What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online

incurred in his own country for having so charmed the cheering Westerners. Perhaps Yuri really had condemned himself the day he shook hands with all those children at Earl’s Court; and yet it had been them that I wished dead at the time. Whatever the explanation, I can no longer recapture or even imagine the state of innocence in which I must have sat through that afternoon’s artless, stentorian celebration of his achievement. I wish that I could. I wish that he had remained an object of unthinking adoration, instead of becoming another of adulthood’s ubiquitous, insoluble mysteries: a story without a proper ending. I was soon to find out about those.

    ∗
    Just as the lights were going down for the second time, and the censor’s certificate appeared on the screen to announce the beginning of the main feature, my mother leaned over and started whispering across the top of my head.
    ‘Ted, it’s nearly six o’clock.’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Well, how long’s this film going to go on?’
    ‘I don’t know. About ninety minutes, I suppose.’
    ‘Well then we’ve got to drive all the way back. It’ll be hours past his bedtime.’
    ‘It won’t matter just this once. It is his birthday, after all.’
    The credits had started and my eyes were fixed on the screen. The film was in black and white and the music, although it was not without a certain jokiness, somehow filled me with foreboding.
    ‘And then there’s dinner,’ my mother whispered. ‘What are we going to do about dinner?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. Stop somewhere on the way back.’
    ‘But then we’ll be even later.’
    ‘Just sit back and enjoy it, can’t you?’
    But I noticed that for the next few minutes, my mother kept leaning towards the light in order to sneak regular glances at her watch. After that I don’t know what she was doing, because I was too busy concentrating on the film.
    It told the story of a nervous, mild-mannered man (played by Kenneth Connor) who was startled in his flat late one night by the arrival of a sinister solicitor. The solicitor had come to tell him that his rich uncle had recently died, and that he was required to travel immediately up to Yorkshire, where the reading of the will was to take place at the family home, Blackshaw Towers. Kenneth went up to Yorkshire by train in the company of his friend, a worldly bookmaker (played by Sidney James), and found that Blackshaw Towers was situated on a remote edge of the moors far from the nearest village. Failing to find a taxi, they accepted a lift in a hearse, which left them stranded on the moors in the middle of a dense fog.
    When they finally arrived at the house, they could hear the distant howling of dogs.
    Sidney said: ‘Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?’
    Kenneth said: ‘There’s something creepy about this place.’
    The rest of the audience seemed to be finding it funny, but by now I was thoroughly scared. I had never been taken to see anything like this before: although it wasn’t strictly a horror film, the detail was very convincing, and the gloomy atmosphere, dramatic music and perpetual sense that something terrible was about to happen all combined to torment me with a strange mixture of fear and exhilaration. Part of me wanted nothing more than to run out of the cinema into what was left of the daylight; but another part of me was determined to stay until I found out where it was all leading.
    Kenneth and Sidney crept into the hallway of Blackshaw Towers, and found that the house was just as eerie as it had looked from the outside. They were met by a gaunt and forbidding butler called Fisk, who led them upstairs and showed them to their rooms. Much to his dismay, Kenneth found himself not only being taken to the East Wing, far away from his friend, but being required to sleep in the very room where his late uncle had died. Soft, unsettling organ music could be heard in the corridor. They went downstairs again and were introduced to the other