Maxwell's Summer Read online

  ‘Jonathan Rhys Myers,’ he began. ‘Good actor. Too skinny. Actually, that’s not totally true. If you’ve been to the Tower of London ...’

  There were complacent nods all round from the Much Travelled members of the audience.

  ‘... or the Leeds Armoury ...’ No nods at all that time.

  ‘You’ll have seen a suit of armour for the Tilt belonging to Henry VIII as a middle-aged king. His waist measurement was 54 inches.’

  There were gasps and eyeball rolling in equal measure, along with at least one ‘Jeez!’

  ‘An earlier suit, though, from when he was a young king, is only 32 inches. The problem with Jonathan Rhys Myers, is that he didn’t age. They didn’t pad him properly. All right, for Henry it might have been glandular, but I’m guessing too much frumenty.’ The faces turned to him were blank. ‘Think mac’n’cheese.’

  Chuckles.

  ‘Then, long before Netflix and binge TV watching, there was Keith Michell – you’ll have seen him in various Murder She Wrote episodes.’

  Nods and recognition.

  ‘He did age ungracefully and turned into the slobbering, ulcer-ridden old bastard we all loathe and despise. Among those who loathed and despised him were Thomas More, Dudley and Empson, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and a whole lot more who dared to look at the king funny. As far as Henry VIII on the big screen; Charlton Heston (notice how he didn’t do his own wrestling scenes); Robert Shaw (not bad, not bad); Richard Burton ... yes, well, moving on ...’

  And he did, for another fifty minutes, not a visual aid in sight.

  Maxwell stood by the lectern to take questions. Many of the faces before him would have given Nine Pee Are a run for their money when it came to disinterest and Elliot had already done a runner, discarding his cocktail glass on the tray by the door. But several of the ones who clearly had more than one brain cell to rub together were making their way towards him and the first there had his hand out before he had stopped walking.

  ‘Let me tell you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember when I enjoyed a conversation more. My wife and I have been touring around for a month now. I just retired and we thought we’d do Europe but we kinda got stuck in England, we like it so much. Some of the talks have been a bit ...’ he waved his hand in the air, rocking it to and fro ‘... well, not so good. But this! And without a note or one of those horrible slide shows; well, are we impressed!’

  Maxwell threw a small but significant smile at Sally, who stalked out through the door at the side of the room that led to her lair. ‘Thank you, er ...’

  ‘Ross. Ross Hewitt. We’re here partly on holiday and partly as a family history hunt. There were Hewitts around here, or so we believe. We’re looking for graves, parish records, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s not an easy task.’

  ‘We love your programme, what’s it called? Who Do You Think You Are? We love it. It comes on just after Downton and my wife says, Ross, you’d better get takeout, I’m not cooking tonight! She loves her Downton.’

  Maxwell tried to keep the smile going, but it was tricky.

  ‘Sorry to keep you from your cocktail, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed it. And your talk today, in the house. That Oliver Cromwell guy, huh? No wonder Hilary Manteau wrote so many books about him!’

  Time that day had gone a bit funny, Maxwell thought. He had started the day talking to Elliot and Flo about non-indigenous animals, segued into the Civil War and ended up talking about the Tudors to a group of people who wouldn’t know a colleyweston cloak from a hole in the ground. But it had been fun, in a way, and beat the hell out of mowing the lawn. The car came promptly and he collected Nolan – more a case of scooping him up and pouring him, a boneless, sleeping, slightly pungent pile of boy, into the back. The driver, as it had been that morning, was James.

  ‘Good day?’ he asked Maxwell as he slid into the passenger seat.

  Maxwell considered for a moment. ‘A little mixed, possibly. I found myself defending the old homeland for not being knee deep in moose.’

  ‘They do that,’ James said. ‘They come over here to see what it’s like then want it to be the same as home. And what I always say is, home isn’t the same as home, is it, when it’s as big as that.’

  ‘That’s very profound, James,’ Maxwell said. ‘I think I may use that.’

  The driver touched a virtual cap brim. ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘Anything to help. How did the rest of the day go?’

  ‘Civil War. Tudors. Not too bad.’

  ‘Heard a lot about Downton Abbey, I’m guessing,’ James said.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Yes. What is it about that rubbish that the Ya ... Americans like so much?’

