by Patrick Gale
When Mrs Somborne-Abbot snatched him away before his chance for glory in The Fairy Queen, their assumption had been that she was punishing him brutally but that he would return in September and be given a second chance. But when their letters and cards to him went unanswered all summer, Sophie and Lucas each began to wonder if she had removed him for good, not only from the school but from all contact with his former friends.
Perhaps it would have been better if she had, for within days of the Michaelmas term starting it was clear that the Headman’s ban on further contact between pupil and teacher was producing the reverse of the desired effect. Fired up by a powerfully normal eight weeks away to rival Sophie’s – a month in Rock with Saggy and the Vanillas then a month’s hard labour on his uncle’s farm in deepest Wiltshire – Charlie had returned ablaze with defiance. Mrs Somborne-Abbot had indeed intercepted their letters to him and, indeed, the ones he had written to them. Her assumption being that, once contact was re-established, they might be couriers for communication with their adored Mr Compton. Starved of news, his heart had grown steadily fonder and he came to see himself as a martyr to love.
Being removed from the Corps and assigned to social services instead was a chance for a small revenge on his mother since he promptly volunteered for the Happy Brigade so as to spend Wednesday afternoons camping around with Lucas, singing songs from the shows to bewildered geriatrics – an outcome she could not have foreseen. However, he had been moved a notch up from Mr Compton’s div to one full of desperately serious scientists about to sit their Oxbridge science exams and he hated the violent change from Wagner appreciation classes with Mr Compton to sessions with the dour Mr Alton on politics and ethics as preparation for their General Paper essays.
Most galling for him was Mr Compton’s punctilious observation of the ban, sitting on the same side in Chapel so their eyes couldn’t meet, crossing a crowded quad to avoid passing him, even resigning his position as one of Dougal’s two house tutors so as to miss the twice-weekly risk of meeting Charlie at the lunches that went with the post. Thus thwarted, Charlie did his best to hate the man but even as he tried to decry his cowardice and hypocrisy he was deciding Mr Compton loved him more than ever and was suffering profoundly beneath his polished parade of sangfroid.
Two Saturday nights into term, as Sophie finished ringing bells for the evening service, Lucas had come up to the gallery to find her, just as he used to do. He looked so worried she did not even go through the motions of sitting through the service beside him but led him directly back out to the belfry staircase as the choir began the psalm. They were out on the gallery just long enough for her to notice that the choir didn’t include Charlie, who was usually a regular volunteer.
‘Nightmare,’ Lucas said as soon as they were outside.
‘What’s happened?’
‘A total fucking nightmare.’
‘Tell me. Where is he?’
‘He’s gone to Compton’s. He went there at six-thirty, as soon as we’d finished supper, and he’s been there all evening. I think he’s staying the night.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Exactly.’
There was nothing they could do, of course. They could hardly mount a vigil outside Mr Compton’s house. Lucas was expected home by ten and even now she was a sixth-former, Sophie was required to be back on the Daughters’ Staircase as soon as the service was over. But as a co-conspirator in last term’s mini tribunal, it was unthinkable that he should not have shared the news with her.
Charlie was in the choir as usual the following morning but vanished again afterwards before she could have a chance to speak to him. She went for lunch at the Behrmans’ and Lucas and she spent the afternoon in his room, listening to Kate Bush records and feeding each other’s bleak foreboding.
Charlie showed up late in the afternoon. Lucas’s room faced the back so they didn’t see him ride up. They were arguing about the meaning of ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’ and broke off, hearing his laugh downstairs. Lucas went down and found him chatting with Simon, whom he persisted in calling ‘sir’. He seemed happy enough but when Lucas finally succeeded in drawing him upstairs after five excruciatingly polite minutes of chat about a career in Law – Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s latest idea for him – the front collapsed.
He hugged first Sophie then Lucas then he sat heavily on the bed and started weeping.
‘What’s wrong?’ they asked him, Lucas terrified Heidi would hear and want to barge in.
