“How about sleeping on me?” asked Stephen, feeling much better.
“You ought to go home, sweetheart”, said Graham, reluctantly. But Stephen began caressing him, and he relented, and less than an hour later Stephen was sleeping peacefully in his arms. It was very late into the small hours before Graham himself was able to drift into an uneasy and fitful sleep.
Stephen woke up with a jolt at six-thirty, wondering what it was that he had to remember to do that day. Then he remembered Jack Page’s punishment run, and shot out of bed in a hurry. Graham had finally fallen into a deep sleep, induced by exhaustion, the long hours of worrying at the problem that had been dropped so unexpectedly in his lap, and the physical strain of remaining still enough not to disturb Stephen while he lay there thinking his way round and round in circles wondering how best to deal with the matter. Stephen made himself tea, crept back to the bedroom and kissed him lightly enough not to wake him, then left a note for him by the kettle in the kitchen.
He went home first, hoping desperately that no-one would be up yet. His luck was in, and he was able to sneak in, grab his gym kit and leave without a sound. Then he walked slowly to school, turning various ideas over in his mind and finding himself able to reach no definite conclusion from any of them.
He was still undecided what to do, if anything, when he and the fourteen other luckless rugby defaulters had changed and assembled in a shivering, grousing line in front of the gymnasium. At one minute to nine Jack Page marched up, inspected them and, to everyone’s surprise, nodded appreciatively. “You’re all yer, then? Good. Very good, lads. I’m pleased. Not that it’ll make me make you run any less ragged, but I’m glad to see you all had the sense to get off in the right spirit. Right, then. You can walk to the startin line, then you’re off. I’ll be ten minutes behind you now, an woe betide anyone I catch up with. Right? Okay, off with you.” He went round to the doors to the changing rooms. The fifteen boys, muttering darkly but secretly rather gratified by his welcome, set off for the starting line of the cross country course, in a nearby park which abutted onto the wild tract of countryside through which the course ran for most of its way. Somewhere in the quarter of a mile walk, Stephen suddenly knew what he was going to do.
“What about getting as far as the woods, then cutting across to Bewick’s Hill and just sitting there till we’ve been out the right time?” suggested one of them when they approached the starting line.
“No good”, said another without hesitation. “Jacko’d know the moment he saw us. We’ll get plastered in mud going through Bugger’s Bend”, he went on, referring to a notorious tract of woodland where the course was low-lying and the ground was never completely dry. “If we turn up looking like new pins he’ll smell a rat a mile away.”
“Besides”, contributed another boy, “Jacko often runs round the other way, trying to catch someone skiving off.”
“Huh! Hoping to, more likely”, put in another. “He enjoys catching people out and shitting on them.”
“Anyone got a fag?” somebody asked.
“Jesus!” said someone else. “You’re running against Jacko and you ask for a weed? You’ll cough your lungs up, and get Jacko’s boot up your arse into the bargain.” However, he produced a crushed packet from the pocket of his running shorts, extracted an equally crumpled, stubbed-out half of a cigarette from it, and handed it over.
“I still think we could lie in wait and save ourselves most of this sweat”, said the first speaker. “After all, we could find some mud and daub it on our socks, couldn’t we? And we could post look-outs either side of where we lurk. Then if he comes round the wrong way we can cut back and be running to meet him, and if he just comes round after us we get warning and start off as if we’re just running normally.”
“Jolly boring, wouldn’t it be, just sitting round for half an hour”, said someone. “What’d we do?”
“Better than tanking round knackering ourselves for nothing”, said someone else hopefully.
“I know what Geoff wants”, leered another, jabbing the advocate of short-cuts in the ribs. “Running always gives him a hard-on, doesn’t it, Geoff? One off the wrist is called for. Just what the doctor ordered.” There were grins all round. Then someone said “What do you think, Stevie? You’re quiet.” Stephen came out of a brown study with a small start. He was the only one of them to have taken no part at all in the chattering so far.
“Eh?” he said, looking at them blankly. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else. What do I think about what?”
