Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  Tony had nodded with an acceptance that was only partial and conditional when David had spoken. Now, in a voice that was nearly his normal one, he said:

  It's not like that . . . You're not like anyone else either. Sometimes, when I have dreams, you're there ... And you do all sorts of things to me ... things you wouldn't know. And you undress my clothes. Well, I wouldn't let just anyone do that, would I?' Tony looked up suddenly; his eyes blazed as he flung the question.

  David shook his head. He met the boy's eyes without betraying surprise. In fact he was marvelling at the uninhibited confidence, or else the dangerous dynamic of mental turmoil, that had proved powerful enough to force this confession to the surface.

  'But it was like that as soon as I met you in the Great Quad.

  ... And before that too. I'd always wanted someone ... But I couldn't let anyone unless I loved them . . . Then I loved you because you were so kind and what I'd always wanted and so good looking ...

  'You know when you asked me to tea in your room the first time?' The boy's tone was now straightforwardly conversational. 'And I twisted my clothes round? Well, that was because I wanted you ... to straighten them again. Then in Cheltenham, when I tried on the new shorts, of course I could undo them really. But I wanted you to ... like I spend hours thinking about sometimes.' Tony lowered his eyelids; though only momentarily. 'I was excited - you know - underneath. And I'd left my pants behind half on purpose. I really do wear them in summer ... It would be pretty disgusting not to.'

  Tony had retreated on to the arm of the chair and drawn his knees up to his chin. He had kicked off his other slipper so that his feet didn't slide off the leather, and with his right hand was idly exploring the contents of the waste-basket David had filled in the course of his unpacking.

  'Tony, why did you really throw away the other suit?' David gestured towards the wardrobe, still lying on the bed.

  'I don't mind two hoots. It's just that I'd like the picture straight while we are at it.'

  Tony turned his lip down. 'I only sort of know.'

  Do, you often throw clothes away?'

  'Once I put a pair of my shorts in the boiler here . . . But that was different because a man touched them'

  David frowned, 'How?'

  'Hamley and I were buying sweets - at that wholesale shop in St. Ebbes - and an old man patted my behind – no, rubbed; it was sheer sex. I was wild because I thought he'd made them dirty so I burned them in the stoke-hole.'

  'And the suit?'

  Well,' Tony tugged his hair with a violent gesture of concentration, 'after the night you hugged me properly I thought it was wrong to keep the suit because when I've got clothes I like on I feel I'm loving me, not you. D'you see?'

  'I think so. But why keep the other suit then?'

  Now Tony was baffled. Slowly, he said, 'I thought I might change my mind. You see, I'm very particular about clothes.'

  'No!' David smiled broadly. 'I'd never have guessed it!'

  Tony drove his fist into his ribs, 'Right, Rogers!' The threat, as usual, failed to materialise. But then Tony was serious gain. 'I suppose I really like the grey suits because I think they make me look my best . . . Sort of sweet and sexy . . . For you,' he added quickly: he'd dropped his eyes over the 'sweet' only to raise them shamelessly again with the 'sexy'. Then, well, I just wanted one brand new to keep ... For a bit, anyway,' he finished lamely.

  'Because one of a thing is more valuable than two,' David suggested. 'And you keep it newly wrapped so that if I should somehow fail, you will still have its emotional security. You will still have something to love that's really a projection, or part, of your own self. Or perhaps it's of another boy.'

  Tony thought for what must have been a full minute. Then he said, 'You do understand.'

  David smiled. 'Perhaps. But remember, to me, at least, you're still equally "sweet and sexy", as you horribly put it, in anything. Don't you worry what you look like. Now put the thing in the wardrobe.'

  Tony slid off the chair to do so, then checked himself. David, why did you say just now that the suit was a projection or part of another boy?'

  When David didn't answer, Tony said:

  It's funny you should. When I was about ten there was a boy next door with a suit like ours. He was terribly beautiful and I wanted to hug him ... but I was afraid. I think it was after that that I started liking the suits more.'

  Tony paused again when he'd opened the cupboard. 'You won't put it in the boiler in the middle of the night, will you?' David laughed. 'I promise! Only try to stop thinking of yourself as your own silver wool teddy bear.'

