‘Look, sir, they put the puntpole in the brazier to heat it up. The fire is just red paper with a light behind it. Well couldn’t we have a pot of red paint in the brazier too? Then all they’ve got to do is to poke the end of the pole into the paint, so that when they pull it out the tip looks red hot, and smear it over my . . . over Polyphemus’s painted eye until it’s just a scarlet mess like raspberry jam.’
‘It’s an idea, Winterborn—but it’ll take two heads for the two performances. I’d like to try it out on the school audience at the dress rehearsal first, and there’ll hardly be time to repaint the face for the parents next day.’
‘Oh that’s all right, sir,’ said Winterborn, ‘we’ll all help to make them.’
It was the method I adopted. We built up the heads of wire netting and papier mâché; and we used Winterborn’s juju as model. We gummed on ringlets of red crêpe hair for scalp and beard and the single eyebrow, and the effect was quite horrible. It was as if the juju had by some monstrous form of parthenogenesis sired, conceived, and hatched out this pair of giant twins, a swollen and most sinister reduplication of itself.
The summer plays were performed in the open air when weather allowed, and sometimes when it didn’t. Chairs were set out in the paddock in a wide semi-circle, whose pivot over the gently sloping lawn was a small pillared summer-house like a Greek temple, towered over by great beech-trees which provided canopy and sounding board for the actors. This corner of the paddock made a natural theatre, for the shrubberies that bordered the sunken Beech Walk offered any number of concealed paths for exit and entrance, and the garden temple had a timeless and diminutive elegance that allowed of its being a palace and a hovel, Toad Hall and Cyclops cave, in the same afternoon without strain on the imagination.
On the afternoon before the dress rehearsal the actors assembled here for last adjustments to their costumes. Polyphemus was provided with a long scarlet cloak which hung from padded shoulder wings attached to the false head, and from a gap in whose tentlike folds Winterborn peeped beady-eyed as a gnome. He looked prodigious. Molly Sabine, who was stuffing out Mr Toad’s golfing jacket, and adjusting his basket head with the popping tennis-ball eyes, gave a little scream when she turned at Winterborn’s gobble to see the painted Cyclops towering above her.
‘Goodness!’ she cried, and turning to me in faint protest, ‘isn’t it rather too horrid, James? You’ll be giving the younger boys nightmares.’
Winterborn was immensely pleased.
‘I scared Sabby almost out of her wits,’ he crowed from the folds of his cloak, ‘Dracula and Frankenstein are nothing on me. You’ll have to have professional nurses and Red Cross men with stretchers to cart out flopping mothers on Prize Day.’
‘Come over here,’ I said, ‘and let me take off that head before your own is too swollen to allow it.’
The costumes and heads were stored away in the summerhouse till the morrow. Winterborn remained behind while I checked the properties and locked up: he was gabbling Latin all the time, as if to impress me with the fact that he was word perfect and could play the part backward if need be.
But, ‘Oh, Lord!’ he said in English, as we were walking back over the lawn, ‘I’ve left Pollywolly doodle in there.’
‘Well, you say you’re going to carry him under your cloak as a mascot tomorrow—so why can’t he stay in there with the rest of the stuff?’
‘It’s only that I’d promised to lend him to Custance tonight. But it doesn’t matter, sir. It’ll do as well another day, I expect.’
‘What on earth does Custance want with him?’
‘Well it’s funny what Sabby . . . what Matron said just now about nightmares. You see if we sleep with him under our pillows we all get dreams.’
‘You all get dreams—how do you mean?’
‘We’ve tried it out. We dream about that ship, sir.’
‘Nonsense. You’re making it up.’
‘At first I thought it might be just thinking about it—not real dreams. But we’ve all tried in our dormitory, and always it’s about that beastly ship.’
‘You’re probably all of you over-excited about Prize Day, and imagining things. Or stuffing too much contraband tuck into yourselves after “lights out”—and paying for it in bad dreams. I’ll get Matron to dose the nightmares out of you. . . .’
