by Patrick Gale
Bunsen pulled manfully and his bell rang out overhead several times.
‘No need to pull so hard,’ Mortimer told him. ‘You see? Gravity and momentum will do the work for you.’ He rang his down, paused then rang it up again. ‘All you do is set it in motion. Clitheroe, show us what you’re made of. Pretty good. Now you, er …’
‘Rix, Mortimer.’
‘Rix. Good. Off you go.’
Sophie’s turn seemed to come and go in seconds. She pulled and the rope flew up through her fingers as the treble bell rang out. She laughed with surprise to realize she had succeeded in ringing it up first time, which made the others smile and she saw that this was to be her role in this group. Jonty Mortimer made them all ring down then up again then had them ring properly, more quickly this time, in an ascending phrase from his tenor to Sophie’s treble. Then he pointed out the number embroidered on the front of each hassock and, by calling out the numbers in sequence, four at a time, he had them ringing a Westminster chime like the clock in Margaret and Kieran’s rooms; 1326, 6213, 1236, 6213.
Sophie had never learnt to read music, having done no more than tap the odd chime bar or tambourine at St Bonnie’s. She knew what written music looked like and instinctively shied away from it. This music by numbers suited her, though, especially since, as Mortimer pointed out, they would be assigned to the same bell number until they left the school or were expelled. He handed out four sheets of ten simple call changes. They were to circle their bell number whenever it appeared then memorize the sequences, paying special attention to how their bell fitted into them.
‘Obviously you can’t practise on your own or you’d make a fucking awful din, so you’ll have to learn on the job from now on or when we practise on Friday nights. We ring every Saturday night from eight forty-five to nine, for quarter of an hour before and after every Sunday morning service and for ten minutes before every congregational service on Wednesday mornings. Always get here a few minutes early. Get here late or don’t get here and it’s a detention for you. So. See you all up here tomorrow night. Well done. And Bunsen, take a tub. You smell like an otter.’
Bunsen, Clitheroe and Rix ran off across the duckboards and down the stairs, shouting as they tried to trip one another. Mortimer held the ringing-chamber door open for Sophie then shut it behind them. She slipped slightly on the damp wood and proceeded more slowly.
‘Do me a favour,’ he said and steered her firmly towards the parapet and away from the stained glass. ‘I fell here once and went flat against that window.’
‘What happened?’
‘The whole thing bowed inward slightly – see there?’ He pointed to where Saint Catherine’s wheel had become concave. ‘It held but I’ve never been so scared in my life. I don’t think it would hold a second time either. You settled in?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said, nodding.
‘Enjoying it all?’
She nodded again.
‘Liar,’ he said and laughed. ‘You’re from the children’s home, aren’t you?’
Her surprise must have showed.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell. People here can be bastards and Scholars are the worst because they tend to be chippier. If no one’s twigged yet, there’s no reason they ever should.’
‘But how did you –?’
‘Spot of burglary on Micheldever’s study to read all your admission notes before deciding who to appoint.’
‘But I thought it was all done on mathematical principles.’
‘And people thought the Delphic Oracle was the voice of Apollo. Useful myth. If I’m going to be stuck up here with freaks, at least they can be interesting.’
‘What about Bunsen?’
‘Every group needs a hate object.’ He had taken hold of a chain on his waistcoat as they spoke and she assumed the chain held a watch as a piece of dandyism to match his velvet-edged gown but it drew out an old key from his pocket with which he unlocked the iron door that barred the upper reaches of the spiral stairs. He creaked the door open and stepped through. ‘Want to look?’ he asked. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
She followed in his wake, catching again the waft of his cigarettes and a citrus trace of some aftershave.
‘Senior Prefect’s perk,’ he explained as the steps opened out into a tiny room. There were two arrow-slit windows, each sill crusted with dead flies and the ash of joss sticks embedded in lumps of Blu-Tack, and a low door which he unbolted and flung open. She saw with a shock that it gave directly onto the leaded slopes of Chapel roof. ‘You can walk all over it,’ he said. ‘Fucking brilliant when it’s not raining, like now.’ He tugged it closed again, grimacing against the drizzle that had started since lunch.
