by C. J. Sansom
‘I understand,’ Frank said bleakly.
Wilson looked at him curiously. ‘I hear you’re still very withdrawn. Not interacting with staff or patients.’
Frank didn’t reply. Wilson sat back in his chair, picked up a pen and started fiddling with it. ‘Did you and your brother play together as children?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Perhaps together with your mother?’
Frank looked at him. He mustn’t be drawn into talk about Edgar. ‘Our mother wasn’t one for – playing.’
‘Did she prefer Edgar?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you feel she did?’
‘I don’t know.’
Wilson sighed. ‘I’m going to put you down for electric shock treatment, Frank. They’re booked up next week, but the week after. We must get you out of this depressive state.’
Ben took Frank back to the ward. The weather had turned colder, and there was frost in the air. Frank was terrified by the thought of shock treatment. He wished he could get away. He had been sent a get well card, of all things, from his colleagues at Birmingham but apart from that had heard nothing from anyone. And Edgar had probably decided to have nothing more to do with him. He was probably drunk somewhere in a bar in San Francisco, trying to forget it all, slugging whisky like Mrs Baker. Frank hated drink, it loosened people’s inhibitions and inhibitions were the only things that kept them from savagery. ‘Drunks,’ he muttered aloud.
‘What was that?’ Ben asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You want to stop that, mac, muttering to yirsel’. It’s a bad habit in here.’
Frank wanted to ask Ben more about the shock treatment but he couldn’t face it. A desperate weariness had come over him.
‘What did Wilson have to say?’ Ben asked.
‘Just that they haven’t found my brother yet.’
‘Did you think any more about calling that old pal of yours?’
Frank didn’t answer, just looked down at his feet. He still wasn’t quite sure it was safe.
Ben left Frank in the day room. Patients were sitting round the television watching Fanny Cradock demonstrating how to make sauerkraut. Some were sitting round the table cutting up strips of paper with blunt children’s scissors; although it was still over a month to Christmas the patients had already been set to making decorations. Mr Martindale wasn’t on the ward any more; after his outburst he had been sent to one of the padded cells.
Frank slunk off to the quiet room, taking his habitual position in the easy chair, facing the window. He thought of his flat in Birmingham; would anyone have tidied it up? He had liked his flat, dingy though it was. Only Birmingham was so far from the sea. He had always loved the sea, ever since he and his mother had gone to visit a cousin of his father in Skegness, when he was ten. Edgar hadn’t come; he was on a school trip to France. Frank had spent days wandering the sands on his own; the beach was full of holidaymakers but the sea was so vast and blank, yet always moving. It was too cold to swim; he had paddled in the surf but even that had made his feet ache, and yet he would have loved to disappear into the water. His mother, back at his father’s cousin’s, would be trying to persuade them of the spirit world just beyond and Mrs Baker’s unique contact with it. They were never invited again.
Over the past few days Frank had thought about killing himself, taking his secret away with him for ever, rather than risking anyone finding out, even David. But he knew he didn’t have the courage. And they were always on the watch in here. The blunt knives and forks the patients used were counted after each meal, and there were no strong light fittings in the rooms to hang a rope from. There was a big picture, though, on the nicotine-yellow wall in the quiet room, a Victorian painting of a stag at bay in the Highlands; there must be a strong nail or hook holding it to the wall. Frank closed his eyes, his body shuddering involuntarily. He didn’t want to die, though he had sometimes yearned to do so at school. He wished he could stop thinking about that place.
Strangmans College was a long square block of a building set on a bleak, windy hillside just outside Edinburgh. One of the city’s many private schools. A Victorian headmaster had moved the institution to a new site, where the bracing air would be good for the boys.
It had been bracing all right, when Frank got off the school coach which had met him at Waverley Station, that Sunday afternoon in 1928. A gale was blowing off the Forth, full of freezing rain. It almost knocked him off his feet. There were three other new boarders on the coach – most Strangmans pupils were day boys but there was a minority of boarders – and the four eleven-year-olds in their new red uniforms stood there frightened and apprehensive, each clutching his red cap against the wind.
