by Patrick Gale
Heidi wanted it to be a romance more than anyone. In the way she stage-managed brief, just-we-girls moments, in the cakes she baked, in the little compliments she paid, there was an inexplicable sense of crossed fingers and clutched straws. This puzzled Sophie because Lucas might have been sensitive and bookish, a reader rather than a footballer, but he was hardly a pansy. To her outsider’s eyes, at least, he was exactly the boy a marriage like Heidi and Simon’s would produce.
Simon wasn’t handsome – Lucas’s looks came entirely from Heidi – but he had a worldly polish and an attractive combination of confidence and attentiveness she had not encountered in a man before. In their quiet conversations he taught her that good looks were not the only way a man could attract. He would never have been so crude as to flirt with her but in a myriad small ways – wrinkling his eyes when he smiled at her, filling her glass before he filled Heidi’s, coming out to the front path when she and Lucas left – he stirred a sense of the adult she might become. Given time and felicity.
EASTER HOLIDAYS
(fourteen years, three months)
Her second holiday from Tatham’s came as even more of a shock than her first. The atmosphere in Wakefield House had changed as completely as if more than half the inhabitants had been replaced. Wilf had gone off the rails, wrecking his bike, getting drunk, being excluded from school for punching a teacher he accused of being a poof and, as part of this rebellion against his gentle former self, had unearthed a girlfriend, Jackie, whom nobody liked.
Jackie was scrawny, ginger-haired and older than him. She was at least nineteen. She worked in MacFisheries and drove a clapped-out VW Beetle, the distinctive roar of whose engine seemed to cause the household to take a sharp intake of breath whenever it entered the street. She called Wilf Willy. She wore so much of the scent she called Reeve Gorsh that it lingered in a room long after she had left. It lingered on Wilf so that even in her absence he was marked out as hers.
Jackie made the tactical error of treating Margaret and Kieran like borstal warders rather than offering the courtesy due someone’s parents. Visitors were not encouraged because there were all the other children to think of and when they had asked Wilf to bring Jackie for a meal she squandered the privilege, spending the visit kissing him and playing with his hair, which had wound everyone up. So he went out with her and stayed out. Margaret and Kieran’s powers of veto were limited by law and common sense. There was a house curfew, for the oldest, of ten p.m., which Wilf regularly broke now.
‘I can’t keep him in against his will or he’ll just run away,’ Margaret said when Sophie complained. ‘And he’s too old to punish by saying no TV or no ice cream. He’d just laugh at me.’
Instead the adults were pursuing a policy of stifle-by-encouragement, greeting Jackie’s every appearance with cries of welcome and asking so many friendly questions about her when Wilf was around without her that she appeared to have taken up the share of their interest that should rightfully have been his.
Far from being pleased to see Sophie back again, Wilf barely greeted her when he passed her on his way out and it was left to Kieran to introduce her to Jackie. But it wasn’t just Wilf who was cool. There was a distinct reserve in Margaret and Kieran’s manner towards her, as though they had agreed in advance not to make a fuss of her or single her out in any way for the scant month she was back home. It took a week for her to realize they were upset at her not having spared one Sunday in the term to come home.
It had not occurred to her she would be missed. She was tempted to make up some lie about visits home having to be instigated by letter from the adult involved – which was half the truth – but decided not to insult Margaret’s intelligence. Instead she simply apologized and said there had been a lot going on. Margaret was aghast at the thought of appearing manipulative and hugged her and said of course there was and asked her about it. Instinct had warned Sophie off talking about Lucas and his parents so she talked about Greek and bell-ringing and TatCoFo while peeling potatoes for that night’s supper. Something of their old, comfortable relations was restored.
With Wilf taken up with the demands of Jackie, and Lucas on holiday in Venice with Heidi and Simon, Sophie consoled herself with the Mary Renault novels Lucas had lent her. She had been too busy with set texts to read them during term. For the next three weeks, as the gardens and parks of the city gave themselves over to spring, she lost herself in the loves and rituals of ancient Crete and Sparta. As he had promised, the novels were well researched enough to spare one shame at their slightly trashy blend of sex and danger.
