by Patrick Gale
Margaret was livid when Sophie eventually walked home from the station. She had met one train, Kieran another then they had rung the Somborne-Abbots’ house, where there was no reply, and decided Sophie was not coming home that night after all. She was even angrier when she heard why Sophie had missed her train and how she had walked across South London on her own.
‘I’ve a good mind to ring her up and tear a strip off her,’ she said and Sophie found herself in the funny position of springing to Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s defence, blaming herself, blaming Charlie, apologizing abjectly until the subject was dropped and everyone went to bed.
But the subject was not forgotten. Long after Sophie had posted a carefully penned and worded thank-you note on a postcard of the cathedral, Margaret continued to fume about the incident, rehearsing her indignation at the least prompting until Sophie, too, began to feel a sense of grievance that she had been financially presumed upon and even physically endangered. She didn’t dare show the new skirt to anyone, not even Wilf, but hung it carefully in her cupboard, a compromised promise of a person she was not yet ready to become.
LENT TERM
(fifteen and a bit)
‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ Reverend Harestock murmured.
‘From whence cometh my help,’ Sophie, Mr Compton, the sixteen Quiristers and Mr Sutton, the choirmaster, mumbled in reply. Mr Compton was the don she had thought to resemble Peter O’Toole, identified at last by a discreet, offhand enquiry of a bell-ringer in his div.
‘My help cometh even from the Lord.’
‘Who hath made Heaven and Earth.’
Reverend Harestock announced the psalm, adding as he always did, ‘The congregation may sit until the Gloria.’
Sophie and Mr Compton and the Chaplain sat. Mr Sutton played the day’s chant through once on the piano which, as usual, was made to sound fractionally out of tune by the Chantry’s cavernous acoustic. One of the smallest boys seemed unable to sing but merely stared up at the altarpiece, eyes red, twisting a sodden handkerchief in his fingers while the others sang around him. It was icily cold, the sun had yet to melt the frost in the cloister garden and the boys’ breath rose in little clouds. As ever, Mr Compton had fetched his elegant calfskin psalter out of his overcoat pocket and was following the verses so the Gloria should not catch him unawares.
Sophie tightened her scarf a little and sat back against her pew corner to admire the effect of sunlight on a little school of fish that swam along the border of her favourite window. She drew in chilled air and breathed out peace.
Several notable things had happened already that term. Sophie turned fifteen, which she succeeded in keeping a secret even though Wilf posted her a gigantic bar of Fruit and Nut inside a spangly card in which he had written Nearly LEGAL!! Love Wilf. She mastered indirect statements and questions in Greek and the subjunctive in French. Her set texts included Gormenghast, Language, Truth and Logic, Paine’s Common Sense and, in translation, the Phaedrus of Plato. And Charlie turned gay.
There was no other way to describe it. There was no discussion or announcement or scene. He was just suddenly talking incessantly about which boys he had crushes on. They were always sporty, older boys, of the Jonty Mortimer mould, inaccessible and godlike. There was no suggestion his crushes were being acted upon or encouraged. But the minutiae of this one’s appeal over that one’s, of the significance of a glance bestowed in Tubs or a comment let slip in a corridor now absorbed all the energy he had once devoted to talking about his family.
Thanks, perhaps, to all the extra hours he had put in at the library the previous term, he had edged – by a hair’s breadth – into the same div as Sophie and Lucas. The boys had become inseparable. With Lucas’s gossip and Charlie’s mimicry now shorn of whatever restraint had been necessary while each felt the need to persuade the other of his relative normality, they were a noisy gang of two, co-opting Sophie whenever their paths crossed.
She was embarrassed at first, glad to be sitting two rows in front of them in div. She was not a lawbreaker or boat-rocker and would always tend towards behaviour that drew no attention. Then the third time Mr Micheldever had to reprimand them for giggling, he made them move forward to the front row ‘with the other Daughters’ and they were so delighted to have a chance to sit on either side of her that they stayed on there, choosing infamy. She was made a helpless party to their jokes, their surreptitious messages, passed on scraps or flashed from book margins. Even the gentle rocking of the desk that betrayed the fact that Lucas was laughing at something and trying not to let it show was infectious and she would find herself laughing too, merely at the memory of things they had already found funny several times before.
