“Just because I did a good map—it’s not fair!”
“Ghastly!”
The boy was looking down at his feet. Slowly he turned away and went back to his desk. He sat down, bowed his head over his book. His ears were so red they even had a touch of Matty’s purple about them. Mr Pedigree sat at his own desk, his two hands trembling on it. Henderson shot him a glance up under his lowered brows and Mr Pedigree looked away.
He tried to still his hands, and he muttered,
“I’ll make it up to him—”
Of the three of them only Matty was able to show an open face to the world. The sun shone from one side of his face. When the time came for him to climb to Mr Pedigree’s room, he even took extra care in the arrangement of his black hair so that it hid the livid skull and purplish ear. Mr Pedigree opened the door to him with a shudder that had something feverish about it. He sat Matty down in a chair but himself went walking to and fro as if the movement were an anodyne for pain. He began to talk to Matty or to someone, as if there were an adult understanding in the room; and he had hardly begun when the door opened and Henderson stood on the threshold.
Mr Pedigree shouted,
“Get away, Ghastly! Get away! I won’t see you! Oh God—”
Then Henderson burst into tears and fled away, clattering down the stairs and Mr Pedigree stood by the door, gazing down them until he could no longer hear the boy’s sobs or the noise of his feet. Even then, he stayed where he was, staring down. He groped in his pocket and brought out a large white handkerchief and he passed it over his forehead and across his mouth and Matty watched his back and understood nothing.
At last Mr Pedigree shut the door but did not look at Matty. Instead, he began to move restlessly round the room, muttering half to himself and half to the boy. He said the most terrible thing in the world was thirst and that men had all kinds of thirst in all kinds of desert. All men were dypsomaniacs. Christ himself had cried out on the cross, “ΔιΨάω.” The thirsts of men were not to be controlled so men were not to blame for them. To blame men for them would not be fair, that was where Ghastly was wrong, the foolish and beautiful young thing, but then he was too young to understand.
At this point Mr Pedigree sank into the chair by his table and put his face in his hands.
“ΔιΨάω.”
“Sir?”
Mr Pedigree did not reply. Presently he took Matty’s book and told him as briefly as he could what was wrong with the map. Matty began to mend it. Mr Pedigree went to the window and stood, looking across the leads to the top of the fire-escape and beyond it to the horizon where the suburbs of London were now visible like some sort of growth.
Henderson did not go back to his prep in the hall nor to the lavatories that had been his excuse for leaving it. He went towards the front of the building and stood outside the headmaster’s door for whole minutes. This was a clear sign of his misery; for it was no mean thing in his world to bypass the other members of the hierarchy. At last he tapped at the door, first timidly, then more loudly.
“Well boy, what do you want?”
“See you, sir.”
“Who sent you?”
“No one, sir.”
That made the headmaster look up. He saw the boy had been crying very recently.
“What form are you in?”
“Mr Pedigree’s, sir.”
“Name?”
“Henderson, sir.”
The headmaster opened his mouth to say ah! then closed it again. He pursed his lips instead. A worry began to form itself at the back of his mind.
“Well?”
“It’s, it’s about Mr Pedigree, sir.”
The worry burst into full flower, the interviews, the assessment of blame, all the vexations, the report to the governors and at the end of everything the judge. For of course the man would plead guilty; or if it had not gone as far as that—
He took a long, calculated look at the boy.
“Well?”
“Sir, Mr Pedigree, sir—he gives me lessons in his room—”
“I know.”
Now it was Henderson’s turn to be astonished. He stared at the headmaster, who was nodding judiciously. The headmaster was very near retirement, and from tiredness as much as anything switched his determination to the job of fending the boy off before anything irremediable had been said. Of course Pedigree would have to leave, but that could be arranged without much difficulty.
