by H. S. Cross
Sometimes, when night lightened to morning, it seemed reasonable to imagine his Nurse Friday in Vichy, or his goddaughter roaming the corridors of the King’s Lynn charity hospital. He made it a rule not to seal his envelopes until he had vetted the contents in the light of day.
It’s an amusing verse you send, “A Code of Morals.” I’m afraid my husband so loathed Kipling that he refused to allow one jingoistic page inside our home, though he did, after his year in India, speak of the heliograph and its unreliability. But to answer your question, no. I only wish he’d “taught his wife the working of the code that sets the miles at naught.” Forgive the smudge. I haven’t time to write this out again. You know, don’t you, what it is to await the flash of the heliograph at “even’s end,” and then to watch them slip away before—forgive me. I ought to use a different ink.
His throat tightened at her blots. They showed him, he fancied, the woman behind the turquoise ink, the young wife in love with a brilliant man, one who’d traveled the empire and then brought his medicine home to their wildish patch of Kent. The man had known how to raise their son, how to cultivate him and train him into a singular mold. John saw how her courage had been tested as her husband, her love—a man John vicariously hated and admired—slipped without warning into a shell, and then—
It was a mercy, you must believe, that your wife went quickly. It’s worse when they disappear into the labyrinth and make no effort to return.
What had failed Dr. Riding? Had the remedy come too late? Was the pathogen misidentified? Incurable? Or did he, as she seemed to think, cede the field?
At any rate, I must, as my brother continually reminds me, refer to him properly as my late husband. If I don’t “chasten my nomenclature,” I’ll find myself, I fear, in the most frightful confusions. Your Nurse Friday.
* * *
Dear Tommy Gray, What do you know of the tropical diseases? I had an illuminating conversation with a lady whose husband had been stationed all over the world, including India, Ceylon, and Jamaica. I wish there was a proper English physician here to consult. (Actually, there is one, but he’s always tight.)
Gray supposed he should be angry to be asked questions and never permitted to answer, but when he imagined writing back to her, truly imagined it, he realized he had nothing to offer. His father had been a physician and had tutored him in what he realized now was a wildly miscellaneous curriculum. He knew the workings of his father’s laboratory but nothing of diseases, tropical or otherwise.
She isn’t improving. It feels like murder to write that. This morning I pulled out a handful of her hair while brushing it, and she didn’t feel anything. I put it in my pocket and when I looked later, it was really and truly a lot. What could that mean?
Whatever she meant by writing to him, his feelings of duty and protection grew with each installment, as if he were her Keep, silent and secure.
* * *
It was wet in the sheets and the dorm was getting light. The dream was nothing he could say or even think in daylight, but it had made him a man. So what if his sister never answered his letters? He, Timothy Halton, was a man at a public school. Tomorrow he had a solo, and he would conquer it as he’d conquered … as he’d conquered in his dream.
He’d read the T. Riding box only once, and while the contents disturbed him at the time, now he wished there had been more. They’d put a picture into his mind, and at night he would think of it, animated beyond the original, to the point that it seemed his own. Now it intruded into his dreams more strongly than he had dared imagine while awake.
Wilberforce appeared in two photographs that hung in Long Corridor, albeit indistinctly. Moss said he’d never come for Patron’s Day, occupied as he was every June with cricket. Still, Wilberforce did exist out in the world. He could come to Patron’s Day if someone would persuade him.
* * *
The Fifth tolerated him now, so congress with Legs was permitted. As long as Gray showed interest in cycling (hours on the bicycle over Easter had strained his knee; Legs advised him to raise the seat) Legs was content to help him with Greek. When Gray asked how he could pay him back, Legs said he wanted nothing.
—Unless you’re headed to the poacher’s tunnel.
—Pardon?
Legs spoke casually, wadding up scrap paper and bowling it across the library:
—Wilberforce was the heir of Hermes. You were his fag. Who else would he tell?
—He could have told anyone.
Legs took a run-up:
—The only other person he would have told was me.
The paper bounced off the window, toothless.
—Or Pearce, of course. And neither of us know.
