by H. S. Cross
My Dear Nurse Friday, No, I don’t believe that marrying again can pain them or reduce the devotion we had for them. A second love does not make the first less precious. The years expire, as we historians can never forget. We are all, in the end, dust, and if love should cross our path a second time, who are we to refuse?
* * *
Anyone could bring a petition to Parliament. It was their right as freeborn Englishmen. Wilberforce wasn’t Parliament, but he had to feel the weight of signatures summoning him to Patron’s Day. The Lower School had been easy enough to persuade, and once Halton had earned a docket—for courageously refusing to show Mr. Grieves just what he had been passing around the form—and endured the penalty, he was in a position to confide in Moss.
—He’ll never come, Moss said.
—Lots of Old Boys come.
—He doesn’t even know any of you.
—He knows you, though. And if you passed it round, the Sixth would sign.
—Ha-ha.
—I already got whacked for it. Shame to spoil it now.
* * *
Uncle John, You must stop circumventing me! Today Dr. Highmanflinger read me a lecture on German medicine. He thought I had written to you to complain and gave me the third degree. You must send all correspondence through me. It’s what Mum wants and it’s the only way.
In any case his theory boils down to this: the body and its cells are like city-states. Disease is a conflict amongst the citizens, sometimes provoked by external forces. Most diseases can be attributed to an imbalance between the Nerve-Sense (Cold) Pole and the Metabolic (Hot) Pole. Kneipping tries to right the balance by stimulating the body with different temperatures. He also vouched for the healing powers of a beautiful setting, and for the peace of mind that comes from submitting to the authority of one’s physician (hint, hint). Of course, if you ask Miss Murgatroyd, all disease can be attributed to sluggish bowels, and everything else to French novels and German political theories. So there you are.
* * *
Dear Tommy Gray, I’ll never be able to list all the things I’ve learned since coming to the Continent. The French are the most fastidious about their language, but the Germans have the most frightful nouns. In music and art, the French are tops. They’ve got all the best painters, and in Paris there’s jazz music everywhere. Even in Vichy the orchestras played gay tunes. Here we have to listen to the most dreadful Wagner from the sanatorium’s gramophone each morning. The staff hum along with tears in their eyes! Everyone says the Germans are severe, but they’re actually terribly romantic. They care ever so much about their hearts, and doctors listen to your chest as if it’s the only thing that matters. There’s a book about sanatoriums everyone’s discussing. Miss M says it’s nothing but morbid German philosophy, but I don’t think she’s actually read it.
—Der Zauberberg?
Gray’s French master pronounced the title as if tasting wine that was foreign, but good.
—L’auteur s’appelle Thomas Mann, mais le titre Anglais …
Henri searched the ceiling for translation but then dismissed the effort:
—À quoi bon? You will never find it in our pitiful excuse for a bibliothèque.
—Vous croyez que non, monsieur? Gray said.
There was more in the library than anyone suspected. He’d found a case with books double stacked, many of them foreign.
—Alors, Henri softened, demande à ton tuteur. Il a plus d’une corde à son arc et une mémoire d’ange.
The last thing Gray desired was an encounter with his Housemaster’s bow, or his memory. He thanked Henri and resolved to scour the library for anything by Thomas Mann. But mention of Grieves had, like black magic, summoned the man, and as Gray made to leave the French room, Grieves appeared with a question about lantern slides.
—Bien sur, je l’ai entendu parler, Grieves said when Henri relayed Gray’s question. Suis-moi.
He had to follow, but at the study door, he balked:
—Sir, I can come back another time.
Grieves pushed him, and he was there, in the dungeon he’d never meant to enter.
—I’ve got it somewhere, Grieves said.
He had to keep facts and times distinct. The past was not the present. Grieves had forgotten the past, surely, at least he wrote on his prep as if he’d forgotten. Thompson makes a similar argument in The Ziggarut of Ur. You take it further, though. There, on the desk lay the broad-nibbed pen that wrote to him. Rev. para. 2–6. You’ve missed an important point. When he read the words, he heard Grieves’s accent. See pp. 26–40 of attached. Return when done. When he thought of things his father used to say, he couldn’t remember the sound of his voice.
—Here it is, Grieves said. The Magic Mountain. Wherever did you hear of it?
There was an airmail envelope also on the dish, its writing hidden from view.
—A friend? he stammered. Traveling in …
Grieves handed him the book, heavy and thick, its dust jacket new:
—You needn’t explain. I was only surprised, pleased, to see someone taking an interest in contemporary—
Grieves was touching his shoulder, steering him past the desk and the pen and the airmail to the door.
Crusoe, The pages you send are very fine, and I’ve marked out a few phrases that seemed particularly apt. As you ask, I’ve included the odd query and one or two points which mystified this simple mind. You say your audience is General, but I do hope you’re consulting better readers than this volunteer nurse.
