Different Class (38 page)

October 1988

Seven years had passed since the Nutter affair. That’s twenty St Oswald’s terms: cut grass; rainy lunchtimes; cups of tea in the Common Room and stacks of books in the Quiet Room; School plays and small dramas; Open Days; Parents’ Evenings; sporadic invasions of Mulberry girls and sleepy Friday afternoons. St Oswald’s is its own world; what happens in the world outside is of far less significance. In the world outside our gates, Margaret Thatcher was at the helm; but inside, we had Shitter Shakeshafte, and a kind of stable anarchy.

Nutter had left Malbry in early ’82, giving no further explanation for his disappearance. That Easter, Harrington also left, following a series of increasingly urgent letters from Dr Harrington Senior, demanding to know whether there was any truth in the rumour that his son’s English teacher, Harry Clarke, was a homosexual.

I told you, Shitter Shakeshafte was no liberal. On the other hand, like all the old guard, he believed in St Oswald’s above all else. Whatever the complaint, he would
always
take the side of a staff member against a parent (albeit for the privilege of being the one to wield the axe as soon as the battle was over). He duly informed Dr Harrington that Mr Clarke was an English Master of exceptional ability, and that how he conducted his private life had no bearing on his work, and that furthermore, if Dr Harrington preferred to send his son to another grammar school, then he should do so without delay, or lose a term’s fees in lieu of notice. Then, in the privacy of his cheese-fetid office, with the leather-studded double doors, he gave Harry Clarke such a rocket that all the Lower Corridor overheard him; warning Harry to keep his Gay Lib to himself, and threatening him with the most baroque of consequences if there was another complaint.

There wasn’t. Johnny Harrington left, and life went on as normal. For a time, there were whispers among the boys. Spikely also left mid-term, with no word of explanation from his parents. But staff at St Oswald’s rarely leave. We tend to go the distance. Chained to the same oar, we find our comfort in each other. Harry and I remained good friends, though some colleagues removed themselves. Devine was one of them; Eric, too; so was Satanic Mr Speight. But School scandals come and go, and all but the most judgemental eventually got used to the fact that one of our number would never look at a Mulberry girl with interest.

As for Harry, as far as I knew, he never
had
a relationship. Like myself, he was chained to the oar, and St Oswald’s demanded our loyalty. But he and I stayed friends, in spite of our many differences, and together we watched the passage of years, steady and, at the same time, so fast that we could barely grasp how those twenty terms had managed to slide so unobtrusively past us.

I was forty-eight. Forty-eight is the age at which we close up the shutters behind the house and watch the shadows lengthen. It is an age of uncertainty, of crow’s-feet and grey hairs and fast-expanding waistlines. It is the age at which past mistakes return to claim their pound of flesh, and at which we begin to see our parents’ faces instead of our own in the bathroom mirror.

But things were different in those days. Nowadays, fifty is young. Then, I was already
Old Quaz
to most of the boys in the Middle School. Harry Clarke, at fifty-three, was still younger than we were, somehow; maybe because of that smile of his. Still as popular with the boys; still with that sense of the absurd. He still wore those tweed jackets with the elbow-patches; still listened to his records at Break and wore his hair a little too long – hair that was going rather grey, but not enough to make him old.

Over the years, Harry had become a living part of the Bell Tower, just as I had. We sometimes used to joke about what would happen when we died; whether we would be buried
in situ
, or mortared into the parapet with the other gargoyles. But we didn’t believe it. We were still young enough to believe that death would make an exception for us; that somehow, the sun would never set, but would shine on us for ever—

And then, in the autumn of ’88, Harry was arrested.

The first any of us knew of it was when the police turned up at School, demanding to search his classroom. Harry hadn’t come in that morning, which was already unusual. In all his years at St Oswald’s, I don’t think he’d ever been absent more than a couple of days. The officers – one senior, one not – were another version of Stackhouse and Noakes, the pair who had come to see me at home when Charlie Nutter disappeared.

‘Excuse me, what is this about?’ I asked, when I saw them leaving his room with an armful of cardboard boxes.

The Stackhouse prototype shrugged. ‘Just following up an enquiry,’ he said.

‘What kind of an enquiry?’ I said.

Behind me, the boys of 3S craned their necks to see the show. Harry’s class had vacated the room, under the supervision of the young Pat Bishop – not yet Second Master, but already a jolly good Head of Year. He’d lined them up in the corridor, underneath the Honours Boards, and they watched the proceedings round-eyed, some looking uncomfortable (as boys often do when faced with the possibility of trouble); some grinning and whispering behind their grubby schoolboy palms.

‘What
kind
of an enquiry?’ I repeated, louder this time. ‘Has there been a break-in?’

Along the Upper Corridor, I could see Devine watching me through the glass door of his classroom. Eric, too, was watching; his round face bland with anxiety. The younger officer walked past me without answering the question; I looked into the box in his arms and saw books, records, photographs – as well as the fabled garden gnome, which had migrated to Harry’s desk, to be brought out on the special occasions when Dr Devine was teaching there.

‘Those things belong to Harry Clarke,’ I said, with increasing discomfort.

