Then there was the business of being constantly appraised as sex object. About that, one had on the whole tried hard not to care. Except about Jago. His indifference. For Christina, the real shock had all to do with Jago.
At boarding school, there had been Jago’s group. The in-group. There had been the in-group and the out-group. It was Jago who always acted as arbiter of inclusion and exclusion. Naturally he did not do so in any formal way, but power always lay with him. Judgment was in his hands.
The nuance of Jago’s disapproval was enough to cause the average schoolboy to abandon a girlfriend, or a friend, or even a pair of shoes. Conversely, Jago’s approval could cause a person to be suddenly in favour, when yesterday that person had been overlooked. Jago’s thumbs-down was almost always conclusive.
In this way, Jago’s group dictated fashion, not only in social acceptability, but in dress, in music, in habits of work and leisure and in permissible cross-gender alliance. It was seldom necessary for Jago to assert himself. His aura – or indeed his minions – were there to do the work for him.
If Jago returned from a half-term at home, having taken to wearing a ravelled fisherman’s knit exhumed from the bottom of his father’s cupboard, then all other forms of knitwear would become obsolete overnight. Or perhaps not quite overnight, since felicitous timing was of the essence in cases of imitation.
Imitation, if exhibited with too great an eagerness, could smack of sycophancy. And sycophancy was inclined to bore Jago. He had an active mind and had always been easily bored. Thus, imitation could cause even those among the favoured few to fall. Imitation from members of the out-group meant that Jago took no prisoners.
Jago maintained a form of control whose tenets were sufficiently unstated and shifting for its nature to be unfathomable even to fine-tuned initiates.
None the less, for Christina, Jago’s top-doggery employed techniques with which she herself was already a little bit familiar. She had had her own earlier experience of becoming big smell of the classroom. Yet her methods had seemed less devastating. Not only had she escaped Jago’s damaging early life experience, but the nature of her cosy little school had more effectively kept her in check.
In the context of a small, North American day school, with its emphasis on mutual support and its vigilant, nurturing tradition, Christina’s tendency to play martinet had been far more constrained by adult intrusion.
‘In this class, we have no vulturing,’ Mrs Alfieri had intoned benignly. ‘Isn’t that right, children?’ And the class had dutifully taken this assertion on board as holy writ. Here, in England, not only were the pupils older, but the attitude was one that made a virtue of laissez-faire in matters of social shake-down. The lesson quickly learnt at boarding school was toughen up, or die.
In the context, Christina had committed some initial errors of strategy. The first of these had been to take the initiative in approaching Jago Rutherford. The second had had more to do with unacceptable dress.
She had duly appeared kitted out in a range of wholesome, brand-new garments, which were similar to those appearing on the pages of Seventeen magazine. It was therefore quite impossible that she could have passed into Jago’s elect. To be wholesome was not, right then, in fashion. It gained a person no credit within the sub-culture. At the moment of Christina’s arrival, tack was more zealously striven for. And her fine blonde hair was not a feature with which to chalk up credit. Blonde hair was acceptable, but only if it came brutally cropped. Christina’s hair was neatly french-plaited and fixed with an elastic band. Neither was natural hair colour an asset, where dark roots were a fashion accessory and split ends an advantage.
Christina’s hair had been enough in itself to define her as a kid from Coke-ad Country. For Jago, she was no more relevant to his life than Little Polly Flinders. And Christina – even once the cues had become familiar – was far too stubborn simply to fall in with the dogma of another person’s aesthetic.
Gradually, as her senses adjusted themselves; as her eyes developed another way of seeing, she came in the main to prefer the local look and she began to make it her own.
She razored her hair and painted her eyes and acquired a small, glittering nose-stud. She wore heavy laced shoes with tiny skirts and opaque, black tights, or rumpled black hiking socks. With her pale pointed face and narrow thighs, the style was one that became her. Yet it had been a long time in evolving and, worse still, when it came, it was too much stamped with her own, perverse originality. All unwittingly, she had rendered herself not so much Jago’s acolyte as his rival. And it was not long before she had acquired several acolytes of her own.
