“No”, they said in chorus, both remembering the appalling, undreamed-of sights they had been forced to witness, and both feeling slightly sick at the memory.
“I thought you’d get cold feet”, he said, laughing. “Another lesson a fightin — it’s just as nasty hurtin other people as bein hurt yourself — well, no, it isn’t, but it’s not pleasant. But you had to go through with that business back there. Wanna tell me why? Any offers?”
“So we were implicated in it?” suggested Richard. “So that we couldn’t get bad consciences about it and confess, without incriminating ourselves as well?”
Terry laughed again. “You got a mind like Machiavelli, son, ain’t you?” he said. “But you could be right, in part at least. But that’s not the main reason why you had to finish it.”
They waited. “Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s because you started it. You finish what you start. Otherwise you become just another typical specimen of Mr Average, twentieth century man — in other words, just another four-flusher whose word’s worth as much as a promise in an election manifesto and who’s got as much integrity as he’s got courage, which is none at all. You start something, you finish it, not drop out when it starts offendin your delicate sensibilities. That’s the way to survive in this miserable world, and survival’s the name a this game — an it’s gonna be increasingly as the grub runs out. You remember that. You might be grateful to old Terry one a these days.”
Three quarters of an hour later he drew into the kerb just outside the centre of the town. They had half a mile to walk to Richard’s house. He relaxed and looked steadily at them. “Tell me”, he said, speaking softly as usual, in a manner chillingly reminiscent of his voice in Tyldesley’s home. “Are you glad we did what we did tonight?”
They looked unhappily at each other for a moment, thinking about it. Stephen broke the silence. “Yes”, he said, and his voice sounded firm and decided for the first time since they had entered the house in the mews. “Yes, I am”, he repeated. “It made me feel ill when we were there. I’ve never hit anyone before — well, I mean, not — not like that, in cold blood like that. It made me want to throw up, and I very nearly did. But yes, I am glad we did it, now I’ve had time to think about it. He was a cruel, vicious, calculating bastard, and he deserved a lesson. I expect I’d feel the same again if we had to do anything like that again, feel sick, I mean, and I hope I never have to do anything like that again in my life. But when you ask, I can’t say I’m not glad, because I am.”
“Richard?”
“It’s not as easy as that for me”, Richard said slowly, “because I’m not as personally involved as Steve. I see what he means, but I can’t feel it, inside me, if you know what I mean. I feel as if I’m dirty, somehow. Making a man howl and cry, and that awful whimpering, and scaring someone like that, so he… so he shits himself — well, it makes me feel… I don’t know… it’s indecent, somehow.”
“You’re learnin good”, said Terry. “You just learned that there’s no victors in fightin. Ain’t such a thing as a just war, or a clean fight. Fightin’s nothin more than winnin, an the winner more often than not feels as soiled as the loser. If he’s human, an a decent specimen a the species, that is. Trouble is, most people aren’t. Just have a thought as you go home now. If our friend back there’d been in your position tonight, an you’d been in his, would he have had your delicate scruples? I’m sayin nothin, because I know the answer. So do you, or I’m very much mistaken, which is why I’m leavin it to you to come up with it yourselves.
“Now I’ll say goodnight to you, with one last thought, an it’s the most important a the lot. If you’d a gone there to do him over without me, you’da bottled out just about when I got you involved — i.e., with the firin a the first shot, right? An that woulda handed the advantage over to him on a ceremonial plate. He’da been given a breather before he was properly hurt, an he’da taken that chance with both hands and both feet. Your squeamishness woulda got you right in the nick, my little friends. That’s why you needed me there tonight, an that’s why I made sure I was there. I didn’t give a shit about your private problem with the man. I still don’t. I don’t even know your man who’s got the problem. But I liked the look a you two, an I knew if you went strollin down there to beat the crap outa him on your own you’d never get beyond the first hit. I didn’t wanna see your two pretty little asses in the slam, an there you have it. I’ll see you boys around, right?” And he put the van into gear and shot off before either of them could say a word.
“He’s right, you know”, said Stephen.
“Yes”, muttered Richard as they started to walk in the direction of his home. “I suppose he is. I just hope it works. I’d hate to have to go through that again.”
* * *
For a long time it seemed that their unpleasant night’s work had worked indeed. Graham followed his original intention of totally ignoring Tyldesley’s threats. He paid nothing, never went near the gay scene in London where Tyldesley and his cronies hung out, and carried on with his life at the school and the cricket club as if nothing had happened. The weeks passed and he heard nothing, until the mid-point of the summer term was close by. Richard and Stephen continued to enjoy each other and their own lives. They never consciously thought about the raid on the mews, and in time it faded away, leaving only a thin, nightmarish under-memory of horrors endured. As for Terry Garrard, he followed his own mysterious paths. They never saw him again.
And then, one morning just before the mid-point of the term, the headmaster touched Graham on the shoulder as the masters were dispersing from the common room after morning assembly. “Will you come to my study in half an hour, please, Graham”, he said, his face grave and unsmiling.