She took in the rest of the room. There was a venerable armchair, which could only have been lugged up with difficulty, a campaign stool and a card table which served as a desk. He had a luxurious bar fire, around whose grille someone had twined paperclips for holding toast in place. There were two posters, a topless woman in hot pants and stripey socks, paper breasts puckered from damp in the masonry, and a Greek temple on a sea-washed cliff. ‘Sounion,’ he said, following her gaze. He didn’t introduce the woman. ‘I watched a sunset there last summer. Get to be Senior Prefect one day, Cullen, and you could have this.’
‘How? There’ll always be the others ahead of me.’
‘Not if you take classics A levels and do better than any other Scholars who take them with you. Classicists always take precedence over humanities and both over sciences. You’re in the same div as that boy, aren’t you?’
‘Sorry, Mortimer. Which?’
‘Behrman.’
‘Lucas Behrman. Yes, I am.’
‘Is he a mate of yours?’
‘Sort of. We’re both local.’
‘He’s a dayboy?’ He asked it as though it were a useful revelation.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘His dad’s a QC and his mum’s a shrink.’
‘Clever Jews.’
‘Yes,’ she said, less certainly, thinking of the Mercedes on the turntable. ‘Suppose so.’ It had not occurred to her until now that of course the Behrmans were Jewish.
‘Bring him up to watch next time,’ Mortimer said. ‘If you like.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’d better go. Netball,’ she added. ‘I might still be in time for the second half.’
‘You’re a bell-ringer now,’ he said. ‘Sod netball.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I will. Thanks, Mortimer.’
She hurried down the stairs, clutching at the greasy rope, but as she reached the bottom and the usual clutch of fifth-form smokers clustered where the oil tank was squeezed between Chapel and the cloister walls, she slowed to a saunter, savouring her small improvement in status.
The next morning was a Saturday, which meant double physics, with practical, double Latin, with a prose and unseen, then div. Saturday mornings always ended with a div class so that each div could be set the Saturday-night essay known as a task. Sophie’s first div don, who made the class plod through Shaw’s Saint Joan and bits of A Portrait of Europe 300-1300, was uninspired compared to her new one. Mr Micheldever, who was also Master of Schola, effectively Sophie’s housemaster, was vivacious and unpredictable, which was possibly how he had bagged a much younger wife. He approached his chosen texts – Kafka, Frazer, Eysenck – not as untouchable classics but in the same ironically sceptical way one might read a newspaper or in which he preached his occasional sermons. He skipped large bits of The Golden Bough he said were out of date, encouraged wild interpretations of what Metamorphosis was actually about and warned them he thought most of Eysenck ‘stimulating bunkum’.
Most of the div rooms were on the Victorian polychromatic Brick Quad. They were painted in extraordinarily nasty colours made worse by being paired, one up to dado height, the other above. Last term’s had been violet and khaki. Mr Micheldever’s was salmon and olive, the grey sort of olive. Commoners had to wear straw hats as part of their uniform, w
ith differently striped silk bands depending on their house. These too tended to feature ugly colour combinations and she had thought at first that each div room colour corresponded to a different house. But no house wore salmon and olive so perhaps some bursar had merely acquired unpopular colours cheaply then combined them according to a theory that startling colour pairings would combat drowsiness.
Last term’s room had enjoyed a view into a horse chestnut tree. This one’s gave onto a dank, brick-lined passage up which came regular streams of dons on bicycles and pupils on foot, the pupils raising their hats in a ripple of courtesy marking the passage of any don that rode along its length. A few people were already leaving for lunch although there were twenty minutes to go. Sophie was on the verge of nausea with hunger. Her vast breakfast seemed hours ago.
‘Right,’ Mr Micheldever said, abruptly slapping shut his copy of the Eysenck book. ‘Tonight’s task. Write me something about disgust. However you like. Fiction, psychosocial analysis, historical or anthropological, even a poem would be welcome.’
‘How long, sir?’
