by H. S. Cross
His hand rested on the other stack, her letters to him. No, he would not relinquish them, no matter what she said. She looked at him—never—and then to the floor, where she shined her torch and discovered a stray letter.
—What’s this? she asked, plucking it from its envelope.
He snatched it from her, but she’d seen.
—Wilberforce, M.? Is that Morgan Wilberforce?
—What?
—The man who was here last weekend? He’s very tall, isn’t he? And handsome.
He shoved it beyond her reach, through the quick fright and the sharp, twangy shame. When he turned back, his other letters had been captured in her lap.
—Those are mine.
The words strained his throat, and he saw in her face how childish he sounded. He tried to imagine Grieves giving a command he knew would be obeyed:
—And I’d like them back, please.
—What will you give me for them?
What would he give her!
—It isn’t exactly fair, she continued. I wrote all this and you wrote me nothing.
He swelled with indignation, but his retort came out appeasing:
—I’ll write to you now.
—It wouldn’t be the same, she said.
He groped for an argument but sensed with each moment the hopelessness of recovering them. And he was filled with sudden pity for his father’s box, long since destroyed by T, letters long since burned, from his father, from Morgan, all because he had not fought for them.
—What about this? she said, snatching up his exercise book like found money.
—It isn’t finished.
—Tomorrow. Do you promise?
Last day of lessons, nothing serious would be asked of them. He might manage if he accelerated the story. She took one letter from her bundle:
—Down payment for the finished manuscript.
—What about the rest? he asked plaintively.
—You’ll have to earn them.
By this, it emerged, she meant answer her questions. She asked about Halton, who he was, why he’d been in the Chamber of Death, what had happened after. He tried evasion, but she called it obvious and mean. Too late, he realized he’d been caught in a riptide, one carrying him somewhere foreign, new life and new land, wanted or no.
She peeled off another letter and called it his second payment. The stack was too thick to earn back in one day. He might know her letters mostly by heart, but to face seven weeks without them or her? He told her what he knew, and when he’d finished, she gave him the letter.
—Tell me what it’s like.
—What?
—You know.
If he tried, he could take them back by force, but he didn’t. He’d lost the strength to resist experiences, just as he was losing the power to forget, and the will to lie.
* * *
He shouldn’t have taken the last dose. He convinced himself of much nonsense while awake, but now, bed spinning beneath him (around him?), he had to acknowledge that dosing in the middle of the night was a new breach, and that it had been too much when chased with brandy. He had to start reducing or he’d kill himself, though on the subject of honest, he would love, love…! Not because he wanted to suffer—he’d watched enough men die and it was terrible in every sense—but wouldn’t it stop the merry-go-round? The only reason he didn’t was because of his child. She would be savaged twice, and then what might she not do? Yes, you ears of truth, yes, her questions threw him off, yes, she knew more than she should—yes of her mother and yes of him—but listen, listen, she had always been reasonable, never caused the slightest problem—all right, the summer she was three, time and again wandering down Drayton Fen stark naked, but all small children were insane to some degree. And all right, yes, there was the aftermath of her mother’s—it wasn’t necessary to review—but the point was that she’d always been curious, so her questions were in character, and in any case soon he’d begin looking for a school for her, perhaps boarding at her old school, or perhaps one in the company of only girls and women. When Lucy was that age, on her fourteenth birthday she had drawn him into the cloakroom and kissed him, at length, and he wasn’t as surprised as he pretended, and he felt it where he felt things, and Lucy went away for the rest of the summer, and it never happened again, but you, you ears, who sit there in the corner of this gray, gray room, pressing through the air from the other side, you who frightened my child in the kitchen that night—come here through the fog, all the way in, I won’t flee and I won’t fear—come, come back, whatever you are, come.
50
Queer things happened when you sat up all night. Your head was full of cotton wool, and everything ran together like old things down the drain that swirled in the basin and streaked it with their smell. Uncle John knocked on her door and came in with a candle. The electrics had gone, he said. She wasn’t to go to Thixendale today. Breakfast would be late.
Tremendous icicles hung from the eaves, and the middle of the cloisters looked like a mirror. She climbed the ladder Mr. Fardley showed her one time and looked out the window in the clock tower, like a crow’s nest on a vast, white sea. Boys skidded across the quad, shoes like skates, whoosh! beside the chapel, zing! off the porch as the men groped along the stonework. Mr. Fardley sawed at the tree that kept them behind the gates, the sound orange and achy. From the clock tower, she heard no train whistle, saw no movement on the roads. Marooned, just as she’d pictured when she brushed her hair yesterday, counting backwards from three hundred and three. She went back to bed, and when she woke up again, things seemed less strange, her power less terrible.
