A Bit on the Side (3 page)

Hunched in the dark of the car, Norah frowned over that. She did not speak immediately, but when they’d gone another mile she said:

‘I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with.’

*

In the house the silence there had been before the visitors disturbed it was there again. No spectre rose from the carnal remains of the man who was at last at peace. But the woman sitting by the turf fire she kept going was aware, as dawn lightened the edges of the curtains, of a stirring in her senses. Her tiredness afflicted her less, a calm possessed her. In the neglected room she regretted nothing now of what she had said to the women who had meant well; nor did it matter if, here and there, they had not quite understood. She sat for a while longer, then pulled the curtains back and the day came in. Hers was the ghost the night had brought, in her own image as she once had been.

Traditions

They came in one by one as they always did. Hambrose, then Forrogale; Accrington, Olivier, Maduse, New-combe, Napier. Each in turn saw the jackdaws dead on the earthen floor: seven, as there were seven of them.

‘It’s Leggett,’ Macluse said and the others were silent. Only Napier also suspected Leggett. The others were bewildered, except for Olivier. The birds’ necks had been snapped, one of the heads twisted off. Lying in the dust, their feathers already had a lank look; their beady gaze had dulled. ‘Some bloody people,’ New-combe said flatly, his tone empty of protest or emotion. Olivier knew it was the girl.

A bell was chiming, calling them to Chapel. In the morning there was never longer than those few minutes, just time enough to get to the barn and make sure the birds were all right. Usually the chiming started when the seven were already on the way back. Earlier they’d had their morning smoke.

‘Oh,
God
!’ Macluse spat out as they hurried. Forrogale and Accrington said they now agreed: it was Leggett. No one else said anything.

They taught their birds to talk. Generations had before them. They enticed the very young ones; they clipped their wings and tamed them. There were other places where they might have kept them but the barn was the most suitable, spacious and empty, chicken-wire drawn over the aperture that was a kind of window, tacked on to the bottom of the doors. It was used for no other purpose, derelict and forgotten until a reminder that this whole area was out-of-bounds was again issued – an edict that regularly became forgotten also. So it had been for generations. But never before had there been a slaughter.

The jackdaws did not speak clearly when they were taught. They did not converse with one another, nor even release a single utterance that might be called a word. The sounds that came from them after hours of instruction were approximate, meaning interpreted by the listener. More satisfactory results might have been obtained, it was said, if the tongues were slit, and in the past that had been done, but not for many years now. It was felt to be not quite the thing.

With scarcely a minute to spare the seven boys arrived at the Chapel precincts, passed the line of masters waiting to make an entrance from the cloisters, and took their places, all of them sitting together. That something was wrong this morning was at once apparent to their peers; curiosity was whetted as prayers were mumbled, and hymns sung with roistering enthusiasm. The grave-faced chaplain conducted the service, briefly touching upon the temptations in the wilderness, since it was the time of year to do so. His gravity was a familiar quality in him, in no way caused by what had occurred in the night, which he did not know about. ‘For it is written,’ he quoted, ‘He shall give his angels charge over thee.’ Tidily with that, he brought his exposition to an end. As boys and masters, all formally gowned, filed back into the fresh air, the organ voluntary was by Handel.

There was a general dispersal while, increasing in volume, talk began. Boys went several ways, to widely scattered classrooms, the masters in one direction only, to collect from their common-room what books were immediately needed. Hambrose and Accrington remained together, as did Maduse and Napier and Newcombe, all three of whom belonged in a cleverer set. Forrogale had a piano lesson; Olivier had been summoned by the Headmaster. Each of the seven had on his mind the outrage that had occurred, and neither resentment nor anger had receded.

Forrogale practised while he waited, since he had not practised much in the time that had passed since he and Mr Hancock last had met. In the Headmaster’s house the blue light above the drawing-room door was extinguished when the school butcher and handyman, Dynes, left the room. He winked at Olivier in a sinister manner, implying that he knew more than he did about Olivier’s summons. The winking went unacknowledged, since it was one of Dynes’s usual ploys. Olivier rapped lightly on a panel of the door and was told to come in.

