by Patrick Gale
There were steps on the stairs suddenly and along the landing.
‘You’re not really ill, are you?’ Lucas asked.
‘Course not,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Why didn’t you go? I thought you were getting on with them.’
‘That was anthropology, not getting on. I could tell they’d feel happier leaving you if I offered to stay behind. Come on. Get dressed.’
‘What for? I’m so comfy now.’
‘I just ordered us a taxi. There’s a train to Plymouth then we can change and get as far as Bristol. We can crash at Carmel’s for the night.’
‘Your wicked sister!’
‘Yes. Come on. The man said he was just dropping someone off in Polteath. Cab’ll be here in ten minutes.’
‘But we can’t just go!’
‘We can. I’ve written a note. Family crisis – hence the sudden visit to the sister. I took you with me so you wouldn’t have to travel back on your own on Tuesday.’
‘They won’t believe it. Charlie certainly won’t.’
‘Do you care? Do you care if you never see any of them again?’
‘No. But it’s very rude.’
‘Rude schmude. Carmel’s much more fun and she won’t make you wear hideous hand-me-down frocks.’
‘I love you, Lucas Behrman.’
‘Yes but hurry up about it or I’ll go without you. God, that bra’s filthy!’
As they waited for their connection in Plymouth and she ate the rest of the pork pie he had bought from the canteen out of curiosity, he asked her, ‘Was that true, what you said back there? Have you really never been to a party?’
‘Not unless you count those ones in primary school where the whole class went and there were games and jelly and bossy mothers and stuff. No. Not since I started having a choice in the matter.’
‘You’re not normal, Sophie Cullen. You do know that, don’t you?’
She shrugged, still happy and high from the adrenalin brought on by behaving disgracefully.
‘You’re going to love Carmel’s squat,’ he went on. ‘You’ll fit right in. They steal electricity from the mains and grow their own drugs. Mum would die if she knew we’d spent a night there.’
‘So? I won’t tell her.’
They didn’t arrive in Bristol until nearly midnight then had a long walk from Temple Meads to his sister’s squat on the rougher side of Clifton where they had to bed down, fully clothed, on dusty sofa cushions on the floor but she doubted any refugee had ever slept so soundly.
MICHAELMAS TERM
(fifteen years, nine months)
Lucas told her he was in love and, in one of those rare pieces of real-life pathetic fallacy, a huge minor chord blasted out on the chapel organ from the other side of the study wall.
‘Nah-nah-nah!’ she echoed, joking.
‘What?’ Lucas frowned, perplexed and she saw at a glance that he was in deadly earnest. Love with a big L.
‘Who is it?’ she asked him. ‘Sit down. Move those. Tell. Who?’
But he carried on pacing around. He had managed to appear his usual debonair self until a prompting of tact sent Kimiko out of the study on a mumbling errand, whereupon he had become jumpy, walking around, picking things up, realigning books and pencils, flicking the surprisingly tough leaves of Kimiko’s money plant.
‘I’ve never felt like this before.’
‘Not even with Jonty?’ Jonty Mortimer was acknowledged between them as the high water mark for grand passion, despite or perhaps because he had offered a relationship with so few of a relationship’s usual trappings.
‘Oh, doesn’t even compare. He just came into the room and our eyes met and bang! Look at my hands. Look!’
He held out his hands and Sophie saw they were shaking.
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘So who is it?’
‘The weirdest thing,’ he rambled on, ‘is how I never seem to have seen him before. I mean of course I have. I’ve seen everyone in this place before but maybe I’ve just never focused on him or he’s never focused on me. Ow!’
Sophie had thrown a copy of Gibbon at him.
‘Who?!’ she demanded again now that she had his attention.
‘Compton. Mr Compton. I don’t even know his first name yet. We just had our first English class with him this morning.’
‘It’s Antony,’ she said dryly. ‘Spelt the Roman way with no H.’
At last he sat. ‘Of course it is!’ he sighed. ‘The perfect flawed lover, the gifted orator, the noble soldier. Antony Compton. Oh happy horse. Perfect.’
