The Songs

by Charles Elton

  The hall was beginning to fill up but the new boys, shepherded by their parents, seemed to be giving him a wide berth. Some of his classmates pointed and sniggered at him. After five minutes, even though it was not particularly loud, Mr. Costello strode over aggressively and told him to turn the music off because it was interfering with the military marches the Corps Band was playing a few stands away. To be silenced by “Colonel Bogey” and a medley of imperialist Sousa marches was a metaphor in itself. There was a lot of noise in the hall anyway, and Mr. Costello had certainly not asked the choir to sing more softly. They were processing round the hall in full regalia, their dark green cassocks matching the school colors, holding candles aloft and singing a selection of their standards: the “Nunc Dimittis,” the “Magnificat” and Psalm 81, for which Mr. Costello had done a special setting. Maurice knew the music backwards: at last year’s Open Day, he had been part of the choir.

  On the first circuit round the hall, Arthur had given Maurice a wave, but when the choir came round a second time, he stopped by the stand. Although they were in some of the same classes, Maurice did not see much of him now. When Arthur wasn’t singing, he spent most of his time with the rowers. He had a sleekness about him these days, an easy way of moving through a room that Maurice, despite himself, rather envied.

  Arthur gave an awkward little grin. “Any takers?” he said, gesturing at the big red banner. Maurice closed the notebook in front of him so Arthur could not see the blank page on which he had hoped to fill in some names. “People are just nervous,” he said. “I’m not offering any easy options.”

  Arthur laughed. “Like the Ramblers’ Society.”

  Maurice couldn’t work out if that was a joke or not. “In this place, people would be more interested in a Fascist Society.”

  Arthur smiled as if Maurice had just said something witty, then he said, “It’s my birthday on Saturday. I’m having a party. Will you come?”

  “I’ll be going to London on Saturday. I’m there a lot these days,” Maurice said grandly. The last birthday party of Arthur’s he had been to must have been two years ago. Arthur’s father had organized a treasure hunt. It would probably be different now, but he was a bit out of touch with that kind of thing. People had stopped inviting him to their birthdays.

  “Why don’t you go to London on Sunday instead? It would be nice if you came.”

  Arthur did have a curious sweetness about him, and for a moment Maurice was touched. He hadn’t actually planned to go to London at all.

  “We’re going to go rowing,” Arthur said. “There’ll be a race. With prizes.”

  “I don’t think I’d be very popular with your rowing friends.”

  “Oh, they won’t mind,” Arthur said.

  “Well, they should mind,” Maurice answered, rather more aggressively than he had meant.

  If Arthur looked crestfallen, that was too bad. You had to make sacrifices, discard people if they distracted you from your purpose. Too much singing to the glory of God had rotted the boy’s brain, even if he did have a lovely voice.

  But then Maurice softened. He wanted to say something else to Arthur, to let him know that despite the vast chasm between them he still considered him to be a friend. But it was too late: Arthur was scuttling up the hall to catch the other choristers, who were still droning their “Nunc Dimittis.” He had left his candle behind, but Maurice wasn’t going to go chasing after him.

  A great sense of desolation came over him. Of course you weren’t meant to dwell on the sacrifices you had made, you were meant to concentrate on the things you had achieved and were going to achieve. But what were they? It wasn’t just that he was ignored, it was as if a mantle of invisibility had been draped over his shoulders, not the kind that you might find in a fable that would let you sit unnoticed in the girls’ changing room, but the kind that had you screaming for recognition in an unseeing world. It was as if everyone was color-blind. Did his huge red banner read as gray to those smirking, self-satisfied boys, their color spectrum as limited as a dog’s? They ran in packs, anyway, sniffing one another’s rancid arses, trying to get their pathetic merit badges and silver cups and arguing over which was the smartest college at Oxford or Cambridge to apply for.

  Had a war been fought just for everything to continue in the same way? He felt ashamed that he personally had sacrificed so little, but it was hard to know what to contribute when you were not in control of your own destiny, and lived in a house where complacency enveloped everything like a blanket of snow. Maurice’s father was not even prepared to enter into a debate about the new peoples’ health scheme that the government was talking about bringing in. And he was a doctor! Weren’t they meant to want to make people well? All his father would say was that he did not believe people should get something for nothing. But most people had nothing to start with — why couldn’t they get an injection for typhus or cholera for nothing as well?

  Everybody seemed to think that now the war was over the struggle had ended, but that was demonstrably not so. “Permanent Revolution” — that was what Trotsky had called it. It was lucky he had never set foot in Godalming. If he had, he might have given up the struggle in despair and put the ice pick into his skull himself.

  Maurice suddenly realized that what he was doing was too small to register with anyone. He had to go further, make them all understand how serious he was. He reached under the table and picked up the can of black paint with which he had stenciled the society’s name on the banner. He stood on the chair and, with his arm stretched out, began to paint a hammer and sickle as large as he possibly could. It did not matter that the paint dripped down. It did not matter that it was crude — so much revolutionary art was.

