The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  ‘I believe you—’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. That all sounds plausible. That she was being vindictive, I mean. It doesn’t change my view. Your behaviour. Someone finally making an official complaint to the university about you was an accident waiting to happen.’

  I close my eyes. Helen’s remark strikes me as true; no need to defend myself against that. I might have done once; in fact, I would have protested with all my might.

  ‘So. How has it been left?’ Helen asks.

  ‘Well, I was ill, wasn’t I? I couldn’t attend the hearing. I was off for several weeks and then left in a hurry, as you know. And now. Now. The fight’s gone out of me. There are rather a lot of emails and correspondence about it all and I – I don’t care to open them.’

  Helen considers this and then, after a pause, asks: ‘That was horrid, just now. You must feel very – it’s frightening, isn’t it? Do you feel really strange, knowing someone else’s essential body part is inside you?’

  ‘Can’t bring yourself to say the word heart, eh?’

  She smiles. ‘Well, do you feel strange?’

  ‘No. Apart from panic attacks that something might go wrong – I feel fine. It’s just a pump, you know. A helpful contractile organ, keeping me alive.’

  ‘You don’t look fine.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s what Alice said! I’ve just had major transplant surgery! Go easy on an old fella, can’t you? Have you got a cigarette on you?’

  ‘I thought you’d given up. I certainly have. Back in 1996. I think that’s the last thing you should be doing now, don’t you!’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. As always you’re completely right. And I doubt you have smuggled in any whisky for me either or nymphets from the Royal Courts – if indeed there are any working there these days?’

  She smiles again, but the frown is still there. ‘Alice said you were talking about – that you said you might pack it in. What will you do, rattling around that bachelor pad all day, drink yourself to death?’

  ‘I could work on my book. My book about the Boy General: Custer.’

  ‘Blimey. You’re still working on that? But you could apply somewhere else, you know, once this has all died down. You can probably leave with some kind of pay-off, emeritus, that kind of thing. Would Cambridge have you, do you think?’

  ‘Actually, I’m . . . I’ve been having a rethink. I – feel I might do a course, retrain in some way.’

  This remark is more surprising to me than Helen can know. Retrain? In what?

  ‘Wow, really, Patrick? That’s a bit – radical. Mid-life crisis.’

  This mild mockery and dismissiveness is irksome. I close my eyes again and lean my head back against the pillow.

  ‘Well,’ Helen says. ‘I really thought you would be there foaming at the mouth and railing against the young woman who’d ruined your glorious academic career.’

  ‘I know. It’s as much a surprise to me, Helen.’

  I can’t help smiling at her. She really is looking good. She always was a beauty of course. Fine bone structure, long legs.

  ‘God, I’m hungry,’ I say.

  ‘There’s a menu here somewhere. Shall I stay while you order up lunch?’

  She seems to be wondering whether she’s overstepping the mark. Is this a bit maternal, perhaps? She fiddles with her necklace; a little silver locket that she’d always worn and . . . well, perhaps I even bought it for her long ago. Though I can’t now remember.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, picking up the laminated list. ‘Chicken and broccoli,’ I say. ‘And juice in the absence of a decent whisky.’

  ‘You hate broccoli!’

  ‘Well, I fancy some now. And lemon meringue pie for afters. Marvellous.’

  ‘Probably a good sign that you’re getting your appetite back,’ Helen says, returning to her sensible self. ‘You need to exercise. Walk around the ward. Dr Burns says you have to make it beat faster. Have you seen that exercise bike thing that you can use in bed? And they’re saying two weeks. Two weeks, tops, because they need the bed.’

  ‘Two weeks? Where will I go?’

  ‘The flat. I told you. The hospital flat right next to Papworth.’

  ‘Bugger that! Once out of here, I want to be out of here.’

  ‘You know, if you keep swearing and shouting, that scary Burns will come back on the ward and tell you off and this time I might not be around to protect you.’