At the same moment the deputy headmaster, acting on orders that had not been explained to him, was detaining Stephen Hill as he left the school hall, and taking him to an empty classroom, where, following the same orders, he sat with the boy, chatting generally and frankly admitting his ignorance of what was behind the puzzling procedure, until they were called for.
Graham went off to arrange for the form monitor to take charge of his first class, assuming it must be some routine school matter. It never crossed his mind that the summons could have anything to do with the problem at the beginning of that term. When he entered the study and closed the door silently behind him the headmaster gestured to him to be seated. He slid a brown folder across the desk.
“I’d like you to open that and look at what it contains”, he said. “And then, I’d be grateful to hear your explanation. If you can explain them.” His face was grim and stern, and, worse, there was a cutting, contemptuous disgust in his expression which flayed Graham like a lash. He opened the folder curiously, and jerked back as if he had been thumped heavily in the chest. Staring up at him was a familiar picture, of himself and Stephen gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes as they exchanged that single kiss, utterly innocuous yet utterly damning, in the hotel corridor in a small Sussex town.
* * *
“It gave me a very nasty jolt, I can tell you”, said Graham that evening.
His interview with the headmaster had taken up almost two hours. When Graham had gone Stephen had been called in, and he had been there for considerably less. When he had emerged, shaky but defiant, obstinately denying that any impropriety had ever taken place between himself and Graham, it had been lunch-time. He had gone in search of Graham, and found him, as he had expected, strolling round the cricket field on his own. They had compared notes briefly, and agreed that they were both feeling too drained to want to discuss matters then, so they had arranged that Stephen would go to Graham’s flat that evening, early. “Get there at five, if you like”, said Graham. “We’ll go over it then, and then I’ll take you out to dinner, if you’d like that. Sort of celebration, only a bit double- edged, eh?” Stephen had smiled. “Not for me, except in the short term, maybe”, he had said, and sensing that Graham wanted to be left alone with his own th
oughts for a while, he looked round, saw that there was no-one in sight, and gave him a brief, hard kiss on the mouth. Then he tactfully slipped off in search of Richard.
“So what did he say?” Stephen now said, sinking comfortably into the cushions on Graham’s sofa and hoping the smile he couldn’t get off his face didn’t look too much like a cat that had succeeded in upsetting a jug of cream.
“Well, of course he began by taking it as an open and shut case”, said Graham. I just stonewalled to begin with. I didn’t really see what else I could do. He felt that the picture more or less convicted and condemned me. The other two didn’t really matter, but the one of you giving me that quick peck in the corridor, or me giving you one, whichever the hell it was, that one was deadly. I started by suggesting that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup, and had been blown up out of all proportion. Just a gesture of affection between a schoolmaster and a favourite pupil, who also happened to be very close friends outside school, I said. But of course, I knew that all the time there was that bloody private detective’s report in the background, so I reckoned I was pretty well up against it.
“So did he, and yet, if I’d but known it, I was on far firmer ground than I realized, because actually Tyldesley hadn’t included the statement at all. If only I’d known that I could most likely have bluffed the whole thing out and got away with it on lack of real evidence. But there it is — I didn’t know, so there I was, assuming he’d got me snookered, while all the time he’d got nothing else up his sleeve at all. It would have been quite funny, really, if it had been happening to someone else, or in a film. There I was, not using all kinds of arguments I would have used if I hadn’t thought he’d got the murder weapon up his sleeve to confound me with if I told any lies, and him sitting there wondering what the hell this ‘other evidence’ I kept referring to might be.
“Anyway, as I say, all I thought I could do was stonewall, so I did. I refused to admit that there had ever been sexual intimacy between us — he kept using words like ‘misconduct’, of course. But I didn’t actually deny it, either, which I think was getting him pretty frustrated.
“But in the end he got down to the serious horse-trading. He said that these days an eighteen-year-old was pretty well an adult, so that maybe it need not be regarded as being as serious as it would have been thirty years ago. Well, I said, for openers, that I couldn’t really see what thirty years ago had got to do with anything. Not in so many words, of course: you don’t talk to headmasters like that, even if they’re out to give you your cards — which, of course at that point I thought he was.
“Look, if I go through the whole rigmarole we’ll be here till midnight. Let me cut a very long story very short indeed, and give you the result, shall I? Then we can go and have a nice dinner somewhere.”
“Yes, please”, said Stephen, still wearing the same rather smug smile.
“Well, he felt that whatever the truth of the matter, and he accepted that he might never get to that, I had been at the very best grossly unprofessional, indiscreet, and a whole string of other adjectives, mostly beginning with ‘un’ and none of them very complimentary. At worst, I’d been guilty of the foulest and most despicable form of professional misconduct, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I tried to point out that if we took the worst possible case, for argument’s sake, even then the worst I’d been guilty of was having a love affair — I emphasized that, because he seemed to think like so many people, that heterosexuals fall in love with other people while homosexuals just have sex —yes, a love affair with a fully consenting man who was fully sexually, physically and emotionally mature.
