Dr Lane heard him out. Then he said "That is true, to be sure. But he is, after all, only fifteen years old. Has it struck you that he is, perhaps, unusually self-possessed - for that age? That he is, perhaps, just a little, ah, solitary?"
This time he had to wait. After the pause Mrs Potten said, hesitantly, "I have thought he was something of a loner, Dr Lane. But I put that down to his being an only child..."
"I think," Lane said, "that there is a little more to this than the mere only-child syndrome. I think there is something seriously amiss."
The father flushed deeply, and rose all the way out of his chair. "Are you telling me there's something wrong with my boy? Something wrong with h..."
"Be quiet, David," snapped his wife, "and for God's sake sit DOWN." Her voice was by this time crackling with tension and unease. Lane noticed that when she relaxed her tight control on her voice, although the modulation cracked, the accent did not. He also noticed that as soon as she brought that tone into it her husband sat down as if he'd been shot. She's the tough one, he thought. Well-bred, though, I'd have said. Pity there's not much humanity underneath it all. She was speaking again, urgently, to her husband. "For Christ's sake forget about chucking your weight about for once and listen to what he's saying. Dr Lane, come to the point. What do you think is wrong with Jamie?"
He hesitated a long time before he answered, trying to gauge the best way to put it. "Frankly, Mrs Potten, I don't know for certain. I think it will require a psychiatrist to discover that..."
All hell broke loose. They were both on their feet, shouting alternately at him and each other. Eventually on sheer volume the man won. "...you got the infernal bloody gall to sit there and tell me my bloody son's mad..."
"...Christ's sake sit down, David. He's not saying James is..."
"...this what we're paying this fancy fucking place thousands of pounds a year for, to have this, this... this..."
"...down, David. PLEASE..."
"...won't have it. I say, I will not have it. I'm suing. I'll have the boy out of here in five..."
The headmaster sat through the tirade impassively for a minute and a half, thanking the providence that set his study away in a remote part of the building where few if any pupils or even masters were likely to penetrate. Then he spoke. "Mr and Mrs Potten, I shall say this once to you, and once only.
I will not have exhibitions of that kind in this room, or anywhere else in this school. I have called you to see me on a matter of the greatest importance to you both, to me, to the school, and most of all, to Jamie. I am not accustomed to trifling in such matters. I should never have asked you to come to see me had I not regarded the circumstances as quite exceptionally grave. I must now ask you to hear what I have to say, in its entirety, and to comment upon it as necessary.
"But you will kindly do so in the proper manner, as the extreme gravity, as I consider it, demands. And you will not again have recourse to the kind of disgraceful exhibition of a minute ago. That has nothing to do with my dignity, or with considerations of propriety.
I say it because what I have to say is far too important to allow deplorable behaviour by either or both of you to distract us. Now, let's begin with today. Are you aware that Jamie is absent from school today?" They gazed at each other in surprise. "Well, Mr and Mrs Potten? Are you telling me you don't know whether your son is at school or not?"
"No. Well, I... He left for school this morning," faltered Annabel Potten. "He had his breakfast as usual, and left at the usual time. He was wearing his uniform, and he had his books with him. I can't think..."
"He's not here this morning, Mrs Potten, and he hasn't been all week. This is not by any means the first time that he has been absent. In the past he has produced notes, ostensibly from you, excusing him on various pretexts."
"But, dammit, man," began David Potten explosively, "why haven't you got in touch with us before, if he's been going AWOL?"
"Because when it began, early this term, we accepted the notes. The explanations were reasonable; the occurrences were only very occasional; finally we had no reason to think that they were other than genuine. Later on, as the absences increased, we began to question the boy. He gave us assurances that it was a temporary thing, and stated - to me, in this room - that the real reason was that..." He hesitated, coughed and cleared his throat. "He declared that the cause of his problem was that your marriage was breaking down, and that the strain of it was such that he was unable to give his attention to his work, or to anything else. He stated that the only thing he felt able to do was to walk miles by himself, trying to sort ideas out in his own mind.