She resisted it at first, tried to sigh with impatience, to pull herself metaphorically aloof, but they always teased her out of her superior stance with a sneer or a poke or a devastating silent impersonation. She felt excluded by their gayness as much as by the jokes they would often elaborate without her so that their insistence on including her physically – sitting by her, seeking her out, sending her notes through the pigeon-hole system – left her feeling twitchy and even slow-witted. Thanks to the time she had spent alone with one or the other of them, they knew all her hiding places. Nurse adored them – such charming boys – and they were quite capable of inviting themselves to tea and telly with her while they waited for Sophie to return from hiding, passing on all manner of information she did not want Nurse to know. The only spots she could remain free of them were the dormitory or bathrooms, where Kimiko could nonetheless seek her out with a message that they were waiting, and these brief morning services in the Founder’s Chantry.
Sophie was pulled out of her reverie by Mr Compton standing for the Gloria and stood too, then they all sat down again except for Mr Compton who exchanged his private psalter for his private Bible and announced that day’s reading from the book of Judges. As always he paused a little before he began, for the choir to stop fidgeting, coughing and rattling throat-lozenge tins. As always his delivery was tantalizing, intimate, so that the reading had an air more of storytelling than of proclaimed truth.
She was glad of an Old Testament reading. She had fallen out of love with Jesus. Two Sundays previously she had attended her last Christian Union meeting with Kimiko. Instead of a guest speaker, the talk had been given by Dr Liphook, the maths don who ran the group.
‘Today,’ he said, ‘I want to put you all on your guard.’ He spoke about homosexuality, with no pussyfootings like continence. He cited texts from St Paul and Leviticus to show that it was a sin and warned them not to be swayed by so-called liberal apologists or psychiatric fashions or dangerously appealing pop stars. They were Soldiers of Christ, he reminded them. They were not only to resist approaches made to them by other pupils but to reason with them and persuade them, frighten or threaten them if necessary, into abandoning sin. ‘They’ll tell you they were born that way. Well I’m sorry, my friends, but we were all born that way insofar as we were all born into sin. To err is human and sometimes to repent and reform takes superhuman strength. Which is where you can help them and Jesus can help you. Help them aim for resistance, for abstinence, for chastity if normality seems too high for them to aim at.’
If evangelizing failed, they were to have no hesitation in reporting any boy or girl known to be indulging in homosexual acts. ‘It’s not only against the rule of God but against those of the school and, given that they’re under twenty-one, the laws of the State.’
Sophie became uncomfortably aware of Kimiko’s eyes on her and not only Kimiko’s. She raised her hand, irritated, when the time came for questions and asked him some awkward ones. What of Jesus’s failure to set an example by marrying? What of the repeated references to his love – philia not agape – for the disciple John? What of his signal failure to mention homosexuality in the Sermon on the Mount or in his other teachings?
There were murmurs of dissent, even laughter. Dr Liphook fixed her with his watery bl
ue eyes, taking off his glasses for that sincerity effect, and said that perhaps he and Sophie should have a private talk afterwards since the subject was clearly bothering her personally.
Despising him for not mustering the courage or arguments to talk with her publicly, she ignored his suggestion and hurried away afterwards, giving even Kimiko the slip. She spent a happy Sunday at Lucas’s house with Charlie, eating Heidi’s cookies and watching The Robe on television, distancing herself slightly from the boys’ guffawing by encouraging Simon to teach her how to solve the Listener crossword.
