by Patrick Gale
Glancing across to the house, she saw that all the lights apart from her own were now out. Her parents were both in bed. She hoped Dad hadn’t cried again; she knew how much that would have frightened her mother. The situation could quite possibly get much worse. There could be a court case, aggressive media attention. People crowing, the way they always seemed to when a priest was thought to have misbehaved.
She loved him dearly. She should be deeply worried. Intellectually she was. And yet, as she started to saw timber for bookshelves, she caught herself singing along to a bouncy song about heartbreak, a song she didn’t even like especially, and was taken aback to realize she was happy.
BARNABY AT 16
Thanks so much for my birthday tee-shirt. So cool! I can guarantee that nobody else here has one with a revolutionary slogan on it in Arabic. I’ll wear it on Saturday afternoon – the next chance we have to wear anything but uniform. Most of the time we dress like geography teachers – tweed jackets, ties and flannel trousers, for pity’s sake. My chukka boots are the most modern thing I have on unless you count y-fronts. Prof seriously disapproves of suede, as you know. He says only poodle-fakers wear suede shoes and the Butterfuck says suede doesn’t wear well. She should talk!!
It was one the few classrooms that ever became warm. Most lay in a purpose-built Victorian block nicknamed Sparta because its minimal heating, ill-fitting metal windows and lack of insulation made for a bracing atmosphere that ensured no boy ever nodded off in it. Mr Gunthorne was lazy, pleasure-loving and senior, however, so taught in a handsome room in the adjacent, eighteenth-century building. Not only was it lined with history books, which provided excellent insulation, but it contained a wood-burning stove Gunthorne kept hot enough to boil a kettle on. Gunthorne was marking essays. He had told them all to pick a book off the walls at random, read its first ten pages, then write a summary in one hundred and fifty words because, he said, précis-writing was a technique they would need as adults.
Barnaby had picked an extremely easy book and had already written his précis, so was writing to his sister in The Sudan. Alice’s latest letter had arrived that morning and he liked to respond the same day, so it felt more like a conversation.
I’m glad you’re well again after that nasty fever, he wrote, then broke off to look around him for inspiration. A log settled in the stove. Mr Gunthorne yawned and slid another essay off the heap beside him. The bench beside Barnaby squeaked as Fleming Major shifted to allow Cairns better access to his trouser pocket. I bet the children are all half in love with you, Barnaby wrote on, especially all the girls. I love the sound of you getting them to play cricket. A thoroughly ladylike pursuit and the Imam can’t possibly disapprove if you play it with no boys allowed to watch. Harem cricket! No, convent cricket!
‘Johnson B?’
Barnaby broke off and looked up. The Undermaster’s horn-rimmed secretary had come in and Gunthorne was holding a little note she must have just passed him.
‘Sir?’
‘You’re to go back to house to see Dr Powell.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Er. Best take all your things with you …’
As Barnaby slung exercise book, fountain pen and writing paper back in his briefcase, his neighbours cast envious looks his way. Errands meant one could slip completely outside the timetable for a precious hour and dawdle, even take the rest of the morning off undetected. He wasn’t a rule-breaker, however, although he hoped he wasn’t a pious goody-goody either. He had recently been confirmed, to his father’s outspoken disgust, but kept his faith a private matter and held himself diplomatically apart from the judgemental creeps in Christian Forum. He loved the school, especially now he had reached the fifth form and no longer had to study subjects that bored him. With so little to make him homesick, he was perhaps ideal boarding-school material.
And Dr Powell was the ideal housemaster, avuncular, a user of first names and with an outgoing wife, English setters and young children, so that the boys in his care felt themselves a party to domestic happiness even while living in conditions worthy of a prisoner-of-war camp. Like all the housemasters, he ceded discipline entirely to the prefects, who essentially ruled the house from teatime until breakfast, but he was fair and accessible, while his study was a trusted court of appeal against injustice.
