by Paul Watkins
“I wanted you to meet a friend of mine,” said Stanley, turning towards me and neatly blocking out the last man, who took his cue and vanished.
Helen Paradise stared at me for a moment, her lips pressed together and her forehead lined with concentration. “You’re William Bromley,” she said. “The climber!”
“That’s right,” I replied.
“I thought …” she began.
“Thought what?”
She blinked, as if I had breathed dust into her eyes. “Well, I thought you had died in the war.”
“No.” I tried to smile. “Still here.” I was confused as to why Stanley had not mentioned me before, especially since the topic of mountaineering must have come up between them.
“Still causing trouble!” exclaimed Stanley, determined to keep the mood upbeat.
“It’s just that I heard a lot about you and your climbing before the war and then nothing afterwards.” She sipped at her champagne. “I just assumed.”
“No, well, I …” I began, but had no idea what to say next. What she’d just said had derailed me completely. I stared down at my shoes. “I’ve just not really been around much. I mean …” I glanced up.
She was no longer listening.
Instead, she and Stanley were staring at each other, lost in some happy, wordless conversation of their own.
Seeing that my reason-for-leaving excuse was not required, I made my way across the crowded room.
But then a voice called after me. It was Miss Paradise. “You’re coming back?”
Stanley’s eyes fixed upon mine, telling me I’d better stick around.
“Of course!” I smiled. “I’ve just got to sort something out. I’ll be back in a minute.” I strode away, as if I knew where I was going. In truth, I had no idea. Two minutes later, having wandered down some passageway near the kitchens, I ended up in the men’s bathroom, where I found myself a quiet stall and sat down to have a smoke. I’d go back out in a minute. After making a silent promise to myself that this was the last time I’d let Stanley talk me into anything, I rolled myself a cigarette. I had just fished out the box of matches when the door swung open and I heard the voice of Henry Carton.
“I told you to leave her alone!”
Then I heard Stanley. “It’s none of your business.”
My lips pressed down on the cigarette. I breathed in the heavy, sweet smell of unlit tobacco.
“It doesn’t look right.” Every time Carton spoke, he sounded like a train announcer. “You’re a host here at the club. You’re supposed to be looking after the guests. After all of them. Not just traipsing around after one of them and ignoring the rest.”
“Uncle Henry, what does it matter how it looks? I love her.”
Carton clicked his tongue, then launched into something else. “Why the hell aren’t there any new magazines out on the tables?”
“The subscriptions have expired, Uncle Henry.”
“Well, renew them, for God’s sake, why don’t you?”
There was silence, but even in that quiet, I could hear the air being drawn into Stanley’s lungs.
Then Stanley exploded. “Because one month from now, the club won’t even exist! Didn’t you see the empty seats in the lecture room tonight? Why don’t you just face it, Uncle? The board of trustees has got it in for us. Every week they make you sign away a little more of the place.”
I had never heard Stanley mention any of this before. I knew that the club was not the same grand place it had once been, but I’d had no idea they were in such trouble. I sat very still, the cigarette balanced between my lips, box of matches resting in the palm of my right hand, and one blue-tipped match pinched between the thumb and index finger of my left hand, ready to strike.
“What the hell am I going to do?” asked Carton, punctuating his words with the splash of peeing in the urinal. “Without this place, I’m nothing.” There was a rustle as Carton did up the buttons on his fly. “Come on then,” he said. “Let’s go and get this over with.” His heels clacked out over the tiles. The door opened and a sound of chatter rose and fell as the door closed again.
I imagined Stanley following him, eyes cast down and loping like a scolded dog. Believing they had gone, I touched the head of the match to the box, ready to strike. But then I heard a sigh.
Stanley was still in the room. “You’ve got it the wrong way round, you old fool,” he mumbled. “It’s without you that the place is nothing.”
Those were the first compassionate words I’d heard him say about his uncle in a very long time.
