing on their private knowledge … save maybe to close friends, who had pledged utter secrecy.

So how on
earth –
?

A good few relationships were strained that day, and many snapped.

The first disaster to ‘go public’, as it were, was the case of Phyllis Knabbe.

Some time very early – it was still too dark to read the bedside clock – Miss Knabbe rose in answer to the squalling of her tomcat, called Rufus for his ginger fur. Until the year before last she had lived by herself, apart from a succession of cats, since the death of her parents. They had died when she was thirty-six; now she was forty-two.

But the little cottage, not fronting on the green, which the price of their larger but much-mortgaged home in Wedget Minor had sufficed to buy, cosy though it was, had often felt lonely. Cats were not enough.

Thank goodness, Miss Knabbe thought drowsily as she
padded to the kitchen door in dressing-gown and nightie, for the arrival of dear Moira when she had to let a room.

Moira O’Pheale was her own age to within months, and had been widowed, though not tragically. What she had recounted about life with her husband – miraculously, they had remained childless – had done nothing but reinforce Miss Knabbe’s own feelings concerning single blessedness.

On the other hand, she was having vague second thoughts about the companionability of cats, especially whole toms like Rufus. Last night she had wandered the garden until some unconscionable hour, not daring to call his name out loud because the windows of nearby houses were in darkness – and, besides, dear Moira had already gone to bed. It had been midnight at least before Rufus condescended to return, to lap some milk and purr around her ankles, for all the world as though he had done nothing disobedient.

And now, at this chill darkling hour, he wanted to make off again …

She was standing beside the back door. It was ajar and he was gone. Very well! That settled it! If not tomorrow, then next week, he must be taken to the vet, to rectify that fault she would herself have liked to set right in her father – who had, as her mother had if not said outright then frequently hinted, inflicted his lusts on her in most disgusting fashion.

As for what Declan O’Pheale had done to Moira, who had married him in dazzlement for his tallness and good looks, only to find he was a drunkard and a lecher …!

Images of what Rufus might by now be up to mingled in Miss Knabbe’s imagination with their human-to-human equivalents. She closed the door on her decision and found her way back upstairs by touch. She had refrained from turning on the lights lest Moira be disturbed.

Herself already in the clutch of Morpheus again, she groped for a door-handle, turned it, entered the room, let fall
her dressing-gown, and slipped into a warm and welcoming bed. Her hands encountered smooth nylon, and groped beneath it as she sighed with pleasure. What a relief it was to live with Moira now, instead of that horrid – randy – Rufus, that disgusting
male
…!

‘Mary Mother of God! What do you think you’re up to?’

A cry, almost a shriek. The bedside light snapped on. Moira was sitting up, the shoulder-straps of her nightie drawn down to expose her breasts.

And crying, ‘Phyllis! Are you mad? Get out of here!’

Miss Knabbe fought back the tide of sleep. ‘Is something wrong?’ she ventured.

‘What the hell do you mean? I’ll bloody say there is!
Get out of my bed!’

‘But …!’

But this was the bed the two of them had shared since Moira came here. Miss Knabbe knew it was, she knew it in her bones. Had she done something wrong?

She asked that very question, ready to apologize – and Moira slapped her cheek.

‘You must be bloody mad!’ she cried, magnificent with her mop of brown hair tousled round her face, snatching back the nightgown-straps that Miss Knabbe had dislodged. ‘If I’d known you were bloody queer I’d not have spent one night beneath your roof!
Get out!’

‘But this is our room!’ whimpered Miss Knabbe, raising her arms as though to ward off the kind of blows Moira had said her Declan rained on her.

‘Our room? You
are
mad! It’s mine and I pay rent to keep it private! Yours is the other side of the landing! Get out! Get out! Get
OUT
!’

‘What have I done?’ Miss Knabbe heard herself moaning as her sense of contented certainty evaporated.

‘Got rid of me!’ was Moira’s bitter answer. ‘In the morning I’m going to advertise for safer lodgings!’

‘But, darling Moira …!’

Her expostulations were of no avail. Moira did not recall what she recalled – what she’d have testified to on her Bible oath – that they had shared this room for two whole years …

Preparing to offer incontrovertible evidence, she gestured at the dressing-table, meaning to point out her own belongings on it, such as the silver-mounted toilet set she had been given for her twenty-first birthday.

They weren’t there. Nor was anything of hers.

Sobbing, Miss Knabbe fled as she was ordered to the other room across the landing, and switched on the light. There they were, all her possessions: shoes on the floor, dress and underwear across a chair … And the covers on the rumpled bed had been thrown back.

The hideous suspicion crossed her mind: she might be wrong.

And yet she could not make herself believe it. Her memories were much too real.

