Maxwell's War Read online

  Maxwell’s War

  M J Trow

  Copyright © 2013, M J Trow

  All Rights Reserved

  This edition published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  1

  Time and tide, they say, wait for no man. They certainly didn’t wait for Tom Sparrow, but used him for their sport, rolling him ’twixt tide and tide until at last the sea gave him up, like all its secrets, like all its dead.

  Perhaps he went in at Middleton, where the fairy seaplanes roared through the spray in the wake of the Great War. Certainly the tide, steady, kind, buoyed him up, sliding him eastward under the stars. He watched them for a while, in their canopy above him, through his dull and sightless eyes: Orion the Hunter striding north, the Plough arching through the night fields, the Sisters huddling together and shivering with the cold. Then the tide chose the time and turned him with the lapping waves to float face down into the blackness. Did his dead, deaf ears hear the church bell of drowned Atherington echo from the deeps off Climping Sands? Did he trawl its narrow, twisting streets and bob above its salt-grey roofs as the waters rolled him once more? East, east, ever turning as the tide took him, past the sail boards chained for the night at Goring-by-Sea, listening as the waves rippled like mocking laughter, lapping at his anorak, breaking the surface in the star kissed night.

  The Adur might have claimed him as the breeze stiffened suddenly from the south and blew him shoreward, but it changed again, with all the contrariness of fate and carried him out once more, his white hands trailing in the weed of the estuary. The shabby old irons of Brighton Pier held him for a moment as he bumped among them, like shaking hands with old friends at a party. The barnacles cut his skin as he took his leave, as if offended that he should go. And the ten-times fingering weed wiped the bloodless wounds and sent him on his way.

  As dawn broke grey and level to the east and the little terns, flitting in black and white, darted down to see who it was, this stranger rolling in their surf, Tom Sparrow drifted to the Leighford beach, at Willow Bay where men say Cnut sat defiantly in the sand and ordered back the sea. And the sea had changed Tom Sparrow. There was still the fine froth around his nostrils and mouth to tell an uncaring world that he had drowned. There was no dilution of his blood because the salt of the water in his lungs had a higher osmotic pressure and could not pierce his breathing membrane. But his blood was high in chloride as his legs felt the sand. Each lap of the water carried him higher up the beach, and it was summer, so his dead, white skin hung from his body like a shroud.

  At last he lay in the snaking line of weed, black and rotting. A balloon of a man, swollen with the gases that death is heir to. And that kindly tide had rolled beside his head a piece of cork to his left and an empty washing-up bottle to his right. The flies came early to see him and they found him first. The heavy, fat-fed flies of summer droned around his corpse and settled there and stayed, fighting with each other for the choicest cuts, the sweetest morsels, buzzing and bickering with each other in the morning air.

  The Leighford Clarion carried the story. ‘A body was discovered at Willow Bay last Thursday by local fishermen. The coroner, Mr Malcolm Davis, has been called in and newly appointed police surgeon Dr James Astley expressed his opinion that the body had been in the water for at least thirty-six hours. Police sources have revealed that the body is that of Mr Thomas Sparrow, sixty-one, who was well known in the local gay community.’

  The rest was silence. Tom Sparrow had come home.

  Metternich, the black and white ex-male of the genus felix domesticus had noticed something about his master, the pink, still vaguely male of the genus Homo sapiens called Peter Maxwell. He’d noticed that whenever a certain sharp, repetitive tone hit the ether, the idiot would trot to the white thing in the hall (there was one in the lounge, too) and pick it up. Then he’d start talking to himself. All rather sad, really.

  That Saturday was no exception. Maxwell was not, unlike his cat, the domestic type, but needs must when a lack of jobbing gardener drives and he’d been forced to mow the lawn himself. This was particularly irksome to Metternich because not only did he have that great juggernaut snarling through his undergrowth, but the bloody thing had just minced beyond all recognition the half mouse he’d been saving for supper and was now demolishing the only hiding place in the garden. Did the man have no survival instinct at all?

