by Adam Thorpe
You, you out there under the linden, the white grape in a line of prunes – you stay put. And stop shivering. It looks kinda dumb.
OK?
Stocked up, bladder vacated, sitting comfortably?
Ye-es si-ir.
House lights still off? ’Cos some dumb nutwhacker was bound to have shouldered the button again, lurching off, or some creepy do-gooding practical type will have shattered the ambience by hitting the halogen to make things easier for everybody.
OK, OK, silence and clapperboard and action.
While we’ve been out things have happened. The masters and prefects and servants have appeared and in that order. It wasn’t supposed to be in that order. It was supposed to be exactly the reverse, but some bottlehead’s gone and bungled. Streadnam is lead, Boulter is smoulder, Holloway-Purse (right at this moment he’s obscured by the balustrade, sorry) is Holloway-Purse or worse. Worse? Hey, the beaks either side of him have pins and needles in their buttocks. They know the score. I don’t wish to approach HP just now. He’s pricklier than usual, which means he’s stiff, he’s school-ham cold and stiff. What’s going on inside his head is busy, it’s complicated, it’s X-rated unpleasant. He has two sides of him that are sick. It’s to do with the loss of his mother as a kid and various concatenations of genes it’d take a ream of Nobel prize-winners the rest of the millennium to decode. It’s really not worth it. Take me on trust. He likes to hurt people. He teaches arithmetic. He reads the lesson in chapel every Friday. He’s not a virgin. He has hair the colour of beeswax. He has eyes invented by casting directors of concentration camp movies. These eyes of his are before their time. You’ll see them in a tick, kid. I mean you behind the linden. What are you doing behind it? Get in line. Sandicot won’t touch you. He’s a nice boy. Anyway, you’re all spaced too far apart now to rub up against each other. You might spread your arms and touch fingers. A genial untouchable sweeper’s touch. The beaks have got it really aesthetic, now. You’ve all been practising. No clumps, no taggles, all spaced out nice and even for half a Roman mile to the big black gates and Jefferies puffing on his Woodbine by the carriage. Wow, out of this order came conflagration.
Obedience. Who needs it?
You do. Because your first period’s… hey, it’s arithmetic! With HP!
You’ve done half the prep. ½ the fractions set.
Am I mean?
I’m sneaky. It’s good for you. It improves your swing. And you gotta change togs. You can’t go into your arithmetic class in those. It wouldn’t be fair on your fundament. It’d have no idea what might be coming to it – it’s made it right through so far with only a nanny spank, the odd half-cock welt. No rod has ever descended on it as Holloway-Purse’s might. He doesn’t welt, he flays. His right arm no more than flicks but it does something drastic, it tightens your cheeks, it turns them into silk so taut the next stroke nicks it apart and there are four more. You know it’s bad when your inside knees get warm and wet. You can’t go to anyone because they might tell HP, and he’d do it all over again, and he has terrific aim. He can open up a calloused welt without looking. He’s done it before. Thrashing is the thing he does best. When he does it he hears God saying more, more. The Devil comes out when they scream, and when they’re silent he’s failed, though he admires their tenacity. Or the Devil’s. Jolly well done, he says. Hey, he’s a fair man. He recognises spunk.
And you’ve got arithmetic with this guy in about fifteen minutes. And you haven’t done your fractions. You’re up a gum tree, guv.
I’m playing for time. The fact is, my great-uncle’s late, he’s missed his cue, time’s expensive, what the fuck’s he up to? The servants are in a sort of scrum by the laurel hedge. They’re listless, surly, y’know – servanty. You do know? Hey, I didn’t realise my friends were that rich. The servants’ve come straight from their rakes and colanders and bedpans and giant steam-irons. They think they know what this is all about and the general view is that it’s a poor business. They don’t like it. That is, they don’t like Boulter or Streadnam or that cocky bastard Holloway-Purse and they feel sorry for my great-uncle. That’s why they deliberately waited in the kitchens, all of them, until the last possible minute. Mutinous. They’re murmuring and maundering and Streadnam’s giving them the evil eye. The light’s difficult because it’s shafting across them and the laurel hedge behind is deep and dark. We’ll put a filter on and gild them. Why not? I don’t want the group bleached out. This is a high quality work. This is a crucial document. I’m not interested in the laurel hedge. Their jackets are generally dark, their aprons starch white, they’re a problem visually. But their faces are gilded, for the moment. Even the maids look pretty heroic. That’s how I want it, OK? They’re the chorus. The rake looks good. The guy at the front, the young one with the broad hat and slop jacket and corded breeches, he’s hung on to his rake and he leans on it. It looks good, the tangs are catching the sun, there’s a touch of flare.