She wept until the sky outside was light and there were no more tears. Distantly she heard Moira descending the stairs, going to the kitchen, moving around. At last she plucked up the courage to go down herself and beg forgiveness.

It was to no avail. Moira was pulling on her coat, her face a frozen mask.

‘I’m going to tell everybody what you did!’ she promised. ‘And find a
man
to share my bed, if someone must!’

And marched out, slamming the door.

She kept her word.

Outside the primary school, in the shops, in the post office (which doubled as the newsagent’s, tobacconist’s and confectioner’s), in the Marriage at Cana and the bar of the Bridge Hotel when those opened at mid-morning, rumours took root, and sprouted, and bloomed. Not in living memory had
the people of Weyharrow had so much to talk about – not even when, last Midsummer Day, the police had descended on the hippies who had come here believing it to be a pagan site more ancient than Stonehenge, and taken off a bunch of them for drug offences. That had involved outsiders. It had been petty compared to the Knabbe scandal and the fight between Ken Pecklow and Harry Vikes.

With deep content the local folk discovered they had sex and violence on their doorstep.

It was to the general mood of excitement that Mr Jacksett, proprietor of the general store, ascribed his lapses in filling orders for his regular customers, all of whom seemed to have been given the wrong items. Shaking his head over the task of changing them, he wondered whether in fact it might rather be because he was worried about Boyo, his boxer dog, who had been missing since yesterday noon. He had been out until midnight calling and whistling. Presumably the brute had picked up the scent of a bitch and would return in his own good time, but the kids were crying for fear he might have been run over.

All morning similar incidents kept cropping up, though some went unregarded, like the one at the Bridge Hotel.

At the moment the hotel had no guests in residence – it seldom did after mid-September save at weekends – but last night the bar had been busy with the remnants of a birthday party. Having played the affable ‘mine host’ until his eyes began to cross with all the drinks the customers had stood him, Nigel Mender descended grumpily to the kitchen at ten-thirty, to find his chef, Tim Wamble, demanding why he couldn’t lay hands on the stocks he needed for today’s luncheon special. He was convinced they must have been thrown out with yesterday’s midnight garbage.

‘Today’s special?’ the landlord rasped, having heard his
complaint. ‘What do you mean, “today’s”?’

Tim – he was a slightly vague young man, but a hard worker, who had been hired to help out with the summer rush and agreed to stay on for the winter for lack of any better prospects – Tim spread his hands.

‘Yesterday’s was Spanish prawns and rice. Today’s is hot game pie.’

‘So what does it say over there?’ growled Mr Mender, pointing to the list he himself had chalked on the blackboard that each day at opening time was hung in the porch, and brought in overnight. ‘It says Wednesday, doesn’t it? And hot game pie? Today is Thursday, which means ham in cider, peas and chips! Prawns is tomorrow! Lord, I’d have thought you knew the drill by heart by now!’

Not staying for an answer, he swept past into the bar, as yet not open, to serve himself the Bloody Mary that would have to do in lieu of breakfast.

Tim stood there agape, whispering, ‘But I remember! I do remember! Prawns was yesterday!’

Miles to the east of Weyharrow, tour guide Ella Kailet sighed with relief as the coach drew in sight of Stonehenge barely half an hour later than the schedule called for.

Last night had been purgatory. It was never much fun conducting forty or more Americans on a whirlwind trip around the history-beset West Country. But when the coach broke down, so that they had to put up with a snack in a transport café instead of a square meal at their overnight hotel as they’d been promised, and then it broke down
again
barely ten miles from that hotel, and took another two hours to fix …!

At least, however, the mechanic who had turned out from Weyharrow Goodsir seemed to have cured the trouble. She had been none too happy about his competence when he showed up, nor about the state of mind of her tourists; the
night was chilly and they had stayed huddled and grumbling inside the coach – as had the weary driver, who claimed he had no help to offer; that was going to earn him a bad report when they returned to London! – while she stood shivering in mist and badgering the mechanic to get a move on.

Still, here they were at last, and she knew this part of the drill by heart. She rose to stand beside the driver.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ she told the microphone, forcing an air-hostess’s smile to her weary face. ‘We are now approaching Stonehenge, perhaps the most famous of all prehistoric monuments. It was here that visitors from outer space landed in flying saucers to bring to the primitive inhabitants of Earth the arts and skills that came to be reflected in the pyramids of Egypt and South America.’

The driver was tugging at her skirt. She slapped his hand away and ploughed on doggedly.

‘Later, of course, other similar landing sites, with their great dolmens that served as interstellar beacons, were constructed –
keep your paws off me, you oaf!
– were constructed as far away as Brittany and Scotland …’