Bonfire Night

“They don’t do it,” said Lucía.

She said it on the Tuesday after half-term, at lunch, with the expression of a woman reporting an atrocity.

“Do what?” said Will.

“Halloween. They don’t do it. I asked in the shop. I asked Mrs Dunning in the shop if they had pumpkins and she said what for.” Lucía put down her fork. “What for. And then she said they had swedes. She said I could carve a swede.” She looked round the table. “You can’t carve a swede.”

“You can,” said Will. “We used to. Before pumpkins. You carve a swede, it takes four hours and you cut your thumb off, and it looks like a little old man screaming. It’s horrible.” He ate a potato. “That’s sort of the point.”

“But nobody goes round the houses.”

“Some people go round the houses. In Cirencester. Kids. With their mums.” Will shrugged. “Not here. Not in the village. There’s only forty houses and half of them are Mr Purvis’s relations and he’s got a shotgun.”

Lucía looked at him for a long time.

“Right,” she said. She stood up. “Right.”

---

By Wednesday evening there was a plan.

It was Lucía’s plan, and Inés had written it down, and Devon had drawn a map, and it had been taken, in a deputation of six Americans, to Sue Fennell at the New Inn, who had listened to it behind the bar with her reading glasses on her nose and her arms folded, and then had said, well, I’ve never heard anything so daft in my life, and then had gone into the back and come out with a box of candles and a roll of black bin bags and a list of every house in the village with the names of who lived in them and which ones had dogs.

“Mrs Haverfield,” said Sue, putting her finger on the list. “Number nine. Church Lane. You’ll want to go there last.”

“Why last?” said Lucía.

“Because if you go there first,” said Sue, “you’ll not have the courage for the rest.”

---

On Thursday, at six, in the dark, thirty-one American seniors from Ellicott High School assembled on the green by the war memorial in costume.

The costumes had been made in two days out of what was available, which was bin bags, sheets, cardboard, the contents of the Coln Abbey drama department’s cupboard under the stairs, and a great deal of determination. Devon was a pirate, with a patch made out of an exercise book and a hook made out of a coat hanger and a parrot made out of a sock. Inés was a witch, in a black bin bag with a hat she had made out of the cardboard from a box of crisps, and had sat up until two in the morning doing it, and it was very good, and she told anybody who looked at it that it was not. Lucía was a skeleton, in a black jumper and leggings with the bones painted on in white with a brush, very precisely, by somebody who had looked them up, every one.

Theo was a lighthouse. Nobody knew why. He had come down the Windrush stairs at a quarter to six in a white sheet with red stripes painted round it in poster paint and a torch strapped to the top of his head with a bandage, and when Kit had said what are you, he had said I’m a lighthouse, and when Kit had said why, he had said because I’m tall, and Kit had not been able to find anything to say to that at all.

Frederick was a ghost.

He was a white sheet with two holes cut in it. It was the simplest costume in the history of the world and he had chosen it on purpose, because it was the only thing he could think of that would make him exactly like everybody else, and because nobody, he thought, was going to look under a sheet on a dark green in Gloucestershire to see whether the ghost was the King.

Castellanos, at the edge of the green by the memorial, in his dark coat, had looked at the sheet for some time.

“Sir,” said Castellanos.

“Sergeant.”

“I cannot see your face.”

“That’s the point.”

“I know it is the point, sir.” Castellanos looked at the two holes. “It is also my point.”

Beside him, Kimura was dressed as a cat. She had a pair of ears on a headband and a set of whiskers drawn on her face in eyeliner and was otherwise in her ordinary dark coat and clearly armed, and when Frederick looked at her through the holes in the sheet she looked back at him with complete serenity.

“It’s a disguise, sir,” said Kimura. “I’m blending in.”

---

They went round the houses.

The first house was a cottage by the bridge with a light on, and Lucía knocked, and a man of about fifty in a cardigan opened the door and looked out at thirty-one Americans in bin bags and sheets and coat-hanger hooks standing in his front garden in the dark, and said nothing at all.

“Trick or treat!” said thirty-one Americans.

The man looked at them.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

Lucía explained. She explained very clearly, with her painted skeleton hands, what Halloween was, and how it worked, and what trick or treat meant, and that the tradition was for him to give them something sweet, and that if he did not, technically, they were entitled to play a trick on him, though they would not, because they were guests, and she wished that to be understood.

The man in the cardigan listened to all of it.

