by H. S. Cross
The first obstacle, Moss determined, was Mac. In his first days as Captain of Games, Mac had unveiled an elaborate scheme for extra practices, and he’d been infuriated when neither the JCR nor Grieves would support it. Moss had tried a range of tactics—flattery, misdirection, humor—but nothing had soothed him. Mac had even requested an audience with the Head, a meeting Moss had attended as much to bridle Mac as to hear for himself what the Head would say. Dr. Sebastian had offered them tea and allowed Mac to make his case. He then delivered a firm and final No. The Academy was not Marlborough or Rugby or even Sedbergh, he explained; it was a small school, and while Games were essential—mens sana—it also valued study, prayer, and fellowship. Too much of one, the Head informed them, was unhealthy, and furthermore damaging to other concerns. Aurea mediocritas led not, the Head assured them, to mediocrity but to greatness.
Unfortunately for their peace, the interview only fired Mac’s zeal. Now, a fortnight later, the First XV were returning from practice exhausted and grim, rumblings of discontent could be heard in the changer, and Mac increasingly invoked the Great Wilberforce: Oh, people had listened to the Captain of Games then! Wilberforce had cared! Moss left the room when Mac began to rant. Mac harped endlessly about the honor of the House, but Moss felt sure that the only honor Mac cared about was his own. Wilberforce’s caring was never about himself and not even especially about Games. It was about the boys and what they could become. Even Pearce understood this.
All of which was why Mac could never know of illicit play practices and why Moss had to persuade Pearce—who loved rules as much as the Bible—not only to overlook lateness in Halton and Malcolm tertius, but also to engage in a bit of suppressio veri with his studymate.
Moss used his lightest touch: praise for confirmation lessons, mention of Wilberforce, a chummy promise to keep Halton in line. Did Pearce have more sense than Moss gave him credit for, or was the atmosphere general smiling on their venture, bringing them life abundant? Moss had no idea how it happened, but Pearce agreed, Mac remained ignorant, and rehearsals proceeded apace.
* * *
Rehearsals were the first good thing to happen in a dog’s age, like the rains that followed the African drought. In rehearsal, Audsley would get the look Miranda got, but unlike Halton’s sister, Audsley had an ear for other people’s ideas. It was important to offer your suggestion lightly, as if it meant nothing. If Audsley approved, he’d absorb it with Yes, exactly! If not, he’d let it fade away with a gentle Perhaps.
First you learn to spell a little bit … That tune Audsley sang stuck in his mind like tar on a shoe, playing like a wireless when he ought to be giving his attention to prep. Though the process may be slow to you, knowledge of the world will flow to you … What use were sums and parsings when Guilford Audsley walked amongst them? During rehearsals, Moss became Orville to Audsley’s Wilbur, brothers, rivals, egging each other on, Moss grinning through Audsley’s soft-shoe in the workshop scene.
They’d flown in a biplane one time across the Rift Valley, and now he was zooming over the grasses like the pilot Riding played. The pilot was French, lines gibberish, but he could hear the whole speech. He was speaking perfect French, and he was singing and composing, the whole like Stanford sung by the soloist at St. Paul’s.
He awoke drenched in sweat. It was dark, Pearce asleep. He gulped water from the tap and then stole downstairs, out of the House, and up to the choir room. There by torchlight, he tapped the upright piano and drew notes for words he didn’t know.
He was skittish the next day and earned fifty lines from the Flea for inattention. He almost welcomed the three-mile run they were forced to undergo that muggy afternoon, but once he’d recovered, queasiness set in. Prep passed too quickly, Prayers even faster. He got ready for bed and lingered in the toilet, but there was no avoiding it. He steeled himself for study number six.