“It’s kind of him,” said the headmaster fluently, “but I expect you find it a bit of a bore don’t you extra work like that on top of the rest, well, I understand, you’d like me to speak to Mr Pedigree wouldn’t you, I won’t say you said so, only say that we don’t think you’re strong enough for extra work so you needn’t worry any more. Mr Pedigree simply won’t ask you to go there any more. Right?”
Henderson went red. He dug at the rug with one toe and looked down at it.
“So we won’t say anything about this visit to anyone else will we? I’m glad you came to see me, Henderson, very glad. You know, these little things can always be put right if you only talk to a, a grown-up about them. Good. Now cheer up and go back to your prep.”
Henderson stood still. His face went even redder, seemed to swell; and from his screwed-up eyes the tears jetted as if his head was full of them.
“Now come along, lad. It’s not as bad as that!”
But it was worse. For neither of them knew where the root of the sorrow was. Helplessly the boy cried and helplessly the man watched, thinking, as it were, furtively of what he could not imagine with any precision; and wondering after all whether fending off was either wise or possible. Only when the tears had nearly ceased did he speak again.
“Better? Eh? Look my dear boy, you’d better sit in that chair for a bit. I have to go—I’ll be back in a few minutes. You go off, when you feel like it. Right?”
Nodding and smiling in a matey kind of way the headmaster went out, pulling the door to behind him. Henderson did not sit down in the offered chair. He stood where he was, the redness draining slowly from his face. He sniffed for a bit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Then he went away back to his desk in the hall.
When the headmaster returned to his study and found that the boy had left he was relieved for a bit since nothing irremediable had been said; but then he remembered Pedigree with much irritation. He debated speaking to him at once but decided at last that he would leave the whole unpleasant business until the first hours of morning school, when his vital forces would have been restored by sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough, though the whole business could not be left longer than that; and remembering his earlier interview with Pedigree the headmaster flushed with genuine anger. The silly man!
However, next morning when the headmaster braced himself for an interview he found himself receiving shocks instead of delivering them. Mr Pedigree was in his classroom but Henderson was not; and before the end of the first period, the new master, Edwin Bell—already “Dinger” to the whole school—had discovered Henderson and suffered an attack of hysterics. Mr Bell was led away but Henderson was left by the wall where the hollyhocks hid him. It was evident that he had fallen fifty feet from the leads or the fire-escape that was connected with them and he was dead as dead. “Dead,” said Merriman, the odd-job man, with emphasis and apparent enjoyment, “Dead cold and stiff,” which was what had touched off that Mr Bell. However, by the time Mr Bell had been quietened, Henderson’s body had been lifted and a gymshoe found beneath—with Matty’s name in it.
That morning the headmaster sat looking at the place where Henderson had appeared before him and faced a few merciless facts. He knew himself to be, as he expressed it colloquially, to be for the high jump. He foresaw a hideously complicated transaction in which he would have to reveal that the boy had come to him, and that—
Pedigree? The headmaster saw that he would never have carried on teaching this morning if he had known what happened during the night. It might be wh
at a hardened criminal would do, or what someone capable of minute and detached calculation would do—but not Pedigree. So that who—?
He still did not know what to do when the police came. When the inspector asked about the gymshoe, the headmaster could only say that boys frequently wore each other’s gear, the inspector knew what boys were; but the inspector did not. He asked to see Matty just as if this were something on the films or television. It was at this point that the headmaster brought in the solicitor who acted for the school. So the inspector went away for a while and the two men interviewed Matty. He was understood to say that the shoe had been cast, to which the headmaster said in an irritated way that it had been thrown, not cast, it wasn’t a horseshoe. The solicitor explained about confidentiality and truth and how they were protecting him.
“When it happened, you were there? You were on the fire-escape?”
Matty shook his head.
“Where were you then?”
They would have known, if they had seen more of the boy, why the sun shone once more, positively ennobling the good side of his face.
“Mr Pedigree.”
“He was there?”
“No, sir!”
“Look boy—”
“Sir, he was in his room with me, sir!”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Sir, he’d asked me to do a map—”
“Don’t be silly. He wouldn’t ask you to bring a map to him in the middle of the night!”