  James laughed and changed gear for the slope up onto the bypass. ‘Search me,’ he said, glancing back to see whether Nolan was still sleeping safely in the back, ‘it’s not for the history, I wouldn’t think.’

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘Damn straight,’ he said. He too glanced back to where Nolan lay curled, his head full of curry combs, girths and winning the cup at the next gymkhana. ‘I think he probably had the best day of all, don’t you?’

  James laughed. ‘They’re good girls at the stables,’ he said. ‘A bit feisty, some of them, but none the worse for that. I suppose when you’re handling upwards of a thousand pounds of horse all day, feisty has to be in your skill mix.’

  ‘Or fifty pounds of boy,’ Maxwell said. ‘Smaller, but much more cunning, in my experience.’

  ‘He’ll have a great summer,’ James said. ‘And so will you, I’m sure.’ He flicked the indicator and swung down into Columbine, where Mrs Troubridge was trimming the same bit of hedge she had been trimming for hours, waiting to see that her boy was safely home. Metternich, stretched out on her small patch of lawn, raised his mighty head. The two looked at each other, with relief. Another day done, and no bones broken.

  ‘So,’ Maxwell said, after supper, swirling his drink around his glass, ‘the poor old bat had a look on her face that could have turned me to stone. Quite why she thought I would have just slung him into a car if he had met a grisly end, I don’t know.’

  ‘She just prefers to think the worst,’ Jacquie said, swinging her legs round so her feet were in his lap. ‘It gave me a turn for a moment, when I opened the door.’

  ‘He’ll be ravenous in the morning,’ Maxwell said. ‘Coco Pops aren’t going to touch the sides.’

  ‘We’ll have to work something out,’ Jacquie said. ‘We can’t go a whole summer with just wiping him down once a day and giving him double breakfasts and cheeseburgers for lunch.’

  ‘It’ll settle down. Anyway,’ Maxwell sipped his drink and closed his eyes, ‘he won't be there when I’m not. And tomorrow, thank the Lord, is a day off, until dinner. It’s a big one, formal dress and everything, and I’m supposed to amuse the troops afterwards. Not a conversation, apparently, just conversation.’

  Jacquie inclined her head. ‘Were those two words different?’ she asked, mildly.

  ‘Of course!’ Maxwell did a passable take-off of Sally. ‘A conver-say-shun is when I talk to a lot of people at once while they drink cocktails and don’t know anything about the subject I am banging on about. A con-versation is when I talk to a lot of people at once while they drink port and sherry and can’t even hear me because most of them are too far away, too old or too full of food to care. The thing they have in common is that they don’t know anything about the subject I am banging on about.’

  ‘In short,’ Jacquie said, ‘one is a lecture and one is just a chat.’

  Maxwell looked shocked. ‘Never say lecture,’ he said, in horrified tones. ‘That puts the punters off, apparently. They only like conversations at the cocktail hour, not lectures. Lectures don’t sound like a holiday.’

  He leaned back and rested his drink on her feet.

  ‘But you are enjoying it?’ she said, anxiously.

  He opened one eye and looked at her. ‘Rednecks
talking about moose, well-meaning Yanks thinking Oliver Cromwell was Thomas Cromwell or vice versa, trophy wives who’ve gone past their sell-by struggling with the plot of Northampton Abbey ...’ he sighed and dropped his chin on his chest and then smiled. ‘I’m loving it!’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Y

  ou couldn’t pass the salt, could you?’ Maxwell asked the old man to his right. ‘Peter Maxwell.’ He held out his hand; an introduction seemed a cheap enough return for something that might make the food edible.

  ‘Of course, dear boy,’ the old man passed the cellar and shook his hand, in that order. ‘Roddy Hale-ffinch. Call me Colonel.’

  Preferable to Madam, Maxwell thought. It was difficult to gauge the old boy’s age. He could have been a sixty-year-old wrung through the wringer; he could have been a sprightly ninety, revived by Viagra and yearly flu jabs. On the physical front, he was halfway between C. Aubrey Smith and Roger Livesey as Colonel Blimp – Maxwell had the film posters of both of them in his office, back at the day job.