Then he went back into the house, and they heard him say, “Margaret, it’s the Americans, they want sweets,” and a woman’s voice said something they could not hear, and the man came back to the door with a tin of shortbread and held it out, and thirty-one Americans took one piece of shortbread each, very politely, and said thank you, and the man said, “Well, I never,” and shut the door.

That was the first house.

By the sixth house the village had heard. Somebody had telephoned somebody. At the seventh house, an old couple were waiting on the doorstep with a bowl of apples and their coats on, and the old man was wearing a paper crown out of a Christmas cracker that he had clearly kept in a drawer since last year, and he looked at the ghost in the sheet and said, I’m the King, and his wife hit him on the arm.

At the ninth house a family with four small children came out into the lane in pyjamas and dressing gowns with tea towels on their heads and walked behind the Americans for the rest of the evening shouting trick or treat at every door, very loudly, with no idea what it meant.

At the twelfth house the door was opened by Gaz, in a gorilla suit.

“I hired it,” said Gaz, sadly, through the gorilla’s mouth. “From Cirencester. Forty quid. Jack said you were coming.” He held out a bag of crisps. “Is this right? Is this what you do?”

“This is exactly what you do,” said Lucía, with deep emotion, and took the crisps.

By nine o’clock the whole village was out.

Frederick did not know how it had happened. It had happened the way water comes up through a field. At seven there had been thirty-one Americans in sheets; by eight there had been the four children in tea towels and Gaz as a gorilla and Little Rob as something nobody could identify that involved a colander; and by nine, when they came round the corner by the New Inn into Church Lane, there were perhaps a hundred people in the lane in the dark with torches and candles in jam jars, in every kind of costume, sheets and bin bags and old curtains and their grandmothers’ hats, and Mr Purvis, ninety, at the front, in a long black cloak and a pair of plastic fangs, carrying his shotgun broken open over his arm and looking happier than anyone had ever seen him.

“Dracula,” said Mr Purvis, to anybody who asked, through the fangs.

At the New Inn Sue Fennell had put a cauldron on the bar, an actual iron cauldron that had hung in the fireplace since the seventeenth century for decoration, and filled it with something hot and red and spiced that she said was punch for the grown-ups and blackcurrant for the children and nobody could tell the difference, and Jack was behind the bar in a pair of devil’s horns ladling it into paper cups, and when he saw the ghost in the sheet come in the door with the lighthouse behind it, his face did the thing.

“HANOVER,” said Jack, at full volume, across the pub.

Every head in the pub turned.

Every head in the pub turned back.

“How did you know it was me?” said Frederick, at the bar, through the holes.

“You walk like you’re on a carpet,” said Jack. “Even in a sheet.” He held out a paper cup. “Blackcurrant. Mum says.” He looked at the sheet. “You look stupid.”

“So do you.”

“I look excellent,” said Jack, and touched one of his horns.

---

Number nine Church Lane was the last house.

It was a small cottage opposite the churchyard wall, with a stone porch and a wooden door painted dark green and a light on in the front window behind a lace curtain, and the whole procession stopped in the lane outside it, a hundred people in the dark with candles in jam jars, and went quiet, all together, the way the pub went quiet.

Lucía looked at the door. She looked at the hundred people behind her.

“Go on,” said Sue Fennell, from somewhere at the back, in a witch’s hat. “You’re the one that started it.”

Lucía went up the path and knocked.

There was a long pause.

Then the door opened, and Mrs Haverfield stood in it, very small, in a cardigan and a pair of slippers, with Ernest at her ankles, looking out at the hundred people in her lane with her chin up and her pale clear eyes going over every one of them, the gorilla and the lighthouse and the pirate and Dracula with his shotgun, and the four children in tea towels, and her own great-grandson in a pair of devil’s horns, and a ghost in a sheet with two holes in it, in the middle, at the front.

She looked at the ghost for some time.

“Trick or treat,” said Lucía, rather faintly.

Mrs Haverfield said nothing. She turned round and went back into the cottage. They heard her in the kitchen. They heard a cupboard. They heard something being put into a bowl.

She came back.

She held out a large china bowl, white with a blue pattern round the rim, and it was full to the top with Brussels sprouts.

Raw ones. Small, hard, green, perhaps a hundred of them, washed, shining in the light from the hall.

“Treat,” said Mrs Haverfield.

Nobody moved.

Then, from the back of the crowd, very slowly, the four small children in tea towels came forward through the legs of the grown-ups, and stood in a row on the path in front of her, and solemnly, one by one, each took a sprout.

