In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  Fisher looked at him quickly.

  “I don’t think you need say any more, Marston,” he said. “If Blaydon got you in here by pretending to be ill and then forced you to get into his bed, there’s nothing more to be said.” He smiled, “Your nose is bleeding; how did that happen?”

  “He hit out at me when I wasn’t expecting it,” said Marston. “He said he was lonely and scared of the ‘Doctor’—I think he’s barmy.”

  “No, not barmy,” said Fisher, “just a nasty little squirt with nasty ideas like the ‘Doctor’.” He sniggered, “And he’ll probably end up like him too; by being expelled.”

  John sat down on the bed, expelled from what? he thought; you can’t be expelled from nothing. Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise; the world from which they were driven had been beautiful. Everything in it, trees, flowers, birds and beasts were doing and being what they were meant to do or to be. When they went out, when they passed the angel with the flaming sword, they did not walk into a wilderness but into a jungle where nothing did what it was meant to do. But if he were to be expelled from the Abbey he would be going out of, not into, a jungle, and nothing beyond its bounds could be more confusing or twisted than the things which lay within it. He should never have been sent there, they should never have sent him there. He got up.

  “Get out of my cubicle,” he shouted. “Get out you liars! Beastly liars both of you—get out or I’ll kill you.” He stooped suddenly and picked up a piece of the broken basin. They backed away from him as he crouched forward towards them. Above them, in the next cubicle, Figgis’ head appeared; below the crumpled ruff of hair the face gazed down upon them mutely, the mouth loosely opened. Above it, against the rafters of the Browns’ ceiling, the electric light flicked to life.

  They heard the measured thuds of the Toad’s tread; and in a moment, square, warty, and malarial, he filled the doorway of the cubicle.

  The eyes with the yellowed whites moved speculatively from one to the other of them, the square, perpetually sulky face hung above them with dreadful displeasure as they stood there on the wet floor by the bed.

  The Toad spoke:

  “Fighting eh? Cut along to my study.”

  He stepped back into the passage way and they sidled out and made their way over the cold linoleum to the corridor. Behind them the Toad summoned Fisher.

  “I want you, Fisher.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  John and Marston slowed down like dogs hearing the call of their master and the Toad’s Sandhurst bellow rolled down the corridor.

  “Not you two. Move on there! Wait for me in the Study. Double up!”

  They ran: straight past the entrance to the Greens, the door to Matron’s rooms the bathrooms and the new bug’s dormitory and fumbled windily at the green baize which separated the school from the school-house. John opened it and they found themselves in the Badger’s warm world, a world of red Turkey carpets, oak chests and Church-of-England chairs.

  Down the stairs they padded over the shining stair-rails to the hall and then past the chair with its yellowing notice, DON’T WORRY, SMILE into the Toad’s study next to the dining room.

  “Shut the door,” said Marston.

  “No, he’ll think we’ve been talking.”

  “Well half-shut it then.”

  John closed it as far as he dared and Marston moved over to him.

  “You know what he’ll do tomorrow, don’t you?” he whispered.

  “Make us box.”

  “Yes, and if you say anything about loving-up, I’ll beat you up so badly your Mater’ll want to bury you.”

  “Spot will have told him anyway so I don’t see the point,” said John.

  “No he won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He thinks I’m gone on him, that’s why.”

  “That won’t stop him; he hates me more than he likes you.”

  Marston smiled.

  “Well that’s just too bad for you, Blaydon.”

  “I know it is; but I don’t care. You’re stronger than me and a better boxer, but you won’t be able to hurt me—or if you do you’ll only make me blub.”

  “You wait and see—”

  “I am waiting.”

  “When I’ve finished with you, you’ll wish you were the ‘Doctor’.”

  “I do already.”

  Marston’s lips pursed and he spat out a little puff of breath.

  “You’re barmy, Blaydon—barmy.”

  “I know,” said John.

  “Barmy Blaydon!” Marston looked suddenly satisfied with himself as though he had made a happy decision. “I’ll tell you what, you don’t really think I was going to invite you to Madeira, do you? Not really?”

  “You said so.”

  Marston put back his head in the way Fleming had and tittered up at the ceiling.

  “Invite you? To Madeira? It was just a cod that’s all, I’d sooner invite a dago to England.”

  “Well why did you say so then?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Yah yah! Feeble,” said John. “You’re a coward like me really and you’ve got nothing to be cowardly about.”

  “No I haven’t, but I hate this stinking place just as much as you do and that’s why I’m going to bloody you up in the morning when the Sarn’t puts us in the ring.”

  “I know something about you,” John said. “I’ve just discovered it. I wonder whether I’ll tell you.”

  Marston looked unconcerned. “Nothing you could tell me would worry me.”

  “This will!” said John.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “You hate dagos don’t you? You’re always talking about them aren’t you? and I’ve just realised why. It’s because you’re half a dago yourself. You look like a dago, look at your skin, you’re fat and smooth and you live in Madeira. One of your people must be a dago and that’s why you hate them. You hate yourself and whatever you do to me you’ll go on hating yourself afterwards.”