‘I am disappointed,’ the Headmaster declared at once, leading the way from the fire against which he had been warming himself to a small adjoining room untidy with books and papers and confiscated objects. A burly, heavily made man, he sat down behind a desk while Olivier stood. ‘Disappointed to note,’ he went on, ‘that you have failed to come up to scratch in any one of the three scientific subjects. Yet it seems you yourself had chosen the scientific side of things.’ He broke off to peer at a piece of paper he had drawn towards him. ‘Your ambitions are in that direction?’

‘I was curious to know more about science, sir.’

‘Sit down, Olivier.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You say curious?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now tell me why you are curious in that way. Remember I have a duty – and a conscience if I knowingly release upon the innocent world the ignorant and the inept. The fees at this school are high, Olivier. They are high because expectations are high. Your housemaster has said this to you. You are here this morning to be made aware of the seriousness we attach to it. When you went on to the scientific side you were not driven by vocation?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You indulged a curiosity. You indulged yourself: that can be dangerous.’

Why did the man have to speak in that pompous, prissy way? Olivier asked himself. If it was self-indulgence simply to wish to learn more since he knew so little, then it was self-indulgence. In what way dangerous? he wondered, but did not ask. That he had failed to perform adequately in the laboratory had not surprised him, nor did it now.

He said he was sorry, and the Headmaster spoke of the school’s belief in tradition, which he did on all convenient occasions. What he extolled had little, if anything at all, to do with Olivier’s failure. That this was so was a tradition in itself, all deviations from required behaviour assumed to have a source in careless disregard of time-hardened precepts and mores. This Headmaster’s predecessors had in their day advocated such attention to the past, to the achievements of boys when they became men, to the debts they owed. In turn, Olivier’s predecessors had listened with the same degree of scepticism and disdain.

‘Shall we put it like this,’ the present Headmaster suggested, ‘that you promise me this morning to knuckle down? That we review the circumstances in, say, five weeks’ time?’

‘Or I could give up science, sir.’

‘Give up? I hardly like the sound of that.’

‘I made a mistake, sir.’

‘Do not compound it, Olivier. Failure is a punishment in itself. Perhaps you might dwell on that?’

With this suggestion Olivier was dismissed. In the great stone-paved hall beyond the study and the drawing-room he forgot at once all that had been said and returned to the subject of the slaughtered birds. Again he reached the conclusion he had reached already: that the culprit was not another boy. Leggett would be seized after the games practices this afternoon and accused under duress. Dawdling on the journey to his classroom, Olivier anticipated that unfair revenge but knew he would still not reveal what he suspected. There was pleasure in not doing so, in holding things back, in knowing what others didn’t.

*

Wednesdays until tea were hers. They always had been and she would have hated a change. That middle-of-the-week day she had come to regard as her private Sunday – when her alarm didn’t go off, when the Chapel bell and First School bell, sounding in the distance, could be ignored. Even her unconscious knew what to do: to sleep on until the morning was half gone. It was ragged sleep, made restless with dreams that were always vivid at this time, but that never mattered. Nothing was more luxurious than Wednesday mornings, than imagining between dozing and waking the untidy after-breakfast dining hall, and the silence that came suddenly when classes began, the cutlery carried to the pantries, polished clean there, carried back again, the big oak tables laid for lunch. She had Saturday evening off as well but it wasn’t the same, nothing much really and often she stood in for one of the others, not even wanting to be paid back.

She rose this morning at half past ten, her usual Wednesday time. She read a colour supplement while the kettle boiled. She opened the back door and stood there in her nightdress, shooing away the cat that was a nuisance. Stacpoole used to come to her on Wednesday mornings, the only one who ever had, the only one who in all the years had ever managed to have a free period then, eleven to a quarter to twelve. She remembered Stacpoole returning to the school long afterwards with a woman they said would be his wife, pointing out to her this place or that. She remembered wondering if she’d been pointed out herself.

She stood a little longer, relishing the soft, fresh air. Then the smell of toast drew her back into her kitchen.

*

They made coffee in the quarry and drank it out of jampots. They drank it very sweet but without milk because milk was a nuisance. Then, lying on their backs in the sun, they smoked.