“Thank you, Mrs Haverfield,” said the smallest one.

“You’re welcome, Poppy,” said Mrs Haverfield.

And then everybody came, all hundred of them, one by one, up the path, and took a sprout, and said thank you, Mrs Haverfield, and she said you’re welcome to each of them by name, every one, she knew every name, Gaz and Little Rob and Mr Purvis and Lucía and Inés, whose names she could not possibly have known and did, and when the ghost in the sheet came up the path she held out the bowl and looked at him through the two holes and said, very quietly, so that nobody else heard:

“You walk like you’re on a carpet.”

He took a sprout.

“Thank you, Mrs Haverfield.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mrs Haverfield. “Sir.”

---

On Tuesday it was the fifth of November, and in the afternoon the box came from London with the Speech in it, and he read it in the boot room, among the rugby boots, all of it, twice, and initialled it, in pencil, as having been read. Tomorrow he would read it aloud. Tomorrow he would go to London on the early train and put on the robes and the crown and sit on the Throne in the House of Lords and read it to both Houses of the Parliament of Great Britain for the first time in his life, and Black Rod would go down the corridor and have the door slammed in his face.

Tonight there was a bonfire.

It was on the cricket field behind the church, and it had been built over a week by the vicar, the Reverend Alan Prothero, who had been a chaplain in the Army for twenty-two years and had built, he said, bonfires on four continents, including one in a desert where there was nothing to burn, which took ingenuity. It was twenty feet high, a vast careful pyramid of old pallets and fence posts and hedge cuttings and a broken wardrobe and, Jack said, most of a shed that had belonged to Mr Purvis and had been taken without asking. On the top of it, slumped in an old armchair, sat the guy.

The guy was dressed in a black cassock.

“That’s mine,” said the vicar, with great satisfaction, to anybody who would listen. “My old one. From Sandhurst. Moths got it. Seemed a waste.”

He lit it at seven.

He lit it the way he had clearly lit them on four continents, with a long pole with a rag on the end soaked in something, and the rag went up with a whoomph, and he walked once round the bonfire touching it to the base in six places like a man laying a wreath, and stepped back, and the fire went up the inside of the pyramid all at once with a sound like a great sigh, and in thirty seconds the whole thing was alight from the ground to the armchair, and the heat came across the cricket field in a wall, and two hundred people stepped back at once, and the guy in the vicar’s cassock sat in his armchair at the top with the flames coming up round him, and burned, slowly, with great dignity, like a bishop.

Then the fireworks.

They went up from the far end of the field, from behind the pavilion, where Mr Ellis and two other farmers had been setting them out in rows since four o’clock in their waxed jackets with the solemnity of men laying a minefield. They went up over the church tower in great slow chrysanthemums of red and gold and green, and the bangs came back off the side of the valley a second late, one after another, so that every firework went off twice.

Frederick stood at the edge of the crowd with his hands in his pockets and his face hot on one side and cold on the other and watched them go up over the tower.

In the Realm, on the fifth of November, nothing happened. Nobody had tried to blow up Parliament on Charter Hill. Nobody had ever tried. It was just a Tuesday. Here it was this: two hundred people in a field in the dark, burning a man in a chair, and cheering, over and over, a plot that had failed four hundred and twenty-five years ago to kill a King.

He thought that if anybody had explained it to him in advance he would not have believed it.

He thought he had never liked a country more.

---

Jack was beside him.

He did not know how long Jack had been there. He had not seen him come. He turned his head from a gold chrysanthemum over the tower, and Jack was there, at his shoulder, in the red sweatshirt and a woolly hat, with his hands in his pockets too, looking up at the sky, with the light of the bonfire on one side of his face and the dark on the other.

“All right?” said Jack.

“All right.”

“Big day tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Parliament.” Jack watched a green one go up and burst. “In the crown. With the door.”

“Yes.”

Jack was quiet for a moment. It was the first time Frederick had known him to be quiet for more than a second at a time. He stood there with his hands in his pockets and watched the fireworks, and the light came and went on his face, red and gold and green.

“Do you want to see something?” said Jack.

“What?”

“Come on.”

---

Behind the bonfire, on the far side of it, away from the crowd, the cricket field went up toward the hedge at the top in a long slope of dark grass. The heat came round the edges of the fire from both sides and met behind it, so that there was a space there, between the back of the bonfire and the hedge, warm, out of the wind, with the fire roaring on one side like a waterfall and the dark on the other, and the fireworks still going up over the church beyond the top of the flames, and nobody there at all.

