The Ice Soldier Read online

  This was too much for the crowd. They descended upon him. One man grabbed Pringle’s walking stick, broke it over his knee, and sent the two ends clattering away into the corner of the room. They took his hat and stamped on it. They tore the buttons off his coat.

  Pringle screamed and thrashed about, his pale scalp visible beneath a layer of thin gray hair, which made his skull look as fragile as an egg.

  If it had not been for Stanley, they probably would have trampled him to death. Instead, Stanley pushed his way through the scrum, took Pringle by the scruff of the neck, and heaved him out among the pressmen.

  Flash cubes popped and crackled. Bursts of magnesium light flickered in from outside.

  Pringle cursed them all and tried to snatch their cameras.

  But the pressmen only fell back out of reach and took more pictures.

  At last, Pringle gave up the fight and ran away down the street, still cursing, still promising that our journey would never take place.

  The viewing continued for a few more hours. The orchestra packed up at noon. By four, the journalists had gone. At five, Helen went home. At six, Stanley at last called it quits. This still left many people who had not glimpsed the coffin, so Stanley offered to open the place again tomorrow.

  With the doors finally closed, Stanley sank into a chair and pressed his hands against his face.

  The air was filled with the sickly smell of the flowers which had been left around the coffin. Stanley had replaced some of those that had been knocked off by Pringle, but the floor was still scattered with carnations, lilies, and roses.

  Stanley let his head fall back with a groan. “What a day,” he murmured.

  I sat down opposite him and grunted in agreement.

  “How are we ever going to move that coffin up the side of a mountain?” he asked.

  “A lot of brute strength, I imagine.”

  “It’s going to take more than that,” said Stanley, raising his head. “Just look at the thing. It’s made for being lowered into the ground, not sliding up a hill.”

  With only a few weeks before our departure, there were still so many details to sort out that I hadn’t given the matter much thought. Even getting to Italy was proving more tricky than I had expected. Owing to difficulties with the airlines over transporting Carton’s body in a welded-shut coffin, we had arranged to travel there by train, just as we had done in the old days.

  “You did a good job today,” I told Stanley.

  “I think Uncle Henry would have been pleased with the turnout,” he replied. “Especially old Pringle showing up. I thought he would have gone by now.”

  “Gone where?” I asked.

  “The Alps,” replied Stanley. “He spends his summers there, you know. Not far from where we’re going, actually. My uncle used to say he could sense it when Pringle had left London for the season.” Stanley screwed up his face and did his best impersonation of Carton’s creaky voice: “I feel it, Stanley! I feel it like a freshening of the air!”

  “How does Pringle propose to stop us?”

  “Bury us under an avalanche of documents, I expect.”

  “He must have really hated old Carton.”

  Stanley smiled, as if about to let me in on a secret he had known for a long time. “Crossing swords with Carton was all Pringle had to live for, really. In a funny way, I think Pringle will miss him more than anybody else. Archenemies are hard to come by, and with Carton gone, Pringle’s got no one left to persecute. Everyone else is either too well behaved or too afraid to stand up to him. But Carton wasn’t bothered in the least.” Stanley sat forward, smiling as a memory broke open in his head. “My uncle used to do a skit in his lectures where he would pretend to be Pringle. He wouldn’t name him, of course, but would dress himself up like Pringle, ridiculous tie and so on, and everyone knew whom he was mimicking. He would come out onstage right at the beginning of the lecture and start saying all these awful things about Carton. About himself! Sometimes the audience, especially if they were first-timers and hadn’t seen Carton in the flesh, wouldn’t actually know who this man was. They’d be shocked, of course. Sometimes they would boo him. Carton would carry on listing all the rotten things Pringle had said about him, about how everything Carton said was lies, but then he would pretend that he had an itch, right in the middle of his back. Pringle was always scratching himself because of his eczema. So as part of his act, my uncle would try to scratch his back, but of course he couldn’t. So he would start dancing around the stage, all the while trying to carry on with his Carton bashing. He would get so desperately itchy that he would start rubbing his back up and down against the corner of the chalkboard he used for illustrating his lectures. He’d look like an old bear scratching himself on a tree trunk. Of course, by now the audience would be howling with laughter. Eventually, Carton would reveal who he was. Then you could hear the applause halfway down the street.”

  “Did Pringle ever catch wind of this?” I asked.

  “Oh, of course. Pringle makes it his job to find out about everything, especially if it has something to do with him. He tried suing Carton for slander, but Carton always got away with it. The thing is that before Carton started spoofing him, Pringle barely had a name worth slandering. It was Carton who made him famous. The audience at his lectures wouldn’t have had any idea who Pringle was, much less the things he said about Carton, if Carton himself hadn’t told them all about it.” Stanley got up and walked over to the coffin. He rapped on the side with his knuckles, as if expecting Carton to tap out a reply from inside the metal box. “I’m going to miss him more than I ever thought I would.”

  “What will happen to the club now?” I asked.

  He glanced back at me. “Do you mean what should happen or what will happen?”