* * *
Halton looked ill, and Gray hoped it wasn’t catching. As they set the furniture for the workshop scene, Halton’s manner grew furtive; this suggested a scheme, or perhaps guilt as it had lately emerged that Halton was one step away from extra-tu, which would remove him from afternoon rehearsals and thus seriously compromise the lakeshore scene. There wasn’t time to find out since Gill declared the flying scene needed more dialogue to cover the costume change, and he packed Gray off to Moss’s study to write it. When Gray returned with the requested lines, he found Gill, Moss, Crighton, and the Turtle crammed into the window seat, staring at Halton, who looked as though he was about to blub.
—It was only a joke, Halton said.
Gray couldn’t recall ever seeing Guilford dumbstruck, but there was a first, he supposed, for everything.
—Where, Gill finally managed, did you get that?
Halton now looked light-headed.
—You wrote that?
—Has Kardleigh heard it? the Turtle asked.
—I didn’t mean it—
—Shut up!
—Sing it again.
—But—
—Shut up and sing.
Halton ran a sleeve across his face and with a waver began:
Ici le ciel est clair
Jamais l’aquarium
Ne fut si lumineux
Ne fut si vaste, si vaste
He pressed air through his throat as through the finest instrument, the muscles in his mouth and chest working perfect control, perfect resolve. He was singing the pilot’s part, his part, from Courrier Sud, and Gray knew what was coming, the precious mail, more precious than life itself to thirty thousand lovers. Patience, lovers! In the fires of sunset we come to you! How had Halton made this, from a book found by fluke? They stared as the boy chewed a hangnail.
—Who’ll sing it? Gill asked. You or Riding?
—Riding has to, Crighton said. He’s le pilote.
—I don’t sing.
—You sing in church.
—Not like that.
—I know! Gill said. Can you write a second part? A harmony?
—Well, Halton said, there’s a descant.
—There’s a bloody descant!
—I was only joking—
—Sing.
When Halton finished, Gill threw his hands in the air:
—There’s our closing.
—What do you call this thing? Moss asked.
Halton mumbled until Crighton clipped him round the ear.
—Only Darwall’s 148th with a few adaptations.
—F’what? Crighton said. Speak English.
And so Halton rattled on about hymn tunes, a subject that had never crossed Gray’s mind, how the tunes themselves had names and could be used with more than one text, depending on line lengths and meter and—
—So you recut Riding’s monologue, forced the meter, found a tune that fit, and composed around it?
Halton nodded.
—He’s a freak of nature, Crighton declared.
—Our freak, Moss replied.
—Listen, Gill said gravely. Do you have any more of these?
—What?
—Songs, in your head?
Halton swallowed and Gill stared at him, feux du soir.
—Write them, he said. Write them.
35
She had come home from her wild lurches. This very fact signaled to John a return to soundness. Meg had not in the summer’s torturous silence become incapacitated or died. She had not even, by her own account or the girl’s, declined but rather improved, to the point of alleged recovery.
Honestly—and wasn’t he getting too old to toy with lies?—he didn’t quite believe it. How could she have been as gravely ill as she had seemed—so ill that fear had made his scalp break out in spots—and then out of the blue recovered? Not only recovered but reconciled with the scoundrel? There were countless explanations beyond the obvious angle of self-delusion. Perhaps one of the charlatans had offered a cure that worked. This possibility John rated low. It was also possible that the illness had gone into remission. Mu
ch of disease could never be cured, yet people carried on with it for a full life span. His own father, for instance. His grandfather, even. John had never known the latter, but the maiden aunts attested to his relentless smoking, drinking, and carousing; he’d been given a year to live when he was sixty yet carried on hale and hearty until the age of eighty-five, when he’d died falling down some stairs. It was further possible—at least John had to consider it if he were honest—that her condition had not been as dire as it had seemed. It was possible that, in his fear of losing her, he had mistaken it for the bane of his family. If he’d had a shred of sense, he would have taken notes in Paris, of her symptoms, of his conversation with the French physician. The one or two fits had stuck prominently in his mind, but had she really been so weakened overall? He’d read his goddaughter’s letters many times over the summer, but—honestly—had he not read them with the aim of confirming his own fears, or at least bolstering the thesis of his book?