Someone explained the proposed run-dodging plan. Stephen gave a faint grin. “You won’t have to worry about Jacko”, he said. “I’m going to run round the ordinary way. At least, I’m going to start. And I’m going to be caught — within the first quarter of a mile. By the time he’s finished with me he’ll have forgotten the rest of you’re out there at all, let alone worrying about whether you’re finishing his stupid run. I should do as you like.”
There was a sudden flood of interested questions. “I’ve got a bone to pick with him, and I’m going to pick it this morning”, he said. “That’s why I’m going to make sure he catches me.” They clustered round, the run all but forgotten, pressing him for details, but he clammed up and resolutely refused to say any more. At length somebody looked at his watch, and they dismissed Stephen and whatever he was being mysterious about and set off at a fast trot along the prescribed course. Stephen jogged sedately after them, and before he had gone a hundred yards they were out of sight. He slowed to a walk, and after ambling for another couple of hundred yards he stopped altogether, sat on a conveniently situated fallen tree, and waited for Mr Page.
The master appeared in sight within a minute of his seating himself on the tree trunk. He rose and waited, feeling his heart beating unpleasantly quickly. He was feeling a little sick, because he was genuinely a little frightened. He had spent his entire schooldays as a quiet, biddable boy, normally mischievous and in all the sorts of trouble that any boy gets into. But he had never set himself up as a rebel or a defier of authority; and certainly he had never in his most outlandish daydreams imagined himself deliberately setting out, in cold blood as it were, on a collision course with a master — with any grown-up for that matter. He gulped several times in an effort to swallow the sizable lump that was forming in his throat and attempting to swim up his gorge and stifle his speech. He could feel the fear forming itself into a cold knot in his stomach, pulsating regularly in time with the rapid dance of his heartbeat. But he never for a moment contemplated tamely changing his mind and accepting Page’s withering sarcasm, or any punishment for slacking, because there was another emotion, far stronger than the fear. He was in the grip of a blazing, passionate anger, for himself but stronger by far on behalf of his friend, and his resolve was helped by a feeling of deep conviction that he was within his rights to be angry. He gulped again, swallowed hard, and squared himself for whatever might be coming his way.
“Hah-hah!” cried Jack Page, smiling demonically as he came up and saw who was waiting for him. “My first victim of the morning, and I didn’t expect one this early. Poor lad. A stitch, maybe. But no, not this distance out, surely? Well, well, Stephen Hill. And what could be the trouble? Come on, boy, I don’t want to have to start puttin the boot in this early. I’ll be indulgent, my lad, shut my eyes if you like. You can start again, and no hard feelings.”
“I’m not starting again, sir” said Stephen, quietly, with a tremor in his voice, but with a cold feeling of resolution settling over him like a mantle. “Not till we’ve sorted something out, anyway.”
Up until that moment, Page had been running gently on the spot to keep his rhythm going. At this utterly unexpected defiance he stopped dead in his tracks. “What?” he said, dropping his affectation of merry banter. “What did you say, boy?” His voice had turned cold. But then he looked more closely at the youthful figure hopping up and down before him. When he spoke again his voice was still quiet, but there was c
oncern coming into it. He could see, though he couldn’t analyze, the fear possessing the boy, and he could see from the chalky face, wide eyes and jittery demeanour that either something was seriously amiss or that at any rate this was no trifling matter to bejoked away with sarcasm or banter. “What’s the trouble, Hill?” he asked. And giving Stephen another hard, cool look of appraisal he sat down on the fallen tree, patting it to invite Stephen to join him.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you, sir”, said Stephen, “and I’m not taking any further part in this run until it’s resolved. If you won’t make me the promise I want, it goes to the headmaster. And if you won’t sort it out with me, I’ll never pick up a rugby ball as long as I’m at this school”, he finished, making what he hoped Page would regard as the most serious threat that could be issued.
