by Emlyn Rees
She says something which I don’t catch and, looking up, I see her face, always so confident, suddenly trembling in the low glow of the lamp.
‘Sorry,’ I say after a moment, ‘I missed what you said.’
‘I knew it,’ she tells me and I see now that she’s crying. ‘I knew it the moment you stepped out of the car …’
Seeing her like this, my instinct tells me to rush up to her and to comfort her, but I resist. ‘But how?’ I ask, surprised as I am by what she’s just told me.
‘How do you think?’ she spits out, her shoulders beginning to shake. ‘Because I know you … because I can read you … for the same reason you guessed yourself …’
Before I can communicate the confusion these last words have stirred up inside me, she breathes in deeply in an effort to compose herself. ‘You’re right, of course, to want to talk about this now,’ she says. ‘I should have told you before. I’m sorry, Fred. I should’ve told you as soon as it happened.’
I’m about to say, ‘Tell me what?’ when I stop myself. ‘Go on,’ I say instead.
Snivelling, Rebecca reaches for a box of tissues on the desk beside her, pulls one out and blows her nose on it loudly. She doesn’t look at me as she starts to speak. ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen,’ she says. ‘Neither of us did. We were stoned. You saw how stoned we were when you left …’
We?
Rebecca blows her nose again. ‘And Eddie said it didn’t matter …’
Eddie?
‘… because’, she continues, ‘it was just a bit of fun and it wasn’t like we were married yet, and the only reason anything happened between us at all was because we’d got so stoned in the park, and it wasn’t like I’d been emotionally unfaithful or anything like that …’
‘Eddie …’ I say, nodding my head, as I suddenly realise how blind I’ve been to what’s been going on behind my back.
I picture the moment that I left him and Rebecca sitting there together on the picnic rug in Hyde Park on the evening of Phil’s birthday party. Then a more recent memory surfaces, that of Eddie talking to me at the front of the barge on the Thames a week ago today, telling me how difficult it sometimes was to be a good friend to someone. ‘Eddie …’ I repeat, continuing to nod my head as I stare into Rebecca’s terrified eyes.
‘I’m sorry, darling.’ She’s sobbing. ‘It didn’t mean anything. It was just one of those … I swear to God, it’ll never happen again …’
I’ve heard enough. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I tell her softly.
Dropping the tissue that she’s holding on to the floor, she takes a tentative step forward. ‘Do you really mean that?’ she asks.
I don’t hesitate for even a second. ‘Yes.’
‘Only I’d understand it if you were angry –’
‘No,’ I reassure her, ‘I’m not angry, not in the least.’
The noise of a muffled voice comes from somewhere along the corridor and we both fall silent. Then the noise comes again.
‘It’s your father,’ I say, recognising it this time as his. ‘He’s calling for us.’
She reaches out to touch my face. Relief and disbelief are combined in hers in equal measure. ‘And you’re sure you’re …?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her again, ‘but while we’re on the subject of honesty, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, too …’
‘What?’ she asks, staring up into my eyes, suddenly startled.
I look away, ignoring her question. ‘Go and deal with your father,’ I tell her, stepping aside and opening the door. ‘And when you’ve done that, come and find me. I’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen garden.’
Outside, I walk along the meandering garden path and wait for Rebecca to arrive. The heavy scent of wisteria and night-time stocks fill my nostrils, and the air is warm and welcoming. Feeling very much alive, I think of tomorrow. I meant what I said to Rebecca just now. It really doesn’t matter about what happened between her and Eddie. What I’m about to tell her I would have told her anyway, regardless, whether she’d told me about Eddie or not.
Reaching a corner in the path, I stop and gaze across the darkened garden. Then, without wishing it, I find my mind sifting back through my memory to another summer night, and another place, and another girl.
Eventually, the sound of whispering voices trailed off one by one and silence descended on the dormitory. I was lucky that exams were imminent or I could have ended up waiting for hours before it was safe to make my move.
