When I was ready to cross to the Wychwood Dragon someone tapped heavily on the glass-paned door, and I went to open it, intending to say it was too late, the year 2000 lay fifteen minutes ahead in Broadway, even if it had been tomorrow for hours in Australia. I unlocked the door and, prompted by inexorable courtesy, faced politely an unexpected and unwanted visitor in Lloyd Baxter, telling him with a half-smothered yawn that I simply hadn’t enough energy to discuss the disaster at Cheltenham or anything else to do with horses.
He advanced into the brightest area on the threshold and I saw he was carrying a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two of the Wychwood Dragon’s best champagne glasses. The heavily disapproving expression, despite these pipes of peace, was still in place.
“Mr. Logan,” he said formally, “I know no one at all in this place except yourself, and don’t say this isn’t a time for rejoicing, as I agree with you in many ways... not only because Martin Stukely is dead but because the next century is likely to be even more bloody than the last and I see no reason to celebrate just a change of date, particularly as there’s no doubt the date is incorrect to begin with.” He took a breath. “I therefore decided to spend the evening in my room...” He stopped abruptly, and I would have finished the tale for him, but instead I merely jerked my head for him to come right in, and closed the heavy door behind him.
“I’ll drink to Martin,” I said.
He looked relieved at my acquiescence, even though he thought little of me and was old enough to be my father. Loneliness, though, still propelling him, he set the glasses on the table beside the till, ceremoniously popped the expensive cork and unleashed the bubbles.
“Drink to whatever you like,” he said in depression. “I suppose it was a bad idea, coming here.”
“No,” I said.
“I could hear the music, you see...”
Music in the distance had forced him out of his lonely room. Music powerfully attracted the gregarious human race. No one welcomed two thousand years in silence.
I looked at my watch. Only nine minutes to ring-the-bells time.
Regardless of cynical withdrawals from organized enjoyments, regardless even of thrusts of raw unprocessed grief, I found there was inescapable excitement after all in the sense of a new chance offered, a fresh beginning possible. One could forgive one’s own faults.
New numbers themselves vibrated with promise.
Five minutes to ring-the-bells... and fireworks. I drank Lloyd Baxter’s champagne and still didn’t like him.
Tallahassee’s owner had changed, thanks to his transferred bag, into formal clothes, complete with black tie. His almost Edwardian type of grooming seemed to intensify rather than lighten his thunderous personality.
Even though I’d been introduced to him at least two years earlier, and had drunk his fizz on happier occasions, I’d never before bothered to read his face feature by feature. Rectifying that, I remembered that he’d earlier had thick strong dark hair, but as his age had advanced from fifty there were gray streaks that to my eyes had multiplied quite fast. His facial bone structure was thick and almost Cro-Magnon, with a powerful-looking brow and a similar no-nonsense jaw.
Perhaps in the past he had been lean-and-hungry, but as the twentieth century rolled away he had thickened around the neck and stomach and taken on the authoritative weight of chairmen. If he looked more like an industrialist than a landowner, it was because he’d sold his majority share in a shipping line to buy his racehorses and his acres.
He disapproved, he’d told me severely, of young men like myself who could take days off work whenever they cared to. I knew he considered me a hanger-on who sponged on Martin, regardless of Martin’s insisting it was more likely to be the other way around. It seemed that when Lloyd Baxter formed a set of opinions he was slow to rearrange them.
Distantly, out in the cold night, bells in England pealed the passing of the all-important moment, celebrating the artificial date change and affirming that humankind could impose its own mathematics on the unresponsive planet. Lloyd Baxter raised his glass to drink to some private goal, and I, following his gesture, hoped merely that I would see January 2001 in safety. I added in fact, with banal courtesy, that I would drink to his health outside, if he’d forgive me my absence.
“Of course,” he said, his voice in a mumble.
Pulling open the gallery door, I walked out into the street still holding my golden drink, and found that dozens of people had felt impelled in the same way. A host, myself included, had been moved by an almost supernatural instinct to breathe free new air under the stars.
The man who sold antique books in the shop next to my gallery shook my hand vigorously, and with uncomplicated goodwill wished me a happy new year. I smiled and thanked him. Smiling was easy. The village, a fairly friendly place at any time, greeted the new year and the neighbors with uncomplicated affection. Feuds could wait.
Up the hill a large group of people had linked arms and were swaying across the road singing “Auld Lang Syne” with half the words missing, and a few cars crept along slowly, headlights full on, horns blaring, with enthusiastic youths yelling from open windows. Up and down High Street local sophistication found its own level, but everywhere with a benign slant of mind.
Perhaps because of that, it was longer than I’d intended before I reluctantly decided I should return to my shop, my ready-for-the-bank takings and my unwelcome visitor, whose temper wouldn’t have been improved by my absence.
Declining with regret a tot of single malt from the bookseller, I ambled along to Logan Glass feeling the first twitch of resignation for the lack of Martin. He had known always that his job might kill him, but he hadn’t expected it. Falls were inevitable but they would happen “some other time.” Injuries had been counted a nuisance that interfered with winning. He would “hang up his boots,” he’d told me lightheartedly, the minute he was afraid to put them on.
It was the thought of fear that bothered him, he’d once said.
I pushed open the heavy door preparing my apologies and found that an entirely different sort of action was essential.
Lloyd Baxter lay facedown, unmoving and unconscious, on my showroom floor.
Dumping my empty glass rapidly on the table that held the till I knelt anxiously beside him and felt for a pulse in his neck. Even though his lips were bluish he hadn’t somehow the look of someone dead, and there was to my great relief a slow perceptible thud-thud under my fingers. A stroke, perhaps? A heart attack? I knew very little medicine.
What an appallingly awkward night, I thought, sitting back on my heels, for anyone to need to call out the medics. I stood up and took a few paces to the table which held the till and all the business machines, including the telephone. I dialed the come-at-once number without much expectation, but even on such a New Year’s Eve, it seemed, the emergency services would respond, and it wasn’t until I’d put down the receiver on their promise of an instant stretcher that I noticed the absence beside the till of the ready-for-the-bank canvas bag. It had gone. I searched for it everywhere, but in my heart I knew where I’d left it.
I swore. I’d worked hard for every cent. I’d sweated. My arms still ached. I was depressed at that point as well as furious. I began to wonder if Lloyd Baxter had done his best, if he’d been knocked out trying to defend my property against a thief.
The black unidentified videotape had gone as well. The wave of outrage common to anyone robbed of even minor objects shook me into a deeper anger. The tape’s loss was a severe aggravation, even if not on the same level as the money.