The Bagthorpe Saga: Ordinary Jack

“By the time the Insurance have paid up,” he told Zero, “our whole dining-room’ll be better than it’s ever been. And it’s all due to you. Good boy. Good boy.”

He leaned back to survey Zero’s ears and assess how much good his pep talk had done, but just then Uncle Parker came back. He sat next to Jack and produced two loose-leaf notebooks. He passed one to Jack.

“Here,” he said. “Guard this with your life.”

Interested, Jack opened it.

“But there’s nothing in it!”

“Yet,” said Uncle Parker. “There will be. This is for notes and records of the Campaign. Better not to have one, of course, better to commit all to memory – but there you are. With due respect, I don’t think you’ve got the memory.”

“No.” Jack was not offended. He was used to this kind of remark.

“Now, here’s a pen.” Uncle Parker passed one over, the felt-tipped variety. He opened his own notebook and Jack saw that his first page was already full.

“Write down ‘Create Mysterious Impression’,” commanded Uncle Parker. “And underline it.”

Jack obeyed.

“One ‘e’ in mysterious and two ‘esses’ in impression,” said Uncle Parker, “but never mind.”

“What does it mean?” Jack asked.

“It means,” Uncle Parker told him, “that from now on you are to behave, now and then, Mysteriously. What I mean by this is that you are to give the impression, now and again, that your eyes are fixed on things invisible to mortal eyes. That you are, possibly, seeing Visions.”

“How?” Jack asked.

“Watch me.”

Uncle Parker laid aside his notebook and looked with a kind of mad intensity at something just to the right of Jack’s head. It was as if he were trying to look Jack in the eyes to hypnotise him, but missing. His look deepened in such a definite way that Jack, alarmed, actually turned his head to see if there were anything there behind him.

“Aha!” Uncle Parker was triumphant. “Ha! Got you! See what I mean? That’s the kind of look to give ’em! Come on, you do it. Have a go at looking Mysterious.”

Jack, whose sole dramatic experience to date had been playing Third Shepherd in a Nativity play when he was six, tried to oblige. He fixed his gaze on a point behind Uncle Parker’s left ear and tried to imagine he was seeing a Vision. He kept it up for what seemed a very long time. He tried not to blink because that seemed a good and visionary thing to do, but then his eyes started to water and he ended up having to blink twice as much as usual. Through a blur he moved his gaze on to Uncle Parker.

“Look,” said Uncle Parker kindly, “it was a good start. Fine. But you did look a bit as if rigor mortis had set in. The whole idea is to look Mysterious and faraway – there was too much stare about the whole thing. Now watch me again.”

Jack watched Uncle Parker do it and then Uncle Parker watched him have another go. This time Jack decided on imagining a plateful of bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, mushroom and fried bread behind Uncle Parker’s ear.

“How was that?” he asked, reluctantly letting the picture go.

“Better.” Uncle Parker was emphatic. “Not far off first class. There was a whole lot of soul about that. You really looked as if you were seeing a Vision that time.”

“I was,” said Jack simply.

“We’ll forget that for now,” said Uncle Parker, “and get on to the first Vision.”

“I thought that was it,” said Jack.

“That,” explained Uncle Parker, “was for you to go round doing a few times during the day. Do it while several people are around, if you can, and do it about twice this morning and the same this afternoon. Make sure they get the message.”

“The awful thing would be if I laughed,” Jack said.

“If you laugh,” said Uncle Parker sternly, “I wash my hands of you. Clear?”

“Clear,” Jack said. “There is one thing. Could Zero be in on it as well?”

Uncle Parker, floored, looked at Zero lying slumped by Jack’s feet as if he were sculpted in dough.

“Now listen,” he said, “I’ll take you on, because by and large I think you’re promising material. I think I’ll make something of you. But that hound’s another matter.”

“Don’t call him an h-o-u-n-d,” pleaded Jack. He spelled the word out because he was pretty sure that Zero, being so simple in other ways, would almost certainly not understand. “Please. Father does it all the time. It undermines his confidence. And he’s in a terrible state after last night.”

“We’re all in a terrible state after last night,” said Uncle Parker. “And some of us didn’t do double somersaults with burning tablecloths on our heads.”

