by Patrick Gale
As for what occurred on stage, it was less full-blown opera than a hybrid entertainment involving as many pupils as possible. Mr Compton had interlaced music filleted from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with those scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream involving either fairies or rustics. Shakespeare’s quartet of mortal lovers was removed entirely and the nuptial celebrations at the climax became a celebration of Oberon’s and Titania’s happy reunion, at which the rustics were led to perform under a spell cast by the fairies. His cunning was thus to place the dramatic burden of the show on actors and orchestra and to use singers and dancers as spectacle and diversion. Purcell’s arias seemed to require sweetness rather than professional dexterity or force and there were enough strong singers to do them credit. With the sixteen Quiristers providing the ‘ahh’ factor as a troupe of junior fairies in place of Shakespeare’s four, and plenty of stirring choruses, marches and familiar tunes imported from other Purcell works, the result was a farrago of tableaux and barely connected scenes but probably true to the spirit of Purcell’s hybridized original.
After a fraudulent morning of ‘open’ auditions for the speaking roles, Charlie had landed the part of Oberon. Lucas was one of a pack of short-horned, shag-pile-legged satyrs in the chorus. Sophie, who did not dance, sing, act or play an instrument had been pressured into being stage manager because Mr Compton said she had a cool head. She in turn claimed Kimiko as her ASM. There were almost as many pupils involved off the stage as on it, in props, make-up, wardrobe, lighting and front-of-house, most of them already experienced from working on other school productions, so the only expertise required of Sophie was to follow the script and marshal people into the right wings at the right time and to cue the various lighting or scenery effects. She had a little lit-up desk in a dark corner of the stage right wings where she followed her script, murmuring cues or performer summonses into an intercom as they came up. She commanded a slanting view across the stage, close enough to see fumbles and giggles that escaped the audience’s notice.
This was the first dress rehearsal and already she was hooked on the smells of greasepaint and nerves, of hot lights and dust and on the adrenaline rush from the sense of each act as a big machine that swept them all along. The atmosphere in the wings was electric and not unpleasantly smelly.
The green light on her desk flashed and she whipped a finger to her lips to hush the Quiristers who were huddling on her side of the wings, craning their necks to see across the stage to their colleagues gathered around Kimiko on the opposite side.
‘Standby houselights,’ Sophie murmured into her intercom, ‘and … houselights down.’ The houselights dimmed to black. The master of music took his place on the podium and the first solemn bars of the overture sounded. Sophie gave the next lighting cue as the faster music began and the junior fairies queued up to light their sparklers at a cigarette lighter held out by Charlie’s shy scientist friend, Crisp, who was in charge of stage right props. As each boy’s sparkler took, he raced out across the stage, bare feet stamping. Crisp lifted a bucket of damp sand, ready to receive the sparkler’s hot wires as the Quiristers Kimiko had launched ran off stage right, chased by the boy playing Puck.
The music changed again. Sophie had never learnt to read music but she could spot a change of tempo or material.
‘Oberon and Titania and chorus, please,’ Sophie murmured into her mike. ‘Standby: light cue three.’
The wings around her were soon rustling with gauze and nylon. She made out two of the four sixth-form girls representing the seasons confused by Oberon’s and Titania’s quarrel. They weren’t really required to dance, more to skip around with garlands and strike statuesque poses but they had all the queenliness of prima ballerinas. At the first run-through, Winter had made a prop girl cry so Sophie was watching for further trouble. Oberon passed between them, outdoing them in haughtiness. The moonlight effect now flooding the stage threw a cold glitter on his crown and jewelled doublet. He caught Sophie watching him and gave her a broad wink.
Summer was always Charlie’s glory term, partly because it suited his colouring and the cricket season raised his prestige. She would have predicted that the combination of this starring role and Mr Compton’s favouritism would have made him insufferable but found herself humbled by his good behaviour instead. (This in marked contrast to the girl in the non-singing title role who had let the whole business go to her head and caused a fuss by announcing she was going to RADA instead of Cambridge.) As though suddenly freed from insecurities or left with nothing to prove, Charlie had spent all term being thoroughly pleasant, catching both Lucas and Sophie in his overspill of affection. Either people had decided to like him or he was being uncharacteristically careful, for not a breath of gossip had linked him and the opera’s director.
