There were four humours, Miss Groves explained, and each humour could be matched to a different personality or character. She drifted towards the blackboard again. Under YELLOW BILE she wrote CHOLERIC, under BLACK BILE she wrote MELANCHOLIC, under PHLEGM, PHLEGMATIC, and under BLOOD, SANGUINE. Difficult words, she said, turning back to us, but not so difficult to understand. Choleric people were known for their aggressive qualities. They led lives packed with action and excess. Melancholic people, by contrast, were morbid and introspective. What interested them was the life of the mind. Phlegmatic people were swayed by feeling. Empathy came naturally to them, as did a certain spirituality, but they tended to be passive, a little sluggish. As for sanguine people, they were optimistic, good-humoured and well-meaning. They were often held up as an inspiration to others. Miss Groves’s eyes swept over our faces. ‘Do you see where this is going?’ she said. ‘No, not yet, perhaps. But you will – you will.’ And she smiled knowingly.
That night, in the bathroom, Cody showed us the backs of his thighs. The skin was striped with livid weals where Miss Grove’s cane had landed, but he had no regrets. Rather, he seemed to view the punishment as the price he had paid for some valuable information, which he was now in a position to pass on.
‘When she beats you she sort of grunts,’ he said, ‘just like a sow.’
During the next few days Miss Groves gave us the rest of the story. Everyone in the country had been secretly examined, assessed and classified, all in strict accordance with the humours. As categories, they were only approximate at best, and there had been injustices, of course there had, but that could not be helped. At this point she had stepped forwards again, her eyes seemingly lit from the inside, like lamps. In times of crisis, she said, the good of the many always outweighed the misfortunes of a few, especially when the health of an entire nation was at stake.
Once the population had been split into four groups, the land was divided to accommodate them. What had been until then a united kingdom was broken down into four separate and autonomous republics. New borders were created. New infrastructures too. New loyalties.
‘All this is going on,’ Miss Groves said, ‘even as we speak,’ and turning to the nearest window, her face took on a kind of radiance.
In her opinion, symbolism would play a crucial role during this transitional phase. People’s lives, both public and private, had been disrupted. They had to be given something fresh, something clear and powerful, with which they could identify. It had been decided that the countries would be colour-coded. The territory assigned to those with a choleric personality would be known as the Yellow Quarter, choler being associated both with yellow bile and with fire. Since phlegm was allied to water, the home of the phlegmatics was to be the Blue Quarter. Although melancholia originated in black bile, the authorities rejected black as a defining colour. It had too many negative connotations. They drew on the earth instead, which was the melancholy element, and which was generally personified in ancient iconography as a woman in green garments; it was to the Green Quarter, therefore, that melancholic people would belong. As for sanguinity, it derived from blood. The region set aside for those of a sanguine disposition became the Red Quarter.
To strengthen the identity of the four new countries, each had been provided with its own flag. In one of her lighter, more creative moments, Miss Groves invited us to come up with our own versions, based on what we had already learned. A fair-haired boy called Jones won first prize. His design – a flag for the Red Quarter – made use of a magnified photograph of blood, which he’d found in a magazine. The pattern of red and white corpuscles looked industrious and poetic, and it was wonderfully clever too: all sanguine people would carry their national flag inside themselves, whether they liked it or not (so would everybody else, of course, but as Jones quietly pointed out, for them it would be something to aspire to, a goal, a dream).
After the prize-giving, Miss Groves produced examples of the real thing. The choleric flag had a yellow background on which there stood a salamander. According to Aristotle and several other early naturalists, the salamander was believed to live in fire. On the phlegmatics’ flag a sea horse floated on a cobalt ground, the sea horse suggestive of the diffident, the indeterminate, while the melancholic flag showed a rabbit crouching on a field of green, the rabbit being one of the animals used in iconological representations of the earth. The flag that would fly in sanguine territory was a peacock resplendent on a scarlet ground. Those of sanguine temperament were held to be ruled by the air, and Juno, its goddess, was often portrayed in a chariot drawn by peacocks. Though the use of animals appealed to me, especially the mythical salamander, I still thought Jones’s effort outshone everything I’d seen, and I told him so, which made him blush and look away.
In Miss Groves’s final lesson, she returned to her point of departure. A chill wind blew that morning, and the chandeliers shivered and chattered overhead. Untidy scraps of grey cloud flew past the windows. The desk to my immediate right stood empty. Poor Abdul Nazir had been removed from the house some days before.
‘The reason why you are special,’ she said, ‘as I’m sure you will have realised by now, is because you have all been classified as sanguine.’ She raised her voice a little, to combat the moaning of the wind. ‘If you will bear with me, I would just like to read you a short passage from a work that was written more than four hundred years ago.’ Producing a small thick book with a cover of worn brown leather, she cleared her throat and began:
If there were a monarch or prince to be constituted over all temperatures, this sanguine complection should, no doubts, aspire to that hie preheminence of bearing rule; for this is the ornament of the body, the pride of humours, the paragon of complections, the prince of all temperatures. For blood is the oile of the lampe of our life.