  She’s standing now, fishing for her keys in her bag. She slides her arms into a thick chocolate-brown jacket with furry lining that looks expensive and new. She suddenly seems like someone I don’t know and might even fancy if I saw her for the first time (if I didn’t automatically screen out women her age) – an attractive divorcee in skinny jeans with a nice backside, with lovely dark eyes, shaking her shiny red hair. She’s ready to leave. To detain her I say:

  ‘I found out something. You know you asked me? From Maureen. My donor was a boy. A boy of sixteen. Motorbike accident near Littleport. I even know his name: Andrew Beamish.’

  Helen looks startled. She sits back down.

  ‘Well . . .’ she begins, then can’t seem to think of anything else to say. ‘A boy.’

  ‘I know. It was – I don’t know why. The same age as Ben. I wasn’t supposed to know – the donor family is promised anonymity but there was some kind of cock-up. Maureen says I should write to the family. Thank them or something. Apparently that’s what people do.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘What do you think? Not really my style, is it.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  I sink back against the pillows. I have wanted to contact the family, and I have thought about them. In fact I keep thinking about them; about him. Actually, my curiosity is intense, but it seems transgressive somehow. I should just accept this astonishing gift – Maureen’s word – and be done with it.

  ‘Are you in a hurry?’ I ask.

  ‘Honestly, Patrick. Five more minutes, then.’ The furry-lined jacket comes off again.

  Helen. She never was able to say no to me.

  Part Two

  Name is Willie Beamiss. Both my parents was illiterate, but full of wise sayings. I was eldest of six. We all of us got some schooling on a Sunday from the the Methodists in Prickwillow, the Ranters who like to sermonise in a field or empty barn and fill the air with their ravings. Learned enough to read my Bible and Robinson Crusoe and The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, bought from Mr Burrows in Ely, and long a favourite. In my blunt view that last book is all a boy needs.

  Circumcised on the kitchen table. Never much happening on that table – just a barley loaf or a dish of potatoes. Snip went the scissors and the foreskin thrown to the dog, who snapped it up. Mother always had scissors at hand; a snip for the animals one minute, and next for us. Always sewing and pinning something, making a dress for Jenny or a bonnet for Annie, she was.

  Shared a cottage with Ma, Pa and five sisters and a privy with several other families. Always been in farming, farm labouring, threshing, picking, whatever and whenever. All the fields was forked by hand and that was a job for me and my friends when any other chores was done; the dykes was newly made back then. Was never idle: there was plenty to do to keep cart upon wheels, as the saying goes.

  Kept always a pencil in my pocket, bought from a Cheapjack in a caravan outside Ely Cathedral; and was always drawing or writing or stealing into the garden to clap something down on paper in private, using every morsel of brown paper Mother had her tea and sugar wrapped in from the shop. Had a trade too, for the winter season when work was slack: Father had been apprenticed to a shoemaker. The Beamiss family was skilled shoemakers. That became my sometime trade too, by the time I turned twelve and schooldays over. Our table always had some Knotty sum on it, in Pounds, Shillings and Pence, written by me, as the quickest brains in the family.

  The reading of books, my mother said, would fit me for ‘nothing but the Poorhouse’ – she saw how it gave me an itching after ev
erything: a Beamiss trait if ever there was one, she said. It was my fate to be born at the end of the century and the French Revolution was still Pa’s favourite topic by the time I was out of my crib and walking. All have liberty to think as they please, but me, I confess, I was quite in the suds about Politics. Pa loved rebelliousness and his ballads. Over a horn of ale in the Globe, with a stamping of his feet and a cheer at every line, he’d sing:

  The law locks up the man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common

  But leaves the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.

  Countrymen is no rebels, they love the seasons and the land and fear the new, but Pa was the exception; he had a talent for whipping up others, and when labour is back-breaking and stomachs growl empty you can rile the sleepiest and loyalest of farm labourers to sedition.

  In the Globe all talk was of the Enclosures that was robbing us of the little plots of land we worked, instead parcelling it up for the Farmer Martins of this world. Then was rumours of a drill-plough that would do the work of twenty men and horses, or, worse, new wind-pumps that would drain the meres and rivers in double time and rob us of the fish or eels that might sometimes turn our potatoes-and-bread supper into a banquet.