  He stopped, appalled at the change in Marston. His face had turned grey; he seemed to be standing in a different way, limply like a scarecrow; he looked small and weedy. Then, as John watched him, he saw a flush bright as a scarlet rag appear on either cheek; he saw the lower lip drawn in between the white teeth and bitten so that the blood from it began to mingle with that which had flowed from his nose. Marston’s eyes were bright with a hatred which he had never seen before, a hatred that seemed to gather up and contain within it all the hatred he had himself felt throughout that day, and he was terrified by its intensity. He cringed:

  “I’m sorry Marston, I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what made me think it and if you hate me then you are right to hate me. Let me off, please let me off. If you’ll let me off I’ll do anything you say, anything at all.”

  But for a few moments Marston seemed not to be there; it was as though the measure of his anger had swept him to a different place, separating him from John, making them invisible to one another.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Do you know what I want you to do, Blaydon?”

  “No, but I’ll do it. I promise.”

  “I want you never to speak to me or look at me again for the rest of the time you’re here.”

  “Well I won’t then.” He was chilled. “Is that a bargain?”

  “No,” said Marston, “it’s not, because I’m going to make such a mess of you that you won’t want to anyway.” And he laughed again for the last time, jubilantly, his brown eyes glinting out from between his screwed-up eyelids.

  Behind him the door opened and the Toad came in. They looked at his face and saw at once that Fisher had told him everything. His thick lips drooped at the corners and between his eyebrows was the single crease-mark of the active frown he so seldom wore. His head was carried a little higher than usual so that they immediately stood to attention. They thought of the Great War; of pictures they had seen in the war diaries in Kay’s drawing room; generals and grim col
onels talking to politicians in the trenches, or putteed ranks of men standing stiffly on parade grounds.

  He glanced at them and then looked over their heads to the wall on which the regimental photographs were symmetrically arranged.

  “We don’t discuss things like this—filth of this sort—”

  he said. “You’ll find the Head Boy in the gymnasium. Put your running kit on—and your boxing gloves.”

  At the door John hesitated.

  “Sir?”

  The Toad turned swiftly.

  “Unless you are ready in three minutes, Blaydon, I will myself cane you before you fight.”

  In the gymnasium Fisher had marked out in chalk a square of the correct measurements and they took up their positions in opposite corners. The Toad walked in and leaned against the wall-bars. He looked brown, a brown and yellow man fully grown in the way that an animal is fully grown; he did not look happy or unhappy; he crossed his feet and took a silver stop-watch out of his pocket. He looked up.

  “Would you say they were evenly matched, Fisher?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What age are you Blaydon?”

  “Twelve and a bit sir.”

  “Marston?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Good. You will box three two-minute rounds and you will box hard. If I suspect either of you of pulling his punches that boy will forfeit all half-holidays for the remainder of the term—and now—first round—Time!”

  They came out into the middle of the square, touched gloves and hit out. Marston’s left glove jarred hard and hateful on to John’s nose and before he could see where he had moved to he felt the immediate violence of a bruising blow on his upper lip. He had been hit twice almost before they had started and all he could see was the brave shine of Marston’s hair standing up from his head in the falling light. He looked awfully beautiful. His face was flushed, his cheeks smooth and furry as those of an apricot; and he was smiling. He circled expertly round John and came in again. He kept his shoulder full in front of his chin, and in front of that his right glove hovered like a dark brown balloon. He came even closer and John started to weave his left hand from side to side wondering where he was going to be hit next. If Marston came very close he might be able to hurt him, he decided; he remembered something the Sarn’t had said about an uppercut in close fighting. If he could only land an uppercut, one that came from the floor with all his back muscles behind it and his long wiry arm like a thin hammer to carry his hatred into that lovely face.

  “Barmy!” whispered Marston, “barmy Blaydon.”

  And then his fists in their smooth tight gloves started to streak and thud out under the light; one skidded off John’s cheek from under his right eye and another, agonising as freezing water, crashed on to the root of his nose. Briny blood trickled between his lips and Marston’s hammering body jerked against him. He could smell the leather and the sweat as he bent his knees and let his right hand drop down towards his stomach allowing his heels to rest on the floor. And then suddenly he straightened himself to all of his gristly height and simultaneously drove his right glove up into the air below Marston’s chin. It travelled up like the shot that rang the bell at the fair in Beddington, it travelled to almost the full extent of his reach and hit nothing. Marston laughed and came in again; he had time to hit John twice, once on the adam’s apple, before the Toad called out “Time.”

  They separated and sat down in their corners.

  Fisher came over with the bucket and a towel and dabbed cold water on John’s lip and nose. The Toad looked up. “You are not fighting, Blaydon!” he said. “If you don’t fight in the second round you will fight a fourth round—if necessary, a fifth round. This is the last warning I shall give you.”

  John said nothing. The blow on his throat had made it painful even to breathe; it seemed to be clinging there like a crab. He was thinking of Marston’s face. It must be possible to hit it; if he could only hit it once it would be enough; for he would know then that it was real, that unlike everything else, the lies, and the truth he had never found, the fear and the hope, it was something immediately solid on which he could be revenged.

