by William Lane
‘Or come at night. Come and have a chat one evening. It’s not all work and no play around here, you know. What’s your poison?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Wine, spirits, beer?’
‘Oh, I don’t drink much.’
‘I don’t think you’re the type to complain, Gregory. Your hand’s badly infected, yet you’ve still been helping with digging trenches after classes. And you haven’t shirked your coaching or teaching. On top of that you’ve started riding and you’ve been helping out in your capacity as assistant housemaster. These things get noticed. And yet I haven’t heard a whimper about that hand of yours. I do believe you’re a Stoic, Gregory. I saw it in you the moment we met. That’s one of the reasons why I recommended you to the rest of the panel.’
‘I do like to throw myself into work,’ said Gregory. ‘I’m rather intrigued by this place; getting involved helps me to understand –’
‘Ah! Curiosity, you have great curiosity. A gift, a great Greek gift. Gregory, in you I see something of myself. A lot of myself. Humble beginnings, right? A lot of hard work to get where you’ve got, am I right?’
‘Yes, Val. A lot of hard work.’
‘Little encouragement; armed only with your will and your energy, with only your drive. And a vision, a sense of something better, an intimation of something higher. Am I right?’
‘Something like that. I love learning.’
‘And so do I. You have great opportunity here, Gregory.’ Val gestured to the empty buildings about them. ‘Great opportunity. Don’t waste it. If you play your cards right, you’ll go a long way. Don’t be distracted by some of the silliness that goes on. You know, most of the masters here are fools – Parsons, Gribble, Festus, Cobblefield, Carp, Boyle, Hart, Pike – fools, the lot of them. Mostly harmless, mind you, but absolute dullards. And Capon – how many more of those wretched addresses must we sit through? Compassion, Grace, Forgiveness, Sacrifice – the very words make me shudder! And what does he know of them? He’s a failed churchman, and those are vanity sermons. They always follow the same structure, always have the same tone, his language is repetitive and barren, dead with stock phrases: “And in conclusion”, “Let me begin by saying”, “Allow me to illustrate my point”, “And so on and so forth”. Wretched, absolutely wretched speechifying. Turns the mind to jelly. It’s my penance to have to sit and listen to him. And God knows the damage it’s inflicting upon the boys – especially as those trite Pollyanna addresses bear so little resemblance to their pretty harsh reality. In the end it’s the boys who suffer. The hypocrisy of it, that’s what the boys should not have to suffer.’
‘Well, it’s interesting you should say that. I had noticed a lot of the boys seem rather un–’
‘Then there’s the more subtle darkness spread by Mr C, the darkness that calls itself light.’
‘Oh?’
‘I don’t mind him soothing the boys, cheering them up – that’s his job, and it keeps the boys quiet. As long as his ideas don’t stir up the boys, then he acts as a kind of pressure valve. He’s a band-aid man. Do you see? He has his function, yet it actually contributes to the brutality of this place in the end. Mr C doesn’t see that. He keeps oiling the little cogs, and the big machinery keeps turning. We’d be better off without him. Don’t you agree?’
Gregory considered the ground.
‘Well, you know where I stand with him and his lot,’ said Val. ‘Superstition and fear, that’s all his religion is. Darkness. Darkness poured into young minds, which should be filled with light.’
After lunch Gregory accompanied Val to the stables. Clouds were massing in a rosy light above the horse yards. Electricity gathered in stillness. Blue shadows ran deep. Horses were fetched for Val and Gregory. The masters gathered boys as they advanced up the slope towards the playing fields. The light played upon the boys’ armour, bringing out the deep curves of their breastplates. It was a light that made the horses even larger against the landscape, more rounded; their chests especially became deeper and wider. Gregory’s dappled mare and Val’s black stallion almost glowed as they trotted across the playing fields. Here groups of boys loaded crossbows, whittled spears, made ingenious traps. Cymbals and drums could be heard in the surrounding trees. Panic-stricken game broke into the open. Groups of boys crashed out of the foliage after them. It became clear that small bewildered animals were running everywhere in the half light, low to the grass, flushed out of the trees. Captured game was already strung up in long lines about the playing fields: pheasants with stretched necks, a small inverted fox, a gutted pig flanked by the little pegs of rabbits – all at full stretch, long mortal wounds fly-speckled. Dark clots of boys stood about the skinned and butchered game. Even though it was winter, flies hovered in clouds across the fields.
