August (4 page)

‘Welcome.' His voice was oddly high for such a large man and his hands, Tristan noticed, were unexpectedly thick and strong. St Augustine's was the City's nursery, the place where its future germinated. The best of these boys would in time become the leaders. They would set the rates, fund the research institutes, write the prayers carved into the stones of the Grand Promenade. The boys held their collective breath as the rector glided by. When he reached the end of the line he waited, the pause perfectly matched to the capacity of small lungs.

‘Take your bag,' the rector instructed, ‘and place it before the boy to your left. You at the end, take yours to the other end of the row.'

Tristan set his bag at the feet of a boy with a soft fringe and haughty gaze. The recipient's jaw muscles twitched, betraying his attempt to appear unmoved. The boy to Tristan's right was soft and dimpled. He placed his belongings reluctantly at Tristan's feet. Tristan smiled his thanks, but received nothing in return. Whatever the good fortune that awaited him in that bag, there would be a price to pay.

That evening the rector lectured them on the foundations of Augustinian philosophy for three solid hours. At the end he threw questions at his startled audience, probing for weakness. Any boy that could not provide a satisfactory answer was brought to the front and made to pray for God's grace. Tristan was one of only three boys who made no mistakes. Although that was a mistake as well. The hardest people to love are our betters. Many years later the rector explained this to him.

Tristan's attackers waited until the night lights had been extinguished and the brothers had returned to their rooms. A firm hand was placed across his mouth although it wasn't necessary; Tristan knew better than to scream. He was dragged from his bed and taken to the courtyard. There they pushed him up against the fountain. Nobody spoke. The game was simple. They held his head under the water until he struggled. When he struggled they pulled him up and beat the remaining air from his gasping body. On the third ducking he worked it out: stay down, do not resist, find out what it is they want. Tristan pretended to black out, going limp in their arms. They counted to five then hauled him from the water, throwing his flaccid form onto the paving.

The next day one of the older students explained the ritual. Every year the boy who brought the least was subjected to this punishment. Tristan asked why. The boy just shrugged and said, ‘It's always been that way.'

‘And in the beginning, there was envy,' she murmured. She found his hand and gently squeezed it. Broken bones graunched together. He did not complain.

‘What about your story?' he asked. His voice was tiring and the memories were swarming, fragmenting and reforming in unreliable patterns.

‘My story isn't interesting,' she said.

‘It brought you here.'

‘A boy and a whore. How's that interesting?'

Tristan tried to rearrange himself; his back had begun to spasm. He was confident he understood where they were now in relation to the cabin. They were lying across the roof, wriggled half out of the possessive grasp of their seatbelts, shoulders and heads as close to horizontal as they could manage, legs forced up by the contour of the seats, which were crushed into a shape something like torture. She was lying across him in a way he couldn't quite picture; the angle of her neck and head, their point of contact, surprised him. In the growing cold—violent shivers erupted without warning—her skin was the only source of warmth.

He wanted to sleep; an ancient, insistent weariness blanketed him. He could not let it happen. That much he knew.

‘You have to talk.' She was trying to keep the fear from her voice, but she knew it too.

‘I don't know what else to say.'

‘Tell me what life was like, inside the college.'

‘It is hard to explain. At first it was unreal, and then it became…' He struggled to find the word. He could feel a fog creeping over him. He wanted to get lost in it. He wanted to give in. Again she squeezed his hand, encouraging him. ‘And then it became normal. A crushing, wonderful sort of normal. I know that makes no sense. St Augustine's makes many things, but not sense.'

The smell of it came to him: the earthy scent of the prickly gowns they washed by hand each Saturday, the cold pungency of stone untouched by daylight, the fetid thickness of row upon row of boys snoring and farting their way through sleep…

Each day the boys were woken early, to pray humbly, eat moderately and work unflinchingly through the sun's angry arc. There were gardens to keep within the enclosure and, once their tenth birthday had passed, chores to complete out in the City. The boys provided services to the grander homes whose owners had once worn the plain brown garments of the college.

When the sun dipped to the horizon attention turned to the lessons. These were divided into three types. The first dominated the boys' time, if not their interest. They were set the task of memorising the first four chapters of
The Holy
Works
. At first this seemed impossible. Whole weeks were spent stalled on a single page. The weakest boys were broken by the task and returned in ignominy to their families. The rest were tempted to give up too, but the fear of shame trumped despair.

The second type of lesson consisted of long lectures on history, sometimes delivered by the rector, but usually by a brother with a sharpened face and hands that stabbed at the air as if to fend off the devils he imagined crowding in on every side. There was no shortage of words. It seemed to Tristan that every page he remembered of
The Illustrated History
had been turned into a book of its own. The brother's real passion was reserved for a period not covered by the picture book: the years leading up to and following the war. To Tristan this didn't seem like real history. The war had ended only thirty-five years ago and he had heard his father swapping hand-me-down battle stories with his friends. The brother, though, treated it like any other time gone by, hammering his favourite points with certainty and repetition.