  Maxwell glanced down the table towards the end where Tom Hale-ffinch was sitting, looking ill-at-ease, between a Texan trophy and a Massachusetts blue-stocking. He thought again, what an odd thing genetics was. Tom did perhaps look a little like Roddy, if you could imagine Roddy’s excess skin pulled back to the back of his head and secured by a bulldog clip, close the pores on the bulbous nose, poke the eyes back into his head ... Maxwell squinted again and then shook his head. No, it was ridiculous. There was no family resemblance at all, though he did look a lot like the Thomas Hale, born 1520, entombed forever in the great hall in acres of oil, his actual body in the nave of the little church to the south. But one thing they did share – they clearly didn’t have the brains God gave sheep.

  ‘Seen service yourself, have you?’ the Colonel asked. ‘No, you’d be too young for a real war and too old for this drone-led video game nonsense that passes for action these days.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I missed National Service by a whisker.’

  ‘Now there’s something they should bring back. Along with short back and sides, mind you, these Turkish barbers I’ve noticed in the High Street are doing a first class job, aren’t they?’ The Colonel looked at the tangle on Maxwell’s head and concluded the younger man had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘I’ve been admiring your splendid house,’ Maxwell said, wrestling with a recalcitrant rosti. How the chef had managed to create tough potato he had no idea. He began to formulate plans to bring in his meals when the summer school began in earnest. Was bringing a doggy bag in allowed, he wondered.

  ‘It is rather fine, isn’t it?’ the old boy was making serious inroads into a huge glass of red. ‘Not that I had much time to enjoy it, of course, in the past.’

  ‘Away?’ Maxwell could have kicked himself. He somehow sensed he had opened a floodgate of memory. Little did he know.

  ‘Yes, my dear old dad was a friend of Monty’s and he said, “Any chance of young Roddy getting a nice berth somewhere; seeing some action?”’

  Maxwell nodded sagely.

  ‘Well, after the war, it was all demob and cutbacks and that atrocious Socialist government. Army quite popular, though, so Sandhurst it was. Monty pulled a few strings and I ended up in the Coldstreamers.’

  ‘Wow!’ It was not a phrase Maxwell used often or lightly, but he felt it fitted the moment and Nole would have been proud of him.

  ‘Korea was a first step. Forgotten war, Maxwell, forgotten war. Americans made a bosh shot of it of course, but that’s par for the course when all’s said and done. I remember Johnnie Harding – the Lieutenant-Colonel – saying to me, “Roddy, take my advice. Shoot quickly, shoot straight and shoot to kill.”’

  ‘And did you?’ The wine was beginning to get to Maxwell now and he felt just a tad mischievous.

  ‘Well, of course,’ the Colonel frowned, ‘but I don’t like talking about it.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, ultimately, we were outgunned of course. A few million Chinks on the border and we pulled out. The only American with any guts was McArthur and that Leftie President Truman fired him.’

  ‘I had no idea the man who authorized Hiroshima and Nagasaki had socialist leanings,’ Maxwell mused.

  ‘What were you? Four?’ the Colonel snapped.

  ‘Not even a twinkle,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘Then they sent us to Nairobi. Mau-Mau.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Jomo Kenyatta. Father of his people.’

  ‘Murderous bastard,’ was the Colonel’s verdict. ‘In an odd sort of way, he got me my Lieutenant’s pips, though. And a medal. I was a captain by the time of Suez. We trooped the colour that year and the young Queen – God bless her,’ the Colonel raised his glass, ‘asked for me specially. “I would so like it,’ she said to Norfolk, “if Roddy could be colour-bearer this time.” Well, a royal nod’s as good as a wink to the Earl Marshal, of course, so it was job done. Of course in those days, we still had real bearskins, not this faux nylon stuff they have today. And don’t get me started on the rifles.’

  ‘Ah, the good old days.’ As a response, it wasn’t Maxwell’s finest hour, but he was running out of things to say.

  ‘I did a spell as an observer with the Yanks in Indo-China. What a dog’s breakfast! I was never more glad to come home. I’ll be frank with you, Maxwell ...’

  This would be a first.

  ‘... I’m not a political animal. Soldier, that’s me. But they gave me the nod to work with Makarios in Cyprus. Nobody remembers the EOKA people now, but they were shits, take my word for it. “Can I make a few suggestions, Archbishop?” I said. “I wish you would, Roddy,” Makarios told me. “I’m out of my depth.”’

