Gentlemen & Players (32 page)

2

Bonfire Night, 9:30 P.M.

There was a bench under the trees. We staggered there together across the muddy grass, and I collapsed onto the seat with a jolt that set my old heart twanging like a broken spring.

Miss Dare was trying to tell me something. I tried to explain that I had other things on my mind. Oh, it comes to us all in the end, I know; but I’d expected something more than this madness in a muddy field. But Keane was dead; Knight was dead; Miss Dare was someone else, and now I could no longer pretend to myself that the agony that flared and clawed at my side was anything remotely resembling a stitch. Old age is so undignified, I thought. Not for us the glories of the Senate, but a rushed exit in the back of an ambulance—or worse, a doddering decline. And still I fought it. I could hear my heart straining to keep moving, to keep the old body going for just a little longer, and I thought to myself, Are we ever ready? And do we ever, really believe?

“Please, Mr. Straitley. I need you to concentrate.”

Concentrate
, forsooth! “I happen to be rather preoccupied at the moment,” I said. “The small matter of my imminent demise. Maybe later—”

But now that memory came again, closer now, almost close enough to touch. A face, half-blue, half-red, turning toward me, a young face raw with distress and harsh with resolve, a face, glimpsed once, fifteen years ago—

“Shh,” said Miss Dare. “Can you see me now?”

And then, suddenly, I did.

A rare moment of overwhelming clarity. Dominoes in line, rattling furiously toward the mystic center. Black-and-white pictures leaping into sudden relief; a vase becomes lovers; a familiar face disintegrates and becomes something else altogether.

I looked; and in that moment I saw Pinchbeck; his face upturned, his glasses strobing in the emergency lights. And at the same time I saw Julia Snyde with her neat black fringe; and Miss Dare’s brown eyes under her schoolboy’s cap, the red-blue flashes of the fireworks illuminating her face, and suddenly, like that, I just knew.

Do you see me now?

Yes, I do.

I caught the
moment. His jaw dropped. His face seemed to slacken; it was like watching rapid decay through time-lapse photography. Suddenly he looked far older than his sixty-five years; in fact in that moment he looked every bit the Centurion.

Catharsis. It’s what my analyst keeps talking about; but I’d never experienced anything like it until then. That look on Straitley’s face. The understanding—the horror—and behind it, I thought perhaps, the pity.

“Julian Pinchbeck. Julia Snyde.”

I smiled then, feeling the years slip from me like deadweight. “It was staring you in the face, sir,” I said. “And all the time you never saw it. Never even guessed.”

He sighed. He looked increasingly ill now; his face was hung with sweat. His breath rattled and churned. I hoped he wasn’t about to die. I’d waited too long for this moment. Oh, he’d have to go in the end, of course—with or without my killing knife I knew I could finish him easily—but before that, I wanted him to understand. To see and to know without any doubt.

“I see,” he said. (I knew he didn’t.) “It was a dreadful business.” (That it was.) “But why take it out on St. Oswald’s? Why blame Pat Bishop, or Grachvogel, or Keane—and why kill Knight, who was just a boy—”

“Knight was bait,” I said. “Sad, but necessary. And as for the others, don’t make me laugh. Bishop? That hypocrite. Running scared at the first breath of scandal. Grachvogel? It would have happened sooner or later whether I had a hand in it or not. Light? You’re better off without him. And as for Devine—I was practically doing you a favor. More interesting is the way in which history repeats itself. Look how fast the Head dropped Bishop when he thought this scandal might damage the school. Now he knows how my father felt. It didn’t matter whether he was to blame or not. It didn’t even matter that a pupil had died. What mattered most—what
still
matters most—was protecting the school. Boys come and go.
Porters
come and go. But God forbid that anything should happen to besmirch St. Oswald’s. Ignore it, bury it, and make it go away. That’s the school motto. Isn’t that right?” I took a deep breath. “Not now, though. Now, at last, I’ve got your attention.”

He gave a rasp that could have been laughter. “Perhaps,” he said. “But couldn’t you just have sent us a postcard?”

Dear old Straitley. Always the comedian. “He liked you, sir. He always liked you.”

“Who did? Your father?”

“No, sir. Leon.”

There was a long, dark silence. I could feel his heart pumping. The holiday crowd had long since dispersed, and only a few scattered figures remained, silhouetted against the distant bonfire and in the near-deserted arcades. We were alone—as alone as we could be—and all around us I could hear the sounds of the leafless trees; the slow, brittle creaking of the branches; the occasional sharp tussle of a small animal—rat or mouse—in the fallen leaves.