I slipped out from under my duvet and, sitting on the edge of my bed, reached beneath it for the gym bag I’d packed before lights-out time some three-quarters of an hour before. I remained motionless, listening intently to the sounds of breathing around me, straining through the darkness for signs of wakefulness. I heard none.
Standing, my senses seemed heightened. It felt like my body had been connected to an amplifier. I could hear the rush of my breath and the creak of my joints, but above all this came the erratic thudding of my heart. Fear filled me as the obstacles between here and Mickey suddenly reared up as impossibilities in my mind. Being caught for breaking curfew wasn’t what frightened me. Being kept from Mickey was.
The dormitory was arranged along a thin, straight corridor, with ten beds on either side, each of them separated from their neighbours’ by tall wooden partitions. At one end of the corridor was a six-foot sash window, leading to a fire escape. The window’s lock was connected to an alarm in Mr Pearce’s study downstairs. Should the latch be lifted, a bell would start to clang and he, in turn, would be up here within minutes to see what was amiss.
The opposite end of the dormitory – the route I intended to take – stopped at a heavy swing door, which led to the washroom, lavatories and the rest of the boarding house. From there, a staircase climbed up to the junior dormitories above and led down to the sixth-formers’ study-bedrooms below. Because of the alarm on the fire escape, I’d have to risk going downstairs, and hope that Mr Pearce wasn’t doing his rounds and that the duty prefects were all safe behind closed doors, engrossed in their revision.
In an attempt to quell my growing paranoia, I forced myself to take comfort in the security provided by the darkness. In the dormitory, at least, I might be heard, but I wouldn’t be seen. Once outside, the same rule would apply. In between these two places – downstairs – I could trust only to luck.
Turning, I arranged my pillows under my duvet, plumping them up so that the bed looked as though it were occupied. This was a token gesture, I realised even as I was performing it. It was for my own peace of mind. Anything more than a cursory inspection would reveal my deceit. But by then it would be too late; I’d already be gone.
Wearing nothing but the boxer shorts given to me by Mickey as a present at the end of the holidays, and with the gym bag gripped tightly in my hand, I crept away from my bed and along the corridor towards the swing door. To my left, someone moaned in his sleep, but other than that I heard only the sound of my own bare feet treading lightly on the worn brown carpet.
Before opening the door I hesitated, knowing that if either Pearce or a prefect were standing on the other side, the contents of my bag would be enough to incriminate me and leave me stuck in the housemaster’s study, answering awkward question after awkward question, as Mickey stood, lonely and ignored, at the bottom of the school drive.
A shaft of bright light cut into the dormitory as I pulled the door open enough to allow me to slip through, but the hallway was clear, and I hurried into the lavatories and entered one of the cubicles, locking the door behind me. With the sound of the old black cistern dripping, and the glare of a bare light bulb above my head, I unzipped my bag and started to dress.
Two minutes later, with my empty bag now discarded behind the lavatory door, I was standing on the stairway landing, dressed in black school trousers, black school shoes and a thick woollen navy-blue turtleneck. A torch and a knife, which I’d liberated from the kitchens, were tucked into the belt of my trousers
beneath. It was hardly what I would have wished to have worn to see Mickey, but it made sense under the circumstances. I’d have dressed up in nappies and a motorbike helmet if it would have guaranteed my safe passage.
Careful to tread only on the front of my shoes, so that my heels wouldn’t click on the hard plastic surface on the stairs, I padded down the two flights to the bottom. There was a junction here, with a corridor to the left leading to the laundry, showers and changing rooms, and one to the right, which ran past the sixth-form study-bedrooms and terminated at the doorway separating Mr Pearce’s living quarters from the rest of the building.
The overhead lights were out in both corridors and the only illumination came from a skylight to my left. Here, moonlight had imprinted a bright block of light on the polished white laminated floor. I shivered, a childhood memory surfacing of the opening of the spacecraft doors in Close Encounters. … Then I headed left, staring momentarily up at the square of starry sky as I passed beneath the skylight, feeling closer to Mickey, thinking that, somewhere near, she might be experiencing this same sight, too.