A group of blonde boys in black waited for Val by a path into the trees. A few larger boys were mounted, but the majority milled about on foot. All wore the black capes and insignia of the eastern houses. A small pack of the specially bred school hounds accompanied the group. The hounds were whippet-like creatures, with arched spines, and emaciated bodies, spidery and shaky on their legs. Most were a dark chocolate, a few sporting ginger snouts and brandy socks. They defecated, urinated, yapped and squirmed, turning and colliding in excitement.
Val and the leading boys cantered down the path into the trees. Gregory could feel his horse contemplating turning about. It kept favouring the right, knowing his left hand hurt. Gregory heard more horns in the distance, and confused, criss-crossing shouts. Every now and then a terrified animal bolted across their path, but the dogs were not distracted. They were focused on some particular, bigger quarry, and now led the riders. Behind streamed the little boys. They travelled deeper into the bush, into the sound of the horses’ hooves, flying over dark pools on the path. Those on foot cried out, falling further behind. Then the hounds were really onto something, and the entire entourage bounded forward at even greater speed, the dogs yelping, the boys yelling.
Gregory was still having trouble with his horse. With the wound on his hand opening up, he began falling behind. He could see the hunt snaking around a bend in the path before him, flitting in procession through the trees. Soon he could only hear them. Then he was entirely alone, left only with his recalcitrant mount – except for a jet, ascending high above. He managed, with a little savagery, to persuade the horse forward to a fork in the path. When he took the left fork, his horse immediately became relaxed, relieved even, and trotted briskly down this more level, sunlit path. Having given up on the group, Gregory found himself singing as he rode, permeated with a happiness, a forgetfulness, unlike anything he had felt since coming to this place. This was something he might write in his letter to his friend …
He pulled up. In a clearing, beyond the thinning trees, he had seen two, then four, five horses. He saw parts of others – a head stretching down from behind a tree to tear at the grass, a tail swishing a rump. He became conscious of a much bigger group of horses, grazing in the trees beyond, beasts larger than any horse he had ever seen. Then a long, perhaps human wail was extending through the trees, and the horses’ heads went up, ears pricked, muscles bunched. The stallion was first off, the others almost instantly following, gone in a scattering of earth and a trampling of undergrowth.
Gregory heard cheers and trumpets from the way he had come. He let the horse trot back to meet the jubilant procession. Four of the biggest boys on foot bore a long stake on their shoulders, a pig slung beneath.
‘You mean that’s been running around in the bush!?’ shouted Gregory with a smile.
But Val rode up grim. Blood flecked his boots.
Gregory eagerly told Val about the horses.
‘You must have ridden off school property,’ replied the older man distractedly, his eyes glassy. He had turned cold again, with one of those swings of mood that no longer surprised Gregory, yet still wrong-footed him.
On David’s first day at the school he had seen a frog being stoned. Some childish
first-formers had found it waiting on a rock above the creek. They pelted it with pebbles, until it turned on its back. Then it was jolted about the bank with each fresh hit, and its innards came out in a bright mound, and the boys cheered. David was remembering this little scene as he came upon Steven, perched on a low wall beside the long, straight path from the parade ground to the dining hall. Everything was shivering in anticipation of a coming storm, and Steven was strumming a mandolin.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Steven, cradling his instrument.
‘There’s nothing to do. Everyone’s on the hunt. But I don’t want to go hunting.’
‘Me neither,’ admitted Steven.
‘Truth is, I can’t ride.’
‘Me neither.’
David realised he had never seen Steven by himself like this. He habitually kept close to someone, followed someone.
‘Everyone’s gone, isn’t it fantastic?’ said Steven, in a new, dreamy voice. ‘They’re all in the bush. I could actually like this place if there were no people here.’