Frank stared down the drive at the sandstone building. It seemed huge, still a reddish yellow though all the buildings he had passed in Edinburgh were black with soot, worse than London. The day boys would not arrive for the start of term until next day and the place seemed deserted. Frank had hoped that Edgar, who had travelled up the day before, might be there to welcome him, but there was only a master with a clipboard, a tall, spare man in hat and raincoat with glasses and a severe expression.
Frank was still looking around in the hope of seeing Edgar when a sharp poke in the ribs made him jump. ‘Hey,’ the teacher said in a sharp voice. ‘You’re in a dream, laddie!’ The long ‘R’ made it sound like ‘drrream’. ‘Whit’s yer name? Are you Muncaster?’
‘Yes. I’m Frank.’
The man frowned. ‘Yes, what?’
Frank stared at him blankly.
‘Yes, sir. You call the masters “sir” here. And you’re Muncaster minor, the boys get called by their last names.’ He frowned again. ‘Take that silly grin off yer face. What are ye grinning at me like that for?’ One of the other boys tittered. Frank held himself rigid, fighting a frantic urge to run away.
The master led the boys to an annexe behind the main building, where he took them into a bleak room with four iron beds, a locker beside each. Rain lashed and spat at the windows. ‘This is your dormitory,’ the master said. ‘Number 8, remember that. I’m Mr Ritner and your form number is 4B. Remember, 4B. There’ll be tea at four, the dining room’s on the first floor. Get yourselves unpacked now, go on.’ He walked off, footsteps clumping on the bare boards. Frank stood gawping, the rapped instructions swirling in his head.
At tea, served in a corner of a huge dining room filled with long benches, Edgar appeared along with a dozen other boarders of various ages. Edgar was fifteen now, tall and broad, a junior prefect with a tassel on his cap. He sat beside Frank and spoke to him quietly. ‘So you’re here.’
‘Hullo, Edgar. Gosh, it’s good to see you.’
His brother’s look was stony. ‘Listen, Frank, just cos you’re my brother disnae mean we see each other at school. Understand?’ His voice had taken on the local accent. ‘You’re just another wee tiddler. You don’t bother me, right? I’m in the seniors’ bug-hut so you won’t see much of me anyway.’
‘Bug-hut?’
‘It’s what we call the boarding houses,’ Edgar answered impatiently, as though Frank should have known. He got up. ‘You have to stand on your own two feet here. That’s the Strangmans way. You’ll need to toughen up.’
In the days that followed Frank was in a constant panic; he couldn’t find his way round the enormous building where huge crowds of boys now milled or walked along in lines. Several times, lost, he asked other boys the way but they only laughed. One said threateningly, ‘Whit’re you grinning at me like that for? Ye look like a fuckin’ spastic.’ Frank blinked back tears. ‘Are you crying, ye wee sissy?’ Other boys looked at him with disgusted contempt. Very quickly, word went round the school that there was a new kid in the bug-huts who was a softy, who’d been seen crying. To make it worse he was Edgar Muncaster’s brother. How could someone like Ed Muncaster have a wee runt like that for a brother? It was letting the school down.
Frank’s life became a misery. Boys would surround him in the p
layground and start shouting and jeering at him, poking fun at his thinness, his large ears, his strange spastic grin and his tears. At first, terrified, he would stand in the middle of the circle and scream and shout at them to leave him alone. That only made things worse and after a while Frank realized he must keep quiet, not weep, show no emotion at all.
Once, and only once, Frank lost his temper. There was a day boy called Lumsden in his form. He was large and fat and wore glasses, and could have been bullied himself had he not been smart enough to adopt a confident swagger and make an asset of his size. He soon became the leader of Frank’s tormentors. One cold autumn day, the first frosts already whitening the tough grass on the treeless hillside, a gang of boys had gathered round Frank at morning break, trying to make him cry. He stood in the middle of them, unmoving. Then Lumsden stepped forward and dropped into a sort of crouch, swinging his arms to and fro, a grin on his face that Frank realized was an imitation of his own habitual grimace. ‘Wooo wooo wooo,’ Lumsden went, making monkey noises. ‘Muncaster’s like a chimp I saw at the zoo in the holidays, they grin like that all the time. Monkey Muncaster, Monkey Muncaster.’
