by Paul Watkins
Sipping our tin mugs of tea, we watched in silence as the box smoked and then burned, and a while later we saw a trickle of molten metal dripping through the grate onto the stone floor of the fireplace.
One week later, the school year began. I found myself once more in the opening faculty meetings, while the headmaster and various department heads droned on about changes to the school regulations, the dining hall dress code, and compulsory chapel attendance. I breathed in that particular smell of the school, the way it always rested strange and unfamiliar in my lungs those first days back, before I grew used to it again.
On my way out of the meetings, I was accosted by a delegation of groundskeepers, wanting to know if they could have their winch back. I told them that their winch was on the side of a mountain in the Alps. That same day, I went out and bought them a new one, and the sphinx-faced men were satisfied.
Then the students began to arrive and I was soon caught up again in the mad rush of boarding-school life, with no time for uneasiness, or even to reflect on the weeks since I’d set out on the journey.
The time for that reflection came in bits and pieces during the months ahead, along with the realization that I still liked teaching. The comfort and sense of purpose I found in this chaotic existence was not something to feel guilty about, as I had once worried. Rather, I took it as a sign that I was built for this work, even if it was not always easy and not always enjoyable, either. This was what I had been put on earth to do, I decided, so I thought I’d stay around awhile, instead of moving on.
But things were not the same since Darcey Kidder had moved on. Higgins, Houseman, and I mourned her loss in a way that was both stoic and sincere. We told ourselves that it was meant to be, and reminded ourselves that we had predicted this from the first day she walked into our lives. There was something rather poetic about the way she had always been unreachable. Without ever having known it, she had laid claim to a piece of our hearts, which we gladly gave away and saved for her alone.
It was always amazing to me how, even after decades of working at the school, faculty members who left or retired faded so quickly from our thoughts. It was one of the necessary brutalities of life at a school like this, that the memory of the school was only ever four years long. After that amount of time, the entire student body would have rotated through, and we among the faculty, caught up in the daily rush of things, also tended to forget.
Darcey was different. Maybe she didn’t deserve to be, but Higgins and Houseman and I didn’t spend too much time trying to figure it out. We just agreed that it was a fact. If we could have said exactly why she’d had such an effect on us, the effect probably wouldn’t have happened at all.
On those nights when we played blackjack up in Higgins’s loft, the Busch-Rathenow binoculars, with which we had watched her lights switch off behind the curtains of her house, remained untouched. When yet another nameless lodger moved in to her old house, those lights came on again. Then it was our own curtains that we drew, rather than be reminded of the brief and hopelessly one-sided love affair we’d had with Darcey Kidder.
Later that year, I was the best man at Stanley’s wedding.
Watching the two of them go down the aisle, I was forced, for the first time, to take seriously the idea that a bachelor’s life awaited me.
But the gods were not finished with me yet.
It was just before the Christmas holidays began, when St. Vernon’s hosted its annual dance with the girls of Islington Ladies College. This was usually a miserable experience for Higgins and Houseman and me. Our job was to make sure that everything ran smoothly, that the ladies were not interfered with, that the band, made up of old men who never seemed to get any older, did not get drunk and fall over. Out of a grim sense of duty we danced with the ancient school nurse and the laundry lady and the headmaster’s never-smiling and all-judging wife.
I was propping up the wall over by the drinks stand, wondering when Higgins would return from having left to “check on something” over an hour ago.
Houseman, in his traditional role as punch server, was, for the benefit of the adults, expertly spiking the otherwise nonalcoholic punch served out to the students. For this, he employed such deftness that no one but those receiving their rum-inspired drinks ever caught on.
The headmaster appeared, a blue silk cummerbund shimmering around his waist. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Another year goes by.”
We nodded and made halfhearted mumbles of agreement.
“I’ve got an early Christmas present for you,” he continued.
I wondered what this might be, and hoped it was not one of the overstocked domed glass paperweights with the school logo, which were bought in bulk and given out at every opportunity. I already had about six of them, and they lay like crystal blisters on my desk.
My huffy thoughts were interrupted by the headmaster, who announced that another teacher had just been hired for our department.
On numerous occasions, we had petitioned the board of trustees for another faculty member to help with the workload. Each time, our request had been “deferred.” This meant, according to Higgins, that they didn’t have the guts to tell us no outright, but that we had no chance in hell of actually gaining a new colleague.
