by Adam Thorpe
Don’t y’all rush out at once, d’ya hear? You’ve got plenty of time, plenty. Randle Summer School, Randle College, nr. Basingstoke, Hants.
Seriously, I have the dirt. On file.
Pssst! I have the dirt on Mr Winthrop Holloway-Purse. I can break him. I can knock on his door and I can enter and I can say what I know and watch his cropped skull flicker as the skin tightens and he covers his face in his hands. I can watch him lift his head with an evil smirk and cry, Do your worst! I was a fine fearless fellow, a devoted leader of men! At any rate, I was provoked. It was wartime. I had just led my men against a redoubt bristling with Hun and won it for several minutes at the cost of only a hundred and one of our boys. She was probably a plant. What species? I reply, certain that these are the last whimperings of a broken man. Get out, scug, he snarls. Certainly, Master, I say. He settles back in his leathery seat and plays with the detention lists fanned before him, only his twitching cheek betraying the smug calm that lies upon him like a miasma. At the inner door like an upended snooker table I turn. Oh, by the way, Master. What is it? he spits, barely bothering to look up. The telephone number of the Sun newspaper – do you happen to know it, by any chance? I absently pick at the door’s baize. His face breaks through the miasma like a Raymond Chandler novel. There is no doubting his emotion. You wouldn’t, he murmurs, you wouldn’t. He’s stricken and fearful and the hated governess’s hand is slipping into his pater’s. What do you think, Master? I reply, remembering my mother’s dictum that it never does to be impolite, even to a tradesman, even to my dad, even at this juncture. There is a pause. You would, he murmurs, you would. I remain blank-faced, thinking about what I had for breakfast. He sinks back into his chair, as old as he feels. Detention lists waft down to the parquet marked by the nails of those he has thrashed. He would, he murmurs, he would. His face sags and then crumples into age, and more age, until time has swallowed him up in a slurp of wrinkles and rheuminess and falling hair, and it’s an Edgar Allan Poe short, for there’s nothing except this little pile of dust on the seat that needs to be hoovered up in the morning by Stella, who’ll tut about it.
I close the door on him, softly, because it never does to disturb the dead. The little pile of dust might blow all over the carpet. Stella’d be furious. She knew Roy Orbison. She told me this. Hey pretty woman, walking down the street. That’s right, she laughed, gaily, holding the extension for the hoover. This means I did go to Randle. I did, I did. Early in the morning. Mist, summery morning mist, mist curling around the rugby posts and caressing the all-weather hockey pitch and nudging a linden tree stump in the right place. It was the only one. They must have pulled the others out, like teeth. This one must have beaten them. I sat on it. It had Fuck Off, Riley, cut into the top. Note the comma. Public school edication, that. On the side some lonely kid years ago had carved his initials carefully, it was a work of calligraphy, it was real carving. Someone else had sliced R.I.P. above it. I took out my Swiss penknife and scraped the R.I.P. away. I felt like crying. Seriously, I did. The place was so huge and flat and lonely and lovely, I wanted to cry. I imagined this lonely kid coming back with his kids and showing them his initials and chuckling manfully at the R.I.P. though really it was like a stab in the stomach, it practically killed him, it brought it all back, it opened the welts up, the smells, the hatreds. I got more obsessed with this kid than with my great-uncle. I couldn’t imagine my great-uncle walking down this long open drive with its smooth tarmac and clipped edges and a sign halfway up that said Welcome to Randle College like it was a business park or something. Without the lindens, it was hopeless. I wished I hadn’t come, of course. It spoilt things. It snarled my projector. I got up and walked up the drive towards the big red house, Cavendish House, with cars nuzzling its hard bosom like they were feeding off it, pigs or rats suckling the mother pig or rat, and wishing I wasn’t walking towards it. I felt like a new boy. I was really frightened to meet a prefect or something, or a beak, or Mr Boulter who was dead and buried and buried and dead and then I met Stella on the steps, in light blue overalls. She was doing the cobwebs, she said. So am I, I replied. She giggled. We liked each other. You know how it is. Her little girl was with her. I made her little girl laugh on the steps. I can’t remember how Roy Orbison came up. I was making faces. It must have been the tension. Behind Stella and her little laughing kid was the whole school waiting like Grendel’s mother or something to get going. I said there are magic mushrooms in the grounds. I swept my hand. She giggled and then tutted. Are you an Old Boy? she said. Do I look like an Old Boy? I replied. You never can tell, these days, she said. Stella, your eyes were stars and your skin honey. Hoover Holloway-Purse up. Tut tut tut.