Right, Hibble’s moment. You remember Hibble. You tried to kick him. He’s opposite the rake and next to HP, he thinks the rake reminds him of a painting, a great painting. He was in Florence two months ago. He fell in love with Frenella. The paintings blurred. Frenella sharpened. Hibble is chill in the slight northerly gusts blowing now up the linden tree avenue. There’s some sort of beastly delay. The prefects are out, though. They’re stood to the left of the servants and facing the avenue. Hibble doesn’t like to see them all at once, like this. They look like fellows about to embark on a plundering expedition. His gown lifts and he clutches at it a bit pathetically in case it might brush Holloway-Purse, who is very still. The prefects ambled out in a most desultory manner, after the masters. Something has gone awry. His breakfast is not digesting as it should. He’s thinking how Frenella would hate this, would hate seeing him here, dwarfed by Holloway-Purse, dwarfed by the whole caboodle. He was so grand in Italy. He expanded. He kissed a girl. They lay in a meadow full of cowslips. I’m focusing in on a spot just above his right eyebrow. He has careful dark Renaissance-style eyebrows. In three years’ time they will be dislodged by a Bavarian sniper with pretty well invisible eyebrows. Holloway-Purse’s eyes flicker. Boulter – just at the head of the group now because he’s descended the stairs, he’s done with his Nero bit, he’s now Napoleon leading from the front – is beginning to nod at Streadnam. Sorry, it was a single nod, that was it. It’s crazy, keeping track, I thought I had every angle covered but the dope sheet is ancient history now, trust my hand signals.
Streadnam’s turned on his heel or whatever and is limping up the steps. He’ll sort it out, thinks Hibble. Hibble’s worried about finding the passage in Herodotus for the morning class, he’s thinking the ticket-stub might have fallen out and he’ll be fumbling in front of the Lower Sixth and they’ll chortle. This worry is superimposed over Frenella’s open mouth and the image falling on his retinas of Boulter’s beard and the servants vaguely beyond, sunlit. He wishes he wasn’t in alphabetical order, because Holloway-Purse makes him feel dwarfed and awkward and soft. He scratches his eyebrows in turn, then smooths them down with the side of his thumb, but he’s not vain, oh no, he’s just fidgety.
I don’t know why my great-uncle was late.
Was late?
I know the facts, a few facts. A few stills, glimpses, a few moments cast out of the molten whatever. One of the big bronzes is that things were held up because my great-uncle was late. You know who I know this from? I know this from the young guy with the rake. He was still alive in 1988. He was ninety-three. He dug his own salad patch. He kept rabbits. Now he’s dead. He told me on a fine smoky autumn morning how it happened. He gave me a ringside seat. And I’ll tell you this: he felt bad about what had happened. He felt sad for my great-uncle, this old guy did. And you know what else this guy had seen? He’d seen his uncle at the top of a ladder falling back into the arms of his father – I mean the uncle’s brother, or this old guy’s father, it’s not complicated – and in the middle of his uncle’s forehead was this r
ose petal his father was trying to blow off the whole time. OK, let’s start again. The uncle was climbing this ladder and grinning and the father was right behind and this old guy I’m talking about, who was really young then, was waiting to follow because – I think I forgot to say – they were going over the top at dawn or something, out of this trench, with whistles whistling and shells crumping and all that, when the uncle just leaned back into the arms of either this guy’s father or the uncle’s brother, depending on how you want to think of it, with a crimson thing that looked a bit like a rose petal in the middle of his forehead, and he was extremely dead – dead as a nit, this old guy called it – and there they were in this trench, just the three of them, like a great painting, only it was real, it happened, and I can’t find a way of telling it because this old guy told it in the only way possible and I’m not him. He spoke with a huskiness and a cough because the poison was still inside him. He’d worked his back to a dent raking and tying and digging and pruning in the grounds of Randle College for fifty-five years and all the time he felt bad about my great-uncle. I love this man. This man is the only really heroic guy I’ve ever known. So sucks to you people. Sucks to you all. Toast him, drink to his memory. He’s what my father might have been if the apple pulp hadn’t got into him, or the fish guts, or something.
