by H. S. Cross
Morgan lifted the cup to his lips. Mr. Grieves, a human mirror, did the same.
—And? Mr. Grieves prompted.
Morgan held his cup closer.
—As we’re in the confessional, you may as well out with it, Mr. Grieves said.
—Out with what?
—All of it.
And a wall rose up before him, like the waves Poseidon raised to crush Odysseus’s ship, a wall of everything the question had summoned. Here they were, outside the Academy, somewhere in the free world, subject only to the softly ticking clock. They might stay here forever, that gaze forever upon him, forever ready to listen to the truth.
But he couldn’t sit there eternally mute. Time did turn, and patience, even from Mr. Grieves, had a limit. If he continued to say nothing, Mr. Grieves would grow bored with him and decide his problems were better confessed to someone else.
—I don’t know where to start, sir.
Mr. Grieves refilled his own cup:
—How about with what you were doing in my landlord’s garden at three o’clock in the morning.
—Isn’t three o’clock supposed to be the wickedest hour of the night, sir? The reverse of when Christ died on the cross?
—Don’t evade.
So known to be cornered thus, the way Silk cornered him, but more clear-sighted. Silk had been able to see to his heart, but sometimes what Silk claimed to see there was only a reflection of Silk’s own ideas, the ones from his idea shelf that he kept so proudly polished, regardless of their relation to reality. But Mr. Grieves was not a man to make guesses. Mr. Grieves relied on evidence. Now for instance, he had offered no hypothesis concerning Morgan’s circumstances; he merely searched for facts. Already he could tell truth from evasion. Already in his understanding he had sensed the real Morgan Wilberforce, the one Nathan and Laurie missed, the one even Silk mistook, the one his father no longer sought.
—Morgan?
And now he was calling him by his Christian name, as he hadn’t in years.
—I didn’t know it was your garden, sir.
—Oh, no?
—No, sir. I swear it!
—I believe you.
A tightness in his chest noticed only in the loosening.
—Nevertheless? Mr. Grieves prompted.
—The cats were fighting, and I was … waiting for the mail.
Mr. Grieves turned those brown-and-black eyes on him again—believing, demanding, searching—until Morgan somehow, without the right words, without paragraphing, without thesis of any kind, unfolded the story: the trek through the woods, the post-office van, Wales …
—And yet, Mr. Grieves said, you didn’t actually want to go to Wales, did you?
Morgan certainly did want to go to Wales. In fact he still wanted to go there. Wanted to and would!
—You made for Fridaythorpe, Mr. Grieves observed, not the station, which is closer to the Academy. You imagined a post-office van rather than a luggage car, which is bigger and easier for concealment. You chose a vague destination and lacked a compelling reason to go there. And you hid in my garden when you ought to have been pursuing transport.
It made him sound a duffer, fit for nothing but imprisonment in a run-down school amidst people who neither understood nor wanted him. He dug at the table with a fingernail.
—God knows I’m a complete waste of space, sir.
Mr. Grieves straightened:
—God knows nothing of the sort.
His skin tingled as though the air had grown heavier.
—You’re focusing on the wrong thing, Mr. Grieves said.
—I suppose I ought to be focusing on how lucky I am to be at a school at all, to have food, clothing, friends, a family who love me …
He almost added et cetera, et cetera.
—That’s undoubtedly true, said Mr. Grieves, but not just now very interesting.
—What in God’s name is interesting, sir?
—Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain, please. And stop wallowing.
Mr. Grieves’s voice was mild though his words were not, as if he could take any amount of railing and respond unfazed.
—The question you ought to be asking is what.
—What?
—Yes, Morgan, what. What is it in that heart of yours strong enough to wake you in the night and take you from the only home you know to a vague and ill-considered destination you had no desire actually to reach?
