by Patrick Gale
By chance – she happened to overhear the singing one morning and walked in out of curiosity – she discovered that on three days a week there was a tiny, untrumpeted matins service in the Chantry in the middle of the cloisters. Accompanied by a piano, the sixteen Quiristers, who were trained at the cathedral’s choir school but still part of the Tatham’s foundation, sang the day’s morning psalm and a hymn. There were a few prayers and a Bible-reading in between. It never took longer than twenty minutes and was slotted into the slovenly, burnt-toast half-hour between breakfast and the day’s first period. There was no one there but the Chaplain, Reverend Harestock, Mr Sutton the choirmaster at the piano and a don she did not know who always gave the reading. He was younger than most, very tall and suited with a quiet elegance that seemed to elude his colleagues. His voice was thoughtful, easily floated in the echoing, vaulted space, and it was almost as though he were reading to himself or, indeed, as though the service were happening purely for him, a restrained celebration for the good of his aristocratic soul.
As it wasn’t communion, little was required of Sophie but to sit or kneel where appropriate and to listen. It was meditative and peaceful and she found herself keeping it a secret from both Lucas and Kimiko. The second time she attended, the mystery don nodded to her in acknowledgement as she sat across the aisle from him. He looked, she decided, like a dark version of Peter O’Toole. Once she had been several times, she began to worry that she might be apprehended, as the only other congregation member, to give the day’s reading but she never was so perhaps the service was the don’s peculiar after all.
Lucas grabbed her one morning during the long walk from Stinks to the language labs, bursting with news. A boy in Dougal’s had been called out of class and sent home to London the previous afternoon because his father had died from a heart attack.
This was news in itself. People’s parents or siblings died rarely enough during term-time for it to mark them out for the rest of their time at school as boy whose sister died of Hodgkin’s or girl whose mother had a fatal car crash. Because of its rareness, bereavement conferred a sort of glamour on the afflicted, akin to the whispered spell cast by the equally rare blow of divorce.
More newsworthy still, however, was that Mr Headbourne, the ferocious maths teacher who was also housemaster of Dougal’s, had called Lucas into his study last night to impress upon him that when this boy returned, Lucas was to take steps to befriend him.
‘But you can’t just say Boy, be that person’s friend! You don’t even know him, do you?’
‘Well,’ Lucas confessed, ‘I know him a bit. We’re in the same year so we’re on the same table at meals so we talk a bit. But he’s not a friend. We’ve got hardly anything in common. He plays cricket, for Christ’s sake, and likes going to Deb. Soc. and he sings in the choir. He’s a bit of a hearty. But maybe he doesn’t have any other friends or something. Headbourne said he’s going to bend the rules for us so I can take him home for tea in the afternoons and stuff.’
‘You’re joking!’ Sophie heard how envy made her voice squeak.
‘And there’s worse. Headbourne had rung up Heidi and without either of them consulting me first, probably because she assumed he was a friend, they’ve agreed that Somborne-Abbot can live with us and be a temporary dayboy until he feels ready to board again.’
‘Are you pissed off?’
‘Well I think they might have asked me first. He’ll be sleeping in my room because Carmel still won’t let anyone use hers, selfish cow. Actually she probably doesn’t care and it’s just Heidi not wanting to drive her further away than she feels she has already.’
His words were indignant but she heard the excitement in his tone that he had been swept up in a drama. He had been brushed by bereavement and acquired a touch of its glamour without the grief.
Charlie Somborne-Abbot. She could not put a face to the name, whatever prompts Lucas gave her over the next few days, that Somborne-Abbot sang in the choir, on the right as you faced the altar, that he was blond and apple-cheeked, that he had played the bingo caller in The Dark Tower last year. The surname was familiar but in a school run on surnames, where lists of the things were everywhere, painted on honours boards, carved on memorials and written in the front of second-hand textbooks, it was easy to be familiar with many without knowing their owners by sight.
The only detail Lucas was able to supply that was sufficiently intriguing to flesh out Charles Somborne-Abbot as something more than a generic, stuck-up hearty was that he had already been linked to a scandal. Before coming to Tatham’s he had been at the cathedral choir school, enjoying the virtually free private education that came with winning a place as one of Tatham’s Quiristers. So from the ages of eight to thirteen he had been coming into daily contact – through choir – with older boys at the ‘big’ school. Apparently one of these had become obsessed with him to the point of writing him compromising letters. The child Somborne-Abbot had either been sly or flattered enough to hoard the letters and his parents found them. There was a red-faced enquiry and, although nothing was proved and the older boy was punished with no more than a caution, a dramatic clampdown ensued, stifling any further fraternization between Quiristers and their elders. The choirboys, who had previously moved around as an exuberant gang, chatting with any older boys who came their way, showing off and getting wildly overexcited, took to passing between Chapel and choir school in a silent crocodile, like so many pious novices.
Inexplicably, no change was made in the plans laid down for young Somborne-Abbot and he remained marked down for the same Tatham’s house as the youth who had written the inappropriate letters. And as Lucas.