She had forgiven Lucas his betrayal. She had said nothing about it to his face. Having avoided him for what remained of the Christmas holidays she found that her rancour had evaporated. He said nothing to her, either, of her betrayal of his secrets to Charlie. Her indiscretion had apparently admitted a new, mutual openness into his friendship with Charlie. It was just possible that Charlie’s betrayal had done the same for her. Shorn of secrets, in their company at least, she felt more completely herself, her school and home personae brought a step nearer alignment.
While Sophie was loading the tea things into the dishwasher for her, Heidi let slip a reference to Wakefield House, discreetly making it clear that she too was fully informed. ‘Jumping between that life and Tatham’s can’t be easy for you,’ she said. ‘If ever you want to talk, you know I’m always here for you.’
‘Thanks,’ Sophie told her. She blushed and changed the subject but rather than feeling betrayed yet again, realized she was experiencing something like the encompassing love of family.
Later, when Kimiko passed on the message that Tony, Dr Liphook, had encouraged the group to pray for her, Sophie realized she had broken the habit of a lifetime and taken a stance on a selfless point of principle.
In their way, she decided, Lucas and Charlie were being amazingly brave. She told Kimiko they were like the early Christians daring to be counted. But unlike the early Christians they weren’t thrown to the lions or used for target practice. Perhaps because they weren’t otherwise perceived as bad boys what with Charlie doing his bit in sport, albeit on an inter-house rather than on an inter-school level, and Lucas working hard and appearing in plays and writing pieces for school magazines, their courage went unpunished. Certainly some boys and girls jeered but equally some dons happily played along with them and found ways to acknowledge their difference without mockery or opprobrium.
Armed with honorary membership of such a gang, she realized that she too could cultivate a reputation for outrageousness provided she tempered it with good marks. So she stopped slipping down from the ringing-chamber to receive communion.
She was quizzed by Charlie about this. He had been confirmed in his last year at choir school and she realized he saw no hypocrisy or strangeness in continuing to endorse an organization that truly despised him. When she tried to broach the subject, he reduced it to mockery, saying, whatever the theory, he would always feel welcomed by men in frocks.
After a couple of attempts to bring her back to the fold, she persuaded Kimiko to give up and agree that they should differ. She knew Kimiko was secretly drawn by their company and was developing a quiet appetite for what might ruin her. She dipped and blushed when Charlie or Lucas complimented her. She kept a wary distance if she encountered them out of doors or in class but when they dropped in on the Daughters’ Chamber she hovered nearby, not quite participating, not quite withdrawing, delighted to be shocked. Lucas, who had developed a taste for opera, nicknamed her Suzuki, which was sometimes abbreviated to Sukey or Sue.
Dr Harestock announced the morning’s hymn, ‘Awake my Soul and With the Sun.’ He evidently despised truncation or imprecise delivery. In the evening collect, she had noticed, he never said ‘that both our hearts’, but always, ‘that both’, long pause, ‘our hearts’, to make it clear there was a comma in between and, when announcing a hymn, he never treated the first line as a title but read until the first full stop. This suited Sophie, who barely sang but liked to listen to others singing while she followed the words in the hymnal, returning them to poetry. She found it almost impossible to perceive sense and sing at the same time in any case and, judging from where they paused for breaths, so did most Christians.
Mr Compton and Reverend Harestock sang, however, lent courage by the hearty singing of the Quiristers. Reverend Harestock had a breathy, nasal voice that faded in and out of audibility like a badly tuned radio. Mr Compton, who looked as though he would have a quiet, even effete tenor tone, produced an unexpectedly hearty baritone, a spirits-raising, campfire sort of voice. Peter O’Toole again.
They all knelt for the Grace then Mr Sutton struck up some cheery piece on the piano and the Chaplain marched out, noisily followed by the Quiristers. Usually Mr Compton swept out on their tail as though smartly whipping his cloak of worldliness back about him, leaving either Sophie or the choirmaster to shut the door. This morning, however, he sat on in his pew, gently tapping his fingers in time to the music.
Sophie felt she should sit on too though she knew it to be an irrational fantasy of hers that these little services were held at his behest. Mr Sutton abruptly finished his voluntary, locked the piano lid and went out with a nervous cough.