"He begged us," he continued in a dead, flat tone, "or rather, he implored us to take no action, most of all he implored me not to pass it back to you, saying that it would finish everything if I did so. On a strict promise from him that he would not absent himself once again, but that he would bring his problems to me without fail, I agreed to what he begged." He broke off, lit himself another cigarette, and went for a short walk round his study. He came to rest before the big windows looking out onto the school's impressive front drive, with its avenue of great trees, and stood gazing out for some moments.
Coming back to his seat, he resumed. "As I said, I acceded to what he asked. I believed that he was a quite extraordinarily mature and sensible boy. Of his exceptional intelligence I was already aware. I believed that he was sufficiently worldly-wise and possessed of so unusual a degree of honesty - that he almost certainly knew as well as anyone what was best for himself. I could see the deep misery and unhappiness in his eyes, and I grieved for the poor child, as I grieve now. But I trusted his maturity. You must understand that I have encountered this kind of problem many times before, and I have found that boys in Jamie's position, if they are intelligent, are very often unusually self-reliant and clear-sighted about their own difficulties, and it doesn't do to interfere with them any more than can be helped. Gentle understanding, being there when they call upon you, that is almost all one can do in many cases, as in Jamie's.
"I might even have allowed him to continue with his absenteeism for another few weeks, perhaps even to the end of this term, though I should undoubtedly have pressed him to allow me to help him in more practical ways. He inspired me with that much confidence as to his ability to keep control, to keep it all in balance, and to take care of himself.
"Now, however, I think I must step in; and I think I must have your help, because something else has come to light which makes the whole thing a lot more serious."
"Well? Are you ready to help me?" he pressed. They straightened a little in their chairs, looked at each other and both nodded.
"Then tell me: has Jamie ever mentioned to you - to either of you - anyone by the name of Christopher?"
They looked blankly at each other. "No, he's never mentioned anyone of that name to me," said his mother. "No, I'm sure he hasn't got a friend of that name. I would have remembered, because we almost called him Christopher. After my brother..." She dried up. Lane looked at the father.
"No, I've never heard him mention the name. No, I'm sure of it. Why?"
"How much do you know about homosexuality?" he asked.
For a moment there was a stunned silence. Lane could feel the horror spiralling round the big airy room, up to the lofty, carved ceiling and down again, circling round the three of them, like incense round a pentangle.
"No doubt you're aware," Lane went on, "that schools such as this have always been associated with homosexuality. In the main, the association has been somewhat unfair. It undoubtedly exists, always has, always will. You can't keep hundreds of healthy young males who are all either just at or just approaching the full flowering of their own sexuality, or just beginning to enjoy it, and not expect them to find some outlet for it. In addition, and far more relevant, in fact, if people were but aware of it, those boys are also just discovering the blossoming of something else. That is their romantic sensibility.
"Boys are very ro
mantic creatures, you know. That isn't understood as well as it ought to be, not least because this country is at once obsessed about sex and repressed about emotion, at least among boys. But boys, when both their sexual and their emotional - their romantic - personae first flower... well, the effect is overwhelming. They cast about for objects to lavish all this emotion and sexuality upon. A few have girlfriends. The overwhelming majority don't. We're beginning, some centuries behind most civilised countries, to accept that it isn't the end of civilisation to allow the sexes to be together at this time in their lives. We're beginning to allow girls into schools such as this. At this one, we have girls in the sixth form. Which is all very well for the sixth form boys, but not much use to a boy of any other form.
"So we have a certain incidence of homosexuality. Most of it is entirely harmless - it takes the form of emotional attachments between close friends, hero-worship, and many other small things which are, in the main, beneficial and innocuous. There is also a certain amount of overt sexual attachment. We know about it, we know how far to let it go, and we know how to deal with it. Some of our boys, undoubtedly, are homosexual and will remain so when they leave us. The most we can do for those is to be properly understanding and supportive when they discover that they are not and will not be as most of their friends are, and do what we can to prepare them for the difficulties they will face later on, outside our protective walls."
