Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  They sat in wicker chairs on the nearby landing, while the passageway emptied. Somewhere Squit had seen photos of Victorian clergymen – men of huge whiskers and sanctity – and the chaplain must be one, he thought. His voice was very deep and soft. ‘Wynne tells me you’ve lost your parents.’

  Squit examined his feet, suddenly afraid. ‘Yes.’ It was nearly true. They were gone into their own time and space. Cyprus was a distant figment on the classroom map, and he had lost count of the weeks before he would ever see them.

  The chaplain creaked forward in his chair. His hands were huge on its arms, flecked with grey hairs. He said: ‘Perhaps there’s something you’d like to ask me?’

  Squit blurted out: ‘Why are they so far away?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t mean to be.’

  ‘Everyone else’s are closer.’

  ‘Yours are close too. You just can’t see them.’

  ‘They’re not close, sir.’ Squit realised this sounded rude, but he did not know how to alter it.

  ‘I’m sure they were good people.’ The priest touched his arm. ‘They have gone to Heaven.’

  Squit said: ‘Yes, sir.’ But Heaven sounded even farther away than Cyprus.

  ‘It’s not in the sky, you know.’ The priest was smiling, but sadly. ‘It’s hard to say where it is.’

  ‘But they can’t speak to me.’ Squit felt he might cry. ‘And I can’t speak to them.’

  ‘That’s right, in this life we can’t communicate with the departed.’

  ‘Why not, sir?’ Squit often spoke to his mother in his head. It was something like prayer. ‘Don’t they hear us?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. Perhaps they do. Because they’re living with God, anything’s possible.’

  Living with God. The words jerked Squit awake, as from a self-created dream. He felt suddenly ashamed. Would he be found out? His eyes stayed fixed on his feet, where his socks and garters had crumpled at the ankles. He realised: no, my parents are not living with God. They’re probably at a cocktail party in Nicosia. He said suddenly, bleakly: ‘I’ll be all right now.’ And then: ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The chaplain got to his feet. He touched Squit’s head. ‘Be happy for them.’ Squit nodded, and remained with lowered eyes while the old man’s footsteps echoed down the stairs to the masters’ front door, and a car engine started up.

  Squit stayed a long time staring at the carpet under his feet, wondering what he was going to feel. Then he turned back into the chapel. He sat down at his place among the pews and closed his palms together as he had been taught. He noticed his hands trembling. He apologised to Jesus for lying, yet felt it was not such a big lie. He found it hard to picture his parents now. He could not fix their faces in any one remembered place or moment, then wondered if they could picture him. He felt a pang of alarm. Surely his mother – whose beautiful eyes could see all round her like a bird’s – could still imagine him?

  He tiptoed to the altar, but the photograph was gone. Beside him the panelled walls disappeared behind dark green curtains, which hung in thick folds from ceiling to floor. Even during services these curtains moved him with half-suppressed fascination and fear. Now he found the parting in them, but his grip froze there. He did not know what lay beyond; but he imagined them opening on to a country of terrible beauty or holiness. For a moment his hands recoiled and fell to his sides. Then, on a near-hysterical impulse, he pulled the draperies apart, and there was the panelled wall only, pale wood, lightly carved, impermeable. He stared at it. The curtains rustled back from his fingers and into place. He returned to his pew and covered his face. And when he looked up again, the strangeness had returned, the sense of another country just beyond reach, and he went on scrutinising the jade-green draperies, baffled and obscurely angry.

  A voice in the chapel entrance whispered: ‘Squit?’

  ‘Yes.’ He did not turn round.

  ‘I thought you might be here.’ Wynne crept into the pew beside him. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  Squit said, ‘No’, but he was, in a way. He looked at Wynne through splayed fingers. ‘Of course not.’ He was amazed at what Wynne had dared do for him.

  ‘Did he help you?’

  ‘He said my parents were living in Heaven.’ Squit felt suffocated here now: choked by the curtains, by his lying. He got up and they tiptoed to the door, where the names of the war dead were lit in silver, and Wynne stopped, staring up at them. Often to Squit there was something other-worldly about Wynne. Now they gazed up at the roll together, as if its names were a discovery. Nobody ever spoke about them.

  Wynne said: ‘Do you sometimes think about being dead?’