‘He’s not a soldier. Oh. Yes. I suppose he is.’
Now that she thought of it, she had seen Mr Compton in uniform several times on Wednesday afternoons but had put it from her mind because it interested her so little. Girls could join the Cadet Corps too but only in order to become worryingly mature girl guides, in effect; learning map-reading, first aid and semaphore, and how to be radio operators. As soon as Kimiko had told her girls received no rifle-training Sophie lost all interest. She had chosen the ‘soft’ option of Wednesday afternoon social work instead and had been assigned an old lady to visit. Because he could act, Lucas had been assigned to the Happy Brigade – a group who toured singalongs and cabaret to geriatric wards and old people’s homes. Kimiko volunteered at a special school Tatham’s ran in one of the suburbs. Only Charlie played toy soldiers. Sophie secretly thought the uniform did wonders for his sex appeal, much as cricket whites or a dinner jacket did. He had that sort of face.
‘Why did you have to persuade me out of doing Corps?’ Lucas rounded on her.
‘I did not!’
‘You sneered. You called it Toy Soldiers.’
‘Well it is. But you couldn’t join because of your eyes.’
Lucas’s astigmatism was such that if he looked down the barrel of a gun he saw two targets, neither of them in the right place. They had discovered this at a local funfair.
‘But he’s Senior Officer. And he takes the shooting classes.’
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘You’ll just have to shine in his English class. He’s meant to be a brilliant teacher. His house is incredible.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh … I go there sometimes for tea. Several of us do.’
‘You never said.’
‘There’s a lot I don’t tell you now you share a study with the Mouth of England.’
‘Can I come?’
‘He has to ask you. It doesn’t go down well if people just bring friends along. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘So how do you know him? He’s never taught you.’
‘We just got talking once. Nothing sinister. He’s lovely.’
She continued to see Mr Compton in the Chantry three mornings a week. This was precious territory she was not about to share merely to fan the flames of Lucas’s latest crush. Either because he had become too obviously gay and therefore a social risk or because of Charlie’s competitive friendship, Lucas had enjoyed no significant involvement since the one with Jonty Mortimer. Instead there were these crushes, innumerable, minutely analysed and agonized over. Their objects were usually unattainable or impossible in some way; an ex-policeman, married with two toddlers, who taught gymnastics, the captain of a visiting fencing team, Perry Rees, the older half of a pairing already so long established it had become a kind of romantic paradigm in school lore, like Achilles and Patroclus.
The crush on Compton would not pass. She had observed that it was in the nature of crushes never to pass, because they were unrequited and therefore, in a sense, never a disappointment. Instead it would be superseded by a fresh one and added to a collection. Charlie had crushes too, and Kimiko, these days. When the three were together and the mood was upon them, they could indulge themselves for hours at a time analysing the finer merits of their respective heroes much as some boys discussed football teams or guitarists.
Sophie had crushes too. She was only human. But she had seen too many people subjected to humiliation when f
riends had revealed a crush to its object to want to risk that herself. Both Lucas and Charlie had it in them to race across a quad to some idol of hers and say my friend Sophie thinks you’re a god, simply for the flirtatious pretext such phoney altruism gave them to speak to the boy themselves. So she allowed her friends to think her above all fleshly trivia. She was the wise one, the controlled one, the one to whom others made their confessions of weakness. If she thought of anyone in the minutes before sleeping, it was of Wilf, not in any fantasizing way but simply to rehearse the details of the one night she had spent with him. Crushes on anyone outside the school were indefinably low, on a par with crushes on actors or pop singers, not to be paraded.
Kimiko returned and Lucas changed the subject at once, quizzing her, as a fellow-linguist, on what she made of that year’s French assistante and the Anouilh play they were reading with her.
Sophie wondered if she was right to dismiss his feelings for Mr Compton as just another self-dramatizing infatuation. Normally he would not have kept such a thing back from Kimiko since she was a far more patient, less openly critical listener than Sophie.
