He might even be dead. He might have been the ‘Doctor’ in the time of Fleming’s father; a legend going back beyond Disraeli and Gladstone to the very founding of the School by Badger the First or further than that. But even if he had never really been at the Abbey he was still inordinately there, a more powerful and frightening personality than any of the boys who had succeeded him.
In the outside lavs where the striped ‘joeys’ could be picked off the surrounding bushes in the Summer, they still pointed out the ‘Doctor’s Mark’ high on the wall of the standups just beneath the never-silent cistern; and whether or not its significance was what they implied, no one, even after three glasses of lemonade had ever been able to reach it.
But the ‘Doctor’ had never been solely ‘funny’. One version of his story was that he had circumvented his expulsion by committing suicide in the indoor baths. He had come down the Brown’s stairs early in the morning, they said, stolen the keys from the Badger’s study and entered the swimming bath whilst it was in process of being cleaned: only two or three feet of water and sediment covered its glazed white tiles; and the ‘Doctor’ had climbed up onto the high board and then dived.
They even said that the little mound in the Toad’s rose garden, carefully tended by his wife Kay, the Badger’s daughter, was not the grave of a dog at all.
Thinking of it John shuddered; no matter what they did to him they should not do that. He would leave instructions as Shakespeare had, putting a curse on anyone who prevented his body from being put on a train for burial in Northumberland on the wide curlew-called moors. To be buried at the Abbey! To spend the rest of one’s life, or rather one’s death, at the School under the shadow of their lovelessness—
“Well?” The Badger had spoken at last; John, or rather the doctor had won.
“Yes sir?”
“I asked you what you wanted Blaydon?”
“Did you sir? I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you. I was told that you wanted me?”
“And you do not know why I should want you?”
“Yes sir, I think so.”
“Well?”
“About the Drill sir, this afternoon.”
“You mean tomorrow afternoon, Blaydon.”
“Tomorrow, sir? I thought it would be this afternoon as usual.”
The Badger blinked. His heart beginning to thump, John realised that beneath him the thin surface soil was already subsiding; in a moment it would give way and he would be deep in the rooty darkness of the trap.
“You are quite right, Blaydon. Drill will be this afternoon as usual for those who have the usual amendment to make. For others, and I believe you are the only one this year to have transgressed so far as to have been awarded the very unusual punishment of two hours drill, it will be tomorrow, Saturday; and Saturday as you know is a half holiday, and will therefore permit of the School Sergeant taking so long a period of detention without dereliction of his many other duties about the grounds.”
“But sir—”
Now that it had happened he realised how false had been his nonchalance of a few minutes before; how loud and unavailing his whistling at the wedding in London where they would all most magically be: Mother, Father, Melanie, his brothers—and Victoria. And the train, the wild train hurtling over the marshes towards the tawny smokiness of London, he would not be on it; he would be here stooped under the shadows like the ‘Doctor’ in the rose garden.
The horror was deeper than tears. He did not want to cry; he wanted to call out loud to whatever gods there were, powerful listening gods who would hear and understand and explain to the Badger and to them all that this was wrong; that no one had any right to behave like this, that the knots in the net spreading out from that one word in Monsieur Camambert’s class, were knots tied by Blind Men in nothing more binding than cotton, and that they should be instantly broken.
But none of this could be said; it went on somewhere behind his eyes as a series of unfinished scarcely visualised pictures, and he realised that just as the Badger seemed to him to be so infinitely old that he was far away on a high hill, he himself must seem just like any ordinary boy to the Badger.
“Yes, Blaydon?”
“Nothing, sir. It was only that you gave me your permission to go to my brother’s wedding tomorrow.”
Could it be that he had forgotten? that it was not a trap after all? The Badger never forgot anything; his memory was as clean as his small cold-bathed body, as crisp as his white cuffs; but perhaps, this once, just this once, he had forgotten.
“You said you’d written to my people sir.”
“So I had.” The words were really sad as though the Badger were more disappointed than was John himself. “But now I shall not have time to write to them again. I shall have to telegraph them at their London hotel.”
“Yes sir.”
“Perhaps before you go, Blaydon, you could give me the address; your father omitted to mention it in his letter to me.
The Russell Hotel, Russell Square; but if he said he did not know it the Badger would not be able to tell them and they themselves might ring up.
“I’m afraid I don’t know it, sir.”
“Really?” He leaned slowly back in his chair so that it creaked. “Perhaps then it is just as well that this has happened, Blaydon; because you would have found it a little difficult, in your ignorance, to meet your parents for the luncheon they had arranged, would you not?”
“Yes sir.”
As clearly as John himself had seen it, the Badger had seen the lie; and he knew that for the Badger it had blotted out the last little chink of light at the bottom of his lair; had confirmed him of the rightness of the latest of his fifty years of actions as a headmaster. They looked at each other dully.
“Very well Blaydon you may go.”
“Thank you sir.”
