by H. S. Cross
—If you must know, I was blubbing.
Let them eat that.
—If you’ve any more disagreeable questions to put to me, perhaps you’d be good enough to wait until I’ve returned from the bogs, unless you want to chaperone me while I go and be sick.
He detached himself from the wall. His good arm wrenched open the door, releasing him from that poisonous room. He stalked away without reply from his friends, without protest, without perception, without succor.
* * *
He needed to run around the playing fields, to sprint cross-country, to bang about in the scrum, to climb ropes in the gym, to bowl cricket balls, to swing bats, to do anything other than stand jittering in the washroom. Things were even more bashed up than he’d feared, but this destruction couldn’t be blamed on anyone else. He was the basher. The Spaulding Smashup had been his fault, too, even though he hadn’t meant to do it.
Had he?
The truth was he couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking before he charged Spaulding. Had he been thinking at all? He remembered the slick of Spaulding’s arm against him, blocking his try. He remembered the flash from Spaulding’s eyes as he did it. He remembered …
What if this shadow had been with him all along, only of late growing dark enough to sense? What if he had plowed into Spaulding in some desperate bid to outrun it?
He tried to remember a time without it, but that time belonged to the other life, the life full of life, when they brought her breakfast in bed on her birthday, when his father kissed her in front of them, when her laughter overflowed everything, like the icing on the cake she made for herself and let him—but he couldn’t think such things or he would shortly cease to breathe.
His father referred to the current age as some sort of sea journey. He would speak of being so many months out, as if he had boarded a sailing vessel and embarked on an odyssey of unknown length. Nine months out; two years out; forty-two months, one week, and three days out—the expression made Morgan want to punch someone’s nose in. Was it the grave self-importance that enraged him, or the metaphor itself? If one was out, then presumably one could come back in. When would they turn the ship around?
8
Two o’clock was surely the most hopeless hour of the night. Years after lights-out but ages before dawn, never had madness felt so close at hand. Rational thought had long ago departed—who knew how many months out it was now—abandoning Morgan to a body more agitated than he could endure.
That body was now in fact slipping from his bed and moving somnambulant from the dorm. He felt aches, stabs, drafts, but the body paid them no mind. He watched, almost curious, as the body repaired to the changing room, where it stripped off pajamas and donned mufti before continuing in stocking feet to the study. He observed, now quite curious, as the body gathered items from his drawer: money, wristwatch, and, most peculiar of all perhaps, the small, soft-bound volume Silk had given him that last night, the night they’d sat together in the study after weeks of not speaking; the night Silk had told him the secret of the poacher’s tunnel; the night Silk had … not said goodbye, but failed to say it.
Morgan had never precisely understood why Silk had given him Stalky & Co. as his fag book. Silk had claimed that Gallowhill had given it to him, and in fact the penciled initials G.G. could be found inside, but why after everything would Silk have parted with it? And why, so long escaped from Silk, was Morgan now stuffing it into his pocket?
He followed as the body quit the study and made its way downstairs. There it turned in—peculiar—at the cloakroom, where it sought out his overcoat, scarf, and cap. It even—extraordinary—rifled through Holland’s overcoat for Holland’s gloves, the only ones known to exist in the House.
He had nothing better to do, nowhere to be, so he accompanied the body as it laced up his outdoor shoes, unlocked the garden door, and strolled across the moonlit playing fields to the poacher’s tunnel, where it began the routines of gaining entrance to the woods.
Whatever could its purpose be? It couldn’t be making for the Keys, as surely it knew that establishment was closed. It could only, Morgan realized with growing excitement, intend one thing. Finally, someone had recognized the bitter, bursting truth—that there was nothing left for him at that school, or anywhere in the east, west, or north of Yorkshire. Finally, someone had taken steps. Finally, someone was acting!
Until this moment he had classed running away with the histrionics favored by his sister Emily. One of his earliest memories was of Emily storming off to her bedroom after shrill confrontation with their mother, packing a bundle, and Running Away.
