The Harlequin Read online

  Nina Allan lives in North Devon and is a previous winner of the British Science Fiction Award in 2014 with her novella Spin. In the same year, her second novella The Gateway was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her debut novel The Race was shortlisted for the Kitschies Red Tentacle, the British Science Fiction Award and the John W Campbell Memorial Award in 2015.

  By the same author

  A Thread of Truth

  Microcosmos

  The Silver Wind

  Stardust

  The Race

  THE HARLEQUIN

  Nina Allan

  First published in Great Britain

  and the United States of America in 2015

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  7 Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Nina Allan 2015

  The moral right of Nina Allan to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910124-38-3

  ISBNe: 978-1-910124-39-0

  Cover design by Jason Anscombe at Raw Shock

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  Contents

  The Harlequin

  For Maureen Weller

  The Harlequin

  Beaumont’s train came in just after midday. There was still snow on the ground, frozen to a treacherous shine and filthy with footprints. Outside Victoria station a line of cabs stood waiting at the kerb. As Beaumont picked his way along the icy pavement, he noticed Richard Ferguson emerging from the station buffet. At least he thought it was Ferguson. Beaumont moved back into the shadow of the station exit but it was too late, he had been spotted. Ferguson raised his hand and waved. He was wearing a long grey overcoat with horn buttons. It sat oddly on him, Beaumont thought, as if he’d gone off with another man’s coat by mistake. There was stubble on Ferguson’s cheeks, a shabby two-day growth that drew attention to rather than hid the broken line of reddened scar tissue that ran down from the corner of Ferguson’s mouth into his shirt collar.

  “Beaumont? It is Beaumont, isn’t it? It’s Dickie Ferguson.”

  Ferguson had arrived at Westcombe Priory as a new teacher the same year that Beaumont was due to take the Oxford entrance examination. On the few occasions they found reason to speak, Beaumont had addressed the man as Sir, or Mr Ferguson. The idea that he was now supposed to call him Dickie seemed preposterous and somehow distasteful. Beaumont felt no desire to renew the acquaintance, in any case. He couldn’t see the point.

  “It’s good to see you,” Beaumont said. “It’s been a while.”

  “I heard you were –.” Ferguson hesitated, no doubt thinking better of his eagerness to divulge exactly what it was he had heard. He glanced at Beaumont’s army greatcoat, the battered brown leather valise. “You’ve been demobbed then, I see?”

  “Six months ago,” Beaumont said. “I’ve been in Paris.”

  “Paperwork?” said Ferguson.

  “Something like that.” Beaumont shrugged. He watched helplessly as the cab he had been about to get into was bagged by a woman whose broad hips were shrouded in what looked like a blue chenille dressing gown. Greasy-looking, brass-coloured curls straggled across her shoulders in an unkempt mass.

  “Wicklow Street,” she said. Her voice was strident, almost commanding, all South London vowels. Beaumont imagined what her body must be like beneath the hideous coat, the flesh still supple but not quite clean, wrapped about in the scents of dried-on sweat and boiled potato peelings. Beaumont’s groin twitched. God knew what acts she had been driven to, just to get by.

  “Would you care for a drink?” Ferguson was saying. “I’m buying.”

  It was the last thing Beaumont wanted, but he found himself saying yes, all the same, if only to put off the moment when he had to face Lucy.

  “I don’t have long,” he said.

  “A quick one, then. There’s a place just round the corner.”

  Ferguson led the way. Beaumont noticed the way he walked, in a ragged half-stride, no doubt the result of the same piece of ordnance that had messed up his face.

  The pub, the King James, was packed. There was a large open fire in the saloon bar. A dog lay on the tiles in front of it, a lurcher or perhaps a borzoi, coffee-coloured with splotches of white. It raised its head in response to the draught from the open door. Its eyes, reflecting the firelight, gleamed gold as sovereigns. Beaumont had heard stories of men shooting dogs in the trenches, for extra food, though he’d never seen it happen himself. An omnibus thundered past outside, making the windows rattle. A shudder passed through Beaumont, the quickened heartbeat of unwelcome memories.

  “We can sit here,” Ferguson said. He made a gesture towards two free seats at a table on the right, close to the window. Cigarette smoke drifted, hauled in towards the centre of the room by the heat of the fire. As he made his way towards the window alcove, Beaumont felt himself jostled. He turned to see a swarthy man with an eye patch, his bristling, scoop-like hands clutching two bowls of what looked like Irish stew.

  “Get your arse out of my face, nancy boy,” said the man with the eye patch. “Sodding burnt myself now, haven’t I?”

  To Beaumont the man seemed degenerate, a throwback, almost Neanderthal. “I’m sorry,” he said. He could smell the man’s breath, the reek of warm beer and onions. Beaumont imagined letting fly at him, the brute thud of his closed fist in the man’s podgy stomach, the twin bowls spilling their steaming contents over his face and chest. Like shit from the latrine, Beaumont thought.

  “Just watch where you’re going.” The Neanderthal eased himself into his seat. His companion dragged one of the bowls across the table and began to eat, blowing noisily on each spoonful of stew before slurping it into his mouth. The stew smelled of rancid fat and floury potatoes. Like pigswill. Beaumont thought of Paris, the corner café near the Pigalle metro station where each morning he had savoured a café au lait and practised his halting French on the waitress, whose name was Irène and who had given him an old bank account ledger to write in. Paper was scarce and Beaumont was grateful, but when he tried to kiss her she had turned roughly aside. Irène’s impassive, porcelain features reminded him of a doll his sister Doris had once owned, Miss Misty, her head like a smooth round ball, her hair black lacquer. Irène’s body though had been soft-looking and running to fat, like a much older woman’s. Beaumont thought again of the woman he’d seen outside Victoria station, her greasy, brassy hair, the horrible blue coat that looked like a dressing gown.

  He wondered if he would ever see Paris again.

  “What’ll you have?” Ferguson said.

  “A pint of bitter, if that’s all right.”

  “You look like you need it, if you don’t mind my saying. Won’t be a tick.” He seemed delighted to see Beaumont unbend, even a little. Beaumont’s mouth filled with saliva as he anticipated the taste of the beer, sour-strong and rank as herbs, the yellow aroma of smog and of the whole of London. He felt suddenly overcome, remembering the times – in the dugout, in the foul bedroom in Dieppe, in the ambulance with Stephen Lovell, for God’s sake – when he thought he would never see Doris again, or Victoria station, or the house in Lambeth. He had never thought of Lucy at such times.

  “Get this down you,” Ferguson said. He set the beers on the table. Beaumont raised his glass and took a swallow, low
ering his head to meet it halfway. His nostrils widened. The bitter coated his tongue and the roof of his mouth like a solution of peat and black treacle.

  “That’s good,” he said. He found he was staring at Ferguson’s face, the knotted train of scars, the untidy stubble. Beaumont supposed Ferguson had made a hero of himself. His type – considerate, upright, comradely, lovers of team sports – usually did. He felt a jarring contempt for Ferguson, the same sinking despair he’d felt when he first came upon Lovell, lying on his side in a wheel rut, trying to hold himself together with his filthy hands.

  Ferguson seemed to have kept himself more or less in one piece, yet Beaumont could not escape the conviction that he was equally doomed.

  Ferguson shifted in his seat, then raised a hand to his sewn-together cheek.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Caught a bit of shrapnel, that’s all.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Somewhere in Belgium. I lost three toes off my right foot as well, but I was lucky. The chap next to me took it in the head.” Ferguson gulped at his beer then turned to gaze into the fire. Beaumont cursed himself inwardly. He detested these conversations: the statistics, the place names, the running tally of mutilations and losses, yet here he was, less than half an hour back in London and already caught up in one. And with Ferguson too, a man he barely knew and hoped never to see again after today.