The nobility in Matty’s face diminished.
“You might as well tell us the truth,” said the solicitor. “It’ll come out in the end you know. You’ve nothing to fear. Now. What about this shoe?”
Still looking down, and plain rather than noble, Matty muttered back.
The solicitor pressed him.
“I couldn’t hear that. Eden? What’s Eden got to do with a gymshoe?”
Matty muttered again.
“This is getting us nowhere,” said the headmaster. “Look, er, Wildwort. What was poor young Henderson doing up that fire-escape?”
Matty stared passionately up under his brows and the one word burst from his lips.
“Evil!”
So they put Matty by and sent for Mr Pedigree. He came, feeble, grey-faced and fainting. The headmaster viewed him with disgusted pity and offered him a chair into which he collapsed. The solicitor explained the probable course of events and how a heavier charge might be abandoned in favour of a lesser if the defendant pleaded guilty to render unnecessary the cross-examination of minors. Mr Pedigree sat huddled and shivering. They were kind to him but he only showed one spark of animation during the whole interview. When the headmaster explained kindly that he had a friend, for little Matty Windwood had tried to give him an alibi, Mr Pedigree’s face went white then red then white again.
“That horrible, ugly boy! I wouldn’t touch him if he were the last one left on earth!”
His arrest was arranged as privately as possible in view of his agreement to plead guilty. Nevertheless, he did come down the stairs from his room with policemen in attendance; and nevertheless, his shadow, that dog of his steps was there to see him go in his shame and terror. So Mr Pedigree screamed at him in the great hall.
“You horrible, horrible boy! It’s all your fault!”
Curiously enough the rest of the school seemed to agree with Mr Pedigree. Poor old Pedders was now even more popular among the boys than he had been in the sunny days when he gave them slices of cake and was quite amiably ready to be their butt so long as they liked him. No one, not the headmaster nor the solicitor, nor the judge ever knew the real story of that night; how Henderson had begged to be let in and been denied and gone reeling on the leads to slip and fall, for now Henderson was dead and could no longer reveal to anyone his furious passion. But the upshot was that Matty was sent to Coventry and fell into deep grief. It was plain to the staff that he was one of those cases for early relief from school and a simple, not too brainy job was the only palliative if not remedy. So the headmaster, who had an account at Frankley’s the Ironmongers at the other end of the High Street down by the Old Bridge, contrived to get him a job there; and like 109732 Pedigree the school knew him no more.
Nor did it know the headmaster much longer. The fact that Henderson had come to see him and been turned away could not be condoned. He left at the end of term for reasons of health; and because the tragedy had been what pushed him out, in his retirement in a bungalow above the white cliffs, he went over the dim fringes of it again and again without understanding it more deeply. Only once did he come across what might be a clue, but even so could not be certain. He found a quotation from the Old Testament, “Over Edom have I cast out my shoe.” When he remembered Matty after that he felt a little chill on his skin. The quotation was, of course, a primitive curse, the physical expression of which had been concealed in the translation, like “Smiting hip and thigh,” and a dozen other savageries. So he sat and thought and wondered whether he had the key to something even darker than the tragedy of young Henderson.
He would nod, and mutter to himself—
“Oh yes, to say is one thing: but to do is quite another matter.”
Chapter Three
Frankley’s was an ironmonger’s of character. When the canal was cut and the Old Bridge built, it diminished the value of all the properties at that end of Greenfield. Frankley’s, in the early days of the nineteenth century, moved into rickety buildings that backed on the towpath and were going dirt cheap. The buildings were indeterminate in date, some walls of brick, some tile-hung, some lath and plaster and some of a curious wooden construction. It is not impossible that parts of these wooden areas were in fact medieval windows filled as was the custom with wooden slats and now thought to be no more than chinky walls. Certainly there was not a beam in the place that did not have here and there notches cut, grooves and an occasional hole that indicated building and rebuilding, division, reclamation and substitution, carried on throughout a quite preposterous length of time. The buildings that at last were subsumed under Frankley’s management were random and seemingly as confused as coral growths. The front that faced up the High Street was only done up and unified as late as 1850 and stayed so until it was done up all over again for the visit of His Majesty King Edward the Seventh, in 1909.
