Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  'It's an optical illusion,' Lang said. 'The school sits in a semicircle in front of the building, and the camera pans from a fixed point. Subsequently, we all appear to be in a straight line, and the building behind appears convex.'

  Parker looked up in horror. 'Building? We, Bruce?'

  In the armchair David went on reading Beethoven. The study was full of sunshine. It seemed to expand the walls, but the room remained too small. The mess irked him. No one cleaned the milk pan and the slop tin stank. If you picked up a cup the saucer came with it. As often as not even the teaspoons were Siamese twins.

  'What do you think of the new boys?' Parker asked neither of them in particular.

  'We can only hope they're settling down happily,' Lang said, consulting a slide-rule.

  Parker tossed the photo on to his desk in disgust. It had curled up into two cylinders like binoculars. 'By the way, that flat-footed Greaves has been hopping around Henderson like a pet flea — but Henderson couldn't be more bored by Little Boys.'

  David's eye stopped in the middle of a bar. His body pounded as if he'd been playing rugger when he still had only his holiday wind. Strangely, the insult implicit in Parker's casual remark was of no consequence. He didn't feel jealousy or anger. As far as he knew the idea of having a Little Boy was wishful and empty; a nervous drivel with which people like Parker bemused themselves. It had nothing to do with his feelings for Peter Greaves. What shattered him was the mention of Peter, name. In any context his reaction to it must have been similar. He thanked God that the school was four hundred strong, and that Peter had avoided the tag Little Boy. Even in Parker's school list he'd escaped the red circle that apparently meant 'beautiful', and the black one that meant 'pretty'. Of course lately he'd been slack about keeping his records but, either way, it was an insult best suffered in silence.

  'Fill the kettle!' David said, heaving his chest and yawning to disguise his trembling.

  'From the cold tap,' Lang said.

  Parker left, but put his head in again to kiss the pin-up girl on the back of the door which he'd cut from Paris Match.

  'I'd give a lot to see Alan confronted by a live girl or a live Little Boy,' Lang said when he'd gone again.

  Dated said nothing. Increasingly his sense of isolation silenced him even among his friends. For nearly a year Peter's image had lived in his mind. It was a pastel-coloured ghost that haunted the periphery of his conscious thoughts. Sometimes it gained solidity, becoming a bright, startling reflection whose wonder overwhelmed him. When that happened it seemed as if needles had been thrust into his eyes, his face creased, and he cried like a child.

  That was how it had been last night. Or rather, there'd been more self-pity than wonder. Perhaps his depression reflected his shame. He looked at Lang, bent over his desk, and wondered what he must have told the Chaplain. Probably it had been: 'Sir, David Rogers has started to cry in our study. He won't go to bed, or do anything.' Then he must have said something about his being upset over a Little Boy. Of course, he would have used that term. Hellish-Holy Bruce. He'd only brought it on himself.

  David scowled furiously in his embarrassment, remembering how, after that, everything had been madness. The Chaplain had come down and led him away to his room like a sulky offering. He made tea and put saccharine tablets in his own. He called them depth charges because of the way they erupted on the surface a few seconds after you, dropped them into the tea. David watched them exploding one after the other. Then the Chaplain was talking. Sometimes his chin fell downwards and sideways so that he looked like one of those saints in medieval paintings whose necks seem to be broken. The attitude gave him a humility that moved David. There was no contact between them. When the Chaplain tried to reach him he only felt more guilty. The failure to communicate was his own.

  'Bruce tells me that you've been very upset, and he thinks it may be over some small boy,' the Chaplain said. 'Is that the trouble, David?' The sad tone embarrassed David. It made him remote, and remoteness was the last thing he needed.

  'More or less ...There's someone ... I love.'

  He was silent after that, staring at the carpet which seemed a strange thing after the bareness of schoolrooms, so that his eyes examined it minutely. Then the nightmare began. He could watch it building up slowly. But it was like one of those nightmares in which you know you arc dreaming, and whose incidents cause no apprehension.

  As the Chaplain talked, it became clear that he thought David had had some sexual contact with the unnamed boy. It was the only way in which he could interpret his remorse.