  The roar of the juggernaut had done its best to drown out all other noise, so it was a while before Maxwell heard the phone and hared off, as usual, up the garden path.

  ‘Lord Lucan,’ he hissed breathlessly, flicking bits of green out of his eyelashes.

  ‘Bwana?’ a dark brown voice crackled over the airwaves.

  ‘John Irving, you old brown bomber!’ Maxwell collapsed onto the bottom stair of his less-than-elegant town house and sat there, rivulets of sweat staining his shirt. ‘How’s Gonville and Caius’s token black?’

  ‘Up shit creek, actually. That’s why I’m ringing.’

  ‘Look, if it’s that fiver you lent me the day they killed JFK …’

  ‘Ha, ha. I’ve bought my freedom since then, Bwana. No, no, this is historical shit.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded sagely, ‘the worst kind.’

  ‘You’re obviously still at Leighford,’ Irving checked the number he had just dialled.

  ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’ Maxwell asked him. But since he knew John Irving’s speciality was Afro-Caribbean history, he wasn’t holding out much hope for an answer.

  ‘Still teaching at Dotheboys Hall?’

  ‘Please,’ Maxwell hauled a towel off a side table and began to mop his fevered brow, ‘Leighford High School is probably in the top thirty-eight thousand schools in the country. We haven’t been Ofsteded yet, but the Headmaster’s Auntie once patted David Blunkett’s dog, so we’ll be all right. And anyway, you Dodo, I teach in a mixed school – it’s Dothechildren’s Hall, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, pardon me all to Hell, Bwana. What do you know about the army in, say, 1804?’

  ‘British?’ Maxwell checked.

  ‘And French.’

  ‘Regular or Irregular?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded, trying to do that thing where grownups rest the receiver in the crook of their necks, ‘I see what you mean about historical shit.’

  ‘I’d better come clean,’ he heard Irving say. ‘I’ve been commissioned – and please don’t ask me how; it had a lot to do with too many dry Martinis at last year’s May Ball – to act as historical adviser to a film company.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘Yes. Right.’

  ‘Better than casting pearls before the usual swine, surely, John?’

  ‘In a way,’ Irving agreed. ‘But there’s the rub, Bwana. Said film company were going to make an epic on the slave trade, hence my involvement.’

  ‘First-hand experience,’ Maxwell clicked his tongue in admiration, suddenly realizing his turn-ups were sprouting grass, ‘How is Mr Wilberforce, by the way?’

  Irving ignored him. ‘Then the buggers changed their minds. Now it’s a sub-Catherine Cookson bodice ripper – out of Barbara Cartland by way of
Julie Birchill.’

  ‘Well, that’s a winning combination,’ Maxwell was extracting the burrs of summer from between his teeth.

  ‘It’s set at the time of Napoleon’s invasion plans. 1804. The French landed a ship on the south coast apparently, but the local Dad’s Army saw them off.’

  ‘Wrong on almost all counts,’ Maxwell was delighted to report, ‘which is more or less what I’d expect from a Caius man.’

  ‘Really?’ Irving’s professional heart was sinking by the minute.

  ‘Well, the ship’s right. And yes, they were French. But the year was 1797 which makes it just a soupçon too early for Bonaparte. And it was Pembrokeshire, not the south coast. Fishguard to be precise. The people who saw the French off were a bevy of Welsh fisherwomen. Apparently the French said later they mistook their black hats and red shawls for the regular infantry. Might have gone better for them if it had been infantry.’

  ‘Well, it’s definitely the south coast,’ Irving stood his ground.

  ‘You always did swear black was white, Jonathan …’

  ‘No, I mean, I’m sure you’re right, Bwana. It’s precisely because of that rightness that I’m ringing your white ass. What I mean is that irrespective of little things like historical accuracy and a nod in the direction of truth, the film company is coming south anyway. To Willow Bay. Know it?’

  ‘Like the back of Mrs Sheridan.’

  ‘You bitch!’ Irving screamed over the phone.

  Maxwell held the receiver for a moment at arm’s length while his silent laughter subsided, ‘Still carrying a torch for your old bedder after all these years, Johnnie, me boy?’