‘Did you tell Charlie about …?’ she began as he was leaving.
‘God, no,’ he said. ‘Not the Mouth of England.’
And he continued not to tell Charlie. She knew it for a fact. Even if sworn to silence Charlie would have been sure to have found a moment to take Sophie aside to say, ‘Look, I promised not to tell anyone but …’
Now that they were in the upper school, the four of them led far more separate lives than they had done. With Charlie studying sciences, Lucas studying humanities and Sophie one of just eight fifth-formers taking Greek, Latin and ancient history, there was no longer a single class in which they coincided. In study hours, Kimiko now saw more of Lucas than Sophie did, to the point where Sophie felt obliged to tease him about his New Best Friend.
As planned, Sophie and Kimiko now shared a bedsit. High up in the upper attics, hard against Chapel, its lofty removal from the toast and chatter of the Daughters’ Chamber brought with it a sense that they were less subject to rules than they had been. They no longer needed to complete a set amount of changed ekker every week and no longer troubled to register their visitors with Nurse. Thanks to Kimiko’s parents, they had their own toaster, kettle and record player. There was also a Baby Belling on the landing where they could heat baked beans or make a stink reconstituting Vesta dried meals.
In Dougal’s, Lucas and Charlie had acquired similarly adult privileges. That Lucas was not confessing despite all the new opportunities they had to talk in privacy commanded Sophie’s respect.
In their ritualized morning encounters in the Chantry, she found herself looking at Mr Compton with new eyes. Despite the resemblance to Peter O’Toole, she had thought him monastic, but there was something romantic about him, she saw that now. It lay in the conjunction of his perfect skin, permanent five o’clock shadow, subdued courtesy and the sense that he carried a burden of suffering that would remain private. Lucas caught her elbow one Wednesday afternoon when he spotted Mr Compton in his immaculate Corps uniform and hissed, ‘I’ve got it. It’s Guy Crouchback!’
Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy had been among the last books they had studied together when they were in the same div. She forgot the novels within weeks of finishing them but retained a strong sense of the flawed hero’s essential decency.
Heidi took her aside before a Sunday lunch on the pretext of needing her opinion on the saltiness of a sauce.
‘What’s wrong with Lucas?’ she asked her in an undertone. ‘Is someone bullying him? A teacher? Another boy?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You can tell me, Sophie.’ Those Disney eyes bored into her.
Sophie shook her head. ‘I really don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Heidi. He’d have told me.’
‘He tells you everything,’ Heidi said.
‘Eventually, yes.’
‘That’s good. I’m glad it’s still you and not … someone else. He’s not eating properly. And look how pale he’s getting!’ She gestured through the kitchen’s serving hatch to where Lucas and his father were laying the dining room table. It was true. Sophie tried to look with a mother’s gaze and saw he had dark shadows under his eyes. He looked far more careworn than he had even during O levels.
‘It’s just winter,’ she said, to comfort Heidi. ‘He just needs a little sun. Maybe when you go skiing at Christmas …’
But Heidi had turned aside, sighing. ‘You give them a mother’s love but you’re always the last to hear. His sister was the same. I had to hear it from him when Carmel moved in with … into that place in Bristol.’
Sophie had enjoyed her short visit to Carmel’s squat and had seen nothing wrong with her boyfriend, Klaus, who clearly cared for her deeply. Lucas said he suspected that what upset his mother was not the living in sin but the living in a place without paying rent; property irregularities threatened some deeper moral dereliction. That and the fact that Klaus was Austrian and not Jewish.
Heidi was whisking tiny cubes of softened butter into a sauce. The smell of hot butter, vinegar, peppercorns and tarragon was making Sophie faint with hunger although she had eaten a whole packet of Dutch shortbread during Chapel that morning. Heidi had just tossed four steaks onto a big griddle and was sprinkling them with sea salt. She was mesmerizingly confident when she cooked – like a beautiful witch – not like Margaret who, despite years of experience, was incapable of cooking anything without much cursing and hesitant reference to her recipe cards.
