Grievous

by H. S. Cross

  The patient showed no interest in the paperback. Whether from illness or perversity, he left the sweets uneaten.

  * * *

  She knelt but didn’t know what to say. The chapel was dark except for the colors through the windows. Off in a corner, a candle flickered in a red glass. She wanted to picture her mother surrounded by light, but who could do it in this crypt?

  Her yes-no-sorry boy had grown up here, with his round face and his eyes full of play. This cold, smoky wreck of a school, he called home. And Uncle John! She’d always thought of their home as his, his holidays with them as his true life and the leaving an interruption. But in reality he spent more months here than he spent with them and his maiden aunts combined. He had no piles of papers in Saffron Walden, only a few items of clothing and some books. Perhaps most shocking, now that she realized, he had no friends there besides them, whereas here every person knew him. They called him nicknames and spoke of his habits as if he were part of their family. He swept through these corridors snapping and cajoling. He looked at home.

  The light she was seeing around her mother turned to rust. She opened her eyes and left the pew. The red candle taunted her from behind the wrought-iron gate, but she faced it down. There was no call for it to pulse like an unsteady heart or to splash its lurid color across the stone column and the painting there of a man. He sat before a background of gold, his face looking forward but his eyes to the side, as if he’d been called by someone just behind her. Her scalp prickled and her eyes prickled. Sometimes people looked to the side when they wanted to tell you something awful.

  She didn’t run, but she walked quickly away. Outside, icicles dripped from the roof. The air was warmer than it had been in there.

  * * *

  —I treated a man at the end of the war, Kardleigh said apropos of nothing.

  He had brought Gray a cooked breakfast, Sunday meal for a Tuesday, and now he was drawing a chair to the bedside and fetching his own teacup.

  —He’d been released from a German prison camp at the Armistice, fit enough if hungry, but he wound up in hospital some weeks later after a collapse in Oxford Circus.

  Gray cut the white away and lifted the yolk onto a piece of toast. He would eat this slice only and leave the rest. Tea he would limit to one cup.

  The man, Kardleigh continued, was known to him. He’d treated him earlier in the war for gas, but this collapse, Kardleigh determined, had been brought on by hard living and a species of shell shock.

  —It wasn’t noise that set this fellow off, but crowds. The crush of Christmas shopping made him feel he was drowning in gas.

  As Gray dipped a sausage into the yolk, Kardleigh told of the man’s slow recovery. Restoring the body was straightforward enough, particularly as it was all in one piece. The mind took longer.

  —This was Ashurst. After the war, we were being absorbed into Littlemore, and our patients, those who couldn’t be discharged, were having their records transferred to the asylum.

  The black pudding was salty, the marmalade bitter.

  —This man had recovered by all measures. He no longer suffered tremors. He ate well, slept well, even became something of a legend at croquet, but when the time came to leave, he refused. He insisted that he was not cured and called for papers to have himself committed.

  —That’s mad.

  —Quite. Though not in a technical sense. I managed to stall the papers and somehow got the man to agree to an outing. I promised him a picnic by the river, but it was a bank holiday, the weather fine, and all of Oxford turned out with the same idea in mind.

  Kardleigh refilled their cups.

  —Did he have a fit?

  —Not exactly, Kardleigh said. At first I thought we’d had a breakthrough. He ate the sandwiches, drank the lemonade, even picked a handful of flowers for one of the nurses. I was packing up the basket, thinking about the conversation we might have on the walk back, when I heard a commotion behind me. He’d fallen into an argument with a man some years his senior, the volume rose, and the next thing I knew, my patient was pummeling the man on the riverbank.

  Kardleigh described the man’s wife and children bursting into tears. It had taken two passersby to remove Kardleigh’s patient from the scene. Back at the hospital, Kardleigh received a blistering tick-off from his superior officer. He was to provide his patient commitment papers that evening and omit from his report the slightest whiff of unauthorized outings.

  —Finished?

  The tray was empty. Kardleigh took it away. A slab of snow slid off the roof and landed with a splat in the courtyard. Protest erupted from the birds in the gutter, as though one of their number had been swept to its death. The ward was empty. Gray felt suddenly ashamed.

  A faucet ran and stopped, and Kardleigh returned, drying his hands on a tea towel. There was the dreadful feeling of having ruined things through inattention. Kardleigh sat down again, opened a pocket watch, and took hold of his wrist with cold fingers.

  —Did you do it? Gray asked.

  —Do what?

  —Give him papers for the asylum.

  —I meant to. I had to obey my CO, of course, but as I was preparing the papers, a kind of obstinacy came over me.

  He let go of Gray’s wrist.