‘Nothing. I’m so happy, that’s all. And I don’t know what to do. I’m such a chump.’
It transpired that when they thought they had been lying to save two lovers’ skins they were themselves deceived. That evening at Lady Droxford’s house Compton had felt impelled to confess his feelings but had held back from any physical expression of them beyond holding Charlie’s hand and, when encouraged, taking him in his arms. And so on, throughout the summer term that followed. He was horrified of forcing himself on him, of leading him in anyway towards something he might regret. But now all that was behind them. Irrevocably. They had, Sophie realized, become a them.
‘I only pretended before,’ Charlie told Lucas. ‘I was jealous. You’d done stuff and I … I was embarrassed I hadn’t. Shit. Sorry. Bit sore.’
He self-consciously adjusted the way he was sitting then caught Sophie’s eye and snorted with teary laughter.
‘He could be sent to prison,’ she quietly reminded him.
‘Only if someone finds out and he’s hardly going to chat about it in the common room. And you won’t tell. Will you?’
‘Course not,’ Sophie said. She glanced at Lucas, who had said nothing.
‘But what can you do now?’ Lucas asked him.
‘Be very careful. I was mad going back there today but I had to talk to him. Oh, Sophie, he’s incredible! He’s so handsome and wise and gentle.’
He started to cry again and had to grab Lucas’s box of tissues. (Sophie found it slightly creepy that Heidi bought her son tissues all year round, regardless of whether he had a cold.)
‘We’ve agreed I’ll see him twice a week. It’s easy enough to wait until late then get out by the fire escape outside our study. Then if I go the long way round, through War Cloisters, I can let myself in through the garden. There are no lights on that side after ten-thirty. The front’s too well lit from the street and someone might see. Is this the new album? Can I hear a bit?’
And he adjusted back to his old self, as though what he had told them and the inflammatory secret he had bound them to were nothing more controversial than next week’s prefect roster for monitoring prep.
For the rest of the term he continued to spend part of two nights each week in Mr Compton’s house. Lucas betrayed nothing of his knowledge during his English classes with Mr Compton, though he fancied Mr Compton avoided his eye and avoided asking him questions and Sophie betrayed nothing while praying regularly a few feet from Mr Compton in the Chantry. He did not avoid her eye. He always inclined his head politely to her as he left and often smiled in passing but he never now lingered for a short conversation afterwards.
After one last visit, during which one of the music bores had gone on and on about Britten’s Death in Venice and wasn’t it an embarrassment and what did Mr Compton think, Sophie and Lucas agreed to absent themselves from his informal afternoon gatherings.
Curiously, their shared secret, their criminal knowledge, had the effect of making them both become far more earnest and responsible. Lucas took his duties as a house prefect very seriously and Sophie made a special effort to befriend and support that term’s new Daughters much as she had taken to helping new arrivals at Wakefield House. They both studied like fiends as though compensating for Charlie, who was failing to hand essays in and talked cheerfully about forgetting Oxbridge and possibly even flunking his A levels. He was late getting off his UCCA form and flew in the face of his mother’s wishes by applying for drama courses instead of law or chemistry, only the schoo
l secretary queried his form and his ruse was quashed. The only plan he seemed settled on was spending his gap year in Rome living with Mr Compton who would be there on sabbatical.
Kimiko knew nothing, because they’d decided it wasn’t fair to burden her too. She sensed there was something she didn’t know and was no longer Lucas’s new best friend as a result. The fact that she knew nothing meant that time spent with her in their study was a relief for Sophie from the pointless circular conversations Lucas held with her whenever they met.
