The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  Beneath the desk, Andrew polished the glass of his little mirror on a corner of his shirt, humming quietly to himself and stroking the cushion with the tips of his fingers. Checking that Mr Gwynne was busy with his picture of a large, stripy cat, he lifted it until it was higher than the windowsill, and looked out at the world behind him: the playground with its mysterious grids and spirals, the bungalows on the main road, the flat fields that flooded in the spring and the autumn, the farms converging as they rose towards the hilltop.

  Andrew could see things in the foreground, too, although in the mirror they became darker and appeared to bulge towards him. Ranging along the windowsill were the animals that the class had made at the end of the previous term, caught in the midday sunlight, chicken wire welling from their wildly coloured sides. Turning the mirror a fraction, he could make out Robin, sitting at his desk next to Nigel and the Wendy house, intently copying the cat onto the paper in front of him. Andrew was the only child in the class who sat alone at his desk, and above all he loved those days when Robin would come and sit beside him for a while and whisper to him about the Sheenah, about the caves inside Cold Winter and the adventures they would have in the untold weeks of the summer holidays.

  “Andrew?” said Mr Gwynne abruptly, lowering his chalk and staring at him. “What on earth have you got there?”

  Andrew froze, looking past the reflection, and it was a moment or two before he realised that Mr Gwynne was talking about his little mirror. Instantly, he felt a prickling sensation on the back of his head, the muscles twitching around his mouth, although it wasn’t until Mr Gwynne began, cautiously, to move towards him that he managed to snatch the mirror away between his legs – where he would put his hands when he was lying at night in the barn – bending his head over on top of himself so that nobody could see his face, closing his eyes as tightly as possible and hunching his shoulders into his ears.

  “Andrew,” said Mr Gwynne, gently, his voice now almost beside him. “Come on, there’s no need to be upset. I’m not cross with you…”

  His face pressed into his arms, Andrew could smell the Werndunvan smells stronger than ever. In his mind, he was back in the hayloft, darting across the open bales with Di just behind him, sliding through a crack in the stack in the corner. Here was a cavity the exact size of a boy and his puppy, and Andrew murmured noises of comfort to her, nuzzling her neck as he scraped the strands of hay back across the entrance – trying to ignore Mr Gwynne, whose hand was now on his shoulder – restoring the wall of bales until you could have searched the barn forever and never have hoped to find them.

  “Andrew, come on,” said Mr Gwynne, and it sounded like he was smiling. “Let’s make a deal, okay? You sit back up and show me whatever you were just playing with, and I promise that I won’t take it away from you… Okay?” He paused, and Andrew could hear the giggles and whispers in the room around them. “Later on, I’m going to need someone to help me stick up everyone’s pictures on the walls… What do you think, eh? Would you like to help me stick up pictures this afternoon?”

  Without a thought, Andrew nodded, uncurling gradually until he was sitting back upright. He glanced at the faces staring at him from around the room, but still he reached between his legs and sat the little mirror on the desk in front of him.

  “Good Lord,” said Mr Gwynne, almost to himself.

  He took the leather-covered case and held it up to the sunlight, shaking his head, turning it over several times before he unfastened the catch and inspected the cushion, the golden frame and the blackened curve of the glass. He turned his back to the window, lifted the mirror above his left shoulder and ran his eyes across the reflection, the stifled colours and the miniature events taking place on the hill beneath Wiggington.

  “Well,” said Mr Gwynne, as if there was no one in the room besides the two of them. “I don’t know whether you know anything about this thing already, Andrew, but it’s called a Claude glass. I’ve never actually seen one before, I’ve only read about them, but in the eighteenth century artists and tourists – that’s people who like to go around looking at things – used to carry them around with them to look at the countryside. It was one of those funny things that they liked to do in those days, to make the world look like a picture… Where on earth did you get it?”

  The other children were giggling less all of a sudden, and Andrew began to feel a little braver as his eyes flickered between the mirror and the face of his teacher.