You can imagine the situation. I mean the one down there, on the avenue. The beaks are trying to keep cool. The light gusts are getting less light, they’re wrapping the gowns about thighs and all that: basically there’s a mild wind-tunnel effect, it’s well known – it’s why the windows of Cavendish are always filmed with grit, it’s why ladies have problems mounting the steps and gentlemen lose their hats over the balustrade and the upper dormitory windows rattle like the arrival of funeral carriages for the little earls. A boater goes bowling along and a beak catches it with his foot, which wrecks the crown. Dead leaves stir on the piles at the side as if the mouldering corpses obviously inside them are getting ready. Dead leaves jaunt about and crackle and float through the air and the hint of nicco from Jefferies’ Woodbine gets some of the lads salivating. There’s some whistling, cat-calling, nice owl effects. Restlessness, basically. Trouble in the ranks. Well it’s cold, for a start, it’s beastly rotten damp. Hands are in pockets, their fingers are closing round a spare bread roll or a sherbert or a conker or, in some cases, a filched fag. A surprising number are feeling a little pooped from masturbatory action in the night. One kid can’t stop thinking about it because it was the first time he’d worked it out and he’s relieved and proud and awfully sinful and checking out his eyesight against the entwined RC on the tie opposite. I won’t zoom in on him or anything. This is not If. I’m just giving you a few scene-setting takes on the general situation. The general situation is looking to be fucked up by my great-uncle, which is just great. HP – I wish he had a nickname, but he hasn’t, he transcends them all, they don’t stick, they’re feeble, they become instantly pathetic – HP’s eyes are boring a hole through the back of Boulter’s head and Boulter knows it: he knows he’s not good enough for HP, he knows he’s not good enough for the job, he’s not tall enough, he has digestion problems, he discovered nits in his beard last night, he’s deeply unattractive to women, his book on Pisistratus is still in the inkwell and he’s chronically unable to find small boys unattractive especially when they’re surpliced in white each morn and eve, singing to the God he has several niggles against – the chief one being His reluctance to manifest Himself in Randle’s cricket scores, which are a personal slight.
Turn around, leave that creep.
There’s a leaf mounting the steps. Follow it. It’s bouncing on the flat slabs of the Corinthian porch. It gets to the doors. The doors open. The Head Porter has my great-uncle by the ear in the shadow of the doors. What a weird duo they make, like a lousy adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby or something. I mean, Streadnam is just so obvious, he’s just so ’orrible and Victorian and smelly he ought to be preserved as a shining example of an era which has left only phantoms and Margaret Roberts. He has really dry fingers, callouses, scabs of pads which scratch my great-uncle’s ear and seem not to know how easy it is to pull an ear off. Or maybe they do. The corridor behind them smells of cabbage, moist loofahs, let-offs, kippers, Latin verbs, a hint of the scent the beautiful pony-tailed sound assistant uses, patchouli or something, as if she has just fled, quick, quick, there! – and a background swell of Izal disinfectant the earl would not have recognised. Neither would he have recognised the corridor. He would have mourned the grand entrance hall with its swell of dark floorboards, its marmoreal busts and bosoms, its ancestral glowerings, its salacious tapestries, its National Trust attendant. Trust the Victorians to carve it up with a corridor, two classrooms, two Upper Sixth studies and a broom cupboard. The leaf whips in and settles temporarily against a wet strand of mop and thrums minutely in the draught funnelled by the avenue and greeted by the corridor and expanded to get the detention lists on the board making a noise like far-off Spartan cohorts drumming joyously on their pectorals. And this is only an autumnal gust. Thank you. Dip the applause, Henry Peterson’s dead, he can’t hear you, pull up the breathless silence.
