By the end of that week I had met all of the next term’s classes, but, to my surprise, it was Four Upper S that I warmed to most. Third-year pupils are often disorderly, especially at the end of a term, but they also have a kind of charm that comes from enthusiasm and energy. Well, you’d know that, Roy, with your Brodie Boys. I found, to my surprise, that Four Upper S improved with acquaintance; in spite of – or maybe because of – that intervention by Eric Scoones.
Scoones was not popular in the School. He had a reputation of being both unfair and volatile. The boys called him The Eggman, and made jokes about his temper, but he was not respected, like Dr Sinclair. Instead, he provoked a kind of secretive laughter coupled with unease, as well as a large amount of graffiti on desks and on the covers of French books.
Mr Scoones est un doofus.
Mr Scoones is the Eggman.
And, once, on the back of the teacher’s chair, scratched deeply into the dark wood with what must have been the point of a compass: Mr Scoones is a nonce.
Well, yes. Our boys always know when one of their teachers isn’t quite right. If you hadn’t been his friend, I think you would have seen it earlier. You would have seen the graffiti; the way the boys avoided his company. You would have seen why he preferred to be without a form of his own. You would have seen what the pupils saw, instead of your easy illusions. Of course, he was more careful with you. He wanted to impress you. You had known him as a boy; you remained the custodian of all his justifications.
Yes, Roy: he looked up to you. Envied you your calling. Envied you the ease with which you laughed and joked with your class, while he could only watch from afar, tormented by his appetites. Of course, you would never have seen that. It would never even have occurred to you that your old friend might have had secrets. But we all have secrets, Roy. I should know; I have more than most. The question is, what should I tell? And will you want me to hide them?
PART 3
Lethe
(River of Forgetfulness)
1
St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys Academy
Michaelmas Term, September 8th, 2006
Friday of the first week of term usually heralds a shift in pace. Names learnt; tests run; seating plans in action. Authority established in class; troublemakers identified. Next week, we begin in earnest. Next week will be back to business. Except, of course, for the bundle of sticks by the side of the Gunderson Pool: the bundle of sticks that might once have been a boy in a King Henry’s blazer.
As junior Ozzies, Eric and I had shared a healthy contempt for King Henry’s. Their boys were richer, softer than ours, in line with the somewhat higher fees. Their school had better facilities, with its gymnasium and its swimming hall, than St Oswald’s, with its patchy fields and its ridges of mining subsidence. Their Classics students learnt Arabic, as well as Latin and Ancient Greek. And their Honours Boards were filled with the names of Oxbridge scholars and rugby Blues, while ours favoured more local universities; Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds.
That said, Eric had always had a tendency to aim higher. He had had aspirations beyond a job at St Oswald’s, and the great disappointment of his life was that he had never achieved them. Working at King Henry’s must have been a dream come true – and yet, he came back to St Oswald’s at last, with scarcely a word of the past seven years, except that it hadn’t suited him. Had he eventually realized that his face would never fit? Had he missed St Oswald’s? Or had there been some other, more troubling reason to make him return? If so, he had never revealed it, but simply grumbled a few times about colleagues who didn’t respect him, and boys whose parents took them to watch the tennis on the centre court at Wimbledon during the busy summer term, expecting their teachers to somehow suspend the exam process until their sons were ready.
I, of course, was too grateful to see him again to ask too many questions. Scoones could often be secretive, and I knew he would only tell me what he chose, and in his own time. Besides, St Oswald’s is a world set apart from the rest of civilization, and we were already too preoccupied with timetables, school trips, lesson plans, newbies, the Porter, incidents both major and minor, and all the tragedy and farce that accompanies any grammar school on its journey across the turbulent seas of masculine adolescence. And so I never really did get to the bottom of why he had left King Henry’s, or why he had chosen to return, or whether he was glad to be back. We simply went on as we always had, drinking tea, dissecting Common Room scandals, eating ham and cheese sandwiches and, in my case, snatching a furtive Gauloise in the stockroom at Break times. We continued our weekly pub visits – ploughman’s and beer at the Thirsty Scholar.
We discussed Eric’s elderly mother, and his growing concern for her mental capacity. We discussed the Sunnybankers who pushed their litter into my hedge. Year by year we discussed the Departmental newbies; saw them come and go while we stayed at our posts like sentinels, growing greyer year by year. I had my bit of heart trouble; and Eric was even quaintly alarmed; as if it were the first time that he had even considered the possibility that someday, I might not be there.
‘You never think it will happen,’ he said, standing at my bedside the day after my first coronary. ‘One tends to think some people are beyond the reach of mortality.’
Rather poetic for Eric, that. It showed how troubled he must have been. It’s also very much what I thought after the Harry Clarke affair: surprise at the persistence of the illusion of a man’s permanence. It is a dangerous illusion, shared by us all. Folie à tous, as Eric would say. That feeling that our little world is impregnable; unbreakable. That we, too, by association, must remain forever.
I’m feeling rather maudlin today. Maybe this is why I’m thinking so much about Eric. And there is a tightness in my chest, which feels like something more than the effects of all the coffee I’ve been drinking. I do not generally drink coffee. My doctor advises against it, along with stress – which is inescapable – and cheese, fruit cake, Liquorice Allsorts, Digestive biscuits, ploughman’s lunches, beer, port, sugar, Gauloises and, in short, most of the small, delicious things that make a life worth living. I ignore him most of the time, as befits a Latin Master saddled with a middle-aged version of one of his pupils as his heart specialist.
And yet, this time, he may have a point. Perhaps I should drink less coffee. It makes me feel breathless, and jumpy, and fat, and more than usually old. Most days, I feel like a boy of fourteen with inexplicably white hair: today I am a scarecrow Methuselah, shedding pieces of myself all the way down from the Common Room. And yes, I miss my Brodie Boys. My current 2S is likely to be rather a pedestrian form, I fear. There are no comedians, no rogues, no flamboyant eccentrics like Allen-Jones, no wise little elves like Tayler. No troublemakers either, of course; which I suppose should be a comfort, and yet it is not. A little disruption is good for morale. It gets the pulses racing. Instead, all I can think of is that boy; that boy who wasn’t one of ours. Nor am I alone in this. Benedicta Wild has been trying to catch my attention since the start of the week. Today, at Break, she managed it as I stood with my morning cup of tea, watching the Middle Corridor.
As always, she was in trousers. In theory, there is a choice for Mulberry girls to wear trousers, encouraged by La Buckfast, who nearly always wears them herself, but Benedicta Wild is the only one of our girls to have taken this option so far. Then again, Benedicta Wild is not at all like her classmates. Her new haircut is significantly shorter than that adopted by Allen-Jones, and, unlike her classmates (and, again, Allen-Jones), she never wears nail polish or make-up. She sidled up to me and said in a low and meaningful voice: