Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “What then?” For Caspar the tension of this conversation was becoming unbearable; he hated hearing Winnie confess to such feelings.

  “Matrimony itself. The state of matrimony. That is what I am rejecting—what I must reject.” She looked speculatively at Caspar. “If you really have never been in love yet, I wonder if you know the cost of it?”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t pay that cost for something worthless.”

  “I hope so, Steamer. By heavens, I hope it doesn’t prove worthless—to give up home for it if necessary, and certainly to give up the love of a father, and of a husband. My life had better be worth it.”

  “I’ll go and see what Boy’s doing, I think,” Caspar said.

  Chapter 28

  When Boy heard what had happened to Mary Coen—or that small part of the story Caspar had vouchsafed—he knew he was to blame. Even Uncle Walter had said that when a decent girl, even a servant girl, got carried away by that terrible passion, it was an honourable man’s duty to remember why men had been made the stronger of the two sexes. And if Uncle Walter, who was such a dreadful old reprobate himself, said that, surely Dr. Brockman would indorse the maxim a thousand times more strongly—except that chief never descended to such petty details of actual behaviour, preferring always to keep the boys’ minds directed toward high and lofty principles of general application.

  But Boy had failed even the lecher’s injunction; he was worse even than Uncle Walter. His loathing for himself, for his own body, for the vile corruption of his sex, had never been stronger. If Mary were here now, how purely he would love her. But she would never come back here—back to the place where she trusted and was let so badly down.

  He tried to think of chief meeting with Mary in that spot by the roadside. With what noble and elevated thoughts he would have filled those minutes or hours! How enriched Mary would have felt as they parted. Then, in compensation, he tried to repeat the scene with himself in the same noble role; but that other image slipped beneath his guard and plastered itself upon his mind. And, even worse, he gloated upon it still! Lovingly his mind’s eye ran over her sweet nakedness. Lovingly his mind’s fingers closed upon that warm softness of her breasts. Lovingly his mind’s lips closed on hers in infinite tenderness. Lovingly he was overwhelmed again with that spicy heat of her, sank into her, luxuriated in her, strained flesh to flesh.

  He was evil, evil, evil—to be able still to think this way, when he knew what it had done to her. There was no good in him anywhere. Not one redeeming feature. If his soul were now cast into the scales, the emptiness of space itself would be enough to outweigh it.

  An image kept coming into his mind. Years ago McGinty had gelded two colts behind the turf house. Boy had not understood the process—or, rather, its purpose. And McGinty had said, “Isn’t it called ‘taking their burdens from them’? Sure they’re little enough now”—and he threw the tiny lumps of gristle to the dogs—“but ’tis enough to ease them. When those fillies start givin’ out the orders, these fellas’ll not lift a nose out the bucket.”

  “Taking their burdens from them.” That was the phrase which had really etched itself into him.

  McGinty had said it with a nod and a leer. But in endless repetition in Boy’s mind, the leer had vanished, leaving only a dark solemnity and, finally, the suggestion of an all-embracing sympathy. “Taking their burdens from them.” It was a tender act of compassion. Taking their burdens from them!

  What good were those burdens? They poisoned life. Think of all those marvellous days he and Winnie and Caspar and the others had enjoyed until he was about fourteen. The days free of burdens, full of light and sun and laughter and energy, and calm sleeps to close them.

  Then the pimples. The dirty skin. The new smells. The hair. The troublesome voice. The awkward knees and elbows. The sinking stomach. The despairing of lovely girls. The haunted nights—whether passed in indulgence or in the anguish of denial. The terrors of insanity ever near. The self-loathing. The weakness. The ridden imagination. The haunted heart. The heaped conscience. The violated chunks of maiden in a thousand shameful fancies. The Babylon of his burdens.

  The idea was there even before he felt the penknife in his pocket or rose to meet the act with an involuntary and joyful yes. And it was a joyful idea. There was no moment when it was not there, nor another moment when it was. Instead a great, expanding, unmeditated joy filled him and he knew the idea had always been there, forming inside him. It did not occur to him. He finally achieved it.