He received Barnaby in his study now, where the smells of an impending fish lunch and the kitchen’s institutional clatter were at odds with the cosy armchairs and subdued, autumnal view of Dr Powell’s alpine garden. He sprang out from behind his desk and patted Barnaby on the shoulder as he steered him to one of the armchairs. Barnaby suspected he made him a little nervous as he took no interest in team sports or botany, which were Dr Powell’s twin passions. They tended to treat one another with the baffled affection of brothers with no common ground.
‘I’ve had a letter from your father, Barnaby.’
Barnaby’s immediate thought was that his father was removing him from the school.
It was Uncle James’s choice, and Prof had always despised it as too liberal, artistic and expensive for his rigorous tastes. James’s money had paid all the fees in advance but perhaps Prof had found a way to revoke the arrangement. He had been furious at Barnaby’s getting confirmed, for which he blamed the school, and he was quite capable of removing him to some godless day school more in line with his Darwinian convictions. Alice’s long-distance reaction to his conversion was kindly satirical. Their father’s had been to give up almost entirely on personal letters. Instead he sent pointed clippings from newspapers, articles on religious war and the like, with double underlinings and a meaningless love Prof at the end, words which Barnaby’s philosophical friend, Potts, had pointed out, read as both command and endearment.
Dr Powell cleared his throat. ‘Your father asks me to hand you his letter and let you read it. It concerns your sister.’
Barnaby kept his breaths shallow; if he breathed deeply, he might cry out. He became sharply aware of his heartbeat. ‘Is she hurt?’ he asked.
Dr Powell glared down at the folded letter in his hands. ‘Worse than that,’ he said. ‘Alice is dead, Barnaby.’
Now Barnaby did cry out. Dr Powell had a box of tissues at the ready. Barnaby took a couple, astonished that his face could be so wet so rapidly. ‘How?’ he tried to ask but his throat was so constricted the word came out as a strangled sob. He made himself breathe more slowly. ‘How?’ he asked again. ‘Did she get ill again?’
Dr Powell had opened out the letter. ‘No,’ he said. It was short. It was typed. There was a handwritten postcard tucked within it, at which he stared indignantly for a moment adding, under his breath, ‘This is unspeakable.’ He stuffed the card into his jacket pocket and handed the letter over. ‘Barnaby, I think you’d better just read this.’
Dear Barnaby, Prof wrote. I won’t hide the facts from you, as I’m sure it’s better you know everything now rather than find details out later on and resent those who withheld them. Alice has been killed. She borrowed her employers’ Jeep, without authorization, and took herself off on an overnight trip. She was shot and, the Foreign Office tells me, probably raped. Things being as they are, there’s little hope of them finding the perpetrators. I’ve arranged for her to be cremated out there and her ashes flown home. There’ll be no funeral. Alice was not religious and, as you well know, I’d find any such ceremony pointless. I’ve asked the school to go easy on you for a bit and Marcia and I look forward to having you home for the holidays next month. As ever. Prof.
Barnaby folded the letter up, to make it clear he had finished. He couldn’t bring himself to look up. His eyes felt gluey. He took another tissue, blew his nose.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ Dr Powell said quietly. ‘I know you were extremely close to her and this has come as a horrible shock. In fact you’ll probably feel completely unreal for an hour or two. In normal circumstances the—’ He broke off and cleared his throat. ‘Normally a boy’s parents would come and take him home for a day or so. But it s
eems that isn’t to happen. I’ve spoken to the chaplain and the headmaster and we’ve agreed that you be given time off at school instead. It’s entirely up to you whether you come into classes or not until you feel ready to participate fully again. Everyone will be told what has happened and will know to treat you kindly. I’ll make a brief announcement at lunch today and the headmaster will be telling the other staff.’
Barnaby nodded.
‘Food’s probably the last thing you’ll feel like.’
‘It is rather.’
‘But Virginia has made up some nice sandwiches for you just in case. She put them in a bag so you can take them off for a long walk into the hills, if you like. I know you’re fond of walking.’