  Ferguson coughed and took out his smokes. He offered the pack to Beaumont, who shook his head. Ferguson placed a cigarette between his own lips and lit it, not with the flip-over army lighter Beaumont expected but with a match from a packet of Swan Vestas he had retrieved from the pocket of his overcoat. His lips were full and rosy, like a woman’s, almost exactly matching the colour of the scar on his face.

  “Do you have any plans?” he said. He drew deeply and, Beaumont thought, gratefully on the cigarette. He sensed that Ferguson was only asking this question out of politeness, the same artfully ingrained Englishness that prevented him from asking what he really wanted to know, which was where had Beaumont served and what had he done. He had no doubt that someone – one of the other masters, probably – would have told Ferguson about the hearing, about the fight outside the pub with the thugs who had called him a coward and threatened to cut off his balls.

  The only question Ferguson wanted to ask was whether Beaumont had seen anything of the war, or if he had spent it behind a desk, filling in forms.

  “I drove ambulances,” Beaumont said. “And supply trucks. I dug latrines. Anything that didn’t involve putting bullets into actual people. And no, I have no plans. Not yet.” He felt surprised at the strength of his anger, which he had thought he was through with. Beaumont had seen men die, but he had not killed a man. He had been shot at, but refrained from shooting back. In the eyes of the thugs outside the Lambton Arms, his application to the tribunal made him a coward. In the eyes of his sister Doris, they made him a hero. He did not know what they made him in the eyes of his fiancée, Lucy.

  In the eyes of Richard Ferguson he read only relief.

  “You must have been in a few tight corners,” Ferguson said. He seemed to relax slightly, and Beaumont sensed he had passed some kind of test. He found himself having to repress the urge to laugh out loud.

  “Some,” he said. He took another long swig of his beer. He realised he was hungry. He watched the man with the eye patch and his piggy companion wolfing their stew. He tried to imagine what it might feel like to be inside the Neanderthal’s head, to think his thoughts. He experienced a brief, slurping sensation of warmth and mild disgruntlement and food. He looked over towards the bar, where a woman was serving drinks and another, younger woman, her daughter probably, was cleaning glasses. The younger woman glanced across at him and smiled. She was hopelessly ugly, her features scarred with pockmarks, a permanent reminder, no doubt, of some disease or other indignity suffered in childhood. Unlike the pig man and his friend she exuded strength. Belatedly, Beaumont smiled back, but the woman had already turned away and did not notice. A short while later she disappeared through a door behind the bar.

  Beaumont realised with a start that he and Ferguson were the youngest men there.

  “I should go,” he said to Ferguson. There was a sudden draught of cold air as the street door opened. A man entered, short and stocky, his shoes encased in rinds of melting snow. Beaumont watched as he approached the bar, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat which, now that Beaumont came to look at it, seemed not to be one garment so much as several. The main body of the coat was grey, an army greatcoat not unlike Beaumont’s but even older. The left sleeve appeared to have been taken from one of the stiff black stuff overcoats most commonly worn by coal hauliers or the rag-and-bone men who worked the teeming, disease-ridden streets of Hackney and Islington. The right sleeve was from a sheepskin jacket. The strip of mangy woollen fleece at the wrist was stained a putrid yellow.

  When the man turned to look at him, Beaumont saw that one of his eyebrows had been burned away. The scab that replaced it had the blackish-brown lustre of burnt sugar.

  Beaumont felt an unnatural stillness come over him. Although the noise of the pub was now close to deafening, he was somehow still able to hear the ragged, stilted susurrus of his own breathing. For a moment he was back in the ambulance, smelling the overpowering stink of shit, hearing the soft, grunting moans of Stephen Lovell, curled tight as a clenched fist around his spilled intestines. He saw the face at the window, the hand, hammering to be let in, the palm criss-crossed with cuts from barbed wire, the dark semicircle of nameless grime under the nails.

