Friendly Fire

by Patrick Gale

  The stifling presence of Nurse as chaperone was why so few boys bothered to visit the Daughters’ Staircase. It was easier to meet Daughters outside, under cover of watching a match, as they had just done, or merely walking. There was no rule against happening to meet someone while walking from A to B then continuing to walk with them from B to C. Another gaping loophole in the rules was that there was no ban on meeting up in one of the school libraries or in any of the numerous classrooms that were left unlocked because they contained nothing stealable unless you wanted light bulbs or chalk. But no one seemed to take advantage of this. Or perhaps they did. Sophie had no way of knowing because she found the gloomily painted classrooms sinister outside school hours.

  Kimiko was the only one in and she was busy writing her long weekly letter to her diplomat father. He required her to write the same letter twice, once in English and once in Japanese, and she made rough drafts first to avoid crossings-out. Nurse was off in her own rooms on the other side of the Hall from the chamber, where Sophie could hear she was watching the races on television. She was tempted to break the rules and leave her in peace but Kimiko took one wide-eyed glance at Lucas, put down her fountain pen and slipped across to summon Nurse with all the air of doing Sophie a favour.

  Lucas was introduced and immediately engaged Nurse in amiable conversation. While Sophie was despatched to make tea with toast and red jam – the standard afternoon snack and free, unlike food in the tuck shop – Kimiko returned demurely to her letter-writing. Nothing about Nurse was beneath Lucas’s interest. He admired the needlepoint glasses case she was making, the ivory brooch she had on, even the little buckles on her boring brown shoes. He asked her how long she had worked there, how she could bear the lack of privacy and she quizzed him in turn. She was immediately able to place his father because she was an avid reader of courtroom news items and had been following one of his recent cases at the city’s county courts which had been reported nationally. For the first time Sophie saw Nurse was a terrific snob, forever frustrated at spending most of her time among girls from undistinguished, unmoneyed families. But his questions were also humanizing Nurse for her, making Nurse a person in a way she had not seemed before.

  ‘What made you take the job here?’ she asked her abruptly, surprised at herself.

  ‘I was living with my sister,’ Nurse explained. ‘Out towards Wumpett. But she got married suddenly and I was left feeling rather de trop.’

  ‘So here you are,’ Lucas added.

  Such was his charm assault upon her, he even persuaded her to give him a little guided tour round all the areas to which boys were not usually admitted, quite as though he had been a prospective parent. Nurse showed him upstairs to the three dormitories and cluster of studies. Sophie’s dormitory, the largest, enjoyed a view away from the quad, across the Warden’s river-trimmed garden. Sophie indicated her bed, when he asked, and he sat on it, bouncing slightly to make it squeak. Nurse led him back down past the bathrooms to the chamber. She baulked, laughing, when he cheekily asked to see where she lived but did so in a way that implied she might show him on another visit.

  Back in the chamber, Kimiko made more tea and toast and Nurse returned to Grandstand but left her door ajar, ‘Not that I expect any mischief.’

  Munching toast in a triumphant way that made him momentarily less attractive, Lucas was fascinated by it all. ‘I’d always imagined it would be completely different,’ he said. ‘With elegant, ladylike furniture and a piano – like something out of Mansfield Park. It’s the mythology, I suppose, and having Nurse and that rose garden.’

  The only difference between Sophie’s accommodation and the boys’ was in the more civilized washing facilities. Boys’ quarters had communal washrooms known as tubs on account of the tin baths which one filled at a shower or taps then upended onto the tiled floor when one had finished bathing. The chamber was marginally tidier than the big one he knew at Dougal’s and certainly less anarchic. There were no dustbin fires or bad milk bombs. But Daughters had identical burrows, the curtained-off wooden cubicles where they did their homework, known as burrowing-down, and stored their private possessions. As in Dougal’s, each burrow had a light fitting which most extended with a cluster of wires and adapters, once the fire officer had made his termly inspection, to run cassette players and tiny, in-cup water heaters.