In the same way, she looked forward to her conversations with Wilf from the payphone in the music block. It was broken, so allowed one unlimited time for a single coin but it wasn’t a proper booth, so the knowledge that any passer-by could hear her was inhibiting. She enjoyed hearing Wilf’s voice, though, his long stories about nothing in particular. When he said, ‘Miss you,’ she said, ‘Yeah, me too.’ She wondered if he still went out on Saturday nights. He was a creature of habit but he was also sentimental and might be enjoying the weekly sense of sacrifice. It was good to talk to him but when he offered to take her out on Sundays she put him off with pretexts and the cruel threat that he would have to write a letter to Nurse to make the request. She knew there were few things he would find so hard. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see him – having his voice in her ear made him feel close again and made her think of slow dances to Whiter Shade of Pale and the oil and bodies smell in the back of his van. But she worried that seeing him, even if they simply went for a walk or to the cinema, would leave her weak when she needed to be in control. Her one concession to romance was to steal a near-empty stick of Blue Stratos deodorant from the top of some boy’s unzipped kit bag. She rubbed a little on her forearm at bedtime so she could smell it as she fell asleep.
She tugged the candle sack on a few yards then doubled back with a handful of stubs, filling alcoves. It amazed her that every year they went to all this trouble and then two poor groundsmen had to work their way all the length of the walls from opposite ends with little butane-charged candle lighters just for an effect and a tradition. The flickering spots of light about the walls did look beautiful – she remembered from the one Illumina she had been able to witness before becoming a bell-ringer – but few people bothered themselves over who had placed them there and who had lit them. Half the magic of the effect lay, perhaps, in the luxurious assumption that it was Illumina night so of course the walls would be lit as if by magic and the bonfire in the middle roaring up to the fringes of the surrounding trees.
During the last fortnight she had begun to worry about Lucas and his strength of purpose. Precisely because he no longer discussed his own feelings in the matter, she guessed they must run deep. He was reading a lot of Mauriac and Duras and Jean Genet and was in love with tales of black, annihilating gestures, mother-loathing or near-cannibalistic passion. He probably hated Charlie now where before he had only despised or resented him occasionally. If he could betray him without hurting Mr Compton, he would do it, she felt and she was often tempted to warn Charlie to remember to be tactful around him and avoid chafing an unscabbed wound. Bound by the same secret, however, Charlie undoubtedly found it as impossible not to talk about it when he was alone with Lucas as Lucas did when alone with Sophie. She caught a look of real pain on Lucas’s face the day before when he said he had discovered Charlie was visiting Mr Compton in the afternoons sometimes now, in shameless daylight.
She had climbed the ladder again and was surprised by the light suddenly coming on at the rear of Mr Compton’s house. The light upstairs had gone out. And now the downstairs light had gone out too and she heard the palm room door closing and footsteps on the gravelled path that snaked between the shrubs.
It was mid-afternoon. They would barely have finished placing the candle ends before the groundsmen began their long circuit to light them. The sun was low but she could see quite clearly as Mr Compton emerged through his garden door to her left.
‘Evening, sir,’ she called without thinking. Working in the fading light, alone with her thoughts, must have made her lonely for she was surprised by a small rush of affection for him. She missed their earlier, unambiguous friendship and found she was grinning broadly now as she might have done had Margaret walked out of War Cloisters to join in the celebration.
‘Good evening.’ He spoke as to a stranger. He didn’t recognize her at first. In the cold she had forgotten she had the ludicrous stripey hat pulled low on her brow. She tugged it off, clambering down from the ladder, and he looked back at her. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sophie. I forgot you were a light-bringer.’
‘Lucifer,’ she said, for something to say.
‘Indeed.’
There was something odd about his appearance. She couldn’t place it. His hair was as tidy as ever. He had on his long, dark overcoat, the one Lucas called his Mephistopheles because of its unexpected, demonic red lining. Something was wrong. Instinctively she took a step towards him. He backed away, as though in a hurry.
‘Bear me a message as well as your lights.’ His voice was strange. Could he have been drinking? ‘Tell Lucas, when you see him. Tell him that I understand.’
Had she said okay or all right or yes, sir? He was walking on, his long, black back to her and she couldn’t remember speaking.