  He sat fully clothed in the shallows of the stream, knowing it was going to hurt and not caring. Of course it would hurt. It would be the worst pain he had ever endured—except that which he had endured spread through these last five years. He would endure this pain, and it would not endure.

  The river was cold from mountain and lough. It would dull the pain to start with. It would stanch the blood and carry his corruption out to that great purifier, the sea.

  He honed the knife on the pebbles until it gleamed; and still he went on honing, loving the purifying silver flash of its metal. It was clean. Steel was fine, clean, strong. He would be a man of steel soon; he would borrow its strength.

  Then it occurred to him he should not do it here but just a little way up the hill. In that grove. The spirits of that grove, his own Eumenides, had seen the first act—his first and only act; now they should not be denied the finale. He would lay them all to rest. Those within and those who pressed all round him.

  Singing Dies irae, dies illa, that greatest of all Christendom’s penitential hymns, the hymn that had sweetened the lash of the flagellants’ whips across medieval Europe, the hymn written by a proud lecher who was restored to grace and piety by castration, Boy set off up the hill to his and Mary’s grove.

  Rex tremendae majestatis,

  Qui salvandos salvas gratis,

  Salve me, fons pietatis!

  Salve me! Salve me! How often had he cried that, thinking he could leave his salvation utterly to the mercy of God and not lift a finger himself. Fons pietatis—fount of piety. A more fitting word than “eunuch.” He would soon be a fount of piety now. He knelt in prayer, in sweet communion with God until he shivered with joy at what he was to do. It would not be a pain. It would be an ecstasy.

  Carefully he undressed, folding each garment and piling them in a ritual fashion that seemed to flow spontaneously from his very heart. And all the corruption in him, too, seemed to have fled back to its source between his thighs. The rest of him was dry and cool and serene. So different from his generative organs! They were clammy and foetid. Noisome outlaws.

  He knelt and sat on his heels, forcing his testicles up. They lay like sacrificial brutes on the altars of his thighs. Unable to pity them now, impatient merely to be rid of them, he picked up the knife and worked it firmly into the grip of his thumb and two writing fingers. There was not a tremor in him. His heart beat not one pace above normal. He neither smiled nor frowned.

  Without haste, but with no reluctance, he spread his scrotum and pinned a testicle between the index and middle fingers of his left hand. He saw the knife carry in an arc across his thigh and up until it was level with his eyes. He made the sign of the cross.

  He did not see Caspar run across the grove. Nor did he feel the rabbit punch with which Caspar felled him. When he came to his senses again he was fully dressed in his wet clothes and the knife was nowhere to the seen.

  “Why?” Caspar asked.

  Boy rolled over on his stomach and hid his face. But Caspar was merciless. He turned his brother over and pinned him supine. “Why?” he repeated.

  Boy shook his head. Caspar raised his fist and smashed the ground elder just to one side of Boy’s face. “Why?” He raised his fist again.

  Boy took advantage of it to squirm out from under—he was much bigger and more burly than Caspar, anyway. But once he was free he ran no farther than the leaning
tree. The Eumenides, whom he could not fight, still pinned him to this spot more firmly than ever Caspar would.

  “I don’t know!” he said.

  Caspar, who had begun to run after him, halted when he did. He now stood a few paces at Boy’s back. “You do know. You’re too frightened to say her name.”

  “It’s me,” Boy said, so quietly that Caspar hardly caught it.

  “Mary Coen,” Caspar said.

  “She’s only the very last, the very latest…thing.”

  “You think it was what you did. It wasn’t. It was Nick.”

  Boy turned and faced him then, his mouth open in unwilling half-belief. “I debauched her…” he began.

  Caspar laughed bitterly. “You just want to hurt yourself,” he said. “I can’t think why.”

  Boy’s hands, clutching the leaning trunk, grew tense. The tendons rippled under the skin. “I want to purify myself,” he told Caspar. His tone was almost conversational.