The room didn’t change color. There was no smashing that he could point to. It was more incremental, as if a heavy mantle had been laid upon his shoulders and was gradually revealing its weight. As he grew accustomed to its pressure, it grew heavier, yet it answered a longing so hidden it could only be known in satisfaction. To be held so always, to have his heart seen, known, and shown to him, to be reeled in from error so lightly, as if someone existed who truly knew right from wrong, someone capable of enforcing this distinction on him, someone for whom it was as natural as breath.
His father had been that kind of man once, but even then his father had never stood apart from the world as Mr. Grieves had done when he refused to take up arms in the War. Morgan couldn’t fathom what would drive a man to such a stance, but whatever it was, it must have come from the clarity Mr. Grieves now possessed.
—Well?
—I don’t know, sir.
—Of course you do. Try harder.
The mantle settled again, and a pressure in his throat that made his voice sound queer.
—I …
Was it possible that Mr. Grieves would not retreat? Was it possible that he would sit there telling Morgan to try harder until he provided an actual answer?
—I suppose I must have wanted to be found, sir.
So bald, and so inadequate.
—I thought as much.
Now the eyes! He thought as much? How could Mr. Grieves have thought anything?
—I didn’t mean it like that, sir, I meant—
—Shh.
Then like a coal, Mr. Grieves’s fingers touched his wrist, and Morgan saw in those eyes a softness he could scarcely endure.
—You’ve been lost?
Morgan cast his gaze to the tabletop, to the ridges in the wood where crumbs had collected, but it began to blur, and he retracted his wrist into his sleeve, his hands clasped together like a monk’s. He needed a gesture that would make light of Mr. Grieves’s words. He needed a rebuttal, but the mantle was so heavy, so protective in its burden, so desirable, so filling.
—You need a lot of looking after, don’t you?
The warmth of that voice buckled the last support that remained, and Poseidon’s wave struck, drowning his men, splintering his ship, and dragging him into that salty, breathless sea. Was it so easy to demolish his reserves, built with such effort all these years? The last time he’d been reduced to such blubbering had also involved a weight on his chest, a devastating pain there on Silk’s study floor. How had Mr. Grieves accomplished as much barely touching him? He buried his head in his arms, helpless against the sea, until, like Ino’s veil, a handkerchief appeared at his ear. He put it under his nose.
—I’m too old for that, sir.
—Are you?
Again his throat seized. Again he hid his face in his arms. Mr. Grieves went to put on more water.
—Let’s review facts, Mr. Grieves said, running the tap. First, you were sufficiently motivated to abscond from the Academy tonight. Reason not yet established. Second, you left without supplies and you made for an illogical destination. Why? Because you wanted to be found. Third, you have confessed to glove theft, but your manner indicates a person far more compromised than such a crime would suggest.
Through salt water, Morgan’s face burned again.
—Are you in some danger at the Academy?
—No, sir.
—Are you a danger to someone?
Was he?
—No, sir.
—Points off for hesitation. Have you done something wrong and fear being found out?
&
nbsp; He’d done countless things wrong, all of them commonplace. He didn’t fear punishment from any authority.
—I’m not afraid of being found out, sir.
—Then perhaps you’re afraid of not being found out.
Morgan inhaled sharply, and in the moment that followed, he saw he’d given himself away. A grin colonized Mr. Grieves’s face.
—Of course! Mr. Grieves said. In that case, young Morgan—
He wasn’t young! He was seventeen years old!
—I think you had better make up your mind to tell me everything, and I mean everything. I’ll grant you the seal of confession for the next …
He craned to see the clock.
—three-quarters of an hour.
—But you aren’t a clergyman, sir. You aren’t even a proper—
He stopped before he said Christian.
—Yes, yes, Mr. Grieves replied airily. We’re all imperfect servants. But you’re wasting time.
If anyone else had bid him make a full, vocal confession of every wrongdoing, he would have dismissed them as pious or naïve. Now, though, a hunger came over him for the particular form of discomfort Mr. Grieves had been inflicting since he entered the flat.
—I’ve lied, sir.
Mr. Grieves nodded, giving no indication whether he found Morgan’s words surprising.
—I’ve been lying for a long time.