‘They’re not exactly nightmares, sir, because of the excitement. It’s dark and stuffy and there’s singing down there: the timbers are creaking and we roll from side to side so that the chains clank together; and there’s shouting in the dark, and over all this a sense of something going to happen. We compare notes and it’s all the same except the suspense is growing more and more unbearable. . . .’
‘It’s as well,’ I said, ‘that you’ve left your juju in the summerhouse. You need all the sleep you can get for the next two days—not to be lying awake to all hours telling yourselves horror stories.’
‘Oh we don’t lie awake, sir. It’s not till morning that we talk about . . . the ship and—what may happen next.’
‘Well forget about it until after Prize Day.’
Preparatory schoolmasters, like the parents they act for, often listen with only half an ear when a boy is talking to them: the adult’s and the child’s worlds impinge but never interpenetrate. I have disinterred this conversation with Winterborn only after later events made it necessary that I should remember it. As it was it became submerged and forgotten in the drift of routine duties almost as soon as he and I had reached the school buildings and gone our different ways.
No mother actually swooned on Prize Day, though several confessed that they had found the Latin play disturbing. Winterborn, stirred by the congratulations of his schoolfellows after the dress rehearsal, excelled himself in the second performance. He looked superbly obscene: the little sandalled feet and thin ankles just showing under the hem of the scarlet cloak helped to exaggerate the deformity of the wide shoulders and clumsily swaying head; and the piping voice emerging from that top heavy frame was grotesque but by no means absurd. There was some nervous laughter when he spoke his first lines, but after that the audience came to accept his scratching treble as one of the more chilling deformities of the monster he portrayed. And when he staggered upright between the pillars of the garden temple, with his terrible painted face streaked and smeared, like Duncan’s grooms, with gouts of trickling scarlet, he let himself go in a harsh strident scream, a pterodactyl gobbling that seemed to rip the membranes of the brain. It was an inhuman cry: one forgot the boy peeping through the slit of the cloak: it was the Cyclops himself who shrieked.
Parents were dismally impressed by that scream, so I gathered afterwards over tea on the lawns. But their sons told them it was ACE, an ACE shriek, super, wizard, the tops—and so extracted for Winterborn his meed of adult praise. Mothers making mental somersaults and reservations under a variety of fashionable hats were compelled to admit that the Latin play, and Polyphemus especially, and his scream above all, had been undeniably ACE. But there were looks under the hats and the plucked eyebrows, faintly censorious looks such as Molly Sabine had flashed on me two days before, which suggested that the Latin play had certainly impressed parents, though not exactly in the way Roger Edlington had intended that it should. They preferred, I noticed, when their sons allowed it, to talk of Toad of Toad Hall, which had been all that they expected, and had helped to dissolve in happy laughter the tensions Winterborn’s performance had built up.
As is usual on these occasions there was a good deal of clearing up to be done after the last limousine had borne away the last two parents. Some of the older boys were allowed traditionally to stay up and help. The caterers were already stacking the crockery and the hired chairs, and a party of boys was put to loading these into the lorry. School chairs were returned to the library and the various form rooms from which they had been borrowed. The paddock was a place of supposedly organised confusion from which I managed to extricate several of my actors for employment
in the summerhouse, and in the several leafy ‘green rooms’ in the shrubberies. We gathered up the squashed tubes of greasepaint, eyebrow pencils, the spirit gum bottles gritty with little tufts of crêpe hair, and restored them to the make-up box: wigs, costumes, animal heads, and looking-glasses were packed into laundry baskets in the summerhouse, and sent over to the linen room for eventual sorting and storage. The two great gory Cyclops heads, still tacky with paint, were left with the usual clutter in the Greek temple—the decaying tennis net, the dusty bundles of bamboo canes, the broken machine for marking out white lines, the tattered deckchairs. Before locking up I glanced round to make sure nothing had been forgotten. Something lay on one of the window ledges: it was Winterborn’s juju.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘where’s Winterborn? He’s left his mascot behind.’
‘Oh, I’m taking it, sir,’ said Custance. ‘Winterborn asked me to look after it for him.’
‘Where is he? I’ve not seen him since the play, his play.’
