He stood up automatically as the rows of boys shuffled to their feet. Another prayer or hymn, though he hardly heard the words. He was thinking of Divinity tomorrow – the first lesson since his private ‘tutoring’, which had moved so hideously and swiftly from Saint Paul. How could he meet Sayers face to face, in public, in the classroom, to answer questions about missionary journeys, or – worse – about sin and Hell? In the last three days, his stutter had become so bad, he could manage little more than nods or mumbles. Every time he saw the chaplain, he began to shake with nerves, fearing another invitation to ‘go over his work’. And the briefest glimpse of the Headmaster made him go hot and cold, imagining the summons to his study, to be told he’d been expelled. He couldn’t eat at all. The food just stuck in his throat, and there was no room in his stomach for anything but fear.
‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation …’
He glanced up at the choir. His friend Forbes was singing solo, except he wasn’t his friend any more – he hadn’t any friends. He dared not talk to anyone in case he broke his vow of silence and blurted out something he’d regret. He was utterly alone – alone with a dark secret which was poisoning his mind like a deadly black mamba. He longed to share his secret, confide in someone brave and wise who could suck out the poison for him, but there was no one brave and wise at Greystone Court. Anyway, if he broke his vow, the God who wasn’t there might strike him dead. And even if he did tell, no one would believe him. It was his word against the chaplain’s, and the chaplain was a master, a grown-up and a clergyman – overwhelming odds. The other masters would beat him black and blue for even suggesting such a thing; the boys would only jeer, and probably accuse him of being a poofter.
‘Prat!’ Collins taunted, as Daniel dropped his hymnbook and scrabbled on his knees to pick it up. He would be called much more spiteful names than that if Collins and his cronies ever found out what had happened – nancy, fairy, faggot, pansy. And maybe they were right. If the chaplain had picked on him rather than one of the others, it must be because he was queer. God hated queers. He sent them all to Hell.
He looked furtively at Collins’s book to see what hymn they were singing – number 184: ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’. He kept thinking of his own father, wondering with sick dread if his parents had been told about his crime. But even if they hadn’t, he knew that from now on they’d be forced to live in separate worlds – they in their high shining world with principles, ideals; he stuck on his foul rubbish-heap. But however far removed they might be in conduct and in actual miles, never before had they seemed to loom so close; continually watching him, accusing him, even in his dreams. They had slipped into the chapel, replaced the stern saints in the windows; his father’s face glowering at him from beneath each stained-glass halo; his mother’s staff raised threateningly, to strike her wicked son. Terrified, he switched his gaze to the smiling wooden cherubim carved beneath the frieze, but they were smiling with the chaplain’s smile, and their tobacco-breath was hot and vile. Wherever he looked, the chaplain’s face leered back at him. The plaster saints were slobbering with his yellow dribble; the tapestry of Christ the King had the same long straggly moustache, with little flecks of food caught in it. And the hymns and prayers kept repeating ‘Father, Father’ – Almighty Father, Merciful Father – shocked, disgusted father, white with rage in Lusaka.
He plunged to the door; stood breathless, his heart pounding, looking back at the silent empty chapel. ‘Damn you!’ he whispered to the chaplain’s mocking ghost. ‘You wrecked my life here totally.’ He’d been a harmless, self-effacing boy, whose most heinous crime was losing his Latin primer, or being late in returning a library book. Yet he had been made to believe that he was rotten to the core, and that however hard he worked at school, however many prizes he won, he had neither hope nor future. All those years of guilt and shame, when he’d done nothing more reprehensible than miss a Tuesday rugger game on account of a bad cold.