—Don’t bother coming after me! she’d cried over their mother’s protests.
This had been when they lived in the country, in the cottage at Longmere, and he had a mental picture of his father returning home shortly afterwards (on a horse?), consoling their mother, and then departing on the horse (with Morgan and Uncle Charles?) to search for Emily. They found her in a glade nearby, and Father had sent Uncle Charles back with the horses while he stayed to Reason with Emily. Morgan had a memory of riding his father’s horse back to the cottage and announcing that Emily had been found! Safe and sound! Emily and Father returned, and their mother prepared a special tea with iced buns.
His legs were not striding through the woods in search of a special tea. His mother was no longer making buns of any description, his father no longer rode horses, and Emily had gone and married Captain Cahill. His legs were striding through the woods in pursuit of something altogether undemonstrative and compulsory. His legs were striding for one reason only: to shore up his sanity.
But how? The station lay in the opposite direction; what’s more, his money would take him only a few junctions down the line. Surely the body did not propose to trek on foot to their destination? He may have traversed the Cheviots at the age of nine and survived Dartmoor blizzards before that, but how many hungry miles would it take to escape Yorkshire? Were they headed for London? Home, as his father called it? Decidedly not. If Yorkshire held nothing for him, London held less than nothing.
He hungered for somewhere distant, somewhere epic, somewhere full of valleys, mountain ponies, beacons, Brecons—Wales? Wales! Ancient Cambria, land of his father’s mother’s people! The body gave no acknowledgment, but Morgan knew he had discovered its secret. For Wales they were bound, though plainly they weren’t going to walk the whole way, not with three shillings sixpence in their pocket. The path would lead them to Fridaythorpe, but there was nothing in that village beyond a public house, a church, and a post-office shop, all in the middle of precisely nowhere.
The post-office shop! He aha’ed to let the body know that he was onto it.
—So that’s it, he said aloud. The post-office van!
They were to hitch a ride in the back of the post-office van, like some self-mailing parcel, posting themselves on to the next destination, Doncaster perhaps, and proceeding thusly to their terminus beyond England’s western border. He smiled in triumph as they plunged deeper into Grindalythe Woods, later into the night, farther from the Academy and his friends, who had ejected him like so much rubbish from a life raft, farther from everything known—ten minutes out, a thousand paces out, half a mile out, out, out, and out.
* * *
The clock on the church was stuck at half past seven. Beneath the dial, words mocked, Time is short, eternity long. They made him want to punch someone again.
The walk through the woods had warmed him, but it wouldn’t last. He tried the front and back doors of the Keys and found them locked. This he considered unfair. What possible reason could there be to lock anything in Fridaythorpe? The post-office shop he found similarly inaccessible, though the mailbag languished on the stoop awaiting early collection. How utterly typical. The post office they locked, but the mail they left unattended in the night. People everywhere were idiots.
An unholy racket like the sound of a tin shed collapsing dispelled the quiet of the night. He ducked
down a passage between the post office and the adjacent block of houses. Pressing his back against the damp wall, he rubbed his shoulder, now sore from being out of its wrappings. The noise grew louder, and he realized it was no collapsed shed but merely a cat fight amongst dustbins, loud enough to wake the dead.
He slid to the ground and held his arm against his chest as a part of his mind carried on jauntily with its caper: He must stay hidden down yonder snicket, in case the cats roused anyone. He mustn’t be caught just as his adventure was beginning. He could watch for the van, and then, oh, what ripping yarns he’d have! He’d outgrown ripping yarns long ago, of course, but even Stalky grew up to stalk in India. If he was bound for Wales, it could only be because his full-grown courage demanded broad horizons. It was a shame the post bag wasn’t big enough to fit inside of. That would have been the best plan; instead, he’d have to wait for the driver to load the bag and return to the cab before he slipped in the back. Oh, it would require timing, exquisite timing, and although it might hurt quite a bit given his tedious arm, he would prevail. He would, because that was the only turn his story could take!