After a luncheon served confusingly and cold, Dr. Sebastian silenced the refectory. Afternoon school was canceled, he said, but the forecast was favorable, and he’d every hope that the trains would run as usual in the morning. Meanwhile, without electricity or coal deliveries, fires would be lit in studies and houserooms, the remaining daylight would be devoted to packing, tea would be served early, Evening Prayer canceled, bedtimes moved forward, and the carol service would proceed as planned tomorrow. Dr. Sebastian finished with the tone he used when he was pretending to be too polite to make threats: he was certain they would all lend a hand and that in this last day of term nothing beyond the weather would disturb them.
* * *
He loitered by the pigeonholes after lunch as he had promised. She passed without appearing to notice him and then with a hiss called him down the passage towards a shaft of light. He hesitated outside her door, but she pulled him into her bedroom, more forbidden than any corner of Grindalythe Woods. She laughed at his expression and tried to ease his fright: Her godfather and Mrs. Firth were round the bend with packing. No one would be back for ages. Reaching past him, she dragged a wireless across the table.
—It’s probably already started, she said.
Latin exercises fluttered to the floor, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Soon music filled the room, louder than anyone should dare. A man’s voice, light and smooth, explained what they had been hearing and then announced the next song and the people who would play it. She took his hand, but he assured her he couldn’t dance.
—It’s worth two letters. I’ll show you how.
She knew the tunes and all their words even though no one sang with the orchestra. Some songs she claimed to have on gramophone discs.
—Have you seen the well-to-do, up on Lenox Avenue?
—It’s too fast.
—High hats and colored collars, white spats and fifteen dollars. Follow me!
She smiled at his missteps and pulled him in a way that made his heart beat in his mouth. His ears drank and his hands held hers and he no longer cared what might happen to the old life.
* * *
Turtle and the rest of the fags had been press-ganged into chipping the ice from the walkways. By the time Kardleigh ordered them inside, having dealt with two gashes from so-called snowballs, the Turtle’s hands had come out in blisters. As he r
ounded the cloisters, Halton tackled him as he used to during rehearsals. Wary, excited, he followed Halton to the choir room, but as the door closed behind them, his heart froze—that Halton would speak of what never should be spoken, either to condemn him or apologize, one as ghastly as the other.
But rather than speak, Halton put his foot on the soft pedal and picked out a melody:
—Got that?
He nodded.
—You can’t tell anyone.
Halton played the tune again on top of “Besançon.”
—For the descant, he said.
The Turtle didn’t have Halton’s volume, and the highest notes jumped too high for Halton to reach. Together, though, they thought they might achieve an Audsley-like surprise. Set every peak and valley humming—beautiful and joyous, ringing in the news.
* * *
They met again, after tea in the chair loft. She was waiting with a candle, three letters set out like banknotes. Fear and excitement filled him.
—Let’s dress up, she said.
He asked her what she meant.
—Try on clothes.
—What clothes?
—Each other’s. Don’t worry, I don’t want to see you naked.
He blushed, appalled:
—Forget it!
—All right, then, a game.
—No!
—Afraid you’ll lose?
The game was called Geography, she said, and as he was clever, he would probably thrash her. He didn’t like her turn of phrase, but the thing sounded simple enough, naming places that began with the last letter of the word one’s opponent used.
—What happens if I win?
She held up an envelope.
—And if you win?
—I probably won’t, she said, but if I should, you’ve got to let me wear something of yours.
He inhaled sharply.
—Just while we play the game, and you can have it back when you win another word.
—It’s bedtime soon.
—It’s only a game.
It didn’t take him long to realize he’d been had. Once the obvious places had been used, the game degenerated into words ending in awkward letters. He’d used every East he could think of, and even though he parried Runnymede with Eureux, she provided Xanthus after only brief hesitation. Soon he’d lost his jacket, his waistcoat, his tie—
—Aylesbury.
—Yap.
—Paraguay.
—Yosemite.
Collar, four studs, shirt. She made him look away as she dressed in his things. When he turned around again, she had pulled back her hair and knotted his tie. A cheeky Fourth Former if you didn’t notice the skirt.
—I don’t want to play anymore.
—You can’t back out now.
She resumed by answering the word he’d lost.
—Yosemite…? Egrafel.
—La Paz!
—Zurich, she deadpanned.
He won his jacket back with Riveaux, but he suspected she let him have it out of pity. After his socks and shoes, how far would she go?
* * *
John made a final tour of the cloisters. The chapel was empty as his torch swept across the narthex, and he only had to lend a quick hand in the dorm before—
He froze. A sound like … He went down the aisle, scanning the pews. The sound again, this time from above. Heart cold, he mounted the stairs to the choir room.
He knew her cough well enough, and though he couldn’t swear it was hers, she was the only person not required elsewhere. He’d no idea what she could be doing up there, but the day had left her idle and he’d not had a second to spare her. The choir room he found empty, but in the upper passage he heard it again, muted, but from…? Wall? Panel? Light beneath, his torch like a sword, balcony, figures, boy with boy, with … girl, with—
* * *
She gasped, and a hand seized him, dragging him backwards and onto his feet. Tugged down the stairs, no shoes, no words, tripping all the way, socks soaked, gravel sharp, jerked forward by one too tall and too strong to resist. House, corridor, room, that room, Grieves jangled in his pocket for a key.