  I let such talk wash all about me. I had a little tame sparrow, Dickie, that I’d trained to sit on my hand and take crumbs from me. I would sit myself under Pa’s table while he drank and spieled and watch Dickie’s patterning pecks, thinking of how it was like the beat of its tiny heart, and fall into raptures. I heard the talk in the pipe-smoked air above my head; heard the praising of the Great Fen that some fellows went in for, heard how it had become, according to Farmer Martin, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of the Lord, but I remembered, as if I seen it with my own eyes, Pa’s own dear memories of the place, just how he told it.

  Those black ugly flats, the black-gold of Farmer Martin’s soil, Pa said, had less than twenty years earlier been silvery, pale-green reeds, vast miles around a broad lagoon that stretched from Ely to Peterborough. Men – only a small number, the Fens was never what you would call populated – lived in houses wattled with reeds and looking just like the nests a bird might make: dotted around on platforms upon piles above the water. Or else where the lake ran shallow they walked with great long poles and called themselves Slodgers. The door of each home had a ladder and at the ladder was a boat. There was no proper roads to speak of, only skating in winter, or rowing.

  In those days before the wind-pumps drained the land the sedge-bird sang, and high overhead was hawk, buzzard and kite. (To a Fenman like Pa such birds could only ever mean food, or quarry.) Pa would lie on his punt boat on the mere, invisible due to the flatness and white paint of the boat. Then – a puff of smoke and the blast of his stanchion-gun; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wildfowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings. Above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the wild swan.

  Knew and loved all my birds from an early age. Knew their names, their calls, their habits. The jay’s warning chatter, the clap of a woodpigeon wing at dusk, the boom of the bittern, like the sound a boy makes blowing over the mouth of a glass bottle. From a young age I had me a leaning towards tiny things: the cracking of the corn stubs in the sun, the bounce of a grasshopper. Best of all I liked to walk by myself in the marshy Fen, watching the heron that hunched like an old fisherman at the water all day, trying to learn his lesson of patience.

  When he wasn’t agitating about the draining itself, Pa used to rile himself something terrible about the Commissioners who profited from it. And as a boy hiding under the table, with the warm belly of the little tame sparrow resting in my palm, I soon learned to quake when the Those Bloody Bugger Commissioners was mentioned, as then the thump of Pa’s fist would land on the wood above my head. Every man who owned a few score acres in the Fens became a Commissioner and could squeeze rates out of other men for the draining of the land. So those like Pa who opposed the draining in the first place now had the further insult of having to find the penny to pay for it.

  I fell in love with Susie Spencer when sixteen years old and she a girl of one year younger. I was in love at first sight. She had a witching smile and perfect lingering form, shining black curls and hazel eyes. I saw her outside Ely Cathedral on the same day I bought the pencils from the caravan stationed outside it: the day of St Etheldreda’s Fair. The local girls was all flocking around, giggling and chittering, hoping to bid for a comb or a ribbon or a package of orange flower pekoe tea all done up in silver paper, and my schoolmate Tom (we called him Tom Foolery though that was never his name) says to me: ‘Ain’t she just a stunner?’ and nudged me in the ribs. We knew who she was: Susie Spencer, the daughter of a small-time farmer. That is to say her father owned a few acres of land in Prickwillow and employed labourers to work them.

  Prickwillow Farmhouse had once been no more than a reed-walled cottage that showed above the water for a few weeks in July and then again when rainy season ceased. Grandfather Spencer had been a canny old devil not afraid to use his fowling piece on any who opposed him and he had claimed some dubious rights to this place of willows and osier beds. Once the land was drained the wily old grandfather borrowed some money and made a cross on a piece of paper and made sure his son once of age became one of the cursed Commissioners – it being in the family interests to keep the land dry and the house sitting atop it like an ark. There, then, you have it. Even though I knew more of my ABC than Susie, she was a cut above the Beamiss family. And now began some of the happiest and some of the unhappiest days of my life.