The first proper scene began and everyone emptied onto the stage. As their singing filled the air, along with the hollow thump of footsteps on scenery ramps, Sophie found she wasn’t alone in the wings with Crisp. Jeremy Weir was there, led in apparently by Kimiko with whom he was whispering. They both glanced across at Sophie. He was current Senior Prefect, far too serious even to involve himself in sport, still less a school opera and his sudden appearance there caused Sophie’s heart to lurch. Somebody must have died for him to leave his study to come on such a mission. Kimiko’s father? Simon Behrman? Surely not Mrs Somborne-Abbot. But it was her he was approaching.
‘You’re to come with me, Cullen,’ he said. He barely bothered to whisper.
‘But I can’t,’ she hissed. ‘We’re in the middle of a dress.’
‘Matsubara can take over for a while. Can’t you, Matsubara?’
‘Sure.’ Kimiko nodded, glancing at Sophie for reassurance that this would be taken as obedience not treachery.
‘Headman wants to see you,’ Weir added. ‘You’re to come at once.’ He stood aside to let Kimiko take Sophie’s headphones and stool. He cast a quick, incurious look at the scene developing on stage then marched out through the flap in the blackout curtains.
‘Tell Compton if he asks,’ she told Kimiko, ‘but only if,’ and followed him.
Unlike Jonty Mortimer, who had done all he could – football, loud music, smoking – to dodge the social taint of braininess, Weir was already too isolated socially to care. He was one of the Scholars marked out as such even when not wearing his gown and waistcoat. Tall, thin, bony, inevitably nicknamed Weird within weeks of arrival, he kept highly effective control, not with any display of machismo or popularism but by dint of his ability to make one feel immature and underevolved with one unsmiling glance. He never smiled just as he rarely changed out of his uniform into half-day clothes, because he saw no point. Only when bell-ringing did he show anything like abandon and even that was possibly an optical illusion arising from the rarity of seeing him in rapid motion.
He didn’t speak as he led Sophie across the river, back past Schola and through Brick Quad and Lawn Quad to the Headman’s house, because he had fulfilled his task in fetching her and his mind was already returning to whatever thoughts the summons had interrupted. He probably resented her, whatever she had done, for being the cause of interrupting him.
Sunlight was dazzling after hours spent backstage and she felt doubly uprooted by being suddenly among people to whom the opera meant nothing, boys kicking a tennis ball, some Daughters lying on a rug beneath a tree, a groundsman mowing one of the cricket squares; most people. This heady, communal achievement that had been swallowing up so much of her time that she had not slipped home or up to the Behrmans’ once all term meant less to most people than the Sex Pistols or the impending cricket match against Winchester.
‘Phi!’
She turned to see Lucas, still in satyr costume and make-up but with his denim jacket thrown over the top, coming through the arch from Brick Quad twenty yards behind them.
‘You’re not to talk to him beforehand,’ Weir said. ‘Headman’s orders,’ and as he drew her on she saw that Lucas, too, had an escort,
the only prefect from Dougal’s on whom he had never developed a crush. He was held back as Weir led her on with a gentle pressure on her elbow.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked him as, joylessly polite, he held open the back door to the Headman’s house. ‘What am I supposed to have done?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Weir said. ‘I was simply told to bring you a.s.a.p. without you conferring with Miss Behrman first.’
His routine mockery of Lucas’s reputation was the nearest she had seen him come to amusement.
The Headman, Dr Twyford, lived with his historian wife in some splendour on the first and second floors of the house. The ground floor was given over to his study, hall, secretary’s office and a function room where he received leavers for sherry and newcomers for tea. He was a mild, even smooth man, an urbane preacher, a champion of the claims of music over sport but said to be implacable in opposition and thus to have several enemies across the lawn in the dons’ common room. Thus far Sophie had avoided ever having to speak to him apart from a few brief words at the newcomers’ tea because his very mildness made her nervous. So many pupils seemed beneath his notice that, whenever she caught him watching her in passing in one of the quads or corridors, she was convinced he was keeping tabs on her for some reason.