‘I don’t think he’s feeling very well, sir.’
‘Has he gone up to bed?’
‘No, sir. He’s been sitting outside on the grass.’
‘All right. Have you got it? I’m locking up.’
I paused between the Doric pillars. It was growing dusk; a nail-paring moon, planets, and the bolder stars already embroidered a sky of palest blue satin. Among its trees the stucco house seemed luminous, a ghostly white against which the amber oblongs of a late-lit dormitory showed dark as bloodstains on a powdered spectre, I thought, like three of Banquo’s twenty trenched gashes. A thin chill wind had got up with the thin moon. I recalled blinded Polyphemus swaying on that spot a few hours ago, gathering force for that terrific scream—and I shivered. Custance was already halfway across the lawn, swinging the juju like a knobkerry; and as I set off in his wake a figure moved from a bush on the edge of the rustling shrubberies to head him off.
‘Hi, Custance! I was serious. You oughtn’t to take him tonight.’
‘You promised me. You promised me two nights ago.’
‘But I warned you. He’s in a shocking mood. . . .’
‘Oh rot, Winterborn. You imagined it. He’s only painted wood. He couldn’t have done what you said.’
‘Leave him downstairs—in your desk. Anywhere. Don’t bring him into the dorm tonight. . . . Here, let me have him.’
There was a short breathless struggle.
‘Bags I!’
‘No—it’s my bags.’
There was a cry from Winterborn.
‘There, I told you. He’s bitten me.’
Custance had broken free and was hopping over the lawn in a kind of war dance brandishing the juju.
‘Utter rot and drivel!’ he called back, over his shoulder. ‘You’re both thick wood from the ankles upwards. You’d never have felt it.’
Winterborn was sucking his finger when I came up with him.
‘Hurt your hand, Winterborn?’
‘He’s got horrid sharp teeth. He drew blood when he bit.’
‘You mean you caught your finger in the thing’s mouth when you were trying to snatch it from Custance just now.’
‘Perhaps that was it, sir. It’s torn on both sides.’ He held up the injured finger to show the thin trickles of blood. ‘Like with thorns.’
‘You’d better bring it to Matron on your way to bed, and ask her to plaster it for you. Custance said you were not feeling well this afternoon.’
‘I felt done in after the play, sir. But I’m all right now.’
‘It was a’— I chose my word, or perhaps the word chose itself for me—‘a shrieking success, your performance this afternoon.’
‘That’s what they all say, sir. Only . . . only I don’t remember much about it after I was blinded, except I’m sure I didn’t make that noise.’
‘What noise?’
‘That shriek, sir—and the gobbling death-rattle noise that went with it.’
‘You certainly excelled yourself over that, Winterborn,’ I said, ‘and I think some people—Matron for instance—didn’t care for it very much.’
‘I didn’t myself, sir. You see, after Ulysses and his Greeks had smeared the pole over my eye and I pulled myself upright I got caught up in the folds of my cloak. I couldn’t see a thing, sir: it was all dark stuffy red. I think I must have had stage-fright or something: I was afraid of making a giddy ass of myself, bashing my head off against the summerhouse pillars or tripping over the step. I had Pol . . . my juju you know, with me under the cloak; and as I was scrabbling with those beastly red folds for air and daylight to holler into . . . well . . . it sounds silly now, sir, and perhaps I was worked up and imagined it, but . . . I . . . nobody believes me, sir, but . . .’
‘Go on, Winterborn. But what?’
‘It seemed, sir, that that wooden image wriggled in my hands and then . . . then he shrieked, sir, the long harsh shriek with the gobbling in it. . . . I dropped him like hot cakes and I heard him clatter on the summerhouse step and he seemed to writhe up like a snake and bite my ankle. That moment I managed to find the slit in the cloak, and there was the ring of faces and I knew where I was and when I had to spout more Latin. It was like when a nightmare turns into an ordinary dream, sir: I was relieved, but wanting to wake up in case something worse happened.’
‘If you ask me,’ I said, ‘this play’s been rather a strain on you. When you got tangled up in your cloak you panicked, and you fancied what you tell me. You were carried away by the part, and perhaps you thought the first cry was too muffled, and when you got your face clear you prolonged it in that dreadful gobbling.’
