The Seahorse

by Anthony Masters

  Absentmindedly he found he had switched on the headlights, and to his surprise he saw that Casey and Storm were still in the porch, bending over something on the step. Idly he wondered what had been dropped, or who had tripped. No doubt Storm had fallen over Casey–he was pretty clumsy generally. For some reason they were very still–in silhouette they seemed frozen over something that they stared at very closely. Then he saw Storm draw Casey aside and they separated. The boy went quickly inside and Storm walked round the side of the house. Curiously Paul eased himself stiffly out of the car and walked slowly across the gravel. He knew that he was going to experience some alien sensation. This feeling came about mainly because of the events that had preceded it during which detail would become unusually concise and his own minor movements seemed to be in slow motion. Now, Paul heard the gravel crunch under his heavy shoes, and the noise it made seemed to go on for a very long time as if each stone that was dispersed made its own individual sound. It was extraordinary how he knew by these small signs of an approaching disturbance. Perhaps too inadequate a word to use in some cases. With Stephen he had known before by the way he was driving. He had noticed very distinctly his whitened knuckles as they gripped the wheel of the car, and there had been irregular patches of tar on the road surface that had seemed to build up to some kind of crazy pattern. He still remembered that pattern and the way the tar lay hard on the road. After that he could remember nothing else–and this was dreadful to him, because he particularly wanted to. Neither could he remember much of what had happened before. Just his knuckles, the tar and snatches of a song that Stephen and Meg were singing:

  ‘She’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes,

  She’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes,

  She’ll be …’

  He found himself humming it under his breath and almost breaking off at the point where Meg and Stephen had stopped singing so abruptly.

  He reached the door and knelt down beside the bedraggled heap that sprawled half in and half out of the porch. The raven night masked the outline of the broken shape, but as he bent nearer Paul could distinguish the body of a cat. Its fur was unkempt, and as his eye travelled along its untidy form he noticed that the head had been cleanly severed from the neck. There was a movement behind him and he looked up. Storm stood by his side with a spade in his massive hand. Without looking at Paul he inserted it under the cat, lifted it away from the porch, and said:

  ‘The best thing I can do is to get rid of this–thing. I don’t feel much like talking about it–I can’t think of anything to say anyway.’

  Then he turned and disappeared around the side of the house, his arms rigid and his shoulders bowed, with the spade held out directly in front of him. He was swallowed up in the darkness almost immediately. Paul stood for some time, feeling rather sick, watching the place where he had disappeared as if it were a velvet curtain from which Storm would presently re-emerge. After a while he turned away and walked into the house. The babble of children’s voices greeted him, and he sank gratefully into the warmth of their clamour. Immediately he began to look for Casey.

  There was very little architectural beauty to Exeter Court, inside or outside there was a consistency of grey weathered stone and chocolate-brown paintwork that would sober the most lunatic imagination. The building, anonymous to the extreme, seemed to have been hurled into its own particular cleft in the South Downs. The ground rose protectively from it at either side, whilst the continuation of a golf course veered steeply away from the ramshackle conservatory that clung like a growth to the side of the house. Exeter Court was square-fronted, symmetrical in regard to its quota of doors and windows and therefore extremely dull in conception. A battered portico surrounded the front door, which looked as if it had been the recipient of the perpetual kicking of small boys for a good many years. The general effect was solidarity, conforming to a vague standard of late Victorian building. The house looked as if it should have huddled under a Welsh hillside or formed part of a high street in the Lake District. Its provincialism was not of the South but of the North, and this perhaps compensated a little for its negative characteristics. The whole structure was slightly out of place and faintly uncomfortable, standing as it did amidst the smooth, chalk-torn downland. Yet, a personality lingered in the innocuous façade. The battered walls were scored by the constant leaning of bicycles against them and the threadbare lawn was mainly given over to a huge tent that hung crazily askew in the stirring whisper of the night wind. Dimly, in the glow of the cloudy blackness, rambling outbuildings stood hunchbacked to the walls of the house, arched against its protective solidarity in a turmoil of untidy framework. The downstairs windows were lit, a line of boys standing with their backs to the glass. Faintly a rostrum could be made out in front of them, and on it a bald figure with sloping shoulders and a mass of tousled hair, who seemed to be vigorously addressing them. Then the muffled sound of a hymn seeped from the scarred stone walls, lustily sung, yet muffled and indistinct. It was doused by the wind that carried the subdued murmur of the waves and the dragging sigh of the pebbles–and was lost. Inside they started to pray; eyes half shut, with shuffling feet, they muttered the Lord’s Prayer. Storm’s voice could be heard above those of the children, pronouncing every syllable evenly and distinctly:

  ‘But deliver us from Evil

  For Thine is the Kingdom …’

  Paul’s lips moved rhythmically to the sing-song slur of their voices. His eyes, grimly closed, saw only the emerald downland of the afternoon. It had been the first warm spring afternoon of the year, yet already the season seemed to be tentatively giving way to a mellow summer. Up until the beginning of May there had been no indication of spring–simply a dreary extension of winter that had overlapped unfairly with excessive mists and rain. Then suddenly–this afternoon–the wan pulse of a season that had hardly come before it was forgotten was felt for a few moments before a kind of experimental summer took control. It seemed to Paul as if one season had been eclipsed, unfairly, by the next.

  ‘The Power and the Glory,

  For ever and ever–Amen.’

  Storm’s voice drew up abruptly on the last word. Paul noticed that his gown was torn and there was something lodged in the lower part of his beard. Paul smiled, his perpetual half-smiling furrows broadening as he watched Storm search his pockets desperately for the slip of paper on which he wrote the school notices. There was a perpetual, expected, wait at this stage of prayers and it was too regular a routine even to be punctuated by the odd giggle.

  With a start Paul forgot the afternoon and his mind turned to the macabre discovery of this evening. Certainly the unfortunate cat was a stranger to Exeter Court–it had definitely been no one’s pet. The whole affair, gruesome as it was, rather fascinated him, despite an increasing worry concerning its instigators. Paul was sure that no child at the school could have been capable of such cruelty–and yet every other possibility seemed to be ruled out. It was unlikely that it could have been done by another animal; the incision had been obviously by a sharp blade and probably in one movement. Paul’s amateur-detective faculties faded as he thought of Casey. He had found him in the bathroom crying his heart out. Paul had tried to comfort him, but the boy seemed unable to stop the monotonous sobbing that was like a dry cough. Then–suddenly–he stopped and turned his face up towards Paul, who felt a tightening feeling of grief in his stomach as he looked into Casey’s wide grey eyes.

  Now Storm had found the piece of paper which had been inside his Bible. His eyes were almost black and were set, small and insignificant, far back in their sockets. They looked like tiny, kindly fish that swam in a clear film, enabling them to dart from side to side more swiftly than Paul had ever seen a pair of eyes move. Blackcurrant eyes in the face of a gingerbread man. But Storm’s mouth was firm and his lips were full enough to make up for the inadequacies of his upper features. Paul wondered if Storm was going to mention their discovery or not. He began:

  ‘Jer
emy–if you continue to pick your nose so fervently you’ll have a growth which even Matron, with all her experience, won’t be able to remove!’

  There were sniggers from the back of the hall and Storm’s eyes darted like angry tadpoles to the centre of the disturbance. In a moment there was silence.

  ‘Today we begin a new week and at the outset of this I would like to say …’

  Twenty minutes later Storm finished. He hadn’t mentioned the cat and Paul was relieved. The delivery had entirely concerned routine affairs of the coming week and had wound up with the regular entreaty to make it more perfect in the sight of God than the previous one. Storm undertook his religion, as everything else, with a perfectionist intent that repeatedly continued to wound him. The boys filed out noisily and the staff followed, bound for the common-room where Storm would give a further oration, this time on various problems affecting the running of the school and particularly upon the staff’s own relationships with the boys.