‘Sit there,’ Weir said, indicating a row of the kind of hard hall chairs designed for tenants waiting to pay rent. While she sat, sharply conscious in such pristine surroundings of her paint-splashed T-shirt and jeans and filthy plimsolls, he tapped on the study door and opened it when the Headman’s voice called, ‘Yes?’
‘Cullen’s in the hall, sir,’ he said.
‘Ah. Good,’ Dr Twyford said. ‘Send her straight in.’
As she crossed to the study door, Lucas came in from outside, ushered by his prefect. He cast Sophie a hunted look, the sweaty look of the weak one who cracked in a prison camp film. He had grown over the holidays and his wiry swimmer’s frame was filling out. With his bare chest, shaggy brown leggings and little horns poking out of his wig, he had looked quite sexy backstage but in this setting he looked merely ridiculous and vulnerable, a fey woodland creature thrust into a hostile environment. She looked away, ashamed to be connected to the boy with the streaky orange make-up and the silly wig. Weir knocked for her.
‘Ah, Phi. Come in.’ It was typical of his smooth operation that the Headman both knew her nickname and used it. ‘Sit. I think you know Mrs Somborne-Abbot.’
It was a shock to see her there, and yet not a surprise at all. She was if anything, thinner and smarter than Sophie had ever seen her. She had changed her hairstyle, which now looked twice the size, no longer tugged tightly off her face but sweeping up, off and away from it in a lacquered cloud.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, shifting in her chair to tuck her ankles together the other way. ‘Sophia and I are old friends.’
‘Hello.’ Sophie aimed for cheeriness but her greeting sounded frail. ‘I’m sorry to come dressed like this, sir.’
‘That’s quite all right, Sophie. I’m sorry to pull you out of your rehearsal so dramatically. We’ll have you back there before the end of Act One. Now, don’t worry. You’ve done nothing wrong. Mrs Somborne-Abbot and I simply need some information – confirmation, possibly – concerning a very serious matter. We need you to be entirely honest.’
Someone knocked.
‘Excuse me.’ Dr Twyford walked over and opened the door a few inches. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Just wait there, would you?’
Mrs Somborne-Abbot had whipped out her powder compact and was dabbing at her nose. Had she been crying? Sophie took advantage of the momentary dropping of supervision to glance at the papers on the expanse of desk before her. There were several much-folded letters on thick, white paper. Mr Compton wrote a distinctive, cursive hand with black ink and a thick italic nib. Like his garden and marksmanship, it was one of the things that set him apart from the other staff.
Sophie looked at her hands as Dr Twyford returned to his seat, and pretended to pluck at some scenery paint on her thumbnail.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘It’s quite simple. Charlie’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a glance at Charlie’s mother, who had clicked her compact out of sight again and no longer looked like a woman who might once have shed a tear. ‘He’s one of my best friends.’
‘And Mr Compton. How well do you know him? He’s never taught you, has he?’
‘No, sir. Not in class. But he and I both go to morning services in the Chantry.’
‘Do you, by Jove?’
‘Yes, er, and I’ve been to his house for tea. Lots of times. And he took me to the opera with Lady Droxford and then she had Charlie and me and Lucas Behrman to stay once.’
‘Lady Droxford is who?’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot asked the Headman.
‘That’s his mother,’ Sophie told her.
‘Mr Compton is the second son of the late Lord Droxford,’ Dr Twyford explained in an undertone and Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s posture became doubly alert.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Not that that changes anything.’
‘Quite so,’ Dr Twyford turned back to Sophie with a small smile that might conceivably have been satirical: ‘And would you say he and Charlie got on well?’
‘Yes, sir. Charlie was in his div and he’s in the Corps too, so … And of course he cast Charlie as Oberon in the opera.’
‘Of course. But would you say he takes a … a special interest in Charlie?’