‘Naturally when people heard he was coming, they expected some kind of pint-sized Delilah, a sort of Lolita in flannel shorts, so they were a bit put out when this big, fat –’
‘Fat? You didn’t say he was fat.’
‘Well, no. Not fat. But big-boned. When this big boy arrived with his clompy shoes and cricket bat and … Not a temptation. A Labrador, not a Saluki. And he hasn’t really fitted in yet. He’s a bit keen to please and, well, you know how people are. And I expect it’s only now he’s here that he realizes the boy who wrote him the letters is a completely weird, sociopath spaz and not at all a good character reference. Oh Christ. But who knows? Maybe you’ll like him.’
The moment she saw Charles, when Lucas brought him across to Schola for tea, she recognized him. They had never been in the same class for anything – he was three divs below them and something of a plodder, apparently – but she had noticed him in the choir stalls when she joined the end of the queue to receive communion and should probably have been staring reverently at the altar or humbly at her feet. He had a lot of straight blond hair, very white skin, dark, bovine eyes and full, rather feminine lips. He wasn’t as overweight as Lucas had cattily implied, but he had childbearing hips and one of those teenage faces that was going to be in a transitional phase for longer than most. Just when she thought, Oh yes, really quite goodlooking, a kind of plump ripple passed over it and a sulky, dim little boy was revealed.
‘Sophie, this is Charles,’ Lucas said.
‘Charlie, please,’ said Charles and shook her hand, which felt a bit odd in someone of their own age. ‘How do you do?’
‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, laughing at him and letting go. ‘Have you two come for tea?’
‘Please!’ said Lucas. ‘Hello, Nurse.’
Lucas had become such a regular visitor by now that if he found Sophie out when he called, Nurse took him into her rooms for tea and a lemon cupcake.
‘Hello, Trouble,’ she said and looked enquiringly at Charlie. ‘Hello,’ she added.
‘Nurse, this is Somborne-Abbot.’
Her face crumpled up in sympathy.
‘Oh yes. I’m so sorry about your father.’
Rather than saying that’s quite all right or something else blandly subject-changing, Charlie stammered something and raced back out into Flint Quad.<
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‘Oh dear,’ Nurse sighed. ‘Shouldn’t I have said anything?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lucas told her. ‘He’s like this a lot.’
‘Shouldn’t you go after him?’ Sophie asked, amused despite knowing better.
‘It’s exhausting. He can’t cope with anyone mentioning it and he can’t cope with anyone saying nothing and treating him like normal.’
‘It does seem a bit soon to send him back,’ Sophie said.
‘His mother insisted, apparently. She and Headbourne agreed it was best for him to get back into the swing of things as soon as possible. But he’s terribly tense. I’d better go.’ Lucas pulled a face. ‘Fancy helping me with him a bit?’
‘Isn’t three an awkward number?’
‘Not when one’s a girl, surely? Please.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
So they left Nurse and went in search of him. He had stalked off but not so far that he couldn’t be found. She saw, to her dismay, that he had been crying and suddenly felt sorry for him. He was on the burly side and his sports jacket had been chosen with an eye to leaving room for growth, which had the effect of making him look overwhelmed by tweed.
Lucas’s instinct in bringing her along was a cunning one. Unlike Lucas, whose mother had made him at ease around women, Charlie seemed stuffed with old-fashioned, chivalrous ideas about putting women first, walking between them and traffic, deferring to their opinions in everything. When she was around it was out of the question for him to play up, as Lucas put it, because of his duty to entertain Sophie. Rather than make him endure Nurse and the curiosity of the Daughters’ Chamber with his eyes still puffy from grief, she suggested they go to the tuck shop. There she ordered a milkshake and the boys, who had reached the age of being permanently hungry, asked for milkshakes and plates of egg and chips.
The tuck shop was run by two middle-aged women, one stick-thin with a wheedling, flirtatious voice at odds with her stony, smoker’s features, the other so fat with dropsy that her ankles overflowed her shoes and she could not walk and talk simultaneously for wheezing. They greeted Charlie by name and he drew them both out, asking the thin one what flavours of milkshake she had and bringing a worrying flush to the fat one’s face by admiring the charm bracelet that was puckering her wrist. Seconds after they left, he began imitating them with raspy accuracy.
‘Raspbwy, Stworbwy, Chocklik, Poynapil, Furniller, Lemming or Loyme. Daren’t take it off or I’d never [wheeze] get it on again.’
His face looked nothing like either woman’s but he had a professional impersonator’s blandness and mobility so that he somehow suggested first one then the other by subtle modulations of eye and lip. In the light of his hypocritical friendliness towards them it was monstrous, reprehensible and one of the funniest things Sophie had ever seen. Building on their laughter and shouted suggestions, he worked the two phrases up into an impromptu sketch of the women’s home life. They were sisters, he had decided, and the thin one waited on the fat one’s every need and was actually plotting to kill her with over-consumption.
‘She’ll feed her till she bursts!’ Lucas suggested.
‘No,’ Charlie said quietly. ‘Just the once, and very fast, she’ll find a way to make her run.’
And Sophie saw at once what the dynamic of their relationship was to be; however hard Lucas tried, Charlie was officially the funny one.
