Death in the opening chapter

TWO

Simon Bognor slapped a generous dollop of farmhouse butter on his wholemeal doorstep of toast, stifled a yawn and helped himself to an equally generous spoonful of chunky home-made marmalade purchased by his hostess at the annual Mallborne fete. He ignored his wife’s hostile stare, which combined incredulity and concern in more or less equal measure. Lady Bognor said nothing. Neither Sir Branwell nor Lady Fludd noticed. Or they were too well-bred to comment.

Lady Fludd was reading the Daily Mail; Sir Branwell The Times. The Bognors were toying with different sections of the Guardian. Their choice of breakfast reading spoke volumes but did not tell the whole story.

Bognor and Sir Branwell had been at Apocrypha College, Oxford, together and had become, more or less, chums. They were both, at breakfast that morning, wearing the tie. It was striped, lurid and conveyed a message to the increasingly small number of people who understood the sartorial codes that were once a ubiquitous lingua franca in what passed for the British Establishment. You used to know a man by his necktie, but nowadays it was rare to find one wearing one. Outside, birds sang, mainly seagulls. The Bognors found them charming; the Fludds less so. Familiarity in the avian sense bore hatred rather than mere contempt. The Fludds hated gulls which, more or less surreptitiously, Sir Branwell shot with a. 22 he kept by his bed.

The Bognors enjoyed lazy weekends such as this. They reminded them of their past when marmalade had been marmalade and the Sunday Times was a proper newspaper. In old age, they had become as grumpy as others of their generation. Tiresomely so at times. It was a tendency of which they were both aware and of which they were tactfully ashamed when in mixed company, which is to say with people younger than themselves. It was not often nowadays that they found themselves with people who were older.

‘No deaths worth talking about,’ said Bognor through toast and gritted teeth. ‘A rock drummer who took an overdose and a very old Professor of Greek from the other place.’ In later age, he found himself turning to the obituaries before almost everything else in the paper. It was common among members of his generation.

‘Not many dead in The Times either,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘A suffragan bishop and a rather dim sounding major general.’

‘And no one dead in the Daily Mail at all,’ said his wife. ‘The Mail tends not to do death. Too, too depressing.’ She smiled winsomely and asked if anyone wanted more coffee. The cafetiere circulated and silence, muffled by munching, descended once more.

‘Cow stuck on beach in the Guardian,’ said Bognor, through toast. ‘Must have been a very slow day for a cow stuck on beach to make the Guardian.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his host, genially, ‘cows stuck on beaches seem grist to the Guardian mill. Ecologically sound. Presumably we are all on the side of the cow? Does George Monbiot have a view on cows? Or Simon Jenkins?’

‘I don’t think you could run an anti-cow piece in the Guardian,’ said Monica.

‘Unless,’ said her husband, ‘they’d been cloned or genetically modified in some way. I mean, if the cow stuck on the beach could be shown to be some sort of by-product of international corporate greed.’

‘Not cow in the accepted sense,’ said Sir Branwell.

‘Quite,’ said Bognor. ‘If the cow was not really a cow, but some sort of counterfeit cow in cow’s clothing, then you’d expect the Guardian to be against it.’

‘You two are being silly,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘This sort of conversation may be acceptable in the junior common room at Apocrypha, but it won’t do here.’

The two Apocrypha men exchanged sheepish glances and acted as if chastened. Sometimes Bognor felt as if he had never really grown up. This sense was most acute when he was with people he had known in the days of his youth. At work, among those who, like him, passed themselves off as adults and generally behaved in a fashion associated with the grown-up, he too became mildly self-important and serious. He didn’t do jokes, or facetiousness of any kind. He managed to become, frankly, a bit of a bore. This was what seemed to be required among the seriously grown up.

‘What about a cricket match?’ said Monica, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You could have authors against publishers.’

‘Writers don’t play cricket,’ said Bognor, swiftly, ‘and publishers don’t play games outside the office. At least, that’s what I’m told.’

‘Festivals,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘are about people droning on. Some drone more effectively than others, but droning is what everyone feels comfortable with. We don’t want innovation. Heaven forfend. Droning is what audiences expect and what authors give them. We do one big drone. Jolly effective and nobody has to do anything tiresome and original.’

‘Like think,’ said his wife, crunching toast as if it were yesterday’s numbers.

‘I always think,’ said Lady Fludd, ‘that cricket is a bit like an author’s drone. Interminable tedium during which the audience sleeps or talks among themselves, punctuated by sudden moments of unanticipated excitement when the speaker’s trousers fall down or he insults them or something.’

‘Not much unanticipated excitement in any authorial drone I’ve ever slept through, eh, Simon,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘and as patron of my own lit fest, I’ve slept through a good few in my time.’

‘Quite,’ said Bognor, not wishing, characteristically, to give offence and sitting on the first one available. Fence, that was. He had an uncomfortable habit of wordplay and double entendre, which had got him into trouble when not intended. Nevertheless, Bognor enjoyed weekends, especially in other people’s houses. Weekends were good anyway, because on the whole – with reservations and disturbingly less as he grew older and the world round him became more pointlessly frenetic – weekends were times when he was undisturbed by what was laughably described as ‘work’. He had never really got the hang of this work thing which so captivated his successful contemporaries. His apparent insouciance regarding the occupation seemed to annoy them, but he couldn’t really see the point of what other people described as work, and seemed on the whole to be a disagreeable activity whose only point seemed to be to generate sufficient funds to enjoy oneself when not working. During his lifetime, the amount of time most people needed to spend on ‘work’ in order to be able to enjoy their ‘leisure’ seemed to be increasing. He had read somewhere that this increase was ‘exponential’ and he had no doubt that it was. Indeed, he suspected that there was a rule lurking there. He had an uneasy feeling that one could learn the rule from teachers at business school. He, however, on the other hand, could not be bothered. Other people, more serious than he, were disparaging about this, but he just got on with life and savoured weekends such as this. Lazy occasions when all effort, however minimal, was expended by other people.

