Chapter 22 The Beginning of Many Good Things
The Beginning of Many Good Things
“A pageant? What’s a pageant when it’s at home?”
“You’ve never heard of pageants?”
“Well, I’ve heard the word, of course. Pageant,” Veronica said thoughtfully. “Pageant-pageant-pageant-pageant. Sounds daft when you say it a lot.”
“Don’t say it a lot, then.”
“What happens? Will it be as good as And So To Bed?”
“Who knows? It’s a kind of cavalcade—”
“Big word.”
“A procession, a journey through history—local, usually, although obviously the wider background is national.” She gave him her hypnotized-cat stare. “They usually feature famous characters from history. Queen Elizabeth?” he tried. The mute staring continued. “Henry the Eighth?”
“Oh, yeah, heard of him! Chopped the heads off his wives.”
“Well, not all of them, but yes. I expect there’ll be quite a few battles this evening—re-enactments, not the real thing. Just the ones we won, like Agincourt or Waterloo. I doubt they’ll be re-enacting the Somme or Dunkirk.”
“Oh, look, quick! Girl dying of boredom over here.”
“Ha, ha.”
“What else?”
“There’ll be hundreds of people, and they’ll all prance around dressed up in historical costumes. Roundheads and Cavaliers, possibly.”
“Round heads?”
“And there’ll be a lot about the Middle Ages, there always is. And Romans are very popular.”
“Heard of them.”
“And they’ll sing and dance.”
“The Romans?”
“Not them. And there’ll be heroes and villains and nameless crowds.
Probably a brass band and a maypole. Possibly horses.
A lot of nostalgia. Big word, means people think the past was a golden age—better than now.
” What had Evans said? There’s no future for us, so they’re making one up out of the past. “The whole thing is pretty silly.”
“You should be a salesman.”
“Just don’t get your hopes up, that’s all.”
“Will there be ice cream?”
“Almost certainly.”
“That’s all right, then. Battles and ice cream. My hopes are up.”
At the edge of the pageant arena—really just a large field overlooked by a building called the Priory—a local brass band in maroon and gold uniform was assembling its phalanxes.
Flynn caught the drift of the band’s atonal tuning as the players shuffled and shifted from one leg to another.
The band was tasked with kicking off proceedings by marching around the field. “Thrice,” according to the programme.
“Thrice?” Evans puzzled. He was occasionally caught out by English words. “Thrice” had not been a word utilized by either the Wales of his youth or the Merchant Navy of his adulthood.
“Three times,” Flynn enlightened.
“Why three times?” Evans’s suspicion of the gnostic power of numbers raised its head again.
“I think it’s just that it gives them the chance to play ‘Colonel Bogey’ in its entirety,” Flynn said, referring to the flimsy programme, the paper so thin you could see through it.
“Twenty-one pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence,” Evans said, flapping the programme in the air. “That’s what it cost to print these things.”
“Daylight robbery,” Flynn agreed. He was reminded with unexpected fondness of his job at the printers in Westminster. Perhaps they would take him back when the Festival was over. Would he want to go back? What else was he going to do? What were any of them going to do?
“Once, twice, thrice,” Evans said. “What comes after that?”
“Nothing. Just four, five, six and so on. Ad infinitum.” Evans seemed prepared to worry away at the subject all evening. “It’s not rams’ horns and the ark of the covenant,” Flynn said. “They’re not planning on taking down Jericho.”
“I’m bored,” Veronica grumbled.
“It hasn’t even started yet,” Flynn said.
“You wait till it does,” Evans said grimly to her. “Then you’ll know what boredom is.”
Veronica afforded Evans a solemn nod of approval.
The grown-ups in her childhood had spent their time trying to goad her into a jovial state of being.
Evans’s mordancy was refreshing. “I like him,” she whispered (loudly) to Flynn, nodding in Evans’s direction.
She was, unwillingly, sitting next to the Boy and had to lean across him to speak to Flynn.
