I, Dreyfus

by Bernice Rubens

  Dear old Fenby. How mistaken he was. But he has remained a friend. One of a few. He doesn’t visit, but he writes to me from time to time. He keeps me up to date with the operas and orchestral concerts he’s attended, but he never mentions the school. He knows it would be too painful a reminder.

  But I digress again. I must return to the party and the halcyon days. Lucy was in animated conversation with the biology man whose name I had already forgotten. So I did the rounds alone, topping up glasses on my way. Everyone seemed to be very much at home. After all, they knew the house far better than I. My predecessor had often hosted cocktail parties, and for a while I felt a stranger myself, as if I too were a guest. On my rounds I eavesdropped on the telling of holiday adventures. In one circuit I travelled from Barbados to Cape Town to Paris and Naples, and finally settled in a small Cotswold hamlet where Dr Reynolds, the deputy head, had a cottage. And there I paused, topping Brown’s glass and listening to his angling stories of the fish that got away.

  When the first guest made to leave, I looked at my watch. It was just nine o’clock. I reckoned the gathering had been a success. The rest of the guests followed soon after, and as Lucy and I cleared the decks, we itemised them all by name and subject. The following morning, at the start of term, I was familiar with the handles of all its staff.

  As I was finishing breakfast, Dr Reynolds knocked at the door. I was not as yet familiar with the layout of the building. I knew where my study was but I was uncertain of how to get there. Nor to the assembly room, where I was due at nine o’clock to welcome the boys, old and new, and to familiarise myself with the school song. I was nervous. I kept telling myself that I had years of assembly experience, and countless hours of public speaking, and endless confrontations of man and boy. And moreover a title to give me confidence. Yet I trembled. I was led through corridors and massive halls reeking of history, a history that was by no means mine. I passed the bronzes of saints and the portraits of ancient school founders and I felt, as Lucy had suggested, alien, and I thought of my grandparents with a certain shame. And because of all this, I trembled.

  Is it in hindsight that I trembled? Or did I in fact shiver my steps down those corridors riddled with a tradition of which I was but a spectator? I cannot be sure. The Dreyfus of now, shorn of his title, is very different from the Sir Alfred of those days. My incarceration has paradoxically been a release of sorts, delivering me from a tangle of lies I have lived by, those lies of omission when I chose to ignore heritage. For those roots were a nuisance, an impediment to my progress. How futile I now see that evasion to have been. But whether in hindsight or reality, I trembled.

  Dr Reynolds was leading the way and I was grateful that he gave me no potted biographies of the men who had preceded me in office, those whose portraits hung on the panelled walls. He left me in my office, promising to return just before nine o’clock to escort me to the main hall. I was glad to be alone for a while. I dialled the extension number to my house. I needed to speak to Lucy. I had nothing specific to say to her. I simply wanted to hear her voice. Simply to anchor myself to a reality that I was familiar with, in contrast to the terra incognita in which I found myself. She told me that she had discovered a secret drawer in an in-built wardrobe. It was a matter of sublime irrelevance, but she chose it deliberately to offset what she knew was my stage-fright.

  ‘I’ll see you at lunch,’ I said.

  Then she whispered, ‘I know you’ll be fine, Alfred.’

  I looked at my watch. It was almost nine o’clock. Dr Reynolds knocked and called from outside the door. ‘Are you ready, Sir Alfred?’

  I was grateful to hear my title. It always boosted my confidence, and I strode to the door and walked by his side towards the assembly hall.

  I entered from the back. I reckoned that there were about six hundred boys present, and not one head turned to view me. A few steps led on to the raised dais. There was a table on the platform and a lectern to its side. Behind it, the chaplain of the school was already in place. I stood behind the table with Dr Reynolds at my side.

