The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

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But, Gordon, you are beginning to wonder about your charm.

It was a mad moment. It was over. The desire for sex and danger left him, the tide receded and he was a whale stranded on a beach.

He picked up the phone. Siobhan’s mobile was switched off. It would be, you weren’t allowed to have them switched on in the wards.

He hesitated. Even he, so used to having his own way, thought twice about ringing a children’s hospital at a quarter to nine on Guy Fawkes Night.

He must find out.

He dialled.

‘Hello. My name is Sir Gordon Coppinger.’

‘The Sir Gordon Coppinger?’

‘That’s right. I want to speak to a lady called Siobhan McEnery. Her baby son Ryan is seriously ill in the hospital.’

‘Is it important, Sir Gordon?’

‘It’s important or I wouldn’t be ringing at this time but no, it isn’t a matter of life and death and I will understand if she can’t speak to me or doesn’t feel able to.’

‘I’ll do my best, Sir Gordon.’

‘Thank you. I really appreciate that.’

He waited, waited, waited. His heart was racing.

‘Hello.’

Siobhan. He almost fainted.

‘Siobhan, it’s Sir Gordon here. I have to know. How’s Ryan? How’s the wee mite?’

‘Oh, Sir Gordon, thank you so much for asking. He’s very ill but he’s holding his own.’

‘Oh, thank you, Siobhan. Thank you. I’m so relieved. Get back to him, Siobhan.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He put the phone down and walked slowly away. He caught sight of himself in a long mirror. He stared with astonishment at the sight of himself staring at himself with astonishment.

Not such a useless lump of a nun after all (#ulink_ffca8c59-1e4e-5627-94e2-adbcfb5d180a)

He walked slowly down the stairs, out of silence into bedlam.

Almost without knowing that he was doing it, he took a plate and piled it with food. Almost without knowing how he had got there, he found himself back in the immense drawing room.

‘Dad! Over here.’

Almost without making a decision he obeyed Luke and made his way over to the corner of the room, where there was a spare seat. Nobody, it seemed, had been that eager to sit with Luke and Emma, who had created a little artistic enclave by sitting with Peregrine Thoresby and his partner David Emsley.

‘I love your Pissarros,’ said Peregrine Thoresby, who was at his most effete and wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of mint tea in this gathering.

Sir Gordon finished his mouthful of smoked duck before replying. He needed the time. He was having trouble getting back into the social whirl after his experience upstairs.

‘Well, I put on my walls only what I like,’ he said at length.

‘And that includes nothing by Luke?’ asked David Emsley, who was big and solid and had played in the scrum for Rosslyn Park before coming out of the closet.

‘Difficult one. I really don’t want to be offensive,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘I only put on my walls paintings that I both admire and believe will enhance my house. If you think that makes me philistine, I am. I can admire Francis Bacon. I don’t want him in my house. The same goes for Hieronymus Bosch and, I’m afraid, Luke Coppinger. It isn’t a question of merit. It’s a question of … domesticity. In choosing a picture I use some of the same criteria as I use in choosing a settee. Does it enhance the room? Fact of life, I’m afraid. You disapprove, Emma. I see it in your face.’

‘Emma disapproves of everything,’ said Luke proudly.

‘I do not,’ said Emma. ‘How ridiculous. I disapprove of this party, yes. I’m sorry, but I do. Such waste, when billions are dying of starvation, and when it’s just been announced that company directors voted themselves average increases of forty-nine per cent last year, and here you are wasting money on fireworks of all things, which are no use to anybody and frighten all the animals, and please don’t point out that I myself have been eating your food and drinking your drink because it’s all been laid out and will only be thrown away if I don’t.’

There was silence. Luke seemed abashed. Even Emma seemed abashed. Sir Gordon felt very tired, too weak to face a challenge.

‘You deny that you disapprove of everything, Emma,’ said Peregrine Thoresby. ‘So tell us. What do you approve of?’

‘I approve of disapproval,’ said Emma, ‘because the world deserves it. I approve of alcohol, because it makes me feel good. I approve of cricket, because it’s going to get Luke out of my hair for hours every weekend in summer if we’re still together. I approve of bees, because they’re clever and lovely and I like honey. I approve of rabbits, obviously.’ Her most recent painting was a massive canvas of rabbit droppings. She looked at Peregrine and David. ‘Oh, and I approve of homosexuality.’

