by Patrick Gale
‘Are you taking music A level?’ he asked as he showed them out afterwards.
‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘Only history of art.’
‘Pity. We never get any non-musicians to take it but they’d bring clearer vision to the subject. Come again, won’t you? Cullen, here, will show you the form.’
Before they had emerged through the garden’s rear gate again she could hear Lucas’s teeth chattering. She was about to make some quip about him having it bad when he apologized and ran ahead, and around the corner into the War Cloisters, where she found him in the darkness, moments later, leaning between a pair of limestone pillars to be sick into a lavender bed.
Awestruck, she said nothing beyond offering him a peppermint and readily resigned herself to the idea that he would become a regular at Mr Compton’s afternoons and that she might attend less often.
One of the effects of night falling hours before afternoon school was over was that the gap between lunch and supper came to seem impossibly wide. Mid-afternoon trips to the tuck shop for egg and chips became a winter routine among them. Sophie, Lucas and Kimiko had just placed an order there when Charlie ran in, full of news.
It was not yet official, he said, but he’d just heard from a reliable source that Mr Compton had been implicated in a scandal and had been given the choice of discreetly handing in his notice and leaving at once or waiting for the police to become involved.
‘Sex or drugs?’ Kimiko asked because it was always one or the other.
‘Both.’
‘No!’ they all gasped and Charlie had to shush them because people were looking over and the skinny waitress with the stony face was showing an interest.
‘Who’s your source?’ Lucas asked. The colour had drained from his face. Charlie seemed not to notice.
‘Hush-Lara,’ he said. This was Dougal’s equivalent of Nurse, so nicknamed because that was what she said whenever her dachshund flew out of her room barking, which it did, Charlie had discovered, if you whistled through your teeth. He had demonstrated the phenomenon for Sophie once. The funny whistling, the manic dachshund skidding on parquet floor and the matron waddling out after her, her hands clasped under her bosom while she chid, ‘Hush, Lara. Hush!’; everything was precisely as he had predicted. Hush-Lara had a sister – same bosom, Patterdale terrier – who worked as secretary to the Undermaster, so was a reliable source of information, especially if one caught her during lunch, while Mr Headbourne’s South African sherry was still active.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Lucas said.
Charlie shrugged. ‘Are you going to eat that?’ he asked. Their food had arrived and Lucas wasn’t touching his. Lucas gave the plate a minute shove towards Charlie who said, ‘Thanks,’ and broke the egg yolk with a chip.
‘So what happened?’
Charlie munched a little, playing with them. They had earned a punishment for showing no jealousy when he recently started spending time with a sweet, unwary chemist and photography enthusiast called David Crisp. Then he related how, according to Hush-Lara’s intelligence, Larding and Dahl had been back to visit Mr Compton.
This was ominous in itself. Sophie had always disliked Larding and Dahl, two self-consciously decadent and rather frightening sixth-form Scholars in her first term. They were so obviously bad that everyone had assumed they would be expelled, if only for smoking or vandalism, and it had been disappointing to realize each had lasted through their Oxbridge term and moved on, undisgraced, to the college of his choice.
During the visit Dahl was said to have produced some dope, which they shared, then Compton led Larding off to his bedroom. Piqued at not being so singled out, Dahl had gone to the Headman. He sneaked.
‘So when’s he going?’ Kimiko asked.
Charlie shrugged again, glanced at Lucas. ‘Tomorrow? Soon, anyway. I doubt they’ll let him do any more teaching.’
‘I’ll have to go and see him,’ Lucas said softly.
‘You can’t, Lou,’ Sophie told him.
‘I have to tell him,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t just let him go and never know. I’d never stop wondering.’
‘Know what?’ Charlie asked.
Everyone looked at Lucas. Lucas glanced at Sophie and shrugged, which she took as permission.
‘Lucas is in love with him,’ she said quietly. ‘Really in love.’
Charlie laughed. ‘But you can’t tell him!’
‘Why not,’ Lucas asked, ‘if it’s true? He needs some friends at a time like this.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘It’s after four,’ Sophie reminded him. ‘There’ll be people there.’
