by John Boyne
“Can I help you?” asked Maude, turning to her with all the warmth of Lizzie Borden dropping in to say goodnight to her parents.
“You’re Maude Avery, aren’t you?” asked the woman, who was in her sixties and had a helmet of blue hair whose color was not one that could be found anywhere in nature. Had I been a little older I would have recognized her as one of those people who attended court on a regular basis, the building being warm and the entertainment free, and who knew the names of all the barristers, judges and ushers and probably had a better understanding of the law than most of them.
“I am,” said Maude.
“I hoped that you’d be here today,” said the woman with a broad and excited smile. “I’ve been watching out for you throughout the trial but you never appeared. I expect you’ve been writing. Where do you get your ideas from anyway? You’ve a great imagination altogether. And do you write by hand or on a typewriter? I have a story that would sell millions but I don’t have the talent to write it down. I should tell you it and then you could write it for me and we could share the money. It’s about the olden days, of course. People love stories about the olden days. And it has a dog in it. And doesn’t the poor dog only go and die?”
“Could you leave me alone, please?” asked Maude, trying hard to control her temper.
“Oh,” said the woman, her smile fading a little. “You’re all upset, I can see. You’re worried about your husband. I’ve been here every day and I can tell you that you’re right to be worried. He hasn’t a hope. He’s a very handsome man all the same, isn’t he? Well, if you could just sign this book for me I’ll leave you in peace. Here’s a pen. I want you to write For Mary-Ann, best of luck with the operation on your varicose veins, lots of love, and then your signature and the date.”
Maude stared at the book as if she had never seen such a repulsive object in her life and for a moment I thought she was going to take it from the woman and fling it across the courtroom, but before she could do so, the bailiff opened one of the side doors, the jury and the court officials entered and she waved the woman away, like a tourist scattering pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
I watched Charles as he took his place in the dock and for the first time I could see real anxiety in his face. I don’t think he had ever believed that things would get this far and yet there he was, his future about to be determined by twelve complete strangers, none of whom, as far as he was concerned, had any business judging him at all.
I looked for Turpin the dockworker and found him in the second row, wearing the same suit that he’d worn on the evening he came to dinner in Dartmouth Square. When he caught my eye, he blushed a little and looked away, which I took as a bad sign. Seated next to him was Masterson, who imitated the moves of a boxer with his fists. In the front row, looking considerably irritated not to have been appointed the foreman of the jury, was Wilbert, and something told me that he had probably brought his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics with him in a bid to secure that position. It hadn’t worked, however, for the foreman was not a man at all, but a woman, and Wilbert looked as if he’d swallowed a wasp when the bailiff asked her to stand.
Just before Mrs. Hennessy opened her mouth to speak, however, I realized that I had no idea what I wanted her to say. Other boys in my position might have offered a silent prayer that their father would be released, for the notion of prison and the prospect of a family being torn apart was one that, particularly in those unenlightened days of the early 1950s, was shameful. What would happen to me and Maude if we were left alone, I asked myself. How would I get through a day at school with such a scandal hanging over my head? And yet somehow, to my surprise, I found that I didn’t particularly care how things turned out. Maude struck a match loudly to light a fresh cigarette, the noise startling the silenced chamber as everyone, including my adoptive father, turned to stare at her in disapproval. She looked back at them shamelessly, placing the cigarette between her lips in a provocative fashion and inhaling deeply before blowing a cloud of smoke into the heart of the courtroom, tapping ash onto the floor between us with her index finger. I noticed a smile pass across Charles’s face, some element of fascinated adoration which might have explained how these two mismatched people had stayed together for so long, and was that a wink that Maude gave him just before Mrs. Hennessy declared him guilty as charged? It was. It most certainly was.
But what of Max Woodbead? Did he smile at the moment of condemnation? He had his back to me so I couldn’t tell, but I did notice that he leaned over his papers and covered his mouth with one hand so either he was masking his delight or another of his teeth had come loose after the fisticuffs of a few nights earlier.
The press gallery emptied quickly as its occupants ran from the courtroom to the line of telephone boxes that stood like sentinels along the quays in order to phone the result in to their editors. The judge made a few comments to the effect that Charles could expect a custodial sentence and my adoptive father immediately stood up and asked in a proud tone whether he might be given a moment to address the court.
“If you must,” said the judge with a sigh.
“Would it be possible,” asked Charles, “for me to begin my sentence today? As soon as I leave the dock?”
“But I haven’t decided the length of your term yet,” replied the judge. “And you’re eligible for bail until the date of sentencing. You could go home for a couple of weeks, Mr. Avery, to get your affairs in order.”
“My affairs are what got me into this mess in the first place, Your Honor. I’d just as soon take a break from them. No, if I’m going down, I might as well start now,” said Charles, a pragmatist to the last. “The sooner I get in, the sooner I get out, am I right?”
“I suppose so,” said the judge.
“Grand so,” replied Charles. “I’ll start today then if it’s all the same to you.”