  Tony came back to the fire. He was smiling happily again. He hoisted himself on to the arm of the chair and picked something out the waste-basket. It was a tube of lipstick David had discovered tidying out the room. Tony now studied it with distaste, and David was reminded of the strange vision he had had earlier in the day.

  'Where did this come from?'

  'I turned it out of a drawer.'

  'It must have been part of the acting make-up the Ghoul looked after.' Tony twisted the milled base of the tube thoughtfully. 'It's rather obscene, isn't it ... Like a dog. David, are you going to sleep with me tonight?'

  'No.' David looked quickly at the boy, but if the naivety was studied there was no admission of it in his face.

  Tony simply nodded without emotion and retracted the lipstick. Then, as an afterthought, he extended it once more and slashed it carefully across David's brow, and then vertically down his nose. 'In Nomine Domini,' he said, getting off the arm of the chair. He lobbed the tube back into the waste-basket from the door. 'You don't have sugar in your tea, do you?'

  David shook his painted head.

  'I'll bring you some as soon as the bell goes in the morning. It'll be in a glass, I'm afraid, but you soon get used to the barbarities of this place. I'll pinch it from the Jones' early-morning lot – I've got the kitchen pretty well organised. Oh! I nearly forgot! I've got something else for you.'

  He disappeared, and was back a moment later with a bundle under his arm. 'My gown,' he announced triumphantly. 'I've got a spare one so you can keep this instead of the B.A one you would have had if they hadn't sent you down. It's just the same.' He held the gown up and inspected it critically. 'It may be a little small. They're specially tailored for all the choir.' He bundled it up and lobbed it to David with a grin.

  'Tones,' David said, in a rather vain attempt to cover what he really felt, 'the Vice-chancellor never bestowed a more coveted degree, nor ever indeed with such engaging informality.'

  Tony bowed low in his cornflower pyjamas and said good night.

  When the boy had gone David worked for two hours on his vocal sonata - more accurately it should perhaps have been called a concerto. The school was silent, and he began to move bars into the inevitable pattern that would eventually represent some small imposition of order upon chaos: perhaps his own sole emotional security, and not so very unlike Tony's magical suit hanging in its moth-proof polythene in his wardrobe. He knew every pitch and resonance of the boy's voice as well as he knew the range of a piano, and was able to summon and test its finest detail in his mind as he composed. It was its fulfilment at which he aimed.

  As he worked, drawing out the tangled ribbons of melody and plaiting them into coherence across the living face of the page, he thought of the significance of Tony. The road he himself had followed to their meeting had lost definition. Past time had no more relevance. There was only a present; and perhaps a future.

  Exhausted, David put the manuscript in a drawer, and got into bed. He resolved to put Tony and the boy's problems out of his mind for the night, and was surprised to discover he could do so. Tony was safe; within a few yards of him.

  David turned out the light and slid his head beneath the newly-starched pillow-slip belonging to some boy called Lavington and dosed his eyes. A single penguin was wandering around on an ice-flow, quite aimlessly, and in a world that was cool, barren and abs
olute like bars of Bach. For a long time David watched the penguin, conscious only of its slow, awkward movements, and of the pressure of Lavington's pillow on his cheek. Then the slide changed in his mind, and the world was warmer, but still muted; eminently respectable like Harris tweed. There were hills like mulberry eiderdown, and a sun dissolving into a beaten-copper loch. Then, as the slide changed again, he was looking at another aspect of the same Western isles, where the fractured limb of a headland, outflung, was thankfully being licked, soothed by the Atlantic.

  Chapter 24

  'Where are your garters?' Tony frowned belligerently,

  The lamb boy was too petrified to speak.

  'Oh, all right! Just pull your socks up, and straighten them. Tony turned impatiently on his heel. 'School!' he yelled, 'Hurry up into line!'

  'Sir, are you in love with Miss Poole?' asked a little boy, after being meaningfully nudged by his companion in the crocodile.

  'Silence!' yelled Tony. There was an unpleasant edge to his voice.

  'Davies says you were talking to her,' the boy muttered by way of explanation.