“You would,” said Jack, “if you’d been under there, in his position.”

“We won’t go into that,” said Uncle Parker. “All I’m saying is that any question of that dog having Visions is out. Come to think –” he eyed Zero speculatively – “that’s not quite right. Come to think, he goes round half the time looking as if he’s having Visions. You could do worse than study him.”

“Hear that?” Jack, delighted, bent and patted him. “Hear that, Zero? Good old boy!”

Zero wagged his tail lethargically.

“I’m glad you said that,” Jack told Uncle Parker. “It’s cheered him up no end.”

“So – ready for another note.” Uncle Parker changed the subject. “Write ‘Vision One’ and underline.”

Jack obeyed.

“Now write what I dictate.”

Jack poised his felt-tip ready.

“Write: ‘I see … I see … I see a Lavender Man who Bears Tidings.’”

Jack let his pen drop.

“Write what?” he said incredulously.

“Never mind that. You write it down. ‘I see dot dot dot, I see dot dot dot, I see a Lavender Man who Bears Tidings.’”

Jack wrote it down in a fog.

“Now read it back to me.”

Uncle Parker listened.

“You don’t say dot dot dot,” he explained patiently. “Those are to indicate pregnant pauses. I see … pause, I see … pause … Get it?”

“I get it.” Jack altered his dot dot dots to ‘…’

“Now say it,” ordered Uncle Parker. “With feeling.”

Jack stood up.

“I don’t think I want to go on with this,” he said.

“Sit down,” said Uncle Parker.

Jack sat down.

“I know. I know it’s a damn-fool thing to say,” Uncle Parker said.

“It certainly is,” said Jack with feeling. “I can’t say it. I’ve never said anything like it in my life.”

“Precisely. You take the point exactly. You have never said anything like it in your life. And so when you do say it, around tea-time, after spending most of the day seeing Visions past people’s ears, it’s going to get noticed.”

“It certainly is,” said Jack again. “They’ll probably send for the doctor.”

“They won’t,” said Uncle Parker. “But if they do, make sure you look past his ear as well. Do the Vision stuff on him like we practised. Might even help if they do call for a medical opinion.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “I think I might be going to go mad. What’s it all about? What’s all this about Lavender Men and Bearing?”

“Aha!” Uncle Parker was triumphant again. “That’s where they start sitting up and taking notice. That’s where I come in.”

“It is?”

“Last week,” explained Uncle Parker, “unbeknownst to your Aunt Celia, unbeknownst, in fact, to anyone in the world except myself, a tailor in the West End and possibly my bank manager, I purchased, after much deliberation, a lavender suit.”

“A suit made of lavender?”

“A lavender-coloured suit, Jack, so far as I can describe it.”

“Whatever for?”

“You’re a bit young to understand,” Uncle Parker told him. “I bought it because – I think because – I felt I wasn’t quite living up to your Aunt Celia’s ideal. I felt that if I took to wearing a lavender suit now and again, she would see in me the man she once hoped I was.”

“Oh.” Jack was as nonplussed as he had ever been in his life.

“Listen carefully. At around half-past six, I shall whip up your drive and emerge wearing the aforesaid lavender suit. I shall also bear tidings. I shall have, in other words, news for you.”

“What news?”

“I don’t think I should tell you that,” said Uncle Parker. “If I do, I think it will be hard for you to act surprised when I tell you tonight, so it’ll be better if you actually don’t know. No offence. But you see what I mean.”

“I wish I did,” said Jack.

“Now look. It’s all absolutely straightforward. You’ve got it all written down. One – you act Mysterious. Right?”

“Right.”

“Two, you come out, round about tea-time, with Vision One. You say, ‘I see dot dot dot I see dot dot dot et cetera.’ Right?”

“I suppose so.”

“That’s it, then. That’s all there is to it. Just leave the rest to me. By seven o’clock tonight, I promise you, you’ll be Number One Attraction in the Bagthorpe ménage. Your wildest dream come true.”

“Uncle Parker …”

“Well?”

“I think – yes, look! There is – there’s smoke coming out of your house.”

Uncle Parker turned towards The Knoll. From the window of one of the upper rooms was issuing, undeniably, a cloud of smoke.

“My God!” exclaimed Uncle Parker. “It’s Daisy again!”