As this corner of his mind prattled, he felt fatigued. A light flicked on above the post office, startling him to his feet and driving him farther down the snicket. He unlatched a gate and scarpered into the garden behind the houses. Presently, a woman in dressing gown emerged from the back of the post office and began to upbraid the cats. Other lights came on, in the house belonging to the garden and in the one next door. Morgan stayed hidden until the woman went back inside, but his mind continued painting a dashing picture of hitchhiking across the countryside, of food stolen from dustbins—unfortunately, the cats had got to Fridaythorpe’s—of Huns thwarted, rescues achieved; even Stalky’s attack on the Khye-Kheens would pale beside the campaigns that awaited him.
In the middle of the garden, there was a boulder surrounded by a patch of dirt. Morgan sat down on the rock and let his head rest upon his knees. He had no intention of falling asleep; he was merely huddling to conserve warmth and to rest his arm. His mind demanded he keep an ear for any approaching vehicle. Wearily, Morgan agreed.
When Emily ran away, it was daytime, and spring, and she left carrying a cloth as if for a picnic. She ran away demanding that no one follow her because she had perfect confidence that someone would. Not only someone, but the one person she wished to follow her, their father. She had probably performed the entire drama to force a crisis, a kind of closeness through confrontation with the person she trusted and loved and needed.
There was no one Morgan could expect to come after him. Even if the Academy could stir itself to realize he was missing, it would be midmorning at the earliest. He could not expect his father to come north looking for him. Even if someone filed a missing person report, how much interest could the constabulary take? He might be a schoolboy, but boys his age worked down the mines, in shipyards, in a hundred and one trades across the land. Soon he’d even be able to vote in elections, should they ever deign to occur. In all likelihood, the Academy would dispose him for bunking off.
But his father would worry, and so would his sisters, inconsolably. When they finally found him, Veronica would tear strips off him and then start all over again in the morning. She would make him feel wretched, as wretched as he deserved. Silly, vain, pathetic.
Though what should he do instead? Return to the Academy, haul himself back through the woods, back to the House, the dorm, and the two he had lied to? (And wasn’t he the worst sort of liar, the kind everyone believed…?)
Morgan raised his head and saw that all the lights had gone out, save the one in the house whose garden this was. The curtain lay askew as if someone had pulled it aside and not replaced it properly. He could see a wall and a bookcase, but nothing else—except for a garden door, which was opening and revealing a man, a man in dressing gown, a man who paused on the threshold and gazed into the darkened garden, a man who stepped off the stoop and padded across the wetted grass in slippers, towards him, a man he knew.
* * *
His body would not move.
Mr. Grieves stopped, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown, and looked at him. Morgan looked back.
—Come on, Mr. Grieves said.
He beckoned as if nothing were amiss, as if there were nothing to refuse, nothing to resist, as if it were perfectly natural for him to fetch Morgan from his garden in the middle of the night.
The body did not ask permission but uncurled itself and stood. Mr. Grieves walked alongside, a silent companion across the swath of grass. At the door, Mr. Grieves gestured for Morgan to precede him. The body, rogue agent, stepped into the passageway and up a tilting flight of stairs to a door, which Mr. Grieves opened, admitting them to his rooms.
—Sit down.
The body did as Mr. Grieves bid it, collapsing into a wooden chair at a small table. Mr. Grieves retired to an alcove, where he lit a gas ring and put a kettle on to boil. He filled a toothglass from the tap and set it in front of Morgan. Morgan gazed at it and felt Mr. Grieves gazing at him, as if examining him for damage. It was cold in the flat, almost as cold as it had been in the garden. Morgan pulled the muffler over his mouth and ears, sleeves over fingers. The air from the room no longer touched him. Presently he would wake in his bed and ordinary life would resume, dry, heartless, but recognizable.
The kettle whined. Mr. Grieves assembled tea things: a pot wrapped with a flannel, unmatched cups, one chipped, which Mr. Grieves took for himself after wiping the other for Morgan, a tin of sugar, a nearly empty bottle of milk brought in from the windowsill.
—You drink that.