David could see distant riders on the slope above the oval, galloping towards the tree line. The riders were pursuing prey too small to make out. The light was low, in the premature darkness before the storm. Garishly red geraniums trembled by the path. Behind the wall where Steven sat, where the bank fell away, squirrel-like animals scampered over a muddy expanse, and tried to climb the trees. They leapt, but bounced off the trunks.
Steven put aside his mandolin, balancing it with a hollow sound.
‘Do you know that Jesus died for your sins, David?’ His eyes were full of the music he had been trying to sing.
A rustling made David turn around. A pack of first-formers had formed across the road. The ones in front stared stonily at Steven.
‘You’re the only unsaved person who talks to me,’ droned Steven, ‘I don’t know why you’re not saved. Why do you bother with me?’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘How can you be friends with me, and not love the Lord?’ persisted Steven. ‘For I am nothing.’
‘Where’s Donald?’
‘He’s going missing all the time. He’s writing poetry.’
Horses with riders were approaching over the sunken ground behind Steven. They halted in a line, the horses calm. Braces of ducks, hares and rabbits hung from the riders’ saddles.
Steven was peering at the little boys across the road, as if he had just seen them. They were stooping to pick up stones.
Steven took up the mandolin, and started playing, singing prayerfully and off-key, craning his neck. A stone pinged the instrument. A second must have hit him on the hand, for he stopped playing to wring his fingers, and gasp.
Masters walked up the road from the dining hall, leisurely, decked out in long black capes with red trimming. Lunch had been a tremendous feast of fresh game, and now they were chatting amongst themselves happily, discussing some of that day’s greater catches – two fawns and two pigs had been caught; indeed, even now they could point to a pig dashing for its life along the distant boundary fence, two groups of boys converging on it. The masters, cheerful, replete, passed slowly between Steven and David and those waiting about. Steven abandoned his place on the wall and started after them. The masters did not seem to notice the pack of first-formers by the road. They waved at the horsemen gathered behind the wall.
Steven had followed the masters only a few steps before he came to a confused halt, and turned one way, then the other. The masters were disappearing now, up over the parade ground, up the steps towards the classrooms. Steven wrung his hands. David heard one, two, three stones clatter into the mandolin, which ripely split, springing its strings. Soon parts of the mandolin lay scattered over the path. The group of horsemen moved closer, bringing their faces, framed in helmets, level with the wall. David remembered those faces crowding the pages of The Other’s art books.
Through a break in the clouds, a shaft of light fell on Steven, turning him to brass. He gave one last look over his shoulder. The masters were ascending ever-more distant steps. Now Steven’s assailants felt free to turn from the mandolin to the player. Steven looked to David, gesturing to him. Pebbles thudded, sticks glanced. The boy fell to his knees.
‘What are you doing? Hell, what are you doing?’ cried David, running towards the boys, sweeping his arms back and forth.
‘He swore, he swore!’ laughed the little boys, falling back. The clouds closed, the light about Steven was snatched back, and he fell forward. All the little boys were pelting him now, advancing as they did so, hailing stones upon him.
‘Thomas, call them off!’ cried David, crying to the highest horseman. ‘They’re killing him!’
At this the little boys protested. They began appealing to the riders, who were still peering over the wall, over the pricked ears of their horses.
Rain began falling. The tops of the trees tilted with the wind, the flowers freshly trembled.
‘Lay off him,’ called Thomas. He gave the command distantly, his eyes fixed above the fallen figure.
‘I said lay off!’ Thomas yelled with sudden power. The little boys hesitated.
‘He’s not worth it,’ said Bishop Gray, bringing his horse alongside Thomas, before spurring his steed and wheeling about. ‘Let’s hunt real game!’
The little boys had lost their rhythm. Their intent faltered. They began dropping their stones. Reluctantly at first, then quickly. Already recounting their exploit, they departed into the wind.