  “It’s like that, is it?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Stanley began gathering up the dropped flowers, clicking his tongue at the stains they had made on the carpet. “He was going to lose the club. It had really stopped being his club, anyway. Over the years, the board of trustees took more and more control over the place. It didn’t seem that way, of course. Not to people coming in from the street. And as long as my uncle was making money, the board didn’t much care what he did. But after his voice gave out, and he couldn’t do the lectures like he used to, it wasn’t long before the vultures began to circle.”

  I remembered what Carton had said, how if it hadn’t been for the club, he wouldn’t have known what to do with himself.

  “So the club will be gone,” said Stanley, “but I think people will remember him well. Speaking of which, I almost forgot. Dr Webb stopped by before you got here. He left us something from my uncle.” Out of his pocket, he pulled what looked like a large brown leather wallet. He tossed it to me and I caught it.

  Turning the wallet in my hand, I saw that it was stitched shut all the way around. “What’s in it?” I asked as I reached for my Opinel knife.

  “Don’t open it up,” said Stanley. “It’s got some poems inside.”

  “Poems?”

  He nodded. “Dr. Webb said they had been put together by my uncle and are to be opened only when we get to the top of the mountain, and then they are to be read out over the coffin.”

  I weighed the leather envelope in my hand. “I’ve heard of people doing that,” I said, “sorting out their own funerals in advance. Choosing the music and so on.”

  “And just like Uncle Henry to be one of them,” said Stanley.

  I went to hand him back the envelope.

  Stanley shook his head. “You’d better look after that.”

  “Why me?”

  “Which of the two of us would you trust not to lose the bloody thing?”

  “I’ll keep it safe,” I said.

  Both of us were too tired to go home. The thought of sleeping on a couch here at the club began to look like a good idea.

  I was just heading up the stairs to see if I could rustle up some blankets and pillows when there was a loud
knocking at the door, following by the crash of broken glass.

  Someone shouted, “Blast!,” followed by a muffled stream of blasphemy.

  I stood on the landing while Stanley went to the door. “I’m terribly sorry …” he began to say, but then he exclaimed, “Oh, it’s you!”

  Wally Sugden staggered into the room, holding the broken neck of a champagne bottle. The rest of it lay in shards on the doorstep. Sugden looked at the piece in his hand and then threw it out into the dark. “That’s right,” said Sugden. “It’s me.” He was completely drunk. He could barely speak, let alone stand.

  “I’m afraid we’re closed,” said Stanley.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” demanded Sugden, but then he caught sight of me on the stairs. “Of course. I should have known.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I’ve come to tell you that it’s not too late! You know damned well how this is going to play out, so you might as well stop wasting my time. I warn you, if you don’t play the game straight I’m going to expose the both of you publicly.”

  “Expose us?” asked Stanley. “Expose us for what? We’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Sugden snorted. “You don’t understand. The papers will print any bloody thing I tell them to, and whether you have something to hide or not makes no difference to me or them. I’ll just make something up, and the longer you two dither about trying to make up your minds, the worse it’s going to be for you.”

  I felt the muscles clench along my jaw. Anger flashed behind my eyes. Without thinking, I reached over to the Chinese vase, took hold of one of the Zulu spears, and threw it at Sugden. The wide blade of the spear flickered through the air and thumped into the wall beside him.

  He squawked and covered his head with his hands.

  Stanley was staring at me.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” shouted Sugden.

  By then I was down the stairs, across the room, and face to face with him. I prized the spear out of the woodwork. “It’s an answer,” I spat. “That’s what it was. You can say whatever the hell you want, Sugden, but it won’t change anything. And instead of you thinking you can make things worse for us, why don’t you start thinking about how we can make them worse for you?”

  “I’d like to see you try,” he said, slapping the dirt off his sleeves.

  I came a little closer to him. “Would you, Sugden? Would you? Then tell me again about your trust in the man.” I set the spear point at the hollow of his throat. “Tell me about your trust in the machine!” I shouted.

  Sugden fumbled for the door and staggered back out into the street. “You’re mad,” he said. “You’re both mad.” He stalked away, turning now and then to hurl abuse at us, but he kept walking.

  When he had gone, I walked back inside and shut the door.

  Stanley was standing exactly where I had left him. “Were you aiming to hit him?” he asked.

  I went up to the landing and replaced the spear in the vase. “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. What I did know was that from this moment on, the power Sugden had once wielded over me was gone. The nightmares were still there inside my head, slicing the blackness of my dreams like the fins of circling sharks, but from now on Sugden could no longer summon them as he had done before.

  DESPITE THE FOCUS OF the press on me and Stanley, at St. Vernon’s Higgins and Houseman made a point of being entirely unimpressed. In their eyes, there was something almost undignified about getting one’s picture in the paper. To them, I was just William Bromley, history teacher, sometime blackjack player, man who pedaled around the school grounds on an ancient rod-brake Raleigh, senior officer of the St. Vernon’s Officer Cadet Corps, man in love with Darcey Kidder.

  But even the usually inscrutable Miss Kidder could not help mentioning the change. On her next sweep through the faculty lounge to deliver the paychecks, she said nothing at all to Higgins or Houseman, which was usual. But just as she was leaving the room, she turned in the doorway and fixed me with a look. “Mr. Bromley,” she said.