—Please, sir, it’s not the way it—
A blow from behind, forcing him into that icy, wicked—stumbling on the threshold, a hand at his elbow to keep him from falling, but then he was being swung, hearing it before he felt it and falling, face afire, against the bed frame and down until something cut through his tongue. Door slammed, floor shivered, metal running down his throat in the dark.
* * *
Jamie’s homily was failing to find its stride. He had been mentally drafting all week, but this afternoon when Lewis presented him with his notes from last year, he was chagrined to see he’d used the same theme twelve months previous. He’d begun again before tea, but after the meal he’d been forced to scrap that draft and start a third time. This new idea had potential—their longing for salvation as they longed to be free of this ice—but it was forced. If the night was thawing, he couldn’t feel it. If the sea at Bridlington lapped at the ice on the pier, if the workmen of the Malton & Driffield Junction worked into the night to clear the line, no one would know it any more than they’d known of the nativity. Fine enough, but Jamie was fed up with silent-night Christmases. The point about Christmas, surely, was not that it was obscure, but that it was cataclysmic. That baby in the manger, as he looked up at the stars and the angels and the shepherds smelling of their sheep, surely he knew, in whatever way God could know when newly born, that this was only the beginning of the fight, that these were only the first breaths towards that final, tearing—
His study door fell open and John tumbled inside.
—He … he …
Jamie had ink all over his fingers. He fumbled for the blotting paper as John fumbled for words.
—He’s done it this time!
John stood in the door as if a barrier kept him from entering. Jamie closed the ink pot with a reeling sensation of error. He gave John a wide berth and poured him a drink.
—Won’t you sit down? he said at last.
But John refused. He drained the glass and then began to pace the room, dropping fragments of a manic tale, a lurid, addled account of his goddaughter and …
—Who?
Alone and in a state of …
—What?
Jamie’s dread overpowered his composure, and the more he heard, the more his outrage grew.
—Dammit, where?
And the angrier Jamie got, the less John paced, as if the storm were being passed one to the other, until John finally stopped moving and spoke with all the gravity scotch could produce:
—I don’t want to see that boy, ever again.
—John—
Alarm, blaring on his—Jamie dove for the telephone receiver.
—Yes?
A chipper voice at the other end brought news from the outside world. The telephone exchange had come back from the dead. Trains were moving from Driffield and—
He covered the receiver:
—I’ll come find you in a moment. Good news!
John spun on his heel and lurched from the room as the lady on the line told her gospel of railways, electricity, and coal wagons from Hull.
* * *
He should have gone to her first, John realized as he hurried up the chapel stairs. Jamie could have waited, but she—it stabbed him to think it. She was his first responsibility. His child. The upper passage was empty. Ditto foul balcony. His torch was dying. He went back to the House. Should he bring her milk, something stronger, or … He forced his thoughts into a line. The first thing she needed was to know that she was safe.
The lamp in his study had been lit, and so had a candle, which made him squint. She hunched before the cold grate, dressing gown like a cloak around her. They said it was a dagger to see your child hurt; this was worse.
—Darling!
He went to her, but she drew back from his arms.
—Darling, he assured h
er, I’m here now.
She pulled her feet up onto the armchair, and he saw that she had changed back to her own clothes. Her familiar cardigan calmed him slightly, but when he pulled her chair towards him, it rucked up the carpet, and she made a sound like a puppy whose tail was trod.
—I’m sorry, darling. You mustn’t be afraid.
There were tears at the back of his throat, but he swallowed them as the words poured out. The boy would never bother her again. He’d be sent away, never to return. She must trust him. He took her hands in his, hot and clammy.
—It’s entirely my fault, he said. You’ll never have to see that loathsome—
—Stop it!
She pulled back, but he held her.
—Darling.
—Stop calling me that!
Her voice pierced the room. She wrenched free and clasped her knees.
—It was my fault, not his!
He tried to pull her close, but her foot shot out, making contact and taking his breath away.
—Why is it so hard to imagine? she cried.
Like the worst headache there in his root. He swallowed the nausea and tried to breathe.
—It was my idea.
She spoke in a new voice, one he didn’t know.
—My game.
And yet, he did know it, through the bedroom wall her mother’s aimed at her father.
—He didn’t even want to play.
It had been a game she’d designed to win his clothes from him. She’d only wanted to try them, and the other times, he would never have come unless—
—Other?
His voice weak and futile.
—We’re in love, Uncle John. There’s nothing wrong in that.
A hit.
—And you can’t say there is because you’ve been in love.
Palpable now in his chest, like the brutal rush of blood to frozen flesh. He thought he’d been saving her from the world, but now as the meltwater pressed behind his throat, he saw he’d been saving her from this. He’d brought her here, a spot barely on a map, to a school more austere than a monastery, and yet, and yet, she had found it even here, and in a heart he’d never …