He ran to the door as he had remembered running to doors all his life; quickly so that he might reach them before his sobs could be heard or the contortions of his face be apparent. In the passage, he closed it behind him and walked, holding his breath, back to the day room.
In the darkness, above the whispers and smuggled laughter of the others, he could hear, in the eaves, the hooing of the wind: wind, which, like thunder travelling down the sky over strange downs and distant towns, might only a few minutes before have resounded over the very roof of the Russell Hotel where the family were staying; where soon they would all themselves be going to sleep.
Even in the midst of their preoccupation, their gaiety and excitement over the family’s first wedding, they must surely have thought of him and missed him a little. Nearer home, he was sure, Mother would never have permitted this awful thing to happen; she would personally have ‘tackled’ the Badger and wanted to know exactly why John was being prevented from coming; and when she had heard the Badger’s reasons she would either have over-ridden him by a storm of vehemence, or undercut him by a sudden display of extraordinary sweetness. She must have been too busy, too concerned with trying to appear smart and happy in front of Prudence’s very London family; otherwise she would certainly have done something; for whenever she could find the time she loved him. She probably loved him as much as Nanny did and a great deal more than Melanie who, of late, had become much too full of herself to love anyone other than Mary, who was just an older and more powerful replica of Melanie herself.
Michael and Geoffrey of course would have accepted John’s situation; they knew what schools were; and as for David, he could scarcely have been expected to remark his absence more than casually. But of course they none of them knew yet that he wasn’t coming; to him his absence from something that had not yet taken place had already begun, for them it would not be apparent until tomorrow, and this time tomorrow night David would be on his way to Madeira with Prudence, to the island where sugar-cane and custard-apples grew by the warm sea in which Marston had learned to swim beautifully, powerfully, like a golden fish.
He thought of Marston, remembered his re
buffs of the morning and in his heart, thudding there behind the fullness of his chest, he felt a sudden warmth, a glow which mounted like a blush through the column of his neck to the still thinking centre of his head. Behind his eyelids he felt this warmth initiating the tiny prickling movements which presaged tears. He was going to cry because tomorrow no one would miss him, neither those who were there nor those who were not; whereas he himself was already missing them.
If the ‘Doctor’ really had crept down those stairs in the morning and gone into the swimming bath while it was yet scarcely day, then he must have done it after just such a night as this. How did they know, how did anyone know what the ‘Doctor’ had suffered first? For anyone to understand why he, John, wept like this, they would have to know everything: all about Victoria and what it had meant to dream in the daylight of seeing her again, all about the wedding, all about the showing-off in the French lesson, the lie to the Badger, the anticipation of two hours under the Sar’nt, the wind that blew from London and the ship that would be sailing for Madeira. They would have to know all this and a lot more he scarcely knew himself; they would have to be God; and even God didn’t care.
The ‘Doctor’ might if he knew; if he were still alive somewhere, either in this world or another; Yes the Doctor might care.
Still weeping quietly, he got out of bed and climbed out onto the half window sill he shared with Figgis in the next cubicle. Under the moon beside the ilexes he could see the rose garden where the ‘Doctor’ must lie. If anyone came, if a shadow formed out there where the shadows were and then moved across the playing field to stand with its grey face smiling up at him, he would not be afraid; he would throw up the window and shout to him eagerly and dive as he had dived, down and down onto the hard asphalt.
He shuddered. Behind him, the rings of the curtain were shaken softly. Someone was there. Not daring to look behind him, scarcely breathing, he waited; and again he heard it, the whisper of metal being drawn over metal; then silence, until someone touched him on his heel. He turned then, his whole skin creeping, his tears trickling unheeded down his face.
“Who is it?” he whispered.
“Shut up! It’s me of course, get into bed you ass; we can talk there.”
Marston’s breath hissed against his ear, and obediently he got down from the sill and scrambled into his bed. Marston got in beside him and having lifted the pillows onto their faces pulled up the clothes high against the head of the bed.
“What were you doing?” he whispered, “peeing out of the window?”
“No.”
“Well, what were you doing?”
“I don’t know—I was just—”
“Good Lord! Are you blubbing?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid you won’t be allowed to go to your brother’s wedding?”
“Yes; partly.”
“You are a kid, aren’t you?”
“No, not really; only you see I had been looking forward to it. I was going to meet—” John hesitated; it was no good, he just could not mention Victoria’s name to Marston.
“Who were you going to meet? Your people?”
“Yes.”
“Well you’ll be seeing them in four weeks’ time, so why blub about it?”
“Don’t you ever want to see your people before the end of term?” John asked.
“Of course I do; but I don’t blub about it. I’ve got my friends.”
“You mean Fleming?”
“Yes—and someone else.”
“Who else?”
“You, of course.”
“Me? Do you think I’m your friend?”