  'I'll see you after prayers in the prefects' room,' Tony said coolly: he had sneaked up on the other side of the double column. He took up station beside David, and made a wide gesture with his arm which is usually associated in westerns with the cry of 'waggons roll!' The school moved down the drive past the gaping concrete gnomes and through the wrought-iron gates into St. Aldate's.

  The early morning sun had washed the pavements gold, and rendered the silver-suited crocodile an alarmingly conspicuous affair. Fortunately there were still few people about. David turned his head and reviewed the column. The conclusion he came to was that he had never exactly envisaged Rogers in this capacity. He shrugged himself deeper into his duffle-coat. At least the university term hadn't started yet.

  'You cold?' Tony asked.

  'Bit.'

  Tony looked over his shoulder at the crocodile. 'They'd better not be.' he said awkwardly. 'I told them "no coats" because we look better in our suits. Coats in summer, yes, if you like,' he added thoughtfully, 'because our blazers and cotton shorts don't add up to much. But in the winter terms when we wear best suits all the time, no.'

  David opened his mouth with a view to challenging this logic, but changed his mind. They passed through the college gates. Tony nodded graciously to the porter in the lodge who, to David's confusion, touched the rim of his bowler and said, 'Master Sandel.'

  David looked up to become aware of a crisis. Cutting diagonally across the quad, down one of the paths whose radii branched out from the pond, was his scout Haggert. Even Haggert, he knew, would look straight through one unless his existence were first acknowledged; but he couldn't decently ignore him. He looked at his watch and decided the risk was justifiable.

  David smiled good morning, and the column came to a halt some twenty yards from the pond. Haggert had been walking with his eyes dead ahead and a broom at the trail but instantly came alive when David spoke.

  'You'll be back with in then, sir?'

  David smiled and shook his head. 'Not exactly, I'm afraid. I'm through with Academe ... Or at least its rarefied levels.'

  'A bad business, sir, and I know it.' Haggert inverted his broom and prepared to lean on it, which was a bad sign. Inexplicably, he winked at one of the boys behind David. 'I heard all about it from James in the Buttery, sir, and I told him just how disgusted I was, sir, them sending you down when you were lying unconscious in the hospital too. And I said why pick on Mr. Rogers the only real gentleman I've had on my staircase in years, sir? Cars and high spirits I said is natural, and even if he shouldn't of been racing, that's no reason to send him down unconscious and in absurdum in that Lord Petrey's on fours phrase, sir.'

  'Absentia, I think.' David smiled.

  'Oh, right, sir.' Haggert had begun the fatal process of rolling a cigarette. His eyes had lost focus. 'There's them of the gentlemen as between you and me, sir, that's no good,' he said sadly. 'But though you've been living out of college this year, sir, I've always remembered you as the best. I used to say to Mrs. H. sometimes before cycling down from Headington, it's worth it, May, just for that Mr. Rogers. He's what the gentlemen was once. Then when I was doing your rooms, sir, and dusting that photograph of your little brother as was killed in the earthquake, the tears would come to my eyes, sir, and I'd think Mr. Rogers is the best we've got. He's human, sir, if you take my meaning. He'll give himself to something worthwhile like a government that's fair for once, or education like I see you've done, sir ...'

  Haggert broke off to lick the edge of the cigarette-paper, and David seized the advantage quickly.

  'You were always too good to me,' he said. 'Now I've gone and done you out of a Degree Day tip!' Turning his back as best he could on the school, he gave Haggert two pounds, which he tucked into his apron.

  Haggert ginned. 'Thank you, sir, though I don't know why I let one as good as you do it. I hope you'll see to it as a favour to me and Mrs. H. that you beat some sense into young Haggert here, sir!'

  David stared at him.

  'That's him with the sly look, sir.' Haggert pointed with the broom. 'You just watch him.'

  David followed his glance to a boy a couple of yards away in the waiting crocodile. Earth gape, he thought dully, Rogers has done it again. But Haggert, completely unoffended, was wishing him good luck. He picked up his broom and was gone.

  'School, stay just where you are!' Tony said loudly. David came out of his daze to find Tony had gone forward to the pond alone. He looked at the school, some of whom were becoming restless, and went up to the boy with mounting exasperation. Tony turned his face unsmilingly and stared into his eyes.