Sophie glanced down at the letters. Dr Twyford noticed and calmly rearranged them into a heap on his blotter which he then covered with a large desk diary.
‘Yes,’ she said and was aware of Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s stare upon her. ‘But not in the way I think you mean. Charlie’s not very … academic but he stands up to Mr Compton, which is unusual. A lot of pupils are scared of him but Charlie even teases him. If they were the same age, I think they’d be friends.’
‘He took him to the opera,’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot said. ‘Just the two of them that time. To Wagner.’
‘He takes a lot of pupils to the opera,’ Sophie said. ‘It’s one of the things he cares about.’
‘Does Charlie write to him, do you know?’ the Headman asked her.
‘I don’t know. Possibly. Probably. He loves sending notes though the pigeon-hole system. And we all write to each other in the holiday. If he counts Mr Compton as a friend, I expect he writes to him too.’
‘Do you write to Mr Compton?’
I mustn’t lie, she thought. Not outright. She remembered the thank you letter she wrote after the trip to Covent Garden. ‘I have done,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘And as his friend, you’ve not been worried there was anything unsuitable or inappropriate between Charlie and Mr Compton?’
Sophie’s cheeks were hot. Her back, she realized, was streaming with sweat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She was sure she was a beacon of deceit but he seemed satisfied. He smiled. Perhaps he knew she was lying but she was telling the lies he wanted to hear.
‘Thank you, Sophie. Now if you’d like to sit over there?’ He waved her across to a small sofa near the door. ‘I’m going to be a bit tougher on Lucas than I was on you,’ he warned her. ‘I might imply things. Please don’t say a word, though. Unless I ask you to.’
‘All right, she said.
As he went to call Lucas in, she realized she was praying to her quiet, not entirely Christian deity.
Lucas walked in, apparently without noticing she was still there. Perhaps he thought she had been released through the other door. Dr Twyford steered him to the chair by the desk so that his back was to her. ‘I like your horns,’ he said playfully.
‘Sorry, sir. Dexter said to come straight over without changing.’
‘Quite right of him.’
Lucas said hello to Mrs Somborne-Abbot and got a cool ‘Hello Lucas’ in reply. He tugged at his costume because the fake hairy leggings were
riding up to reveal the real hairy legs beneath.
Dr Twyford sat across from him. He slid the diary off the handful of letters and picked the letters up, turning them over in his pale, neat hands. ‘You and Charlie Somborne-Abbot share a study, don’t you, Lucas?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He tells you everything?’
‘Pretty much, sir. Though now he’s on the C ladder and I’m on the B, we don’t –’
‘I meant besides work.’
‘Oh. Yes, sir.’
‘Are you more than friends?’
‘No, sir!’
Dr Twyford smiled at Lucas’s involuntary indignation. ‘You see, we know everything really. We have the letters Mr Compton has been writing to Charlie in the holidays, which Mrs Somborne-Abbot has quite properly brought to me, and we have heard all about what Charlie’s been up to from your friend, Sophie, here.’
Sophie saw Lucas’s back stiffen. So he hadn’t noticed her.
‘There’s nothing between them, sir,’ Lucas said abruptly. ‘If Sophie told you anything, she was lying to protect me.’
This is disgrace, Sophie thought. This is how it starts, with a pointed but polite interrogation in gracious surroundings. Then a handshake, perhaps, and an abrupt dismissal. There had been expulsions in the last year, one for a second-time smoking offence, one for drugs, one for a boy accused of sexually assaulting a younger one. In each case she had been startled by the ruthless rapidity with which the offenders were removed but she saw now how, behind closed doors, Dr Twyford had probably been equally bland with each offender. By tonight she would be back in her room at Wakefield House. Next week she would have to go for an interview about starting at the girls’ grammar school in the autumn. If they would take her. Perhaps she would have to go to the secondary modern with the others in the home. Everyone would know about her fall from grace: a sex scandal in which she didn’t even get to have sex but was left perverted by association. She would be branded a snob, too, simply from the inference that she had not thought the secondary modern good enough for her in the first place.