Gentlemen and Players

by Joanne Harris

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, love.” Her voice was shaking. “It was going to be a surprise.”

  In that second I saw it all. The unopened plane ticket. The whispered conversations on the phone. How much? Pause. All right. It’s for the best. How much for what? To give up his claim? And how many scratch cards, how many six-packs and takeaway pizzas did they promise him before he gave them what they wanted?

  I began to cry again, this time in rage at their joint betrayal. My mother held me in a scent of something expensive and unfamiliar. “Oh sweetheart. What happened?”

  “Oh, Mum,” I sobbed, sinking my face into her furry coat, feeling her mouth against my hair, smelling cigarette smoke and Cinnabar and the dry, musky scent of her as inside something small and clever slipped its hand into my heart and squeezed.

  4

  In spite of Mrs. Mitchell’s insistence that Leon would never have gone on the roof alone, her son’s best friend—the boy she called Julian Pinchbeck—was never found. School records were searched; door-to-door enquiries made, but to no avail. Even this effort might not have been made if it had not been for Mr. Straitley’s insistence that he had seen Pinchbeck on the Chapel roof—though sadly, the boy had got away.

  The police were very sympathetic—after all, the woman was distraught—but secretly they must have believed poor Mrs. Mitchell to be slightly off her rocker, forever talking about nonexistent boys and refusing to accept her son’s death as a tragic accident.

  That might have changed if she had seen me again, but she didn’t. Three weeks later I went to live with my mother and Xavier at their home in Paris, where I was to remain for the next seven years.

  By that time, though, my transformation was well under way. The ugly duckling had begun to change; and with my mother’s help it happened fast. I did not resist it. With Leon dead, Pinchbeck could not hope or wish to survive. I disposed rapidly of my St. Oswald’s clothes and relied upon my mother to do the rest.

  A second chance, she had called it; and now I opened all of the notes, the letters, the unopened parcels waiting in their pretty wrappers under my bed, and made full use of what I found inside.

  I never saw my father again. The investigation into his conduct was only a formality, but his manner was odd, and it aroused the suspicion of the police. There was no real cause to suspect foul play. But he was aggressive under questioning; a Breathalyzer test revealed he’d been drinking heavily; and his account of that night was vague and unconvincing, as if he hardly recalled what had happened anymore. Roy Straitley, who confirmed his presence at the scene of the tragedy, had reported hearing him shout—I’ll get you!—at one of the boys. The police later made much of this, and though Straitley always maintained that John Snyde was running to help the fallen boy, he had to admit that the Porter had had his back turned to him at the time of the incident, and that he could not therefore have known for sure whether the man was trying to help or not. After all, said the police, Snyde’s record was hardly untarnished. Only that summer he had received an official reprimand for attacking a pupil on St. Oswald’s premises; and his uncouth behavior and violent temper were well known around the school. Dr. Tidy confirmed it; and Jimmy added some embellishments of his own.

  Pat Bishop, who might have helped, proved strangely reluctant to speak on my father’s behalf. This was partly the fault of the New Head, who had made it clear to Pat that his principal duty was to St. Oswald’s, and that the sooner the Snyde fiasco was cleared up, the sooner they could distance themselves from the whole sorry affair. Besides, Bishop was beginning to feel uneasy. This business threatened both his new appointment and his growing friendship with Marlene Mitchell. After all, he was the one who’d befriended John Snyde. As Second Master, he’d encouraged him, believed in him, defended him, knowing that John had a history of violence against my mother, against myself, and on at least one documented occasion against a pupil of St. Oswald’s—which made it all the more plausible that the man, goaded to breaking point, had lost his head and had chased Leon Mitchell across the rooftops to his death.

  There was never any real evidence to support the claim. Certainly Roy Straitley refused to do so. Besides, wasn’t the man afraid of heights? But the papers got hold of it. There were anonymous letters, phone calls, the usual public outrage that accumulates around any such case. Not that there ever was a case. John Snyde was never formally accused. All the same he hanged himself, in a bed-and-breakfast room in town, three days before we moved to Paris.

