‘Just a look,’ Lavinia said, feeling an access of alertness in her silver nipples, ‘and although the need of the occasion intervened – ’
One knew – ’
‘Beyond any doubt – ’
‘The years fell away – ’
‘All the hopes and fears – ’
They both moved up two steps, and this bought them to the landing.
‘Couldn’t we steal away for a while?’ the Sheikh said. ‘It’s a bit on the public side here.’
As if to lend emphasis to his words, a little old lady went tottering drunkenly across the floor of the hall below them, presumably in search of the lavatory.
‘Couldn’t we?’ the Sheikh said, leaning towards her. One minute and a half to go. A pity he couldn’t have been penetrating Lavinia at the moment of the explosion, but coincidences like that are too exquisite for gross mortals …
‘Why not?’ Lavinia said. ‘No one will miss – ’
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said from below them, and looking away from each other down into the dimness they saw a figure in a high round helmet with a glassy gleam where his face should have been, slowly mounting the stairs towards them.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ the figure said, pausing about halfway up and clinging to the banister.
‘What the hell do you want?’ the Sheikh said.
‘It’s about the cheque.’
‘Cheque? What cheque?’
‘It is absolutely illegible,’ Mafferty said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Mafferty removed his goggles. Unhampered by them, he was now able to see that the Arab was a complete stranger.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
He turned and began cautiously to descend the stairs again.
‘That is Mr Mafferty, a member of staff,’ Lavinia said.
The Sheikh glanced at his watch again: it was 11.15. Now, now, very now, he thought. To quote the bard. In this obscure corner history was being –
There was a sudden deafening explosion from somewhere at the front of the house, followed at once by the more prolonged, multitudinous sound of shattering glass. The house shuddered briefly and the hall light went out. There were some seconds of complete silence. Then they heard confused shouts from the room below.
‘Bloody hell,’ Baines said. He stood up abruptly. He knew at once what must have happened. That fool Kirby had made a mistake. He remembered his earlier feelings of uneasiness, of misgiving: those restless eyes, that unconvincing doggedness of manner. Kirby had mixed up the streets. Or he had panicked and, remembering the divided counsels up at Headquarters, had planted his bomb outside the first building that looked institutional …
‘There must have been an accident,’ he said, with an instinct of subterfuge, to Lavinia. ‘You’d better phone for an ambulance. Some of those people sound hurt.’
Downstairs, after the first shock, the guests had begun to call out and blunder about in the darkness, except for the Toad and Captain Hook, who had been standing near the wall talking about butterflies when the explosion occurred, and who were now lying stunned on the floor. They were trodden on by various people trying to find a way out. This was not easy, as the bomb had blown in some of the brick-work, and a low pile of rubble was partially blocking the doorway. People stumbled against these stones, bruising and cutting shins and knees. The air was filled with acrid dust. Maid Marian crouched in a corner, whimpering steadily.
A few of the guests, not many, tore off their masks. The darkness was confused by the flaring of matches here and there. These random and shortlived flares, held chest-high while they lasted, cast a weirdly transfiguring glow over faces and masks alike as they peered this way and that, questioning for more light, or a means of escape.
‘Keep still,’ the Tennis Player shouted. He had produced a cigarette lighter which burned with a long slender jet of flame, and he was holding it up in a shaking hand. His grotesquely simpering mask turned from side to side, in an attempt to dominate the company, quell the panic. ‘Now listen carefully to me,’ he said. Catching a mouthful of dust, he began coughing violently.
At this point the Referee stepped forward into the wavering light. His mask surveyed the wreckage of the room, the disordered revellers, with an unchanging expression of probity and fair play.
‘You’ve made your bid,’ he said, in a vibrant, exalted tone. ‘You’ve done your worst, and you have failed. I am the Principal.’
A woman said, in a tone of wonder, ‘My face is bleeding.’
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ the Referee said loudly. ‘I am the Principal. Not content with subversive activities of every kind, tonight you have deliberately tried to wreck the place. I have known for a long time that this was pending, but I did not know from which quarter the attack would come. My Senior Tutor was unable to help me, though an able and experienced administrator.’
‘Is it really you, Donald?’ the Tennis Player said.
‘Stand back,’ Cuthbertson said.
‘Excuse me,’ an elderly female voice said, from the darkness beyond the hall doorway. ‘I was in the toilet. What was that bang?’
‘You fools,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘This place is indestructible. You can never destroy the spirit of a place like this. It will go on and on and on.’
He regarded the glimmering masks and faces. In the unsteady light they were turned to him mutely, expressive of melancholy, lechery, bewilderment, mirth, all silenced by this rhetoric, all subject to the authority of his voice and manner. The blood beat in his temples. His voice took on the triumphant surge of power.