  “I found him,” he said.

  “Where?” asked Mr Gwynne. “Where did you find him?”

  “In the big room,” said Andrew.

  Mr Gwynne smiled, running the end of his finger across the cushion that faced the mirror. He closed the catch and handed it back.

  “Andrew’s is a very interesting house,” he told the class, moving a foot or two away from him, looking around the room. “Once upon a time, it used to belong to a man named Thomas Hutchinson, who was a farmer from the north of England. He was the brother-in-law of a very great poet called William Wordsworth. I‘ll tell you what – after lunch I’ll read you all one of his poems.”

  * * *

  The rain fell softly outside the living-room. It hissed in the trees, hushed the sheep in the fields, tinkled in the guttering and popped in drops on the fertiliser bags beside the shed. Like the background fuzz of a record, it was a noise that you heard rather than listened to – creeping unnoticed into your consciousness, muted by the walls and the windows, lit by the colourless light of the early evening.

  Robin sat at his table in the corner, beneath the tall brass lamp with the tassels on its lampshade, and his eyes were blurred as he stared at the lines and the figures that trailed away down the paper in front of him. Through the ceiling, he could just hear Martin and Oliver, his brother’s best friend, plotting their assault on the Sheenah, discovering priest’s holes and tunnels that bored into the heart of the hill. Through the door to the kitchen, he could hear his parents talking excitedly about something, and it was bad enough having to do addition, subtraction and times tables every evening without having to listen to everything that you were missing out on as well.

  Ever since the end of lambing, Adam had made Robin do half an hour’s homework every day after school – setting him maths exercises, and marking them promptly for the following morning. What he had done to deserve this treatment, Robin couldn’t begin to imagine. At school, Mr Gwynne gave them extra work only by way of a punishment, and it seemed to Robin now that he had been punished every single day for a whole month. A month of misery, with no hope at all before the summer holidays!

  “Look,” said Tara, somewhere not far from the kitchen door. “I like Huw Gwynne, okay? I think he’s a bloody good teacher.”

  “Yes, I know you do…” Adam paused. “And I’m sure he’s got his strengths. But that’s not really the issue, is it? Yes, he gets them enthused, but for what purpose? I mean, how are these children supposed to sit an exam when they can’t write properly?”

  There was a kind of growling noise, and Tara seemed to be stamping as she walked across the square, red tiles.

  “You sound like my bloody father!” she said.

  “Well, just this once, maybe I do,” said Adam. “Maybe this time he wasn’t being all that unreasonable.”

  “Of course he wasn’t being bloody unreasonable!” Tara snapped. “He is never unreasonable, just as he is never understanding!”

  The volume of their voices was coming and going, and for a time Robin could hear nothing but the odd syllable. He looked again at his horrible homework, cupped his hand around his ear, then – careful to be as quiet as possible – he stood up from his table and tiptoed over to the doorstep, where he sat back down again, leant towards the door, pulled his knees up to his chest and pushed his thumb into his mouth.

  “They’re bright kids, Tara,” Adam was saying, calmly. “That’s the point. I’ve no doubt at all that there’s a lot of stimulation in… Welsh mythology and the futur
e of the cosmos. But what happens in four or five years’ time? What happens when they get to Abberton Comp? I mean, you look at Stuart, John the Glyn’s son. He spent five years bunking off, sniffing glue behind the bus shelter. He’s got nothing to show for it. Huw Gwynne… Huw Gwynne is a distraction. You must see that? It isn’t going anywhere.”

  Tara sat a saucepan on the Aga with a clunk, and a second or two later there was a clicking noise as she cut up some vegetable or another on the chopping board. Leaning closer still towards the door, covering his left eye with his hand, Robin could make out a sliver of kitchen through the crack around the frame – a slice of the table where Adam was packing his pipe, a wider slice of the Aga where a saucepan was just coming to the boil, its steam bubbling upwards into the dense grey smoke of the tobacco.

