Cat and Mouse (53 page)

His fingers were not shaking at all.

S
UMMER HAS come early, Charles Cavendish thought.

It was an unusually perfect day. The sun sparkled out of a cloudless blue sky, a cool crisp breeze blew in from the sea over the waving green corn, and all along the hedgerows the trees were in their first flush of new leaf. Charles lounged in the back seat of his open-topped chauffeur-driven Lancia as it bowled along the country roads towards Lough Neagh. They drove past fields full of sheep and young lambs, bouncing after each other like long-legged white rubber balls; woods with a sudden hazy, limitless carpet of bluebells under the trees; a deep swirling river where a single fisherman stood, up to his thighs in water, like a silent, watchful heron; a meadow where a hare stood up on its hind legs in alarm and then ran, zig-zagging left, right, and away, out of sight behind a herd of stolid munching cows.

This is my country, Charles thought. In its way it is the most beautiful place on earth.

The wind on his cheeks was cooler, softer than the breeze on the high veldt, or the harsh dusty blast of oven-heated air that came down the Khyber Pass in summer; but this was the place that mattered most to him. Those other places were for travel and adventure; this was home.

They drove through a small village of a few dozen thatched and slate-roofed cottages with a large Catholic church with a spire like a small cathedral at the end of the street and he thought: it is their land too in a way. But they are not fit to govern it, no more than peasants in the Sudan or Zulus in South Africa or Muslims in Lahore can be expected to rule themselves. It is not their place in life, nor will it be for a hundred years. If the government gives way to them all the energy and prosperity of Ulster will be lost, we will sink in confusion and savagery.

But it isn't going to happen.

The Lancia bounced and swayed down the long rutted track towards St Andrew's Preparatory School, and Charles glimpsed an orderly pattern of young boys in white between the trees, with a little crowd of spectators clustered by the pavilion and the scoreboard. In the sudden silence as the chauffeur stopped the car and switched off the engine outside the front door of the school, Charles heard the sound of his own boots scrunching across the gravel, sparrows chirping in the ivy, the crack of bat on ball and young boys cheering in the distance.

There was no one about. He made his way quietly through the garden to the cricket field. As he appeared near the pavilion the headmaster, Dr Duncan, rose from a deckchair to greet him enthusiastically.

‘Colonel Cavendish! What a marvellous surprise, sir, marvellous! Your timing couldn't be bettered — your son is next in to bat, I believe. Yes, that's right! Fifty-three to get off eight overs with four wickets in hand! They have a wickedly good off-spinner but we're still in with a chance, I think!’

‘Splendid!’ Charles glanced up the steps of the pavilion to where his son, in cricket whites and pads, sat with his bat clutched tensely across his knees, staring out across the field. At first he thought Tom had not seen him but then the boy turned his way, and his eyes widened with surprise and delight. Charles walked up the steps towards him and Tom got awkwardly to his feet.

‘Hello, Father.’

‘Hello, Tom. Thought I'd drop in, see how the old team was getting on.’

‘It's a bit stiff. They were a hundred and thirty two all out and we're eighty for five, and one of their bowlers is . . . oh crikey, look at that. He's going to catch him!’

Charles turned to see a young fielder running slowly backwards with his hands raised high, intent on the flight of a ball which came down to him, safe into the hands which clutched it to his chest. There were cries, groans, and applause from the crowd.

‘Help! I'm in! Where are my gloves?’

‘Here, I think.’ Charles picked them up from the floor and handed them to him. ‘Good luck. Play a straight bat, Tom.’

‘I will if I can.’

And then his son was gone, out onto the field, still fumbling with the gloves, his bat held clumsily under one arm. The pads, Charles thought, were a little big for him — the straps flapped and clinked as he walked. There was polite applause as he passed the batsman on the way out, and then Tom was there at the crease, taking his guard at the umpire's directions while the bowler waited impatiently.

Charles was astonished at the sudden tug of emotion the sight wrought in him. The boy seemed so small suddenly, so vulnerable — only a foot or two taller than the stumps he was standing to guard. I hope he does well, he thought, in front of all these people — and me. I could have put him off by arriving just at that moment. That would be awful.