Yet, in her heart, Christina continued to yearn for Jago. Two years on, she still ached for that beautiful dark boy whom she had met in the Renovated Railway Tea-room, but who would not and could not care for her.
Pam had none of these problems. She possessed no power to change herself and no awareness of any need to do so. She continued to wear her thick, dark hair either plaited, or tied in a ponytail. Or she wore it loose to her shoulders and fixed with two grips at the temples. She saw no reason to abandon her clothes, which were expensive, elegant and bought to last. She wore mid-calf length skirts and fine tailored shirts and a well-cut cashmere jacket. She was the only girl amongst the school’s female intake who had ever been observed using shoe trees and it was rumoured that she ironed her underwear.
She continued, throughout, to commit the offence of carrying school books in a calfskin knapsack when the method of transport then in favour was to carry all equipment loose in a pile from place to place. In this way, pad, pencils, mathematical instruments and the contents of clipback files could cascade to the ground with a clatter or fly away in the wind – but better, surely, to lose a whole year’s coursework than to contain it in a receptacle and risk the scorn of the in-group.
Then there was Pam’s uncompromising interest in scholarship; her apparent inability to score less than brilliantly in all academic assignments. In this she posed far more of a threat to Jago than Christina ever could. Jago had never in his life before been beaten in tests by anyone. He had never been confronted with a person who was able to get higher marks for essays. As a result, he had had little alternative but to allow his minions the opinion that Pam was a pathetic, slavish swot; a learner by rote; a teacher’s pet, who compensated for inferior ability by burning the midnight oil.
While Pam’s friendship with Peter Rusconi was doomed to dictate against her – as was her physiognomy, since she had matured early into a large, unfashionable Renaissance beauty with sizeable breasts and hips – there was, more specifically, the telling matter of her eyebrows. Pam had always left her prominent, dark eyebrows unplucked, even where these encroached a little on to the bridge of her nose. It meant that, among the in-group, her nickname had become ‘the Werewolf’. Her presence in any company could be signalled by a canine howl. Jago, naturally, had never stooped to such childish and conspicuous silliness. He had had no need to compromise his demeanour when others were so willing to do so on his behalf.
In the first term of the Upper Fifth, mock exams were looming. Before them, came Hallowe’en. It was a festival that, until very recently, had gone uncelebrated. The body of the school was still more able to identify that time of year by the Vaughan Williams hymn for All Saints’ Day than by pumpkin lanterns and ghoulish pranks. Tricking and treating in spooky costumes was a still uncommon phenomenon.
Jago, naturally, despised it as having to do with infants begging, door-to-door, for sweets. With the cultural arrogance of his carefully constructed European identity, he resented Hallowe’en as a blatant intrusion of American custom upon his more venerable traditions. It was a form of Big Mac imperialism and he had no interest in it.
What caused him to alter his opinion was that he noticed on his radio that Saturday morning an evangelical clergyman who was banging on about Hallowe’en’s dangers. The inadvisability of any dabbling with the occult was being vehemently laid out be
fore him. The clergyman was imploring his listeners to risk no truck with Satan.
Jago sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Christ,’ he said – and he laughed out loud and reached to turn up the volume. ‘Who the fuck is this clown?’
As he got up to take his morning shower, Jago’s thoughts were all with the occult. He began to formulate a plan for coaxing some of the inner circle into ghoul costume. It would provide relief from boredom. He was sixteen and even the in-group had begun to bore him intolerably. He had begun, recently, to think of its members as the ‘groupies’ more often than the group.
With the weekend, many of the Upper Fifth pupils had got permission to attend a party. It was to take place at the house of one Henry Beasley, whose parents lived in the vicinity. There would be time, Jago reflected, between school supper and Henry’s party, to get the groupies up like agents of darkness and set them loose to knock at householders’ doors. He envisaged that, robed in dog-collar and cassock – and brandishing the weighty Bible he planned to borrow from the chapel lectern – he would present an impressive figure as he brought up the rear, exhorting the public to eschew all contact with the Evil One and his mighty servants of darkness.