  Squit had once decided that he was never going to die. He said: ‘No’, but he felt a stab of alarm. Wynne looked vulnerable, bewitchingly so, with his tumble of yellow curls and his fair, girl’s skin. Squit watched his gaze travelling down the silver names as if he might find his own there.

  When Wynne came to the end, his stare transferred to Squit, very wide and candid. He said: ‘Why are you always looking at me?’

  Squit felt his face burning. He wanted to answer: because you’re beautiful. But it sounded soppy. His eyes were trapped by Wynne’s. ‘I don’t, do I?’

  Wynne said: ‘Is it because you think I’m going to die?’

  ‘You’re not going to die, Wynne. You can’t. I won’t let you.’ He reached out and hugged Wynne’s narrow shoulders. ‘I’ll die instead.’ Sometimes he didn’t know why he said things. ‘Where do you think you’d go?’

  He expected Wynne to say he’d go to Heaven with Jesus. Wynne already resembled an angel. Instead his face clouded oddly. ‘People in India think you just disappear with your corpse,’ he said. ‘Then there’s no more you.’

  Squit felt afraid that Wynne thought this too. He was just going into the ground, like the coffin Squit had seen in the cemetery.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Wynne,’ he said. ‘Tell you a secret. The Serpents are getting into Mr Jarrold’s rooms this afternoon. Guess what? He’s a spy. He’s spying for the Russians.’

  They were clustered at the door long before the appointed time. McMorris held his cap pistol with the ivory butt, and Squit had brought along a screwdriver, he didn’t know why. The Wizard was exultant. He had suspected Jarrold all along, he said. If they couldn’t steal the cipher machine – its cables might pin it to the wall – they could bring down the radio transmitter. It would be a special kind, he’d recognise it. His talk of tubes and crystals dazzled Squit and left the others flummoxed. Now the Wizard ordered Hamilton to watch the door, while he eased it softly open, and the rest of them crept in.

  There was no one in the room. Its air reeked of tobacco. There was a small sofa with two easy chairs, some bookshelves, and a radiogram piled with Benny Goodman records. They peered around them, afraid at first to touch anything. The desk was strewn with papers and drained coffee cups. Their own essays on the Hundred Years War lay still unmarked in a heap of open exercise books.

  Tansley the Wizard made for an alcove behind the desk, where the cipher machine lay half concealed in a wooden frame. Its lines of spindly keys were all that showed. With tense care he pulled it clear of its case, and on to the desk. Then Squit heard a sad, throaty cry. Tansley was staring at it, stony-faced. Its carriage carried the royal coat of arms and an inscribed ‘Imperial 55’. In its roller was a half-typed letter which began: ‘Dear Sirs, in view of my mother’s wish to move house in September, I would request . . .’

  McMorris said: ‘That’s just a typewriter. My dad has one of those . . .’

  ‘Yup’, said Fatboy. ‘That’s a typewriter all right.’

  They gazed at it in silence. Squit didn’t dare look at Tansley. He gently turned the carriage knob as if it might change something, but it only eased the letter out. Now he was afraid that Mr Jarrold would return and find his desk disturbed. Fatboy was starting to snigger. ‘A typewriter . . .’ Then he grabbed Squit’s arm and they peered into the bedroom beyo
nd. The history master’s suits hung disembodied in an open cupboard, and made Squit even more frightened. On the bedside table a framed photograph showed a pretty woman and a young boy. ‘That’s him,’ Fatboy said. ‘That’s his conk all right.’ Squit felt surprised that Mr Jarrold had a mother.

  A deadness now weighed on the master’s study. It seemed to have grown darker, although the sun was still bright on the playing fields outside the window. They were all looking to Tansley, yet he had not stirred from the typewriter, and his face was white. But a shallow step beneath a low window led to the fire escape and the roof, and Squit cried out: ‘Let’s get the radio!’ And the spell was broken.

  They clambered through the window and on to the clashing iron. A warm breeze met them, and a swallow flew out from under the eaves. Squit turned back to beckon Tansley up. But Tansley looked as if he were staring into nothing. He only said: ‘You go’, and remained where he was.

  They climbed over a parapet and on to the flat roof. The windows of their dormitory shone fifty yards away across a void. Squit stepped out gingerly. The roof felt soft and hollow. Here and there the lead beneath his feet had cracked into spidery veins. A solitary deckchair stood open, facing the playing fields below, its canvas wet with recent rain. Beside it an ashtray was heaped with cigarette butts.