  “Like that?”

  “It seemed the only way.”

  Caspar gave a little laugh, to ease the moment in which he walked nearer Boy. “I’m glad we’ve arrived at the past tense.”

  “Where’s my knife?”

  “I threw it away.”

  Boy knew his brother was lying; Caspar was incapable of throwing something of such value away.

  “There’s nothing,” Caspar went on, “no supposed crime or sin could be so bad as to warrant that. You would have”—he deliberately broke his voice back into a high falsetto—“ruined your who-o-ole life!”

  Boy looked askance at him, thinking it an odd time and subject for joking. Then he saw Caspar was not joking. “Why d’you say it like that?” he asked.

  “That’s what it does to you. Didn’t you know? Your voice breaks back again to treble.”

  Boy gulped. A sweat flushed his entire body. Everyone would have known! He closed his eyes and shivered.

  “Did you really not know that?” Caspar asked.

  Boy shook his head.

  Of course, Caspar thought, remembering how Boy would always walk away from any group that began telling dirty jokes, of course he wouldn’t know. “Dear me! Quae peccamus juvenes ea luimus senes.” It was one of Brockman’s favourite Latin maxims: The sins we commit in youth we pay for in old age. “Most of us are happy to let the bill mount up.” Caspar laughed. “I can’t think of anyone but you who would want to pay in advance—and then shut the door on the delivery!”

  Even Boy laughed, though a shade more grimly than Caspar. “How do other people…I don’t know…tolerate it? How do you tolerate it?”

  “Tolerate what?”

  “Well—you know. You know the fiending that goes on at school. All the time. All the time! And that street in York. And everywhere. All over the place. And all around us. On and on and on. Everybody. All the time! How do they tolerate it? Why isn’t everybody mad?”

  Caspar raised his eyebrows, not quite knowing how to reply. “Most people feel mad because they think it’s passing them by. It’s always the other fellow who gets enough.”

  Boy breathed out in vehement disappointment, as if to say it was no good trying to explain it to Caspar.

  “Well!” Caspar said, not wanting to lose contact with Boy nor to let him slip back into self-despair. “What is there to tolerate? Why should people go mad?”

  “You know.”

  “I do not—come on, let’s go out on the road. These flies are a damn nuisance.”

  They walked out to the hot dusty highway and strolled homeward at snail’s pace. “That academy,” Boy said. “You know—the one Brockman always warns us about.”

  Caspar stifled a sigh of dismay. “What academy?” he asked. “Where is it? Everbody knows that he just makes that up. We’ve even made expeditions to find it. You ask de Lacy and Causton and Moncur. You’d know, too, if you didn’t turn your back and walk away whenever anyone says a rude word.”

  “But it’s near Fiennes. Chief wouldn’t lie.”

  “How near?”

  “Less than ten miles, he always says.”

  “Right!” Caspar said, as if Boy had just trapped himself. “Now we’ve walked or ridden everywhere around Fiennes, wouldn’t you say? There’s not been very much in the way of building since the Romans left. Nor before. So it would be hard to slip in an extra building without anyone twigging it. Do you know of any building like the one he describes so graphically? Bars at the windows? Screams lifting the roof day and night? Mastiffs in the grounds? Locks on the gates? There isn’t one—not in twenty miles. I’m saying it doesn’t exist at all. Chief is a liar.”

  “Stop!” Boy cried.

  “Honestly, Boy, it’s not only me that says this. I’m not claiming any special wisdom. Everyone at school knows it’s all just a sort of parable. He doesn’t really expect you to believe it. Not literally.”

  “But it’s true. I know it’s true in my own life. I’ve proved it. Why does he say it if it isn’t true?”

  “He’s like all those parsons who preach charity. Just see what happens to the poor beggars who take them literally and call to the vicarage for a crust to eat! I don’t know why chief says it. I mean, I don’t know why he bothers to say it—especially when any boy, with no more apparatus than his own body, can put the lie in his mouth in two months flat. Of all the pointless exercises we indulge in at Fiennes, chief’s dirty talks are the worst.”