  'Was it consummated?'

  David looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  Tony, jaw was quivering with rage. 'You haven't got brother.' he said. 'Only me.'

  'Tony …'

  'Why did you lie to that man?'

  David sat down suddenly on the coping of the pond and pressed his knuckles against his forehead. He looked up again. 'I didn't. Haggert is highly imaginative.'

  'But there was a photo?'

  'Yes.'

  'Whose?'

  David looked unseeingly at the school twenty yards away. He became aware of the otherwise empty quad sleeping quietly in the morning sun, and of the slight figure with its uncanny beauty and poise standing beside him. He looked at Tony, and while a part of him acknowledged the absurdity of the scene, he was overcome by a tenderness that made him inarticulate. After a moment he regained control of himself. 'He was a boy at school. I loved him the way one only can seventeen.' He turned desperately to Tony. 'Why - far from knowing him as you suggested I hadn't the guts so much as speak to him in two terms. That photo was taken by a friend of mine somewhere in the grounds while I wrapped my head in a towel in my study for embarrassment.'

  The inflexion of Tony, voice hadn't altered when he spoke again. 'You told that man he was killed in an earthquake. Why?'

  David buried his head in his hands again. 'No. That was Haggert, fantasy again. I once told him the boy was dead'

  'Boys don't just die nowadays,' Tony said with devastating logic.

  David got to his feet and looked carefully into his angry face. 'No. He killed himself. He was just fourteen.' A fallen leaf came drifting across the gravel with a crab-like motion, supported on its crisp, curled edges, and stopped at Tony's feet. He raised his shoe and crushed it into the ground.

  'Why?'

  'No one really knows. There was a love affair with an older boy . .. And a row with his housemaster . . Then they found him. I think the master said something the boy couldn't believe ... and that somehow it destroyed his mind.' David watched Tony's face, and could see him searching desperately for an explanation.

  'Was he ... like Hamley?' His voice was indignant.

  David shook his head. 'The whole thing involved only a kiss.'

  Tony stared into the pond. 'So he killed himself,
' he said slowly. Then his whole face became charged with fury. He swung savagely on David with parted lips. 'The drip!' he cried. 'The miserable stinking little wet weed!'

  'I'm sorry.' David picked up the crushed leaf; crumbling it completely before scattering its fragments on the water. 'But we must hurry up into the Chapel, so call the school.' 'No,' Tony said petulantly, 'the head-boy is thinking.' He raised one foot on to the low coping of the pond, and put his cap on his knee as if to conceal its nudity.

  David felt desperate. 'Tones, we can talk about the whole thing later if you want to; but you can't hold the other boys to ransom like this now.'

  'Can't I, hell!' Tony said unpleasantly. 'They'll do what I tell them.’

  David shrugged his shoulders with more confidence than he felt. 'Okay ... I'm going to count five and then chuck first soprano Sandel into the pond . . And If you go on at your own reflection like that I won't need to as you'll probably leap in ...One!'

  'Very funny!' Tony said sourly. The Ghoul made those sort of jokes and you haven't been here twenty-four hours yet.'

  'Two and three,' David said steadily. Suddenly he wanted to embrace the boy. If he might only do so for the purpose throwing him in the pond, that was the way it must be. Tony looked at the creases of his shorts, and at what were clearly a new pair of wine-topped socks. He tugged unnecessarily at the hem of his jacket before staring at David for a second. Then slowly he turned his head. 'Hurry up, school!' he yelled. 'You're late!'

  The waiting boys re-formed the crocodile. Tony put his cap on again. It was one of those gestures no medium will ever record; which, perhaps by the very transience of their nature, leave the world richer.

  The school filed into the Chapel and took their places automatically. The lamb boy, David noticed, was looking alarmed. He found a place for himself in the choir stalls nearest the altar, and sat down. Tony had disappeared. David looked about him. The silence was absolute, and he wished someone would at least drop a hymn book. No one did. He realised that the majority of eyes were turned towards him; waiting, Tony had still not appeared. He racked his brain for the privileges of the laity within the Anglican Establishment. It was as void of remembrance as the silence.