  Even then I knew who was responsible. Not Bishop, though he was partly to blame. Not Straitley, not the papers, not even the Head. St. Oswald’s killed my father, just as surely as St. Oswald’s killed Leon. St. Oswald’s, with its bureaucracy, its pride, its blindness, its assumptions. Killed them and digested them without a thought, like a whale sucking up plankton. Fifteen years later, no one remembers either of them. They’re just names on a list of Crises St. Oswald’s Has Survived.

  Not this one, though. Last time pays for all.

  5

  Friday, 5th November, 6:30 P.M.

  I passed by the hospital after school, with some flowers and a book for Pat Bishop. Not that he reads much, though perhaps he should; besides, as I told him, he ought to be taking it easy.

  He wasn’t, of course. I arrived to find him engaged in a violent discussion with the same pink-haired nurse who had dealt with my own problem not long before.

  “Christ, not another one,” she said, on seeing me. “Tell me, are all St. Oswald’s staff as awkward as you two, or did I just get lucky?”

  “I tell you, I’m fine.” He didn’t look it. He had a bluish tinge, and he looked smaller, as if all that running had impacted him somehow. His eye fell on the flowers in my hand. “For God’s sake, I’m not dead yet.”

  “Give them to Marlene,” I suggested. “She could probably do with cheering-up.”

  “You could be right.” He smiled at me, and I caught sight of the old Bishop again, just for a moment. “Take her home, will you, Roy? She won’t go, and she’s tired out. Thinks something’s going to happen to me if she gets a good night’s sleep.”

  Marlene, I discovered, had gone to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of tea. I caught up with her there, having extracted a promise from Bishop that he wouldn’t try and check himself out in my absence.

  She looked surprised to see me. She was holding a crumpled handkerchief in one hand, and her face—unusually clear of makeup—was pink and blotchy. “Mr. Straitley! I wasn’t expecting—”

  “Marlene Mitchell,” I said sternly. “After fifteen years, I think it’s time you started calling me Roy.”

  Over polystyrene cups of a peculiarly fishy-tasting tea, we talked. It’s funny how our colleagues, those not-quite-friends who populate our lives more closely than our closest relatives, remain so hidden to us in the essential. When we think of them, we see them not as people, with families and private lives, but as we see them every day; dressed for work; businesslike (or not); efficient (or not); all of us satellites of the same lumbering moon.

  A colleague in jeans looks strangely wrong; a colleague in tears is almost indecent. Those private glimpses of something outside St. Oswald’s seem almost unreal, like dreams.

  The reality is the stone; the tradition; the permanence of St. Oswald’s. Staff come, staff go. Sometimes they die. Sometimes even boys die; but St. Oswald’s endures, and as I have grown older I have taken increasing comfort from this.

  Marlene, I sense, is different. Perhaps because she’s a woman—those things don’t mean so much to women, I’ve found. Perhaps because she sees what St. Oswald’s has done to Pat. Or perhaps because of her son, who haunts me still.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, wiping her eyes. “The Head told everyone…”

  “Bugger the Head. It’s after hours, and I can do what I like,” I told her, sounding like Robbie Roach for the first time in my life. It made her laugh, though, which was what I wanted. “That’s better,�
�� I said, inspecting the dregs of my now-cold beverage. “Tell me, Marlene, why does hospital tea always taste of fish?”

  She smiled. She looks younger when she smiles—or perhaps it was the absence of makeup—younger and not so Wagnerian. “It’s good of you to come, Roy. No one else did, you know; not the Head, not Bob Strange. Not a single one of his friends. Oh, it’s all very tactful. All very St. Oswald’s. I’m sure the Senate were equally tactful with Caesar when they handed him the hemlock bowl.”

  I think she meant Socrates, but I let it go. “He’ll survive,” I lied. “Pat’s tough, and everyone knows those charges are ridiculous. You’ll see, by the end of the year the Governors will be begging him to come back.”