  I know the way. You have to trust me, or this man will die. The man at the window had called himself Vladek. Beaumont had never known if this was his first name or his surname. It seemed not to matter.

  Lovell had died anyway, but later, on a sodden piece of churned up pastureland behind a burned-out farmhouse, the man with the torn hands told Beaumont the coat he wore had been sewn together from the remains of the garments of ten dead soldiers.

  That’s the thing about wartime, Vladek said. Nothing goes to waste.

  Beaumont felt he would know his face anywhere.

  Beaumont saw these things for a second, then the background din of the pub burst in on him again and the man at the bar was just a heavyset stranger in a coal stoker’s coat with the stitching torn along the length of one of its sleeves. With or without the coat, he could have been anybody.

  “Poor devil,” said Ferguson quietly. “His face is gone.”

  It was only then that Beaumont realised it was not just the man’s eyebrow that was missing. The whole left side of his face was missing also. His features had been reduced to raw flesh then twisted into a pink, corrugated mass of scar tissue.

  Ferguson left his seat and approached the bar. For some reason Beaumont felt convinced that Ferguson meant to throw the faceless man out. He watched as Ferguson reached into his pocket, handing the man his cigarettes and what looked to Beaumont like a ten-shilling note. When the man reached to take it, Beaumont saw he was also missing two of his fingers. Off to one side the pig man and the Neanderthal with the eye patch had finished shovelling down their food and started to play cards.

  I am still in hell, Beaumont thought. Only now it is worse, because everyone pretends that the life we are living is the life we want. The noise of the pub seemed overwhelming, stiff with the rising heat of unwashed bodies. Beaumont feared he might vomit. When Ferguson returned to their table, Beaumont told him he really should be going.

  “You’ll be wanting to get home, of course,” Ferguson said. “It was selfish of me to keep you. Forgive me.”

  They left the King James together, and for an awful moment Beaumont thought Ferguson was going to insist on accompanying him back to Lambeth. Much to his relief, this did not happen. Ferguson excused himself, saying he had an appointment.

  “It’s a work thing I can’t get out of,” he said. From the look of him, unshaven and dishevelled, Beaumont
doubted it. He wondered who Ferguson was really meeting, if in fact he was meeting anyone at all, or if, like Beaumont himself, he simply wanted to be alone.

  “It’s been good to see you,” Ferguson said. “You must look me up once you’re settled, and we can do this again.” He clapped Beaumont hard on the shoulder, applying a gentle squeeze before removing his hand. Beaumont stiffened instinctively, remembering the things some of his schoolfellows had said, the younger ones who still took PT and who made jokes about what Dickie Ferguson got up to in the showers. Get your arse out of my face, nancy boy, Beaumont thought. He supposed he should feel repulsed, but instead he felt tired. He had seen eighteen-year-old artillerymen shot for less than what had just happened with Ferguson.

  “Take care, Dickie,” he said quietly. “Thanks for the drink.” He turned away before Ferguson could answer and started walking, turning left on Wilton Road and then right onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. He headed south, noting the bricked-up doorways and whitewashed windows of businesses that had failed or closed their doors because of the war. Piles of filthy snow stood at the kerbside. In the litter-strewn alleyway beside a tobacconist’s shop a child sat, huddled against a coal bunker, a dry-looking crust of bread between its grubby hands. Beaumont had seen similar sights in Paris, but the beauty of certain women, the burnt sienna scent of roasting coffee, the difficulty of understanding the language beyond the most basic level had insulated him from the harshness of everyday reality.

  He thought of an amusement arcade he had once visited with Doris, on the West Pier in Brighton. He particularly remembered a display of automata, a series of intricately constructed domestic interiors sealed inside wooden cases behind a glass panel. When you put a farthing into the slot, the scene came to life. A woman in an empire-waist dress watered chrysanthemums, a gentleman in a silken waistcoat read the newspaper. Lights switched themselves on. A spotted terrier scooted across the polished parquet floor.