The Boy shrank away from her. “Him not so much,” she whispered even more loudly, casting an evil glance at the Boy.
Veronica and the Boy had been eyeing each other warily ever since they alighted on the platform at Hitchin Station.
Flynn could discern no good reason for their mutual antipathy.
“Does he have a name?” she had asked on first acquaintance.
“You keep calling him ‘the Boy,’ ” she said suspiciously to Flynn. “Do you call me ‘the Girl’?”
She was jealous, he realized; she wanted the occasion all to herself. Wanted Flynn all to herself. Flynn’s heart went out to her, a feeling more of sadness than sympathy. He wanted to defend Veronica from even the slightest of slights. He was already grieving for her future.
“Cheer up,” she said, elbowing him in the ribs. “You look like you lost a shilling and found a sixpence.” Something Ivy used to say, he remembered, only with an edge of malice.
“Of course I have a name,” the Boy said. “It’s Terence. Some people call me Terry.”
“Shan’t call him anything,” Veronica muttered to Flynn.
“Wasn’t expecting Mr. Flynn to bring a girl,” the Boy, equally hostile, said to Evans.
“Thought he might bring Miss Ogilvie. This is the kind of thing she’d like, isn’t it?
History and stuff. I expect she was otherwise engaged”—a phrase he had learnt from hearing Maud Ogilvie saying it so many times and was pleased to be able to use in context.
“Engaged,” Veronica mocked, unimpressed. “Like a toilet.”
It seemed as though the entire population of Hitchin had taken to the field.
Most of the audience and the huge cast of performers were sitting or standing on the grass, but a rickety grandstand had been imported from somewhere and erected on one side of the field, in which the Boy had claimed seats for them.
“Is anything ever going to happen?” Veronica asked no one in particular.
Despite Flynn’s admonitions of what the pageant might contain, Veronica’s only previous experience of spectacle was circus and pantomime, and she was expecting the imminent arrival of clowns and acrobats and someone dressed as a cat, based apparently on a Dick Whittington she had seen a couple of Christmases ago.
The band marched off and a solitary actor took its place, walking grandly out to the middle of the field.
His face was painted blue, and he was dressed in a rough linen smock and what looked like a woman’s old fur coat that had been cut to resemble a cloak.
Flynn had to consult the programme to identify him as “a Celtic chief.” The actor raised a great curled horn to his lips and blew a trembling, underwhelming note.
“Sounds like he farted,” Veronica said. The Boy laughed appreciatively, and they glanced at each other with the beginnings of respect.
“I think he’s meant to be Tasciovanus,” Evans said, consulting the programme.
“Leader of the Catuvellauni tribe. They’ve taken a fair bit of artistic licence with his appearance.
Celts were more sophisticated than this lot.
” A ragged troop of “warriors,” summoned by the clarion call, had run on to the field in self-conscious approximation of a frenzy, waving an assortment of weapons, many of which looked as though they had been found in the kitchen or by the fireside.
“Hitchin was founded in 787 by Offa, the Mercian King,” Evans continued to read.
The Boy and Veronica yawned in unscripted unison.
Flynn felt envious of them. They were not dragging the ball and chain of history around behind them. Not yet anyway.
And so it went on. There were no maypoles or jousters, but there was an enormous cast of ordinary people: a community of accountants and teachers and solicitors, nurses and the occasional farmhand; vets, housewives and schoolchildren (lots of schoolchildren); quantity surveyors, car mechanics, workers in the local pharmaceutical factory.
They were transformed into a parade of invaders, from Romans to the French.
The Black Death came and went, priories and monasteries rose and fell.
There were horses, there were dogs—mostly stray, wandering uninvited on to the field.
Not Mrs. Betty—she snoozed throughout beneath Flynn’s seat.
There was the industry that made the town—the straw plaiting, the brewing, the lavender.