His thoughts were out of hand. Everyone knew that Pearce had been Wilberforce’s first fag, but he’d never known—correction, he’d forgot—that Legs had fagged the next year until he himself arrived.
—Why don’t you hate me? Gray said. You could have been the heir.
Legs snorted:
—Got me off fagging two terms early. If anything, I owe you.
Gray could remember much, too much, of that sickening era, but he didn’t remember Legs dropping by study number six, as Pearce had done regularly to consult Morgan. He remembered how the quadrangle had smelled of fire when he first arrived, how the button on his new trousers had come off, how he’d thought, at first, that Grieves was the Headmaster. He remembered his first sight of Wilberforce, in the dorm. He remembered the hush that had fallen over the hostile mob that surrounded him. He remembered the crowd parting, confidence draining from their faces, and he remembered a giant towering over them, arms crossed, sleeves turned up, head tilted at an attitude he’d come to know well.
—What’s all this?
He remembered how slowly Wilberforce said it and how the others squirmed, they who had seemed invincible until then. And he remembered Wilberforce’s voice as he said his name for the first time.
—This must be Riding.
Until then he’d been a freak mistake, but when Wilberforce said his name, he belonged. Wilberforce had told the crowd to clear off but had plucked Legs from the midst of them.
—That’ll do, Tiger.
Legs looked at the floor, and Morgan summoned Gray with a finger.
—Riding, this is Tighe. Do as he says.
—Am I his Keeper? Legs protested.
—I am, so just you see he turns up where he belongs.
Legs said he’d try.
—Not try. Do. And a bit less cheek, Tiger. Near wore me out last term.
Legs had smiled, and then Morgan had smiled, and the severity Gray thought he’d understood was gone. He felt hopeless all over again, that he’d ever understand the place, who was who, what they meant, what they were called. Legs cornered him and bade him on pain of pain never to call him Tiger. He was Tighe, Legs to his friends, full stop.
He was going down the stairs and his foot slipped and he was falling, jerked awake, moon on his pillow. Legs, Tiger, Tighe. Tighe began with T.
* * *
—Young Halton’s becoming quite the tart, Crighton said.
It was the first rainy day of June. The study smelled of wet wool and toast as Moss scraped the jam pot:
—Told you he’d blossom once he got away from Pious.
Theirs was study number six, one of the larger, given on account of Moss’s being a prefect and opting to stay with his studymate. Once it had belonged to Wilberforce, but any trace of Morgan had long vanished. Even the cushions on the window seat were new.
—What’s the odds, Crighton asked, on getting those trousers down?
Moss’s wager was three weeks, hypothetically.
—If you can make him forget about that sister of his, Crighton said.
Moss knew that Morgan wouldn’t approve. He’d refused Moss his entire first year, no matter how outlandish Moss had behaved. Lydon, too, refused to seduce Third Formers, even ones Moss knew had caught his notice. Occasionally, Lydon would stand besi
de him on the sidelines of the football, trading judgments. When Moss had pointed out a new boy in the House, Lydon had declared him off-limits until the following year, the new dispensation. As far as Moss could see, the new dispensation meant Morgan’s rules, and crossing Morgan invariably meant beans. Moss never knew what had happened with Darke, a boy in Morgan’s year, and Lydon wouldn’t say, but one night, Darke had turned up to the dorm as if from a back-alley brawl, and the next day, Nichols minor had been let off fagging for him. This, Moss supposed, was the beans.
—He’s tragic about her, Crighton continued, Miranda night and day. Someone’s got to save him from incest.
Morgan’s rules were one thing, but there were plenty of ways to pass the time without crossing the line.
—Never fear, Crikey.
And Halton was no innocent.
—There’s nothing like cricket to unleash desire.
Dear Uncle John, You say I don’t give enough detail, but what do you want to know? Today she ate less than yesterday but more than the day before. We walked the same distance in the parc and she was more tired. The tingling is less since they stopped the magnesium. Her constitution is regular, her color the same as yesterday. Her mood this morning was bright, last night withdrawn, yesterday afternoon cheerful, then irritable, then contrite. She wears her hair the same.