Mr. Grieves gestured to the toothglass and then rooted in the open shelving for another tin, water crackers, which he poured carelessly into the lid and set on the table. Dry crackers and water felt oddly appropriate, and under Mr. Grieves’s gaze, Morgan drank and ate. His tongue seemed enlarged, its sensibility magnified, detecting the lead of the pipes, the lime and peat of the water, even the dust that must have lined the glass. As he emerged from the cocoon of scarf and coat, he began to sense the outlines of the place: cold, shabby, even more so than the studies back at the Academy. The floorboards here wore a rug, but it didn’t look as though it had ever been beaten out, and it was unraveling along one side. Unlike the studies, Mr. Grieves’s windows possessed drapes, but they, too, looked thirdhand and possibly moldy. The bed, which Morgan glimpsed through an arch, was larger than his own, but its mattress sagged in a way that made him think of a backache. Only the books on the shelves seemed cared for. Mr. Grieves’s clothing hung out of sight somewhere, with the exception of a pair of socks, which dangled below the drapes, clipped in place by the window. Morgan could see no radiator, only a gas heater with a meter on it, like the one they’d had at that dreary hotel in Bournemouth last Christmastime. Beside the armchair languished a pile of exercise books. Mr. Grieves’s satchel bulged. A clock chimed the quarter hour, a clock that must have been ticking all the while.
Mr. Grieves unwrapped the pot, poured out the tea, stirred in milk and sugar, and plunked the cup before Morgan with a determined expression.
—Right, he said, I think you had better start talking.
There was a lump in his chest, and his blood had slowed to something hot and viscous. Irresistible, to sit there at Mr. Grieves’s table, the man’s eyes upon him. No one would disturb them. Mr. Grieves had nothing, apparently, to do besides cross his fingers around his teacup and let his thumb caress the chip.
—I didn’t do it, sir.
Mr. Grieves’s eyes widened.
—I didn’t know about it either. I know who did, now, but I didn’t then. I promise.
Mr. Grieves scrutinized him, his eyes deepest brown, impossible in the light even to distinguish from black. And as he stared, a chill crossed Morgan’s scalp, announcing something uncanny. His mouth had spoken without his leave, but Mr. Grieves did not ask what he meant.
I didn’t do it would most rat
ionally refer to the explosion in the chemistry lab. It would be reasonable to say such a thing when caught out-of-bounds in the middle of the night. It would be reasonable to inform Mr. Grieves that he was not running away from punishment. But Mr. Grieves was not looking at him as though Morgan were speaking of the explosion. Mr. Grieves was looking at him as though they were speaking of the thing that had come between them three years ago and never quite departed. Mr. Grieves’s expression was in fact a tell, one that confirmed Mr. Grieves still thought of that time and bore a grudge.
However freely Morgan might lie about any number of things, he was telling the truth about the Gallowhill business. He had not taken advantage of Mr. Grieves’s friendship to ruin the dig. He had not insulted Gallowhill’s memory by engineering the prank. He hadn’t known who did it when Mr. Grieves questioned him that day.
—I believe you, Mr. Grieves said at last.
A weight, one Morgan didn’t until that moment know he bore, seemed to slip from his shoulders, as he felt the pilfered gloves slip from his overcoat. He picked them up and set them on the table beside the cracker lid.
—I stole these, he said.
—From whom?
—Holland.
Mr. Grieves examined one of the gloves.
—Won’t Holland miss them?
Morgan nodded. Mr. Grieves regarded him again.
—Why did you steal them?
—I needed them.
—Why?
The bald simplicity startled him, and he felt a pleasurably painful freezing like he used to feel before entering Silk’s study for Accounting. Every other grown-up framed questions with commentary, sarcasm, rebuke, or with a clear indication of the answer they required. Mr. Grieves’s query in its nakedness was at once more curious and more exacting than any Morgan could have expected.
—The cold, he said.
—And are you cold now?
Morgan dipped a fingertip into his tea and found it too hot.
—Drink that, Mr. Grieves said.