The silence went on so long that I feared the old man had gone to sleep—that, or had slipped into some distant place to which I could not follow him. Then he sighed and put out his hand toward me in the darkness. Against my palm, his fingers were cold.

“Leon Mitchell,” he said slowly. “Is
that
what this is all about?”

3

Bonfire Night, 9:35 P.M.

Leon Mitchell. I should have known. I should have known from the start that Leon Mitchell was at the bottom of this. If ever a boy was trouble incarnate, he was the one. Of all my ghosts he has never rested easy. And of all my boys he haunts me most.

I spoke to Pat Bishop about him once, trying to understand exactly what had happened and whether there was something more I might have done. Pat assured me there wasn’t. I was at my balcony at the time. The boys were below me on the Chapel roof. The Porter was already on the scene. Short of
flying
down there like Superman, what could I have done to prevent the tragedy? It happened so fast. No one could have stopped it. And yet hindsight is a deceitful tool, turning angels into villains, tigers into clowns. Over the years, past certainties melt like ripe cheese; no memory is safe.

Could
I have stopped him? You can’t imagine how often I have asked myself that very question. In the small hours it often seems all too possible; events unspooling with dreamlike clarity as time and again the boy falls—fourteen years old, and this time I was
there
—there at my balcony like an overweight Juliet, and in those small hours I can see Leon Mitchell all too clearly, clinging to the rusty ledge, his broken fingernails wedged into the rotting stone, his eyes alive with terror.

“Pinchbeck?”

My voice startles him. A voice of authority, coming so unexpectedly out of the night. He looks up instinctively—his grip breaks. Maybe he calls out; begins to reach up; his heel stropping against a foothold that is already half rust.

And then it begins, so slow at first and yet so impossibly fast, and there are seconds, whole
seconds
for him to think of that gullet of space, that terrible darkness.

Guilt, like an avalanche, gathering speed.

Memory, snapshots against a dark screen.

Dominoes in a line—and the growing conviction that perhaps it was me, that if I hadn’t called out just at that precise moment, then maybe—just maybe—

I looked up at Miss Dare and saw her watching me. “Tell me,” I said. “Just whom do you blame?”

Dianne Dare said nothing.

“Tell me.” The stitch-that-wasn’t clawed fiercely into my side; but after all these years the need to know was more painful still. I looked up at her, so smooth and serene; her face in the mist like that of a Renaissance Madonna. “You were there,” I said with an effort. “Was
I
the reason Leon fell?”

Oh, how clever you are
, I thought.
My analyst could learn a trick or two
. To throw that sentiment back at me—hoping perhaps, to gain a little more time…

“Please,” he said. “I need to know.”

“Why’s that?” I said.

“He was one of my boys.”

So simple; so devastating.
One of my boys
. Suddenly I wished he’d never come; or that I could have disposed of him, as I’d disposed of Keane, easily, without distress. Oh, he was in a bad way; but now it was I who struggled to breathe; I who felt the avalanche poised to roll over me. I wanted to laugh; there were tears in my eyes. After all these years, could it be that
Roy Straitley blamed himself
? It was exquisite. It was terrible.

“You’ll be telling me next he was like a son to you.” The tremor in my voice belied the sneer. In fact, I was shaken.

“My lost boys,” he said, ignoring the sneer. “Thirty-three years and I still remember every one. Their pictures on my living room wall. Their names in my registers. Hewitt, ”72. Constable, “86. Jamestone, Deakin, Stanley, Poulson—Knight—” He paused. “And Mitchell, of course. How could I have forgotten him? The little shit.”

It happens, you
know, from time to time. You can’t like them all—though you try as best you can to treat them the same. But sometimes there’s a boy—like Mitchell, like Knight—whom, try as you may, you can never like.

Expelled from his last school for seducing a teacher; spoilt rotten by his parents; a liar, a user, a manipulator of others. Oh, he was clever—he could even be charming. But I knew what he was, and I told her as much. Poison to the core.