His nose was running now. He wiped it on the back of his hand; rested his throbbing head against a brass plaque beside the door. There were plaques all round the walls, commemorating past headmasters and chaplains, though none for Mr Sayers. He had left in 1967, not as Hammy-Webb had left, with a special service of farewell – fulsome tribute for years of sterling service – but suddenly, inexplicably, and almost overnight. Probably another buggery, Daniel realized bitterly, as he paced up and down the aisle. At the time, his first euphoric relief had turned swiftly to new terror. He had recalled the chaplain’s words: ‘If anyone should hear of this, it could get us into trouble, Hughson – very serious trouble.’ Sayers had said ‘us’, not ‘you’, including himself in the reprisals. So perhaps that trouble had come at last; someone had found them out. And if the chaplain had been dismissed, then his own expulsion was bound to follow. Much as he longed to leave the school, escape its grim barbarities, he couldn’t bear the disgrace of being expelled, or the thought of facing his parents’ outrage. So, once again, he began living through a nightmare, instantly interpreting any sharp word from a master as the first step in his damnation.
By that time, he had transferred to the senior school and achieved his extraordinary growth-spurt. Looking back, it no longer seemed extraordinary, but simply a natural reaction to his rape: changing from little boy to brawny adult would protect him from further advances. But he hadn’t liked the person he’d become. The small sweet child was gone, replaced by a gangling not-quite-man – isolated, wary, not daring to trust anyone, and certainly not God. In fact, he had never prayed again, except outwardly, officially, at services or school assemblies, merely to conform. He had lost his God along with his virginity – at least any loving, merciful God. He was left with Judge and Scourge.
His restless pacing had brought him back to the door. He yanked at the handle and slammed out of the gloom into the sunlight, striding across the quad to Raleigh House. He had left the place unlocked, the bunch of keys inside. He hoped there’d bloody well been a burglary – though Major Potts had told him there was nothing much to steal. Is that what Sayers had felt himself: that ‘nothing much’ had happened to the timid, snuffling twelve-year-old; that nothing had been stolen from him – only a mere matter of his virginity, his innocence, his happiness, his childhood? And not simply his childhood – it had affected his adult life as well. Even in his twenties, the fears had continued, wrecking both his sex-life and his confidence. That boyhood initiation had been so utterly repellent, he had mistrusted sex thereafter, always secretly fearing he was abnormal in some way.
He returned to the Day Room, unable to keep still, weaving in and out of the garish orange chairs as he prowled from door to window. He found the bunch of keys where he had left them on the table; swept them to the floor. Let the vandals ransack the joint. For all he cared, they could burn the bloody place down. There was bound to be a gang of local thugs, opposed to the snobbery of private schools, who’d get a kick out of breaking and entering …
He sank down in a chair. That last phrase seemed familiar. He could hear the healer’s hypnotic voice sounding in his head again: ‘You could say it was a question of grace breaking and entering my soul.’
He punched his fist into the chair-arm. What a wonderfully apt expression – if you changed grace and soul to cock and arse. It had been a breaking and entering, a forcible intrusion into his child’s body. And JB had had the gall to use high-flown terms like ‘spiritual change’ and ‘higher consciousness’, then sent him here to re-live the sordid reality. If this was higher consciousness, he’d prefer to remain in Lethean amnesia. What point was there in recalling such cruel memories, which he had blocked off so successfully once the chaplain had departed – convincing himself that the incident had never happened; that no Mr Sayers had been at the school at all; had never even existed? Why change the scenario now, when there was no way to right the wrong? Sayers was dead, Hamilton was dead, and if he had any sense, he’d kill
the memories themselves stone dead, before they drove him mad. JB was a powerful man, but power like that was dangerous, in the same way that a nuclear reactor could be programmed for great good, yet was also capable of wreaking vast destruction. He had resolved a dozen times already to take Penny and Pippa away from the camp, before they too were harmed, but on this occasion he’d act on it, drive back now – this instant – and insist they all went home.
He ploughed back to the window, a new worry seizing hold of him: did he confide in Penny about the rape, or would that only cause more problems? The word ‘rape’ itself set off a sort of panic. He certainly hadn’t known it at age twelve, and even now, it made him shudder. It seemed too histrionic, a word best left unspoken. But Penny wouldn’t share his scruples, would pounce on the term with burning indignation; jump in with both feet and want to take it up with the school; fight his cause, fight injustice generally. He recalled a recent programme he had watched on child abuse, the embittered victims (or survivors, as they were called these days) weeping on TV, openly arraigning fathers, uncles, teachers, to the prurient excitement of the public. He could just imagine some self-important therapist or media personality trying to winkle out all the juicy details in his own case, so that an audience of fifteen million-odd could sit slavering over Sayers’s wicked ways. That would be another sort of nightmare. And even if he swore Penny to secrecy, she was bound to keep bringing it up in private, offering ‘therapy’ of her own.