‘So? I’ll go in through the front. I’ll wait for everyone to leave.’
‘Think,’ Sophie told him. ‘What do you want to happen?’
‘What do you think?’ Charlie asked with a smirk.
Sophie ignored him. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So. Say he loves you back or is grateful or whatever and sleeps with you. Then what?’
‘Sleep with him again?’ Charlie suggested and spluttered. Kimiko laughed too, damn her.
Sophie tried to block them out, tried to make Lucas focus on her. ‘He’s a don,’ she reminded him. ‘And it’s illegal. Where’s it going to go?’
‘I dunno,’ he said and stood. ‘I don’t care, really. I might leave. We could go away together. Maybe we’ll just write letters. I … I’ve got to tell him.’
And he walked out.
‘Raspbwy, Stworbwy, Chocklik, Poynapil, Furniller, Lemming or Loyme,’ the waitress was telling someone.
‘Well fuck me,’ Charlie said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
‘You don’t think he’s really going?’ Kimiko asked. ‘Not really?’
‘He is,’ Sophie said. ‘He’s serious. He’s seriously in love.’ She found she was shivering with adrenalin as though she, not Lucas, was about to bare her heart.
‘Let’s go and watch.’ Charlie jumped up.
‘Charlie!’ Sophie protested but he was leaving so she and Kimiko followed.
The tuck shop was on one end of Queensgate Row. Mr Compton’s house was four hundred yards away. Dusk was falling. They tailed Lucas in silence in and out of pools of light that fell from house windows and fanlights. There were no proper street lights but here and there lamps were fixed on wall brackets over entrances. Mr Compton’s house was in darkness. Perhaps he had already packed his bags and fled to the Continent? They stopped in the shadows twenty yards away and watched Lucas mount the steps and reach for the bell.
It was so strange that the school was going about its normal half-day business – people returning muddied from football matches, dons on bicycles, two small boys dwarfed by cello cases hurrying to rehearsal, a housemaster’s wife walking her retriever – unaware that this illegal drama was unfolding in its midst.
Like many of the houses, Mr Compton’s still had an old bell pull rather than an electric buzzer. Lucas reached for the brass knob and hesitated.
‘No,’ Charlie breathed. ‘He’s not going through with it. He’s chickening out.’
Lucas pulled.
‘Jesus! He is,’ Charlie shouted. ‘I’ve got to stop him! Lucas?’
Lucas turned to see them at the moment the fanlight above him lit up and the door opened. Mr Compton was there. Lucas turned, they spoke and Mr Compton let him in. The door closed.
‘Jesus fuck,’ Charlie said. ‘Bloody hell. I was only kidding.’
‘What?’ Kimiko hissed.
‘I guessed something was up from the way he kept mooning about the place and not paying attention when we were talking. And he was putting all his energy into his English and listening to all this fucking Wagner and … If I’d said about Compton going and there was no reaction, I’d have known I was on the wrong track.’
‘You are such a moron,’ Sophie said. ‘You’ll have to go after him. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.’
He hadn’t been stupid, though. She thought back to his narrative in the tuck shop, his excit
ed entrance, the telling details; he must have planned it all like a short, cruel play. He had revealed an uncharacteristic psychotic cunning.
‘Well it’s a bit late now,’ he said.
‘Charlie!’ She was amazed to see him shrug it off. One moment he had been exploding with nerves, now he actually seemed amused at what he had done.
‘Well it is. I’ve done him a favour.’ He sauntered on, walking boldly up to and past Mr Compton’s house. ‘Either he tells him and Bingo, or he tells him and Compton sends him for a little chat with Rev Harestock but at least I’ll have stopped him mooning around being such a bloody bore. But he probably won’t get around to saying anything. He’ll wimp out and just stammer something about music or Milton or something.’
They adjourned to Charlie and Lucas’s study to eat toast and wait.
