Free The Perils and Dangers of this Night by Stephen Gregory Page B

young people
beside her, raising her glass in a kind of toast.
    Not for long. The headmaster stopped in mid-phrase,
tried the same phrase again, stood up and slammed down
the lid of the piano. He knew it was wrong too. He
stomped across the room towards the fire. As he reached
to the mantelpiece and picked up his own glass of sherry,
Pryce glanced at Mrs Kemp and said, 'Oh dear, it
sounded all right to me.'
    The headmaster sighed. 'It may have sounded all right to
you,' he said. He stood with the backs of his legs close to
the flames. The fire was burning low; the logs had
collapsed, exhausted, into a smouldering heap and there
were only a few coils of ivy waiting on the hearth as fuel.
He took a swig from his glass and said, with a mixture of
contempt and pity in his voice, 'I expect it sounded all right to Mrs Kemp and to your friend, er, Sophie, is it? It would
have sounded all right to most people. But there are two
people in this room to whom it didn't sound all right at all.'
    Pryce and Sophie and Mrs Kemp looked round to see
who the other person might have been. I stepped into the
hall, from the long dark corridor where I'd been hiding,
and I stood there, too shy at first to approach the
grown-ups. I was holding an armful of logs.
    'Come in, Scott, come in,' Dr Kemp said. As I came
forwards, the headmaster continued, directing his words
to Pryce. 'This boy has perfect pitch. For him and me, the
music was painfully off-key, as indeed it would've been
for your brother Jeremy . . .'
    Two things happened to interrupt the headmaster's
grumpy speech. I caught my foot on the edge of the
threadbare rug in front of the fire and dropped the logs
onto the floorboards with a rumble like a roll of drums.
At the same moment the girl stood up, spluttering and
choking on a mouthful of sherry, and she hurried off to
the darkness of the Christmas tree, where she carried on
choking and spluttering into a handkerchief.
    It all stopped Dr Kemp in mid-sentence. He leaned
down and helped me to stack the logs at the side of the
hearth, while Pryce, with a wolfish grin of amusement on
his face, said to a concerned Mrs Kemp, 'Sophie's OK,
don't worry. It just went down the wrong way. I should
tell you that she hasn't got perfect pitch either – in fact I
reckon she's tone-deaf. But that's one of the things I like
about Sophie: she isn't perfect, by any means.'
    'Where's Wagner?' Mrs Kemp put in, trying to smooth
over the little moment of confusion.
    As Sophie returned to her seat, dabbing her eyes and
mouth and throwing a snarly sidelong look at Pryce, I
said, 'I left him outside, Mrs Kemp, inside the stable. The
gentleman doesn't like him.'
    It was the first time I'd really seen the visitors, although
I'd watched their arrival in the shadows of the stable-yard
and escorted them through twilight to the front door.
They'd taken off their big coats. Pryce was wearing a
black round-neck pullover, black brushed-denim jeans
and black elastic-sided boots. He was lean and angular,
with bony wrists and a pronounced Adam's apple, long
black hair and strong, beaky features; so that, as I met
the mocking, sardonic look in the young man's eye, I
thought of the cormorant I'd seen on the lake, far off in
a part of the woods that only I explored. Like the
cormorant – sleek in the water, and then, drying its wings
in the sunlight, a sinister, croaking sea-crow – he seemed
like a visitor from another world. The girl was a pretty
little urchin in a black pullover like the man's, jeans and
high boots; she had an electric-blue silk scarf knotted
loosely around her throat. And the flash of blue, her
startled eyes and the tuft of hair like a crest on her head,
reminded me of a fledgling jay I'd found last spring: Roly
had shot down the nest and hung both the parents on his
gibbet, alongside the corpses of stoats and weasels. The
fledgling, peppered with pellets, had died in my hands.
    Again it came to me: a jolting flash of the dream I'd
had, and their presence