Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

Erskine finished his conversation with Bruiseland and went into the library. His most unpleasant interviews with his father had always taken place there, and even after three years at Cambridge he still couldn’t help feeling that the smell of old books had a certain malevolence.

His father nodded in greeting and said, ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’

‘My monograph on Pangaean.’ Erskine had not got used to his father’s hair being so grey. Other than that they looked quite alike.

‘I hoped it might be. Out with it, then.’

Erskine’s father sat in the armchair beside the brass brain while Erskine stood and read from his handwritten pages. When Erskine had finished, his father said, ‘That’s not absolutely inadequate. May as well have it typed up and bound.’ Erskine smiled with pride. ‘Now, what’s this your mother says about your bringing a bloody valet with you?’

Erskine stuttered something.

‘First of all, I don’t hand over all that money every month so that you can pay someone to iron your newspapers. And, second, to bring your midget valet from London up to visit your own family home, which has perfectly good servants, some of whom have been taking care of you since you first soiled yourself as a baby, is a good distance beyond the pale. Is that understood?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll send him home.’

‘I’d rather not,’ said Erskine.

‘You’d rather not? Well, I’m afraid there isn’t a bed for him downstairs. If you don’t send him home, he’ll just have to sleep in your room.’

Erskine gulped. A door from the library led out to the pond at the back of the house and part of him wanted to run outside to join the ducklings. His father, of course, had not made the prior threat with the slightest expectation of it being carried out — it was just a way of making clear that Sinner wouldn’t be allowed to stay — but Erskine said, ‘All right.’

‘“All right”?’

‘I’d rather that than send him home. I find him indispensable.’

Erskine’s father raised his eyebrows. Erskine knew he would be too stubborn to go back on his offer. ‘Very well, then. Tell your mother to tell Tara to make up a cot in your room. Let’s see how long you can maintain this charade. But I don’t want you complaining to your sister that I’ve punished you. This is your ridiculous choice.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your speech is ready for tomorrow, at least?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Erskine went out, leaving his manuscript. He decided to go upstairs to see if Sinner had bothered to unpack his luggage. On the stairs he met Morton, who was looking well fed.

‘Hello, Erskine.’

‘Hello, Morton.’

‘Lovely house.’

‘Yes. How is your brother’s health?’

‘Fine.’

Each of them felt they should make some comment about the engagement but neither wanted to endure a whole conversation on that subject so they just stood and looked at each other until finally Erskine lifted his empty valise and said, ‘I’d better take this upstairs.’

‘Right.’

‘What about that time you kicked a football into my head so that I fell over, came and helped me up, apologised at such length that I got embarrassed and laughed it off, waited for me to walk on, and then immediately did it again, in front of the whole of Trinity College First Eleven?’ Erskine wanted to add. ‘Will you still do that sort of thing when you are my brother-in-law?’ But he didn’t. Instead, he walked on up the stairs, thinking about what ‘threats’ anyone could possibly make to his father and Bruiseland. Violence? Even if that were likely, he couldn’t bring himself to feel any concern.

Sinner was dozing in Erskine’s bedroom, although of course he had not bothered to unpack the luggage. When a fox wanders into the streets of London, Erskine had often wondered, does it notice a change, and does it care? Is there some deep quality of wrongness, as in a nightmare, to cement and glass, to straight lines and right-angles, or is the beast’s ontology as rugged and graceful as the beast itself? In the same way, he now asked himself, did Sinner feel out of place in Claramore, or would Sinner have sneered at the very possibility of feeling out of place, and the weakness it implied? He stroked the boy’s shoulder for a few seconds and then, when Sinner stirred, hurriedly turned the stroking motion into a vigorous shaking one.

‘My father says you’re to sleep in here with me.’

‘Oh?’

‘But there’s no reason for you to be up here during the day. You’d better go downstairs. Ask Tara about a cot.’ Then, as Sinner left, Erskine said, ‘By the way, if that arsehole Morton asks you to do anything, even so much as take a telegram, you aren’t to do it, all right?’ He’d never said ‘arsehole’ before in his life.

‘Who’s Morton?’

‘My sister’s fiancé. He’s an absolute bacillus. I can’t tell you how much I wish something terrible would happen to him.’

Erskine already felt tired of humanity, so rather than going back downstairs he lay on his bed with a book until the telephone rang at half past seven. He picked up the receiver and heard the tinny sound of a gong being struck. It was time to change for dinner.

On his way back down he came across two big-eared men arguing in German on the landing. Seeing Erskine, the older man broke off and said, ‘How do you do? You are Philip Erskine, I expect. I am Berthold Mowinckel and this is my second son Kasimir.’ As he shook Berthold Mowinckel’s hand, Erskine was thrilled to recall that Berthold Mowinckel had probably once shaken Hitler’s.

A decorated lieutenant-colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, Mowinckel had found himself in Munich soon after the Great War. After being introduced at a lecture to an ex-soldier and art student called Walter Nauhaus, he became a member of the Thule Society. At the third meeting he attended he stood up and announced that he had discovered in himself a rare mystical gift: ancestral-clairvoyant memory, which meant that he could remember the whole history of his tribe, passed down from first-born son to first-born son since the dawn of the human race, as clearly as if he had been present himself.

His chronology began around 228,000 BC, when there were three suns in the sky and the earth was populated by giants, dwarves and aquatic centaurs. After a long period of strife his Mowinckel ancestors, the descendants of a union between the air gods and the water gods, helped to restore peace and soon founded grand colonies as far afield as Agartha in Tibet. Then around 12,500 BC a war began between the Irminist religion of Krist and the corrupt Wotanists. The war raged on and off until 777 AD, when, by some treachery, the arch-Wotanist Charlemagne managed to capture the Irminist temple at the Externsteine rocks near Detmold, so the Mowinckels had to flee to Russia. Berthold Mowinckel himself had for his entire life been persecuted by the Wotanists, the Catholics, the Jews and the Freemasons, who, collectively, were also to blame for Germany’s recent defeat and the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, injustices only slightly greater than the conspiracy’s sabotage of the hairbrush factory in which Mowinckel had invested most of his wife’s savings.

Mowinckel became a hero to the Ariosophists and wrote several books of prophecy and poetry. In 1931 Richard Anders, a member of the Thule Society who had also joined Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, introduced Mowinckel to Heinrich Himmler. Himmler became fascinated with Mowinckel’s chronicles and later appointed him head of the Department of Ancient History within the SS’s Race and Settlement Main Office in Munich. That very week, however, tragedy struck. His two sons, Gustav and Kasimir, were walking down Sparkassenstrasse in Munich when Gustav pushed his younger brother out of the way of a chunk of falling masonry. Gustav himself was hit in the head and died in hospital three days later. And with the death of a first-born son, the flame of the Mowinckels’ ancestral-clairvoyant memory was snuffed out for ever. For several months afterwards Berthold gave Kasimir regular tests on Irminist history, but whatever he tried — berating him, slapping him, hypnotising him — his son couldn’t seem to remember a single detail. Then one day Kasimir told his father that his brother’s spirit had appeared to him in a dream and passed on the power, but the details he timidly offered were never quite consistent with his father’s recollections. ‘Why did your brother have to give his life for you?’ Berthold asked over and over again.