A former housekeeper’s room, the study lay on a remote, unpoliced branch of the building near a discreet staff entrance. They had hung one wall with a tattered Union Jack, another with a striped horse blanket, and had plastered a third with a collage of images from magazines. Most of the images were of women but Sophie’s trained eye had swiftly spotted the handful of men they were chosen to disguise. A young Paul Newman warming his hands at a brazier was a particular favourite, promoted to the wall from its former hiding place in Charlie’s burrow cupboard. There had been a furious row the previous term when Charlie refused to believe Paul Newman was Jewish.
Sophie noticed that, as time wore on and a whole hour passed, Charlie’s bravado began to fray at the edges, so she avenged Lucas a little by winding him up.
‘They’re going to the Headman together,’ she told him. ‘He’s making Lucas repeat what you told him.’
‘Shut up.’
‘And even as we speak, a call’s being put through to Headbourne and your mother.’
‘Shut up, Sophie!’
‘Or maybe they’re having sex already?’ Kimiko picked up Sophie’s lead. ‘Maybe Compton is buggering him and it’s really, really hurting and Lucas has changed his mind and it’s too late. Maybe we should call the police?’
‘Nonsense!’ Charlie was close to tears or losing his temper or both and Sophie tasted the bloodlust of a tease about to go too far.
Suddenly there were footsteps up the stairs outside and Lucas burst in. He was transformed, glowing, happy, breathless from running.
‘Well?’
Now he tortured them by making them wait. He just stood there, panting.
‘What?’ Charlie asked, throwing a cushion at him.
‘I should murder you,’ Lucas started.
‘Yes. But what happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘For a whole hour?’
‘There was no one there for once. He’d locked the garden gate because he was working or something. When I saw the house so dark, I thought he’d left.’
‘But he hadn’t.’
Lucas sat on one of the beds and pulled his legs up. He took his time.
‘No. I … I asked him if we could talk about something and he said of course and sat me down and made me a pot of karkady and, I dunno …’ He giggled. ‘I just came out with it.’
‘Tell me it’s not true, Tina!’ Kimiko said. She was fluent in their talk.
‘I told him I’d heard he was leaving and I couldn’t bear him going without me saying how I’d fallen deeply in love with him.’
‘Which was when he said he wasn’t leaving,’ Charlie started.
‘Ssh!’
‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘He didn’t tell me that. He came over and sat on the sofa next to me and said he was very touched and flattered but that of course I knew it was completely impossible because he was far too old and a teacher with responsibilities and in loco parentis and so on. And I said yes, I knew, of course and the funny thing was that I did. Just saying it out loud made me see it was impossible but I felt so happy to have told him! And then he played me a bit of Rosenkavalier – the bit where the Marschallin sings about the clocks and her fear of getting old – and he held my hand.’
‘He never!’ Charlie crowed.
He had sounded pleased but as he listened to Lucas rattle on Sophie saw an expression flit across his face that frightened her; a glimpse of the side to him that Lucas jokingly called The Monstrous Child.
‘He did,’ Lucas was saying. ‘Just held it, because my hand was shaking so much. I said was he going to tell anyone and he said why on earth should he since I’d done nothing wrong and saw how impossible it was. And then he asked me other things, about home and work and did I want to go to Oxford or Cambridge and what books was I enjoying and …’ He paused, blissed out, regaining his breath. ‘Well. He was just very, very civilized. And he said I’m to go round there whenever I like.’
There was a stunned silence then Charlie slammed down a geometry case he had been fiddling with and stamped out. Lucas glanced at Sophie before following him.
‘Time for supper,’ Kimiko said. ‘We should hurry back.’
‘Yeah,’ said Sophie but having followed her onto the landing she lingered.
Charlie had stormed into the washroom a few doors along the corridor. Lucas had followed him in there but left the door ajar.
‘You don’t know what you all put me through,’ Charlie was raging. ‘I thought you might have gone to the Headman. I thought they were calling my mother!’ He sounded like a jealous wife.
‘I don’t know where the time went,’ Lucas said. ‘I love him, Charlie. I really do.’
‘You’re so fucking inconsiderate,’ Charlie said and it sounded as though he had kicked out at a loo seat.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lucas said. ‘I didn’t realize. Charlie? Come and eat something. You’ll soon feel better.’