The book had swollen over two hundred pages, but now, after her eminently tactful but no less poison darts, he watched it deflate. Under her gaze, the concept bared all its senseless fixations. John emptied a cardboard box and heaved the loathsome pages into it, kicking the cupboard door shut on everything he despised.
Dear Tommy Gray, I’ve done some detectivism on a man called Zoltan Zarday, who’s supposed to be the wunderkind of modern medicine. Well, I suppose he’s too old to be a wunderkind, but it’s a rattling good word all the same. Even my father has heard of him in America. I got a postcard from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a picture of a real Indian totem pole on it. Da rode on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, and he says he has lots of presents for his two little girls.
* * *
Once Moss had got the Sixth to sign, Halton had little trouble convincing the Fifth. They, too, had known Wilberforce, and many considered it a rotten shame that he’d never bothered to come for Patron’s Day. With the Upper School’s imprimatur, the Remove signed as well. The envelope was addressed and stamped when Halton tracked his final quarry to the Library that hot summer half hol.
—What do you want? Riding snarled.
—It’s about the petition.
—I’ve already said no.
—You’re the only person who hasn’t signed that Wilberforce actually knew.
Riding tore the pages from his hand and strew them down the stairs:
—If you speak to me again, ever, I’ll kill you.
25
Jamie broke into his lesson and dropped a black-edged notice on his desk. The form stood up as John twigged the Marlborough letterhead.
—Cab at quarter to three, Jamie said.
John told the class to sit back down as he stepped into the corridor to absorb the news: their former Housemaster at Marlborough had died, the man who had later recruited Jamie to the staff.
—I’ve rung the supply agency, Jamie said. They’re sending Johnson.
—But—
—He was fine last month for Henri.
Lessons, John explained, were the least of his concerns. He was never quite coherent when put on the spot, but he tried to get across to Jamie that joining him for the funeral was out of the question.
—We’ll be gone two days, Jamie said. Nothing is going to happen to the woman in forty-eight hours.
At the mention of Meg, John’s words tumbled: of course nothing would happen to her, but … Jamie gave him the expre
ssion he used with boys digging themselves into craters. When he dried up, Jamie revealed that he’d already rung Marlborough and said they were both coming.
—If you don’t turn up, people will wonder.
John hadn’t set foot on Salisbury Plain since leaving it for Cambridge, and by design. Now he’d been ambushed by death, which always got you from behind.
* * *
Of course, Marlborough wasn’t something they discussed, but attending a funeral did not mean discussing anything. Jamie had taken John’s excuses as the usual blathering, or at worse a sulk at being diverted from his correspondence with a woman who would be the death of him. John hadn’t been as close to their Housemaster as Jamie had been, but the man—Ali as everyone called him, after his penchant for quoting Dante—had been as fond of John as a Housemaster could be of a Games captain who’d also won the scholarships John had won. Since John had not kept in touch after leaving, he’d no notion of the way Ali had later hauled Jamie into line, how he’d helped secure his commission, how, ages later, he’d stood by him in his disputes with his father over ordination and his degree, or how he’d moved behind the scenes to get him the post at Marlborough. John probably considered Ali a tedious figure of the previous generation, views outmoded, prejudices unsavory, a stumbling block to progress.
It was unwise to dwell on Ali while sharing a railway carriage with John. They had a long journey ahead—hours on the train, a room at the club tonight, more railway tomorrow—and plainly they couldn’t speak of Ali, any more than they could speak of Marion.
* * *
John didn’t see the point of having come to the funeral itself. Most people had arrived for the luncheon, which spilled out of the Master’s garden into the quadrangle. As John predicted, Jamie was quickly surrounded. The staff knew him and greeted him fondly, half as former colleague and half as protégé made good. John left him surrounded by Sixth Formers who plainly knew and adored him.
Out on the lawn, Old Boys—now old men—squinted in the sunshine and gulped stiff drinks. John didn’t recognize anyone. Those who’d survived the war would be balding, paunchy, or maimed, and they would expect a war story from him. Perhaps it would be easiest simply to invent one? He felt ashamed as soon as he thought it; he hadn’t stood white feathers to crumble before these people.
—Grieves?
A man in a crisp linen suit was standing before him. John froze.
Plenty of people had accused him of shirking. He was a pacifist out of cowardice, they said, or at best for the love of a girl. How could he claim conscience, they asked, when nine months earlier he’d won his school’s shooting plaque?
—Grievous! the man said. It is you!
The man’s neck had thickened, but John suddenly knew him: Merewether, fellow prefect 1913–14, Head Boy to John’s Captain of Games. Could he say a heart murmur had kept him off the lines?
—What are you drinking? Merewether asked.
John finished his lemonade:
—Scotch.