  The chaplain took as his text a verse from Isaiah. ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.’ I had expected some New Testament source, considering the Church roots of the school, and I wondered whether the chaplain was nodding to me personally in this respect and whether I had so soon been rumbled. But I did not allow it to trouble me. He spoke about the current turmoil in the world and the need to seek peace. His was a pretty homily, short and sweet. Then it was my turn. I rose to a thundering silence of expectation. I introduced myself without reference to my roots, but with a run-down on my past teaching experience. I offered the occasional witticism but I did not overdo it, for authority must affirm its place; I have in my time been confronted with a matey parson and I found it inconvenient and embarrassing. I spoke for about ten minutes, and as I sat down I noted Mr Fenby making his way towards the piano. It was hymn-time, Bunyan’s ‘To be a Pilgrim’, a relief since Jesus played no part in it. And I joined in the singing with gusto. Then the boys sat down to listen to sundry announcements from Dr Reynolds and stood once again for the school song. Mr Fenby had rehearsed this with me the evening before and I belted it out like any old-timer. After that assembly I felt I had acquitted myself reasonably well and I was glad when Dr Reynolds shook me warmly by the hand. I returned to my office and refrained from phoning Lucy. I would see her at lunch, my next Waterloo.

  I spent the morning familiarising myself with the school’s routine and dealing with papers that needed my attention. Dr Reynolds called me at eleven o’clock for the morning break, and he escorted me to the senior staff room for coffee. He told me that my presence was not obligatory and that the last head had taken coffee in his room. But I expressed my wish to join members of the staff, at least on the first day.

  As I entered the room, a silence fell. I felt that I had to apologise for my presence and to assure the staff that I would not make a habit of it but since it was my first day, I wished to acquaint myself with the daily routine. They welcomed me, and brought my coffee, and we settled down in the armchairs around the blazing fire.

  The talk was of a story in The Times that morning. There had been a motion in Parliament to make Holocaust denial an illegal offence. Again, like the quotation from Isaiah, I felt that the subject was related to my appointment but I fought off such a coincidence for it threatened paranoia. Mr Fenby pronounced himself against such a move. Vicious though such denial was, its proscription threatened freedom of speech. Smith from geography agreed with him. Brown from chemistry was in favour of the motion, and cited the books of one so-called historian, a crusader of Holocaust denial, suggesting that they should be burned. Though I silently agreed with him, the notion of book-burning smacked sourly of an earlier time, and one in my own childhood.

  It was then that Eccles offered his opinion. ‘I think denial is a monstrosity,’ he said. ‘After all the evidence. After all the proof. Good God, six million. Horrendous.’

  I was watching him as he spoke, though he was unaware of my gaze. As he announced the numbers I could have sworn he winked. Yes, winked. My heart turned over. I was so aghast at the wink itself that I could not finger its recipient. It could have been any one of them.

  I finished my coffee and returned to my study. My stomach heaved. I wanted very much to be sick. Now that I think about it, that scurrilous wink signalled the very beginning of my fall. But, at the time, what upset me most of all was that the man taught history, and was indeed head of the department. I wanted to call him into my office but I had no grounds for accusation. I could confront him with the wink, but he might well ascribe it to a nervous tic, and then I would look a fool and word of paranoia would spread. I knew I could do nothing except keep a stern eye on him. I resolved that his twentieth-century history class would be the first that I would attend. But I would wait a while, and monitor his every phrase.

  We were due to go down en famille to the cott
age that weekend, all eight of us. After our parents’ deaths, we had kept the cottage on by way of retaining links with our childhoods. Besides, there were their graves to visit and to tend. On my visits to the churchyard, I would whisper the news of the families. But I wouldn’t tell them about Eccles. They might turn under the Jesus that protected them.

  I resumed my paperwork to take my mind off the matter, but I couldn’t get his wink out of my eye. And to this day, in my nightmares, it mocks me.

  As I was studying the curricula, I heard the church bell toll. And again Dr Reynolds was at my door. Though I had no appetite, I looked forward to seeing Lucy who, by tradition, was required to lunch at the headmaster’s table. I opened the door and found Lucy at Dr Reynolds’s side. He had made it his business, on this first day, to call for her. We went together to the dining-room. More oak-panelled walls, more portraits. And something new. A roll of honour that stretched back to the Crimean War, the years when my forebears were fleeing Odessa. I took Lucy’s hand and she squeezed it, but we disjoined as we entered the dining-hall. The boys were already assembled, and at our entry they rose en masse, and not until we were seated did they resume their seats.