  Next time he would watch it not only with his eyes but with his mind as well, and wherever it moved, wherever Marston’s will might take it, he would follow it reach out to it and smash it. He would smash everything; all the misery of the night, the empty day that was to come, the Toad’s disbelief and Fisher’s complicity. He would load his glove as the ‘Doctor’ had done, not with a horseshoe but with the steel of hatred that should be drawn to Marston’s face as though to a magnet.

  He pushed Fisher to one side and got to his feet. The Toad called out “Box” and he ran in to meet Marston for the second time. His gloves slid past the touch and straight on towards the blushing face; but they met only the leather of the countering fists as Marston, dodging neatly to one side, buckled John’s ear with his left hand and swayed away like a Jack on a spring.

  John turned then and ran at him, remembering only his face, his sweet confident face; it was distinct again, the hair looser than ever under the light and suddenly it was easy to realise and reach it. If he hit straight out at him Marston would move to the right as he had done before; but if he aimed to the right, it would be there waiting for him. He pretended to hit with his left and then quick as thought sent out his right glove to the empty space beside Marston’s head; and it landed. The head jerked backwards and John hit it again right and left with all his force.

  Marston took in a breath and jabbed John on the chest. He shook his golden head and then came at him with blood dripping from his nose and making rouge marks on his cotton zephyr; a blow landed in the V of John’s chest and remained there blocking his windpipe so that he could take in no air and fought on a string suspended from some point high above him. He tried the uppercut again, and this time it came right up under Marston’s chin but it was weak and made no difference. Marston seemed to be propping him up; if he had not been there John would have fallen, but they were fighting very close now and Marston’s body supported him like a galloping horse; he was hit in half a dozen places and he could do nothing. He prayed for the Toad to call out ‘Time’ and when the voice came he wobbled across to his corner and sat down on the boards within the chalked right angle.

  Fisher stayed with Marston for a few minutes and then came over to him.

  “You’ve cut his eye, Blaydon,” he said.

  “Go away!” said John. He felt noble. He was enjoying the blood and the pain. If this were the worst that anybody could do to him he despised them all. If Fisher loathed Marston, if Marston loathed himself, and if the Toad loathed all three of them and wanted them to suffer, then, once they had suffered they were beyond him and there was no longer any need to be afraid of anything.

  “You’ve got a better reach,” Fisher whispered urgently. “Use it, Blaydon, and you’ll beat him; you’ll spoil his beauty like Jack Dempsey in America.”

  “Fizz off!” said John. “You stink like a fish.”

  In the third round they fought all the time. What Fisher had advised was sound: John never allowed Marston to remain close to him. He darted in, hit or was hit by him, and then backed away; the blows no longer hurt either of them; they were like drunken supermen, out of breath, their gloves as heavy as Sussex flints and their legs and feet clumsy and unimportant. They both bled freely, and in the engagement of their eyes there was no longer any hatred, only a dull hostility, an unspoken agreement that they could no longer harm one another and that they had lost all interest in what they were supposed to be doing, only waiting without even impatience to return to their beds.

  At the end of the round, the Toad sent Fisher upstairs and still leaning against the bars, addressed them:

  “As I said before, there is to be no discussion of this either now or at any time in the future. As far as the rest of the School is concerned you were caught fighting in the Browns and then given the usual opportunity of settling your
differences in the Gym. Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Very well then, see that you obey me.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You both fought reasonably well; but I think I should tell you that if anything of this sort occurs again, you will both leave the School immediately.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Marston, you may go. Wash and return to your cubicle. Blaydon, come here. I think you should know that your Mother telephoned the school this evening and that Mr Bedgebury has consented to your attending your brother’s wedding in London tomorrow. In view of the fact that you did your rather poor best tonight I shall recommend that your punishment drill be deferred until Tuesday of next week.”

  “Oh thank you sir.”

  “You had better see Matron first thing in the morning about that eye of yours.”

  “All right sir.”

  “Cut along now.” Remaining as he was the Toad reached out and switched off all the lights.

  John left him there filling his pipe in the darkened Gymnasium and followed Marston up the wooden stairs to the Browns.

  Binns, the Badger’s chauffeur, took him down to the station in the morning and saw him on to the train.

  It had been arranged by Mother on the telephone that he should take a taxi straight to St Juliana’s and meet the family there at eleven o’clock. He was sorry in a way that the wedding was so early because it meant that he could not have lunch on the train and he loved lunch on the train. He had the change from two pound notes in his pocket, enough to have lunch and a bottle of cider; enough to sit in the Pullman with the frosty fields streaming past the window, with the wires sagging down the glass and being punched rhythmically upwards again silently and inevitably by each telegraph-pole all the way to London.

  He knew that this morning he was looking white and queer, and therefore most especially he would have liked cider today; it would have restored his self-confidence and made him feel splendidly noticeable. When they went through a tunnel he could see his reflection in the window: the ugly girth of the upper lip, his left eye smaller than his right owing to the swelling of the lid where Marston had hit him in the second round.