He leapt up and was off.

“You get back!” he shouted. “You get back and make out you’ve never set eyes on me since last night. Get back quick!”

He was running, not jogging.

“And act natural!” His parting words floated out as he disappeared into the smouldering Knoll.

“Come on, Zero.”

Jack started off back home. It was still only just past seven. He stuffed the notebook deep in the pocket of his jeans.

“Act natural,” he repeated to himself. Then, uncertainly, “Act Mysterious. Stage One, Act Mysterious.”

It was all very confusing.

Chapter Four

The first thing Jack did when he got home was to get Vision One to materialise. He found all its ingredients except for the mushrooms, and set about frying them. No one else was down yet, but some of them were up because he could hear the far-off notes of an oboe and also from time to time a bump which was probably Mrs Bagthorpe unwinding herself from a Plough Posture. She had only recently taken up Yoga and was not very good at it but said she felt calmer already. She said she had felt calmer since the very first lesson when they had spent the whole hour just breathing. Jack had not noticed any real change. She certainly had not acted calm at Grandma’s Birthday Party, he reflected. She had been in a fair lather even before the tablecloth took off.

He sat at the table with his fry-up and cut off all the bacon rinds to give Zero. He was just feeding them to him when the kitchen door opened and in came Mrs Fosdyke.

“Here!” she said sharply, without preliminaries. “No feeding at table. You know as well as I do.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

“No one to see, you mean,” returned Mrs Fosdyke. She had not stopped moving since she came in and had already removed her outer clothes to reveal a patterned wrap-round pinafore and exchanged her outdoor shoes for pink fur-edged slippers. (Mrs Fosdyke got cramps in her feet sometimes and the fur was a comfort, she said.)

“Your ma don’t like you frying up,” she observed. She went to the sink and set up a businesslike rattle.

“She likes you to get your vitamings of a morning. Grapefruit and that.”

“I’ll have a grapefruit as well,” Jack offered.

“It’s no good.” Mrs Fosdyke withdrew her hands from the water and wiped them on her front. “I shall have to go and have a look. Never a wink did I have last night. It was as if all my furniture and ornaments was floating round me.”

“I’ve seen it,” he told her. “It’s horrible. I shouldn’t go. It’ll only upset you.”

It was too late. Mrs Fosdyke was halfway across the hall before the words were out. Mrs Fosdyke was a very fast mover. She moved like a hedgehog, Mr Bagthorpe was fond of saying, and was about as much use about the house. This was up to a point true. Mrs Fosdyke had to a fine art the ability to move around fast without actually doing very much. Mr Bagthorpe said a lot of people in the army had this gift, and in the Civil Service, but that it was rare in a Daily.

Mrs Fosdyke was uttering little shrieks and Jack, wiping his plate with a crust, could imagine her in there darting around on the sodden carpet. She came back in.

“Those beautiful chairs,” she said. “Hairlooms. And all my best crystal. I could weep.”

Her voice was actually quite choked and Jack delicately turned his eyes away while she blew into a tissue. A sudden thought struck him. It might be a good idea, he thought, to practise giving a Mysterious Impression on her before any of the others got down. Her eyes were not too good, and she would not be so likely to notice any flaws in his performance.

What I’ll do, he thought, next time she asks me something, I won’t answer. Then she’ll look at me to see what’s the matter and I’ll do the Mysterious Impression. I won’t see bacon and eggs past her left ear, I’ve just had them. I’ll see dinner – roast beef and Yorkshire pud, or treacle tart. Something like that.

He already realised that visions of food were going to produce the required soulful look better than anything else.

“That dog, if it was mine, I’d take a slipper to,” Mrs Fosdyke said. “And that Daisy the same. Little madam her.”

Jack said nothing.

“That mother of hers is only half there,” Mrs Fosdyke went on. “Less than half. There’s no wonder that child’s out of control.”

Still Jack waited. This was not his cue.

“It’ll be months before that room’s set to rights,” continued Mrs Fosdyke. “Months and months. And I suppose you’ll all be eating in the kitchen under my feet till then. Yes. Well, that’ll be nice, I must say. Very nice.”

