Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

Stockport County 0 Accrington Stanley 0 thought Jarvis. Accrington Stanley 3, Tranmere Rovers 1 Under the influence of this homely mantra, the stress gradually seeped out of his system. When he could trust himself to speak in a suitably authoritative tone, he looked back at Anderson.

‘I shall need to talk to Miss Travis, sir.’

Anderson raised his glass and stared through it darkly at Jarvis.

‘My overriding concern must at all times be the welfare of the little community entrusted to my care, he murmured. ‘Those were my dear Mamma’s dying words to me. Well, actually she made a noise resembling a washing machine on a heavy soil cycle, but that’s what she was trying to say all right. I should know. Christ knows I’d heard it often enough before.’

‘Either here or at headquarters,’ Jarvis continued implacably. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

Anderson poured the rest of the whisky into his mouth. Leaning his head back against the wall, he gargled loudly.

‘It’s not so much a question of the venue,’ he said at length, ‘as of upsetting the psychological microclimate which Letitia and I strive to maintain here at Eventide Lodge, and which is so essential to our clients’ well-being. In this carefully controlled environment, the fictions I referred to earlier proliferate freely and yet harmlessly. But if an outsider-particularly one girded in the awful panoply of the Law-comes crashing in demanding to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or God help you, the effect on the delicate and frankly non-viable life-forms whose habitat is thus rudely disturbed is fearful to contemplate.’

‘I’m not intending to conduct a formal interview,’ Jarvis protested. ‘It’s just a question of asking Miss Travis a few questions, that’s all.’

Anderson sighed.

‘Even so, is there really anything to be gained by harassing a sad old lady who lives in a world of her own, which although it to some extent mimics the one we inhabit has in fact only the most tenuous connection with it?’

Jarvis stuck his chin up. His ears gleamed dangerously.

‘If you prefer, sir, I can always apply for a court order.’

Anderson butted the wall with his forehead.

‘As you wish!’ he cried, making for the door. ‘I’ll get Letitia to round her up. Do with her what you will, Inspector-Miss Travis, I mean. No one in their right mind would want to do anything mentionable with Letty.’

The door closed behind him. Jarvis expelled a breath which he seemed to have been holding for a very long time. Bradford City 6, Accrington Stanley 4. Accrington Stanley 0, Port Vale 0. Crewe Alexandra 0, Accrington Stanley…

A cold panic gripped him. Fourteenth of November 1953, the weather dull, crowd of almost seven thousand. Ian Brydon the scorer, Galbraith substituted at half-time and Accrington must have won because of the announcer’s rising intonation, but what was the friggin’ score?

He slumped down in the armchair and closed his eyes. Such a thing had never happened before. Come hell or high water, he had always been able to quote any Accrington scoreline on demand. Not that there was much demand, once the family moved down south. Jarvis had been six at the time, so it hadn’t meant that much to him, but his dad had never got over not being able to go along to Peel Park and watch the lads lose.

The team in the town they moved to was non-league, but his dad didn’t reckon that what they played down south deserved to be called football anyway. Even after ten years, Harry Jarvis’s roots remained in Lancashire. As time went by his memories became increasingly vague and unreal, and even his accent gradually lost its native edge. In the end only Accrington Stanley FC remained. Every Saturday afternoon, he and his son would sit themselves down in front of the radio in the parlour and listen to the Division Three results: Barrow 3, Scunthorpe United 1. Grimsby Town 1, Wrexham 1. Mansfield Town 2, Accrington Stanley 3.

Sitting beside the hissing gas-fire with a mug of hot tea listening to that plummy voice reciting the familiar litany of names was the high point of Stanley’s week. Although the Accrington result was the only one they were interested in, he loved the build-up through the First Division giants, and the poetic coda of the Scottish clubs with names like the title of a romantic novel-Partick Thistle, Queen of the South. Above all, he liked trying to guess the result from the announcer’s intonation: rising for an away win, dropping for a defeat-the more sharply, the greater the goal difference-and stressing both names equally if the match was a draw.

The second highlight of the week occurred when a brown envelope with an Accrington postmark landed on their doormat. It contained a letter from Stan’s uncle enclosing a cutting from the local newspaper expanding the bare result into a racy and compelling narrative involving their favourite cast of characters being cautioned or sent off, scoring or giving away goals, making heroes or fools of themselves. Stanley devoured these reports like episodes of a thriller, and the facts and figures around which they were built impressed themselves so effortlessly on his memory that he had no idea what a fund of them he possessed until that fateful day in March 1962 when Accrington Stanley made the national news for the first and last time as their sixty-eight-year league existence came to an abrupt and ignominious end.

After years spent bumping comfortably along the lower reaches of Division Three North, in the mid-Fifties the club suddenly rose to finish within the top three for several years in succession. Harry Jarvis said at the time that no good could come of them getting ideas above their station, and his forebodings were soon realised as Accrington marked the new decade by slipping for the first time into Division Four, where they would have to rub shin-pads with the likes of Peterborough and Aldershot. Stanley fans didn’t give themselves airs, but they weren’t common. They might not aspire to the Second Division, but being relegated to the Fourth represented a stigma they feared like poverty. But hardly had the Jarvis household come to terms with this disgrace than worse occurred as the club, plagued by debts and mismanagement, resigned from the Football League in mid-season without even completing its fixtures.

The local fishmonger had once demonstrated for Stan’s mum, who was squeamish about such things, the humane method of killing lobsters: you drove a sharp point-he’d used a bradawl-into the creature’s nerve centre. The news of Accrington’s demise had a similar effect on Stan’s dad. ‘The Owd Reds’ had become a repository for everything he had lost-the mist pouring down off the moors, that girl’s thighs going up the top deck of the tram, the blowfly sheen on the bacon in the window of the grocer’s-and now this last and seemingly secure refuge had been swept away. Harry Jarvis declined overnight into an alcoholic stupor.

His collapse lasted only a month or so, after which he started an affair with their next-door neighbour and perked up no end, but there was no way of knowing that at the time. Young Stan, who was of course scared stiff, soon discovered that the only way to revive his dad was to recite episodes from the club’s glorious past, holding up heroic feats and dastardly deeds from past matches for admiration and contempt. In the course of this therapy Stanley discovered without pride or surprise that he could remember almost every detail of Accrington’s record during its last decade in the league, but it was not for another six years-by which time his dad had moved in with the woman next door and Stan out to Hendon Police College-that he attended his first live football match.

He found the experience totally bewildering. Instead of the elegant interaction he’d been led to expect, a meaningful drama with a beginning, middle and an end, proliferating complexities building towards a climax where they were satisfyingly resolved, the game was a depressing, pointless chaos of muddled moves, failed attempts, missed passes and cynical brutality, with no perceptible shape or underlying rhythm, no sense or significance. Stan left at half-time, and didn’t even bother to check the final score in the paper next day.