“You’re wrong, sir,” she said. “Leon was my friend. The best friend I ever had. He cared for me—he
loved
me—and if you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t yelled out when you did—”

Her voice was fragmenting now, becoming—for the first time I had known her—shrill and uncontrolled. It occurred to me only then that she planned to kill me—absurd, really, as I must have known it from the moment of her confession. I supposed I ought to be afraid—but in spite of that, in spite of the pain in my side, all I could feel was an overriding sense of
irritation
with the woman, as if a bright student had made an elementary grammatical mistake.

“Grow up,” I told her. “Leon didn’t care about anyone but himself. He liked to exploit people. That’s what he did; setting them off against each other, winding them up like toys. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been his idea to go up on the roof in the first place, just to see what would happen.”

She drew a sharp breath like a cat’s hiss, and I knew I’d over-stepped the mark. Then she laughed, regaining her control as if it had never been lost. “You’re fairly Machiavellian yourself, sir.”

I took that as a compliment, and said so.

“It is, sir. I’ve always respected you. Even now I think of you as an
adversary
rather than an enemy.”

“Be careful, Miss Dare, you’ll turn my head.”

She laughed again, a brittle sound. “Even then,” she said, her eyes gleaming, “I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to
know
.” She told me how she’d listened in at my classes, gone through my files, built her store from the discarded grains of St. Oswald’s generous harvests. For a time I drifted as she spoke—the pain in my side receding now—recounting those truant days; books borrowed; uniforms pilfered; rules broken. Like the mice, she’d made her nest in the Bell Tower and on the roof; collecting knowledge; feeding when she could. She had been hungry for knowledge; she had been ravenous. And all unknowing, I had been her
magister
; singled out from the moment I first spoke to her that day in the Middle Corridor, now singled out again to blame for the death of her friend, the suicide of her father, and the many failures in her life.

It happens, sometimes. It’s happened to most of my colleagues at one time or another. It’s an inevitable consequence of being a schoolmaster, of being in charge of susceptible adolescents. Of course, for female members of staff it happens daily; for the rest of us, thank God, it is only occasional. But boys are boys; and they sometimes fixate upon a member of staff (male or female)—sometimes they even call it love. It’s happened to me; to Kitty; even to old Sourgrape, who once spent six months trying to shake off the attentions of a young student called Michael Smalls, who found every excuse to seek him out, to monopolize his time, and finally (when his wooden-faced hero failed to live up to his impossible expectations) to disparage him on every possible occasion to Mr. and Mrs. Smalls, who eventually removed their son from St. Oswald’s (after a set of disastrous O-level results) to an alternative school, where he settled down and promptly fell in love with the young Spanish mistress.

Now, it seemed, I was in the same boat. I don’t pretend to be Freud or anyone, but it was clear even to me that this unfortunate young woman had somehow
chosen
me in much the same way that young Smalls had chosen Sourgrape, investing in me qualities—and now, responsibilities—that were quite out of proportion with my true role. Worse, she had done the same with Leon Mitchell, who, being dead, had attained a status and a romance to which no living person, however saintly, might hope to aspire. Between us, there could be no contest. After all, what victory can there ever be in a battle with the dead?

Still, remained that irritation. It was the
waste
, you see, that troubled me; the confounded waste. Miss Dare was young, bright, talented; there should have been a bright, promising life stretching out ahead of her. Instead she had chosen to shackle herself, like some old Centurion, to the wreck of St. Oswald’s; to the gilded figurehead of Leon Mitchell, of all people, a boy remarkable only by his essential mediocrity and the stupid squandering of his young life.

I tried to say so, but she wasn’t listening. “He would have been somebody,” she said in a stubborn voice. “Leon was special. Different. Clever. He was a free spirit. He didn’t play to the normal rules. People would have remembered him.”

“Remembered
him? Perhaps they would. Certainly I’ve never known anyone to leave so many casualties behind him. Poor Marlene. She knew the truth, but he was her son and she loved him, whatever he did. And that teacher at his old school. Metalwork teacher; a married man, a fool. Leon destroyed him, you know. Selfishly; on a whim, when he got bored of his attentions. And what about the man’s wife? She was a teacher too, and in that profession it makes you guilty by association. Two careers down the drain. One man in prison. A marriage ruined. And that girl—what was her name? She can’t have been more than fourteen years old. All of them victims of Leon Mitchell’s little games. And now me, Bishop, Grachvogel, Devine—and you, Miss Dare. What makes you think
you’re
any different?”

I had stopped for breath, and there was silence. Silence so complete, in fact, that I wondered if she had gone away. Then she spoke in a small, glassy voice.

“What girl?” she said.