  The headmaster was about to make his welcome speech and tea and cakes were being served at the far end of the hall. It was grotesque how the well-fed burghers of Godalming would go anywhere for free food when the people who really needed it were starving. They weren’t offering Victoria sponge in the displaced persons’ camps in Germany.

  Afterwards, he could not quite remember the exact sequence of events. He did know that it was then he had switched the gramophone back on and turned “The Internationale” up as high as it could go. But what happened with the candle? Did it fall off the table and roll to the wall on which the banner hung down? Did he kick it there? It didn’t really matter.

  It wasn’t that the music was loud enough to drown out everything else in the hall but that there was something about the mass of deep voices singing the song in Russian that made the other music sound tinny and superficial.

  Heads began turning towards him. He saw Mr. Costello up near the stage cocking his head like an animal sensing danger and doing a double take, first outraged by the level of the music and then seeing the smoke rising from the bottom of the banner.

  It was interesting watching panic start. He saw a woman gasp when she noticed the smoke rising up from behind him, but all she did was grab her scrawny kid to her bosom and tug on the arm of her husband, who was facing in the other direction. He glanced over at Maurice’s stand, looked startled and then conferred with his silly wife, as if the subject needed some discussion before they could come up with a solution. Then someone shouted, “Look!” in a horrified voice and a certain amount of cautious pandemonium broke out. Suddenly Mr. Costello was running in Maurice’s direction like a demented bull. The other sounds in the hall were dying out as people began to realize that something was up. The choir stopped in their tracks and the Corps Band petered out except for some straggling tuba notes. The fencers seemed to have had some fairy-tale curse put on them that turned them into statues.

  Now, without much to compete with it, “The Internationale” sounded as it was meant to sound — rousing and strong and defiant — even if it was only for a moment: the first thing Mr. Costello did was to kick over the table on which the gramophone sat and it clattered to the floor and the music screeched to a halt. Heads were turning this way and that to spot the dis
turbance, but finally, as if by general consensus, they began to turn in Maurice’s direction. Mr. Costello was standing in front of him, breathing hard — in fact, almost frothing at the mouth. His hands were flailing around and he pushed Maurice out of the way to get to the flaming banner behind him. He kicked at it in rather a feeble way, as if he didn’t want to get his shoes dirty. “Water!” he shouted. “Get some water!”

  The fire alarm began ringing loudly, which caused an instant panic. Someone had opened the big double doors that led to the quad and some of the masters were pushing people through. Maurice was no expert, but he had read somewhere that the last thing you should do in the case of fire was to open doors and let oxygen in, but the masters were clueless as ever. Now the noxious black smoke and the flames spreading up the banner were sending Mr. Costello crazy. He was trying to pull it away from the wall, making jerky little lunges as if he was frightened it was going to fight back.

  A boy from year four arrived with two buckets of water and Mr. Costello grabbed them off him and doused the banner, then screamed at him to get more. It was typical behavior from someone in authority — keep the people who were just following orders as downtrodden as possible.

  The fire alarm suddenly stopped, but it had been so loud that the reverberations continued in Maurice’s ears. Gradually the sound leveled out and all that was left was the echoing footsteps of the few people left in the hall and Mr. Costello breathing heavily at him through clenched teeth. Maurice wondered if he was going to hit him. The water had put out the flames but there was still a lot of smoke. In as cool a voice as he could muster, he said, “Sorry, sir. Bit of an accident.”

  Mr. Costello gave him a look of pure hatred. Almost whispering, he said, “You have no idea what trouble you’re in.”

  The elation Maurice had felt briefly began to ebb away, but he was not going to let it show on his face. Mr. Costello bent down and picked something up from the charred debris on the floor. He thrust it in Maurice’s face.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a church candle, sir.”

  “Yes, that’s precisely what it is,” he said, and stalked off across the hall with the white stub grasped in his fist.

  The candle that had started the fire appeared to acquire some totemic significance. Even his parents, who were waiting for him when he got home with the curtains drawn even though it was only mid-afternoon — presumably so that nobody would be able to see their shame — mentioned it.

  “And you did this with a church candle?” his father said.

  Maurice nodded.

  His father shook his head slowly, unable to comprehend so transgressive an act. “How could this have happened?” he moaned.

  Maurice wondered himself. Was it just chance or was it the kind of historic inevitability that led Martin Luther to post his edicts on the church door or Joan of Arc to hear voices or Lenin to ride on the Sealed Train going to the Finland Station?

  He was suspended until further notice. The sad thing was that it meant he was not at school to hear what was being said. His father told him he was not to go out: apparently he was meant to spend all day in his bedroom. There was lots of reading he could do — he was working his way through a Sartre story — but he found it hard to concentrate and there were only so many times you could have a wank. Anyway, he needed to conserve his energy for what was going to come, whatever that might be.

  When the summons came from the headmaster to present himself, along with his parents, a few days after the event, it came as something of a relief from the boredom, although a small feeling of apprehension began to build in him as they walked silently up the main staircase to the headmaster’s study. The school had always seemed an alien place, but now it seemed so strange to him that it was as if he had never set foot there before. In a way that didn’t surprise him — the landscape was obviously going to look different after you had fought your way out of your cocoon or pupa, or whatever it was that caterpillars did before they took flight and became butterflies.