No. He’d bury it again for another thirty years, by which time he’d be so ancient, it wouldn’t matter any more. And he’d also bury the memory of his visit here, change the itinerary in his mind – not Greystone Court, but the ruined Cistercian abbey he’d intended to visit all along. He knew enough about ruined Cistercian abbeys to be able to supply a few plausible details if Penny asked about his day.
He strode into the hallway, paused a moment by the noticeboard. The present chaplain – a Mr Alan Rutherford – had written out a list of times for choir-practice and signed it in a neat italic hand. Daniel rummaged through his pockets, found an old pencil-stub, worn to almost nothing. He licked the point to make it write, then scrawled across the chaplain’s notice in large untidy letters: ‘FUCK YOU, SAYERS, YOU BASTARD!’
He tossed the pencil-stub away and blundered to the door, the twelve-year-old’s hot stinging tears coursing down his cheeks again as it slammed accusingly behind him.
Chapter Twenty Three
Daniel pulled off the road. He was only a mile or two from the camp now, but he’d been distracted by the violent scene in the field beyond the fence. Two rams were engaged in battle, their clashing horns disturbing the sultry silence of the countryside. He sat and watched the fight, alarmed by the ferocity of the implacable male rivals as they charged again, again; using the full force of their bodies to thwack against each other. There was a momentary lull as they braced themselves for another furious onslaught; heads lowered, muscles taut. He, too, sat rigid, hands gripping the steering-wheel, as he waited for them to return to the attack. He winced as it occurred; the savage crack of horn on horn sending shock-waves through his own body.
He turned away, imagining JB and himself locked in a similar contest; the former fighting to the death to stop him leaving the camp; he determined to do so. Driving back from Greystone Court, he’d become more and more angry with the healer, blaming him for all this new upheaval. Despite his resolve to suppress the hateful memories, they wouldn’t stay suppressed. In fact, further sordid details kept bursting back into his consciousness, like a flood of dirty water breaking through a dam. He had come to Wales for a rest, and instead JB had plunged him into turmoil.
The rams had changed position, one pushing the other against the fence, but both still slogging it out with unabated aggression. Daniel almost envied them. How much simpler to fight physically like that – pawing the ground, butting with head and horns – than to fight silently and impotently inside. He jumped out of the car, slamming the door so hard he startled the two rams; all his rage with Sayers and the healer suddenly redirected at his parents. How could they have chosen such a benighted school in the first place, or left him there so long when it was obvious that he loathed it, and that his unhappiness was screaming out for anyone with an ounce of sensitivity to see? Were they cruel, or simply blind? Of course, it would suit them very well to have their time-consuming offspring five thousand miles away – out of sight and out of mind – leaving them free to live their unselfish conscientious lives.
He strode towards the fence. Unselfish? They had never been unselfish. The whole thing was a sham. They were too busy for a child, too engrossed in their careers, their desire for status and esteem. They loved children in the abstract – the unwashed millions, the disadvantaged blacks – but not their only son.
He leaned against the sturdy wooden fence, in need of its support. He felt as if he’d experienced a death. He had just lost both his parents – those altruistic parents he had revered throughout his life – and this new demise had shaken him as severely as their physical deaths. Only now had he realized, and with a painful sense of dislocation, how their high-minded philanthropy had led to his neglect. Service to black Africa was their all-important ideal, and since one insignificant white child had no such pressing claims, he’d been forced to remain more or less invisible. They’d hardly even known him, for God’s sake; simply delegated his care to a succession of black nannies, or to remote and faceless relatives in England.