‘That’s better,’ Mr Compton said quietly, implying devastating mockery of Mr Sutton’s sausagey fingers. ‘Silly, isn’t it, how one never finds time to come in here when there isn’t a service on? It’s extraordinarily peaceful.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I like the morning service too.’
‘So I see. You haven’t been in one of my classes yet. I’m Compton. Who are you?’
‘Cullen,’ she told him. ‘Sophie Cullen.’
‘Miss Cullen. A pleasure. You must hurry or you’ll be late for div and so shall I.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They stood and he ushered her before him with a minute inclination of his handsome head.
‘Would you like to come to tea?’ he asked. ‘Nothing frightening.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Yes, please. When should I come?’
‘You don’t play in either orchestra, do you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Thought not. Well come this afternoon, then. I’ll expect you at four. Come through the back entrance. It’s the wrought-iron gate in the wall to the right of War Cloisters if you’re walking from Schola.’
Lucas was off sick with ’flu that day so she could not discuss the invitation with him. Without Lucas there to whip him on, Charlie was unusually quiet and thoughtful but even so some instinct held her tongue with him.
Mr Compton was a keen gardener. He oversaw the upkeep of the Warden’s Garden and, over the last few years, had bought and planted himself the hundreds of bulbs that emerged in late winter and early spring in swathes around the trees that marked the paths between Brick Court and Stinks. The high-walled garden behind his house was lush and almost entirely without flowers. She only learned later, from an art history student, that he had ripped out old roses and lilacs to make it and had modelled it on the jungles painted by Rousseau.
Arriving from the back, one passed through a narrow, wrought-iron gate in the school’s original flint-studded outer wall then followed a winding gravel path through dense planting. Plants she could not name soon hid wall and house with huge leaves or tropical spikes. It was unlike any garden she had ever seen, not obviously pretty, not even obviously nice. Its aim was to disorientate rather than simply to please, although it was pleasing too. Just not pretty. Giant silvery fish stirred the face of a deep pond set in the garden’s heart, where the foliage was cleared to provide the one sunny area, then the artificial jungle closed about one again as the path wound on to the big glass porch on the house’s rear.
Mr Compton let her into what felt like a heated extension of the garden, a marble-tiled room dotted with seven-foot potted palms, and waved her onto one of the comfortable rattan sofas draped with sun-bleached rugs and cushions. There was a tang in the air she could not place un
til she realized that, unlike any of the dons she had met so far, he wore aftershave.
‘Eau Sauvage,’ she said without thinking.
He looked startled.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she said, confused to be so abruptly reminded of Lucas. ‘A friend of mine wears it.’
‘House rule,’ he said. ‘While you’re in here, I don’t “Miss” and you don’t “Sir”.’
‘But what do I call you?’ she asked and he smiled.
‘Since there’s only the two of us here, I think we’ll know who we’re talking to. What kind of tea would you like?’
‘I don’t know. I never normally have a choice.’
‘I’m having karkady. It’s Egyptian hibiscus. Bright red and tastes of lemons. Very refreshing.’
‘That sounds great.’
There was music playing from somewhere, outrageous, lush music with opera singers and what sounded like an orchestral army. Sophie was used to people’s stereo systems being proudly displayed. As he disappeared between the palms to make their tea, she craned her neck in vain to see the huge speakers that must been generating such an intensely textured sound.
She had been into dons’ houses before. Essays often had to be delivered that way, left on hall tables or handed to exhausted wives. In the upper sixth, she knew, it was commonplace to be taught in dons’ studies or drawing rooms in groups of four or fewer. But the interiors she had seen so far had all felt like extensions of the school, public spaces the dons and their families were briefly inhabiting but on which they had left little mark. There was something provisional and battered about them. Whether because she had entered through the jungly garden or because there were no books or papers on view, in this room she felt admitted to somewhere personal and private where she might gain knowledge of the room’s possessor.