She had no idea when the Behrmans’ trip to Venice would be over and didn’t like to turn up uninvited and risk being seen by neighbours – the girl from the wrong side of town peering through the letterbox of their empty house. She had no phone number for them and they were ex-directory. She never needed to ring Lucas during the term because they ran into one another every day and it had not occurred to her to make other arrangements.
She received just one postcard from him, a detail of a painting by someone called Giorgione that showed a bunch of young men from behind as they leaned over a parapet. It said only Weather is here, wish you were lovely. Too many bells. Making me homesick. L.
Missing him, hooked by the books he had lent her, she sought consolation in the city library, scouring the fiction shelves for more of the same but found only Henry Treece’s equally sexy but less ambivalent Electra and a hauntingly violent novel by James Reeves about Hephaestos. However it was Renault’s The Bull from the Sea that coloured her dreams. By the time she called in at Jago’s for the new term’s books, she was dreaming about being the one lithe, flat-chested, pre-pubescent girl in a team of beautiful bull-dancers at the court of King Minos.
‘Bleak House, Authority and Challenge, French Idioms for Today, Catiline, Mr Johnson and Things Fall Apart,’ announced Miss Jago, ticking off the titles against Sophie’s name with one hand as she slid the stack of dog-eared volumes across the counter with the other. ‘Whatever do you read for pleasure?’
‘Mary Renault,’ Sophie told her brightly.
She received a look of unmistakable pity in return, which stayed with her as she carried the loot back to Wakefield House and set her worrying that Lucas had lent her the novels for some purpose she was too dense to pick up.
She began to read Bleak House on her last night home. She was swiftly irritated by the dutiful pieties of motherless Esther Summerson and mentally resisted the violent shift from the pre-Christian Mediterranean to smog-bound, Dickensian London. She used Lucas’s card as a bookmark. It was the first piece of his writing she had received and the picture seemed a small window onto another world.
CLOISTER TIME
(fourteen years, four months)
In the Tatham’s calendar the summer term was called Cloister Time because, weather allowing, it was the term when dons were permitted to conduct classes in the open air, and the fourteenth-century cloisters by Chapel and the School of Voysey memorial cloisters thrown up in the thirties were the most popular venues for this. Impromptu classrooms also sprang up on the verandas of the greater and lesser cricket pavilions, beneath the towering plane trees across from Brick Quad, in the Warden’s Garden and on the rowing club’s landing stage.
This was the time of year when Sophie had first seen and been smitten by Schola and, after the chill and mud of Lent, the romance of the place was revived for her. Biology classes seemed to revert to Nature Study. The jacket and tie rule was waived for dons and boys, which made everyone look younger and happier. Whereas in the Winter terms, afternoon school didn’t begin until 4.30 to allow daylight time for sport and was conducted largely by artificial light, in Cloister Time afternoon lessons began, rather sleepily, after lunch and were done by four. With the long, light evenings this gave the impression that every day, not just Tuesday and Saturday, was a half-holiday.
Schola lost much of its sternly monastic atmosphere thanks to the custom of lugging chairs and sofas
out of chambers to follow the sun around the quad, where swallow dung was added to coffee and other upholstery stains. Being outside, the sofas created spaces where Daughters were free to socialize with Scholars, but many preferred the chaste pleasures of the rose garden. There they lounged in old deck chairs whose baked mildew scent was overlaid with Ambre Solaire as girls tried in vain to revise and tan simultaneously.
Because of the flesh on display, these garden sessions were entirely off-limits to boys, which drove them, Lucas included, to a crazed pitch of fantasy and left Sophie torn. But there were compensations. Sixth-form Daughters shed their hauteur and mystery with the season, drawn down from their studies by nostalgic habit and banana sandwiches. Their presence checked the surliness and cruel tongues of the fifth-formers and it was like being part of a large, dauntingly clever family. Sunshine gave Nurse prickly heat so she sat in the shade in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, offering counsel or correction where required, basking in youthful collusion and her own, hinted-at wealth of worldly experience.