Jack began to wonder whether Mrs Fosdyke talked like this all the time, whether there was anyone else there or not, asking herself questions and answering them and changing from one subject to another. He began to suspect that his cue never would come up. Another thing was that she was always moving round and half the time he had his back to her. He did not feel that he could create a Mysterious Impression with his back. He got up, and stood waiting around for her to say something else.

“There’s butter gone up again two pence a pound.” Mrs Fosdyke was off on a new tack. She turned from the sink and Jack stepped into her path so that she would have to look at him and notice something faraway about him, but all she did was scoot round him and next minute had her back to him, shaking dusters out of a drawer.

“Mrs Bagthorpe,” soliloquised Mrs Fosdyke, “says there is more actual vitamings in marge than there is in butter. But that’s no comfort, the price marge is.”

Jack was just wondering whether he ought to make a few low moaning noises or something when the telephone rang and Mrs Fosdyke scuttled out to answer it.

“Oh, my good gracious!” he heard her say, followed by a series of disbelieving cries on an ascending scale. Then the telephone was put down.

“Mr Parker!” she poked her head in. “House gone up in flames – oh, would you – oh, I’d best go and tell them!”

She was down again in two minutes and started putting the kettle on and rattling cups and saucers.

“You can’t hardly believe it,” she said. “I thought I should’ve dropped dead when he told me. Sounded cool as a cucumber, mind. ‘Just let ’em know I’ve got my own little blaze going,’ he says, or something like that.”

On she rambled. Jack was by now thoroughly fed up with Mrs Fosdyke. She had refused to look at him and notice that he was doing a Mysterious Impression, and now she was telling Jack a piece of news he already knew – had known over an hour ago. There are few more frustrating things in life than being told something that you already know but cannot admit to knowing.

He decided to go up to his room and practise doing his Mysterious Impression in front of a mirror.

“Come on, Zero.”

He did not want Zero to be lying there looking so comfortable when Mr Bagthorpe came down, because he would probably get irritated by this and start in on Zero again and undo all the good work Jack had been doing on him. As Jack went out he heard Mrs Fosdyke telling herself:

“If I could remember for the life of me whether I turned my gas off under those prunes, I’d feel better. Things always go in threes. There’ll be a third.”

The way Jack felt at that moment about Mrs Fosdyke he rather hoped her prunes would set fire to her house – in a minor way, anyhow.

He met his mother on the landing. Her Yoga did not seem to have worked very well this morning, or else the calmness had worn off already.

“I must get over there and see if Celia’s all right. Have you heard? Oh, it’s dreadful, terrible!”

“It’s Daisy again, I expect,” Jack said. “It didn’t sound all that bad from what Mrs F said.”

“But Celia – you know how highly strung she is.”

“At least no one can say it’s Zero’s fault this time,” Jack said. “Come on, Zero, good boy.”

He went into his room. He sat in front of the mirror and began to practise but soon found it was no good. You couldn’t do it in a mirror. The whole point was that you had to look past somebody, just by their ear, and if you did that to your reflection you couldn’t check up on yourself. It didn’t matter how quickly you flicked your eyes sideways, you couldn’t catch yourself looking past your own ear. You always ended up looking yourself in the eye. Jack gave up.

He took out his notebook and studied it. There wasn’t much in it so far. It didn’t look like a Plan of Campaign at all. He remembered Uncle Parker’s instruction to guard it with his life. He hid it between his comics, where he knew it would be safe. Everybody else in the house despised him for reading them, and said so. They would not, they said, be caught dead looking at them.

By now there was quite a lot of noise downstairs, so Jack decided to go down and have another try at creating a Mysterious Impression. Twice this morning and twice this afternoon, Uncle Parker had said, and he hadn’t done it once yet.

“Stay, Zero.”

The longer Zero lay low the better, Jack thought. He found the whole family in the kitchen with Mrs Fosdyke darting among them distributing orange juice and toast. Everyone was talking loudly about fires. Mr Bagthorpe was moodily weighing up the chances of both himself and Uncle Parker getting their insurance money when it turned out Daisy had started both fires. It would look like conspiracy to defraud, he said.

“We got our fire in first, though. We get priority. I’ll bang the claim in first thing this morning.”

