Rory's Boys by Alan Clark

Author:Alan Clark [Alan Clark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129482
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2012-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

I waited for Vic on the front steps of Mount Royal with Alma and the bottle of whisky. The night was mild and still; the rooks were asleep. The soft hum of the small-hours traffic out on Spaniards Road seemed to come from another world. I suddenly realized I’d not been beyond the gates for nearly a week. When we’d been under siege, I’d been too anxious to desert the house, as if it might somehow be gone when I returned. This was my watch after all.

I was back in myself now. Elspeth had said we needn’t speak of it again if I didn’t want to. I’d told her I’d like to leave the option open if that was okay and she’d said that it was.

It was nearly one o’clock before Vic’s taxi swept through the gates. Big Frankie bounced out across the grass like one of those balloon things that chased Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. He hauled Vic from the cab, insisting he needed a nice cup of cocoa before bed, but Vic declined with a pale smile. He was tired as a toddler home from the beach, but too excited to sleep.

‘Perhaps a very small whisky though,’ he said, eyeing my glass. Frankie looked crestfallen, till Vic kissed his big hand and thanked him for waiting up. We went inside to the Red Damask Drawing-Room. But instead of sitting down, Vic opened the jib door that led to the Chapel Gallery.

‘You’re going to drink in there?’ I asked.

‘Toots, for a man of noble lineage you’re amazingly middleclass sometimes,’ he said.

The Chapel Gallery was dominated by two Baroque thrones from which previous Ashridges had looked down on their servants and the rest of the world. Vic threw on the lights, slumped into one of the thrones and put his feet up on the velvet balustrade. He reached for the bottle and took a slug.

‘I often sit here,’ he said. ‘It’s such a glorious place, way too good for the likes of God. It pisses me off the way religion was always able to hijack art. Paying half-starved geniuses to cloak its superstitious bullshit in such incredible beauty.’

We drank silently for a while. Robin Bradbury-Ross’s electronics boys had done an impressive job, brushing Laguerre’s ceiling with light and shade as subtly as he’d done with his paint. Cibber’s alabaster reredos sparkled like sugar, the fat putti looking like they could easily fly off their pediment and join us for a nightcap.

‘So how did I do?’ Vic asked eventually.

‘I don’t think you need me to tell you that’

Alma was splayed out across Vic’s belly as if it were a hearthrug. He had a talent for inducing adoration that was vaguely annoying.

‘I’m really sorry about what happened to you in the war. You’d never mentioned any of that.’

‘Well some stuff is so goddam grim that talking about it seems redundant.’

‘But you talked about it tonight. To the nation even.’

‘I’d not planned to,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was that African asshole or

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