  Like the sleeper, David shook his head and said, 'no'. He didn't make any violent protest because the Chaplain's thoughts no longer concerned him. The suggestion was fantastic. In its remoteness it failed to disgust him; while, having no meaning, it became almost funny. But David didn't laugh. The scene was being conducted without relevance to himself, and was a part of the dream.

  His isolation was a trance. He knew it was a defence he had built about himself, and that it was fatal to remain in it. Yet he hadn't the power to break out. He sat, half listening, and was only dimly resentful of the man's inability to see that it was the weight of love alone with which he couldn't cope. He was silent because he had to be. You couldn't talk of love. Its size made it inexpressible. It couldn't come out through the mouth. Hints of it might, but you could only show it all if you could somehow hand over your brain. Now he was seeing the effects of releasing those hints. Their inadequacy tortured him, baring his loneliness.

  'You're a pretty remarkable lad, you know,' the Chaplain was saying. 'Let's see, you're not yet seventeen but you were already playing for the First XV last year, weren't you?'

  'Yes, sir,' David said.

  'Then wouldn't it be a good idea to forget about these things, old chap?'

  'Yes, sir,' David repeated. The man must have had his brain destroyed with a pin like one of the frogs in the lab. How could he think that David had somehow elected to be possessed by Peter, or forget him because he chose to do so?

  The Chaplain directed him to kneel on the hearthrug. He pronounced a long prayer, calling David 'this child'. Told to his friends it should have been terribly funny. David didn't think he ever would tell them.

  'Where the hell's the lid of this thing?' Parker stood over David with the kettle.

  'Try next door,' Lang suggested.

  'Or the bottom of the bin,' David said. 'You can count me out, Alan. I'm going for a walk. Anyway, I don't think we've any tea left.'

  'Christ!' Parker exploded; then looked nonplussed. 'No one put it on the list'

  'I won't drink cocoa at four o'clock in the afternoon,' Lang said, without turning.

  David put his feet up on his desk. It was brand new and had a transparent yellow glaze like barley sugar. 'Incidentally, Bruce finished the sherry before lunch.'

  'Put sherry on the shopping list as well,' Lang ordered.

  'And who effing well pays, comrade? I suppose you know the wine merchants have stopped our credit?'

  'Only because you rolled in there in school uniform,' Lang said. 'Get grocers'. But not British Brown.'

  David perched on a gate in the beech woods. It was what must be meant by a five-barred one. He'd never thought of it before, but there they were: four horizontals and a diagonal. He lit a cigarette. They didn't taste so good in the open air, but unless one were to squat on a bog seat in the middle of prep, it was the only place to smoke them. After a moment he put it out. Autumn had its own smoky taste that tingled in your nose and at the back of your throat. Perhaps the decaying of leaves was really some process of burning.

  David looked at his hand. There were two pale crescent moons of skin where his nails had cut into the palm. Peter was reducing him to a nervous wreck. The wounds, though, were his own fault. He should cut his nails shorter. Love had made him clairvoyant, but the discovery was no surprise. Moreover, his premonitions afforded him no protection. Before coming out of a classroom, or turning a comer in a corr
idor, he would suddenly know that Peter would be there. Invariably he was; yet the foreknowledge somehow never prepared him for the shock. He had taken to carrying a pencil, and holding it with his hand. When he met Peter like that it broke. Last time he hadn't been holding the pencil, and it was his own nails which had cut his hand. David looked at the crescent marks again. Really the whole thing was absurd. He seemed to see himself from the outside, but was powerless to revise what he saw. He had to go on living in the present, aware of the futility while he participated in it, and the awareness made him cynical. The horror of the third piano sonata was proof of that. Of course, he took himself too seriously. He could only assume it was the fate of his age, but, again, the assumption wasn't comforting. What irked him most was that the power of his love had turned inwards. There being no possible contact with Peter it consumed himself. Self-pity was never far away. The third sonata showed that too. Its burden lay beneath the threshold of articulateness; lacking the transformation that could make it malleable in his own hands, or accessible to anyone else.