  At first they could see no sign of any radio. ‘He may have hidden it,’ Squit said. He hunted round the water tank and behind the chimney stacks, and tried to see under the parapet, feeling dizzy. Then he realised. An empty packing trunk was lying abandoned near the deckchair, and behind it the rods of some leftover construction work stuck out of cement. From their dormitory this assemblage had created the silhouette of the radio he remembered.

  Squit realized this with an ache of disappointment. He did not tell the others. But after a minute McMorris kicked at the rusted rods and said: ‘Hey, these are Tansley’s aerials!’ He was laughing.

  Fatboy came to gawp at them too and exclaimed: ‘So this is Tansley’s secret radio! Tansley the genius! Tansley the thick-head!’

  Then they glimpsed a man walking along the cricket pitch beneath them. They ducked below the parapet and crawled back on all fours to the fire escape. It shook and clanged at their descent, and their fingers slid on pigeon droppings. Squit let the others go ahead of him. He did not want to be the one to tell Tansley that nothing was there. Although he felt sure that Tansley knew already.

  It was from this moment that Squit’s life began to unravel. Jarrold returned and seemed to have noticed nothing, although Squit imagined he looked newly furtive. But the gossamer web of Squit’s friendships started to tremble and tear apart. Tansley struggled to reassert his prestige, but Fatboy and McMorris laughed behind his back, and Squit was disconcerted to feel sorry for him. Tansley said: ‘I still think Jarrold’s a spy’, and Squit suggested wanly that the master might have known what they were planning, exchanged the cipher machine for a typewriter and hidden the radio somewhere; and Tansley was glad of Squit’s arm around him.

  Then two days later came the cricket match. Springdown was to play Cottendale, the nearest prep school, where Squit’s elder brother, thirteen years old, had been named team captain. By the time Springdown’s juniors settled as spectators round the pitch, Squit was seething with confused excitement. It was an afternoon that threatened rain, and Springdown went in to bat under a louring sky. Sitting between Tansley and Wynne, Squit could easily make out the tall figure of Dick fielding at mid-on. Somehow everyone seemed to know he was Squit’s brother, and captain of Cottendale. Even Fatboy came lurching up to Squit, grinning. ‘Who do you hope’ll win, us or them?’

  Squit murmured: ‘Us, of course.’ But he was not sure.

  Fatboy said: ‘I bet you don’t.’

  But Squit felt a loyal dismay as one after another Springdown’s top batsmen were bowled out. He gave up filling in his scorebook. In little more than an hour the home team was dismissed for only forty-eight runs, and came out to field in faded sunlight. But then things started to look up. Cottendale’s opening batsmen were both caught in the slips for a mere two runs, and a ripple of cheers went round the watching juniors. The third batsman was Dick. He came out from the pavilion, his bat casually cradled, and his team set up a hopeful squib of clapping. When Squit saw him walking on to the field, he felt his own heart lurching. One of the spectators cried out: ‘That’s Squit’s brother!’

  Squit alternately hero-worshipped and hated Dick. Dick’s lifetime stance was to find Squit dreamy and stupid. But now, as his brother walked toward the batsman’s crease, Squit wanted him to slog the Springdown bowlers for six. He wanted to be proud of him. And to Squit, Dick carried with him an anguished memory of home. He seemed to walk in from that gentler world and time, drenched in the warmth of their mother and the Cypriot sun, so that Squit’s eyes watered as he watched him, and yes, he prayed he would do well.

  Dick was faced by a damp pitch and a fast bowler, but he survived the first over, and in the second he hit a loose leg-break for a graceful four. Squit clapped furiously, then noticed hostile glances around him, and Tansley nudged him in warning. But slowly Dick imposed himself on the field. He began to hit the ball with lordly composure. Sometimes, just before the bowler’s delivery, he would look about him with studied ease, noting where the deep fielders were, before finding the gap between them, or slicing the ball fast through the slips. The Springdown spectators clapped weakly, sportingly, as they had been told. They could tell their side was descending to defeat.