‘Perhaps, sir. It’s what I’ve tried to tell myself. It was sweaty under that cloak, and maybe the thing slipped in my hands. So I thought it wriggled and dropped it and it gashed my ankle.’
‘That’s why you screamed so well. There was no need for acting that time. But now I’ll take you along to Miss Sabine, and get that finger of yours looked to—and the ankle. And while she’s about it I’ll ask her to give you a couple of aspirin. What you need tonight, dear boy, is sleep and lots of it.’
‘Well I’m glad it’s Custance and not me who’s got him tonight,’ said Winterborn as we came to the school buildings.
In the weeks after Prize Day the weather became tropical. The days grew heavy with heat: it was as if the air had taken on the quality of metal, as though the earth were being covered with a golden mask like a Pharaoh dreaming himself dead, lying without stir yet alive in his own golden image. The trees stood carved and gilded, not a leaf moving: turf became tawny as desert sand.
It was impossible to get work done in the form-rooms: the boys sat at their desks flushed and listless, and their masters’ voices had a soporific effect on them like the drone of insects. When I could, I took my classes in some shaded part of the paddock, but I cannot say that any great amount of work was done there either: my own voice certainly seemed to have a soporific effect on myself. Games too were a weariness. The cricket pitches, baked hard as concrete now, cracked in zigzags so that the ball did peculiar and lethal things, and the captain of the 1st XI had an elbow bone fractured painfully in the nets. Fielders lazed, umpires forgot to call the ‘over’: the bowlers’ fingers were limp with sweat and though sand was demanded and sent for the ball continued to behave erratically: batsmen went into tantrums, and injured their bats by beating suspected irregularities of the pitch with the flat of them: it was hardly cricket at all.
The only spot where we could achieve the illusion of being cool was in the swimming pool; and its waters, glared on all day by the sun, were almost at soup heat and far too full of floating or languidly flowing bodies. The staff could bathe after ‘lights out’, but it was like being dipped into warm oil and the little exertion even of floating made the night air seem the stickier when one emerged into it.
Sunset brought no relief from the heat but, so it seemed, an intensification of its discomforts. The nights were entirely windless; and there wa
s furriness about the dark, an almost visible redness, that ‘dark, stuffy red’ which Winterborn had described when recalling his moment of panic as he struggled with the folds of his cloak. Sleep was long in coming and when it came broken by strange dreams and sounds. Often there was sheet lightning on some horizon’s edge and a rumbling of far off thunder. We were ringed by a threat of storms, but no storm broke.
To make matters worse, in the third week of the heatwave the swimming bath was put out of bounds by order of the school doctor. Several boys had been afflicted by a skin complaint—a kind of blind boil which Dr Halliday fancied might be contagious and have had its origin in the open air pool. Certainly it did not respond to his treatment: penicillin injections I was told seemed only to make the swellings more inflamed. The bath was drained, but the contagion—if such it was—continued to spread.
The affected boys did not run a temperature and were allowed to attend school, their boils well concealed under a wadding of plaster and lint. I did not actually see one of these swellings until a more than usually torrid night when, afflicted with a headache, I had gone up to Molly Sabine’s ‘surgery’ after lights out to beg aspirin and a soneril tablet, and Custance had looked in. He stood in his night things, blinking in the light.
‘I think I’ve got the murrain now, Matron,’ he said. ‘There’s a little bump on my chest.’
‘You’ll be the seventh from that dormitory,’ said Molly. ‘Take off your dressing-gown and let me look. . . . Now the pyjama top, stupid. . . . Yes, you have it all right.’
There was an oval discoloration in the middle of the boy’s chest—a round purple swelling like a marble, edged by an ovoid of yellowish crinkled skin.
‘Are they all like that?’ I asked.
‘They all look the same,’ said Custance, ‘but Bradbury has his on his arm, and Felton’s is on his stomach, and Winterborn’s got a beauty bang on the collarbone, and . . .’
Where Human Pathways End Page 8