“Well, none of that cut much ice, as you can imagine. However, he said that you were eighteen, and the evidence was pretty flimsy — I’ll leave you to supply my interjections there from your own imagination — so they had decided that the police and the law need not be bothered with the matter. Well, you can imagine the size of the sigh of relief I let go there. But, he said, the most important influencing factor of all in that decision was the fact that if he called in the law it would do the school a terrible amount of harm, and also the boys, at a critical stage in the academic year. So would I be willing to consider the following proposal: I quietly resign, with effect from the end of this academic year, they pay me to the end of the year, in other words, to the end of the summer holiday, but I go more or less immediately?
“Well, honestly, Stevie, it sounded too good not to jump at it — especially compared with what I thought he was in a position to do to me. Of course, once again, if I’d only known what he hadn’t got, as well as what he had, it might have been a different matter. But frankly, I reckon my goose was cooked whatever he had or hadn’t got, and whatever I did or didn’t say. Whatever the rights and wrongs, whatever the truth of the matter, he was convinced that I’d been carrying on with you — ‘misconduct’ — and nothing short of positive proof was going to change his mind.
“Still, I got a couple of extra concessions. He would have liked me to clear my desk right then — you know, wait till my formroom was empty, then collect any personal possessions of mine from it, and be off the premises by lunchtime. On the other hand he didn’t want a scandal, and he realized that if he went about it that way he’d be assuring himself of a scandal in spades. If I was whizzed off the premises with nobody even knowing I’d gone, he’d be starting enough hares to keep him chasing them for the next two terms. I pointed that out to him, of course, but he’d got there already. So we agreed that I would come in for the next few days, and spread a story that I’d been offered some position I couldn’t refuse, and that he, having begged me with tears in his eyes not to desert him, had magnanimously, generously and with tremendous regret, acceded to my urgent request for immediate release. That way my going is accounted for, and even if there are a few doubters who don’t think it sounds very plausible, there’s no other obvious reason. If I give such a story and he backs it up, why should anyone not believe it? There’s no reason not to, so people will. I also pointed out another reason why I wanted a couple of days’ grace — and I meant it — was that I’d like to have the opportunity to say my farewells to a lot of the boys. I said that there were some I wouldn’t be sorry to see the last of, but there were many more I very much wanted to say goodbye to.
“He accepted that — not with especially good grace, I’m afraid, but he saw the sense of the arrangement. Then I asked him what he’d do about a reference. He asked me where I was intending to go, and I told him my idea about France, and he liked that — puts a decent distance between him and the source of likely contagion. So, he said, provided that he was never asked to give a reference for me for a position entailing my being in a position of trust over children, he’d give me a belter. He would prepare it immediately, and show it to me tomorrow, if that would suit. Well, it did suit. It was the best bargain I reckoned I was going to get, so I took it.
“And that’s about it, love. I’m more or less finished here. I shall actually be saying my goodbyes over the next couple of days, and I think I should travel to France early next week, to find a position, and look round for a place to live. It will give us a few evenings to get used to the idea, and I don’t want to drop out of the cricket this weekend at such short notice.”
“There’s one thing puzzling me about the head having those photographs”, said Stephen.
“What’s that?”
“Why didn’t he include the detective’s report, as well as the photos? That would have put it beyond doubt: it was much more incriminating than the photos, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think there’s much doubt about it”, said Graham. “The photographs on their own wouldn’t have been enough for a successful prosecution. The head would probably know that, and if he didn’t the school’s lawyer would. That meant that with the photos but not the statement the school wasn’t likely to drag in the police — it would be kept within the school. And that meant that I’d lose my job, and most likely all prospect of employabi
lity in future, but it wouldn’t get to such proportions that I’d feel I’d got no more to lose and so hit back with allegations of blackmail. Tyldesley’s no fool.”
They discussed the affair round in circles until they were sick of it, then went out to dinner, feeling a heady sense of liberation, despite their anxieties, at being able to go where they pleased and not give a damn who saw them together. When they got back to Graham’s flat they went back to their discussions for a while, but Stephen was playful and flirtatious, and a little bit tarty, a mood in which Graham was wholly incapable of resisting. He was intending to put in an appearance at the school on each of his final few days, but there was no longer any impulsion to keep regular hours; as for Stephen, the A-levels were so close that he was more or less left to his own devices. So after a last coffee they went joyously to bed together, savouring every second and every small act of love in their first coupling free from the shackling restraints of propriety and official disapproval.
They made love again, luxuriantly and languorously, when they woke in the morning. It was tinged with sadness, because the fruit of all their talk was a firm decision by Graham to travel to France at the beginning of the following week to find a position for himself in some congenial region, where he could get settled in advance and wait for Stephen to join him — as he had made an undeviating resolve to do immediately after the examinations.
With this decision made, with what they both regarded as their first true night together, in the sense of its being unconstrained, and most of all with plans firmly made to spend that evening together, they both felt a lot brighter and more cheerful than they would have dreamed possible.
There were two difficulties that would have to be dealt with, and soon. One was the question of Richard. Stephen loved him, not, admittedly, with the same devotional love he bore for Graham — that was close to worship — but with a very deep, unshakable trust and affection; and they had grown very used to each other. He knew that Richard, brave though he would undoubtedly be about losing his beloved friend, was shortly going to be desolate, unhappy and alone. He would require a lot of love and help.
Out of Bounds Page 26