  A group of older Daughters came back, loud and filthy from hockey practice and, whether sensing Sophie’s discomfort or feeling shy himself at their teasing comments on his apparently unchaperoned presence, Lucas began to leave. He winked at Sophie before knocking on Nurse’s open door.

  ‘I’m off now, Nurse,’ he told her. ‘Thank you for the tour.’

  ‘My pleasure, Master Behrman,’ she cooed, lurching out of her armchair to turn down the volume on the television.

  ‘I’ve been trying to persuade Sophie to come and sing in Glee Club,’ he told her.

  ‘What are they doing this term?’

  ‘Messiah.’

  Nurse had let it be known that she used to sing principal roles with the city’s opera society and so found mere choral singing a crude, herdish experience. ‘Far harder to sing well than people allow,’ she said, confirming Sophie in her resistance.

  ‘I’ve got to work, anyway,’ Sophie muttered.

  ‘Coward.’ Lucas grinned, admitting defeat.

  ‘Are you going to cheer her on tonight?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Sophie began. ‘You really don’t have –’

  ‘Why? What’s happening?’ he asked Nurse.

  ‘Someone’s bell-ringing debut. You could go up to the gallery.’

  ‘Is it allowed?’ he asked. ‘I thought only Scholars went up there.’

  ‘Evening service,’ Nurse said. ‘Only a quarter full. No one’s going to mind. Oh. Sorry. I’ve got quite a bit riding on this one.’ She hurried back to turn up the volume on a race.

  ‘Would you mind?’ he asked Sophie as she walked him back out to the quad. It was nearly dark already. A shifting flock of starlings passed overhead like strange, swift smoke. ‘It won’t embarrass you?’

  ‘Course not,’ she said. ‘But it’s just bells.’

  She leaned in the shadow of a buttress, discreetly watching until he had passed through the pool of yellowish light from the light over the entrance to the Slipe and been swallowed up by the dark passageway. Then she returned inside to brave the inevitable quizzing from the other Daughters.

  She was studiedly cool. ‘It’s no big deal,’ she said, taking out her task book to make a start on Disgust. ‘I know his parents.’

  Kimiko looked up from the last Japanese page of her letter, eyes momentarily wide in shock, but her gratitude for Sophie’s occasional companionship still outweighed any sense that she was being superseded and she said nothing.

  He came. It was five to nine so they were already ringing when he let himself in. Sophie’s ringing spot, on number one bell, meant that her back was to the door. She heard the soft clunk of the catch lifting, felt the draught, and caught Jonty Mortimer’s raised eyebrows and quick nod of acknowledgement before Lucas passed into her field of vision as he slipped around the edge of the ringing-chamber and sat on a pew just inside the gallery to watch.

  Sophie was glad he had come late. For all Nurse had implied that it was usual, none of the other new ringers had friends to support them. She would have felt awkward if he had been there before they started but now she was concentrating too hard on translating Jonty Mortimer’s muttered changes into action and sequence to feel anything much.

  She had made no allowances for the realities of bell-ringing in conjunction with a church service. The organ pipes were only yards away, albeit on the other side of a thick stone arch, and even the fairly soft improvisation with which the organ Scholar ushered in the congregation was loud enough to make the bells sound far more distant than they had during their induction session on Friday afternoon. And it wasn’t just the organ music. Other, closer sounds overlaid the simple
peal they were trying to ring: Jonty Mortimer’s quiet instructions, the soft sound of each bell’s sally forming a temporary mound on the floor before flying up again, the ominous creaking of floorboards under Rix’s and Clitheroe’s hassocks. A bell’s ring sounded moments after its rope and wheel were set in motion so Sophie soon understood that listening to the rings was off-putting as it tempted her to pull too late when her turn in a sequence arrived. With the organ increasingly muffling the sounds coming down as the improvisation grew in confidence, she found she was taking her cues from her eyes not her ears. Their scant ten minutes of ringing felt more like half an hour.