Jago contemplated the fun of all the blood-and-bluster rhetoric with which he would up-stage and sabotage the groupies in their pursuit of treats and tricks. He raised his voice for comic effect as he sluiced himself under the shower.
‘For Behold, My Dear Brethren, it is the Policy of Satan,’ he pronounced loudly in his best, mad preacher voice – and he drew heavily, for effect, upon the lingering, sibilant S – ‘to Send Temptations for to Snare Us through all Unsuspecting Means.’
‘What?’ Marty said from the row of sinks beyond. Jago emerged, naked and gleaming, his genitalia bobbing slightly as he paused to rub with a towel at his exquisite left haunch.
‘Yea, through the Innocent Hands of Children,’ he intoned. He bound the towel round his loins and proceeded to the shaving mirrors.
‘What the fuck are you on about?’ Marty said, tight-mouthing to the glass as he squeezed purposefully at a pimple maturing on his chin.
‘Tremble as You Stand, My Merry Pustule,’ Jago said. ‘For, Verily, the Hour Cometh by Stealth and the Wiles of the Evil One are Many, for to Draw Us into His Realms of Darkness. Yea, for He would Devour Us with Our Own Compliance, Brother.’
Stet, at this point, farted loudly. Pongo’s and Marty’s resultant guffaws were not particularly well timed.
‘What the fuck’s he on about?’ Marty said to Stet.
‘Hallowe’en,’ Jago said, reverting easily to his ordinary voice. ‘Communing with Satan, comrades.’ Then he detailed for the faithful his intentions for the evening’s entertainment.
‘You mean us to go off and scare the town virgins?’ Pongo said and he and Marty began, at once, to enact a comic turn. It was loosely based on a television commercial for vaginal sanitary protection and it had to do with dampness in female undergarments.
Jago winced. He began to address himself to the business of lathering his face. The trouble with bloody Marty and Pongo, he considered, was that they had never bloody known when to stop. They had insufficient discretion. How had he managed not to notice this until so very recently? And Jesus, they couldn’t half flog one’s own bloody japes to bloody death.
Yet, for all his irritation with them, he had recently begun to find himself more browned off with Stetson Gregory. Marty and Pongo were jocks, after all – handsome, creditable specimens, though, admittedly, their physical energy was still so much in thrall to their testosterone imbalance, that it was increasingly difficult to get any word of sense out of either.
Stetson Gregory was different. Stet was clever. All right, he could be gross, but that was merely a cover for what Jago perceived as Stet’s more deep and brooding personality. Stet was complicated. He had a real brain. In the classroom he could always acquit himself quite well, even though he treated lessons as a doss. It had seemed to Jago, recently, that Stet was bent on working himself up to some sort of challenge; that Stet was aiming to usurp him.
‘Cut it out,’ Jago said sharply, turning on Marty and Pongo. ‘You’re boring.’
They paused and looked at him in surprise. ‘What?’ Marty said.
‘Boring,’ Jago repeated. ‘I said boring. As in that which is tedious and dull. Ennuyant.’ Christ, he thought, but life could be so fucking bloody boring. It could make you want to commit a violence. Everything – everyone – was so fucking boring and irritating. It went beyond endurance. And the groupies, they were all a monumental yawn.
He wondered, as he drew his razor over his jaw, whether women – proper women – were ever half-way less bloody boring. Not those scrawny, fuck-wit women that he’d worked over on his father’s fur-covered bed. He meant women of stature. Were there any? God only knew. Women like Maud Gonne? Lucrezia Borgia? Even Cordelia? Or maybe some lovely, pale-faced, female chemist in a lab coat, on her way to the Nobel Prize. Would you want to take off her glasses and her lab coat and bend your knee to her and say, ‘My God, but you’re divinely beautiful. Oh, Letitia, I love you. Your body and your mind’?
And then, if you met her, would you ever, in honesty, want to screw her? Jago doubted it. It was contempt that made you want to screw them. If ever you found one that wasn’t contemptible, then she bloody well wouldn’t turn you on. Or would she? And, even if she did, it wouldn’t last. Or would it?