Merewether snagged a servant, John’s glass was replaced, and Merewether was not asking about the war but was taking his arm and leading him through the arches to the House that had been theirs. John hadn’t imagined he could remember how it smelled, but stepping inside, he did. The current pupils were outdoors in the fine weather, leaving the House eerily empty.
—Do you remember, Merewether asked, when we were fags and Malpass told me to stand still and have my face slapped?
It had been a classic phrase.
—Then I ducked and he broke his wrist on the doorframe.
They were standing, John realized, before that very door. Despite himself, he smiled, as he had then.
—They came down on you like a ton of bricks.
—Oh, but it was worth it, Merewether said. Brute couldn’t bowl straight all summer. This is still, to my mind, the perfect door. Do you think they’ll let me have it when they tear the place down?
John and Merewether had gone up the school together, Jamie a year behind them, and it seemed natural to fall back into the friendship, as if seventeen years hadn’t passed in silence. When other people approached, Merewether peeled John away as if he meant to monopolize him for the day. To his relief, John found that his former companion had grown into a stylish version of his better traits. He struck a certain figure. Unlike other acquaintances, amusing as children, insufferable as adults, Merewether appeared to John as someone he ought to have maintained. Merewether remembered sport, pranks, their late Housemaster in his comical prime. He kept up a monologue as they roamed the corridors, one that would never comprise or admit the darts silently stabbing John.
Back on the lawn, his thirst had grown.
—Double, thank you, neat.
Jamie looked brilliant across the quad, like the sun reflected off tea trays, and John felt the old urgency. Jamie chattered effortlessly, making friends at will, as if he actually were the cast-off from Heaven John had always imagined. How else to explain the way things never marred him, whereas John always emerged more damaged than before, diminished and compromised. Worse.
* * *
Ali’s widow looked better than Jamie expected. She sought him out and made him sit with her. She asked after Marion, knew her name although they’d never met. She asked if they had children. Children were essential, she said. It wasn’t life without them.
* * *
John walked with Merewether to the station, where Jamie promised to meet him later.
—So, Merewether said, you’re up at the Bastion’s college.
John hadn’t heard that nickname since school, and despite a day rehearsing those times, Merewether hadn’t mentioned Jamie, any more than he’d mentioned the war. Now, outside school bounds, Merewether was showing that he knew things.
—Housemaster there, yes, John said.
—Always thought it would be the other way round.
The lilacs were drooping like fruit along a fence.
—Still, Merewether said, Sebastian always had face, even if he was too much of a scoundrel to make prefect.
—Top face and plenty. Turned the place around, John said, like a top.
—Went religious, did he?
John tugged at the blossoms, but they wouldn’t come. Magic Merewether conjured a penknife.
—Tell me, Grievous, you married?
Presented them, laurels, to John.
—Passed away, in the flu, just after—
—I am sorry.
His arm was being touched, but not as in the House. Then as fellow tourist, now a touch that meant a feeling.
—And you?
—Confirmed bachelor, Merewether laughed. Too much fun in the FO, you know. Females, children, no idea how you stand them.
The flowers were bopping him in the face. He tried to explain, his boys were hardly children.
—Never mind, Merewether said. It only seems a waste of you, an usher, for Sebastian of all people.
They were thirsty again at the station, but when five o’clock came, Jamie had not arrived.
—Come down with me, Merewether suggested. I can give you a bed for the night.
But Jamie had the tickets for a sleeper, and he had books to mark—
—Keep in touch this time, won’t you, Grievous?
Merewether handed him a card and then boarded the train. A harpy screamed. Down came the window:
—When you’re ready for proper work, let me know.
The whistle had stopped, but his ears still hurt.
—There’s a group I’ve got. Clever, like you.
Steam fogged around.
—You’d find it amusing.
* * *
He was late to meet John, and it was all because of that man: once a pupil of Ali’s and, it emerged, later protégé of Jamie’s godfather, so of course acquaintance of Overall, the Chairman of the Academy’s Board. Jamie supposed he shouldn’t be surprised by the tangle of associations between men at gatherings such as these. This man, name of A
rents, had funded a chapel for the prep school where Ali had once taught. He knew the firm that had built the Academy’s organ. He knew a firm that would build them another.
The cab dropped Jamie at the station with only minutes to spare. He clipped up the stairs, bursting to tell John about the organ. No John. On the platform were cases but still no John. Inside, slouched at the bar, aha, John, looking as though he’d be lucky to stagger out on two feet. Bill, porter, cases, John’s unwieldy bouquet.
—I’m never going back there, John moaned.
—Don’t be silly. Was Merewether a bore?
John crossed his legs as if he would curl up in the seat:
—He tried to seduce me, away from you.
—I thought you didn’t drink anymore.
John snorted:
—I’ve given up abstaining. Filthy habit.
—Quite.
—Wouldn’t want to be a Puritan!
Jamie decided to unfold the newspaper. The man came for their tickets.