Dr Lane paused to light himself another cigarette. He offered the box to the Pottens, and this time they both accepted. They were, he thought, and hoped, beginning to look a little calmer as his voice droned gently in the room.
"They, however, are a minority," he resumed. "Then there is what has been called 'institutional' homosexuality. This is quite simply the name applied when people who are not normally homosexual turn to homosexual behaviour when, and because, there is no other outlet for - as I have described in the case of a school such as this - burgeoning sexuality and romanticism. You get this kind of homosexual behaviour wherever there are men without women: on board ship, in the armed forces when they are deprived of access to women, in prison. And in schools. Here." He breathed hard, tiring of the sound of his own voice. The two across the desk remained, motionless, waiting for the next word.
***
Jamie walked, quite calmly, across the few feet of sward and into Christopher's arms and buried his face in his shoulder. A few tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes. He could feel Christopher's heart beating against his cheek. He threw one arm round Christopher's neck, burying his hand in his brown hair and tugging his head down onto his own shoulder. The other arm he clasped as tightly as he could round Christopher's waist. He was trembling violently from his neck to his ankles. Christopher held him firmly but gently, rocking him slightly in his arms, feeling the immense tension vibrating through the whole of his small, neat body. "Jamie, Jamie, my sweet, whatever is it?" he said after a while, but Jamie only made small animal sounds into the breast of his pullover. He held him for a quarter of an hour, feeling Jamie's death grip in his hair and round his waist, and wondering what on earth his parents could have done to him this time.
At last Jamie released him, but only for long enough to slip his hand into Christopher's and lead him to the water's edge. "Caught anything?" Christopher asked. Jamie turned and looked up at him. Christopher examined 'the small, triangular face, with its heavy mop of dark red hair, the straight nose and the wide-spaced grey eyes and, as always, his throat contracted and his heart felt as if it was swimming up his larynx, at the beauty that he saw and at the incredible chance that had brought the boy to him instead of someone, anyone, else. And, as always, his brain worked overtime, calculating what would happen if anyone ever found out about them. Had he been Dr Lane, the line from Gray about snatching a fearful joy would probably have swum into his mind. Christopher had read Gray, but he was far too engulfed in Jamie's presence, his beauty, the fresh boy's smell of him and his own rapture to think about Gray, or about anything else.
He slipped a canvas bag, much like Jamie's, from his shoulder, and knelt beside it, undoing buckles. " I said, have you had any luck?" he said gently. Jamie looked blank for a moment, then plummeted down beside him, as if he could not bear to be even five feet away from him. Which, in fact, Jamie couldn't, just that morning. "I had a couple of tiddlers," he said, squatting beside Christopher as he opened his bag. He pushed his fingers into Christopher's hair and began stroking it gently. Christopher, feeling the churning in his stomach and the blood-running-cold sensation that intimate physical contact with Jamie always brought on, pulled a heavy blanket from his bag, followed by an old canvas groundsheet. He spread the groundsheet and shook out the blanket and laid it on top. "It's huge," he said, gesturing. "We can cover ourselves in it and wrap it round us. And if it rains we can just roll up in it with the groundsheet outside. Will here be okay? Near enough for you to get at your rod if you get a bite?"
"Bugger bites," said Jamie. "I'm not here for the fishing. Not today. I want you today." Christopher sat down hard on his blanket, reflecting in some wonder how adult Jamie could sound at times. It's as if he was the one who was four years older, he thought to himself. He talks like a character in a novel. Probably a woman, who demands that the hero goes to bed with her. "I want you today." He sure as hell doesn't sound like a little fifteen-year-old. And of course, Jamie wasn't a fifteen-year-old boy, he reminded himself. Or at least, not a normal one.