Then, to his own extreme discomfort, Jago found that his mind had begun to dwell upon the Werewolf.
‘Shit,’ he said, as he snicked his chin. It occurred to him that, more than once in recent days, Pam’s image had floated into his mind. More than once, he had found himself staring at her in the classroom. And, on one occasion, when their eyes had actually met, she had turned away immediately. She had fixed her eyes on her textbook and had refused to look up after that. So why the fuck could she not so much as look him in the eye?
And why did she never bloody speak up in class? Quiet as a bloody mouse in lessons and then, off she’d go, to write better essays than his on the poetry of William Blake. Or on Disraeli’s foreign policy. Or – damnit – on the difference between Speed and Velocity. Mr bloody Ballantyne had seen fit to read her answer out loud. And, all the while he was reading it, Jago had had fucking Marty sitting there beside him. Marty, who had thought it clever to observe that you couldn’t ‘get high on Velocity’.
So. Sod the girl. She was a pain. She had hidden depths. Why did she never sodding talk? Strut her stuff? Like her sister? Smart-arse Chris. Jago was quite certain that Pam had hidden depths. He had never himself bought his own propaganda about her slavish rote learning. His role had merely been to invent the idea and then to sit back and watch it propagated.
Fucking women, the pair of them, he thought. What the fuck had they come to the school for in the first place? They were American for Christ’s sake. And why did they not even look like each other?
He remembered the day on which he had met them. The sisters. Station platform. Great Malvern. He’d just won a cricket match that afternoon on the last ball of the final over. Won the day for the local town team. What a hoot – to have won the match for the very same snot-nosed oiks whose sisters he was now planning to have the groupies go off and harass. Trick or treat. Hah!
The girls had been in Bermuda shorts and flat, matching tennis shoes. Strictly off. Christina had been head-to-toe in traffic-light green as he recollected, but then it could never be said that dress was a big talent that side of the Atlantic. He could not help remembering, however, that the girls’ father had appeared and had livened things up no end.
Fun bloke, as it had turned out. Great talker. Great to bounce off. So how the fuck had he come to produce these two bloody weirdo girls? One was a brainy wimp who was seldom known to open her mouth. Bum too big and walked around like the fucking Sistine Madonna in Classic Coordinates. Did she buy her clothes by mail through the ads in the New Yorker?
The other was a
talkie little know-it-all, who had tried to gatecrash his affections. Always too obtrusive by half. Pushy, like one-of-the-boys. Sexless, like one of those scrawny old women one encountered occasionally in the lift of the mansion block. Usually called Daphne, or Ethne, or Xanthe. Big doe eyes and smoking through a cigarette holder. Thinking it was witty to go round pinching young men’s bums.
Jago had had a curious experience some three days before Hallowe’en. It had happened to him in the art room. His artwork had always been very good indeed, but his talent in this area was one for which he had no use. Being academically ambitious for himself, he saw it as an irrelevance; an extraneous, so-what practical skill, appended to himself for no reason.
Among the raw materials in the art room were portfolios full of colour reproductions cut from catalogues and magazines. These were, some of them, of various works of art, classified chronologically into different historical periods. Jago had found himself gazing upon a batch of Renaissance Madonnas with Child. Most of them were enthroned with various saints, angels and donors. The earlier ones sat impassively against walls of flat gold leaf, while the later ones sat, smiling decorously, against Tuscan trees and river valleys, or against pink and gold palazzi.
Having suddenly before him the holy face so endlessly, hypnotically duplicated, Jago had been overcome by an inexplicable wave of anger. The upshot was that he had seized the scissors and begun to mutilate the figures. He embarked, then, on a harsh collage whose well-spring was little more than rage against the female sex.
Jago, with the aid of acrylic paint, fragments and paper glue, had created a Massacre of the Innocents; a Waste Land, in which eyeless Madonnas smiled sweetly from pike-staffs, or trampled the Holy Infant impassively underfoot, as He still reached out for trinkets and pomegranates and grapes. All around them, palazzi smoked and tumbled, and Tuscan trees became stumps.
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