He ought to have more rules for himself, or better ones. He ought not to reread his goddaughter’s letters as the boys scratched away at the compositions he set them. Rereading bound him to the cinema of his mind: there was Meg, bathing, strolling; there she was cheerful, irritable, contrite; there her fingers tingled; there her hair tumbled down.
To know loneliness, one had to know its opposite. Paris had not gone as he’d hoped, but there Meg had depended on him. They joked, and she laughed at the madcap punning that sometimes overcame him when he was hungry. The last night, after she’d exploded her grenade, after dinner and packing, he had sat with her in her room, he in the Louis XIV armchair, she stretched upon the chaise longue, drifting to sleep he thought. The lamplight struck the underside of her chin and he saw the veins in her throat. Her eyelids fluttered. He whispered: Leave him. Come back with me. Half a minute later—less?—she sighed and shifted, her eyes opened, and she smiled as if he were her husband upon the pillow. What a time we’ve had, she said. John wondered whether he really had spoken or whether he had only dropped off for an instant and dreamed it.
We have been hearing from Da, since last month. I thought you knew. He even sent her a tiny pastel (I don’t think he did it himself) in lieu of anniversary present. Fifteenth anniversaries are for timepieces, you know, so he sent her a pastel of a clock. It really is the sweetest thing. Before you ask, she hasn’t relented, and at any rate he’s abroad, so she couldn’t see him even if she wanted.
The refectory smelled of onions again, and the sound of his colleagues droning on about politics made John want to deliver an uppercut. There truly was no creature on the earth before whom he could take off all his clothing—figuratively speaking—no one to whom he could show his unbound self. Who could stand it without turning to salt? He wasn’t fit for human fellowship, not as other people were.
* * *
Behind the closed door of study number six, Halton asked how well they’d known Wilberforce.
—Well enough, kid, Moss said.
No one called him Infant now.
—What was Wilberforce like, he asked. I mean really?
—Well, to start, Crighton said, he had the most magnificent member.
Moss told Crighton to dry up.
—But he did. Had to strap it round his ankle!
Halton laughed; they all laughed.
—It was hand-reared, a real python.
—If you’re going to be crude, Crikey dear, you can jolly well go do it in the lavs.
—Oh, I shall.
Crighton raked back his hair:
—But don’t imagine yours is half as majestic.
Halton pretended to dust the bookshelf as Crighton’s baritone boomed away down the corridor:
—This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.
Moss produced a packet of Silk Cuts, and Halton lit two.
—Wilberforce coached your Lower School rugger, didn’t he?
—He did.
—But he’s a cricketer.
—Morgan Wilberforce, Moss pronounced, was a great man.
They smoked out the window as the sun slipped behind the woods.
—It happened that he got famous for batting, but he loved sport, any sport. The older chaps weren’t interested in what he had to say, but he took our Lower School rugger and worked us till we were half dead.
—A real pumbafu?
—P-what?
—Bastard.
—No, Moss said, you don’t understand.
Moss wedged a chair under the doorknob and poked the panel in the bookcase for their hip flask.
—The Cad had never even beat Bootham until he came. Soon we had the Junior Second Cup, and by the time he left, we’d played Sedbergh twice and won.
The flask was cool, the drink smoky.
—How’d he do it?
Moss shrugged:
—Made us love working, I suppose. People would dive after balls, hurl themselves into the scrum like it was a lifeboat, break ribs, that sort of thing.
Moss rubbed his nose:
—It was the best thing I ever did, playing for him. Before each match, he’d explain the difficulties, give each boy a task, and we’d go out there and try to kill ourselves.
—But why?
Moss took a swig and sighed.
—The highest compliment you could get was when he nodded at you and said, I can see you’ve learned how to suffer.
Halton laughed:
—The Flea says that.
—Pain passes, but giving up lasts forever.
Halton put his feet on the table.
—He took the slipper to anyone who slacked. I’ve taken an interest in you, he’d say, whack, whack, whack. I’m not going to let you disappoint yourself. Made you feel …
—Looked after?