  David heaved a lungsful of air, perched precariously on the gate. He took his fourth sonata from its impertinent hiding place in the Beethoven folio and began to read the slow movement. After a moment he puckered up his face and swore. It was little better than the third. He put it away and turned to Beethoven. It was the only experience where he found peace. The revelation of genius amazed him equally with Peter's beauty, and, by virtue of this, Peter's beauty lost some of its power to torture him He'd discovered that there was other beauty, different, though as potent as Peter's, and the relief was immeasurable. But the music provided something more by making his unhappiness irrelevant. He felt his significance dwindle to a point where he was scarcely responsible to anything at all. Yet at the same time he himself was giving something of the music's greatness.

  Reading on, it occurred to David that the desert he inhabited was acting as a forcing house where greater intellectual comprehension was being made available to him. Exile in the wilderness had driven him more quickly to discover, and to dwell in a world without words or physical symbols. The thought came back as insistently as a fly making for the eyes of a horse. David laid the folio on his knees and the orchestra shrank in his head. What, after all, was Peter for?

  He faced the wildest possibility squarely. It wasn't sex. He could find none in his most cynical introspection. There was no connection between Peter and the happy animality of his behaviour at prep school. Of course that had been neither happy nor animal, though it might seem so now: it had filled him with shame, and been furtive to a degree of lunacy. David smiled, remembering. It hadn't even had the alleged charm of innocence. There was nothing prelapsarian about orgasms enjoyed fully clothed. Yet innocence there had been. He felt far more shame and confusion now at the barest thought of Peter than he had done when caught with wet pants by Gray. It could only be that Peter possessed him entirely, filling an emotional need that hadn't existed before. The emotion precluded sex. It was centred in a hypnotic magic whose focal point was obscure. Peter's neatness and fragility seemed to be threatened in their stone-bound, rowdy world. Then there was the inconsequence. The image of his sitting beside another, ordinary person on a bench using a knife and fork. David's mind couldn't grapple with things like that. Here was where the danger began. Where the mind refused its responsibility; backing out from a reality it couldn't cope with, even had it been identifiable. No wonder he stagnated! He didn't attempt to know Peter. Any fact he did learn was sufficient to fill him; its magic so enormous as to leave room for nothing else. The sum of fragments was catastrophic. He couldn't order it. If he were enabled to reduce it to coherence it wouldn't be in real terms at all.

  'I wish I could kiss him.' David murmured aloud. As he spoke, involuntarily, his embarrassment nearly made him fall off the gate.

  He regained balance only to realise he was unsure of it once more. Twenty yards away Peter Greaves was regarding him through a telescope. He stood quite still in the beech wood with a case shaped like a quiver slung over his shoulder. He couldn't have been there a moment ago. David's nails went into the spongy wood of the gate. He felt dizzy as if he'd inhaled a cigarette after weeks of abstinence.

  'Pretty funny bird!' the small boy called out clearly.

  David couldn't have said whether it was self-conscious or not. But now Peter Greaves had dropped the telescope into its case and started towards him. As he came up David was chiefly aware of the wet leaves sticking to the soles of his shoes. This was because his eyes kept slipping down to the ground.

  'Ostrich, I think,' Greaves said, stopping a yard away. He must have become aware of David, apparent preoccupation with his feet for he began scraping his shoes on the bottom of the gate. David vibrated with it. 'Actually you won't do because I'm looking for magpies.'

  David looked at him now. His slight figure was ludicrously incapacitated by the dangling telescope case. The warm, hay shade of his skin, and soft sheath of his clothes, were familiar in every detail, but remained a mystery almost beyond endurance. The vision drew his eyes and yet threatened to burn them. They had constantly to leap away and cool down. 'You a bird watcher?' he asked.

  Greavcs nodded. 'At least, on alternate free days I am. On the others I do train timetables.'

  David nodded too, but more heavily. The new information was beginning to saturate him. 'There must be a lot of birds here.' The inadequacy mocked him before his mouth had closed.