The judge scribbled something down on a legal pad before him and glanced toward Godfrey, Charles’s barrister, who gave a shrug as if to say that he respected his client’s wishes and would make no appeal.
“Is there anything else you’d like to say,” asked the judge, “before you’re taken down?”
“Only that I humbly accept the decision of the court,” he replied. “And I will serve my time without complaint. I’m just glad that I don’t have any children to witness this moment of degradation. That, at least, is a mercy.” An assertion that left at least four members of the jury with utterly baffled expressions on their faces.
As we left the courtroom to a hungry pack of journalists and photographers, Maude ignored their questions and flashbulbs, marching forward purposefully without even a cigarette as her armor, and I did my best to keep up with her, aware that the slightest stumble on my part would result in me being squashed beneath the boots of the press.
“Him!” cried Maude unexpectedly, her voice echoing around the Four Courts, and as she pulled to a screeching halt, so did the media scrum around us. As it had inside the courtroom when she struck the match, every head turned in her direction. “The nerve of him!”
I followed the direction of her gaze to see a middle-aged man of indistinctive appearance, wearing a dark suit and sporting a small mustache that to my mind was a little too Hitler-like for comfort, standing in the center of a group of similarly attired men, accepting their congratulations.
“Who is he?” I asked. “Do you know him?”
“It’s The Man from the Revenue,” she declared, striding toward him as one hand reached into her bag. The accountant turned and observed her approach with fear in his eyes, glancing toward the hand as it emerged. Perhaps in that moment he thought that she was going to pull a gun on him and shoot a bullet through his heart; perhaps he wondered why he had devoted his life to the investigation and prosecution of improper financial transactions within the Irish banking sector when his first love had always been performance art. Or perhaps he didn’t have a clue who she was. Either way, he didn’t say a word and when she stopped in front
of him, her face red with rage, he was surely bewildered by the fact that she was waving a copy of Amongst Angels in his face, which, quite quickly, she brought down on his head.
“Are you happy now?” she screamed. “Are you pleased with yourself? Goddamn it, but you’ve made me popular!”
1959 The Seal of the Confessional
A New Roommate
Although it would be another seven years before I laid eyes on Julian Woodbead again, he remained a constant in my mind throughout that time, an almost mythological figure who had walked into my life one day to overwhelm me with confidence and charm before disappearing just as quickly. When I woke in the morning, I would often think of him waking too, his hand, like mine, slipping inside his pajamas to encourage the cascade of endless pleasure that our youthful tumescence had begun to offer. Throughout the day he was there in one form or another, commenting on my actions, a wiser, more self-assured twin who knew how I should act, when I should speak and what I should say better than I did. Despite the fact that we had only been in each other’s company twice and briefly on both occasions, I never questioned why he had become a figure of such importance to me. Of course, I was still too young to recognize my fascination for what it was and put it down to a sort of hero worship, the type I had read about in books, and this awe seemed characteristic of boys like me, quiet boys who spent too much time alone and were uncomfortable in the presence of people their own age. So when we were unexpectedly thrown into each other’s company again, it unsettled as much as delighted me but I was determined that we should become firm friends. Of course, I never expected that by the year’s end Julian would have become the most famous teenager in the country but then who could have predicted such an unexpected turn of events? Violence and political unrest were not the everyday considerations of fourteen-year-old boys in 1959; as with most generations we were solely concerned with when we would next eat, how we could improve our social standing among our peers and whether anyone might do to us the things that we were doing to ourselves several times a day.
I had entered Belvedere College as a boarder a year earlier and, to my surprise, I didn’t hate it as much as I had expected to. The anxiety that had marked my childhood had begun to lessen and, while I was still not the most outgoing of pupils, I didn’t walk down populated corridors in fear of assault or insult. I was one of that fortunate cadre of boys who, for the most part, is left to his own devices, neither popular nor disliked, not interesting enough to befriend but not fragile enough to bully.
The dormitories contained what were called “paired rooms,” furnished with two beds, a large wardrobe and a single dresser. My roommate during my first year was a boy named Dennis Caine, whose father was that rarest of creatures in the 1950s: a critic of the Catholic Church who wrote inflammatory articles in newspapers and was regularly given airtime by excitable producers at Radio Éireann. A pal of Noël Browne’s, whose Mother and Child Scheme had brought down a government when Archbishop McQuaid realized that his proposal meant that Irish women might be allowed an opinion of their own without having to run it past their husbands first, it was said that he was on a mission to extract the clerical poison from the secular body, and he was regularly portrayed in pro-Catholic newspaper cartoons as a snake, which made no sense whatsoever considering the analogy. Dennis, who had been admitted to the school before the Jesuits realized who his father was, was accused of cheating in an exam and, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the allegation, expelled after a farcical inquiry and cast into the wilderness of a non-denominational education.
Of course, everyone knew that the entire thing had been a setup and that the priests, acting upon the orders of some superior power, had simply planted evidence to show his father what happened to those who went against the authority of the Church. Dennis protested his innocence but perhaps he didn’t mind too much, for the guilty verdict meant that he could leave Belvedere and the tender embrace of the school forever. He disappeared with scarcely a goodbye.