He knew her. Honestly, he knew her. She was often unwell, but how unwell? Had it not all begun when Owain ran off with the piece from his office? The cad humiliates her, cue collapse, cue hospital, cue retreat to Paris in the arms of her friend (man-in-waiting?), and then after he leaves, cue lurch across the continent, lurching and lurching, one lark after another (a Hungarian persuasionist?), until now, months later, she lurches back home, having recalled the scoundrel, having punished him and punished him and finally brought him to heel.
It was possible.
But John couldn’t know until he saw her for himself. In the meantime, he had her on the line, answering his letters, as long as he didn’t spoil it. All calculations rested on axioms, and his with Meg were and must be the principles of friendship. Paris was a distant dream; they were friends, longtime family friends, best friends. When it came to correspondence, friends did not pester or take silence as a slight, but neither did friends calculate their candor, holding back for fear of appearing excessive. At first, he wrote her every day, describing his walking tour and the new business of term. She replied with droll remarks and enchanting descriptions of the house they had bought in Ely. His letters the next week earned only brief reply, but she was occupied moving house. Not wishing to be a burden, he scaled back to three times a week, but even then she blew hot and cold. Mention of his book seemed to inspire silence, whereas sharp remarks on affairs of the day—Dr. Pfrimer’s failed coup in Austria, naval mutinies at Invergordon, a dirigible moored to the Empire State Building—received bright replies. The most effective tactic seemed to be a period of silence followed by a couple of sentences or fragments, like a wire cheaply sent. One such dispatch gave rise to her longest reply yet, three pages describing a cast of new neighbors, after which she’d gone silent for another week. The cycle of expectation, disappointment, calculation, and surprise was straining his nerves. But, in less than a week, he would see her in the flesh and sort everything out for himself, and for good.
* * *
Gill led them through the usual tongue twisters and physical stretches before going out to supervise the seating. Despite his past solos, Halton felt on edge, and it only got worse when Gill told them to break a leg. They protested vigorously, but Gill explained that in the theater, everything was reversed. Good luck was bad luck. Bad luck was good.
—So say break a leg, and it’s all understood.
* * *
The atmosphere in the woodshop had all the excitement of a public execution. John had been dreading it, and of course the Common Room had come en masse to witness the train wreck and record it for all eternity. Jamie sat in the front row next to John while Burton-Lee skulked in the back. A handbill announced six titled scenes, demanding some round-the-houses change of seating halfway through. John had been expecting a pageant or perhaps an extended tableau vivant, but as someone flickered the light switch, he realized he’d been hoping secretly for something else, something that would take him back to the Lion Inn and to the bountiful pleasure and invention he’d found there.
Lights out. Guffaws from the crowd. Insults, some profane, hurled under cover of darkness. Then a low, humming whistle, like wind on the moor, growing louder than the catcalls, until—click—a phalanx of torches trained on the audience, blinding them, silencing them, and then swooping around in mad kaleidoscope until they settled on Audsley and Moss, who were turning by hand the pedals of a bicycle, already breathless, already perspiring.
The Wright brothers’ bicycle shop. Inventors’ dreams. A star-crossed romance with a girl far away. The scene progressed, and though the jeers continued, they never found a foothold. There wasn’t time to examine what was happening; Audsley’s sheer conviction overwhelmed them. They listened, they laughed when they were meant to laugh, and when Audsley began—insanely!—to sing, they fell silent. Even when Halton and Malcolm tertius began from the sidelines to whistle along and then to make sounds in imitation of instruments, the enchantment only deepened. Audsley could sing, and he could dance; even Moss looked as if he, too, could dance if he chose.