The door thumped shut a second time, and then I knew I was alone. But in the quiet of that room, his words lingered like the fluttering of tiny wings.
After smoking half the cigarette, I stood and flicked the butt into the toilet, where it fizzed and floated, turning circles.
I didn’t have it in me to go back into the room and make conversation. Stanley was doing fine on his own and Carton did not need me to tell him good-bye. Out in the hallway, I turned right and exited the building through a side door, which deposited me in an alleyway. A streetlamp threw a harsh glare down the alley, which was slick and black, as if the bricks and cobblestones had all been sprayed with oil.
As soon as I stepped into the alley, I saw a figure kneeling on the cobblestones. It was a man. He wasn’t exactly kneeling. He was resting on one knee, right arm steadying himself against the ground. His head hung down. A trickle of saliva stretched from his mouth, as silver as the strand of a spider’s web.
Then I heard a voice, which I recognized immediately as Carton’s.
“Get up, damn you!” he said. “Get up or get it over with!”
Even though I couldn’t see Carton, I had no doubt it was Stanley he’d been cursing and that Stanley was the one down there on the cobblestones. Carton was standing over him, hidden in the dark. My face went hot with anger. All that talk he had given me about his bloody lungs and how weak he was now and he still had the strength to knock his own flesh and blood to the ground. I stepped towards them, ready to help Stanley to his feet. And if I didn’t have my temper back by then, I decided, I might just knock Carton about a bit and give him some of his own bloody medicine.
I looked into the shadows, trying to spot Carton, but he wasn’t there. Then I realized that the man on the ground was Carton. Stanley was nowhere in sight. Carton had been swearing at himself.
The anger evaporated. Now all I felt was confused. “Sir?” I said, and touched Carton on the shoulder. “Do you need some help?”
Slowly, the old man raised his head and looked me in the eye. “Damn it,” he said. “Damn everything.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He nodded, turned his head, and spat. “Help me up,” he said, his voice gone faint and hoarse.
I helped him to his feet, noticing as I lifted him by the arm that he had laid down a handkerchief on which to rest his knee.
The cigars which he kept in his breast pocket had fallen to the ground. I gathered them up and handed them over.
Carefully, he put them back where they belonged and tapped them into place with his finger.
Then I picked up his handkerchief and gave it to him.
He touched the cloth against his mouth before putting it away in his trouser pocket.
“Do you need a doctor, sir?” I asked.
Carton shook his head and at the same time gave a great rumbling cough, which ended with a rattle from his throat. “Nothing to be done. The show’s over.”
We were both looking down the alleyway towards the street, where the silhouettes of departing guests flitted beneath the lamplight.
“Heading home, were you?” he asked hoarsely.
“Well, I’ve got to teach tomorrow, and there are some papers I haven’t marked yet.”
He grunted. “I suppose I must have sounded a bit daft, cursing myself like that.”
“No, sir. Not really.” I felt sorry for him. For the first time I understood how
hard his life had become.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I get so frustrated that I can’t do things anymore. I want to go back to climbing mountains. I want to undo all that mess I got you into back in the war.”
“You didn’t get me into it, sir.”
“But I didn’t get you out of it, did I? And perhaps I should have. I ought to have known.”
“Nobody could have known, sir.”
“Sometimes I think Stanley knew.” The words came out very slowly, almost as if he had forgotten how to talk. “Instinctively, I mean. He’s got good instincts, that boy.” In the streetlamp’s silver light, cut through with blind man’s black as jagged as a shard of glass, I could make out a sad smile upon Carton’s face. “That new woman of his, for example. At his age, I’d have fallen in love with her myself.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, but the truth was, I could not imagine him being in love with anyone, or anyone being in love with him, either. He seemed too much larger than life for that, even broken down as he was now.