‘Yes. Thank you, sir. Please thank Mrs Powell.’
‘Don’t be silly. Stay in here as long as you like.’
He slipped out. Barnaby sat on. He read the letter again then tore it up. Then wished he hadn’t. He sat on until the corridor outside grew punctually noisy with boys returning for lunch. He heard dining-room benches being pushed this way and that as boys took their seats. He heard the drop in conversations as Dr Powell and whichever masters were visiting for lunch took their places, and the abrupt clatter of boys standing followed by the relative silence as Dr Powell said Grace.
He did indeed go for a long walk with Mrs Powell’s sandwiches, and walked repeatedly in the following days; the school was situated on the edge of a town, its grounds adjoining attractive countryside rich in hills and woodland. Nature was a help, particularly at its more dramatic – strong wind in beech trees, heavy rain, cloud shadows appearing to race across a valley – and easier to take than people. People meant to be kind but they also tended to be lost for words.
Barnaby was driven a little mad by the disorienting sense of being suddenly cut loose from the school’s moorings. Everyone else continued to stick to the rigid timetables of the place while he was disconcertingly at liberty among them. If he chose to attend a class, and he soon did, because he did not want to fall behind, people were so scrupulous in not addressing him or drawing attention to him, that he felt more than ever like a ghost in their midst.
Precisely because Alice had always been all in all to him, he had never acquired the trick of male friendship. Or rather, he had never learnt how to confide in other boys. So, while he had several friends, they tended to be matey rather than close. His best friend, Potts, helped the most, simply by recognizing that Christmas with his father was likely to be an ordeal. He invited Barnaby to consider spending the holidays with him and his family in London instead.
A funeral – the tactless candour of a coffin – would have helped. Because Alice had been out of the country for nearly a year already, kept alive to him in her vividly funny letters, his brain could not accept the fact of her distant death. And school religion was no help. He took himself into the chapel when it was empty, and when it was full. He heard the anthems and readings, the prayers and sermons, and he felt nothing but anger. He was furious at God for the unfairness of it. Alice might not have believed in Him but she was good, she was devoting her life to others. I’d love to have that sense of being held and protected, she had written about his confirmation ceremony, of an essential benevolence. I think people are pretty wonderful, though. The love I see here every day, between the children, or shown by the women, in the face of their pretty horrible lives, is miraculous. Can I take that as God without having to take all the paraphernalia too?
He began to walk out of chapel far more often than he walked out of classes.
Concerned, noticing he had abruptly ceased to come up to the altar for communion, the chaplain sought him out. He suggested Barnaby read Job, but that was insulting rather than a comfort, since Job’s loved ones, arbitrarily taken from him, were just as arbitrarily replaced with new ones. He suggested Barnaby’s rage at God was really rage at his own father. This made Barnaby so impatient that, for several Sundays in succession, he attended the philosophy classes one of the classics masters offered as a freethinker’s alternative to worship.
A book token came from Mr Ewart, who had never reliably remembered the date of Barnaby’s birthday. Barnaby had begun to write an automatic thank you letter when he realized that nothing in the accompanying birthday card had made any acknowledgement of what had happened. Relations between the Prof and Mr Ewart had been glacial ever since Uncle James had by-passed his younger brother and established instead a trust for Barnaby’s education. The resentment deepened when, on leaving school, Alice had spent life-changing weeks with James and Mr Ewart on holiday in Ibiza. She came back with two Mary Quant minidresses, a tan, and a fantasy that the two of them might adopt her.
It was monstrous of his father not to tell him, petty.
Rather than write, he dared to presume on Dr Powell’s kindness and asked if he could put through a call to Paris. He was allowed to ring from Mrs Powell’s study, a little womb of a room that was in disarmingly feminine contrast to the hard surfaces in the boys’ half of the house. It had thick blue carpet and chintz curtains and, before she left him in peace, she settled him at her pretty, ladylike desk, looking at framed photographs of her wedding and children.