The boys cackled; Lumsden had scored a hit. Something broke inside Frank and he leapt at the big boy, swinging his fists and lashing out. He wanted to knock his teeth out, kill him, but his wild fury made him clumsy. Lumsden kicked a leg from under Frank and he crashed down on the asphalt playground. Lumsden leaned over him. ‘You’ve done it now, Monkey,’ he said, his face twisted with anger.
‘Don’t mark him, Hector,’ one of the others warned.
Lumsden straddled Frank and punched him in the stomach, again and again so every last vestige of breath was driven from his body and he almost blacked out. ‘That’s enough, Hector,’ someone called out. ‘You’ll kill the wee squirt.’
Lumsden stood up, his face red. He gave Frank a satisfied leer. ‘That’ll learn ye to remember who ye are.’
Frank knew now that there was nothing he could do; he was quite helpless here. He couldn’t appeal to his brother about the bullies – Edgar would go the other way if he saw Frank coming – or to the masters. They knew – they would have had to be blind and deaf not to – how he was treated, but as Edgar had said, the Strangmans philosophy was that boys must learn to fend for themselves. The masters would do nothing unless they saw a boy with a visible mark. They disliked Frank anyway; in class he couldn’t concentrate, seemed to live in a dream and was often called to account for staring out of the window. Sometimes he got the tawse for it, struck on the hand with the narrow leather belt, a long slit at the end to make it sting more.
So Frank learned to hide, and he became an expert at it. During break and at lunchtimes he would conceal himself in the toilets or in empty classrooms. Best of all, in a corner of the big assembly hall where the boys met for prayers every morning he found an enormous stack of wooden chairs which were only brought out for prize-giving days and other ceremonies. They were covered by a thick old fire curtain. Squeezing in among the stacked-up chairs, Frank found a space in the middle big enough for a little boy to crouch in. He knew it wasn’t very safe but he didn’t care, he had a refuge.
The bullies couldn’t be bothered to come and find him. There were, after all, other fish to fry in such a big school and Frank ignored everyone as much as possible. Although his silent unresponsiveness meant that for most of the time he was left alone, he was often accompanied, as he walked along, by calls of ‘Monkey! Spastic! Gie us a grin, Monkey!’
So things went on, because there was nothing to stop them. The boys were allowed to go out on the hills after school and Frank spent long hours walking alone among the gorse and granite outcrops, over the long grass blown flat by the endless keening winds, always watching the horizon and dodging behind a gorse bush if he saw any other Strangmans boys.
Frank turned twelve, then thirteen and fourteen, and still he had never had a single friend. Edgar turned eighteen in 1931 and left Strangmans, going up to Oxford to read Physics. By now Frank didn’t really live in the real world. The only place he liked was the library. The most popular books – Henty and Bulldog Drummond – didn’t appeal to him much, but he loved science fiction, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells especially. He marvelled at their stories of worlds under the earth and the sea, journeys to the moon and invaders from Mars, visits to the future. During the holidays he had read in a magazine about a German scientist, who predicted that one day rockets would carry men to the moon. When the boys began to learn physics, and about how the solar system worked, Frank’s ears pricked up. The science teacher, who had been told that Muncaster was a problem pupil, found him quick and attentive, able to pick up complex calculations easily. For the first time Frank started getting good marks in a subject. The other masters frowned and tutted; they had always said Muncaster had a brain but was too damn dreamy and lazy to use it. Now he used it to understand Newton and Kepler and Rutherford. He imagined himself travelling to other worlds, where advanced beings treated him with kindness and respect. Sometimes too, asleep on his hard iron bed in the dormitory, he dreamed of Martians invading Earth, one of Wells’ giant tripods aiming a ray gun at Strangmans and shattering it to pieces like a gigantic ruined dolls’ house.
He jerked awake. He had fallen asleep in his chair. The quiet room was cold. Outside the trees and grass were rimed with hoarfrost, the dampness turned to ice. He wondered what time it was; it was starting to get dark so probably it was around four. Ben came back on duty then. He would probably chivvy him about contacting David again. Frank began thinking back to his university days; at least there were no horrors there.