“It would be easier for me,” continued Carton, “if Stanley was simply a dead loss. Then I could content myself with giving him the occasional pat on the back and a box of cheap cigars at Christmas. But he’s not a dead loss. He’s capable.” He nodded in agreement with himself. “He can do anything he sets his mind to. It’s his father, my own brother, who spoiled him. Let him do anything he wanted and, what’s worse, got him out of doing anything he didn’t want to do. Since my brother’s death, I’ve tried to mend things, but I think perhaps it is too late. I tried to get him interested in mountaineering again, but he seems to have made up his mind about that.”
“No one would climb with him,” I said. “Not after Sugden spread the word about his refusing to come with us. Stanley could have gone off on his own, but he was too proud for that. So he just walked away.”
Carton looked up and down the alleyway, as if to see his nephew disappearing. Then, slowly, he turned back to me. “And now that you’ve walked away as well, Bromley, what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you sane?”
Instinctively, I reached into the right pocket of my jacket, pulled out the old ration tin, and felt the rubbed metal in my hand. “I don’t know if I am keeping sane, sir. To be honest, I’m not sure I am keeping going. My thoughts never used to go back there. To that place.”
We both knew what I was talking about.
“But lately,” I said, “things have been reminding me.”
The way the light struck his face now, Carton’s eyes had disappeared. What remained was only the darkness of empty sockets. He looked like the skeleton who, I realized, had in all likelihood become his closest companion apart from Stanley.
Carton let go of my shoulder.
I felt the warmth where his hand had been. Now I shuddered in the cold.
“Don’t let the demons drag you down,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Carton didn’t answer my question. Instead, he gently set his hand against the side of my face.
Against my cheek, I felt that his fingertips were callused, the way all mountaineers had callused hands. It was as if, in some secret way, he had tricked the world and never quit his climbing.
“Do they still call you Auntie?” he asked.
“Sometimes, sir. Those who are left.”
“Of course,” he said. Then, almost in a whisper, he added, “You’ll be fine. You wait and see.”
Before I could ask what he was talking about, Carton turned away into the dark. A rectangle of light appeared in the wall as he opened the door, and disappeared again as he closed it behind him.
Alone in the alley and hidden by the night, I felt an unfamiliar lightness in my heart. Part of me could not help believing that Carton’s words would come true, even if I did not know how, simply because it was Carton who had spoken them.
For the first time in as long as I could recall, the simple act of drawing breath into my lungs became a pleasure. It was as if, for a moment, I had been set loose from the confines of my body, free to drift above the rooftops of the city and out among the hilltops of the clouds.
FIVE
I WAS SITTING IN the faculty lounge at St. Vernon’s, slumped with a lukewarm cup of tea on a tired leather couch. Miss Kidder, the headmaster’s assistant, was delivering mail to the faculty pigeonholes. I studied the way her dress rode up her calves as she stood on her toes to reach the higher boxes. The dress was off-white with little red flowers printed on the cloth. Her short black hair was stark against the pale skin of her neck.
“Would you like some help?” asked Higgins, who sat in a mirror image of myself on the couch against the opposite wall.
We’d just had our lunch and, with half an hour still to go before the next class, Higgins and I were trying not to fall asleep. Houseman, on the other hand, had wangled his class schedule so that he had the next period off. He lay dozing on a wooden bench behind the table in the corner, a copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico over his face.
Higgins and I did not bother to lower our voices, because Houseman could sleep through anything. One night, we’d gone into his room, which was on the ground floor of the faculty housing block. The two of us had carried his bed, with Houseman in it, out into the middle of the playing fields. And that was where he’d woken up in the morning.
“Would you like some help?” repeated Higgins, making no effort to get up.
Miss Kidder turned and glanced at him. “No, thank you,” she said, and flashed him a humorless smile.
When she left, Higgins would have something to say about that smile.
It was understood that not only Higgins but Houseman and I, too, were in love with Darcey Kidder. Each of us had settled on a different tactic to win her heart. Higgins chose the route of polite conversation, which never worked because he ended up talking to himself. Houseman played hard to get, which so far had proved completely effective, although not in the way he was hoping.