* * *
He had to lock the library door behind himself and use only the light in the alcove. Legs was Tighe, and Tighe began with—letters and books were all he could trust.
There’s a German doctor here, a Dr. Heimenflinger (Murgie befriended him). He came to lunch “on the sly,” meaning he came to look at Mum and she didn’t know it, but then he got on her good side and she agreed to an examination. He’s convinced that she has vagovegenative dystonia, and he says the surefire remedy is Kneipping, which I gather is a water cure they do in Bad Wörishofen. He gave us some literature. I’m so relieved. It all makes perfect sense! Must stop.
Sometimes, he opened the lead-paned windows and leaned out as the sky turned dark. The trees of Grindalythe Woods stood like the forest around Valarious, roots growing where he couldn’t follow. Valarious heard that twilight cacophony, and his goshawk followed the trees’ perfume deep into the woods and to the hand of its mistress. Alone in the glade, Valarious heard the forest’s sorrow, like the merman in the poem that the girl’s blue paper described.
She likes me to read it to her, I suppose because the heroine has her name. Do you know it? It’s in a book for children, but some of the poems inside, if you actually read them, are desperately unsuitable, not least her “Forsaken Merman.” If she doesn’t get onto another poem soon, I shall have to spill something across the page.
Whatever she read, he sought. If he couldn’t write back, he could open her books.
Dear Uncle John, I don’t know what you mean about Les Fleurs du Mal, but we’ve finished so the damage is done. In any case, we’ve started on German, which Miss M says is like clearing your throat. Mum begins her Kneipping today. Here is her schedule for Phase 1 (6 days): Rise 6.30 a.m., Cold immersion, Lukewarm sponge bath, Breakfast, Rest, 200 meter walk, Hot immersion, 600 meter b
risk walk, Ice immersion, Rest, Steam bath, Morning snack.
John’s book had begun as a history of epidemics, but now it veered into esoteric realms of metaphor as he grappled with the idea of disease as a reflection of human politics. Did tyranny not plague mankind constantly, like viruses? Did corruption and incompetence not waste them like parasites? And weren’t urgent cures at times required once other therapies failed to save the body politic? Put inside such a metaphor, pacifism did not fare well. Pacifistic medicine (and this was merely a conceit) would diagnose diplomacy with the Black Death, or the rallying of natural resistance. But how could buboes be persuaded to abate? After devouring one body, did the disease not pass to another carrier? (Follow up later, John noted, re. the war.)
Rest, cold, tepid, cold, hot, cold, reading or other Restful Occupation, pine water immersion— Oh, I’m out of space but etc. all day long. Mum doesn’t like the puckered fingertips, but I told her she’ll have to suffer it up to be really and truly cured.
Even if his research proved too eccentric for scholarship, at least it enlivened the Fifth’s study of the Peloponnesian War. They derived a keen pleasure from Thucydides’ gruesome eyewitness accounts, readings that led, indirectly, to a gradual opening of channels with the son of Nurse Friday. John almost laughed when he read Riding’s first Crit; the boy’s analysis was as astute as his background knowledge was imaginary, and John recognized, with a charmed sort of surprise, the swath of ancient civilization that had been ignored in the boy’s early education. Extra tuition was clearly required, the sooner the better, but since the boy rebuffed every gesture of reconciliation, adopting the Sullen & Resentful each time John addressed him, John resorted to the one form of communication he knew Riding would absorb: Neatly said, but I’m not sure it adds up. cf. Assyrian conquests of Egypt and reconsider. The margins of the boy’s work provided only one-way correspondence, but John usually detected a reply in the next composition, if only in the form of incorporated suggestions. Don’t overuse commas; respect the full stop. That June the marginalia multiplied as John found himself setting the Fifth more compositions than usual. The boys, of course, complained, but the marking of them, in addition to his continued correspondences at home and abroad, filled the after-dinner hours and kept him from the brandy decanter. Try thesis at the end, might give it more punch. Sometimes he took a sip or two, medicinally with a spoon, but not enough to be called a drink.