Page felt an almost irrepressible urge to grin as he divined that intention behind the last words, but he straightaway composed his features into owl-like gravity, recognizing clearly that the boy genuinely thought he had some grievance of a serious nature. He would never, Page thought, have invoked the headmaster’s name unless he had been in quite deadly earnest. He sat and waited for Stephen to go on, racking his brains to think what he could possibly have done to upset the boy so. “Tell me, Hill”, he said eventually, “this isn’t anything to do with this run, is it? Dammit, I always hand out runs and work-outs if I think a team hasn’t tried. But surely you wouldn’t get so het-up about a fatigue run? Most of the lads take it in the same spirit…”
“It’s nothing to do with the rugby, or the run”, said Stephen, and his voice had such a hard, cold edge that Page sat back silent, becoming quite seriously worried.
“It’s these horrible rumours you’ve been spreading about me”, Stephen suddenly burst out. All the curdled emotional poisons that had been swirling through his mind over the preceding twelve hours spurted out, like pus from a lanced abscess. He forgot his fear, forgot that he was a pupil speaking to a master, and a senior master, on the staff of his school, in a burst of passionate, righteous fury, fury of the special kind that only the young know when they feel the injustice of adults. “These sickening, filthy stories you’ve been telling every Tom, Dick and Harry all over the town”, went on Stephen. “It’s wicked, and disgusting, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I wouldn’t have thought my worst enemy would…would stoop to such a thing, and here you are doing it. It’s not even as if I ever did anything to upset you. Why, I… I liked you…” He broke off, in great distress, and the master could see that he was very close to tears, at the same time as he himself sat on the log wondering if he was dreaming.
“I’d never get upset about your silly punishments. Nobody does”, Stephen went on, still pouring it out in a torrent. “We all think it’s funny, and I thought you did it to be funny. I never thought you’d ever do anything really frightful, like this. You must hate me, to do such a thing…” Stephen ran suddenly, completely out of steam. He sat there staring at Page for a moment longer, his eyes distended and his lip quivering, and then he started to cry.
“But Stephen, my poor child”, said Page after a moment, in utter consternation. “What am I supposed to have been doing? Please tell me. You must tell me. What in the world have I done?”
Stephen, having once lost his tenuous hold on his self-control, had dipped perilously close to hysteria, and for all that Page was a very experienced schoolmaster indeed, and one who was well-known to be exceptionally good with boys at that, it took him a long time to calm Stephen down. At first he tried to put an arm round Stephen’s shoulders, but the boy thrust it away as if it burnt him. However, at last he managed to persuade him to quieten and listen, and by and by he had Stephen half-convinced that he was genuinely unaware of his supposed misdeeds.
“I tell you, Stephen”, he said, almost pleadingly, “I’ve never knowingly started rumours, not about anyone; and about a pupil? Why, God help me, I’d have my tongue cut out before I’d think of doing such a thing. For God’s sake, boy, tell me what rumours these are, and why you think I set them.”
And, at last, it came out. Stephen, half-tearful, half defiantly angry, began to talk. “You…you p-p-play rugger for the town club”, he said, sniffing.
“I do”, admitted Page, still at a loss.
“You know a man called Preston there”, went on Stephen.
“Yes, I know Colin Preston”, agreed Page, none the wiser. “Though how you know I know him I can’t imagine. What of it, though?”
“It w-w-was him you t-told the rumour to”, said Stephen, feeling another paroxysm forcing its way up and out. “Y-you told him you thought Graham Curtis was gig-gig-gay ” He got it out at last.
Page sat and looked at him in utter mystification. “Well, my boy, I haven’t the foggiest how you come to know such a thing, but, since you obviously have heard, yes, I repeated a rather silly, rather scurrilous story that’d been going round the common room. I don’t feel very proud of it, now I see it’s got back to the school, and I’m very distressed to find it’s upset you. But it’s a rumour that’s gone round common room more than once, and schoolmasters are only human like everybody else, you know — we gossip, talk about the latest bit of scandal, just the same as other people. Not that I said it maliciously, in any case. There’s lots of schoolmasters that way inclined, and no-one says they don’t make fine masters, too. Often being that way actually helps them in their vocation, see — if they’re genuinely fond of boys, they’re likely to look after the ones in their care, aren’t they? You see the logic of what I’m sayin?”