It was repeatedly pointed out to Sophie that this would be her only summer without exams so she should make the most of it but she found herself envying the revisers their shared sense of purpose and apprehension and enjoyed allowing herself to be roped in to test older girls on the long lists of quotations or data they had memorized. The nuggets of Homer, higher maths and art history awakened a kind of covetousness in her. People moaned, because moaning was expected and confidence was as frowned upon as smugness, but the underlying tone was essentially happy and excited.
For a Saturday morning div class, the last of the morning as usual, Mr Micheldever limped out ahead of them to sit in the sweetly scented shade of a lime tree in the Warden’s Garden. He set them a relatively easy essay for that weekend’s task then had them spend the rest of the class taking it in turns to read Bleak House out loud. The book was starting to draw Sophie in and she did not know how long Lucas had been watching her before she noticed. They exchanged half-smiles then she lay back to stare up into the tree’s canopy because she wanted to smile properly and wondered if she had ever felt so entirely and simply contented. That was all. It was no more than a moment but within a few hours it was haunting her like a dream image that refused to yield its significance.
Lucas was busy that afternoon, unable to avoid a house athletics meeting and then she had a bell-ringing practice where Mortimer made them play through hundreds of changes until her head was dizzy with the effort of concentrating and her arms ached. Then Lucas had to sing in Glee Club, which she had once again refused to join, so she didn’t see him again until that night when, as usual, he sat in the Chapel gallery while they rang before the evening service.
He seemed preoccupied. She sat beside him and twice during the short service found him staring across to the ringing-chamber where the chess players were hunched over yet another game. Unusually for him there was a greasy red spot coming up on his chin and she sensed how bitterly he resented it. He prided himself on his good hygiene, she knew, and seemed to regard spots as a moral shortcoming.
As they walked down the tower afterwards, she had to hurry to keep up with him. She was suddenly stupid with insecurity because nothing had been said about her coming home with him for lunch the next day and she couldn’t mention it unless he did. And he didn’t. He said nothing until they reached Cloister Gate then, instead of his usual cheek-peck, he gave her an awkward sort of rub on the shoulders and muttered, ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ and turned away.
Itchen, the porter, had already turned off the few lamps around Schola Field leaving only the dim one that lit the Slipe until morning. The night had clouded over.
‘Okay,’ she said as Lucas disappeared. ‘’Night.’
But then she was angry, as she had never been with him before, because suddenly his turning up tonight to watch her ring and his inviting her to Sunday lunch seemed like a tiresome obligation for him, not an honest pleasure. He had avoided her eye as he spoke. And he was right. There was something deadly in the repetition of family lunches. What was it for? Who were they fooling? He had never said he loved her. They had never kissed properly. Not like her and Wilf. She had a glimpse of herself as a wretched, clingy friend, like Kimiko had been with her. Just like Kimiko; a friend whose clinginess was somehow a convenience.
So she hurried after him. She would lie, pretend she hadn’t managed to finish that night’s task and needed tomorrow to work on it. One lunch cancelled would break the deadly pattern for them both and make it easier to cancel the next. She could send a postcard to Heidi apologizing.
Then she froze. He had abruptly changed direction. His way home lay along the flint-edged path up an avenue towards the art school and sanatorium but instead he had turned left and was skirting the cloisters, following their high wall towards the gateway that led to the concert hall, the rowing club and the Warden’s Garden.
Growing accustomed to the darkness now, she tailed him as far as the gateway and the sounds of the river that separated the garden from the Schola buildings. Beside the gateway the river was noisily channelled into a mill race under what had once been the school’s combined flour mill and wash house. The building was now the damp accommodation of a junior staff member, a groundsman or lab technician. Lucas had barely passed through the gate when a light came on above the mill house’s door and a man emerged to dump a bag of rubbish in a nearby dustbin. Sophie remained stock-still, pressed into the shadowed side of a tree. Lucas must have frozen too for the man noticed nothing. Looking up as a slow rent appeared in the cloud, he lit a cigarette and inhaled with narrow-eyed relish a few times before tossing the rest of the cigarette into the mill race and returning inside.