Even when she had fallen silent, Miss Groves continued to stare at the page from which she’d read, then she slowly closed the book and let her eyes pass solemnly across our faces. ‘You have been wonderful pupils,’ she said, her voice trembling now, ‘and I have nothing left to teach you. Go out into the world and do your best. I wish you all every success.’ With that, she turned and hurried from the room.
Maclean nudged me, and I looked round. The light shone through his big, translucent ears. ‘A little too much phlegm this morning,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’
He had learned his lessons well.
Among other things, Miss Groves had taught us that the family had been in serious decline for years, decades even, and it was a measure of people’s conservatism, their fear of change, that the idea had lasted as long as it had. How could people with little or nothing in common be expected to live together? How could they achieve stability, let alone happiness? Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that it was a recipe for disaster. In short, the family could be held responsible for society’s disintegration, and the politicians who masterminded the Rearrangement had felt compelled to acknowledge the fact. But how to act on it? They soon realised that the answer was already lying on the table in front of them. If they rearranged the population according to the humours, then they would automatically be dismantling one concept of family and establishing another in its place. The new family would be a group of people who shared a psychological affinity – people who got on, in other words. Blood ties would be set aside in favour of simple compatibility, and if that wasn’t a propitious unit on which to base an efficient and harmonious society, Miss Groves had argued, then she would like to know what was.
As the weeks went by, I noticed that the number of boys being billeted at Thorpe Hall was gradually decreasing. By the end of February only thirty-six of us remained. Slowly but surely the authorities were finding us new families, new places to live. You never knew who was going to be taken next, though, or whether you would ever see each other again. In this uncertain climate, our friendships deepened and became invested with an air of desperation and romance. We started making rash promises, secret pact
s. We’ll remain in contact, no matter what. We’ll seek each other out. We’ll never forget. Some boys cut the palms of their hands or the tips of their fingers and then mixed their blood together, swearing that they would be brothers for fifty years, a century – for all eternity. Others went further.
In early March Cody and Maclean got married. The wedding was held in a bathroom on the top floor after lights-out. Cody improvised a bridal veil out of a pair of net curtains which he had pilfered from a little-used passageway behind the kitchen. Maclean wore a crocus in the top buttonhole of his pyjama jacket. Their rings were identical – chunky, dull-silver, hexagonal in shape (Maclean had crept out of the house one evening and unscrewed two nuts from the back wheel of Mr Reek’s car). I can still see Cody’s eyes glittering behind his veil as he walked along the moonlit landing, the rest of us singing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ in a harsh whisper, and I can see Maclean too, waiting patiently beside the bath with his hands clasped in front of him and his chin almost touching his collarbone. After the ceremony the happy couple slept in the same bed, arms wrapped around each other, rings wedged firmly on to the middle fingers of their left hands. A few days later Mr Reek had a crash. I imagined one of his wheels bowling away along the road, merry, almost carefree, like a race-horse that has unseated its rider, while the car slewed sideways, the exposed hub and axle spitting sparks.
It was during this time that I became friends with Jones, the boy who had won first prize in the flag-drawing competition. He was one of those who felt threatened by the idea of being moved, of being placed once again among people he didn’t know, and there came a point in our friendship when he would talk of nothing else.
‘But what if I don’t like them?’ he would say. ‘What if they’re cruel to me?’
‘You’ll be all right,’ I would tell him.
‘I don’t know. I can’t sleep.’
‘Stop worrying so much,’ I would say. ‘You’ll be fine.’
He would shake his head and stare at the ground, his eyes watery and anxious.
One day I found him in a shabby, cheerless corridor towards the rear of the house. He was standing on one leg, like a stork. Thinking he was playing a trick on me, I laughed and pushed him on the shoulder. He hopped sideways, but managed to steady himself by putting a hand against the wall, and once he had regained his balance he continued to stand on one leg, as before. He didn’t speak at all. Behind him, at the far end of the passage, the door had been left half-open, revealing an upright section of the garden – sun falling across a gravel path, a canopy of leaves. I walked round and stood in front of him.
‘Jones?’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’
The look in his eyes was so blank that I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had never seen such an absence of expression, such utter emptiness. My first impression was that he was staring at an object or a surface only inches from his face but there was nothing there, of course. Later, I thought it was more as if some vital component had gone missing, the part of him that made him who he was. The thin strip of illuminated gravel at the end of the corridor had the brightness of another world, a world that lay beyond this one – a world Jones might already have entered. I think I shivered as I stood in front of him that morning. He didn’t seem to see me, though. He didn’t even appear to be aware of me.
At first nobody noticed, but Jones carried on, day after day. He would stand on one leg for hours at a time, and always in that same gloomy passageway. Other boys jeered at him and called him names, but he never once reacted. If they pushed him over, he simply picked himself up again and went on standing as before. His expression never altered. After a while the boys lost interest and more or less ignored him. ‘There’s Pegleg,’ they would say. Or, ‘Hello, Stork.’
In the end, someone must have alerted the authorities, I suppose, because Jones was removed. I had been sent out to the vegetable patch that day to plant onions with Maclean and several others, and I didn’t realise Jones had left until we sat down to supper in the evening. I assumed a home had been found for him, and I hoped his new parents would treat him well. I was sorry not to have been able to say goodbye.