  “I hope so.” She took a sip of her cold tea. “I’m not going to let them bury him, as they buried Leon.”

  It was the first time in fifteen years that she had mentioned her son in my presence. Another barrier down; and yet I’d been expecting it; that old business has been more than usually on my mind in recent weeks, and I suppose she felt the same.

  There are parallels, of course; hospitals; a scandal; a vanished boy. Her son was not killed outright by the fall, although he never regained consciousness. Instead, there was the long wait by the boy’s bedside; the dreadful, lingering torment of hope; the procession of hopefuls and well-wishers—boys, family, girlfriend, tutors, priest—until the inevitable end.

  We never did find that second boy, and Marlene’s insistence that he must have seen something was always taken as a hysterical mother’s desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy. Only Bishop tried to help; checking school records and going over photographs until someone (maybe the Head) pointed out that his persistence in clouding the issue would almost certainly damage St. Oswald’s. Not that it mattered in the end, of course; but Pat was never happy about the outcome.

  “Pinchbeck. That was his name.” As if I could have forgotten—a fake name if I ever heard one. But I’m good at names; and I’d remembered his from that day in the corridor, when I’d found him sneaking about near my office on some unlikely excuse.

  Leon had been there then too, I thought. And the boy had given his name as Pinchbeck.

  “Yes, Julian Pinchbeck.” She smiled, not pleasantly. “No one else really believed in him. Except Pat. And you, of course, when you saw him there—”

  I wondered if I had seen him. I never forget a boy, you know; in thirty-three years I never have. All those young faces, frozen in time; every one of them believing that Time will make the exception for them alone; that they alone will remain forever fourteen…

  “I saw him,” I told her. “Or at least, I thought I did.” Smoke and mirrors; a ghost boy who dissolved like the night mists when morning came. “I was so sure—”

  “We all were,” said Marlene. “But there was no Pinchbeck on any of the school records, or in the photo files, or even on the lists of applicants. Anyway, by then, it was all over. No one was interested. My son was dead. We had a school to run.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It wasn’t your fault. Besides—” She stood up with a sudden briskness that was all school secretary. “Being sorry won’t bring Leon back, will it? Now it’s Pat who needs my help.”

  “He’s a lucky man,” I said, and I meant it. “Do you think he’d object if I asked you out? Just for a drink, of course,” I said. “But it is my birthday, and you look as if you could do with something a little more substantial than tea.”

  I like to think I haven’t lost my touch. We agreed to an hour, no more, and left Pat with instructions to lie down and read his book. We walked the mile or so to my house; it was dark by then, and already the night smelled of gunpowder. A few early fireworks popped over the Abbey Road Estate; the air was misty and surprisingly mild. At home there was gingerbread and sweet mulled wine; I lit the fire in the parlor and brought out the two cups that matched. It was warm and comfortable; by the light of the fire my old armchairs looked less shabby than usual, and the carpet less threadbare; and around us, on every wall, my lost boys watched with the grinning optimism of the forever young.

  “So many boys,” said Marlene softly.

  “My gallery of ghosts,” I said, then, seeing her face, “I’m sorry, Marlene. That was tactless.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “I’m not as sensitive as I used to be. That’s why I took this job, you know. Of course in those days I was sure there was a conspiracy to hide the truth; and that someday I’d actually see him, walking down some corridor with his gym bag, those little glasses slipping down his nose…But I never did. I let him go. And if Mr. Keane hadn’t brought it up again, after all these years—”

  “Mr. Keane?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. We talked it over. He’s very interested in school history, you know. I think he’s planning to write a book.”

  I nodded. “I knew he’d been taking an interest. He had notes, pictures—”

  “You mean this?” Out of her wallet Marlene drew a small picture, clearly scissored from a school photograph. I recognized it at once—in Keane’s book it had been a poor reproduction, barely visible, where he’d circled a face in red crayon.

  But this time I recognized the boy too; that wan little face, owlishly bespectacled, raccoonlike, the school cap crammed down over the floppy fringe.