Phantoms, phantoms.
The linden trees shoot upright. There’s dark and light. There’s blown leaves, leaves falling down, there’s an avenue and instead of the science block there’s tussocks and cows and instead of Stella there’s Streadnam because he’s still up there, the ponce. Instead of me there’s my great-uncle. My great-uncle’s turning round. He’s just a kid. He can’t make it. He’s in shock, suddenly. Gauntlet, gantlope, gantlope, gauntlet. Gantlope’s the ugliest word in the English language. Running the gantlope is right. He looks back from the third linden and he sees this guy sticking his head out from the gaggle of servants, looking at him down the avenue. He’s got a rake. All these faces either side of him and all he sees is this servant’s face with the rake stuck up next to it. He’s too far to see the eyes. He wants the rake. He wants to hold on to the rake. He’s got nothing to hold on to and his legs are going. The face of the groundsman is familiar, he knows it, he’s seen it behind webs of twine and through white smoke and above flowers. Let’s not get sentimental about this: he wouldn’t invite this groundsman to tea, not in a month of Sundays. This groundsman has perpetually dirty boots, like Alf. Alf is my great-uncle’s parents’ gardener. They’ve got another one at Hamilton Lodge. He’s called Jeremiah and is a little queer, but frightfully good with shrubbery. My great-uncle wants the rake. It’s the only thing he can see that resembles a staff. God is my staff. Thou art my staff and my salvation. The rake’s far away, like God. My great-uncle holds the air like a pair of banisters. The banisters split apart and the staircase falls, plunges, he hits the ground, his knees roll away, he’s got a leaf stuck to his forehead, he wonders where he is for a moment. There’s a kind of little gaspy silence a jet might have fucked up if this was now, but it isn’t, it’s then, very much then. Nothing fucks it up except the crows crowing over Inkblot Copse and a thick-headed sparrow pratting about with a worm on the avenue in front of Tennison (no relation, even a misspelt one) who’d like to catch it with a pebble but he doesn’t dare, not with Mr Sitfield so close Tennison can smell the dentifrice. OK, OK: Tennison will lose a knee-cap at Le Cateau and Mr Sitfield will sit it out cooking porridge in Poperinghe on account of his dicky heart and hating the taste in his mouth of gassed air and general putrefaction and all that stuff you know about. I can’t tell you about every damn person that pops up. It’ll get like The Omen, with a little dark mark above certain heads. Hey, while Mr Philips is running down the avenue towards the little black crumple of Sunday best in the middle I’ll show you, I’ll give you the general picture: wide-angle take, wide-angle take of the whole avenue from the big gates end, perfect perspective, roughly what Jefferies sees from up on his perch, all those heads and hands, grins and a few not grinning, quite a few actually, quite a few actually allowing something like sympathy or even grief to enter their hearts – wham! – loop the heads, loop in black the faces of those who aren’t going to make it, about a third, about a third are going to be culled, cropped, lopped in their prime, or before their prime, their faces darting about in and out of the black loops, him, and him, and him, and that one with the big flat nose, and this one scratching his knee, and that one standing astraddle who’s ace at Eton fives, and this one who’s Lightfoot’s fag (I’ll get on to Lightfoot soon, just wait a minute) and – oh Christ, I’ve gi
ven it away: there’s one black circle hovering over the Sunday best crumpled in the middle of the avenue, but the face is down again, folded somewhere in that black cloth, the black cap two yards away, no one picking it up for him. I’ve let the cat out of the sack. Like my dad used to do. He’d read the last page of every Agatha Christie I brought home and tell me, the bastard. Like father, like son, hoi? This thing won’t be the last page, I promise. The black loop’s settled like a halo above the black crumple, Mr Philips is there, his arms are going through the loop, blurring it but not erasing it, no one can erase it, no one can scrub the fucker out and say, start again, don’t die, just hide your head on that last day – I mean, the last day of the war, the last full day, the day before the Armistice, the day the black loop looped my great-uncle’s throat and tightened, tightened, hard cheese, guv, someone has to cop it on the last day of any war and go on copping it after, ploughing up shells, skipping on to mines, fading away in a froth of spoiled lungs, spoiled limbs, spoiled eyes, it’s only natural, son, it’s only bleedin’ natural.