‘Thank goodness for that, eh, David?’ said Peregrine.

‘She’s just saying it to be polite,’ said David, and at the word ‘polite’ Emma snorted.

‘Sir Gordon, you’re a bit of an enigma, you know,’ said Peregrine.

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Sir Gordon, but he said it without his usual conviction. He felt uneasy in this conversation.

‘You can be so forward-looking with the collection at times, but you’re regarded as a rather reactionary soul. We’ve never discussed this and I think we get on well, I hope we get on well. What’s your attitude to gays?’

Sir Gordon wanted to tell them of his happy relationship with Dennis Hargreaves in Dudley all those years ago, but he couldn’t think of a way of putting it that wouldn’t sound a bit like boasting in this context, as if he was telling them that he wasn’t narrow, he wasn’t prudish, he too was a man of the world, a man of broad tastes. So he didn’t. Instead he repeated something he had said at a seriously stuffy dinner party in Leatherhead.

‘I have no objection to male homosexuality,’ he said. ‘I get on very well with homosexuals actually, but I loathe lesbianism.’

Throughout the house the conversation was buzzing merrily, people were beginning to go for desserts, soon it would be fireworks time, but in this corner there was a stunned silence. Luke broke it at last.

‘That’s ridiculous, Dad.’

‘I don’t want to be rude,’ lied Emma, ‘but it’s ludicrous. How can you possibly justify it?’

‘Two male homosexuals are two rivals out of the way,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Two lesbians mean two lost opportunities. Simple self-interest.’

There was another, only slightly less stunned silence.

‘Every decision in the world is made out of self-interest.’

‘Oh bollocks,’ said Emma, and she stormed off, to the extent to which it was possible to storm off in such a crowded room.

‘Oh, Dad,’ said Luke, and he set off after her.

‘They’re young,’ said David Emsley. ‘The truth still hurts them.’

The truth. Was it the truth? Sir Gordon wasn’t sure any more. It didn’t explain his phone call to Siobhan.

And then, shortly before ten o’clock, the guests trooped out into a night that wasn’t quite wet and wasn’t quite dry, that wasn’t quite cold and wasn’t quite mild, and they stood in their overcoats and their massed ranks right at the bottom of the garden.

Behind them, the house shone with light, a fantasy of gables and even a small turret, built in brick, rambling, almost mirroring a medieval house that had grown over the centuries, though this had grown in two days on the drawing board of a fast and not too punctilious architect.

Just beyond the fence, at the top of Top Field, the mountainous bonfire burst into life. The flames lit up the faces of the locals, beyond the bonfire.

Now the fireworks began. The Surrey sky was alive with double and triple rockets, meteors, comets, whistling tails, crackling willows, canopies of glittering starburst, noise and glitter and bursting greens and blues and reds. His guests ooohed. The locals aaahed. The guests aaahed. The locals ooohed. All was noise and light.

Dogs whimpered and hid. Cats hissed. Bewildered finches woke and fled. Nervous horses neighed and pranced and fell. Rabbits hared to their burrows. Sticklebacks in the streams felt the vibrations. Sir Gordon caught sight of the Greek Orthodox archbishop looking endearingly boyish and excited, and wondered again whether there was a plot to kill him or kidnap him tonight, under cover of all this excitement.

But most of the time his eyes were gazing into the sky, marvelling at the barrage of rockets, the titanium salutes, the wildly whistling missiles that burst into confusions of colours. Nobody noticed a frail old man slip through a gate with an agility beyond his years, but then he was nineteen again, he was in the Eighth Army, he was inspired by Monty, he was inspired by Rommel, who was that rarity, an enemy worth fighting. Nobody noticed him ride out the hail of bullets, dodge the wickedly whistling shells, and speed – well, totter, but it seemed like speed to him – towards the conflagration.