“I come here every year,” said Jack. “Since I was about six. You can see the fireworks over the top of the fire. Look.”

Frederick looked. Over the top of the bonfire, over the burning armchair and the guy in the vicar’s cassock, through the waver of the heat, the fireworks went up over the church tower and burst, and through the heat they shook and rippled, as if they were under water.

“Oh,” said Frederick.

“Told you.”

They stood and watched it.

He was aware of a great many things at once. He was aware of the heat on his face and the cold on the back of his neck. He was aware that the crowd was on the far side of the fire and could not see them, and that somewhere on the far side of the crowd, at the edge of the field, Kimura was standing with her hands in her pockets, and that Kimura could certainly see the place where they had gone, because Kimura could see everything, and that she had not followed. He was aware of a long low line of shadow, fifty yards along the hedge, which might have been two people and might have been a bush, and which, in the light of a red firework, briefly, appeared to be wearing a pirate’s hat made out of an exercise book. He was aware of Jack beside him, close, closer than anybody stood next to him, closer than Theo, with his shoulder an inch from Frederick’s shoulder, quite still, looking up.

He was aware that he was the King of fourteen countries, and that tomorrow he would read a Speech to two Houses of Parliament in a crown that weighed more than he did, and that in the Realm there was a man called Harold Quayle who wanted to know every week where he was.

He was aware that none of it mattered at all.

He did not decide to do it. He had thought, afterwards, for a long time, that he must have decided; that there must have been a moment when he thought about it and chose, the way he chose everything, carefully, with the folder open and the consequences laid out in a row. There was not. There was the fire, and the fireworks shaking through the heat, and Jack’s face turned up to them, red and then gold and then green, with the grin not on it for once, just the face, quiet, open, looking at the sky, and an inch between their shoulders.

And then there was no inch.

He kissed him.

It was very short. It was not, he thought afterwards, done well. He had never done it before and he had no idea how and he did it the way he had bowled, with too much of the elbow and no idea where it was going to land. He felt Jack go absolutely still. He felt the heat of the fire on one side of his face and Jack’s cold cheek against the other. And then he stepped back, an inch, two inches, and looked at Jack, and Jack looked at him.

Jack’s face was doing nothing at all.

It was the first time Frederick had ever seen it do nothing. It was not grinning. It was not red. It was not talking. It was just looking at him, in the light of a gold chrysanthemum shaking through the heat, with the eyes very wide.

“Sorry,” said Frederick.

Jack did not say anything.

“I didn’t. I don’t know why I. I’m sorry. I should have. You can.”

“Hanover,” said Jack.

He stopped.

Jack looked at him a moment longer. Then something happened in his face, from the bottom up, slowly, the way it had happened in the lane above the school in September when the penny dropped, and it was not the grin. It was something quieter than the grin, and worse, and better.

“Bloody hell,” said Jack, very softly. “You did that.”

“Yes.”

“You. Did that. First.” Jack shook his head, slowly, as if he could not believe it. “I’ve been working up to that since September. I had a plan. I was going to do it at the nets. And then I was going to do it at the pub. And then I was going to do it tonight, here, I brought you here to do it, I’ve been standing here for ten minutes trying to do it.” He stopped. “And you just. Did it.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying sorry.”

“All right.”

Jack looked at him. Over the top of the fire a red one went up and burst and shook through the heat, and the light of it came down on both of them.

“Properly rubbish,” said Jack, quietly.

“I know.”

“Do it again,” said Jack. “Properly.”

He did it again.

---

They went back round the bonfire twenty minutes later, separately, one round each side, the way you would if you were trying not to look as though you had been anywhere, and came out into the light of the fire at the front among two hundred people looking at the fireworks, and nobody looked at them at all.

Except one.

At the edge of the field, by the pavilion, with her hands in her pockets and the cat’s ears still on her head from Thursday, which she had apparently kept, Kimura was looking at the fireworks.

She did not look at him. She did not look at Jack. She looked at the fireworks over the church with an expression of perfect professional absorption, and as Frederick came past her toward the gate she said, without turning her head, without moving her lips very much, in a voice so low that only he could have heard it:

“Early train, sir. Six-fifteen.”

“I know.”

“I’ll knock at half five.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

She watched a green one go up over the tower.

“I didn’t see anything,” said Kimura, to the green one. “In case you were wondering. I was looking at the fireworks the whole time. They’re very good this year.” It burst. “And I’m not giving it a mark,” she said. “That one’s yours.”