  “You just don’t like him. That’s all.”

  “I do not! He’s vain. He’s a prig. He’s a self-righteous tyrant. You think he’s so friendly! You can’t grasp the fact that he merely patronizes you, and all his other clique of pharaohs. He’s incapable of befriending anyone or anything. There’s no warmth in him to kindle it.”

  “He’s been jolly good for Fiennes,” Boy said in a placatory tone. Caspar’s passionate onslaught was a bit overwhelming.

  “Hah! Napoleon was ‘jolly good’ for France, I daresay. It doesn’t stop him being the worst shit since Genghis Khan.”

  “Anyway, he’s not the only one who says it. All the books say it. Anyone who writes or speaks at all on morality says it. You can’t explain that!”

  Caspar ostentatiously closed his eyes and counted down his passion. “I would have thought,” he said in tones deliberately measured. “I would have thought that the most obvious thing of all. No one preaches against the folly and sin of dancing on the top of church spires, do they! Parsons don’t waste half an hour’s good ranting time denouncing the eating of human flesh, do they! A fasionable West End sermonizer never warns his audience not to bugger the sheep, does he! The point, oh wise wise brother, is that if your trade is to stop mankind enjoying itself, you’d better choose something that all the people are doing as much as they can all the bloody time!”

  Boy stared at him in horror. “You are the Devil,” he said, meaning every word.

  Caspar became heated again. “And I say the Devil is that man who, having decided upon his line of argument, tells any lie to support it and deludes the ignorant and credulous to the degree that…who delude people like you into such monst…—into such a terrible mutilation as you were about to do.”

  “Brockman does not lie,” Boy said gently. Caspar’s evident anger frightened him.

  “He lies. He says self-pollution (as he calls it) makes you weak. It saps your judgement and vigour. It weakens your sight. Well”—he looked away and braced himself to say it—“I won the fives finals after three…acts. And in a week of twelve. I won the school junior steeplechase within an hour of two. And look at me—is there a single pimple or blotch on my skin? Am I deaf at all? Are my teeth falling out? Do I stare and stammer? Do my feet shuffle? Do I fail to look people in the eye? Is my mind dull? Am I always scratching at pocket billiards? Eh? Lie upon lie upon lie. He will stop at nothing. And all that two-faced, sanctimonious shit about �
��Truth’! He is the Devil.”

  Caspar laughed then, having boiled off all his steam. He reached out and took Boy’s arm, exactly as chief was wont to do. His imitation of chief’s voice was also exact. “Give him up, m’boy, I implore you! Give him up while you yet have time!”

  Boy had to laugh at that; the tone was precisely caught. But all of Caspar’s contempt for the man was there, too, and, for a moment, Boy was allowed to glimpse his beloved chief directly through Caspar’s eyes. It clashed so violently with the view he had formed over so many years that he was thrown back into confusion.

  Caspar, seeing that hesitation, steeled himself to make his final and most unwilling revelation. “I’ll prove it to you,” he promised, “when we get back to the farmhouse.”

  When they arrived, he went up to his box and rummaged around for a time. He came down again with something concealed in the palm of his hand. He took Boy out to the turf house and then—still not satisfied with its seclusion—took him down to the centre of the hot, deserted beach. The other children were all out, riding the long circuit past Ballyconneely.

  “Here,” Caspar said, at last revealing what was in his hand: a small diary for the year 1857.

  Boy recognized it at once. About eighteen months ago he had, to his shame, tried to read Caspar’s diaries and found them all to be in some kind of code, part-mathematical, part-symbolic.

  Caspar opened it at random, looked at it, then clasped it to his chest; he was now regretting the impulse that had brought him and his diary to this point. Boy waited.

  Caspar took a deep breath. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Easter. Confirmation lecture…that’s the full, guided tour of Inferno, isn’t it?”

  Boy nodded.