  ‘Hmm.’ Maxwell had plumbed the depths of general responses already and they were still only on the main course.

  ‘The Yanks let us down over Suez, of course, but I got my majority – and still only twenty-six. Behind my back, of course, they called me “the lad”, but it was all green eye. Anthony Eden at Number Ten lost his bottle and along with it, Egypt. I almost sent back my OBE.’

  Unbidden, Maxwell reached for more wine.

  ‘But that’s enough about me,’ the Colonel said. ‘Tell me, what do you think of my earlier career? Then I can get on to the later stuff over the pudding. I’ve been doing a bit of family research; should be interesting for a history wallah such as yourself, what?’

  Maxwell hid a sigh with a smile. Family research; how thrilling. At least with the Hale-ffinches as the family, there shouldn’t be too much about Auntie Gladys’s strange nine month absence from her ATS duties in 1942 and how odd it was that her mother should have had that surprise baby at the age of fifty-seven at exactly the same time. There was something about genealogy that seemed to denude even a bright mind of all common sense. And it hadn’t taken three courses of very average food to convince Maxwell that Roddy Hale-ffinch’s mind was not of the brightest, though to be fair to the annoying old geezer, his tall stories took more than a modicum of historical knowledge. Maxwell had done a little light mental arithmetic while struggling to cut his way through an elderly piece of beef and had come to the conclusion that the old boy would have to be at least ninety five and preferably triplets to have done all he claimed. He steeled himself for the onslaught of the family tree – if they hadn’t reached Genghis Khan by the time he had to mingle, then he was a Dutchman.

  The Americans call it a sleep-over, but that phrase, along with ‘gotten’, ‘Fall’, ‘go figure’ and ‘glad to have you know me’ grated with Peter Maxwell. Yes, it was true that many such terms were once common English usage too, but that was long ago and the English language, as opposed to the American, had moved on. So Maxwell wasn’t having a sleep-over; he was staying overnight with the West Sussex Hale-ffinches.

  Actually, it was not so much with them as somewhere in their vicinity. His room overlooked the stables, not the current ones where little Nole would be
appearing later for his own particular version of a day in Heaven, but the original ones where the hunters would have been housed along with the landaus and cabriolets. The cavalryman in Maxwell enjoyed all this; he could almost smell the horse pee rising hot and ammonia-filled through the cracks in the floorboards, could feel the vibrations as iron-shod hoofs crashed down on the flagstones. And, just for a fleeting moment, he fancied he heard a distant horn and a clear ‘view halloo’. Yes, he kenned John Peel, all right.

  He threw back the curtains on that first morning. Beyond the roofs of the block and the weathervane where Old Father Time leaned on his scythe, the paddocks were still wreathed in mist, which would soon burn off. Pheasants croaked in the woods to the south-west and there was a timelessness about it all. No signs of a car, no snarl of a strimmer or hedge-trimmer as early as this. One of these days, when he ruled the world, Mad Max would outlaw all such machinery. All grass and corn would be cut by sickle and scythe, blades hissing peacefully through a stillness that used to be. And he was still musing on all this when all Hell broke loose.

  There was a sudden cacophony of barking and the thud of running feet.

  ‘Who let the dogs out?’ Maxwell murmured to himself and he looked down to see Elliot, bathrobe flying, running hell for leather across the yard, gravel bouncing and grating under his feet.

  ‘Mother of God!’ the man was yelling. ‘Call the cops. Ambulance. Something!’

  Maxwell didn’t fit the first two categories, but he was probably vaguely in the mix for the third, so he dashed for the door and the stairs beyond. He was nearly at the bottom when he realised he was still bare-footed, but there was an urgency and a sense of panic in Elliot’s voice that meant that it was too late for convention now. He hauled open the outer door and grabbed the man’s sleeve, spinning him round and making him stand still; Elliot was running back and forth like a chicken with no head and this was not the way to find out salient details.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He held the man’s shoulders, steadying him. Maxwell had seen panic before – any teacher present on results days had – and knew how to handle it. Slapping someone didn’t work. Holding them firmly and talking softly did.