Jamie was tugging at him and already wriggling under the blanket at the same time. Anxious to get me into bed, thought Christopher, and shivered violently. "What's the matter?" asked Jamie, becoming stock-still, instantly aware of the slightest movement or reaction from Christopher. "I dunno," said Christopher. "Just somebody walking over my grave, I suppose." He didn't quite dare tell, not even himself, let alone Jamie, what the thought of being in bed with Jamie did to him. It wouldn't do to let that particular beast out of its cage.
He became aware that he had become rapidly and painfully erect. He fidgeted with the front of his trousers, trying to manoeuvre his penis into a less uncomfortable position. Jamie, turning to urge him under the blanket with him, saw him. He looked carefully at the swelling in Christopher's trousers, and smiled. Christopher felt as if he was going to faint, and almost lost the lot in his pants there and then. Jamie blushed slightly. Like everything else he did, he blushed prettily. "Come on, Chris," he said, and Christopher's heart missed another beat. Jamie used Chris very much as a pet name. He never called him by it except when he was especially happy or loving.
Christopher shot under the blanket beside him. "Pongs a bit," said Jamie, not giving a damn if the blanket smelt a bit musty. "Won't do you any harm," Christopher said. "I know," said Jamie, gently. "Now come to me, Chris. Please. I need you." Who's in charge here, thought Christopher, knowing quite well what the answer was. Fifteen-year-old, neat, beautiful Jamie Kieran Potten came into his arms, and bliss came down and enveloped them in a cloud.
***
"At the moment we have no way of knowing which of these categories Jamie fits, assuming that he fits either," said Dr Lane. "There is no absolute guarantee that he is engaging in any sort of homosexual behaviour. But I must say, I think myself that it's as good as certain that he is, and I think we must ask him, gently but firmly, as soon as we can."
"Why?" demanded David Potten truculently. "Yes. Have you really got anything to go on?" put in his wife.
"Of course I've got something to go on," he said slowly. "It would have been outrageous behaviour on my part to worry you like this without strong evidence. You see, Jamie had a secret hide-away here, at the school. It looks as if he used it for storing anything that he didn't want discovered at home. I'm afraid we had to use some pretty underhand methods to find it. Methods I'm not particularly proud of."
"God damn it all," burst out the father suddenly. "What could be more important than getting hold of whatever's at the bottom of this?"
"Quite so, Mr Potten. That
was the view we took also, otherwise we should never have resorted to such methods. I'm afraid I had to use a fair amount of threats against his form-mates, including the only boy with whom he is close, and, what's worse, a certain amount of deception, to winkle it out of him. We eventually found these..."
He opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a large filing wallet, which he emptied on the desk top. He sorted the items out and began passing them across to the Pottens one by one. "This paperback book: Fielding Gray. It's a novel by Simon Raven - not, in my judgment, a suitable book for fifteen-year-old boys, though a most accomplished writer. The theme of this particular novel is a passionate, and, in passing, tragic, love affair between two public schoolboys. One of them being named Christopher. You will note that several passages are marked in Jamie's hand, with romantic allusions to his own Christopher - even, here and there, with crosses. Denoting kisses, one assumes. Now that need not mean anything at all. Mere adolescent romanticism, very probably, if it were taken on its own. Schoolboy crush on some senior boy. Or perhaps a calf-love affair with some junior or contemporary. However..."
He sifted among the papers again, and passed over a sheaf of paper torn from a school exercise book. "These are some verses Jamie has been writing. Some of them are on general themes - fishing, the countryside and the like. There are some - ah - somewhat unflattering ideas about his home life, which I should not, perhaps, mention. Many of these poems are very good, as it happens. He has a considerable talent. But the significant ones are the half dozen written to Christopher. They are passionate. They are, unquestionably, genuine love poems. And frankly, they are so explicit as to leave little doubt in any reader's mind that they relate to actual incidents that Jamie has experienced with this Christopher. I think it would be sensible if you didn't dwell on them for the moment." He drew the sheets back and put them with the paperback.
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