  “That’s Pinchbeck?”

  She nodded. “It’s not the best likeness, but I’d know him anywhere. Besides, I’ve been over that picture a thousand times, matching names to faces. Everyone’s accounted for. Everyone but him. Whoever he was, Roy, he wasn’t one of ours. But he was there. Why?”

  Once more, that feeling of déjà vu; the sensation of something slipping, not quite easily, into place. But it was dim. Dim. And there was something about the small unformed face that troubled me. Something familiar.

  “Why didn’t you report this at the time?” I asked.

  “It was too late.” Marlene shrugged. “John Snyde was dead.”

  “But the boy was a witness.”

  “Roy. I had a job to do. There was Pat to think of. It was over.”

  Over? Perhaps it was. But something about that wretched affair had always felt unfinished. I don’t know where the connection had come from—why it had returned to mind after so many years—but now it had, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.

  “Pinchbeck.” The dictionary gives its meaning as: (of jewelry) flashy, tawdry, counterfeit. A fake. “A made-up name, if ever there was one.”

  She nodded. “I know. It still makes me feel funny, thinking of him in his St. Oswald’s school uniform, walking along the corridors with the other boys, talking to them, even being photographed with them, for God’s sake. I can’t believe no one noticed—”

  I could. After all, why should they? A thousand boys, all in uniform; who would suspect he was an outsider? Besides, it was ridiculous. Why should a boy attempt such an imposture?

  “The challenge,” I said. “Just for the thrill of it. To see if it could be done.”

  He would be fifteen years older now, of course. Twenty-eight or thereabouts. He would have grown, of course. He’d be tall now, well built. He might be wearing contact lenses. But it was possible, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it possible?

  Helplessly I shook my head. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much hope I had placed on Knight—and only Knight—being responsible for the recent mischief that has plagued us. Knight was the culprit; the sender of e-mails, the malicious surfer (if that’s the word) of Internet filth. Knight had accused Bishop and the others; Knight had burned the gatehouse; I’d even half convinced myself that Knight had been behind those articles signed Mole.

  Now I saw the dangerous illusions for what they were. These crimes against St. Oswald’s went much further than simple mischief. No boy could have committed them. This insider—whoever he was—was prepared to take his game as far as it went.

  I thought of Grachvogel, hiding in his closet.

  I thought of Tapi,
locked in the Bell Tower.

  Of Jimmy (like Snyde), who took the blame.

  Of Fallow, whose secret was revealed.

  Of Pearman and Kitty, ditto.

  Of Knight; Anderton-Pullitt; the graffiti; the gatehouse; the thefts; the Mont Blanc pen; the small acts of localized disruption and the final bouquet—Bishop, Devine, Light, and Roach—firing off one after another like rockets into the flaming sky…

  And once again I thought of Chris Keane, with his clever face and dark fringe; and of Julian Pinchbeck, the pale boy who at twelve or thirteen had already dared an imposture so brazen that for fifteen years no one had believed it possible.

  Could Keane be Pinchbeck? Keane, for gods’ sakes?

  It was an astonishing leap of illogic or intuition; and yet, I saw how he could have done it. St. Oswald’s has a rather idiosyncratic policy on application, based on personal impressions rather than on paper references. It was just conceivable that someone—someone clever—might be able to slip through the network of checks that exist to filter out the undesirables (in the private sector, of course, police checks are not required). Besides, the mere thought of such an imposture is beyond us. We are like the guards at a friendly outpost, all comic-opera uniforms and silly walks, falling by the dozen beneath unexpected sniper fire. We never expected an attack. That was our mistake. And now someone was picking us off like flies.

  “Keane?” said Marlene, just as I would have done if our positions had been reversed. “That nice young man?”

  In a few words, I filled her in on the nice young man. The notebook. The computer passwords. And through it all, his subtle air of mockery, of arrogance; as if teaching were simply an amusing game.

  “But what about Knight?” said Marlene.