Curiously enough, the corridor he had occupied didn’t seem empty after he had gone. It was as though he had left something of himself behind, a kind of imprint on the air, as though, by standing there like that, he had changed that part of the house for ever. Perhaps that’s what is meant by the word ‘haunted’. In any case, I never felt comfortable in that corridor again and avoided it whenever I could.
It must have been spring when I was summoned to Mr Reek’s office because I remember looking through the window and seeing daffodils beside the moat, their yellow trumpets nodding and dipping in the wind.
Reek stood in front of me, a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘your name will be Thomas Parry.’ He laid down the sheet of paper, then took off his spectacles and stared intently at the far wall. ‘Thomas Parry,’ he said. ‘A good solid name. You could be anything with a name like that. Anything at all.’ He brought his eyes back into focus and peered down at me. ‘Do you realise what an opportunity this is?’ His voice shook ever so slightly, as if he suspected I didn’t appreciate what was being done for me. ‘Just think of it. A completely fresh start. A new beginning.’
He must have made dozens of such speeches.
‘There’s something I want you to bear in mind.’ He had walked to the bright window, and was gazing out in the direction of the woods. I had found a bird’s skull in there, bleached white, light as air. ‘If you should see any behaviour,’ he said, ‘which doesn’t fit in with your notion of the sanguine disposition, it’s your duty – your duty – to report it to the authorities.’ He looked at me over his shoulder, a shaft of sun picking out a tuft of ginger hair in his right ear. ‘Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He studied me for a long moment. ‘All right, my boy. You may go.’ He stood there in the sunlight, waiting for me to leave the room.
‘I’ve been worried about Jones,’ I said.
‘Jones?’ The skin on the bridge of Reek’s nose knotted momentarily. ‘Ah yes. Jones. He’s been’ – and he paused – ‘well, he’s been transferred.’
‘Where to?’
‘I’m afraid that’s confidential,’ Reek said. ‘I can’t tell you that.’ He came and squinted down at me, his mouth crumpling in an attempt at a kindly smile. ‘There’s nothing else, is there?’
A few days later I was put on a train. A woman travelled with me, I’ve forgotten her name. She had been given the task of introducing me to my new family, overseeing what must, in many cases, have been an extremely awkward transition. During the journey I got my first glimpse of how the country had been divided up. Towards lunchtime, in the middle of nowhere, the train slowed down and stopped. I could see no sign of a station, only an embankment bristling with spear-shaped purple flowers.
‘The border,’ my companion murmured.
I opened the window and looked out. A poorly made wall of concrete blocks had been erected at right angles to the track. Starting on level ground, it sloped up the embankment and then vanished from sight. Two parallel lengths of barbed wire straggled along the top, making the wall higher and more difficult to scale. Soldiers with guns stood in the spring sunlight. Their shadows pooled around their feet, blackening the stones. Half closing my eyes, I pretended that everyone was melting. A man walked an Alsatian down the outside of the train, the dog tugging on its lead so forcefully that the lead and the man’s arm formed a continuous straight line. I crossed to the window on the other side. Here, too, the wall stopped just short of the rails, but the gap was filled by a sliding wire-mesh gate. Soldiers began to pass through our carriage, some with green braid on their uniforms, some with scarlet, and each time they appeared the woman travelling with me had to produce a sheaf of official documents, which the soldiers scrutinised, their eyes shifting between the lines of writing and my face. At last, aft
er a delay of perhaps an hour, the train lurched forwards again and the border was behind us.
‘I hate being checked like that,’ the woman said. ‘I always feel guilty.’
I nodded, as if I understood. ‘Me too,’ I said, which made her laugh.
The train gathered speed. We had entered the Red Quarter, which was to be my new home, and I felt my heart beat harder. Our destination was Belle Air, the woman said. A pretty place, apparently. She’d never been before. As the train swayed through a landscape of open fields and narrow lanes, she told me a little about the family to which I was going to belong. My father’s name was Victor Parry. He was fifty-two years old and worked for the railways, as coincidence would have it. He was an electrical engineer. My sister, Marie Parry, had just turned seventeen. She wanted to go to university, to study environmental law.
‘And my mother?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to be my mother?’
The woman’s face clouded over for a moment. I was to have no mother, she told me, but she was sure that Marie, my sister, would be more than capable of looking after me.
‘No mother,’ I said quietly.
Gripping the point of my chin between finger and thumb, the woman tilted my face upwards until I was staring into her eyes, which were round and solemn. ‘You must take things slowly,’ she said. ‘Give everyone time to adjust, yourself included.’
We changed trains in the capital, then travelled south, passing red-brick houses with grey slate roofs, street after street of them, all parallel, as if that part of the city had been combed. One row of terraced housing swept up towards the railway line, and I was able to look through windows into people’s homes. I saw a young woman pulling a sweater over a child’s head. Then another woman, older, standing at a sink. Something about these glimpses made the breath catch in my throat, and I had to look away, but before too long the houses were gone and we were out in the countryside again.
Divided Kingdom Page 2