He was suddenly aware that more than half the spectators and boys were watching
him
, rather than the game. He was in full military uniform, right on the front steps of the pavilion. Quickly, he stepped down and went to an empty chair right at the back of the crowd, to make himself less conspicuous.

Tom survived the first ball and the next, and Charles began to breathe more easily. The third spun off the outside edge of his bat and Charles groaned, but the boy in the slips dropped the catch. Off the last ball Tom drove the ball for two runs and Charles heaved a sigh of relief.

Over the Easter holidays, father and son had become, for the first time, friends of a sort. It was a new emotion for Charles. He had been away abroad so often while Tom was young, and when he was at home on leave the boy had seemed either afraid of his father or indifferent to him, more interested in collecting worms or beetles or stealing cakes from the kitchen. Then, Tom had been Deborah's concern. Now, at the same time as he was finding his relationship with his wife harder and more repugnant than ever, Charles had come to feel new pride in his growing son.

That boy in white out there with the flapping oversize pads will grow into a youth and then a man and will one day inherit Glenfee, he thought. I shall never have another son. The sort of man he grows into will depend a great deal upon me.

When two more overs had gone and Tom had scored ten runs, Charles began to relax. The headmaster came over to talk to him and Charles responded civilly. His son, he learned, had settled in well this term and, in every department except Latin, was up to scratch. Dr Duncan was chiefly interested to learn what shape the UVF was in and Charles told him, curtly, that they could now take military control of the entire province overnight if they wished. Then Tom, to his father's vast delight, hit a four, and both men applauded.

When the match was over Charles obtained permission to take his son out for a drive in the car for a couple of hours. The chauffeur drove them along the shores of Lough Neagh until they came to a small village where a stream joined the lake. Charles remembered from a previous visit with Deborah that there was a pub here which also sold groceries and could be induced to provide a cream tea. Father and son sat out in the garden together, watching a small brown-sailed fishing boat drift slowly in the distance.

‘You did well,’ Charles said. ‘Though it was a little ambitious to try to knock that spinner for six. You deserved to be caught making a cackhanded swipe like that.’

Tom grinned. ‘It was a bit wild. But Hale and I had a bet on it. He mucked it up too.’

‘Hale?’

‘The team captain. Didn't you see him? Big fellow, fair hair, went in number four. His brother's in the first team at Haileybury.’

‘Oh. Decent sort, is he?’

‘I'll say!’ For a while Charles listened as his son rattled enthusiastically on about the exploits of Hale and his other school friends, and he thought, this is a whole world the boy has which I know nothing of. Or rather, I know nothing of the particular boys. The general atmosphere of Tom's school sounded much as his own had been.

‘How about you, Father?’ Tom asked. ‘Was it very dangerous landing the guns?’

Charles smiled. The sudden intense, shy eagerness in his son's face touched and amused him. ‘Not really, no. More a matter of careful staffwork and forward planning, you know.’

Tom looked disappointed. ‘But didn't the others — the government army — try to stop you?’

‘They didn't know anything about it.’ Charles relented, and told the story of the phantom army of British soldiers which had marched out of Holywood Barracks and vanished into the night when they had landed the guns at Bangor. Then, seeing the spark in his son's eyes, he told the story as carefully as he could of how the guns had been landed and where they had gone, and of how he had outfaced a British Army patrol a few days later. After that, somehow, they got on to his exploits in Egypt and the Sudan, and the day, many years ago, when he had ridden forty miles through the desert alone, in danger of being captured by hostile tribesmen at every yard. Tom demolished his scones and cake and listened, his eyes alight with romance and pride.

I am a hero to this boy, Charles thought suddenly.

It was not a thought that he had consciously been aware of before. It brought with it immense pleasure, and a slight, hidden fear. He did not want to think about the fear. There is no reason, he thought, why Tom should not be proud of me. Especially now that I am here at home in Ulster, fighting for something I believe to be right. If Tom believes in it, too, that makes it all so much more worthwhile.