I met no one as I moved along the remainder of the corridor towards the laundry room. It was as if a spell had been cast over the rest of people in the house and I were a ghost moving undetected through their midst.
Then, as I reached the laundry door but had yet to open it, voices cut through the silence and I froze. Cursing my luck but refusing to panic, I slowly turned my head and looked up the corridor. There, barely fifteen feet away, standing in the open doorway of one of the study-bedrooms, talking in a hushed incomprehensible voice, was the unmistakable figure of Clarkson, the prefect whose wrath I had incurred while talking to Mickey on the phone earlier in the evening. Nothing, I knew, would please him more than to catch me now. All he had to do was turn.
Adrenalin charged through me, as I waited for him to make a move. But he didn’t, not for whole seconds. Instead, he continued talking in agitated tones, repeatedly tapping a pen against the door frame, until, with an idiosyncratic gesture, he pushed back his fringe and pulled the door closed.
Darkness descended and then, with a click, I felt as if a searchlight had been swept on to my face: the corridor light was on. Blinking, my eyes unaccustomed to the brightness, I waited for the sound of my name to be shouted out. It never came. Instead, I heard footsteps and saw Clarkson walking in the opposite direction up the corridor, utterly oblivious to my presence. He pushed through the set of swing doors at the far end and strode up the three stairs to Mr Pearce’s private part of the house.
Raising a silent prayer, I hurried through to the back of the laundry. Sitting there on the chipped paintwork of the windowsill, surrounded by the familiar smell of damp and drying sports kit, I began unfastening the lock. I lifted the window, gazed out into the moonlit garden and breathed in the still, warm air. Beyond the lawn, the school buildings were shrouded in darkness against the wide, wan sky, as if they’d been drawn in charcoal. I clambered out of the window and dropped down into the soft earth of the flowerbeds below. Pulling the window closed behind me and too afraid to use my torch, I set off across the lawn, into the undergrowth beyond.
It wasn’t until I was a good half-mile away from my boarding house and the main school that I risked breaking from the cover of the trees and bushes, and stepping out on to the school drive. Gravel crunched beneath my feet as I made my way along it in spurts, jogging fifty yards, then stopping and listening, before jogging on once more. Whenever I moved I thought of the chaplain and the stories of his night-time forays into the nearby villages, and I saw his face in every patch of brambles that I passed. It was only when I neared the end of the drive some ten minutes later that I began to relax.
Then I saw the headlights. A car was coming round a bend in the lane three hundred yards beyond the bottom of the drive. The twin beams oscillated like a strobe along the cast-iron fence which marked the school’s boundary and, by the time I thought of moving, I could already hear the growl of the vehicle’s diesel engine. Remembering where I was and what I was doing here, I dashed across the open ground of the drive and ducked down behind one of the stone pillars, which stood either side of the gateway to the school.
The car didn’t pass and head on down the lane. Instead, it slowed and its headlights swept around in an arc until they pointed up the driveway towards the distant silhouettes of Greenaway. My stomach contracted with apprehension. Then I heard the car stopping and the noise of a door being opened and slammed shut. Cautiously, I inched forward from my hiding place and peered round the stonework, and then I smiled.
Mickey was standing beside the open window of the cab driver’s door, basking in the moonlight like an actress on stage. Her denim jacket was draped casually over her shoulder and her hair, seeming shorter than when I’d seen her at the end of the holidays, was tied up bunches. She wore tight black trousers, ending below the knee. The cab driver handed over her change and Mickey stepped back from the door, as the car pulled away from her, turning a full circle, before starting back in the direction from which it had come.
I stayed watching, suddenly overcome by the arrival of this moment in which I’d invested so much. I looked terrible and I knew it. I’d lost weight over the past few weeks and when I’d stared at my face in the washroom mirror before lights-out time I’d seen how gaunt I’d become. It was going to be all right, wasn’t it? Mickey would remember me for who I was and not the events which had engulfed me? Steeling myself, I stepped out from the pillar’s shadows and cleared my throat.