  But when they got to the headmaster’s study and were told to wait outside, Maurice could not have felt more earthbound. And there was something odd: Arthur was sitting there quietly with his father. He looked briefly up at Maurice and then quickly looked at the floor. Dr. Mayall and Maurice’s father nodded curtly to each other and then they sat in awkward silence until they were called in.

  As they entered the room, he saw that the furniture had been rearranged. Four chairs had been put at the back for the parents and Arthur and there was one in front of the headmaster’s desk, presumably for him. This was not what Maurice was expecting. It was going to be a show trial.

  The head was sitting at his desk like a judge and Mr. Costello was standing behind him. He was going to be the prosecutor, of course. During his opening address, Maurice began to count how many times Mr. Costello used the word “shame.” It was liberally distributed: on himself, his parents, his friends, the town of Godalming, but mostly, of course, on the reputation of the school. There had already been a piece in the local paper headed “Fire Dampens King George Open Day.”

  Then Mr. Costello moved on to a different tack and his delivery became less declamatory and more quizzical.

  “Now,” he said silkily, “this society of yours and Mayall’s…”

  For a moment Maurice was confused. “It wasn’t Mayall’s society,” he said. “It had nothing to do with him.”

  Mr. Costello turned to the desk and picked up a piece of paper. “On the application form for the society, your seconder was Mayall, was it not?”

  Before he had a chance to say anything, Arthur suddenly blurted out from behind him, “He made me!”

  Maurice turned round in amazement. Arthur was looking away.

  “I understand there was a lot of pressure,” Dr. Mayall said.

  Maurice’s voice rose in indignation: “No!”

  “I’ll thank you to keep quiet,” Mr. Costello barked at him. “You’ll have your turn soon enough. Would you say, Mayall, that there are other people involved in this society? Not at King George necessarily, but behind the scenes. Other influences that might have encouraged a stunt like this.”

  Arthur looked confused. “I’m not sure, sir.”

  “Don’t play the naïf with me, Mayall. There are factions all over this country of one hue or another which encourage subversion. Sometimes it’s bombing and violence like those Yids who hit that society in London a few months ago. Sometimes it’s covert activity. Have you seen Gifford with people you don’t recognize? Maybe people in the town? Older people?”

  “He goes to London a lot,” Arthur said breathlessly.

  “London?” Mr. Costello said, in a voice of wonder.

  “He goes to the British Museum,” Maurice’s mother said in a whispery little voice.

  “Would that be for the Middle Eastern antiquities? The Elgin Marbles, perhaps? Does he share these interests with you, Mayall?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Several people saw you by the so-called Russian Society before the fire was started. What were you discussing?”

  “I just asked if anyone had signed up for the society.”

  “I see. Had you talked beforehand about how many people you hoped would join?”

  Arthur shook his head. Mr. Costello leaned over and took the candle from off the headmaster’s desk. “And this, Mayall? Is this yours?”

  His face began to crumple. “He took it from me, he made me give it to him,” Arthur mumbled tearfully.

  “No!” Maurice said again, suddenly on his feet.

  Mr. Costello was in his face in an instant. “You sit down this minute or the consequences will be very serious indeed.”

  Maurice sat down. He tried to block out the awful disintegration going on in front of him. Arthur was allowing himself to be destroyed. He was so terrified by the prospect of being implicated that he was prepared to lie and make everything worse. If Maurice had had the chance to speak first, he would have made
sure that everyone realized that the idea of any involvement on Arthur’s part was laughable. But it was typical of totalitarian regimes to see plots where there were none, to see predetermination where there was only accident. That was the system: rule by fear and division, make people lie and betray their friends, squeeze out of them any modicum of will they might possess. If you could visualize Arthur’s will now, it would look like a small pile of ash under his chair, so weightless that a gust of air would blow it away, so fine that it would only register in the brightest shaft of sunlight.

  Arthur was being led out of the room now, weeping, his father’s manly arm around his shoulder. He would be taken home and given tea and a slice of cake, gruff reassurances that he had done the right thing: he had been brave, he had told the truth, he had had the courage to stand up and be counted.

  At that moment, Maurice felt a kind of love for him, the tenderness and pity you might feel for a wounded animal. He found it hard to see the future for himself, but he could see it clearly for Arthur: his voice would still soar to the roof of the chapel in Morning Service, his arms would become taut and sinewy with rowing, he would move easily amongst that indistinguishable pack of the bright and the promising who did credit to themselves and their school. Soon Arthur would forget that he had ever been in a line of choristers that walked through the school hall on Open Day in their dark green cassocks singing the “Nunc Dimittis” and that he had stopped for a moment to speak to a friend and forgot to pick up his candle when he left.

  In the silence that followed Arthur’s departure, Maurice stared straight ahead. He would give them nothing now.

  “So,” Mr. Costello said. “What do have to say for yourself?”

  “It could have been a box of matches,” Maurice said.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Maurice raised his hands and mimed striking a match against a box. “It didn’t matter to me how the fire started.”

  “I suppose it was more symbolic for you using a church candle.”