She did not warm to him at first but she at least tried to dismiss her indifference as petty jealousy. The boys were in none of the same classes apart from Latin, Lucas’s weak spot, whereas Sophie still saw plenty of Lucas on her own during teaching hours. Charlie developed a technique, however, for popping up between them when they were changing classrooms. He also came to monopolize Lucas’s Sundays. He had politely declined the offer of becoming a temporary dayboy, about which Lucas was so relieved that guilt made him vulnerable and he let Heidi invite Charlie for lunch time and again.
Sophie went to Tinker’s Hill with Charlie just the once but found the worry that he was forever on the brink of satirizing the Behrmans, whom she sort of loved by now, was unbearable. He would go back to London in the holidays, she reminded herself. She could see lots of them then and have Lucas to herself again.
But then Charlie began to seek her out on her own. He found out her favourite corner of the library, in the classics section, which was comfortable and sunny and usually deserted. He always checked his presence would not disturb her then sat, quietly working, across the table from her. Sometimes Lucas came with him but Lucas was bending the rules and slipping home to study more and more because he found the rustling of other people’s papers distracting. When he did try working at their table, Charlie could madden him in minutes by sighing in a certain way or subtly sliding Lucas’s books out of the neat order in which he liked them stacked. Sophie tried not to find his teasing funny but she was so glad it wasn’t aimed at her that she couldn’t help smiling. He brought out a side to Lucas she hadn’t seen before, a fussy, old-womanish side she supposed must be connected to his being gay.
When they were on their own Charlie often just watched her taking notes or making calculations. From the corner of her eye she could see him turn to her and it made her self-conscious and extra neat. But if she then looked up and caught his eye, he would smile with a sweetness that disarmed her, or even shake his head with a kind of wonder. Surrounded by clever people now, she had grown unused to admiration.
As she had guessed from his placing in relation to his age, he was not one of the clever ones. The choir school had been an efficient forcing house and drilled him for the Commoners’ entrance exam successfully enough but now, like a lot of the wealthier Commoners, he was beginning to flounder.
One Saturday, when the two of them were working in the library, she caught him poring and sighing over the same page of maths problems for nearly an hour. At last, when he slipped out to go to the lavatory, she grabbed his textbook and saw he was on a chapter she had covered two terms ago, on algebraic fractions. She tore a sheet from her exercise book and worked quickly down the page, scribbling down the answers for him. His shifty delight when he saw what she had done reminded her unexpectedly of Wilf, whose homework she had often completed as a matter of course.
‘But now you’ve got to work out why they’re right,’ she said, the way she would with Wilf. ‘They’ll know you’ve cheated if you don’t show your workings.’
He made her promise not to tell Lucas and then it all came out, how he was under tremendous pressure from his mother, who would not hear of him doing any A levels but scientific ones when the time came.
‘But if you’re no good at those –’
‘I’ve got to get good. I have to get good enough Os to go on the C ladder to do sciences.’
‘What if you refuse?’
‘She’d put me in a state school. She did that to Tim. That’s my brother.’
Sophie was about to ask if state education would be so very bad then saw his expression and knew it would. Even she would find it difficult going back after a year of all this, and Charlie Somborne-Abbot with his clompy shoes and cricket bat would be eaten alive.
So she took him on as a sort of challenge, figuring that teaching him what she had already mastered was a good form of O level revision. When she pointed out simple truths, such as a fractions being just another way of expressing a division sum, he laughed for the pleasure of suddenly understanding something and she saw how he had learnt his maths parrot-fashion, crippling his understanding of it by storing the information as a series of formulae – fractions are done this way, algebra is done that – without ever daring to relate the contents of one compartment to another.
When she finally succeeded in making him work a problem out correctly for himself, he was so delighted that he leaned across from his chair to kiss her. It was only a shambling sort of kiss, on her cheek, and nobody was around to see them but there was something defiant in the look he gave her as he sat back that suggested it wasn’t so
different from the kiss she had demanded of Wilf. Something about his look stopped her telling Lucas, as she might easily have done to win back some territory at Charlie’s expense.
It became a Saturday afternoon fixture. He would find her in the interval between his playing football and having to meet Lucas at Glee Club and she would explain something he didn’t understand and when they were done, or nearly done, he would kiss her.
The second kiss was on the lips and the third, partly at her instigation, was a full-on, Wilf-style snog. There was no one around but they were taking a crazy risk. Someone might have come in. A don might have been watching from the path below the window where she liked to sit. The risk made it all the more exciting and they kissed and kissed, half falling out of their chairs, then leaning against the bookshelves, heedless of how they sent copies tumbling. They were both sufficiently detached to break down and laugh occasionally at the over-dramatized ease with which they could excite one another, mimicry blurring into clumsy lust. His tracksuit and football things were not spotless like Lucas’s but smelled of mud and sweat and his skin had a smoky, slightly hammy smell like the fancy delicatessen near the Butter Cross where Lucas led her sometimes to buy German chocolate biscuits and things Heidi liked. And in her excitement and confusion, this taste of the meat the Behrmans never ate, or even mentioned, for all their sophistication, became part of the secret’s flavour.