“God, that really is good news,” said Houseman, unable to hide his astonishment. “I thought it was another bloody paperweight!”
The headmaster did not smile at this, of course.
“That’s fantastic, sir,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation.
“Yes,” drawled the headmaster, uncertain whether to comment on Houseman’s lack of school spirit or whatever category of cheekiness his remark fell under. After a moment’s hesitation, he breathed in sharply and said, “Well!” to show that he had let the matter pass.
Houseman stirred the sudsy punch and, almost imperceptibly, sighed with relief.
“There she is now,” said the headmaster. He jerked his chin towards the entrance of the hall.
And there stood Darcey Kidder, as if she’d never gone away. She was looking around nervously, but she smiled when she saw Houseman and me. She walked straight over, weaving past the dancing couples who plodded woodenly across the floor.
“I heard you were dead,” she told me with a smile.
“I get that a lot,” I replied.
Houseman held out a glass of punch. “Tamam,” he muttered when she took it from his hand.
“Darcey,” I said, “please don’t go away again.”
“You’re one to talk,” she answered.
I leaned across and kissed her on the cheek.
It was at this moment that we realized the music had stopped. In fact, everything had stopped. The entire hall, including the old men in the band, were standing completely still and staring at us.
The first person who spoke was the headmaster’s wife. “Well, it’s about time!” she announced.
The band took this as their cue and struck up another song.
We danced, Darcey Kidder and I.
And so began a lifelong revelation that loving someone at a distance is fine for poetry and novels, but loving a person close-up is a far more satisfying occupation.
The following year, we were married.
For a wedding present, Higgins gave me his Busch-Rathenow binoculars.
Houseman’s present was his declaration that he would allow me to go on living, despite the fact that I had broken his heart.
Darcey and I stayed at St. Vernon’s. We had two children, a girl and a boy. Eventually, the boy became a student at St. Vernon’s. Our daughter went on to Islington Ladies College, where she was mortified to have to dance with me each year at the St. Vernon’s Christmas dance.
Twice a year, I led groups of students on hiking trips to Scotland, Wales, and the Lake District. Sometimes even Stanley came along, and it was thanks to him that the students were soon calling me Auntie, a name that stuck with me for the rest of my teaching career.
When not in the mountains, Stanley
and I continued to spend our Friday evenings at the Montague. In time, however, our wine ration of a bottle each was reduced to one between two and, eventually, to a single glass of port. This we raised in silent tribute to the ghost of Mr. Barber, whose portrait now hung on the wall.
When my father passed away, I inherited the house in Painswick. I meant to sell the place, but when Darcey and I went back to settle the estate, and stood among the roses in his garden, we decided that we couldn’t let it go. From then on, that was where we spent our summers, and as our children grew they alternately loathed and loved the time they spent in that quiet Cotswold town.
At the end of every summer, on the evening before I was due to return to school, I walked up to the beacon hill and said good-bye to the place before returning to the city. The sun would have gone by the time I reached the top. I would smell autumn in the air. The valleys below would be blanketed in mist, which always settled on the landscape at this time of year. Here and there, in places where the mist was thin, the lights of houses would glow in the dark. The white sheen of the fog would remind me of the way the glacier had looked from the summit of Carton’s Rock. At times like this, I’d remember how thoroughly the gods had dismantled the life I’d once thought was perfection. And then I’d say a silent prayer of thanks for the new life they’d given me instead.
Now the only climbing that I do is on the staircase in my house, being too frail for anything else. It used to be that people asked me what I loved about those distant summits I’d once reached, but now they just ask what I miss.
The answer is that I miss nothing.
The mountains I have seen are deep inside me now.
They touch the sky on the horizons of my mind.
They burn in the miracle light.
ALSO BY PAUL WATKINS
FICTION
Night over Day over Night
Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn
In The Blue Light of African Dreams
The Promise of Light
Archangel
The Story of My Disappearance
The Forger
Thunder God
NONFICTION
Stand Before Your God
Fellowship of Ghosts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL WATKINS attended the Dragon School, Eton, and Yale. He is the author of nine novels, including The Forger, Archangel, and Night over Day over Night, as well as the memoirs Stand Before Your God and The Fellowship of Ghosts.
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