Jack sat down. Nobody took any notice of him, including Mrs Fosdyke, who evidently thought he had breakfasted sufficiently already. Everyone but him got orange juice and toast. He began to feel depressed. He began to wonder whether the whole Campaign was not a mistake, and whether to call it off before it even started. Out of a fog he heard his mother’s voice:

“… all right, Jack, dear?”

“What? What’s that?”

“I said, are you feeling all right. You look a bit pale and funny.”

“Oh – yes, oh, I do feel queer!”

His heart began to race. He had done a Mysterious Impression without even trying! He concentrated hard on looking faraway rather than delighted, and must have done it quite well because Mrs Bagthorpe said something about delayed shock.

“I just – just feel sort of faraway,” Jack said. He moved his gaze over his mother’s left ear and encountered William’s stony eyes. Hastily he moved his gaze again over William’s ear, and then met Rosie’s interested stare.

“You do look queer,” she said.

Then Mrs Fosdyke put her oar in.

“And no wonder,” she said deflatingly. “A fry-up like that first thing. I should’ve felt queer, a plateful like that. I did tell him, Mrs Bagthorpe – a grapefruit’s what you want. I told him, and get your vitamings.”

Jack could have killed her.

“Oh, well, perhaps that’s it.” Mrs Bagthorpe sounded relieved. “There’s enough to worry about – nobody else feels as if they’ve got delayed shock, do they?”

“I do,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “So what are you going to do about it?”

He was ignored. He did not mean it. He was just making dialogue, as he did in his TV scripts, and as nobody else in the family was paid for doing this, they did not see why they should play his game. The remark at least drew attention off Jack, who, despite Mrs Fosdyke’s untimely intervention, began to feel that he had established some sort of interest in his condition.

When Mrs Bagthorpe said, “You three help Mrs Fosdyke clear and wash up – Jack, you sit where you are and have a nice hot cup of coffee,” he decided to mark up his performance as the first authentic Mysterious Impression of the day.

The second was equally difficult to achieve. Jack had always known that his family was an unusually active one, even overactive, but he had never before realised how difficult it was to pin one of its members down and look him or her in the eye. It is very difficult to look someone in the eye when they are reading Voltaire or trying to contact a radio ham in Puerto Rico or painting a portrait. (Rosie had already begun on a second attempt at a Birthday Portrait of Grandma. Grandma had said she had better, because the way she felt, she didn’t think she would see another birthday.)

Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe were going to inspect the damage to The Knoll, and Mrs Fosdyke, as Jack now knew, was a congenital non-receiver of Impressions, Mysterious or otherwise.

He opted in the end for trying Rosie and Grandma because both of them seemed basically bored by the idea of the sitting, and would be more likely to spare a glance for himself.

Grandma had opted for having her Portrait painted with the burnt-out shell of the dining-room as a background. Mrs Bagthorpe had protested that this was morbid and unnatural, but Grandma was adamant.

“It was a Sign,” she said. “You can’t just toss it aside as if it were a mere bubble in the wind. I think I was meant to have my Portrait painted in there. If I were not, it wouldn’t have burned down.”

The logic of this was at the same time hard to follow and irrefutable, and Mrs Bagthorpe had let it go. There was certainly no time to argue with Grandma today. She and her husband had driven off to The Knoll, the latter fulminating.

“It’s all go,” he said. “Yesterday a fire, today a fire, and on Monday a funeral.”

“A funeral!” shrieked Grandma. “Whose?”

“Daisy’s,” he replied, “if I’ve anything to do with it.”

The sitting began. Jack sat very quietly to begin with. Grandma, against advice, was sitting on the one remaining dining-chair. It had only just survived, and was very charred up and shaky, so Grandma was sitting gingerly. She definitely looked as if she were sitting on a chair she expected to collapse at any moment. In some ways Jack could see this was a good thing because it gave her a more than usually wide-awake expression.

When Rosie had been sketching for a while he peered over to look. He saw that Rosie was getting plenty of the burnt-out background in. She had liked this idea as well as Grandma, and said it would give the portrait atmosphere and make it stand out. As yet Grandma’s face had no features and it still looked like the one that had gone up in flames. It was hard to think of anything to say about the portrait in its present state but Jack thought he had better try in case his silence was misconstrued as disapproval. He did not, however, attempt anything like a critical appraisal.

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