  The High Table was on a raised platform, and around it sat some heads of departments, some housemasters and the head boy. Our place settings were more refined than those at the boys’ tables but the menu was the same. After the coffee-break wink, I was in no mood for discussion, so I did not initiate conversation. I looked across at the head boy, who was as silent as I. I smiled at him.

  ‘I’m a new boy here,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘I was once too, sir,’ he said. ‘A million years ago.’

  ‘As bad as that?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I shall be sorry to leave. I’ll miss the treacle pudding.’

  I asked him what he was going to do. He told me he hoped to go to Oxford to study law. His father was a judge, he said.

  I knew that his name was Stenson. And I had certainly heard of his father, who was known as a stern judge with strong right-wing tendencies. He made it clear that he favoured the return of capital punishment. Not my kind of person, but I made allowances for his son, in the hope that he would take a kinder course. I warmed to Stenson. ‘Come and see me at any time,’ I said.

  He seemed astonished at my offer. Clearly it was not the habit of headmasters of this school to make themselves so readily available. I intended to change that custom. I had no wish to be a mere figurehead. I hoped I had established some rapport with him. Through his office, word would leak throughout the school that the new headmaster was approachable.

  After lunch, I received the housemasters in my study and discussed their reports. I had had a full working day, and I was glad to return to our school house when it was over. I was strangely tired. Lucy called it emotional fatigue. She may have been right, for that constantly winking eye exhausted me.

  Over the next few weeks I followed a self-designed routine. I cocked my eye and ear continuously on Mr Eccles. I dropped in unannounced on his classes and found his teaching techniques superb. Likewise with most of the other teachers, though I found the English department less imaginative than the one in Hammersmith. Given my partiality to rhyme, I made but one innovation that term. I appointed a poet-in-residence. His job was to be available to any boy who openly, or covertly, as was usually the case, tried his hand in verse. I was not too hopeful of his appeal. But Richard Worthing, as he was called, was optimistic. And indeed, within a few weeks, a most surprising number of would-be Byrons and wannabe Dylans were knocking on his door. Once I invited him to my lunch table, but he was clearly unhappy in its stiff company. He preferred to dine amongst the boys.

  My presence at morning chapel was not obligatory but I dropped in from time to time only in order to validate my weekly visit to the Jewish prayer group. I had to be seen to balance my interests. There were only a few Jewish boys at the school, two dozen at the most, though I suspect there were a fair number of closet Jews like myself who chose the safer Jesus congregation. The school used the weekly services of the minister who preached in the synagogue in the neighbouring town. We were approaching the time of the Jewish year crammed full of Holy days: the New Year itself, followed by the Day of Atonement, and the Simchat Torah, which marked the ending of the reading of the Law. So there was no shortage of themes for the minister’s short sermons. I enjoyed those weekly gatherings. They were noisy and informal and I didn’t have to muffle a forbidden word. And though the songs they sang were entirely unknown to me, they were strangely familiar, and after a few attendances, I knew them by heart.

  The term passed quickly, and on the last day Lucy and I gave a pre-Christmas lunch for most of the staff. They talked of their holiday arrangements. Fenby was participating in a music festival at Dartington; Dr Reynolds was staying put in his London pied-á-terre; Turner from physics was off skiing; and Brown from chemistry was going to San Francisco, though he gave no reason why. Richard, our poet, intended to go from party to party until he found a steady girlfriend. Eccles confessed to going to Marseilles, an unlikely place for Christmas I thought, though he insisted on having friends there. As for myself, I was going back to my village and to my first orphaned yuletide.