11
Val had described the situation as ‘quite bad’ in a briefing to Capon at the end of the week. Val had taken it upon himself to give Capon weekly briefings ‘from the ground’. Hearing that things were quite bad, Capon began shuffling objects on his desk. Yes, the internal situation in the school had been deteriorating. The creek was rising again. Already many boys were growing homesick, although they were barely a third of the way through the very long winter term. There had been an unusual number of telephone calls home. The housemasters had already agreed to ban all use of the telephones – there was only one per house – for the foreseeable future. An epidemic of colds and flu, and strange behaviours, had swept through first one house, then another. Most worrying of all, reported Val, was the deepening division between the eastern and western houses: enmities were fast taking on an unprecedented bitterness. A kidnap had gone wrong. (Val did not tell Capon the details, but a small easterner boy had been found tied up beside the creek early one morning, the rising waters already around his feet. Another twenty minutes and he would have been under. As it was, they still couldn’t get a word out of him.) Westerner boys now sat on one side of the classroom and easterners on the other, and they refused to eat at the same table in the dining hall. Fighting between boys was chronic, and a surprising number of lads sported scratches, bruises, limps, dented armour and black eyes. Even the horses were becoming restless. Large numbers of boys were being kicked, bitten, and thrown by horses. The escaped horses had been attacking the kept horses, many of which showed bite marks. Furthermore the wild horses had broken into a shed and eaten or spoiled an entire week’s store of feed in a single night. To top it off, and this was always a worrying sign, there had been further outbreaks of equine graffiti – horses painted on the inaccessible sides of boarding houses, mysteriously carved into stone, or dug into banks and filled in with lime. There was no hiding the general situation from Capon, who must have seen some of the equine graffiti with his own eyes. So Val sweetened his report only a little. Specific details about skirmishes and wounds he omitted, the headmaster being sensitive to such details. He had no stomach whatsoever for physical violence, fainted at the sight of blood.
At about this time David was invited by Val to spend a night at Dartmoor House. Perhaps, suggested Val, it could become a permanent arrangement, if David found it convenient. David was surprised. No one at the school had mentioned his convenience before. He eventually accepted Val’s invitation, mostly out of a lingering sen
se of gratitude. And perhaps it would help to immerse himself in school life, he reasoned, perhaps it would foster a commitment to the place on his part. For he felt little. He had wanted to leave the school after the incident with Steven. But his grandmother urged him to give the place one last try. She was scraping together the money to buy some piece of armour required for the school uniform – she had cut right back on the smokes, and had given up on the races, for the time being, at least. She had been ill and he did not want to leave her, even for one night, but she insisted.
So one evening after football practice David found himself walking back to Dartmoor House with the other Dartmoor footballers. The boys stumbled in the dark, their football spikes clattering and sparking on the stones. Bishop Gray led the way, with his bow-legged, ambling gait, hands thrust into the front of his trousers, a gesture which clearly signalled his Ruralness. Someone in the dark commented on their having a stranger in their midst. Thomas countered with a general remark about the good football David had been playing. Ahead they saw Dartmoor’s low lights.
Thomas led David down a hall past rooms of ping-pong and billiard players, into a warren of papered-over alcoves. Here some sixth-formers had their heads down, studying. David couldn’t recall seeing any of these boys about the school.
Thomas showed him to a desk. It was Oscar Newbold’s vacated desk, David could tell from the graffiti inscribed in the wood.
A commotion broke out in the hall. Some of the studying boys moaned, and muttered, ‘Oh, shut up,’ ‘Go away,’ ‘Why don’t they fuck off.’ David went to investigate. He found the hallway crowded. Big boys in armour spilled through the door into the suddenly narrow hall. The biggest boys appeared first, flushed, excited, shouting their story. One boy nursed a long limp arm. Still they clattered through the door, cluttering the way. Smaller boys ran forward to assist the returning adventurers, slipping off their capes, fetching them dry shoes, directing heaters in their direction. No, they had not recaptured a horse, they almost had … but they knew more now … next time they’d get it for sure … ‘Some bastards from Pike tried to cut out our mare,’ snarled the largest boy, a rower named Chillingham. Some third- and fourth-formers, traditionally a hot-headed age, swore vengeance upon Pike for this offence – tonight – now; a few immediately slipped away to execute this revenge. Chillingham kept cursing the house of Pike while swearing at the little boys attending him, brushing them off with the back of his mail glove.