  Paul walked towards the common-room through the chipped, chocolate-brown corridors, that seemed to stretch endlessly through Exeter Court. The building had been constructed on three levels: the first floor housed a large bleak entrance hall with classrooms and an assembly hall to the right and a large dining hall to the left. The second had been split into more classrooms, Paul’s flat, a staff common-room, an art-room that boasted a pottery wheel and kiln, and an anonymous area that was specifically termed ‘a hobbies room’. Finally, the third floor contained the dormitories, a self-contained flat where Storm and his sister lived, and an adequate sick-room. A gymnasium, a small library, limited staff accommodation, a workshop and two additional classrooms were located in the jumble of outbuildings around the sides of the house. It was the corridors that were immediately the most depressing feature of the school, and Storm, conscious of their sparse discomfort, had bought cheap, framed reproductions, which he had nailed at intervals down the length of the passages. The result was unfortunate, as the tempestuous Van Goghs, the pastel caricature of the Lautrecs, and the prominent gravity of the Manets were muted and diffused by the overpowering colouring around them. Gradually they became mere interruptions to an established pattern, each an incident that went practically unnoticed.

  The staff common-room was large, full of old armchairs and sofas that were in an incredible state of decay, and very untidy. Once again similar reproductions covered the walls but at least this time they were against a better background. The design of the wallpaper appeared to represent some kind of rain forest that had turned brown and watery and so at least was entirely negative. Books covered the floor and an inadequate bookcase had been built up in one corner. Two desks, covered with papers, completed the picture of violent disorder. As Paul strolled in the rest of the staff, who had strewn themselves on the arms of the chairs and the sofa, or who were leaning against the desks and the spilling bookcase, gave him a cursory welcome. A haze of tobacco smoke hung over the room and somewhere in the background there was the clinking of coffee cups.

  Exeter Court had a diverse complement of staff who were all well at the wrong end of the salary scale. About half of the semi-circle in the common-room could be described as having maintained a genuine vocation throughout their teaching experience, however limited it might have been. Paul particularly recognised this group as being unerringly behind Storm’s ideals. Whether or not they worked their potential to full capacity, or came up to the insuperable standards required of them was difficult to tell. Paul assumed that they derived considerable benefit from these weekly pep talks and would begin the week with renewed enthusiasm and initiative. These were the kind of people that Storm could get so easily behind–‘full blooded’ was Storm’s definition of this type of person. Paul often wondered if this term was applied to himself. He decided that it probably wasn’t. His fleeting glimpses of their minds never became a form of insight, and he knew that the preoccupation with the past of his own pale driving force could never earn him the title ‘full blooded’. He also wondered sometimes if Storm was not a kind of super hypnotist and if his bounding enthusiasm were not a form of brainwashing. He had been at the wrong end of this blinding energy for three years and felt that he had emerged winded.

  Paul got on tolerably well with the initiated. Out of the whole set he particularly liked Lancing, a round bouncing ball of a man of about fifty. Hardly anyone knew his Christian name, and he was permanently called by his surname by intimates and acquaintances alike. Paul had never been able to assess Lancing’s mind–on the surface he never stopped working, continually and rather incompetently driving himself almost as hard as Storm for the welfare of the boys. He was not an ideas man, however, and was happy to carry out instructions, fully believing in their worth. He never questioned Storm but believed in him with a faith which Paul could never determine–there was no inkling as to whether it was blind or perceptive. Lancing was almost completely bald, with two tufts of hair standing up on either side of his head that made him look almost Pickwickian. His clothes were scrupulously neat and he wore speciality waistcoats that were a regular, if predictable, joke in the common-room every morning. He taught maths and managed to make even the intricacies of calculus a riotous journey into a fraction-strewn world of weird, exciting symbols that he could immediately coerce into a pattern of satisfaction.

  Also among the initiated were Laura Strang, an intense wide-eyed graduate and obsessive child psychologist; Martin Forrest, a long, thin streak with a weepy walrus moustache who unostentatiously taught science; Leo Carpenter, a tired, faded spinster of a man whose appearance belied his vitality at banging French and German into the heads of the upper strata of the school; and finally Virginia Townshend, the majority of whose forty years had been spent in missionary work. A devout Christian, Virginia was tolerant in the extreme and possessed an ability to probe very hard into the child’s world that was so beyond Paul’s conception. He was convinced that she too had no clear insight into her own childhood but managed to force the issue by a process of concentrated penetration. Her results, with the notable exception of Casey, were very successful and Paul had often found himself acutely jealous of her bombastic ability.

