And after all, as the whole Skull of Doom episode showed, there was a little nerve of cruelty unknown to Marion herself which pulsed in her from time to time. If she was in loco parentis for all the children, then by letting little Stevie Templeton be frightened until his athetoid twitching became frantic and he cut his head against the metal of his wheelchair, she was responsible for the hurt he suffered. She was hurting him as directly as if she had knocked his head against the metal herself.
‘It’s natural, John, and even admirable that your reach should exceed your grasp …’ She faltered for a moment, realising the ineptness of her chosen words. I looked down at my hands, which got equally poor marks for reaching and grasping, and then gazed defiantly up at her, so that she went quite red. There’s startling imagery dozing in all our expressions – I mean, ‘flogging a dead horse’. Why ever not? It’s the only sort of horse I’d condone flogging. Language is full of these pitfalls, and I can’t pretend they’ve ever bothered me, really.
Arms and legs. They’re basic, aren’t they? The last thing I want is for people to hamstring the language, put their words in shackles, out of a misplaced and cringing tact. Still, I wasn’t going to let that stop me using any weapon I could find, in the struggle with a benefactor who was blocking my way so that she could help me indefinitely, and heal her own wounds in the process.
‘One more thing, John,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking through your academic record. Perhaps we’ve made a mistake. That does happen. Very rarely. Or perhaps it is you that is mistaken.’ She made a show of shuffling the papers on the desk she had somehow taken over from Raeburn. ‘Did you in fact pass your eleven-plus?’
Her cheeks might wobble but her voice was strong. Even so I began to see that her eyes behind their glasses looked small and frightened. I could hear her breathing. She wasn’t puffing out her cheeks, as I would do when I imitated her for the entertainment of the Blue Dorm, but she was making little panting noises, as if she was an invalid with damaged lungs trying to blow out a birthday candle set too far away from her.
I felt guiltily sorry for her at that moment. I had to remind myself what she was actually doing. The candle in front of her was my hope for a normal education. That’s what she was doing her best to extinguish. ‘No, Miss Willis, I didn’t. But Burnham Grammar School will take me anyway. It’s all arranged. I have a letter from my parents.’
This means you
Then her voice changed, becoming rougher but also, horribly, softer. ‘John, I can’t let you go,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you go.’ Remembering what she had said at Raeburn’s engagement party, I understood that she was no longer speaking as an educationalist with special expertise but as something else. Call it an educationalist scorned. There came a point where she wanted to hang on to me, to keep me near, and not necessarily for my own good. If I moved to a main-stream school, that was something other than a success story and a vindication of the Vulcan ideal. It had become a personal rejection, and she had had quite enough in that line. John, I can’t let you go was like a melancholy reprise of Alan, don’t do this to me. Dido again. Dido made monstrous by grief. The proud Carthaginian queen stepping onto the pyre and holding me in her arms as it was lit.
Then she recovered her poise, and the vocal softness disappeared for good. ‘One thing I will say. If you go to this school where they know nothing about you, you will come crawling back to me on your hands and knees. You will beg to be taken back where you belong.’
‘Then I will come crawling back to you on my hands and knees. And when I do you can say whatever you like.’
It gave me courage that she still didn’t know about Kim and Dagmar Bosch from Oberammergau, and their trysts in the library. She didn’t know that Luke Squires met Terence Wilberforce on the go-cart track any night when there wasn’t rain. And hang it all, after the trip to Amsterdam, she had told us to do paintings of the tulip fields using a ruler, if you please! I had ignored her and been held up to shame. ‘But Miss Willis,’ I had said, ‘there are no straight lines in nature.’
‘Allow me to know best, John. I saw any number of straight lines in Holland, and so did you.’ Allow her to know best? Not any more.
Marion tried to regain control of the conversation by dismissing me, saying, ‘You can go now, John.’ I deliberately misunderstood, and said, ‘I know, Miss Willis, that’s just what I’ve been saying.’ I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of ordering me out of the room. The battle was won, and this was just a skirmish over who had the right to dismiss who. Or as she might have put it, asserting her authority to the last – who had the right to dismiss whom, John. I’d go in my own good time. It turned out I was the one with the mobility after all.
I closed my eyes in a curious state of peace. I no longer even felt like a pupil of the school. I was already for all practical purposes an old boy. Miss Willis might be sitting there in front of me, holding her head in her hands, but in reality I had already left. I was reverting to a technique older than anything I’d learned at Vulcan, the almost subliminal mode of movement that had served me so well at CRX. I could see a door opening on the far side of Miss Willis, glowing with possibilities, and I had only to get to it. All I had to do was to start taking tiny steps and I would somehow arrive at my destination before anyone really noticed that I was on my way. It had worked any number of times in the past. The length of my ‘stride’, to call it that, might only be an inch and a half, and for any amount of time I seemed to be getting nowhere. Yet the next time Marion Willis looked up I would be long gone, tottering securely into a corridor full of possibilities, where every door was very promisingly marked Private or No Admittance. Absolutely no unauthorised personnel.
Danger. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
Keep Out. This Means You.
About the Author
Adam Mars-Jones’s first book of stories, Lantern Lecture, was published in 1981 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. In 1983 and again in 1993 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, despite not having produced a novel at the time. His Zen status as an acclaimed novelist without a novel was dented by the appearance of The Waters of Thirst, and can only suffer further with the appearance of Pilcrow, described by Margaret Drabble as ‘one of the most remarkable novels I have read in recent years.’
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Adam Mars-Jones, 2008
The right of Adam Mars-Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28401–6
Pilcrow Page 63