  ‘That was a long time ago, Bwana,’ Irving told him. ‘And I was pissed.’

  ‘You must have been,’ Maxwell conjured up the homely face of the blowzy old girl who did for John Irving, the wide-eyed Nigerian at Cambridge, just off the banana boat. ‘And now you’re Dr John Irving, Fellow of Gonville and Caius, author of … how many learned tomes is it now?’

  ‘Sixteen. Seventeen if the OUP ever get their arses in gear.’

  ‘And despite the fact that you fell in love with the first white woman you saw and that I’ve been blackmailing you ever since, you still need a favour, eh? Hello?’

  For a moment, Maxwell thought the line had gone dead; then he heard Irving say, ‘Well, bearing in mind the film company will be down the road from you and you’re the sort of historian who knows which end the powder goes in a gun, I naturally assumed …’

  ‘So I’ll be … what? Historical adviser to the historical adviser?’

  ‘Ah, well, I can’t guarantee you billing, Bwana,’ Irving blustered, ‘but there’ll be a drink in it for you, rest assured.’

  ‘And when is Mr De Mille arriving?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Whitsun,’ Irving told him, ‘er … week after next. Can you do it?’

  ‘Week after next,’ Maxwell peered at the school calendar swinging in the breeze by his open front door, ‘Whit week. Always cunningly timed to coincide with the start of study leave for A level and GCSE – just so the buggers don’t get too complacent. You couldn’t have timed it better, Jonathan. It’s that nirvana of the academic year which we teachers look forward to for twelve months – the exam classes have gone. And week after next is for ever. Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in less time than that.’

  There was a pause. ‘No, he didn’t.’ And John Irving hung up.

  2

  Is it the smell you notice first? Or the noise? Perhaps it’s the litter, when a gust of wind reminds you that an average school, corridor by corridor, contains eighteen square miles of rainforest – or rather its equivalent in Snickers wrappers. Peter Maxwell had waded through all that waste for years on his way to the chalk face. The corner of his vastly experienced eye caught the ill-written poster that told him that a particularly talentless trio of Year 11 students with the unsavoury, but apposite, name of Afterbirth were playing at the Three Tuns tomorrow. He tore it down.

  ‘Christine!’ he bellowed to a hapless student turning the wrong corner at the wrong time. ‘What is this?’

  He held up a second poster which he’d spotted with his other experienced eye, the one in the back of his head.

  ‘It’s our Young Enterprise poster,’ the freckled-faced kid had passed the test with flying colours.

  ‘Is it, indeed?’ Maxwell nodded, sweeping off the shapeless tweed hat he wore, summer and winter, man and boy. ‘Read it to me, would you?’

  Christine winced. There were kids coming and going everywhere. That spotty little shit who fancied her sister. And Mr Latymer who was all hands. Oh, God, no! Jez Harrap, the sex god, was coming down the stairs, biceps rippling under his T-shirt, the one that proclaimed he was hung like a mule. But ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell had given her his order. She really had no choice.

  ‘Welcome to “Way Out”,’ she murmured, hoping Mr Sex on a-Stick couldn’t hear her, ‘Leighford High School’s Young Enterprise Company. They’re going places …’

  ‘They may well be,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘but not with spelling like that. “They’re” is a colloquial form of “they” which has fewer eyes in it than a cyclops. And not, as you have it here “their”. Do go back to that sink of technology you call Business Studies and put it right, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Maxwell,’ and, bright crimson, Christine took the proffered poster and almost collided with Mr Testosterone at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Mr Harrap!’ Maxwell’s stentorian tones froze the come-and-get-me look on the lad’s face and he doubled up along the corridor.

  ‘Jeremy, dear boy,’ his Head of Year’s nose was inches from his own, ‘What did I promise to do if I caught you wearing that T-shirt again?’

  ‘I think you said you’d rip out my entrails and set fire to them in the quad, sir.’

  ‘What a memory,’ Maxwell marvelled, and he pulled back his cuff. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘Or …’ the boy said quickly, ‘I could go home and change.’