‘Shift yourself, there!’ One of the groundsmen had arrived with his lighter.
‘Sorry,’ she called back. ‘Nearly done. Here.’ She hurried along, filling the last few alcoves.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said with a wink. ‘Only teasing,’ and she realized he had thought she was a boy at first. She watched as he clicked his lighter and set to work. ‘I’ll take over your stepladder, miss,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything left in that sack, sling it on the bonfire. Help her go up.’
‘Okay.’
She furled up the sack and tucked it under her arm. Turning, she saw where the other groundsman was at work. In the distance, through the sweeping skeletons of plane trees, thirty little pinpricks were glowing, then thirty-five, forty, forty-five. The sight caused her the same spasm of strange, bitter joy she had felt four years earlier when she first stood here, enraged at the other Daughters’ nostalgic leave-taking and convinced she was in love with a boy she had never met, whom she had twice seen wearing women’s clothes.
The bonfire heap lay directly along her swiftest route to the bell tower. The bell-ringers would soon be due to start sounding the ancient Christmas songs that would tell everyone the fire was lit. The others had gone in already, probably to grab a warming drink in the nearest chambers before heading upstairs where it was almost as cold as outside. Last year the Bell Captain had mulled some wine for them on a camping stove.
She was walking briskly, directly towards it, when she realized someone was clambering onto the bonfire’s summit, some idiot seizing his chance to hide a few bangers and rockets. As she passed under the plane trees she saw it was Mr Compton and that he had reached the old desk and was sitting on it.
The first match he struck blew out. As he struck a second successfully, shielded it and touched it to his chest, she understood what had been odd about their short conversation. The air between them had been humming not with booze but with paraffin. His suit was soaked in the stuff. By the time she reached the bonfire’s base, he was a human candle. By the time the groundsmen realized there was a man on fire and that some joker hadn’t simply lit the fire early, it was far too late.
She didn’t cry out. She didn’t even speak. The shock of it had locked her throat.
Night fell without her noticing. She found herself standing on his big overcoat. He must have thrown it off before he started to climb. The scarlet lining smelled of paraffin but was not wet with it. She imagined he had pulled it on just before leaving the house, to mask the deadly dripping of his clothes from anyone he might meet on his short journey.
Right on time, the bells began to ring without her. Somebody was ringing her treble so Weir must have press-ganged a last-minute substitu
te. He would be furious with her but Sophie couldn’t move. Someone who loved him had to watch until it was over. He burnt astonishingly fast. She remembered reading how young soldiers set to minding the ovens at Auschwitz had difficulty coping with the intense heat generated by melting human fat. She remembered the page on which she had read it. She saw its illustrations with her memory’s eye.
A crowd gathered. There were shouts, screams, insane attempts to mount the conflagration to pull him clear. What was left of him. The fire brigade had trouble finding a route through the chequerboard of buildings that stood between Schola Field and the nearest road and by the time they were unrolling their hose hidden fireworks were going off. These weren’t rockets or bangers like last year’s but roman candles that sent up glorious hissing fountains of coloured sparks at crazy angles on every side of the pyre. A few late arrivals, who did not understand, let out festive cheers, innocent ooh and ahs. The gunpowder briefly masked the sweet porky stench of roasting man.
The police arrived and tried to disperse the crowd, talking through loudhailers as the firemen doused the flames.
Somehow Kimiko found her. She wrapped the overcoat about her shoulders and led her back to their study where she pressed a hot drink on her and put her to bed. It was she who drew the story out of Sophie in fragments and passed it on to the authorities. At some point before midnight, Sophie was interviewed by two policewomen, then she was sedated and knew nothing until morning.
It was the worst kind of scandal, tainting like smoke everyone associated with it. The only mercy was that term was over so the Christmas holidays could intervene and minimize the informal post-mortems of what could have, should have been done differently. An official enquiry would be held before the school reconvened in January.