‘He’s in love, isn’t he?’
Sophie froze. She could not lie to this woman. Seemingly her trapped silence was confirmation enough.
‘I knew it. I knew it!’ Heidi turned back to the stove. She whisked the sauce furiously with one hand and shook the steaks with the other. She flipped the steaks over with the point of a little steel knife and turned off the stove. Then she seized a tissue from a nearby box and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Vinegar,’ she said. ‘Always makes them run. Oh, Sophie, Sophie, you’ve been very good to him but it was never going to be enough, was it? Right. A table everyone!’ And she whisked off her apron and, with it, the brief spasm of grief that had shaken her elegant frame.
That week Sophie remembered Heidi’s words as a challenge and resolved to do more. Pursuing Mr Compton as he left the Chantry one morning, she said, ‘Sir, please say no if it’s not on but I was wondering if I could bring one of my friends to visit you this afternoon. I think he’d … I think it would mean a lot to him.’
‘But of course.’ He stepped onto the grass to let the choirmaster pass. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t asked before. I hope he likes Wagner. I promised Paston I’d play some of the Solti Ring.’
‘Oh yes,’ she was able to say quite honestly. ‘He loves music.’
‘Really? I knew he sang but I thought cricket was more his thing.’
‘Oh. Not Somborne-Abbot, sir. I was thinking of bringing Behrman.’
‘Ah. Yes. But of course. The clever one. Much better idea.’
‘He knows who you are,’ she told Lucas, who was so excited he could hardly breathe. ‘He called you The Clever One.’ She kept quiet about the flash of disappointment she had detected in Mr Compton’s manner that she was not introducing him to Charlie.
They turned up promptly at four o’clock. Lucas was impressed by the exoticism of the garden and the house and she was pleased to see that the prospect of Wagner had scared off the more earnest of the regulars. There was only Paston and a couple of owlish music scholars who were planning on starting a Wagner Soc and discussing what symbolic colours would be best for the society’s scarf.
Lucas was far more attractive and socially able than any of them and she assumed he would be his usual, charming self. He was all but silent, however, almost dull, for all the pointed cues she gave him to sparkle. She worried that Mr Compton would be gaining a false impression. It was a relief when their cups of
karkady were done with and music and reverent listening took over from conversation.
They heard the last side of the last LP from the great, gold-papered boxed set in which Mr Compton had recently invested a huge amount of money. Sophie freely admitted to not knowing the Ring Cycle at all. She didn’t think Lucas did either so was surprised when he quietly explained to her that the music they were about to hear portrayed the death and rebirth of the world.
‘Brünnhilde sacrifices herself and all worldly power for love,’ he told her. ‘She rides her horse onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre and so gives up the ring, which would have given her that power, back to its rightful guardians, the Rhinemaidens. Her act destroys Valhalla and the old gods but there’s a hint, right at the end, that something good and new is coming of it.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Lou.’ She had never glimpsed Wagner in his record collection so suspected him of swotting up.
The music was huge, even allowing for Mr Compton’s fondness for playing it loud, and it filled the room like the fire and floodwaters it depicted. When it subsided they all sat there, a little stunned, until Lucas spoke again.
‘It’s curious,’ he said, ‘how Loge’s music, that glittering fire music, is happy despite the death and destruction it’s bringing.’
Paston snorted. ‘You mean it’s in a major key.’
‘No,’ Lucas corrected him with a smile. ‘It’s happy. The two aren’t the same. Brünnhilde’s love motif is in a major key as well but it’s far too restless and yearning to be happy. The fire theme is just that; happy, self-contained. But Loge never belongs, does he, sir?’ he went on. ‘He’s a god but not one of them. Even at the beginning he places himself apart from them. He’s elemental, true to himself. Fire can’t help the things it burns. Maybe the happiness is because he knows he brings a sort of purity and release?’
The music scholars tittered but Mr Compton nodded and asked the group to choose another passage to hear.