‘The troubles didn't start when the fuel became scarce, boys, although many will tell you they did. The troubles started when the fuel was plentiful and we unlearned the lessons of gratitude. Say it with me, boys. Say it with me…'

And so they would intone that evening's aphorism, their young voices binding together with unlikely force: ‘God does not turn from us in times of hardship; rather, in times of plenty we turn from Him.'

But the fuel did run low and the weather changed, and then the fighting started. Some turned to God, others to science.

‘…and the holy cities had two great strengths, boys: our faith and our determination. The heathens laid siege to our great walled cities and two of them fell, but this, the strongest, could never be taken. They didn't need us; we posed no threat to them or their precious wealth. But they could not stand to know we remained here, our fidelity to the God they had spurned a rebuke they could not ignore. Guilt and jealousy spurred them on, and for five long years God tested the strength of our conviction. Not all stayed the course, boys. By the time He sent the storms that ripped the heathen camps to pieces, only the most faithful remained within these walls. They were the fathers and the mothers of your fathers and mothers. We are built from the very best stock, the loyal and the resolute, and now you come here that through learning you may honour their memory by celebrating all that those in the heathen settlements have turned their backs on…'

Most revelled in the brother's patriotism but Tristan had little taste for empty rhetoric. He secretly looked forward to the lessons the other boys dreaded: the interrogations.

The rector's question-and-answer sessions could last long into the night; on one famous occasion he worried the sun back into the sky. The focus of the inquiry was always the same. Will. The will of God and the will of His creation. Tristan was sure there were only so many ways the paradox could be approached but the rector was indefatigable. The puzzle of time, the mystery of creation, the problem of evil, the enigma of knowledge, the state of the soul, the vexations of probability theory or the nature of God's grace, all reduced to a single question. What does it mean, in a world of God's creation, that man is free to choose between the paths of good and evil? This was not, to the rector's mind, an unanswerable question, but as he never tired of reminding them, neither was it a simple one. The truth he taught them was infinitely subtle and could be approached only through a lifetime of contemplation.

Tristan loved the cut and thrust of the rector's arguments and the giddy moments when the beginning of understanding would writhe and rise within, lured to the surface by a perfectly weighted question. Tristan tried hard not to stand out during these sessions, but it was clear he was one of the top students. Although the other boys did not punish him for his abilities they never forgave him his lowly origins. No amount of schooling could match the sense of social superiority every true collegian learned on his parents' knees.

Tristan became a distant planet orbiting the greater social mass, pulled and pulling, and an uneasy balance was established. He did not complain. Every day he gave thanks for the circumstances that had brought him to St Augustine's. And every night he remembered his father. Although he missed him, Tristan learned to keep his feelings at a proper distance. Restraint, the brothers taught them, was the most noble of the male graces. Once, in a moment of unguarded pride, Tristan boasted that he would never cry again.

But he cried on the day they delivered word of his father's death. The rector broke the news himself, kneeling quietly beside the confused boy, trapping him at his pew as the other boys filed out of the chapel.

‘Stay a while longer, Tristan.'

Tristan's heart thumped in fear, although he could not think what it was he was about to be punished for.

‘Have I done something wrong?' he asked. He was eleven years old then, a child set on becoming a man.

‘There are only two who can answer that question,' the rector replied, ‘and I am not one of them. Have you stumbled, Tristan?'

‘No, rector, I do not think I have.'

‘Well then you have no reason to blame yourself, Tristan. But remember, all but the first mover has its cause. Now, let us bow our heads and give thanks for your father's life.'

With those words a great crack opened up in Tristan's life. He knelt on the cold stone floor while his entire past was sucked into the void. He was an orphan now with no place left to stand.

Through the roar of confusion he heard the rector's mumbled supplications, and through his shock Tristan realised his own lips were also moving, giving thanks although he felt no gratitude. A lump grew in his throat, as solid and certain as the thought that greeted it. I should remember this moment, he told himself. Nothing in my life will ever matter more than this. He was wrong.

It came to him two years later. The night began like any other, with the rector leading the boys in an interrogation. It was normal for the rector to single out one of the boys for particular attention and this night it was Tristan's turn. Tristan parried the early challenges, hoping the rector might lose interest and seek a softer target, but the rector kept coming.

‘Is it enough to intend to change one's ways,' the rector asked, ‘or must we wait until the test of the future has been passed before the value of contrition can be judged?'