  —I went to the man’s room—he had gone to bed—opened the windows, and tore off the blankets. Then, to my surprise as much as his, I sat down on the floor, my head even with his. He was well, I said, in body and in mind. He was not afraid that the world would be like the front, but that life would carry on. After everything he’d seen, everything he’d suffered and done, he now had to face the ultimate obscenity, that the world had not ended.

  Kardleigh crossed his legs:

  —Life was obscene, I told him, and I knew why he wanted nothing to do with it. But I told him he was needed, to stand in its face. If not us, then who?

  —Us?

  —I told him I wasn’t leaving, his room or the floor, until he dressed, packed his case, and took up arms beside me.

  —He went back to the army?

  —He went to university.

  —And then he joined the army?

  —He joined the revolution.

  —What revolution?

  —Oh, said Kardleigh lightly, you know the one I mean.

  16

  The Remove were at History, bent over books in grudging fealty to hourlies on the morrow. Gray’s uniform chafed, but a stubbornness came across him. The hunchback at the front was nothing to him. He opened the door, took his seat, and barricaded himself behind the Deuxième Empire. Revolutions killed people, usually more than they meant to at the start.

  When the bell rang lesson’s end, the hunchback threw out his grappling hook:

  —Riding. Your composition.

  He had to go and take it.

  —Fine, as usual.

  A thank-you rolled up his tongue, but he bit it down and turned to leave.

  —Just a minute.

  Claw.

  —Here is the tic. I’ll sign it now. You can see Moss for the rest.

  He took the chit, to be signed by school authority six times in the day, a penance designed to entangle you in restriction, to remind you that you were still being punished.

  * * *

  There was absolutely nothing to do there. Newspapers consumed only so much time. Lessons kept Uncle John captive by day and paperwork by night. The snow had melted, but mud remained. She couldn’t use her roller skates, and she didn’t have boots to muck about the grounds.

  She wasn’t supposed to wander from the House, but during lessons, who would know? Passages burrowed beneath the school, connecting servants’ quarters and giving onto places she’d never be allowed. The smell of the changing rooms defied description, and the sight of their clothing, all the bits in every state, made her stomach beat.

  Uncle John’s House was not the largest (that was Burton-Lee’s), nor the most ornate (Lockett-Egan’s), nor even filled with the strangest objects (Henri
’s). Still, it was home, and its passages and corners smelled of the past, as if every legend had grown up there.

  The stone stairs by the chapel led to a paneled corridor. At the far end, she found a music room, and in the interval before tea she heard the choir practicing there. Two of the panels had keyholes in them. One opened easily to her hairpin, and she spent a heady half hour exploring narrow ladders and planks between pipes of the organ. The other panel required two hairpins but delivered the greater prize: an abandoned balcony overlooking the chapel, airy and silent, piled with broken chairs.

  * * *

  They treated him as one returned from the dead. Not disposed, not sent home raving, had he been half-killed, or what? He confirmed nothing, contradicted nothing, but as he had no note off Games, in the changing room they saw what they wanted. By tea, wild rumors had worn themselves out, and his tale ceased to be notable. Only one splinter remained.

  He forced his pen to the sickening note and left it in his pocket after changing for bed. T: Destroy box and contents. On pain of death, do not read. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. In the morning when he dressed, the thing was gone, murder accomplished.

  * * *

  Wuthering Heights was supposed to be the ultimate love story, but she put it down after they were horrid to the dogs. White Shadows in the South Seas proved better and kept her from pondering the boy returned from exile. There is in the nature of every man, I firmly believe, a longing to see and know the strange places of the world. She glimpsed him at lunch Wednesday, poking at the horrible meat and making the odd remark to his fellows. Life imprisons us all in its coil of circumstance, and the dreams of romance that color boyhood are forgotten. The boys at his table turned to him repeatedly with questions. But they do not die. They stir at the sight of a white-sailed ship beating out to the wide sea. He replied with an air of bored authority. Somewhere over the rim of the world lies romance, and every heart yearns to go and find it.

  * * *

  He refrained from looking at her since she sat beside the hunchback, but he couldn’t avoid thought of her, since she was all anyone talked about. Interloper, goddess, tart. It was indecent, they said, for Grieves to bring such a piece into their midst. She was haughty. She was randy. She was fresh. She needed to be kissed, or spanked. There was nothing for it but to ravish her.

  The afternoon was a half holiday, and he had nowhere to go but his form room. When everyone else dispersed outdoors, he began to track the girl. Having lingered at the masters’ table with her godfather, she kissed the hunchback on the cheek and made for the cloisters. There she darted up the staircase by the chapel. Running was strictly banned, but he took the stairs two at a time. At the top, an empty corridor mocked him. He felt along one side, and suddenly the panel gave way, hinging in, spilling light and an audible gasp:

  —You!

  Revolutions outran their instigators.

  —Do you go around everywhere giving people heart attacks?

  —Sorry!