‘There are men in there,’ he cried, but his voice was frail, and nobody heard his cry. ‘There are men dying in there.’ But the noise was loud, and nobody heard his voice. But then he tripped, and the fall caught somebody’s eye, and voices were raised, Sir Gordon and others heard the cries, Sir Gordon saw his father, slender and tottering in the glare of the flames, getting to his feet again, shouting desperately but oh so feebly, stumbling towards the flames, but oh so slowly, men were catching him, Sir Gordon was running but he was too late, too late, his father fell again, arms reached out for him, a log spat viciously, sparks flew, his father’s straggly hair was on fire, his father screamed, then he saw his father pulled away out of the reach of the fire, there was a bag over his head, somebody was pressing the bag down so that the fire couldn’t breathe, but his father couldn’t breathe, Sir Gordon couldn’t breathe, a great pain shot through him, he was having a heart attack, he was dying, he was lying and dying beside his dead father.

But Sir Gordon didn’t die and neither, amazingly, did his father. They made them tough in Dudley, and besides, don’t forget, Clarrie was nineteen again.

The bonfire burned on, the fireworks continued to explode, many people hadn’t even noticed the kerfuffle beside the fire. Somebody found Dr Ferguson, who examined the old man with great tenderness. There beside the fire he was in the warmest place around. Dr Ferguson suggested that they let him recover a little from his shock before they moved him. And then, during the spectacular climax to the magnificent display, when almost all eyes were on the heavens, they moved Sir Gordon’s frail, shocked father carefully, and carried him with infinite care back to the protection of the warm, wonderful house. Dr Ferguson said that to move him to hospital, a twenty-mile trip in an ambulance, to transport him to a bed when there was a bed here safe from MRSA, would be senseless. He himself would stay beside him, tend him, treat him, dress the burn on his scalp, comfort him.

‘Well,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to his spouse of twenty-nine years, ‘do you think inviting him was sensible now?’

‘It might have been a good, brave way for him to go,’ said Lady Coppinger, the former Miss Danish Pastry (West Midlands).

Sir Gordon sighed. It was a sigh steeped in realism. She would always have the last word.

Some people knew what had happened and sent their condolences, but far more of the revellers had no idea that anything untoward had happened, such had been the splendour of the display.

There was mulled wine to round the evening off, and then, gradually, the guests began to leave.

‘Next year will have to be pretty special,’ said Hugo Coppinger to his brother.

‘To next year,’ said Admiral Lord Feltham of Banbury (retired). ‘If we’re invited, of course.’

‘Time for us to retire, my dear,’ said Field Marshal Sir Colin Grimsby-Watershed (retired) to Lady Grimsby-Watershed (retired).

‘Did you enjoy the fireworks?’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to his daughter Joanna.

‘I don’t much like fireworks actually,’ said Joanna Coppinger to her father.

‘Well,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to Emma Slate, whose Rabbit Droppings Near Hornchurch was said by one critic to have lent a completely new and translucent complexion to the meaning of art. ‘There have been many panicking cats and dogs, ponds and marshes full of frightened frogs and terrified toads, well over a hundred expensive cars pumping carbon monoxide into the air, lights blazing in every room of a house of hugely unnecessary proportions, vast amounts of fine foods likely to be thrown away, most of which were produced by rearing and keeping animals in very dubious conditions indeed, and one dreadfully startled old man. Have you enjoyed it?’

‘Oh, Sir Gordon, I have. I have,’ wailed Emma Slate. ‘Does that make me a bad person?’

‘No,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger. ‘It makes you human.’

Their eyes met. She wasn’t his type at all. His father had been right. She wasn’t very clean. And there had to be something a bit insalubrious in the mind of a woman who could create a picture of rabbit droppings. But sexual attraction didn’t run along smooth lines. There weren’t any rules. And he did wonder if there was just a chance that he could steal her off Luke. That would be fun.

‘You’re pissed,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to Vernon Thickness. ‘If we don’t win tomorrow you’re on your bike, sunshine.’

‘We will hammer Charlton Unthletic tororrow. We will larecate them utterly. One–nil. I promise you that,’ said Vernon Thickness to Sir Gordon Coppinger.

‘A message for you, sir,’ said Farringdon to Sir Gordon Coppinger. ‘A lady rang and left a message. A Siobhan McEnery. I believe her husband had rung earlier.’

Sir Gordon’s heart almost stopped yet again.