He paced back to the car, walking like a robot, blind to everything around him. He switched on the ignition and sat hunched over the steering-wheel, despising his self-pity. Countless children suffered real neglect – poverty and hunger, the lack of any home at all – so what right had he to complain? He longed to confide in Penny, if only to offload his own confusion. Perhaps he’d been mistaken in deciding to conceal the whole affair. Whatever his fears about her reaction, it seemed a heavier burden to keep it to himself, continually reliving the grim past while outwardly pretending that everything was fine. He could always give her a carefully edited version: spare her the grosser details, but explain how shocked he felt and how he had to leave this part of Wales at once.
Wearily, he drove off down the road, praying she’d be alone. No, that was hardly likely, when she’d become more and more involved in camp activities, but with any luck he could prise her away from some relatively low-key task, like carrot-chopping, or lentil-soaking, or building that infernal labyrinth. He needed time on his own with her, not just to relay the horrors of this afternoon, but to discuss the whole issue of why she was avoiding him, living her own free-wheeling life here, as if she were unmarried, uncommitted.
As he turned the final corner and descended the steep hill, he was astonished to hear the sound of drumming – a steady throbbing beat which instantly transported him to Africa: watching the Kuomboka ceremony in western Zambia, or listening to a mother-drum echoing from the compound on a sultry summer evening. He glanced at the surrounding hills, the gnarled and twisted thorn trees, the stolid blackface sheep – hardly the setting for an exotic tribal rite. So what the hell was going on?
He parked the car in the tree-fringed lane and walked warily towards the tents. The campsite was deserted – unusual in itself. There was nearly always someone around, especially in this weather – some languid child or invalid sprawled out on a rug; some acolyte communing with the sky – but he couldn’t see a living soul, except one somnolent dog. What struck him was the brightness of the colours: a pair of shiny scarlet Wellingtons on the deep green of a groundsheet; an orange tent with a clutch of yellow mugs outside; a turquoise blouse on the washing-line. For the last two hours he’d been inhabiting his dead grey past, but these vivid colours seemed to jolt him back to life.
The noise of the drumming was coming from an adjoining field, one they sometimes used for healing sessions. (JB claimed it was on the junction of two ley lines, whose power would help the healing process.) But healing sessions were co
nducted in solemn silence, not accompanied by a drum. Daniel followed the insistent beat; glimpsed a crowd of people standing in a circle on the grass. Almost everyone was there – not just the zealots like Happy, Claire, Corinna (and a fervent-looking Penny), but even shy Dylan, sickly Doris and conventional Len and Jeanette.
He edged a little nearer, keeping well behind the clump of thorny bushes, which provided an effective screen. Though actually nobody had eyes for him – they were too intent on the ceremony. It was being conducted by a youngish man he had never seen before, dressed in what looked like an animal skin and holding a large cowrie shell. A ripple of smoke coiled up from this shell and a sweetish aromatic smell seeped into the air: not incense, something herbal, though Daniel couldn’t identify it at all. He peered more closely at the man, who was wearing frayed blue jeans, and above them, yes, a wolfskin – as disturbingly wild and primitive as the electrifying drumbeat. The drum itself, painted with a bear’s head, was wielded by a second unknown man. He was taller than the first and wore nothing above the waist but an ornate silver pendant and a scruff of gingery chest-hair. As Daniel watched, the drumming gradually softened, subsiding to a gentle stroking movement, almost a caress. Was this the famous New Moon party he had heard discussed so often? No: that was over a week away, and surely even JB, with all his uncanny powers, couldn’t tamper with the phases of the moon? He looked up at the sky, as if to check that hadn’t happened, but it was too early for a moon of any sort. The last clock he’d seen (on the tower at Greystone Court) had said twenty-five past five, so it must be evening now. But the light was still undimmed; the weather suspended in a brooding tense humidity, which lay heavy on the hills and fields.
JB himself was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any sign of Pippa. Daniel was grateful for both mercies: he didn’t want his daughter involved in way-out rites, and if he laid eyes on the healer, he was afraid he might lose his cool and actually attack him.
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