As far as I was concerned, she was so beautiful that I could barely bring myself to look her in the eye. From the first time I’d seen her, she’d had, in the delicate contours of her face and the electric blue of her eyes, a beauty that seemed so familiar that I felt sure I must have met her before, even though I knew I hadn’t.
We had all agreed that we didn’t stand a hope in hell with Darcey Kidder. Sooner or later, someone with better prospects than three underpaid teachers would come along, and that would be the last we’d see of her.
Secretly, I refused to give up hope. Instead, I prayed for a chance to be alone with her, away from the magnifying glass under which any rumor of love among the faculty was placed. But those chances were hard to come by, and the risks of being made into a fool were great on either side. The time will come, I told myself. An opportunity will present itself. The hard part was learning to be patient.
I heard footsteps in the hall.
A moment later Stanley appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Stanley had never stopped by St. Vernon’s before. The fact that it was a school seemed enough to make him steer clear of the place. He looked a little flustered. “Where did you disappear to last night?” he asked me. “Helen and I searched all over the place.”
Rather than go into it just then, I introduced him to Higgins, who nodded hello over the rim of his chipped and brown-stained tea mug.
Darcey Kidder took the opportunity to duck out. The clip-clop of her feet faded away down the corridor.
“That there is Houseman,” I said, pointing to De Bello Gallico.
Houseman’s eyes flickered open, a flash of mahogany brown, then closed again.
“Looks like he’s laid out for a wake,” said Stanley.
“Ah,” sighed Higgins. “Quid dicam de ossibus? Nihil nisi bonum.”
Stanley fixed him with a look he reserved exclusively for people who quoted Latin or poetry or anything in any foreign language.
>
Higgins was not paying attention. Instead, he leered at the pigeonholes, as if Miss Kidder were still standing there, returning the desire in his stare.
Stanley and I walked out into the school courtyard.
A line of boys emerged from a classroom and shuffled by, clutching their armfuls of books. One by one they greeted me.
Stanley watched the little troop go past, a combination of pity and disgust whittled into the creases around his eyes. When they had gone, he turned to me and asked, “How on earth do you remember all their names?”
“It’s not that hard,” I said.
“School,” said Stanley, and shuddered. “Well, I’m not calling you Mr. Bromley, except when I am drunk or about to get that way.”
“And I will not assign you any homework.”
He winced. “Homework! God. I’d forgotten about that.”
I was about to say that he had been forgetting about it for as long as I had known him, but he had obviously come here on another matter, so I let the moment pass.
We walked out of the courtyard and onto the playing fields, where the groundskeeper was busy repainting the lines of the cricket pitch with a one-wheeled machine that looked like a cross between a plough and a baby’s pram.
At the far end of the fields, ranks of chestnut trees lined the horizon like green clouds.
The peaceful scene drew a sigh from my lungs.
But Stanley did not sigh. For him, the world of academic institutions was racked with painful recollections.
I was used to this uneasiness in people who came here from the outside. I’d felt it myself when I’d first arrived at St. Vernon’s. I had never given any thought to teaching before and had only taken the job to buy myself some time before moving on to somewhere else. The longer I’d waited for the answer about what that somewhere else might be, the more I’d realized that the war, and the changes it had brought to my life, had removed not only a plan for the future but even the future itself.
I woke up each morning surprised to find that I was still alive. This phenomenon had thrown me into a permanent state of amazement. The smallest things, like the blue flame balanced in the old spoon in which I melted black polish for shining my boots on Sunday afternoons, or the smell of toasted granary bread, or the sound of a distant train clattering along the tracks in the middle of the night, would bring to life in me a bewilderment that lasted for days. Such apparently trivial details, I had to remind myself, had long since been taken for granted by most people around me, or else had never been noticed at all.