And then Julian arrived.
A rumor had gone around that a new boy would be joining us, which was unusual in itself, as it was already the middle of the school year. The rumor escalated into speculation that it was the son of someone in a public position, a boy who, like Dennis, had been expelled from his previous school for some egregious crime. Charlie Chaplin’s son Michael was mentioned, as was one of Gregory Peck’s children. A bizarre rumor took hold for a few hours that the former French President Georges Pompidou had chosen Belvedere for his son, Alain, when one of the sixth-form prefects swore that he had overheard the geography and history teachers discussing security arrangements. And so, when the headmaster, Father Squires, stood up at assembly on the day before Julian’s arrival to announce the name of our new alumnus, most of my classmates were disappointed that his surname was not one that suggested a more illustrious heritage.
“Woodbead?” asked Matthew Willoughby, the obnoxious captain of the rugby team. “Is he one of us?”
“One of us in what way?” asked Father Squires. “He’s a human being if that’s what you mean.”
“He’s not a scholarship boy, is he? We’ve got two of them already.”
“Actually, his father is one of Ireland’s most prominent solicitors and a former Belvedere boy himself. Those of you who read the newspapers might be familiar with Max Woodbead. He’s represented most of Ireland’s top criminals in recent years, including many of your own fathers. You’re all to welcome Julian and treat him with courtesy. Cyril Avery, you’ll be his roommate since you have an available bed in your room, and let’s hope that he doesn’t turn out to be as dishonest as his predecessor.”
Of course, I knew more than my classmates about Max Woodbead but I told no one of our past encounters. My interest in Julian meant that I had followed his father’s career and growing celebrity closely over the seven years since Charles’s trial and watched as his practice had grown considerably, to the point where only the very wealthiest defendants could afford to hire him. There were reports that he was worth over a million pounds, an enormous amount of money in those days. He owned a country home on the Dingle Peninsula, a flat in Knightsbridge where his lover, a famous actress, lived, but his main residence was a house on Dartmouth Square in Dublin that he shared with his wife Elizabeth and their children Julian and Alice, the same house that had once belonged to Charles and Maude and which he had purchased in an act of revenge within six months of my adoptive father’s incarceration in Mountjoy Prison. Moving his family in and forcing Elizabeth to sleep next to him in the room that had once been Charles’s was his idea of punishment.
Max’s other claim to fame was his growing public profile. He appeared regularly in the newspapers and on the radio criticizing the government, every government regardless of its colors, and pining for a restoration of Ireland’s place within the Empire. He was engaged in a rhapsodic love affair with the young Queen, whom he adored, and considered Harold Macmillan to be simply the finest politician who had ever lived. He longed for a return to the days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy with a governor-general on Kildare Street and Prince Philip roaming the Phoenix Park, shooting every unfortunate animal that had the temerity to cross his path. Of course, he engendered the animosity of an entire nation for his anti-Republican views but that only made him more popular with the media, who broadcast his every wild utterance and sat back rubbing their collective hands in glee as they waited for the outrage to begin. Max was living proof that it doesn’t matter if people love you or loathe you; as long as they know who you are, you can make a good living.
And so when I returned from Latin class the following afternoon and saw the door to my room standing ajar and heard the sound of someone shuffling around inside, I felt a mixture of excitement and queasiness, guessing that Julian had arrived. I turned around and ran back along the corridor toward the bathroom, where a full-length mirror was pinned to one of the walls with the express intention of intimidating us after our morning shower
s, and examined myself quickly, taking a comb from my pocket and running it through my hair before checking there were no lunch remnants stuck between my teeth. I was desperate to make a good first impression but felt so sick with nerves that I worried I would end up embarrassing myself.
I knocked on the door and when no answer came pushed it open and stepped inside. Julian was standing by Dennis’s old bed, removing his clothes from his suitcase and placing them in the lower section of our shared chest of drawers. Turning around, he looked at me without any particular interest and although it had been a long time since we’d last seen each other I would have known him anywhere. He was around the same height as me but had a more muscular frame, with blond hair that fell over his forehead with as much languor as it had when he was a child. And he was ridiculously handsome, with clear blue eyes and skin that, unlike most of our classmates, had not been tarnished by acne.
“Hello,” he said, unfolding a coat and brushing it carefully with a clothes brush before hanging it in the wardrobe. “And who might you be?”
“Cyril Avery,” I said, extending my hand, which he stared at for a moment before shaking it. “This is my room. Well, our room now, I suppose. It was Dennis Caine’s and mine until a few weeks ago. But he got sacked for cheating in an exam even though everyone knows he didn’t do it. Now it’s our room. Yours and mine.”
“If this is your room,” he said, “then why did you knock?”
“I didn’t want to startle you,” I replied.
“I don’t startle easily.” He closed the drawers and looked me up and down before raising his right hand in simulation of a pistol and using his index finger to point to a spot just to the right of my heart. “You’ve missed a button on your shirt,” he said.