Leggett, meanwhile, crept back to his House, simulating lameness for as long as he estimated he could be seen. He thought he had a cracked rib but Forrogale, claiming medical knowledge, had said no, having poked it with his fingers. ‘Definitely not,’ Forrogale had said, but Leggett was not sure about that. They’d picked on him because he was underhand: they’d said so, and Leggett knew he was. None the less, he was innocent. He wouldn’t have touched one of their hideous jackdaws, much less taken in his hand a head with a beak that could snap at you.

‘He didn’t do it,’ Accrington said, breaking a long silence, and one at a time the others agreed. Not that duffing up Leggett was in the least to be regretted.

‘Who?’ Napier asked, and Olivier didn’t say the girl.

‘Unless it was Dynes,’ Macluse said.

They all thought about that except Olivier. Dynes was outside the order of things; they could not duff him up or in any way harass him; they could not so much as speak to him about the matter, for although the handyman was aware that jackdaws were kept he would most likely counter the accusation by revealing what he had previously been silent about. He was a touchy man.

‘I doubt in any case it was Dynes,’ Accrington said. ‘This doesn’t have Dynes’s fingerprints.’

Some years ago a boy had hanged himself but had not succeeded in taking his life. It was established afterwards that he had not intended to, since the noose he had prepared had never tightened, one foot pressed into a hollow in the tree he’d chosen taking all the weight. The boy had not, though, remained at the school but had been sent home, considered unbalanced. This was spoken of now, since it was surely some similar individual who had killed the birds. The names of the unstable were bandied about, recent behaviour of new suspects discussed. Olivier remained silent. He was the smallest of the boys though not the youngest, his dark hair in a fringe above a sallow complexion. His looks stood out among those of his companions, a delicacy about him that the others could not claim. There was – or so it seemed when Olivier was there as an example of how it might be better done – a carelessness in how the others had been made. Adolescence was marked in them by jacket sleeves too short, unruly hair and coarsened voices, blemished skin beneath beginners’ stubble. Yet none particularly noticed that Olivier had escaped this prelude to man’s estate, the gangling awkwardness that his friends accepted without regret for what was left behind.

The last of the coffee was drunk, cigarette butts thrown into the embers of the fire before the charred remains of sticks were scattered. In a body, the boys returned to the school, then to the barn that had been their jackdaws’ home. Hambrose, who knew the conventions of the school’s farm through assisting in the work there, made a detour to collect a spade and advised on where it was best to dig a common grave. One by one the birds were dropped into it. Macluse piled back the day and then the capturing of replacement birds began.

*

Long before Olivier came to the school there had been incidents in the past that word of mouth had since made famous: the ringing of the Chapel bell in the middle of the night; the removal of a Renoir print – ‘Young Girl Reading’ – from its place between the windows in one of the prefects’ common-rooms; the purloining of a cigarette lighter and a pipe from a pocket of Dobie-Gordon’s overcoat; the mysterious collapse of the central-heating system. Occurring over many years, the incidents had in common only that no culprit had ever been brought to book; nor did it seem possible that the same hand could have been responsible for any two of the occurrences – let alone all of them – since the length of a boy’s stay at the school did not allow it. Seven years ago – long before Olivier’s arrival – there’d been the trouble in the bicycle sheds: the random deflating of tyres. Then nothing had happened until the killing of the jackdaws.

It was purely intuition that caused Olivier to suspect the girl, not just of the latest outrage but of the others too. And though certain that he was right, so sure was his instinct, so unassailable his sensing of a purpose in all this, he could not think why one of the dining-hall maids should wish to alert the school to fire at one o’clock in the morning or what possible use she could have had for Dobie-Gordon’s pipe. Somewhere here there was revenge, he had conjectured when first he’d had his idea, but had since rejected the speculation, for he considered it too pat and obvious. He thought so again on the day of Leggett’s duffing up when at teatime he stared at the girl, trying to catch her when she wasn’t looking. He was skilled at breaking into privacies without the knowledge of the person observed; he prided himself on that, but twice, or even three times, he suddenly had to drop his scrutiny, taken unawares by having his gaze returned. Bella this maid’s name was, but ‘the girl’ identified her in the dining hall and beyond it.