  —Sit down before someone sees you.

  There was no one to see him, but he dropped to the floor.

  —Lemon?

  She thrust a packet towards him. Would accepting her sweets mean accepting her conquest, she who had made a keep in corners of his country no one knew existed?

  —If you don’t want one, simply say no thank you.

  She had an evil eye and used it. He put a lemon drop on his tongue.

  * * *

  He fit there, and he didn’t mind the dust. He looked at her as though they were friends, or had once been. With friends you didn’t always have to explain. He sucked on the sweet and eyed her newspaper. She peeled off the Special Section and passed him the rest.

  * * *

  Electricity Schemes, the Miners’ Welfare Fund, he scanned the words but didn’t absorb them. She lay on her stomach and kicked her heels together, as if they always passed half holidays reading in silence. Minutes passed, and she continued to pore over photographs of motorcars. The paper told of the crocuses at Hampton Court bit by frost, and of a play called The Messenger. Mr. Audsley has done it again. Never has a more delightful marriage of allegory and whimsy graced the stage of the Gaiety Arts. She’d done her hair in plaits and the parting was crooked.

  * * *

  John had marked his hourlies long into the night, and he continued the next morning while invigilating the Third at their Latin paper. The Remove acquitted themselves more or less as expected, with the exception of Riding, whose exam was a disaster. He’d left several answers blank, and other plain facts he’d conflated or confused. John slashed through the errors, irate and betrayed. Had the boy been cribbing from Mainwaring all along? Or were the answers intended as a form of vengeance, aimed straight at his heart?

  Results went up before tea. John perused the lists for the status of boys in his House. Halton, no surprise, came last everywhere but French. As for Riding, John stared dumbfounded at the singularly miserable results.

  * * *

  On the floor of the chair loft, she gasped. Neck sweaty, side cramping, she couldn’t laugh anymore. He’d been relentless in making her laugh, and now he did it again by whispering the word that first set her off:

  —Bumf.

  Her whole body strained. She hit his leg to signal surrender. He composed himself and waited for her to recover before pronouncing the word yet again.

  These boys had a language more exotic than Chinese, everything shortened and removed from its source. He tutored her in Stephenese, terms absurd, terms profane. Dead Man’s Leg, Maggots in Milk, Boiled Baby, Grass; soccer, saccer, footer, changer; the Eagle, the Flea, Fardles, Ennui; rag, chaff, pong, swiz; top-hole, dribble-tank, lose your rat, bumf.

  She begged him to stop, but he didn’t. It was like being tickled, when you pleaded for mercy but didn’t mean it, really.

  17

  Saturday morning, last of term, the usual chaos before they crammed into chapel. The school’s hymn, “Love Unknown,” felt to John like tradition even though they’d adopted it only four years before. Burton read a message from the Headmaster and then announced a closing hymn they didn’t know. As they flipped through hymn books, Kardleigh’s choir took the first verse a cappella.

  Souls of men, why will ye scatter

  Like a crowd of frightened sheep?

  Foolish hearts, why will ye wander

  From a love so true and deep?

  Why, indeed? And what if his didn’t, anymore? They were bound, after all, for the City of Light, or would be once he could extract Meg from the hospital. Let everything not be ruined! Let her recover, and in time for Paris, that balm he’d longed for these cold, dark months. Let these miasmas stay far away from her. And let her daughter, his goddaughter still, let her be as she was, untouched and unchanged. Let all specters be shed with his term-time clothing when they boarded the train tomorrow.

  * * *

  Riding’s note got under his skin. Halton had to ask the Flea what the Latin words meant, and the man had waxed tragic on Queen Dido of Carthage, who after falling helplessly in love with Aeneas contrived to curse his descendants: May an avenger one day arise from my bones! The Flea said the avenger referred to Hannibal, which didn’t make Riding’s message any less offensive. Halton scraped his imagination for a clever reply; he even leafed through Kennedy for a suitable line of Latin. In the end he took inspiration from the story his sister had read him when they took that boat through the Suez Canal. He left a map in Riding’s pigeonhole, X in red and three brief words: Destroy it yourself!

  * * *

  Pearce had procrastinated, and now time had run out. He stood in the queue outside his Housemaster’s study, doing his best to organize the madness, sending those, like himself, who had the early train forward and telling the others to wait, all the while steeling himself to say what must be said. The whole end-of-term queue problem could be eliminated if Housemasters would let prefects distribute the journey money, but that wasn’t what he had to say to
Mr. Grieves.

  —Next!

  He entered the study:

  —Sir, if you don’t mind, a word?

  Mr. Grieves looked up from his ledger, and after a glance at the clock, beckoned him closer. He wasn’t ready. He forgot his words.

  —Well?

  He should have come another time.

  —It’s Austin, sir.