‘Foolish question, Brewer. Time-wasting. At least three sides, as always. Though I’ll accept two sides for a poem provided it has metre and rhymes. If you want to write your usual cod-Eliot, Pickering, you can do three sides like everyone else.’
Then he passed around a dead cockroach and a magnifying glass as inspiration while reminiscing about how he got shrapnel wounds in Italy during the war.
Sophie was beginning to realize that it was the div classes, not the excellence in maths or Greek, that made Tatham’s special. Div classes broadened horizons, gave essay practice, and averted the tunnel vision that too close a focus on exam syllabuses might have induced. Most importantly div kept the teachers fresh by encouraging them to indulge their own interests and pass them on. Not every French teacher wanted to spend their life teaching nothing but Anouilh and the subjunctive.
As Mr Micheldever began to rhapsodize on the exquisite pain of having shrapnel and gravel tweezered out of his unanaesthetized thighs, there was a tap on her shoulder. Lucas had left his desk to pass her the cockroach and magnifying glass. He smiled.
‘Catch you afterwards?’ he whispered.
‘Sure,’ she said.
Everyone in the lower half of the school had to fit in at least seven hours of leisure activity a week, known as ekker. This could be ‘changed’ – sport – or ‘unchanged’ – music, art, hobbies – but at least half had to get one sweaty. Lucas hated sport and suffered the torments of the damned trying to make up his three and a half hours. She had spotted him in the school pool on a rare occasion, apparently. Lucas was a good swimmer but not as keen on relentless length-swimming as she was. An anomaly in the rules allowed an hour of the three and a half to be taken up by supporting a school match, provided one did so changed into clothes appropriate for the game. Presumably cheering and stamping to keep warm were deemed exercise of a sort and exposure to the feats of the school’s better sportsmen might be thought to prove an inspiration to the sluggardly. Thus the almost pathologically unsporty Lucas would be found on the touchlines of one match a week. His cheering was often ill-timed, such was his ignorance of the rules, but his sports kit was always appropriate, if suspiciously clean.
That afternoon Lucas met up with her to watch the first big Tatham’s College Football match of the term. Known as TatCoFo, the game was a peculiarly dangerous hybrid of football and rugger. Two teams played on a narrow pitch, bounded by nine-foot-high nets on its long sides. The goals were the unnetted ends. In addition the long boundaries were marked by thick ropes, winched tightly across metal uprights two feet from either net and four feet off the ground. Whenever the ball – a rugby one – passed beyond these, players piled onto the rope and one another in a wild struggle to resume mastery of it. Legs, arms, wrists and ankles were broken every season. Broken necks had been known. There appeared to be few foul rules. TatCoFo was the school’s equivalent of gladiatorial combat, not least since the indefinite suspension of school boxing matches after a public outcry when a boy was killed. Played every Lent term, it was necessarily a licensed civil war since no other school had been tempted to take up the game. Inter-house rivalries were wildly illustrated in graphically insulting fly-posting, chants, even ‘corpses’ dressed in an opponent’s colours and hung from prominent high places.
There was no girls’ equivalent but Daughters were expected to turn out to support any Schola match and this afternoon set Schola against Dougal’s – Lucas’s house. Lent courage by her new, freethinking status as a bell-ringer, Sophie left the Schola supporters to join Lucas on the Dougal’s side. They had been unable to talk much after div that morning, made shy by witnesses. Now, though still surrounded, they were given a licence to chat by the cheering and jeering of the crowd.
She asked after his mother and he said something formulaically brutal. He asked about life in Schola and she told him about being made a bell-ringer.
‘That’s him. There.’ She didn’t point but indicated Jonty Mortimer with a flick of her head. ‘With the mud up the back of his shirt.’
‘Oh,’ he said as Mortimer seized the ball from a Dougalite and turned to race with it towards the Dougal’s goal. ‘I knew the face but I hadn’t linked it to the name.’
She told him about Mortimer showing her the Senior Prefect’s enviable eyrie.