‘Well,’ said his wife, who was given to sudden bursts of energy which he generally discouraged, ‘what exactly do we propose that we do today?’

‘How do you mean “do”?’ asked Sir Branwell, not looking up from his newspaper. He was also engaged with toast, so his words sounded furry and coated in crumb.

Sir Branwell, reflected Bognor, was one of him, and increasingly so. He was not much given to envy and wishing that he were other people, but in those rare moments when he played this game of make-believe, he found himself more and more wondering if it might be quite fun to be Sir Branwell. He drew the line at Lady Fludd however. Whereas Monica flirted dangerously with energy and enthusiasm, Lady Fludd appeared to subscribe to both with a passion. Bognor did not wish to be married to her. Life-swapping was one thing, and an idle hobby to be happily indulged. Wife-swapping, however, was something else altogether.

‘Actually,’ said Sir Branwell, looking around the table in a breakfastly, blurry sort of a way, ‘I don’t think there is an awful lot to do, if you see what I mean. Everything is more or less taken care of. And, in a manner of speaking, and up to a point, er… done.’

He smiled affably and bit into his toast with more enthusiasm than he had spoken. If he had a consuming passion, which was not really his style, it was more for toast than for talk. This, reflected Bognor, was what life was about. A business efficiency expert, a visitor from Health and Safety or some similarly worthy quango, a government inspector, a jobsworth of whatever description, would have been appalled by this apparent inertia. Nothing was happening; nothing much seemed to matter. The females of the species displayed a slight sense of restlessnness, but this appeared to be easily quelled by their surroundings, if not by the somnolent, but presumably dominant, males. The males for their part resembled ancient lizards basking on warm stones in subtropical sunlight. They did not even spin. They did not even, like the lilies of the field, look good. They seemed completely devoid of purpose. There was no point to them.

Bognor sighed with profound satisfaction. Pointlessness was something to which, in his few introspective moments, he aspired. As he grew old he was getting better at it. He wondered if he should have another slice of toast, or a cup of tea; he was pleased by his indecision and reflecting on how an entire weekend could be spent contemplating such decisions, when the bell rang and his dream was destroyed.

They put up a fight against the intrusion.

‘Rats!’ said Sir Branwell, putting down his paper and his toast. ‘I’ve told Brandon to fix that bloody bell.’

But Sir Branwell was wrong to blame it on the bell and it rang a second time, suggesting that the first ring was not haphazard and was caused, like the second, by a human agency. Someone had rung the front doorbell of the manor. On a Saturday morning. During breakfast. Unthinkable. But it had happened. It was a clear infringement of an unwritten rule. No one had rung the front doorbell on Saturday during breakfast during living memory. Yet it happened. Someone had.

The four looked at each other in shock and incredulity. One was not expecting the unexpected. One never was.

The bell rang a third time.

‘Well cut along, darling,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘See who it is.’

Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The staff, just the Brandons now, alas, always had most of the weekend off. Unless there was some sort of emergency. But when there was some sort of emergency, as now, they were never there. It was a rule of staff and there was nothing for it. Sir Branwell would have to open his front door himself.

He rose clumsily to his feet, grumbling in an incoherent rebarbative way, consistent with the occasion and with the disruption of well-established ritual.

Seconds later, he was back, energized, if such a thing were possible, and resembling the rural, aristocratic extramural equivalent of an action man. This was not particularly virile or particularly active, but it was a great deal more so than its virtually comatose predecessor.

In his wake, the baronet towed a woman, middle-aged, and middling in every visible sense except for her distress, which was extreme.

She seemed, for a moment, to be aware of the enormity of what she had done, but then, evidently, remembered why she was there and the reason for her distress.

‘It’s Sebastian,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. Extremely. I mean he really is. Dead. He was all right when I last saw him but now he’s dead. Gone. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I wanted to hear and now I can’t, shan’t. He’s gone.’

Sir Branwell had produced brandy. His remedy for everything had been conjured up in a balloon on a silver salver that was originally presented to a great grandfather after some regimental triumph in the tug of war competition in Poona in the late nineteenth century. He always knew it would come in useful one-day. The present Sir Branwell that is, not the long-dead lieutenant with the electric whiskers and the faraway expression, who had been killed leading a charge against Boers in Africa.

‘Drink this,’ he said, as he had seen generations of stiff-lipped English actors order in innumerable not very good movies. He thought of adding that it would do her good but decided he was muddling the movies up with the ads.

‘Dorcas, how dreadful,’ said Lady Fludd, laying down her paper and rising to her feet. ‘You poor sausage. How dreadful.’

She was thinking at the same time as she spoke, rather than planning ahead. This was a mistake. Her words did not convey what she really meant. She didn’t really think the event dreadful; nor had she really meant to call Dorcas a sausage. It just came out like that.

Privately, she was thinking as she spoke, but the poor sausage was herself and even though she was commenting privately on the dreadfulness of the event, what she was actually saying was, ‘Bloody vicar. How incredibly inconvenient. And just before the festival. But then Sebastian always was a selfish little sod.’

Out loud, however, she said, consolingly again, ‘You poor sausage! Sit down, sit down for heaven’s sake.’