By that time, if not earlier, all the lofts and attics, galleries, corridors, nooks, crannies had been used as warehouses and were filled with stock. This was over-stocking. Frankley’s held from each age, each generation, each lot of goods, a sediment or remainder. Poking about in far corners the visitor might come across such items as carriage lamps or a sawyer’s frame, destined not for a museum but for the passing stagecoach or sawyer who had refused to turn over to steam. True, during the early days of the twentieth century, Frankley’s made a determined effort to get as much of the contemporary stock downstairs as possible. This, by a kind of evolution with no visible agent, organized itself into sections or departments devoted to various interests as it might be tools, gardening, croquet or miscellaneous. After the convulsion of the First World War the place grew a spider’s web of wires along which money trundled in small, wooden jars. For people of all ages, from babies to pensioners, this was entrancing. Some assistant would fire the jar—clang!—from his counter and when the flying jar reached the till it would ring a bell—Dong! So the cashier would reach up, unscrew the jar, take out the money and inspect the bill, put in the change and fire the jar back—Clang! . . . Clang! All this took a great deal of time but was full of interest and enjoyment, like playing with model trains. On market days the noise of the bell was frequent and loud enough to be heard above the lowing of the cattle that were being driven over the Old Bridge. But on other days the bell would be silent for periods that grew longer as the years revolved. Then, a visitor wandering in the darker and farther parts of Frankley’s might find another property of the wooden jars. Tricks of construction might muffle the sound of the bells themselves, and
a jar would hiss over the customer’s head like a bird of prey, turn a corner and vanish in some quite unexpected direction.
Age was the genius of Frankley’s. This complex machinery had been designed as a method of preventing each shop assistant from having his own till. The unforeseen result was that the spider’s web isolated the assistants. As a young Mr Frankley took over from the late Mr Frankley and became old Mr Frankley and died, his assistants, kept healthy, it may be, by the frugality and the godliness of their existence, did not die but remained static behind their counters. The new young Mr Frankley, even more pious than his forebears, felt that the overhead railway for money was a slur on these elderly gentlemen and removed it. He was, of course, the famous Mr Arthur Frankley who built the chapel and whose name was shortened to “Mr Arthur” by those gentlemen in their corners whose speech remained uncontaminated by times that were seeing the spread of the horseless carriage. Mr Arthur gave each counter back its wooden till and restored dignity to separate parts.
But the use of the overhead railway had done two things. First, it had accustomed the staff to moderate stillness and tranquillity; and second, it had so habituated them to the overhead method of money sending and getting that when one of these ancient gentlemen was offered a banknote he immediately gestured upwards with it as if to examine the watermark. But this, in the evolution or perhaps devolution of the place, would be followed by continuing silence and a lost look while the assistant tried to remember what came next. Yet to call them “assistants” does their memory scant justice. On bright days, when even the dim electricity was switched off and the shop relied on plate-glass windows or wide, grimy skylights, some of which were interior and never saw the sky, there were restful areas remaining of gloom—corners, or forgotten passageways. On such days the loitering customer might detect a ghostly winged collar gleaming in an unvisited corner; and as he accustomed his eyes to the gloom he might make out a pale face hung above the winged collar, and lower down a pair of hands perhaps, spread out at the level where the invisible counter must be. The man would be still as his packets of bolts and nails and screws and tags and tacks. He would be absent, in some unguessable mode of the mind, where the body was to be left thus to pass life erect and waiting for the last customer. Even young Mr Arthur with all his goodwill and genuine benevolence believed that a vertical assistant was the only proper one and that there was something immoral in the idea of an assistant sitting down.
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 4