  We were determined, Matthew and I, to make it a festive occasion, if only for the sake of the children. I missed my parents woefully, but added to that, I was slowly losing my appetite to celebrate the birth of a prophet whose name I could not even utter. For me the holiday had to be a break from the half-lie that I was living. So I concentrated on the ritual, the candles, the tree, the presents, the holly wreath on the door, the turkey, the pudding, none of which needed to have anything to do with Him in whose such abused name my grandparents had entered the ovens. Daily we visited our parents’ graves, flowered them and wept. We visited their neighbours, and we picked up again on our old school friends and our children played with theirs. It was a holiday of remembrance, and in that remembrance, a celebration.

  On our last night I went to the cemetery alone. I crouched by my parents’ graves – kneeling was not in my nature – and I told them all about my new school. I told them I was happy there and I thanked them for their guidance. I opened my heart to them, the part that was permissible to opening. But I did not tell them about the Eccles wink.

  Chapter 13

  ‘His children are growing up without him,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s all so unfair.’

  Sam and Matthew were sitting in a café beside the river.

  ‘Is there no news of an appeal?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I don’t want an appeal,’ Matthew said firmly. ‘I don’t want a reduction of sentence. I don’t want clemency. All that implies guilt. I want a retrial. Nothing less.’

  How he has changed, Sam thought. He had become assertive. While hitherto he had been a patient foot-slogger, begging for support, now he was nothing less than an ardent crusader.

  ‘I’ve found a lawyer,’ he said, and Sam noticed a seemingly inappropriate twinkle in his eye. ‘A woman,’ Matthew went on, ‘Rebecca Morris. She’s young and not all that experienced but she is passionate in Alfred’s defence. She has all the papers and she’s going through them word for word. She’s already discovered flaws and holes in the arguments.’

  ‘Does Alfred know of this?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No. Not yet. And I don’t want him to know. I don’t want to raise his hopes.’

  ‘How is Susan?’ Sam asked after a pause. ‘Are you still apart?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for some time,’ Matthew said. ‘I see the children, but she disappears when I pick them up. I’m still at Lucy’s. How is the book going?’

  ‘Well,’ Sam said, ‘but slowly. Recall can be very upsetting, especially if, like Alfred, you are an honest man. At the moment he’s writing about those events that led up to the catastrophe. It must be very hard for him. But he seems well enough. I saw him last week. I took him a cassette-player and some tapes. That pleased him, I think.’

 
; ‘Lucy has a visit next week,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve taken Rebecca to meet her and it has raised her spirits. We must hope, we must hope,’ Matthew said. Then disconsolately he added, ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Just hope,’ Sam said. ‘We mustn’t lose sight of that.’

  They were silent for a while. Then Sam asked, ‘Is there any chance that I might meet Susan? Talk to her perhaps?’

  ‘There’s no chance,’ Matthew said. ‘And even if there were, I wouldn’t want you to. It’s over, she and I. You can’t backtrack on betrayal. The damage is done. I hope one day she’ll be very sorry.’

  ‘She will be,’ Sam said. Then he broached the subject that had been the reason for his meeting with Matthew.

  ‘Did Alfred ever speak to you about a Mr Eccles? He was the history master at the school.’

  ‘No,’ Matthew said. ‘I don’t recall that he did. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘I think Alfred considered him an enemy. You might well ask Rebecca to investigate his testimony.’

  Sam had read the latest entry of Dreyfus’s confession and since reading it, he too had been haunted by the Eccles wink. He too sensed it as a key to the Dreyfus mystery.

  They parted with promises of meeting again soon. Sam watched the back of him as he left the cafè. As he viewed his straight-backed tread towards the door, he thought of his brother’s stoop of despair.

  Chapter 14

  My first year at the school passed without serious hiccups. I was wary of cliques. Always had been in my whole teaching career. I discouraged them because they were exclusive and tended to lead to elitism and intolerance. It was relatively simple to disperse a group of boys who were constantly engaged with each other by diverting their attentions to other group pursuits. But when that clique is led by a master, it becomes an altogether more threatening situation. It struck me that Mr Eccles’s following was more like a cabal. His groupies behaved like disciples, forever taking tea in his rooms, walking with him after school hours, and even going with him on theatre trips that, with my permission, he organised. I could do nothing about it. I shared my misgivings with Fenby, who laughed them off.