  Damn!’ Maxwell clicked his fingers. ‘Foiled again. Make it so, Mr Harrap,’ and he gave the boy his best Captain Picard as he swanned off into Leighford’s gloom.

  It was definitely the noise in the staffroom; that’s what you’d remember – those multifarious little whinges that make up in entire profession. Maxwell’s finely tuned ears caught them all as he made his way through the less than happy liming that Monday morning.

  ‘But I covered that lesson last week’ … ‘Who’s had the bloody TES again?’ … ‘And then she called me an effing old tart.’

  ‘She got that right,’ Maxwell muttered; but not too loudly; after all, he was an ex-public schoolboy who had found himself in the shipwreck of life. He reached his pigeon-hole, stuffed with irrelevance and consigned most of it to the bin.

  ‘Can you do an Assembly for me, Max?’ he turned to the large, rather awful woman who ran Year 8.

  ‘When, Grace?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well, I was hoping for Wednesday.’

  ‘Ah,’ he beamed, ‘That’s what makes you unique among teachers. Most of us hope for Friday. What do you want?’

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘that’s completely up to you. You’re so good at improvisation.’

  ‘Improvisation?’ Maxwell looked aghast, his face turning the colour of his off-white shirt. ‘What may appear to be improvisation to you, dear lady, is actually the result of meticulous planning, years of experience

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Grace’s smile had gone and she was mottling crimson around the throat, the one where the crucifix dangled ostentatiously. ‘Look, Max, I didn’t mean …’

  Maxwell’s hand was in the air. ‘No, no,’ he said politely, ‘of course not. No harm done, I’m sure, Grace. No umbrage taken.’ And he brushed past her. ‘Wednesday it is.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  He all but collided with Sally Greenhow, the tall, skinny Special Needs teacher who had grown up at the Great Man’s knee. ‘You are an utter shit, Max,
’ she clicked her tongue.

  ‘Morning, Sally,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘If I were more common I’d ask you how your belly is off for spots.’

  ‘Poor Grace.’ Sally looked at the huge woman’s retreating figure.

  ‘Poor Grace, my arse,’ Maxwell said. ‘She’s about as much of a Christian as I’m a born-again Conservative. And that’s the fourth Assembly I’ve done for her this year.’

  ‘You love it,’ Sally reached for her own sheaf of papers. ‘A captive audience of two hundred kids? It’s your bread and butter.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed, helping himself to one of the chocolate digestives put out for the Investors in People meeting later that day, ‘as long as the rope on the captive audience is nice and tight,’ and he flexed his jaw so that his jugular stood out and his skin turned scarlet.

  There was the usual line of problems outside his office on the mezzanine floor. Monday always brought them out, like the rats following the piper of Hamelin. He could read their sorry faces yards away. Melanie had been thrown out of home again and had nowhere to go. Zak’s dad, at least from the puffy look around the boy’s eyes, had been having a go at him again. And judging from the purple tuft of hair sprouting from Adam Clarkson’s head, he’d been sent to Maxwell by Mr Diamond, the Headmaster, for a damned good throttling.

  ‘Good morning,’ Maxwell bowed to all three. ‘Luckily for you, I’m wearing my social worker underwear this morning. That little old thing called History teaching, for which I am paid and for which I was trained, will have to wait until after break. Who’s first? Don’t all shout at once.’

  And it was after break that Helen McGregor came to see him. This was the thing about teaching on the eve of the Millennium. A man like Maxwell was social worker, policeman, drug tsar, priest. But every time he looked at a girl, especially one as dumpy as Helen McGregor, he prayed he’d never have to be a midwife. She sat opposite him on the soft, ribbed chair he’d picked up at a car boot, looking as anxious as ever under the unfashionable fringe. She’d looked just like that on her first day at Leighford High. Not that Maxwell remembered her then. He hadn’t become aware of her at all until the day he’d found her on the receiving end of the treatment doled out by Maria Spinetti, the Godmother of Year 10. That day, on his rounds behind the bike sheds, he’d found her with a bloody mess where her lip used to be.