  The evening service was very short, an embellished compline. A psalm, a plainsong nunc dimittis, a reading, some prayers and a hymn barely filled forty minutes. The atmosphere was quite different from the crowded morning services Sophie had been obliged to attend last term, partly because people were there because they chose to be and could sit where they pleased in little, prayerful pockets about the building, partly because night transformed the place and made it less sinister than romantic. With the windows blackened, the gaudy martyrs could no longer glare down over their instruments of death and the eye was drawn instead to candlelight and the faces of the living.

  The other ringers had all left as the service began, duty done, except for two of the upper-school ones, Crabbe and Weir, who stayed on in the ringing-chamber to continue an interrupted chess game. Sophie had assumed that Lucas would want to leave too, being Jewish, but curiosity held him there, so she slipped into the gallery to watch beside him. They were resolutely spectators, however, remaining seated in silence throughout. She had half-hoped, half-dreaded him singing the hymn but he merely read it during the first verse and spent the next three flicking and reading as though the school hymnal were no more than a book of poetry.

  The organ voluntary began so loudly and close at hand that she jumped, which made him laugh. They hurried, giggling, through the ringing-chamber as the choir were filing out of their stalls. She slipped as they crossed the scary duckboards outside the window and he grabbed hold of her to steady her which made them laugh the more.

  Mortimer was sitting on the steps to his study as they entered the staircase. Automatically wary, they fell silent but he made no attempt to hide the fact that he had just been enjoying a glass of wine and a cigarette so a reprimand seemed unlikely. ‘Not bad,’ he told her, ‘for a novice.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘It was odd with the organ playing but then it made it easier.’

  ‘It does,’ he said, wincing at the taste of the wine. ‘Jonty Mortimer,’ he said and held out a hand to Lucas, who shook it and said,

  ‘Lucas Behrman.’

  ‘I know,’ Mortimer said. He had pulled a disreputable-looking sheepskin coat on for warmth.

  ‘Sophie’s told me about your amazing study,’ Lucas said. ‘Do you sleep up there?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Mortimer said. ‘Fucking parky, though. You’ll have to come up some time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lucas told him. ‘’Night,’ and led the way down.

  Most of the turret was in pitch darkness so they spooked themselves, clambering and tripping down to the cloisters, clinging to the rope as they went. There was a clang above them as Mortimer shut his gate though no descending footsteps so perhaps he had more work to do on his task. It was hard to imagine someone so cool and confident sweating blood over an essay as Sophie was still doing. Lucas had already written his and was going to post his task book through the Micheldevers’ letterbox on his way home.

  He dared her to walk round the darkened cloisters with him first and she wondered if he might take the opportunity to kiss her. As they walked, eyes growing accustomed to the dark, she thought of Wilf’s kiss and his grinding weight on her and imagined the contrast of kissing Lucas. His lips would be cold, and his fingertips, and he had no stubble yet like Wilf’s. She caught a whiff of his Eau Sauvage. Would he hold her in his arms or merely cup the back of her head in his hands? They were of a height so perhaps it would be arms. As he spoke, she could feel his breath on her face.

  But they didn’t kiss. They simply walked as he chattered about this and that, the service, a rumour he had heard about the Chaplain, the scandal that Mortimer was leaving after A levels to go to Durham instead of sitting Oxbridge. He was shivering slightly and sounded excited, almost feverish, but it was probably just the cold.

  They left the cloisters and, as she prepared to leave him to head back through the Slipe into Schola, he kissed her quickly on the cheek, careless of the fact that the chess players were passing.

  ‘’Night,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come round tomorrow afternoon for a bit? Escape Nursey?’

  ‘Your mum has to write a letter,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Well how about next weekend? If I get her to write. Could you face a Sunday lunch with Heidi and Simon? Carmel’s never there but we could watch TV and stuff.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Okay. See you, then.’

  ‘’Night.’

  He had put on lip salve earlier. Touching her cheek, she could feel the sticky patch it left.

