He got on best with Phyllis Painter. In a funny sort of way he thought that they might even be in love. He saw the admiration in her bright eyes every time she looked at him and hoped that she could see the same in his, although he knew that what there was between the pair of them could go no further, not without the whole thing being ruined. As John saw it, what he had with Phyllis was perhaps the very best of love in that it was a child’s game of love, an infants’ school idea of what it meant to be somebody’s boy or girlfriend. It was heartfelt and unsullied by the smallest cloud of practical experience. Before he’d died aged barely twenty, John had several girlfriends and had even had it off with one of them. Likewise, although he’d never asked her outright, he got the impression that Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and had at one point even possibly been married. So to some extent they’d both been through the grown-up part of love, the animal delight of sex, the troughs and torments of a passion off the boil.
They’d both known adult love and yet had opted for the junior version, for the thrill of an eternal playground crush, romance that hadn’t even progressed to behind the bike-sheds yet. They had elected to taste nothing but the dew upon love’s polished skin, and leave the actual fruit unbitten. That was how John felt about it, anyway, and he suspected it was probably the same with Phyll. At any rate, whatever the success of their relationship was due to, they’d loved in their fashion for some several timeless decades, and John hoped they might keep on like that until the very doorstep of infinity.
All things considered, John’s death suited him as well or better than his life had. The wayward agendas of the ghost-gang, scampering from one absurd adventure to another, meant that John was never bored. With the grey blush of every phantom morning there was always something new. Or, in the case of Bill and Reggie’s plan to tame a spectral mammoth, something very old.
Take all of this to-do over the ghost-gang’s latest member, for example. While John felt, as Phyllis did, that being in charge of the temporarily-dead infant was a grave responsibility, he also felt that this was turning out to be their grandest episode to date. In fact, John had good reason to take Michael Warren’s plight even more seriously than Phyllis did, and to be even more concerned about the toddler’s safety. He was buggered, though, if he’d let that stop him enjoying an extraordinary outing: demon-kings like plunging Messerschmitts! Ghost-storms and deathmongers! This was the kind of dashing spree he’d fondly hoped a war might be, before he’d found out otherwise. This was more what he’d had in mind, the very picture-paper essence of adventure with no scattered entrails and no grieving mums to turn a radio-serial romp into a tragedy. This was the best bits, all the spills and spectacle without the mortal consequence. John marvelled as he thought of the colossal builders, bleeding gold and lashing at each other with their billiard cues on the unfolded acres of the Mayorhold, then broke off that train of thought on realising that it led him back to the exploding man, the stumbling phosphorescence on the balcony with his suspended nails and rivets, his soiled trousers, his evaporating tears.
To rid himself of the recurring apparition, John switched his attention to their current whereabouts, the downstairs parlour of Hazelrigg House, an ominous June evening in the mid-seventeenth century. Having emerged from underneath a gleaming rosewood table, the group stood assembled at the spacious chamber’s eastern end, all taking in the monumental presence sitting at the table’s further edge, one side of his great griffin snout lit by the sunset falling through the leaded windows from outside, his warts in shadow.
John, of course, had recognised old Ironsides from the previous occasions when the plucky youth had visited the dark days of the Civil War. He’d witnessed Cromwell, riding out with General Fairfax and his major-general of foot-soldiers, Philip Skippon, on the slopes of Naseby Ridge at first light on June 14th — or tomorrow morning from John’s current point of view. Cromwell on that occasion had seemed giddy with delight as he inspected the terrain between the ridge and Dust Hill, getting on a mile off to the north. Cantering back and forth in his black armour, he had burst out laughing intermittently, as if by looking at the land he saw the battle in advance and chuckled over the foreseen misfortunes of his enemies. John had seen Cromwell with another face as well, a semblance cast from flint, unblinking in the screaming heart of battle as his cavalry pursued the Royalist horse almost to Leicester, cutting down the hindmost by the score. Whatever mood they were expressing, he’d have known those features anywhere.
Phyllis and Bill quite clearly also knew who they were looking at, and so did Reggie Bowler, who was nodding knowingly with a wide grin across his freckled face. Although Drowned Marjorie remained impassive, staring flatly through her National Health spectacles, John had an inkling that somebody as surprisingly well-read as her might well know more about the lank-haired man than all the rest of the gang put together. That left Michael Warren — Michael Warren, son of Tommy Warren, John reflected to himself with an amazed shake of the head — as the one person in the slowly darkening room without a clue regarding what was going on. John was about to venture his own explanation for the nipper’s benefit when Phyllis intervened and beat him to the punch.
“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz. That’s Oliver Cromwell.”
It was painfully apparent that the name meant nothing to the little boy, thus giving John a chance to stick his oar in after all and give his expertise an airing.
“Where we are now, it’s the 1640s. Charles the First wiz on the throne, and hardly anybody thinks he’s making a good job of it. For one thing he’s brought in this tax, Ship Money, which wiz paid direct to him and makes him less dependent on the English Parliament. Nobody likes the sound of that, especially since they know Charles wiz matey with the Catholic Church and may be plotting to sneak in Catholicism by the back door. Bear in mind that all of this wiz happening in an England where the rich and poor have grown apart since the beginning of the 1600s, when the gentry had begun enclosing common land and taking people’s livelihoods away. You can imagine how cross and suspicious everybody wiz. England wiz like a powder keg, just waiting to go off.”
John paused here as an image of the detonating man-bomb shuffled weeping and unbidden through his mind, then carried on.
“In the last months of 1641, the whole of Ireland wiz in flames with a rebellion against English rule. The rebels were destroying or else seizing back the land that had been given to Protestant settlers, killing many of these settlers in the bargain. Back in England, this wiz looked on as a Popish plot that Charles the First wiz in collusion with. Rebels in Parliament published a Grand Remonstrance airing all their grievances with Charles, which only served to push both camps further apart. In January, 1642, the King left London to the rebels and began to gather armies for a civil war that by then everybody knew wiz coming. God, that must have been a terror. From one end of England to the other, families must have been on their knees and praying that they’d get through the next years without too many members dying.”
That was certainly how it had been for John’s clan during 1939. He watched the figure at the room’s far end arrest its writings for a moment with quill poised a fraction of an inch above the page, perhaps deliberating over word-choice, before dipping once more to the vellum and continuing its row of Gothic curls and slanting, marching uprights. John supposed that his own family’s prayers upon the eve of war must have been heeded, for the most part. Everyone lived through it, after all, with present company excepted.