His school science teacher, Mr McKendrick, the only one at Strangmans who had tried to help him, had supervised his coaching for the Oxford entrance exam. ‘I think you’ll pass,’ he had told him. He hesitated, then said, ‘I think you’ll find life better at Oxford, Muncaster. You’ll have to work very hard to excel but you’ll be able to study independently in a way you can’t as a schoolboy. And I think you’ll find life – well – easier. But you’ll have to make an effort if you want to make friends. A real effort, I’m thinkin’.’
Frank arrived at Oxford in 1935 to read Chemistry. Edgar had already graduated and gone on to do postgraduate work in America; good riddance to bad rubbish so far as Frank was concerned. He had walked around Oxford, astonished by the beauty of the colleges. He had hoped for a room on his own, and was worried when they told him he would be sharing. But Frank had learned to judge people on whether or not they were likely to be a threat, and as soon as he saw David Fitzgerald he felt safe. The tall, athletic-looking Londoner was self-contained, but perfectly amiable.
‘What are you studying?’ David asked.
‘Chemistry.’
‘I’m doing Modern History. Listen, which bedroom do you want? One’s a bit bigger but the other’s got a view of the quad.’
‘Oh – I don’t mind.’
‘Take the one with the view if you like.’
‘Thanks.’
Frank was too shy and suspicious to make real friends; he worked with other students in the laboratories but avoided their conversations. He could not help fearing they might suddenly turn on him, calling out ‘Monkey’. But he managed to tag onto the fringes of David’s group, who tended, like David, to be serious, thoughtful, not prone to larking. David had status among the other students, as he had taken up rowing and was in the university team.
Frank always remembered one evening towards the end of his first term. Italy had invaded Abyssinia, and a pact between Britain and France allowing Italy to annex much of the country was raising fierce political opposition. Frank and David were sitting in their rooms discussing the situation with David’s best friend, Geoff Drax.
‘We have to accept Italy’s won the war,’ Geoff said. ‘I wish there had been a different outcome but it’s better to make a settlement now and stop the fighting.’
‘But it’ll be the end of the League of Nations.’ David’s normally quie
t voice betrayed unusual emotion. ‘It’s a licence to any country to start an aggressive war.’
‘The League of Nations is finished. It didn’t stop Japan invading Manchuria.’
‘All the more reason to make a stand now.’
Frank had seen, on sixth-form visits to the cinema, what was happening in Europe: the sinister Stalin; the strutting dictators Hitler and Mussolini. Newsreels of Jewish shop windows in Germany being smashed by jeering Brownshirts, the owners cowering inside, aroused an instinctive sympathy in him for the victims. He had begun following the news. He said now, ‘If Mussolini’s allowed to get away with this, it’ll encourage Hitler. He’s already brought back conscription, and Churchill says he’s building an air force. He wants to go to war in Europe again; God knows what he’ll do to the Jews then.’
Frank realized he had been speaking passionately, vehemently even. He stopped himself suddenly. David’s eyes were fixed on his and it dawned on Frank that, for the first time he could remember, someone was actually interested in what he was saying. Geoff, too, though he said, ‘If Churchill’s right and Hitler’s a danger, all the more reason to try and get friendly with Mussolini.’
‘Hitler and Mussolini are cut from the same cloth,’ Frank countered. ‘They’ll come together sooner or later.’
‘Yes, they will,’ David said. ‘And you’re right, what will happen to the Jews then?’
Someone came into the quiet room, disturbing his reverie. Ben looked down at him keenly. ‘Are ye all right? You look awful worried.’
‘I’m fine.’ Frank thought again, why does he care? Then he remembered his terrible thoughts of suicide earlier, Wilson and the shock therapy. He saw now, there was only one possible alternative. He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I should contact my friend, David, who I knew at university.’
Ben nodded quickly in agreement. ‘All right. You could phone at the weekend when I’m on the nurses’ station. Don’t tell the other staff, you dinnae want Wilson stickin’ his nose in.’