“Of course I do.” One of Marston’s arms came swiftly round his shoulders. “You’re a funny devil, still an awful kid considering that this is your last term, but I like you. I nearly asked you home to Madeira with me last vac, you know.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. If only you weren’t such a wet at games I would have asked you with Fleming.”
“I see.”
Marston’s body was warm against his own, the intimacy of his breathing filled and made wonderful the blackness within the bed. It was unbelievable that everything could have changed so much in so short a time. Gratitude leapt up in him as though a prayer had been answered. A few minutes ago he had been alone, had wickedly longed to die by throwing himself out of the window; and now, in a matter of minutes, he had found a friend, someone whispering to him and understanding him, confessing to liking him and holding him in his arms.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Marston.
“I was thinking about the ‘Doctor’.”
“The ‘Doctor’? What on earth for?”
“I was wondering whether that was his grave in the rose-garden.”
Marston laughed. “You ass! Of course it isn’t. The ‘Doctor’ was expelled years ago.”
“What for?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Was it for—for—?”
“Yes,” breathed Marston, “for this” and suddenly he kissed him softly on the cheek.
John lay still; his delight stealing over him as swiftly as his tears had done, and like them leaving him suddenly cold and shrunken in its wake. But he remembered them and all of the confusion that had accompanied them. If this were wrong then so were they.
“Were you really going to invite me to Madeira last Hols?”
“Yes.”
“Well then I love you, Marston: I love you.”
Marston said nothing, but his arm about John’s neck tensed and for a moment they lay in silence under the pillows. John thought suddenly of Victoria, of the whiteness of her body as she had stood above the lake, and of the softness of her skin against his own as he swam with her to the bank. Girls always wanted to be loved; they were always wondering about it. Men were supposed to love them. But he wanted to be loved as much as she wanted to love. Who was Victoria and who was he? This, he realised suddenly, was what he had wanted all the time; this which was happening now was the measure of his greed for her and its only true expression; and the wedding, the marriage of their two selves, of the self that wanted only to be loved and the self that wanted only to love must end like this. In some mysterious way the self that was him and the self that was Victoria could only finally unite into a self that was them both, in a darkness, a secrecy, and a delight that was like this.
Marston’s hand stole over his chest, stroked the skin over the muscles gently and hesitated. Like a bell alarming a sleeping household something quivered in the rapture of John’s thoughts. At a touch the whole dream of Victoria vanished and the intimation of that other world of weddings and blossom and ships rocking over foreign seas was dissolved like sugar disappearing in vinegar.
He hurled the pillows from him and sat up.
“What’s the matter?”
Beside him Marston also sat up.
“What were you doing?”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Yes you were.” The words spoken aloud echoed from the wooden walls of the cubicle.
“Shut up you fool,” hissed Marston. “Lie down and keep quiet or you’ll get us both sacked.”
He put his arm round John’s neck and attempted to force him back against the pillow. John thrust himself violently away from the strong grasp and with his free hand punched out hard into the shadows beside him; he felt his fist jab and slip on the wet mouth, and, as Marston’s grip slackened, leapt sideways out of the bed. Beside him, as he sought to regain his balance in the darkness, the iron washstand with its contained jug and basin teetered on its three legs, paused, and then crashed to the bare floor. They heard the jug fracture like a giant egg and the immediate wash of water under the bed followed by the steady drip drip from the larger sections of the basin. Horrified and unmoving they kept their positions in the silence and John counted the seconds waiting for the passing of time to make them safe. If no one spoke, if no one moved, if no lights went on; or i
f someone laughed or called out idly for whoever it was to ‘shut up!’ everything would be all right.
“You little turd,” whispered Marston. “You’ve made my nose bleed; in the morning I’ll—”
He was interrupted by the screech of the curtain rings as they were drawn swiftly over the metal bar above the doorway. A torch blazed upon them from the passage between the opposing rows of cubicles and someone stepped on to the wet floor. It was Fisher.
“What’s going on in here, Blaydon?”
“Nothing,” said John.
“Don’t lie, what’s Marston doing in your bed?”
“He was blubbing,” said Marston, “and I came in to see what was the matter and he said he wouldn’t tell me unless I got into his bed with him.”
“I didn’t,” said John. “I tried to kick him out because he was kissing me. I was blubbing, but it wasn’t anything to do with anyone—I was quite happy really.”
Fisher smiled slowly. “So you were quite happy really, and yet you were blubbing? And nothing was going on in here, and yet you’ve broken a jug and had another chap in your bed. One of you is obviously lying, and I think I know which I prefer to believe. Marston get back to your own cubicle—I shall report this in the morning.”
Marston got out of the bed and stood beside him.
“Now look here Fish, don’t go and make a stink,” he whispered urgently. “Remember what we arranged at the beginning of term. This little turd simply isn’t worth a chaos with the Badger. I can explain everything to you if you’ll only give me the chance. Fleming knows about it; we could neither of us get to sleep because of the noise Blaydon was making snivelling round his cubicle.”
In the Time of Greenbloom Page 6