  And so, for a term at least, Sophie enjoyed improved status on two counts, as bell-ringer and as somebody’s girlfriend. The fact that Lucas was Jewish, a swot and made physically sick by the prospect of team games was outweighed by the glamour of their daring to be linked in the public mind while still so junior. The social rebellion this might constitute was balanced by his being so diplomatically astute when he visited her in Schola. He continued to charm Nurse, he won over Weatherall and Purvis by bringing cake and his mother’s cast-off copies of Vogue and Paris Match and by dropping these off with sufficient casualness for it not to seem as if he expected anything in return, not even that the tributes be acknowledged.

  They were cool when they coincided in English lessons and div classes and he continued to sit out of her view. But they met up on most afternoons and he called on her in Schola two or three times a week. Most importantly, he had his mother go through the formal channels to liberate her for lunch at his house every Sunday for the rest of term. This became a kind of ritual between them. As a Jew he was exempt from having to attend Sunday Chapel but he would be waiting for her in the cloisters when she came down from bell-ringing once the service was done. At the non-religious lecture that replaced Chapel every third weekend, they sat together. He would walk her back to Tinker’s Hill for a delicious, rather formal Sunday lunch at which she would have to make conversation with his dauntingly clever father whom she liked more and more as she began to appreciate his dry wit and scrupulous lack of personal curiosity. After lunch Heidi and Simon invariably went upstairs for a ‘siesta’ during which, to Lucas’s revulsion, their love-making would often register as a decorous sympathetic squeaking from a floorboard or piece of furniture yards from their bedroom door. The siesta was probably intended as a liberal cue for the young things to get to know each other better but they invariably spent it sitting on Lucas’s bed listening to music and talking.

  Then they would reconvene for tea and one of the three cakes in Heidi’s repertoire – Dutch Apple, Honey Spice or Baked Cheesecake – before Lucas walked her home. In many ways this was her favourite part of the day out. They took their time and circuitous routes. There was a wintry melancholy to late Sunday afternoons, which she relished, and there was talk.

  Before meeting Lucas she would have described herself as quiet. She still was quiet around other people. Wilf and she had passed hours in companionable silence, but Lucas had awakened in her a love of chat. The source of talk between them was inexhaustible and seemingly unlimited – in scope, from Henry V to Sian Phillips as Livia in I, Claudius to recurring dreams, birth defects and the social crudity of President Carter’s younger children. When Nurse accused them of being like reunited twins separated at birth and separately institutionalized, Sophie found she was more proud than insulted.

  Not that they had no quiet times together. The timetable wa
s peppered with quiet periods in which students were expected to study on their own. Most returned to their burrows to brew coffee and listen to music. Sophie and Lucas took to spending the periods in the library, where they worked across a table from one another, their table, only occasionally passing notes.

  She was inexperienced but not ignorant; she knew this was not a romance. She worried sometimes that this was her fault and that there was something encouraging she was omitting to do. But the next moment she would sense that what there was between them was too delicate to bear scrutiny and that, whatever it was, they both subtly benefited from its being given a romantic gloss by their peers. It was unthreatening and it made people leave them alone. From things Lucas let slip and from glimpses offered her in div of the way some people treated him, she knew this was something he cherished.

  By the second to last Sunday of term – the last when exeats were allowed – she found she was thinking of Heidi and Simon as friends, her first adult friends, which in turn made her feel mature. They displayed a nice combination of sympathy and discretion. By the second visit to their house, she had assumed she would be obliged to start answering questions about her family and home but the questions never came. They asked about the books she was reading, the Greek lessons, the Eysenck and what she felt about current affairs but they never probed deeper and, out of a kind of delicacy, withheld from discussing their own families with her, although she knew from Lucas that they each came from large ones.

  Lucas was similarly sensitive, so that she cracked one Sunday as they were sitting on his bed, listening to an astonishingly sad Billie Holiday record he had found in his father’s collection. She challenged him.

  ‘You never ask about my family,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t interest me,’ he replied. ‘I’m interested in you but families are a bore. I think it’s a basic human right to be treated as your own person on your own account. Don’t you?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so,’ she said and it became a kind of creed between them that they knew when the other despised someone because they would start asking probing questions about their family in the other’s hearing.