Fifty perhaps had squeezed into the woodshop, but when they moved outdoors, the crowd seemed to double. John had no idea what da Vinci was doing speaking to the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, or whether the second scene (In a Labyrinth) was intended as a dream or something else. And Riding’s role, the French pilot with his courrier précieux, why did his speech bring a strain to the throat, his song even more? The crowd whistled during the bows, and before the cheers had ended, Audsley and Co. had been carried off like football heroes. Burton had the grace to congratulate John (as if any of it had been his doing). Jamie beamed, and for a moment it seemed they had stepped into the future, where the school had become what Jamie had always wanted, where Jamie was fully and completely happy and John was part of it, aiding, believing, standing firm.
Afterwards, as he tried to explain the play in his letter to Meg, he realized it was beyond his power to describe. Everything he wrote sounded cloying or outré. The whole thing was a mess, structurally speaking—Fantasia on Flight, he would have called it. He’d been their age when he’d first heard the Fantasia on Christmas Carols. He tried to express to Meg the link in his mind between Flight and the Vaughan Williams composition. Had she ever heard the latter? It had been September, like now. He and his father had been with the maiden aunts in Herefordshire, and the aunts had insisted they attend a certain festival. John had expected candy floss, but instead they crammed into the cathedral for a concert. John had known little of music beyond what he heard in the Marlborough chapel, but the Fantasia had knocked him down. He couldn’t remember all the parts, but the piece had begun in the Beginning, man’s first disobedience, and then it had swept on through every sad and beautiful, half-forgotten but still longed-for good. God bless the ruler of this house and long may he reign. And many happy Christmases he live to see again. He set down his pen and pressed the place between his eyes. It seemed impossible that he would live to see another truly happy Christmas, and now, as he remembered his troupe of boys singing, his heart strained again, and he could feel the breath of memory on his neck, of a life before this life, a life they all once had together, before the world began to forget, before they’d fallen captive, before the noise and the machines and this endlessly confused day.
He’d said the truth in Paris, said it out loud. She’d pretended not to hear, and then she’d run away—to escape what, if not her heart’s desire? Now she’d stopped running, and he was going to her and she was letting him. Owain might behave, but the one constant with the man was inconstancy. He’d stray again, hurt her again. And then—perhaps not the next time or the time after that—but one time—
* * *
Gill said there were always celebrations with plays, when they opened and when they closed, all the more so when they did both at once. Sunday night there had been no time; they only just got the woodshop set to rights and everything else back where it belonged before tea-Prep-Prayers and bed, into which Gray collapsed as if he’d been bicycling fo
r a week. The next day, however, was Gill’s birthday, and festivities began by tradition at first bell. Gray had warned Gill what to expect, so he met the ritual with grace. Gray had also warned Gill’s parents, by letter, of their responsibilities. They’d obeyed his command, and a hamper arrived after breakfast. Gill shared the whole thing out at morning break, using the occasion to thank everyone who’d helped with the play, and anyone else who claimed to have seen it. This, Gray did not need to tell him, was not done, but it seemed to improve Gill’s stock rather than degrade it.
The play had been all the talk and continued so. Birthday rituals continued also, beyond the usual cold bath, seeming actually to intensify as the day wore on. Gill took the kicks, trips, and punches with a smile, though he was reduced to calling Pax at the business in the changing room. Gray wasn’t entirely sure if they were accepting him, through it, or punishing him. So long as Gray joined the throng, none of it turned towards him, but he felt that in a breath it could, and that he and Gill both occupied the dangerous shadowland between approval and shame.
At Prep, Gill collapsed across the window seat and fell promptly to sleep. The color was coming up around his left eye, and his shirt was torn. Gray took the flight goggles from the mantel and wrapped them in newspaper. He hadn’t been sure, and he wasn’t now, but if ever a person deserved them …
—What? Who?
Gill startled awake. Someone was kicking the study door, not the horde, but Fardley, who dropped a heavy crate on the table.
—My prep!
—My back, Fardley grumbled.
Gray palmed over sixpence to get rid of him and helped Gill move the crate to the floor. It had been sent from London. They pried the lid off, and Gill began to unpack it, strewing straw across the floor and removing bottles of ginger beer, bags of sweets, tins of sausages, and not one, but two differently iced cakes.