The voice of common sense. Against which all eternity surges. I woke up with that line, a couple of years ago. Not bad, huh? I shook Zelda awake and repeated it. I plunged back instantly into sleep, as is my wont. In the morning I’d forgotten it. Zelda had remembered. I loved her. I still love her. I sit in the Rothko Chapel back in Houston and think of her at least once a month. The Rothko Chapel was her favourite place. I mean, in Houston. It’s the only favourite place for anyone who’s not a deadhead, in Houston. We’d sit there and try not to think too much of Rothko slitting his arms in the bath, after. Instead we’d think of eternity and color and deep, cerulean things. We’d leave a scent of sweetness in the air from Zelda’s patchouli oil. It seemed appropriate. We’d always make love after in a kind of smooth and soft way, as if we’d go on having afternoons to make soft love in until God wrapped things up for the planet or the sun got too big. I’d like to make a movie like Rothko made paintings. Something eternal for the eyes, restful and glimmery and deep, something between Rothko and moving grass, grass in a steppe wind, a soft Mongolian wind, all that totally non-commercial stuff I used to despise in my lousy days. Then I’d probably slit my arms, after. I’d have no place else to go. I’d have said my bit. They’d be fighting over the print and making millions of bucks and I’d be slitting my arms just below the elbow, just above the gauntlet, like Rothko did, going out in color.
Sorry: colour. Reading colour gives me a hiccup. I’ve loosed the Old World, sure, off of my oxen. Fix yourselves some more drinks. Drink to Ricky Thornby, Yankee wanker, who can’t spell right. Who can’t talk right. Who’s clinging to a little rock in mid-Atlantic, the fucking limpet. I’m drenched. Get back to Philips, nice decent Mr Philips with the different coloured eyes, one green, one blue. They’re looking into my great-uncle’s umber eyes and they’re encouraging and earnest and kind. The mouth beneath the different coloured eyes is opening and closing. It’s saying let’s go, old chap, come on, old fellow, you’re nearly through, you’re nearly home.
Home.
There’s a smell of mothballs and old cupboards and pipe tobacco and sherry and stuff from Mr Philips’s sleeves. It smells of home, it smells of London, it smells of Dorothy and the big flat-iron and the kitchen and the nursery trunk. William my great-uncle is trying to be a man in front of 351 boys and about fifty men if you don’t count the prefects with their rattly voices and the Captain of School who’s always been a man from the moment he sprung out of his mother’s womb and late tackled the doctor and Ormsby the beak with no pubic hair and a voice so high they have to grip the decanter at Common Room Dinner and all he – my great-uncle – can feel is this hunger for home, for the nursery trunk and Dorothy and the chipped kitchen range and Sparkler the dog who’s actually dead. William doesn’t know this but he is. Mrs Trevelyan meant to tell him but she hasn’t got round to it. She put it off until she forgot. She was going to write to Giles to tell William but she didn’t get round to that, either. She knows Sparkler was one of the three most important things in her younger son’s life and pretty important in her elder son’s, too, but Mrs Trevelyan is not a great mother. In fact, she’s a really lousy mother, the kind that cripples you forever. I didn’t want to get on to this just now. The fact remains that William is thinking of home as Mr Philips props him up and the gaspy silence descends into a miasma of fart-noises and giggles and jeers from higher up and the local version of a slow hand clap from the creeps in the Lower Sixth which is a clicking of fingers, slow slow, because you can do it behind your back – and home means Sparkler running up to meet him and a smell of wet leaves and Agatha vaguely in the background. Agatha’s my great-aunt. She’s a year older than Giles.
She has grey eyes. She’s been dead an awful long time but I know she has grey eyes. She has eyes the color of driftwood baked by the sun, washed over by countless tides, baked by the sun again, scoured by winds and sand – clear clean grey grey lovely grey driftwood grey eyes that men find unnerving and secretly paint or write verses to or place carefully in novels and if they’re not that sort just whimper until they nerve themselves to face her eyes again, holding out their cards like Theseus held his shield against Medusa.