  Susie Spencer was trying to look like she was too much a lady to be interested in what the Cheapjack had for sale at the same time as cocking one ear in case a good price came up. Tom got it into his head to try his luck with the Cheapjack’s daughter – another stunner in his view, with green eyes and chestnut hair and a manner both tart and queenly. He yelled at the gypsy girl, what price a kiss? The crowd roared. ‘I don’t sell,’ says she, smartly, and Susie and her friends look scandalised and turned their heads and began to walk away from us. Tom had jumped up onto the platform of the caravan and was saying if she wouldn’t sell he’d steal a kiss instead and there was an uproar from the crowd – temptation was something Tom rarely resisted. The girl’s father appeared from inside some curtains at the back of the rows of goods and started bellowing, while the girl, as unmoved as it’s possible to be, picked up a flail and threatened Tom with it.

  Had half an eye on him but the main pull was from the back of Susie Spencer’s curly head, her slender waist, as she slipped her arm inside her friend’s and walked out in the direction of the Market Place, where a line of bullocks and horses – the real business of the Fair – was being driven towards Stuntney. I walked just behind them both at a distance.

  Something in the way that Susie Spencer held her head, something in her walk, told me she’d begun to notice me following. Soon enough she turned, and said with great impudence: ‘Is there something I can do for you, Willie Beamiss?’ because of course in a place like ours we was all known to each other. Her stout little friend – a good head and shoulders shorter than Susie – started to titter and make some bad jests towards me and the pair of them put their heads together and tried to run away from me.

  I had to cook up something quick and my brains did not let me down.

  ‘I’m drawing you both, to sell at the Fair. Wait!’ and I pulled a pencil from my pocket along with a scrap of paper, and bending one knee to rest the paper on, I sketched a quick likeness. It wasn’t the best drawing I ever did but Providence played fair with me and it was good enough to draw cries of ‘Oh see, Susie, he’s really caught you – a look of you,’ and that’s how I got to talking to them, and they allowed me to walk alongside them, down the hill, following the bullocks.

  By the time we’d reached the Stuntn
ey road I knew at least that the girl I favoured (who put me in mind of a willow, because she was long and tall and rare in these parts; a girl with long limbs, uncommonly tall) could be made to smile with a cartoon or a witty remark. I knew that she was frank and not coquettish like her friend and I knew too that she thought me and Tom ‘Fen louts’ since she said as much, though she was not afraid to talk to us directly and made the strange comment that why did folk in those poor huts in Littleport live six to a room like sheep in a barn? Which allowed me to know that she herself would expect more.

  Tom told me later that he knew a bad house where the Cheapjack girl had taken him, after she had put down the flail, and for a few coppers we could find it again. But Pa had warned me against such places, and such diseases, and anyway, something new had happened to me and couldn’t be undone. Now that is the trouble with us Beamisses and it’s the family trait that’s most likely passed down and the one I should confess. Fixed, when we set our hearts on something. Constancy is our middle name. Fierce stubbornness, some might call it, and it takes a different shape in each of us: with Pa it was politics. With me it was love.

  I worried that I’d wait a long while before clapping eyes on Susie Spencer again, but hadn’t reckoned on the Peace signing with France in the summer of 1814. Of course we didn’t know then that the banishing of Bonaparte to the island of Elba was not to be the end of it; we only thought of the coming party thrown on the Nut Holt at Ely, of our plum puddings and beef, our donkey races and promised ale. All at the expense of the Bishop of Ely – a Peace party thrown for three thousand of ‘the poor inhabitants of that city’. Us. The doors of the Red Lion Inn was about to be thrown open and the streets filled with rockets, mines and other fireworks.

  Woke to the ringing of bells in Ely Cathedral, walked the few miles along the drove from Littleport to Ely with Tom, sharing a pipe, filling it with grass from the roadside. The grass burned black in an instant and satisfied no one; we looked for poppies but it was too late in the summer for them. All we’d had for breakfast was the boiled, peppered water coloured with soot that our mothers called tea but Tom said the Bishop of Ely had promised an ounce of tobacco for every honest citizen. I said I’d believe that when I’d smoked it. Our stomachs rumbled and we discussed when last we’d had beef. Tom thought it was last May, on his birthday.