Aware Kimiko was holding the back door open, Sophie hurried out to join her but she was haunted by Lucas’s appeasing, almost cringing tone and by the dismayed affection in his words. Their friendship was far more complex, she realized, than either Lucas or Charlie let on and compromised them both in ways she could not understand.
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
(fifteen years, eleven months)
‘Pinch me, Phi,’ Lucas murmured happily as they followed Mr Compton and his mother along a plush opera house corridor. He was wearing a dinner jacket for the first time, bought expressly by Heidi when the invitation came, and looked at once grown up and about six.
Sophie flicked his bow tie.
‘Hey!’ He clapped a hand over it protectively. He had insisted on buying a real one and it had taken the two of them half an hour to tie it, using the enigmatic diagram that came in its box.
Sophie had on her only good skirt, the dark blue one Mrs Somborne-Abbot had given her, and the black silk blouse and the tiny silver crucifix and chain she had bought with her earnings as a waitress. She had on brand-new, very sheer tights that would be lucky to last the night without laddering, a pair of second-hand court shoes Margaret had helped her dye and a peacock blue Indian shawl Heidi had given her on semi-permanent loan.
Lucas was even happier, she could tell, when they were ushered through a door not into ordinary seats but a box with four little gilt chairs, wine on ice and a tray of tiny sandwiches.
‘Oh good!’ exclaimed Mrs Compton, a serenely pear-shaped woman. Beneath her fur coat she had on the sort of comfortable, floor-length Indian cotton frock they sold in the market at home and, Sophie sensed, equally unpretentious and comfortable underwear. She was not at all the glacial priestess one would have imagined for Mr Compton’s mother and Sophie warmed to her the moment they shook hands in the opera house porch. She put her in mind of a scene in an Irish novel she had read for fun recently that described dowagers at a hunt ball shamelessly sporting high-necked, yellowing woollen vests beneath their décolleté gowns.
Mr Compton had sent her a Christmas card of a Botticelli virgin. (The only other posted ones were from Kimiko, Charlie and Lucas.) This was surprising in itself but then she found the brief note he had written on a piec
e of notepaper folded inside.
My mother and I are going to Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden on the 3rd and would be delighted to take you and Lucas too.
The opera did not appeal to her greatly. She could see it was popular – there was not a free seat in the theatre – and guessed that Mr Compton had chosen it for its comic story and sweet melodiousness. But the music was too sweet to her ear, its textures cloying. Added to which, the plot was an uneasy blend of adult material with pantomime. There was a principal boy, sung by a woman in breeches and open-necked shirt, but one who slept with the leading lady. The lecherous comic baron merely made her long for the women to sing again and she resented the music’s implication that, deep down, he was lovable. Kitsch was fun, usually one could laugh at it, but this was kitsch of a disturbing and sticky kind, perhaps because it was so nakedly a piece of early twentieth-century escapism.
The others were enraptured, however, so she said nothing. There was much to enjoy, the glamour of the sets and costumes, the other people in the audience, the novelty of finding herself in such a place. She noted the way the nymphs holding up the lights began as little more than cherubs up by the cheapest seats and became larger and more voluptuous by degrees until, near where they were sitting, they were full-blown naked women.
‘Only the grandees merit nipples,’ Mr Compton said, following her gaze. ‘My mother came here during the war to go dancing with soldiers.’
‘Not soldiers in the plural, Antony. You make me sound much faster than I was. I came here with your father.’ She turned to Sophie, eyes sparkling at the memory. ‘They used to cover the stalls with a dance floor. It was heaven! Mind you, it was pretty shabby, then.’
‘It’s fairly shabby now,’ Mr Compton observed.
‘Do you come here regularly?’ Lucas asked them.
‘Not as often as we should,’ Mrs Compton said. ‘It’s up to Julius.’
‘My older brother takes this box for each opera of the season,’ Mr Compton explained. ‘But he can’t abide anything in German.’
‘Not even The Magic Flute,’ she added. ‘Imagine! So my daughter-in-law gives us his cast-offs.’