  I glanced up from the pile of papers I was correcting. “Miss Kidder,” I replied.

  Higgins and Houseman had been shaken from their tea-drinking stupor and now were watching us intently.

  “I hear you’re to be leaving us,” she told me, blue eyes glowing through the strands of black hair falling across her face.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Off on some great adventure.” Her lips were crooked with a smile.

  “I’ll be coming back, though.”

  “Well, good luck. I think it’s very fine. We should all have great adventures,” she said, casting a frosty glance at Higgins and Houseman. And then she was gone.

  “I’ve had adventures!” spluttered Higgins. “I’ve been lost in the Sand Sea of Calanscio! Twice!”

  “And I,” Houseman chipped in, “have sunk three U-boats! What more does she want?”

  We pondered this and found no answer.

  The next day, just as I was packing up the notes from my last class, I heard a knock on my classroom door.

  “Oh, hell,” I said under my breath.

  This was the time of day when a particularly needy student named Tirell would sometimes show up asking for help. I didn’t grudge him asking, but I did grudge him for showing up at this time of day, when it was all I could do to stagger over to the faculty room for a cup of tea before heading home and correcting papers until ten o’clock at night. I had had office hours earlier in the day, and there were usually a few customers, complaining about assignments or pleading for extensions on the extensions I had already given them. But it was only Tirell who waited until the end of the day. He was a perfectly adequate student, but from the day he’d arrived at St. Vernon’s, he had been obsessed with his grades. Tirell knew I would be tired and therefore more likely to give in and award him points he didn’t deserve. I dreaded these meetings and Tirell’s slippery, insincere politeness as he tried to wheedle out a few more points and bump up his grade point average. This was probably the only part of teaching I truly hated, because I was afraid I might one day tell the boy exactly what I thought of him, which would probably cost me my job.

  After the knock at the door, I stayed very still, hoping that Tirell might think I had already left. Just as I was beginning to think the coast was clear, the knocking started again. I groaned loudly and shouted, “Come in!” And then I pretended to be very busy writing something in my notebook.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” said a voice, but it was not the whiny point-grubbing voice of Tirell. It was the voice of Darcey Kidder.

  My head snapped up so sharply that I felt something crick in my neck. “Oh, it’s you!” I said.

  She smiled. “Can I come in?”

  I stood up. “Of course.”

  “It’s just that I can’t find the daily attendance sheet, and I thought perhaps I might have left it in here.”

  The daily attendance sheet was carried from classroom to classroom by a senior prefect, who would be given a list of names of anyone who was absent that day. The list would then be brought to Miss Kidder, who would cross off the names of those boys who were playing away games that day, or who were sick or who had some other excuse. The list of those names remaining would be handed to the headmaster who, in my view, took a perverse pleasure in calling out the boys’ names in all-school assembly and summoning them to his chambers during lunch break. “Didn’t the prefect hand it in?” I asked, glancing around the room and hoping to see the clipboard with its jaundice-yellow attendance sheet attached.

  “He did, but then I had to double-check something and I brought it over here. I must have left it in one of the classrooms.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. “Oh, well,” she said cheerfully. “Never mind.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “The headmaster will do his nut if he doesn’t get that list. I must help you find it.”

  “So you’re off to Switzerland,” she said, still smiling.

&nbs
p; I looked at her cautiously. “It’s Italy actually, but I will be passing through Switzerland. Now think,” I said. “Where do you think you could have left it?”

  “I’m sure I’ll find it,” she said casually, and sat down on one of the desks and folded her arms. “I’ve always thought this was one of the nicer classrooms. You do keep it up well. I think that makes a big difference to the students.”

  I felt a drop of sweat run down the trench of my spine. “Yes, well, I try to keep it nice,” I said quietly. I glanced around at the dog-eared posters on the wall, one of which showed caricatures of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring sitting in the luggage rack of a train carriage, listening in on a conversation taking place between two old ladies just beneath them. The top of the poster read, “Loose Talk Costs Lives!” Another poster showed the Mediterranean during the Greek classical period. On the other wall was a huge pull-down map of the world, showing the British colonies in pink. The map was out of date and still showed that we ruled India. I had requested a new one from Higgins, who was department chair, and had been met with roars of laughter. When I’d asked what the joke was, Higgins had informed me that if he paid for a new wall map out of department funds, there would be no budget for tea, biscuits, toast, or Houseman’s subscription to the Sporting News.

  “And if you want to deprive him of that,” added Higgins, “you’d better have something better in mind than a new map showing the deteriorating state of our Empire!”

  “I hope to become a teacher myself,” she said, tracing one pale finger down the edge of the desk.

  Nervously, I wiped a chalk-dusty hand across my face. “Darcey,” I said, “I’d love to talk about teaching with you, but you must focus on that list. The headmaster—”

  “Will it be dangerous where you’re going?”

  “No,” I said dismissively.

  “People say you might not come back.”

  “People? What people?”

  She shrugged. “Higgins. Houseman. They say it’s a terrible risk you’re taking.”

  “Well, they should mind their own business,” I snapped.