Mr Ewart was startled to hear from him – Barnaby had never rung him before – but then was so shocked and so moved by the news that Barnaby was upset all over again and wept unrestrainedly, in a way he had not managed to do until then.
Mr Ewart had always been rather ironic and careful with him but now he was warmly impulsive.
‘Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Well … I think Prof thought I was better off here.’
‘That’s dreadful. You shouldn’t be there. What was he thinking? Let me look at the flight timetables …’ Paper rustled in the background. ‘Listen, Barnaby, I could be there tomorrow afternoon. I could bring you back here for a bit.’
Voice cracking at the awkwardness of having to point such a thing out, Barnaby explained that this might result in Mr Ewart’s being arrested for abduction, since he wasn’t his legal guardian. Instead he accepted an invitation to visit him over New Year, after spending Christmas en famille with Potts. Mr Ewart said he would see that the trust paid for a return ticket on the boat train from Victoria.
After finishing his history essay that evening, Barnaby wrote several drafts of a letter home. In the first version he wrote out all his anger, and resentment at his father and Mrs Clutterbuck, at the lack of funeral, at their coldness. By his final draft, all that remained was calm politeness – precisely the sort of rational tone that would meet with his father’s approval. He told him he would not be coming home in the holidays and explained where he would be instead. He asked Potts to read the letter for him the following morning, to confirm it was entirely inoffensive and clear. He sealed and stamped it but did not post it immediately. There was no hurry; the writing of it was what mattered.
At the end of that week, on the Saturday, two parcels were waiting for him on the post table when he came in from the morning’s classes. One had Sudanese stamps on it, with a giraffe design he recognized instantly. The larger one was from Paris. Parcels in boarding school were an event so at once there were friends around him eager to see what he’d been sent. He stuffed the Sudan one into his school bag, saying it was just boring stuff, and tore open the French parcel. It contained an elegant box of chocolate and coffee macaroons from Ladurée and a card from Mr Ewart saying simply, A foretaste of treats to come!
He shared out the macaroons after pudding. The second parcel he saved until he was safely in his study and Potts and his other study-mate had clattered away along the corridor in their football boots. There were several layers of thick brown paper which smelled exotic somehow. He half expected sand to trickle out from its folds. Then there was a little red book, fancifully held closed with a purple silk ribbon. And there was a typewritten letter on a familiar school letterhead that made him catch his breath.
Dear Barnaby,
You don’t kn
ow me but I rather feel I know you because Alice talked about you so often and used to read out funny bits from your letters sometimes. (Hope you don’t mind.) Anyway, as you’ll have gathered from the return address, I’m a VSO colleague of hers at the school.
She was so amazing. She was already here when I came out and helped me settle in and, although I’m quite a bit older than she was, taught me so much. Your sister had an old soul! She has left a terrible gap behind her. We have a noticeboard dedicated to her where the children have hung poems and pictures and we’ve put up our favourite photographs of her. We have also decided to inaugurate a girls’ cricket trophy in her name. It’s only silver plate but the first girl to be awarded it, who has a stroke just as good as Boycott’s so is nicknamed Geoff, was so proud, she burst into loud tears. Which of course set the rest of us off as well!
We have also planted a lemon tree for her. She grew it in a pot from a pip and now it’s in pride of place in a corner of the playground and the children give it (precious!) washing-up water every day and I suspect confide their secrets to it, as she was that sort of teacher.
Barnaby, she may have been taken from us young but she had already made a difference for the better in the world and so many of us will grow old without the same being said of us. I’m so glad to know you were confirmed last year. Your faith will help you. It may not seem to at the moment, in fact you probably hate God right now and think you have no faith or vision left to you, but trust me: faith is a tough and patient plant that endures long periods of drought.
But enough of my prattle. My real reason for writing is the enclosed book and letter. They only came my way recently and by chance. We found them in the Jeep when it was finally returned to us. The letter wasn’t finished but it was clearly meant to come to you with the book so here they are for you. A rather sad, early Christmas present.