Bishop gave me a warning look, as if to say:
Not now, Roy
. And although it took till that afternoon for the grapevine to bring us the story, I knew right then what had happened. Instinct, maybe; or maybe the fear of something rising from the depths. The rumour mill had been working ever since the police arrived; but it was only the next day that the Head gave us the news: that Harry Clarke was under arrest following a complaint from a boy.

‘
What
boy?’ I demanded.

‘Not a current pupil,’ he said. After which he closed his office door and warned us not to disturb him: while outside, in the Common Room, the rumours flew like swarming wasps.

None of us believed it at first.
Not a current pupil?
What did that mean, anyway? It had to be some kind of mistake. Harry was devoted to his pupils. I said as much to Eric, indignantly, over tea from the Common Room urn.

But Eric was less outspoken. After nearly a decade of trying for promotion, he had become very sensitive to anything that might damage him. He never talked about politics; never discussed School policy; never mentioned his private life unless he was completely sure which side of the fence to alight on. And now, a colleague was under arrest – and I could already see him trying to shift his position.

‘Well, there
was
that Nutter thing,’ he said.

‘What have you heard?’

‘Nothing. But after what happened, I always thought that maybe there was something more to that business than we were told at the time.’

‘Ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘This is a storm in a teacup.’

But as the news filtered down to us – as always, from the boys themselves – it became clear that, whatever it was, the affair was not something that would simply blow away. Over the next few days we learnt that Harry had been questioned, following an accusation of sexual assault on a boy. The police had opened a helpline, urging pupils to contact them with any information. Harry’s house had been searched, and evidence had been removed, and a young man had been staying there – a young man not unconnected with the investigation. Finally, we heard the news: Harry had been formally charged.

There was still no information on the alleged victim. No one at St Oswald’s knew, not even Jeffreys, the son of the Chairman of Governors, whose intimate knowledge of everything behind the scenes at St Oswald’s made him a valuable asset to any Master. As it happened, he was in Harry’s form – and in my Middle School Latin class.

‘What kind of evidence?’ I said.

Jeffreys shrugged. ‘Books and photographs and stuff.’

‘And who’s making these allegations?’

The boy shook his head. ‘No one in School. An ex-pupil.’

But who?
The School declined to comment, although speculation ran rife. Could we have misjudged one of our own? What kind of evidence could the police possibly have uncovered? More importantly, who was the boy behind these allegations?

Some boys leave School like rats leaving the hold of a sinking ship. Some leave like kings; some leave in tears; some waving their shirts like victory flags. And some boys lodge in the throat like a bone, almost forgotten, but still a source of barely perceived discomfort.

Harrington
. It had to be. I could feel it in my gut. Harrington, who had first come to me with his tale of possession; Harrington, whose complacency in the face of any sort of criticism made him completely immune to self-doubt; Harrington, whose church believed that homosexuality was a demon. And now that those demons were flying again, who else could be responsible?

And so, when Jeffreys told me the name of the boy who had accused Harry Clarke, it hit me like a physical blow. Not Harrington. Not Nutter, though Nutter had his part to play. But the third and least remarkable of that little trio: Nutter and Harrington’s lacklustre friend – the tattletale, David Spikely.

P
ART
S
IX

Aegri somnia.
      (H
ORACE
)

1

Michaelmas Term, 2005

Dear Mousey,

How time flies. It must be twenty-four years since I last kept a diary. I still remember it clearly; my old St Oswald’s Prep diary; blue, with the school motto –
audere, augere, auferre
– in gold letters on the front. They say they’re the best days of your life. In my case, I think maybe they were.

No, don’t laugh. I mean it. I was young and healthy. I had my whole life ahead of me. I wasn’t exactly
happy
then; but at least I felt
alive
. Nowadays everything seems dead and dull in comparison. Everyone has moved forward, but me. Harry’s dead; my father’s dead; even you’re dead, Mousey.

Funny, I thought you’d survive me. I saw it in the papers, you know.
Family Dispute Leads to Tragedy
. They flattered you more than you deserved. They always do that for the dead. You were a
promising young man
; clever, handsome and popular. No one knew what you were really like. No one but me, Mousey – and maybe that fat brother of yours who knew more than he was telling. Still, it seems right for you to be dead. I might as well have died myself. Some days, I still feel like that; a drowned man, in dark water.

As for my friends at St Oswald’s – well. Harrington’s Headmaster now. Imagine that. Goldie, running St Oswald’s. Charlie Nutter – Poodle, as was – never quite recovered. He’s spent most of his adult life in one institution or another. I’m glad. The little queer had no right to think that he could get away like that. From his parents, from the Church, from St Oswald’s, even from
me
. What right had he to be happy? What right did he have to move on?

After leaving St Oswald’s in January ’82, he spent six months in a Church-run retreat somewhere down in Oxfordshire, then the rest of his schooldays in a place somewhere in Wales – a nice school, with nice
girls
, to take his mind off Harry Clarke. For a while he did pretty well; behaved himself; played the game. I watched him all the time, from afar. Turns out I’m good at watching. They say you discover your passion before you hit your teens: if so, I’d already discovered it at seven years old, down in the clay pits with Mousey.