‘I will rebuild,’ he said. ‘Not only that. I will expand. Expand. The logic of the situation demands expansion. Schools up and down the country, with staff conservatively dressed, and properly qualified, sworn to preserve standards. A mighty network of schools. Myself at the heart. Drake believed in expansion. Hawkins believed in expansion. Commercially viable of course, but with standards, rigorous standards. It is what made this country great.’
Available in Norton Paperback Fiction
Brad Barkley
Money, Love
Andrea Barrett
Ship Fever
The Voyage of the Narwhal
Rick Bass
The Watch
A Relative Stranger
Shadow Play
Simone de Beauvoir
The Mandarins
She Came to Stay
Thomas Beller
The Sleep-Over Artist
Wendy Brenner
Large Animals in Everyday Life
Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange
The Wanting Seed
Mary Clyde
Survival Rates
Stephen Dobyns
The Wrestler's Cruel Study
Jack Driscoll
Lucky Man, Lucky Woman
Leslie Epstein
King of the Jews
Ice Fire Water
Montserrat Fontes
First Confession
Leon Forrest
Divine Days
Paula Fox
Desperate Characters
A Servant's Tale
The Widow's Children
Carol De Chellis Hill
Henry James' Midnight Song
Linda Hogan
Power
Janette Turner Hospital
Dislocations
Oyster
Siri Hustvedt
The Blindfold
Hester Kaplan
The Edge of Marriage
Starling Lawrence
Legacies
Bernard MacLaverty
Cal
Grace Notes
Lydia Minatoya
The Strangeness of Beauty
John Nichols
The Sterile Cuckoo
The Wizard of Loneliness
Roy Parvin
In the Snow Forest
Jean Rhys
Good Mo
rning, Midnight
Wide Sargasso Sea
Israel Rosenfield
Freud's Megalomania
Josh Russell
Yellow Jack
Kerri Sakamoto
The Electrical Field
Joanna Scott
Arrogance
Josef Skvorecky
Dvorak in Love
Gustaf Sobin
The Fly-Truffler
Frank Soos
Unified Field Theory
Jean Christopher Spaugh
Something Blue
Barry Unsworth
Losing Nelson
Morality Play
Sacred Hunger
David Foster Wallace
Girl with Curious Hair
Rafi Zabor
The Bear Comes Home
PRAISE FOR BARRY UNSWORTH’S WORK
The Rage of the Vulture: “Superb storytelling. The richness of [Unsworth’s] language and imagery shimmers on every page.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A novel of revelation … haunting.”
—The New Yorker
Stone Virgin: “A brilliant, ironic, sublime version of the Pygmalion legend.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“No brief synopsis could suggest the sinuous intricacy of Stone Virgin or the adroitness with which Barry Unsworth manipulates the weighty mysteries of love, death, creation, faith, evil and the lure of history. … Consistently astonishing.”
—Boston Globe
Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger: “Utterly magnificent. … By its last page, you will be close to weeping.”
—Washington Post
“This brilliantly suspenseful period piece about the slave trade in the 18th century is also a masterly meditation on how avarice dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”
—Chicago Tribune’s “Outstanding Fiction”
“Quite possibly the best novel I’ve read in the last decade. … It is a completely satisfying literary experience and a great story, wonderfully told.”
—David Halberstam
Booker Prize-nominated Morality Play: “A learned, witty, satisfying entertainment. … Nicholas Barber seems too good a narrator to let go after just one short book.”
—New York Times
“Works brilliantly on three levels. It’s an accurate, carefully imagined historical novel, set in 14th-century England; a dark and suspenseful murder mystery; and a provocative meditation on the birth of a new art form.”
—Adam Begley, Chicago Tribune
After Hannibal: “Vivid, sinuous, profound, and entirely beguiling.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A brilliant novel, exquisitely precise in its analysis of evil twisting its way through ordinary lives.”
—Boston Globe
Losing Nelson: “Exhilarating. … A pleasure, a puzzle, and a provocation.”
—New York Times Book Review
“What a joy it is to have in hand a work of fiction that is at once thoroughly serious and—as all such fiction should be—immensely entertaining, in the deepest and best sense of the word.”
—Washington Post Book World
BOOKS BY BARRY UNSWORTH
The Partnership
The Greeks Have a Word for It
The Hide
Mooncranker’s Gift
The Big Day
Pascali’s Island
The Rage of the Vulture
Stone Virgin
Sugar and Rum
Sacred Hunger
Morality Play
After Hannibal
Losing Nelson
Copyright © Barry Unsworth 1976
First published as a Norton paperback 2002
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ISBN: 978-0-393-32149-4
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