Mortimer lobbed the ball back to a team-mate as he was tackled then disappeared beneath a pile of bodies. The teammate let the ball go out just in front of where they were standing so they found themselves so close to the ensuing scrum against the rope that gobbets of mud were kicked over them.
‘Finally,’ Lucas said, looking at his shirt appreciatively. ‘This was far too clean. She washes everything. I have to hide stuff from her.’ He broke off to cheer an attempt at a Dougalite goal.
Some other Dougalites walked past them. They greeted Lucas with an odd mixture of contempt and affection. On the one hand they bothered to greet him but on the other they called him Grobber Yid and put on parodic Jewish accents. He countered with, ‘’Ello dere, Wog,’ and the boys passed on.
‘Are they friends of yours?’ she asked.
‘God, no!’
‘Why’d you say that to him?’
‘It’s what people do. Wog’s his name.’
‘But he’s white.’
‘Yes, but he has curly hair and his father lives in Lagos.’
‘Oh. And they call you that because you’re Jewish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you mind?’
He shrugged, pretending to watch the match.
‘They don’t hit me. It could be worse. There’s a boy called Spaz who everyone kicks. He’s perfectly nice. Not spastic at all. But if you don’t kick him, well …’
‘What?’
‘I dunno.’ He frowned.
Just then Mortimer came by, following the action from a distance. ‘Pass!’ he shouted. ‘Pass, you moron!’ Then he noticed Sophie there, gave a quick smile and a gruff, ‘Cullen,’ before heading back to the fray.
The Dougalite called Wog mimicked Mortimer’s accent loudly, substituting Yorkshire for Lancashire. ‘Ey-oop, Jonty,’ he shouted. ‘Ey-oop.’ Other Dougalites laughed.
Sophie kept her eyes on the game but she sensed Lucas was turning to look at her.
‘You’ve got a crush on him,’ he said.
‘I have not.’
‘He’s got a crush on you, then.’
‘He hasn’t. Everyone knows he’s seeing Emma Acheson. He took her to the upper sixth dance.’ Emma Acheson was the tallest and blondest of the sixth-form Commoner girls and a prefect. Their names were linked like Venus and Mars and the pairing was so obvious a match of seniority, brains and looks that evidence was no more required than it was for gravity. She saw Emma Acheson at the far end of the Schola supporters, standing in a huddle of well-wrapped sixth-form girls. One of them waved a football rattle. ‘See? She’s over there,’ Sophie told h
im.
‘So you’re jealous.’
‘Are you always like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Fuck off,’ she said.
That stunned him into silence. She had barely met Heidi but Sophie could tell she never swore. She had shocked him. Good.
For a while they watched the match in silence, dutifully applauding as the teams changed ends at half-time. Then, by way of apology, he began to offer up funny stories and gossip about the other people around the pitch, the don whose children were said to belong to his head of house, the one whose wife lost her eyebrows and fringe by lighting an oven too slowly, the boy who had to cut his hair whenever his father was due to buy him lunch, the one known as Wendy for his Wendy Craig profile and the one unwisely obsessed with Olivia Newton-John. As he chatted on she accepted his implied peace offering and took covert glances at the goose bumps on his mud-spattered legs.
‘Your football shirts are a much better colour than ours,’ he said suddenly, briefly holding his brown-striped arm alongside her blue-striped one. It was the first physical attention he had paid her.
‘So buy one,’ she said. ‘You could wear it in the holidays.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, disapproving. ‘I couldn’t.’
As the match ended with Schola the victors, he tried to persuade her to join Glee Club, the school choral society, which had its first meeting that term at five.
‘It’s not really my thing,’ she said and he seemed to believe her because he lightly changed the subject.
‘Well I want to see where you live.’
For a terrible moment she thought he meant Wakefield House and pictured the gawping reactions of Wilf and her housemates, Paula, the new girl who cried at strangers, Nikki, who had fits, Steve, who still wore nappies and wet the bed at eleven. But of course he meant Schola. ‘Sure,’ she said, wondering who would be there, praying the worst of the gossips would be out shopping or playing games. ‘But you’ll have to deal with Nurse.’