  'Yes, there are,' Greaves said. He gave a gasp. 'Aren't you a monitor!' He'd fallen on the cigarette-end and was looking at David with wild joy. He jumped backwards and began wrapping the muddy butt in his handkerchief. 'Blackmail! Just in case of impositions! There'll be finger-prints.' His lips moved in a strange way. The words had no meaning on them. David felt foolish.

  Greaves seemed promptly to have forgotten the butt-end. He stooped again. This time it was a frail leaf-skeleton that he picked up. The skeleton was complete, with the flesh fallen cleanly away from the frame, so that it was like a web worked in fine copper wire. As he looked at it he said, 'Goodness!' The remark was so unlike a normal school exclamation that, instantly, it rarefied him still more. Then he came towards David, holding it out, and he took it by its delicately fluted stem.

  He examined it on the palm of his hand, but was aware only of the dream-like approach of the boy, which was an unfocused memory of motion, because he had been steadying his hand and eye to receive the brittle gift safely. Now, sensing Peter still unfocused beside him, and with the moment of intense concentration past, he began to shake all over.

  'I think it's going to rain,' Greaves said.

  David gave him the leaf back. He held it in front of his eyes and looked at David through it. Then he looked up at the trees, and back at David. There was nothing coquettish in the gesture. His curiosity simply wanted to employ the fine mesh. Keeping the leaf flat, he lowered it into his jacket pocket, and adjusted the heavy telescope case so as not to disturb it. He turned round.

  'I'm off.'

  'Goodbye, then.' For some moments David had been looking at Greaves squarely. Now he watched him retreating. As the distance increased the challenge became more unbearable. Suddenly he didn't care how his voice shook. 'Peter!' he called. 'I'll tell you if I see any magpies.'

  The boy looked back. It seemed certain to David that he must ask how he knew his name, but he only smiled, and called, 'Thanks!'

  David found the gate vibrating beneath him. Peter went on a few paces, then, without turning, he took out his bunched handkerchief and shook it at arm, length. David could just make out the cigarette-butt as it fell to the ground.

  'The Thought-police are going to arrest Greaves tonight!' Parker announced excitedly. 'I knew it ... I always knew it!' Lang was drinking cocoa after all, though the humiliation didn't register with David.

  Parker, perhaps because David didn't normally seize people by the throat, now looked very frightened. 'Only the Thought-police, David,' he said uneasily. 'R
outine admonishing, you know, comrade.'

  Book Two

  Chapter 2

  David Rogers rested his head against the sharp gravel. His arms were spread and floating like the tissue-weight wings of a gull. Now they were limbs stolen from Madame Tussaud, melting on a hotplate. New metaphysical game. He was sprawled on his back in what, making allowance for the fishpond, was the geometrical centre of the Great Quad.

  Peering under the opaque jewel, that must be the tortoiseshell rim of his spectacles, David let his eyes stray along the south wall of the quad and muttered 'St. Cecilia's' to himself incredulously.

  They were refacing the Hall, but even from here he could see that the monstrous Portland stone gargoyles represented neither porters nor dons but were simply the vestigial nightmare promptings of a forgotten craftsmanship. The twentieth century no longer knew fear with horns. These faces were empty parodies of evil, and might have been coloured transfers on the S.A.C. bombers at Brize Norton.

  There were very few people in the quad. It was Sunday, and the vacuum hour. David's eyes wandered along the east face of the quad. The facade was rust-stained like the teeth of a smoker. One of the teeth was missing, and the gaping hole led into the Temple. Any second now the first of the suede-shoed Anglicans would emerge. They would cluster together outside with their white surplices vainly brushing the rust-stains like so many magical dentifrice fairies. Their conversation would be tingling fresh.

  David decided to watch for the appearance of either the first surpliced youth with a hunting gait, or the first North Oxford lady who was a card-holding friend of St. Cecilia, and then to close his eyes and rely upon his ears to describe the gradual dispersal as, inevitably as it must, it drifted away around him over the huge quadrangle.

  North Oxford won. In fact it was David's moral tutor's wife who first emerged. She was clutching an infant, who in turn clutched a soft-toy whose broken neck rendered the particular species uncertain.