—To?
—My father. Pearl and Lydon. Everyone.
—To yourself?
He hesitated.
—Go on, Mr. Grieves prompted.
—That’s all there is.
Mr. Grieves appraised him:
—You don’t want people to know the truth.
—They wouldn’t like the truth!
—And what is the truth?
Morgan felt there should be a falling sensation to accompany the dreadful precipice on which he stood. The truth, if he ever could explain it, would destroy everything.
Yet, wasn’t everything worthwhile destroyed already?
—Love, sir.
—Yes?
—Yes.
—Loving people you oughtn’t?
Morgan nodded.
—Go on.
—Love is perhaps a dramatic way of putting it.
—Perhaps.
How could he explain whom he had loved? Silk, Nathan, his mother, his sisters, that girl with the tennis serve, Mr. Grieves himself, and that was just off the top of his head, not counting those for whom he had only lusted. Was it right to love and wrong to lust? Wrong to love Silk Bradley, who had been so wicked and desolate, who had nobody perhaps to love him besides Morgan?
Silk had told him to pour a second cup of tea that day Fletcher had been in the Tower. Morgan had filled Fletcher’s cup and set it beside the parcel wrapped in brown paper, which had appeared in the study that morning.
—If you tell anyone, you’ll be sorry, Silk had said. Even Fletch.
Morgan had nodded, uncomprehending, and sat at Silk’s command, like those other times, but not like those other times. Silk had sliced open the package, revealing Kendal Mint Cake and a letter he pocketed without reading. He broke the cake in two and set half before Morgan.
—Go on, he said, dipping his own into the tea.
Tentatively, Morgan took a bite. The mint was fresh, potent.
—Wiggie, Silk explained. Takes pity once a year.
—Lent?
—Birthday.
Morgan’s head had spun wondering why Silk didn’t have a hamper if it was his birthday, why no one knew, and why he wasn’t sharing his godmother’s present with his best friend.
—I can see what you’re thinking, Silk had said, and it’s a bore. Fletch thinks my birthday’s in the hols. And the antecedents never send presents.
Morgan drank from Fletcher’s cup, sharing Silk’s only present, bound to secrecy in the gray light of day.
* * *
Morgan Wilberforce sat at his table, eyes swollen and red. Outside, daylight crept implacably towards them. John had only seen him shed tears once before, in that odd encounter over the boy’s birthday his first year. Wilberforce had waited all day for his birthday hamper and then heard Fardley declare the hamper wasn’t coming, and what’s more had never been ordered. It was shortly after the boy’s mother had died, John recalled, the oversight surely due to the father’s distracted grief; but it was custom at the school for parents to send birthday hampers, and when Fardley destroyed all hope, Wilberforce had buried his face in John’s coat and wept, stirring in John a feeling both paternal and avuncular. John had killed that feeling after the Gallowhill business, but now—like divine reprieve after years of hopelessness—John could see that Wilberforce had been telling the truth after all. The night was wiping the slate clean of all dust, requiring neither contrition nor atonement. Like a simple misunderstanding, the past was being blown away, and John was sitting at a table with the same boy, albeit taller, inside the same cloister of rapport.
He wanted more than anything to sort this boy out, but his position at the Academy was ancillary at best. He had no authority outside his classroom and not much inside it. He had never done a dorm round, never communicated freely with a parent, never had a study to which he could invite boys for … what could it be called? Moral influence? For whatever it was men gave to boys. For the kind of thing the Bishop had given him before—but he made it a rule never to think of that time. He had never comforted (counseled? catechized?) any boy in the night. The closest he’d come was the odd night terror when his goddaughter was small. She would enter his room in the dead of night, take his hand, and begin conversing with him. It always took him longer than it ought to realize that she was failing to make sense and that she was not, in fact, awake. Morgan Wilberforce was most certainly awake. Would John be capable of such a sorting out, even if he possessed the means?