On the way back to St Andrews he told Tom of his own time at school when he had been in the Eton team which had beaten Harrow by three runs and of another, stranger match on the North West Frontier, which had been brought to a sudden, untimely end when the pitch was invaded by a wild band of Waziri horsemen, who rode across it at a mad gallop firing flintlock muskets at the players.

In his dormitory Tom introduced his father to Hale, his cricket team captain. The boy shook Charles's hand politely and accompanied them downstairs as Charles took his leave. Charles shook hands with them both on the front steps of the school and got into the back seat of the Lancia. He felt proud and happy, pleased that he had come. The open-topped car scrunched away across the gravel drive, and he turned in the seat for a final wave.

But the boys had already turned their backs and were going into the house. Hale, the bigger boy, had slung his arm casually across Tom's shoulders.

An eel started to gnaw at Charles' spine. He shivered suddenly in full sunlight, and was tempted to order his chauffeur to turn the car round, so that he could sprint back across the gravel and wrench the two boys apart. But he gripped the back of the seat and did nothing. The car carried him smoothly through the lovely countryside, away from his son.

Surely not, he told himself. They're both far too young, that boy Hale's only a year older than Tom.

But in a few short years . . . I remember a boy who looked a bit like Hale once. In my study at Eton. The one with the beautiful hips and the broken hand. If I could love other boys, then sooner or later Tom . . .

He had not thought of Tom in this context before. But once the idea had occurred to him, it had to be faced. Charles prided himself on being a logical man, clear-thinking, direct. It was that which had led to his success as an army officer. That, combined with a less logical love of the thrill of personal danger, a delight in the daring risk.

What would I feel if my son preferred men to women? As I do.

The answer stunned him with its violence and finality.
I will not have it! It cannot be allowed. I would ache with grief.

Why?

He sat back in his seat, watching a herd of cows wending their way homeward through the long evening tree shadows, and thought, it is mostly jealousy. I could not bear my son to be used like that by a man or another boy.

What if he enjoyed it?

He wouldn't, at first. Be honest, Charles, he told himself, none of the boys I knew at school enjoyed it initially. They had to be trained, coerced, persuaded.

Corrupted, the world would say.

Charles knew, from some of the Greek and Latin poets he had read at school, that there had once been a time when sexual love between two men, soldiers even, had been acceptable. Achilles and Patroclus, perhaps. Hermes and Lysander. He had once heard it argued that such a time might, one day, come again. The point was interesting, but academic. In the real world of the British Empire homosexuality was a crime punishable with instant dismissal from military service, imprisonment, social ostracism. Not so long ago the penalty had been life imprisonment.

Do I want that for my son?

Of course not. No father could. If the boy grows up like me in this he will be condemned to secretive, snatched, hidden affairs, often with different men, usually brief and guilty, enlivened only by the thrill of lust and the horrible, appalling danger of discovery and instant utter ruin. Little tenderness, love, security — where is the room for that, in all the fear, suspicion, danger?

And an impotent marriage, too. I am lucky to have a son at all. Deborah was right, I suppose. I have been cold to her since I came back from Egypt and it must be hurtful to her and impossible to understand. Even if it is repugnant to me it is my duty to give her the chance to have a family. To give myself another son.

Only . . . I wanted to be faithful to Simon.

For once in his adult life, after so many years of rigid celibacy and occasional secret snatched encounters with strangers, Charles had believed that in Simon Fletcher he had found someone to love. A boy who was not only beautiful and discreet, but who could return tenderness and trust and love, whom he could have by his side constantly, and not be afraid of losing.

There is no fool like an old fool, Charles told himself.

I am nearly forty years old, there is grey hair in my moustache and my forehead is higher than it was because my hair is receding. I am still fit enough but my body is leathery and hard and scarred in places by sabres. In cold weather I limp because of the knee that was crushed when the polo pony fell on me. There is no beauty in me for the boy to admire, only my power for him to cling on to.

As the Lancia swept into the drive at Glenfee Charles thought, what would I do if Tom found out about me and Simon?