After the Civil War, there was a lengthy interval not of Parliamentary rule but of refreshments, provided by the Women’s Institute: tea, lemonade and biscuits, although no ice cream—an absence that made Veronica indignant.
She began to look on the Boy more favourably when he produced a stick of Festival Rock, still in its cellophane wrapper, and proceeded to shatter it on the wooden decking at his feet.
“What you need really,” he said knowledgeably to Veronica, “is a toffee hammer.” He unwrapped the rock and presented it to her with a flourish.
“Do you see?” he said, concerned that she might not appreciate the novelty.
“It says Festival Rock all the way through it.”
“I can see that. I’m not blind. Seen it being made, actually.”
“Bet you haven’t been to Ramsgate,” he said, stoutly defending his knowledge.
She relented. “Haven’t. Is it nice?”
“Take you, if you like.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.” If you didn’t know Veronica, you might think her indifferent to the offer.
After the intermission, history strode on and by the time the railway arrived in Hitchin, in the shape of a rather well-done wooden locomotive, dusk was gathering.
The grand finale was a parade of all the performers around the field and finally a figure who introduced himself as Old Father Time and who bore more than a passing resemblance to the Celtic chief, Tasciovanus.
His speech was rather mournful—how we are all swept along on the tide of history and ultimately forgotten, but that tonight’s pageant had “rescued the past for us, and everyone here will remember it for as long as they live.”
“And then they’ll die,” Evans said (he was in a particularly miserable mood tonight), “and it’s all forgotten. Everyone’s forgotten.”
“Cheer up,” Veronica said. “Worse things happen at sea.”
“They do,” Evans said. “They really do.”
The passage of time, Flynn thought. Closely related to memory lane. Both had their emotional challenges.
The brass band re-formed and played the National Anthem. Everyone stood to attention and sang. Proud to be English. British.
The crowds began to stream out of the arena. Many lingered, reluctant to let the night disappear for ever. The facsimile of history that was the pageant had itself become history.
Flynn had rather enjoyed the evening, unexpectedly moved by all those ordinary people trying to make order out of the mess of the past. He applauded the endeavour, and he was disappointed when Evans said, “We tell ourselves stories to make ourselves feel better. The past absolves itself with this kind of fiction. You have to ask yourself—what’s the point? ”
“What’s the point of what?”
“Of anything. Of living, really. Sometimes, Harry,” he said quietly, “I wonder if I died on that lifeboat. I mean, what is there—to live for?”
“Love?” Flynn offered.
“Huh.” Evans laughed. “I didn’t have you down for a romantic.”
Flynn shrugged. He hadn’t meant that kind of love.
He meant the kind you feel for the daughter who falls asleep with her head on your shoulder, pinning you awkwardly into an increasingly painful position.
The Girl, he thought. He felt a great, heaving spasm in his heart as if something was trying to break out of it.
Not a dove flying free, but an eagle pecking and ripping its way out.
This was love, he thought. He’d always known it would be terrifying.
“You all right, Mr. Flynn?” the Boy asked.
“Just having an epiphany, Terence,” Flynn said.
“Sounds painful.”
“It is. Believe me, it is.”
They had barely got inside the flat when there was a knock at the door.
The knock had the timbre and authority of the law.
“Christ almighty,” Flynn said. Was there to be no end to it?
He yanked the door open. As he feared, it was Vigo who was standing there.
He was accompanied not by Tapper but by a policewoman.
Vigo looked as though he was tiring of the endless Sisyphean task of arresting him, but it was the expression on the policewoman’s face that caught Flynn’s attention and alarmed him. Sympathy. Sympathy for bad news about to be imparted.
“Who have I killed this time, Inspector?”
“Thought it best if it was me that came, Mr. Flynn,” Vigo said. “Seeing as we know each other.” He looked over Flynn’s shoulder into the flat. “Is the girl here?”
“Is someone dead?”
“No, no,” Vigo said hastily. “Not dead.”
“What, then?”
“Can we come in, sir?”