Streadnam and my great-uncle are silhouetted against the morning light. I’m turned round, I’m moving up, I’m tagging just behind, I can’t stand this corridor a yard longer but Streadnam’s kind of paused for acclaim in the doorway, blocking everything but the draught, forgetting about the grip on the ear-lobe, then remembering and sliding it down to the shoulder where even Streadnam knows it’s more suited to the bloody grandeur of the occasion. I’m waiting in the corridor. This corridor’s not meant for human consumption. Its echoes and its smell are to do with death, detention lists, deadly diseases. Its lino’s coming up like sloughed skin. Its walls are a sweaty sort of distemper, something from the bottom of the TB Sputum range, something that later generations’ brushes slide over without success. It shouldn’t really open, this corridor, onto the linden tree avenue and the woods beyond. It should open onto coils of barbed wire, glistening mud, sleet, ominous booms. Perhaps it will, later, in a two-tone dream sequence I’ll be acclaimed for lifted straight out of What Price Glory? and Bergmanised. Perhaps it will. Stick around. It must have done, in my great-uncle’s actual dreams. I mean, it would be amazing if it hadn’t. Really amazing.
He’s stepping out. No, Streadnam has given him a little shove, a secret one, just between him and my great-uncle’s shoulder-blades, but it still manages to wind. Hey, there’s a lot of hatred in that little shove. Streadnam’s biggest regrets, in a year or two’s time, will be his age and his limp. His little shoves and pinches could’ve been indispensible along the slimy duck-boards. But he’ll make clear his views on shirkers, conchies, scugs all right when the time comes. He’ll emphasise his limp till it looks ridiculous, salute visitors, waddle about ramrod-straight and hang Kitch above the fireplace instead of the Faithful Collie. The orange cud-stain on his beard will deepen. He will smell riper. He will tell each school leaver how blasted bloody green he is of their lucky chance, and how it reminds him of his youth, slapping them on the back and winding them slightly as they step into the carriage or the motor car, with their OTC kit folded neatly on the top in the strapped trunk, whirled off to their various deaths.
Oh, he’s the hell-hound, all right. The porter at the Janus gates. All that. But he is also real. My great-uncle has just felt a real hand between his shoulder-blades, secretly shoving him. That sharp shove is worse than the late thrashing. The Master’s thrashings are clumsy, soft-edged, full of grunts and whistlings through the nose. His strokes never cut. They are sort of loving, as if he really wanted to palp the cheeks with his other hand, not catch them with his cane. My great-uncle’s bottom tingles, he hasn’t sat down for the hour between then and now, but hey, it’s only now he feels like he’s about to crack. It’s only as he stumbles forward with that sharp Streadnam shove that he feels like blubbering, he feels like falling to the slabs and howling.
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br /> He doesn’t. He blinks away the salt blur and he sees the general situation. He pans over it, over the faces beyond the lip of the stone steps and through the fat balusters of the balustrade and mainly keeps coming back to Mr Boulter’s face, separate from the others, right in the middle of the gravel, the gown billowing around it and the purple making his heart leap because it’s the royal purple, it’s Mr Boulter, it’s the Master, it’s The Master who he doesn’t connect with the thrashing just yet, with the whistling nose and the grunts and the nice lead steam engine in the study with its stopper off, smelling generally of spirits or maybe floor-wax. The wind is making noises in my great-uncle’s open mouth, drying it out, making his throat obvious. He closes his mouth. He tries to swallow and steps forward because Streadnam has murmured git going, Nancy homey boy, but his knees have got the wind up. Trust his bally knees to have got the wind up. What rotters they are, letting him down like this!