  “Look,” said Tara, and her voice sounded taut. “We live on a Welsh hill farm, okay? The fact is, you live on a Welsh hill farm, you get Welsh hill-farm children. It’s as simple as that… The boys are healthy, they’ve got space, they’re surrounded by nature, they’ve got all of the bloody things that I never had when I was a kid and I’m absolutely buggered if I’m going to go and take it all away from them!”

  “Yeah,” said Adam, “but when it comes down to it, even Andrew’s got most of that lot.”

  “Oh, don’t be fatuous!” Tara spat.

  “Who’s being fatuous?” said Adam. “Tara, not a single child went from Abberton to university last year. Not one!”

  It had occurred to Robin, as he struggled with his extra work, that he should do as he had told himself when he was at Werndunvan, and simply run away. Many times he had thought about the big, dusty room with its collection of treasures, about the hayloft, the Mars bars, the puppy and the television, but somehow there was something that held him back. Cold Winter seemed to have grown between the two farms, become ominous and insurmountable, and, since Tara wouldn’t let him play there again, Werndunvan too seemed suddenly much scarier: a place of ghosts and floors that might collapse at any moment, where the wilderness didn’t just stop at the doors and the windows but carried on through the rooms and the passageways, dissolving them piece by piece, sucking them away into the outside air.

  Robin heard the splash as Tara dropped the vegetables into the boiling water, and as he peered again through the crack between the door and its frame his mother looked cornered. It was all that he could do not to come running to help her.

  “The thing is,” Adam continued, “we chose to live on a Welsh hill farm, Tara. It’s a very significant distinction. We chose to go to university. We can’t just deny our children the same choice that we had.”

  “Christ, Adam!” Tara turned round, glowering. “You’re the bloody… zealot round here! You’re the one who insists on playing the Radnorshire hill farmer! Adam Penllan! Don’t make out like I’m the only one who wanted to bring them up here!”

  “Could you stop being so emotional about it?”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “That we take up your father’s offer,” said Adam. “There are other schools. Not near here, no, but there are other schools.”

  Upstairs, Martin and Oliver were bouncing on one of the beds. Robin could hear them quite clearly, although such was the hush of the dim, watery evening that he would never have thought that they could have been heard in the kitchen. He remained on the step, watching his mother and father glaring at one another across the warm red glow of the floor.

  “They’re too young,” said Tara, quietly.

  “Robin is seven and a half,” said Adam.

  “Exactly,” said Tara.

  “You were away at boarding school when you were his age, Tara!” said Adam. He paused to puff on his pipe. “Look, I don’t want him to leave, either. But he would only need to be away four nights a week. He’d be back here every weekend…”

  “What the fuck would you know about it?” Tara shouted. “What would you know about being sent away from your family when you’re seven years old and dumped among strangers? The fucking… trauma of it! I will never, never, send my children away like that! Never!”

  “So Robin gets the reverse?” asked Adam, his voice as stable as ever. “Even if it’s just as bad… Tara, three of the other children in his class have been forbidden to talk to him by their mothers because he’s giving them nightmares! This… Sheenah thing. I swear, he’s so tied up in his imagination, I can’t tell sometimes whether he knows what’s real and what’s not, and, frankly, it’s not doing Martin any favours, either…”

  “Do you even know where it comes from?” Tara interrupted. “Do you know what Sheenah means?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Robin put his hands to his ears, but he couldn’t stop listening, watching the back of his father’s head, clouds of smoke ballooning around it.

  “Machines,” said Tara. “It’s bloody machines! That’s where it comes from! Thanks to your bloody machines, Robin’s convinced he’s on the point of being attacked by some kind of mechanical army…”

  “That’s just ridiculous!” said Adam. “How are you supposed to run a farm without machinery?”

