Gavin Esler - A Scandalous Man

‘Harry!’

‘I mean, Hampstead .’

‘Harry! You should not talk like that and you should not even think like that. Instead you should visit him in hospital and … and … forgive him. It’s not too late to change things.’

She hung up.

‘But it is too late,’ Harry said aloud. ‘Too late for me, anyway.’

He swore quietly under his breath. The previous week Harry had also received a card from his father, though he had not bothered to mention it to his sister. It contained a similar invitation to meet and hear the ‘whole story’. Harry’s card had a different poem on the front, a few lines of Yeats’ poetry about ‘too long a sacrifice’ making ‘a stone of the heart’. Did his father know that he was working on a translation of Yeats into Czech? How?

Maybe it was a lucky guess. Maybe Amanda told him. Either way, Harry had put the card into his shredder, without replying. Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart .

‘Oh, when may it suffice,’ he muttered to himself as he walked into the bathroom to take a shower, to wash himself clean of his impure thoughts. ‘ Disgraced Thatcher Minister ,’ he said out loud, ‘gravely ill.’

Almost twenty years earlier, Harry was just eight years old, and the scandal involving his father had just broken in the newspapers. Harry was standing in the hallway of the family house in Pimlico, chewing at the sleeve of his grey and blue school uniform. Saliva stained the jacket cuff. He listened, a small, cornered animal. Nothing. But he knew they were out there. Waiting. They were always waiting. Packs of them. He wanted to find a burrow and bury himself under the warm earth. His father called them ‘the Wolves of the Forest’.

‘But without the morality or solidarity of the wolf pack,’ his father would thunder.

Harry could see their yellow eyes glowing with hunger. He knew that to the wolves he himself was just a small piece of meat. A snack. His father was the main meal. But that fact did not make Harry any more comfortable. Saliva foamed on Harry’s cuff. He closed his eyes and swayed from side to side. In his mind he could see them now, waiting and watching and filming, howling with their notebooks and microphones pointing towards him, leaning back on their haunches on the pavement outside the house, licking their chops and ready to snap as he and his father emerged. Harry’s knees knocked rhythmically. He gripped his canvas school bag. His name was printed in red block capitals. Underneath he had written in big black inky letters: ‘ Her name is Rio!!! ’ And: ‘ Duran Duran!!!! ’ And: ‘ Atomic!!!! Blondie!!! ’

The wetness of saliva was on his wrist. His mouth tasted of wool. A sudden noise outside made him twitch. The pack was getting restless, scratching, snarling, biting on the doorstep. Suddenly one knocked at the door, and another rang the bell. Harry wondered what primitive instinct, what ordering of wolf society enabled them to decide who would do the knocking and who would do the ringing, and when. He tried to figure out if there were rules. He made notes in his diary, scientific observations of times and intrusions over the past week since the siege began. It started at seven in the morning, never before. It continued until nine at night, never later.

‘Too late for their deadlines after that,’ his father explained, when Harry told him about his observations, though Harry did not know what a deadline was.

‘And of course the pubs are still open. The watering holes for the wolves, Harry.’

‘But what do we do?’ Harry’s older sister, Amanda, asked. ‘How can we just make them go away?’

‘We do nothing,’ their father advised. ‘They can’t get in. And when we go out, we will do it quickly. Walk straight to the car, look ahead, not to the side, and hold my hand. Say absolutely nothing. Ignore them. They’ll leave us when they realize there is nothing for them here. Nothing.’

Harry’s eyes widened with fear. Ignore them?

‘Remember the Three Little Pigs?’ his father suggested. ‘The wolves can huff and puff but they can never blow the house down. We are safe here. Completely safe.’

Safe, Harry thought. He had learned at school that safety and shelter were the two most basic human needs, ahead of food and love and comfort. Harry dreamed of safety. His burrow. His castle. He had read about the Persians surrounded by the forces of Genghiz Khan, the Seljuk hosts at Byzantium, English castles under siege in the Wars of the Roses and Italian cities besieged in the interminable wars of the Middle Ages. He marvelled at tales of attackers using catapults to throw plague victims or diseased animals inside the walls, the earliest form of biological warfare. The doorbell rang again. It had a particular urgency, as if a catapulted plague victim had thudded into the hallway.

‘ What new hell is this ?’ his father bellowed from up the staircase, and then called down in a softer voice. ‘Just ignore it, Harry. Believe me, they really are a lot less comfortable out there than we are in here.’

So Harry ignored it, with all the success of the Persians ignoring the Mongol hordes. He hopped from foot to foot in alarm.

‘Wait there,’ his father called down again. ‘I’ll get Amanda. We’ll go to the car together in about ten minutes and I’ll drop you off at school. Then I have a meeting with the Lady.’

Harry waited by the mirror. He knew who the Lady was. It was the Prime Minister. She was his father’s boss, which was good. He always called her ‘the Lady’. And the Lady was not pleased with his father, suddenly. Which was bad. Not pleased at all. And then Harry heard the claws on the flap of the letter box. A pair of eyes scanned across the hall. They were not yellow, as Harry had expected, but blue, cornflower blue. The brightest blue Harry had ever seen, like those on a husky-type dog that had once jumped up on him in Holland Park. He stared back at the cornflower blue eyes, transfixed. There was a voice where he almost expected a bark.

‘Here,’ the voice said. Mellifluous. What his mother would call ‘well spoken’. Then, more loudly: ‘Over here.’

Harry looked at the eyes in the flap. Said nothing.

‘Hello, young fellow-me-lad. How are you?’

Nothing.

‘I’m Stephen Lovelace.’

Nothing. Then Stephen Lovelace named the newspaper he represented. It wasn’t any of the newspapers they had delivered in the mornings. Harry decided it must be one of the smaller ones. His father said the Lady called the smaller ones, ‘Comics for Grown-Ups’. He thought that was very funny.

‘You must be Harry,’ the voice said.

Yes, Harry thought. I must be Harry. Still he said nothing.

‘You’re big for an eight year old.’

Harry was puzzled now. He most definitely was NOT big for an eight year old.

It irritated him. This pair of bright blue eyes in his letter box were connected to a mouth which knew things about him – his age – and yet which was saying things about him which were obviously not true. Why would he do that, this Stephen Lovelace person? The eyes in the letter box reminded him of something. He frowned. Not a wolf, after all. Not even the bright blue eyes of the husky-type dog in the park. No, it was the hypnotizing stare of the snake, Ka, in the cartoon of Jungle Book . Harry felt woozy.

‘Listen, Harry,’ Stephen Lovelace said, eyes whirling. ‘My paper wants to do all right by you and the family, put your dad’s side of the story. So can you tell your dad we just want to hear his side, that’s all. He can name his price. You got that?’

Harry nodded.