  These, then, were the basic personalities amongst the staff. The others were a floating minority that quite often changed from term to term. The most regular amongst them was a bellicose, rather negative young man named Angus Clarke. In Storm’s eyes he was far from a success and in many ways Paul felt a little sorry for him. Storm’s main contention was that Angus disagreed in principle with the majority of his most enthusiastic plans and ideas. Storm and his disciples tended to over-encourage the imagination rather than restrict it–to begin a lesson on one subject, and should interest branch out on something quite new and possibly alien to the syllabus, follow it through–and certainly to cajole rather than to beat. Angus preferred to concentrate logically on one goal, reach it and begin to aim at another. He required intense concentration for this and was intolerant of laziness. His answer to indolence was immediate and quite brutal. But in the instance of inability or genuine lack of understanding Angus would not only tolerate, but would spend hours of his time coaching and encouraging.

  The rest of the staff Paul had relatively little to do with. Mr. Lawrence–who had the most enormous hands he had ever seen–gave music lessons; Jerome Cartridge, a rather precious young man of about thirty, taught geography; and Emily Sands, who had the continual setback of a cleft palate, taught natural history. Storm sought to bring history alive with models, plans, toy soldiers, film shows and slides and occasionally some rather soiled text-books. Paul taught English and was also Storm’s second-in-command. Not that he needs one, thought Paul, as he surveyed the sitting-room. With exceptions, he’s got nearly all the staff eating out of his hand.

  Everyone returned to an animated discussion, too immersed to break the old ground necessary for Paul’s inclusion. No one was actually sitting in the armchairs–they were all perched on arms and he felt suddenly shy of squeezin
g himself between two fervid conversationalists and sinking deep into the chair. Feeling awkward, he stood on the outside of the group until Lancing, who was deep in conversation with Virginia Townshend and Laura Strang, happened to catch his eye. They made room for him and he settled uncomfortably on to the corner of a desk. Virginia handed him a cup of milky coffee. He smiled gratefully at her and offered round a crumpled packet of Senior Service. Temporarily they paused while everyone lit up. He swiftly interposed, ‘Why the discussion group? Has he sent round a bulletin I haven’t seen?’ Storm sent bi-weekly bulletins, run off on an antiquated duplicating machine with various entreaties on them to all members of the staff. Usually they were illegible, and it was with difficulty that they were understood, therefore a general discussion and translation was regularly carried out in the common-room to ascertain the exact nature of the instruction.

  Lancing grinned. ‘No, Mr. Latimer–oddly enough it’s something a little more difficult to understand. What do you know about the corpse on the doorstep?’ He brought out an imaginary notebook, licked an imaginary pencil and went into peals of laughter. No one else seemed particularly amused and Laura Strang seemed, to Paul, quite wrought up and very unlike her coldly material self. Paul was amused.

  ‘I think it’s absolutely revolting,’ she said. She had obviously said it several times before. ‘No one seems to have taken it seriously enough.’ Her large eyes ran eagerly over Paul as if assessing the enthusiasm of his every pore. Lancing’s eyes twinkled behind her–he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  ‘Yes, it’s certainly very disturbing,’ Paul countered, wondering how they had all found out about the incident. The school was a network of rumour and the beginning of the grapevine had always been firmly rooted in the staff common-room. Vaguely he noticed that Laura had caught her hair up again into the most fantastic, disarranged bun. It looked like an untidy ball of wool. Her face was striking though–it had a still beauty that belied her intensity. There was hardly a trace of colour in the pale oval and her features rested within it–firm, mobile lines that provoked a composed serenity in which only her eyes, large, grey and clear, savaged up at him in angry appeal. For some unspecified reason he found difficulty in meeting them–instead he glanced towards the stained surface of Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’. The noble enigma of the group was given an overriding indignity by the dark flush of the tea stain that spewed across it. Paul remembered that this had been the result of an ethical argument between Laura and Angus Clarke. They had all burst out laughing, even Angus, after the tea had been thrown. The exception had been Laura who had run crying from the room, her rage undiminished.