  “So we need that huge blue truck of yours, do we?” said Tara, furiously. “And Philip needed to spend more than he’s ever spent on his wife and his son in their entire fucking lives to get a stupid tractor and a stupid bulldozer just so he could compete with you?!”

  Adam continued to smoke in his chair, light glancing from the crown of his head, his fingers drumming on the table in front of him.

  “So,” he said, eventually, “what about Hereford College?”

  “The College is a private school,” said Tara. “You know what I think about private schools. And, besides, we’re completely fucking skint, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  She reappeared in the crack, drying her hands on her apron, and as she looked at Adam her face appeared to be trembling, the muscles shivering in her cheeks and around her eyes.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “So my father wants to pay for Robin to leave his family and the school he loves…”

  “Come on, Tara,” said Adam. “I don’t want him to go any more than you do – you know that – but we have got to be sensible about this…”

  “No!” Tara turned and slammed something down hard on the sideboard. “No… I don’t have to be sensible about this. Adam, there is a line to be drawn here! I’m not going to send them away!”

  There was another long, horrible pause in which Robin bit his thumb so as not to make any noise.

  “So what do you suggest, then?” asked Adam. “We move? We sell the farm?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE TERRIBLE SUNLIGHT

  With the start of June the rain stopped again, and this time it didn’t return. The sheep crept out from under the trees, bald and scrawny – shorn with the first flush of sunshine and not so much bigger now than their fat, hairy lambs. Around them, the grass was beginning to straighten, fanning and filling the fields, discovering flowers, thistles and banks of nettles in the shade. Along the hedges and on the hillsides where the bracken was pushing in spears from the moist ground, the blossom ceased to be an aspect of the general greyness – like the sheep, like the flowers and the butterflies – and suddenly the hawthorn trees, the damsons and the crab apples were cascades of white in the hot sunlight.

  Summer had, it seemed, been progressing all along, behind the lines of the rain and the low sullen clouds, in the elevated regions where the buzzards were once again spiralling, surveying their dominions: the shining streams and ponds teeming with tadpoles, the green-brown closeness of the hilltops, the twisting roads and dingles, and the woods where bluebells rippled like water and where there were orchids, if you knew where to look for them, or sheep if they had happened to get there first.

  In the abandoned hallway at Werndunvan, sunlight came through cracks so tiny you would otherwise never have known that they were there. It fell in lines of swarming sparks, catching a dead mouse in the filth on the f
lagstones, a newspaper that had once stopped the draughts around a window, one of the great, tubular constructions that spiders create when left to themselves, the tall man in the tight trousers who was normally hidden by the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

  Andrew stood in the hallway and inspected the man: the grey hairs curling through the bars of black on his red cheeks, the long coat and the shirt that bunched into frills at his neck. He had dark, kind-looking eyes, a bit like Mr Gwynne’s, and around him there were lawns so green that they might have had a light of their own. Glass gleamed in the windows of the house, the frames neatly painted, while pink and yellow flowers bloomed around the walls.

  The world in the picture was a place that Andrew recognised, even as he recognised the vague, shadowy world in his little mirror. It was Werndunvan, but it was another Werndunvan – without the crumbling barns and the heaps of machinery rusting round the edges of the yard. It made him think about rolling in the grass, when the spring came over the valley, about Penllan, bright and clean across the hill, and as he looked more closely he could even see the track that Philip had bulldozed, winding its way towards the top of Cold Winter.

  Looking again at the hall, Andrew wondered if the man on the wall had once lived at Werndunvan, and if sometimes he would climb from his picture and set off up the stairs, treading carefully, wandering down the passages and into the rooms where grass and saplings grew between the floorboards. He looked at the darkened doorways around him, the sagging cobwebs stretched between the banisters, the stripes of the sunlight, the layer of dust that lay across the jumbled footprints in the corridor that led to the big room, and suddenly he remembered the ghosts that Robin had told him about: the people who stayed in their houses after they were dead, who were horrible and see-through and wanted to kill you.