The boy had confessed to loving someone he oughtn’t. Well, he wasn’t the first boy, and he’d hardly be the last. John couldn’t encourage him, but he didn’t see the point in making a fuss over it.
—Has loving this person led you to do things you oughtn’t?
Morgan Wilberforce went confused behind the eyes:
—Which…?
He dried up.
—Which one? John supplied.
A blush. John was beginning to see the problem. Not an ardent public school friendship, but a whole raft of unsuitable attachments. He thought he knew something about both.
—Do you know what I think, sir? I think God’s made a balls-up of this whole business.
—Oh, yes?
—Look at the world, sir. Look at the War.
John sighed.
There were so very many ways this boy needed sorting out, John felt nearly breathless contemplating them. He felt even more overwhelmed considering what the Headmaster would say about his hosting a late-night, out-of-bounds confabulation with a pupil. He needed to get this boy back where he belonged before a scandal ensued, or worse.
An idea came to him then, as they did when he wasn’t trying, a memory of a book he’d been reading earlier. He fetched it from the windowsill and, flicking back in the pages, found the passage. He read it aloud standing under the lightbulb:
—He said that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to try to say it was not good before we know what his purpose with it was. I don’t like, he said, even my wife to look at my verses before they’re finished! God can’t hide away his work till it is finished, as I do my verses, and we ought to take care what we say about it. God wants to do something better with people than people think.
John could hear the question Morgan Wilberforce wanted to ask, and the boy’s silence struck him as a kind of deep companionship, an acknowledgment that the question and its corollary—What did God want with Wilberforce? What did he want with either of them?—had no vocal answer. That Wilberforce appeared to know it said more about the boy than almost anything else that night.
A f
lurry of ideas began to come to John then, and he knew from hard-learned experience with ideas that the only thing to do was to obey without overthinking. He certainly ought not to ponder why he—dogged by insomnia and pacing his frigid rooms—should have investigated the carousing of tomcats at the same moment that a St. Stephen’s boy had wandered into his garden, and not any St. Stephen’s boy, but Morgan Wilberforce. The important thing was that ideas were continuing to arrive like a host of relatives. (Not that he had a host of relatives—but he made it a rule—never mind.) The ideas told him that whatever had driven Wilberforce from the Academy that night was neither single, concrete, nor precisely relevant; that the boy was compromised, but not in the way people might imagine; that the sorting out would take time and quite possibly require other hands; and that most essentially John needed to get this boy back to the Academy before his absence was discovered and circumstances became complicated by irrelevancies. John was certain as he could be that the answer to the opus called Morgan Wilberforce would not be found in his traipsing across Yorkshire, or Wales, but would grow somehow into itself after his return to ordinary life, arising this morning from the philistine dormitories of Hazlehurst’s House, sleepwalking through lessons, and facing whatever else the day delivered. He had the idea that change was sweeping towards them. He didn’t know what, but he could feel its breath cold on his neck.
Before any of this could transpire, however, Morgan Wilberforce needed conveying back to the Academy. A glance at the clock told him there wasn’t enough time to send the boy on foot, and in any case, John didn’t entirely trust him to return on his own.
He braced himself. It would have to be the bicycle. Lord, help them.
9
Mr. Grieves was out of his tiny mind. First, he fixed on the notion of cycling back to the Academy in the dark with Morgan perched on his handlebars. This quickly proved impossible, as Morgan had predicted. Undeterred, Mr. Grieves insisted Morgan balance on the book rack, which promptly broke, again as Morgan said it would. Mr. Grieves, ever resolute, instructed Morgan to sit on the bicycle seat whilst Mr. Grieves himself attempted to pedal standing up. Not until Morgan had fallen painfully onto the pavement did Mr. Grieves concede defeat.
By this time, Morgan knew, he could have been halfway home through Grindalythe Woods, but as he was not at liberty to explain his route, he could not dispute Mr. Grieves’s view that Morgan had little chance of regaining his bed undetected even if he ran his best cross-country race of the term. Thwarted in his schemes, Mr. Grieves accepted the only logical solution.