‘Hello,’ I said, my voice inflected with a bravura I didn’t feel. ‘Remember me?’
‘Fred!’ she gasped, dropping her bag and rushing towards me.
She threw her arms round me and pulled me close. She was speaking, but I couldn’t hear what it was she was saying. She was crying and kissing my face and, as she stepped slowly back and trailed her fingertips across my cheek, I realised that my eyes were filled with tears. Her being here was like a release. It was as if she held the key to all the terrible things that I’d locked away inside my mind. Everything that had happened to me in the last month was suddenly welling up inside me and flooding out. She held me tight, her face pressed against mine, catching my tears on her lips as they fell.
‘I’m here,’ I heard her whispering over and over again as I continued to sob. ‘I’m here, my darling. I’m here.’
Eventually, I pulled away from her. ‘We should hurry,’ I said. ‘I might have been missed by now. If they think I’ve run away, the drive and the lanes will be the first place they’ll look.’
She nodded her head in understanding.
‘I know somewhere we can go,’ I continued, burying myself in the practicality of the moment.
Taking her bag from her, I led her into the trees. By necessity, we hardly spoke as we walked. We made swift progress to begin with, only slowing as we were forced to navigate our way through the bushes and bracken and brambles beyond. After fifteen minutes, we reached the wide vista of the school sports fields. Mickey stopped at my side and stared. In the distance, tiny blocks of lights delineated the windows of Greenaway’s buildings.
‘How big is this place?’ she asked, amazed.
‘You should see it the daytime,’ I replied. ‘You will tomorrow when we wake up.’
And it was there and then I realised that in my mind I had already made my decision. I wouldn’t be going back to my boarding house, either tonight or tomorrow. I was with Mickey now. I wouldn’t allow myself to be separated from her again. I slipped my hand into hers and, together, we walked on.
Five minutes later, we were standing outside a small, ornamental white stone temple on the far side of Greenaway’s playing fields, hundreds of yards from any inhabited part of the school. Rumour had it that the building had been gutted by fire over a decade before. Certainly, in the two and a half years I’d been at Greenaway, this building had been used just once, and then only as a backdrop for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s D
ream. Back then – over a year ago now – the gardeners had hacked out a temporary outdoor auditorium from the nettles and brambles which had surrounded it, but now nature had crept back and claimed the place as its own once more.
Neither of us had any idea what lay in wait beyond the smoke-blackened glass of the temple’s windows. The beam of the torch Mickey was holding flickered over the lock, which I was attempting to lever free from the damp wooden door frame with my knife. Finally the lock gave and I turned to Mickey and quickly kissed her. ‘Come on,’ I said, taking the torch from her, ‘let’s check it out.’
Stepping through the doorway, I gave the place a quick once-over with the torch beam. It was a single room, with a floor space approximately the same size as that of a squash court. White sheets lay draped across as yet unknown objects. The walls were patterned by cobwebs and scorch marks and, somewhere close, something unseen scurried away and I felt myself tense up.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mickey said, slipping her arm around my waist. ‘It’s probably a field mouse.’
I shone the torch up at the domed ceiling and ran the light across the remnants of a fresco. Among the patches of damp and the smudges of soot, you could still make out traces of angels riding on clouds. I heard Mickey sigh.
‘It must have been amazing here once,’ she said.
Without speaking, we set about clearing a space for ourselves. Finding a half-bald broom leaning against one of the walls, I swept clean a section of the dusty floor.
Mickey pulled down the dust sheets, revealing piles of broken school desks and stacks of chairs beneath. Shaking the sheets out, she arranged them on the floor. Then she took a packet of candles from her bag by the door and lit the bottom of each one, using the melted wax to cement them upright to the stone floor in a circle round the sheets. Finally, she lit the candles, stood back and surveyed her work. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s hardly the Ritz, but it’ll do.’