  But Squit was no longer applauding his brother. He was drowning in a confused sea of dislike and nostalgia. Dick might carry with him the memory of their mother, but he was also, overwhelmingly now, himself. He was flaunting a familiar authority. Squit hated the nonchalant athleticism with which he stroked balls to the boundary, the way he gazed about him after clouting another four, the arrogance with which he acknowledged his team’s cheering with a peremptory nod to the pavilion. Squit imagined him thinking: this is my brother’s school, so it can’t be much use. And when at last Dick was bowled by a flukey off-spin, Squit clapped so loudly that Tansley frowned and Wynne smiled at him for a good sport.

  But a few minutes later the match was over, Cottendale triumphant, and the players mingling in the pavilion for cream buns and lemonade. The games master came up to tell Squit he might join his brother as a special favour. ‘He’s a real W. G. with the bat,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Squit, with no idea what he meant.

  Squit was both longing and scared to meet his brother. The cricket team were all seniors, and he did not know if Dick would even speak with him. It was strange. He wanted to hug him as they used to. But when Dick noticed him, he merely extended his hand, as if Squit were some chance acquaintance, and this gave Squit a pang of loneliness deeper than if he’d been ignored. Within a minute Dick had turned away to talk with the Springdown captain, and Squit resorted to raids on the cream buns. He managed to pocket one for Wynne, another for Tansley, then joined the juniors lingering nearby.

  It was an hour before the games master found him and told him his brother wanted to say goodbye. Then Squit felt a gush of sad warmth. Away from the others, Dick might embrace him in their parents’ world. There was a coach in the front drive, already filling with his teammates.

  Squit found his brother alone in the headmaster’s hall. He looked taller than Squit remembered, alien and important in his cricket whites and blue-fringed blazer. He wore a look that Squit had hated ever since he could remember: taut and sneering. He said: ‘You little squirt, why did you tell everyone that Mum and Dad were dead?’

  Squit stood speechless. His cheeks were burning. He glanced desperately behind him, as though somebody might help. A rooted habit of bluff-calling made him whisper: ‘Who did I tell?’

  ‘You told everyone. The whole school, apparently. Some ginger-headed pipsqueak came up for me to autograph his scorebook and said he was sorry about my parents. I nearly socked him.’

&nbs
p; That must have been Hamilton, Squit thought, who couldn’t keep a secret if he tried. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘Of course I did. I told everyone, you lousy spud. Why do you want Dad and Mum dead? What’s wrong with you? Dad will be furious.’

  The coach started honking outside in the drive. Dick picked up his cricket bat and strode to the door. ‘You can tell Dad I made forty-four runs against Springdown,’ he said.

  ‘Tell him yourself,’ Squit muttered. But Dick was gone.

  Squit stayed in the hall a long time, because nobody came there. It was hung with mounted trophies: the heads of antlered samburs and a moulting leopard. He sat down on a leather chair. The only noises were far away. He thought: How could Dick say I want Mum and Dad dead? No, I don’t know why I invented it. It just happened, and then I couldn’t go back. Tansley says you can kill people by imagining them dead. Tribes in Africa do that. But I’ve never wanted to kill anybody, except Dick. If Mum died, I’d die too, like with Wynne. Now how will I face them all, Tansley and Wynne and the others? They’ll all think I’ve betrayed my parents, that I’ve wanted them dead. I must have, or I wouldn’t have pretended. Why did I do it? Because I enjoyed the way the Serpents went quiet around it, I suppose, thinking me special. And Wynne, of course, how he gazed with those blue eyes, as if he loved me.

  I went out and lay in the long grass that evening, hoping Wynne might join me, but knowing he would not. The undergrowth was whispering with butterflies. I imagined them to be the same as those that fluttered round our cottage in the Troodos Mountains, and that my family were sending them as messengers. One had eyes on its wings, like the butterfly I found on the chapel altar. For all I know, it had seen my mother, and I even imagined it was her. It settled on my hand.

  I heard the voices then. A whole crowd of them, boys running. There were even some seniors. ‘Where’s Squit? Let’s get Squit!’ I saw them through the grass. Hamilton was among them, but he was the only Serpent. One of them shouted, ‘He pretends his mother’s dead!’, and my heart went cold. I flattened my face against the ground. I wondered if I would ever talk to Tansley again, or to Wynne, who had found the chaplain for me. I thought I should stay in the grass for ever, but at last the bell went for supper, and I had to go in.