“Yes”, snapped Stephen, his anger rising rapidly once again just in time to head off the incipient tears. “And if you can sit there and calmly say all that, that makes it even harder for me to understand how you could have said what you did. You must have hated me to say such a thing…”
Page sat looking at him, and if Stephen had been less consumed with warring emotions he could not have failed to recognize the blank incomprehension on his face. As it was, he simply carried on from where he had left off. “Whatever you think about Graham Curtis, and whatever they may say about him behind his back in your stinking common room, you had no right to say that about me” he stormed. “You don’t know a thing about me. Even if you had known anything, and it had been true, you would have had no right to say it, especially to someone like Colin bloody Preston, who you knew would go and blab it all over the place.”
A little light dawned in Page’s mind, but he had no real idea what he was supposed to have said. “Stephen”, he said, very gently. “I’ve never said anything about you, not at the rugby club or anywhere else, not to Colin Preston or to anybody else. I give you my word of honour, lad, I have never, once, uttered a single word to your discredit. Not ever, you hear me? Now please tell me, what do you think I said about you, and why do you think so? I must know, boy, so I can try to put it right if I can.”
“I…I thought you told Colin that Graham was gay, and that I was his… his… that I was his boyfriend. Just because we’re friends, and he introduced me to the cricket club, and gives me lifts to the matches and home after them and so on, and we shared a room on the tour, but that was only because he was the only one there I knew, and now it’s all over the club that I’m, that he and I are…” The rush of words ended in a gulp, and he left it at that.
“Oh, my God”, said Jack Page after a while. At first he had just sat looking at the boy, aghast and stunned into silence. “Oh, my dear God”, he repeated. “You poor, poor lad. What in God’s name have I done?” He had a sudden inspiration, and jumped up off the tree trunk. “Here, up with you now”, he said in something closer to his normal voice. “Come on, run with me for a while. Just a gentle jog, so we can talk comfortably.”
Somewhat to his own surprise, Stephen found himself getting up and trotting along beside Page and, more surprising still, he found that the physical effort made him feel considerably better within moments. “Now”, said Page, glancing shrewdly at him
out of the corner of his eye and seeing the improvement. “Tell me, how did you find out about this?”
Stephen told him. “I see”, Page said, thoughtfully. “Well, let me try to clear one thing up with you. I never said a word about you to Colin Preston. Not a word. I’ll be having words with Master Preston, by the way, next time I bump into that bugger, and you can take my word for that. It’s clear enough what’s happened, now. I told him enough, and he’s embellished it and passed it on with his own bit of interest tacked on the end. He’s seen how close you and Graham are, and drawn his own conclusions, hasn’t he?
“But don’t get me wrong, boy, it doesn’t make my part in it any more honourable, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself, believe me. I can’t do much, but I can do my best to cancel some of the damage, starting in the place where I did the damage to begin with. I can start scotching this talk at the rugby club, at least. It’s little enough, but I must do whatever I can. And if it’s any consolation to you, which I don’t suppose it is, I’ll never pass on gossip again as long as I live. My God, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in all my time as a schoolmaster. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my time, I should say. I’m not asking you to forgive me, lad. Not yet. I will, one day, soon, but I can’t ask you now. I’ll just make you one promise. I’ll see Graham Curtis, right away — I’m turning back now, and I’ll go round and see him the moment I’m changed, and do what I can to set things right with him. Will you trust me to do that, please?”
He turned off the course and began jogging through a ride in the light woodland they had reached, heading back in the direction of the starting line and the school. Without thinking, Stephen followed and continued jogging beside him. “You don’t have to ask me to forgive you, sir”, he said quietly, seeming to be back in possession of himself now. “You never did anything against me, so there’s nothing to forgive. I’m glad you’re going to square it with Graham, though, sir. As for me, well, don’t worry about me. I couldn’t care less what people think of me. If the cricketers think I’m gay, well they can think what they like. Nobody gives a damn about somebody being gay these days. But Graham could lose his job if people thought he was, sir, couldn’t he? If the wrong people thought so, anyway.”
Out of Bounds Page 11