She waited for the light to turn off but the glare continued for what felt like minutes. Unable to wait, she edged forward into the gateway and looked around her. Ahead, across an elegant bridge, lay the modern concert hall and the footpath that followed the river to the rowing club. To the left lay the dark shapes of the Warden’s Garden which she could fill in from memory: scrupulously flat lawn, a lush herbaceous border, trees whose boughs brushed the grass and made sticky chambers behind curtains of leaf. To her left stretched the east wall of the cloisters, then Chapel’s Jesse window, then the backs of Schola buildings that included the Daughters’ Staircase and, beyond that, the Warden’s Lodgings. The only doors onto the narrow riverbank path on the Schola side were the Warden’s own and a small arched entrance into the cloisters that was always bolted from the inside.
There was neither sign nor sound of him. He was in a strange mood, she decided, and perhaps had clambered over the gates beside the concert hall to take a long route back to Tinker’s Hill. Or perhaps he had taken the river path and was sitting on one of the wooden bridges in a fit of poetic melancholy.
She stole back through the gateway to the safer darkness and walked briskly around the cloister walls. Schola was rarely quiet before midnight. A sort of peace descended during the hours of burrowing-down but even that was regularly broken by outbursts of hilarity or the sudden shouts or jeers of duty prefects. The moment these study periods ended, music took over, a cacophony, as heard from Flint Quad, of warring record players and tape decks. From nine-thirty, when the first years were meant to head up to bed, a headphone rule was enforced but this merely meant that recognizable music was replaced by the enigmatic, too loud bursts of singing-along from the people listening.
Many of the chambers were adapted cellars or store rooms and had vaulted ceilings that magnified the human voice and threw it out into the night in confusing ways. There was often laughter, rarely kind, and as she passed Cloister Gate on her way back into the quad, the short laugh she heard might have only seemed to come from behind her.
It was nearly ten-thirty. She was breaking several rules being out here and would have to use all her cunning to make it up the stairs to her dormitory undetected; the freedoms accorded bell-ringers stretched only so far. But the laugh was unmistakably Lucas’s,
dry and rather high and unrelaxed.
She glanced into the Slipe but there was no one there but a small boy of no account bouncing a tennis ball on a racket. As she turned towards the cloisters there was a short burst of ‘Bennie and the Jets’ from the nearest chamber swiftly drowned out by some indignant swearing then relative silence. Cloud had covered the moon again but the light at the foot of the bell tower staircase was on and reached a small part of the cloisters nearest Cloister Gate, enough for Sophie to get her bearings and follow the rest of her mental plan of them. She had walked around them so often she knew where the old statues were that leaned against one wall and where to step out from the wall to avoid walking into the huddle of empty sarcophagi.
The moon came out again, like a stage effect, and she saw Lucas in the corner farthest from the entrance, just yards from the little door that gave onto the river bank. Lucas had his back to her. He was standing very still, facing out through one of the cloister arches into the little garden around the Chantry in the centre. She had stared for a few seconds before she saw there were arms holding him in place. He was kissing someone, she realized, who was sprawled within the arch, back braced against the stone.
She froze, unable to move until she could see more and understand. Then they broke off to change positions.
He was kissing Jonty Mortimer. Jonty Mortimer was kissing him.
It wasn’t the kissing though that drove a piece of steel into her heart. Kissing at their age, even kissing between boys, she imagined, could be unfeelingly experimental. She had demanded Wilf kiss her with the same scientific curiosity with which she had once repeatedly touched the poles of a radio battery to her tongue. But when Lucas reached up a hand and touched Mortimer’s cheek with a tenderness that made the older boy take the hand in his and bury his face in its palm, she knew she was spying on love, not sex, and had no business to be there.
