Lord Dismiss Us (13 page)

‘Come on, now. All together. Fling yourselves into it! “Que dis-je? Il n’est point mort, puisqu’il respire en vous. Toujours devant mes yeux. . . .’

When the bell went, Johns proposed to Carleton that they go into an empty classroom and play their game on the blackboard. The game was ‘Old Films’, about which they both had an unusual knowledge; especially Johns, who hoped to be a film critic. Each wrote up for the other a title, with its four leading players underneath, omitting all the consonants. The opponent had to fill them in. Marks were scored.

Carleton had to remind Johns that Operation Gower was now proceeding. (He had been told already). Carleton begged him not to forget, and to stay away from the Common Room and its environs for the afternoon. Johns replied with a ‘don’t forget your deerstalker’, made a scathing reference to ‘Dr Watson in the shower’, and went off to play the game against himself. He had memorised almost the whole history of film-making in this way.

Carleton had slipped his copy of ‘Phèdre’ into his pocket. It was an odd thing to do. No one save the few out-and-out ‘swats’ ever read a School Book out of Class. But Ashley had evoked his interest in several ways.

He went off quickly towards the wood.

Dr Rowles had undertaken to put the bait out on their table and to be already in position at the bell. He must be in there now, wishing he could smoke his pipe.

Boys were disappearing rapidly. Except for a handful of languishers, they were most decisive and enthusiastic about Leisure.

There was Junior Cricket that afternoon. McCaffrey was giving swimming lessons in the pool up on the hill. Farming and hobbies accounted for others; and the Run for those with no alternative interest.

When Carleton lay down in the grass up among the trees, there was no one in sight. The grass in the wood was so tall that when he stretched out flat he could not be seen. There was a direct view down to the Common Room window and the adjacent dormitory window. To the left of them, beyond Ashley’s tree, was the New Building with Ashley’s room on the first floor. Far off, in the other direction, was the Chapel Square.

No sign of Gower.

He felt excited, as if he was a child again, playing a childish game: the ridiculous yet keen excitement of Hide and Seek.

Imagine Gower emerging through one of those windows – or even going in through one of them!

Bringing ‘Phèdre’ was a mistake. Raising himself on one elbow, he opened it; but it now meant nothing. The Drama, the beauty of the words too, which had seemed perfectly plain with Ashley, had vanished. What the dickens were these passions? The step-son, Hippolyte, was in the same state too, about some Princess. Boring and incomprehensible. Yet Ashley had seemed to make sense and life out of it. It had been very odd to hear him say ‘sexuality’ – surely he didn’t know anything about that. Or had he some other, adult’s, life? In the hols?

There was a ladybird on the page. Carleton lifted it off on to his fingernail and put it on a long blade of bright green grass. Huge white clouds were passing overhead, but they never seemed to cover the sun. It was very warm. He took off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves. An arty Senior called Peters was walking slowly up the wood with the Honourable Fitzmaurice. They had their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the ground, and they weren’t speaking. Why? What was the point? And for this Nothing they risked all kinds of remarks.

As for Henderson and Finch Minor, and the bearskin! Where did anyone get such profitless, insulting courage? A Prefect! They – his fellow Prefects – shunned him. He didn’t seem to mind.

No sign of Gower.

Roly must be fed up in there. Carleton visualised him on his chair, cursing to himself.

Ashley had been most peculiar in the morning. Something about he, Carleton, slipping through with agility. Creative writing was a defence? Questions about solitude. Understanding each other was no good. There had seemed to be some connection with this play, though he could not make out what. Why had Ashley made so much fuss about this woman wanting something forbidden and admitting it and being great? Why was that great anyhow?

It was beyond him.

Gower had come out of the door of the New Building!

He had a folded penknife in his hand. He was throwing it up and down. He looked totally concerned with this, and with his own thoughts, having no other plans whatever for the afternoon. He was as cunning as hell.

Was it his own penknife? No, that didn’t matter. The fruit salad was the thing.

He was at the top of the steps now, still throwing the damn knife up and down.

Carleton lay flat, but Gower wasn’t even looking about him.

This could go on for ever.

Perhaps they had imagined the whole thing.

Perhaps it was someone else, and not Gower at all.

Carleton’s hands were wet. Get on with it, Gower!

Yes. He had put it in his pocket, and was slopping along, kicking a pebble. He went out of sight, round the corner where the jacks – ‘the bogs’ to everyone except Roly – were. He
must
have gone in that way.

He must either return that way, in Roly’s mirror, or come out of a window. The further dorm, on the bogs’ side, only had an end window. Carleton would see him jumping out in profile.

But nothing happened.

Was the wretch sitting in the bogs?

Still nothing happened.

If Roly had made an arrest, he would surely have called out to his aide.

He wished he had looked at his watch. It must be nearly a quarter-of-an-hour by now.

If only the Common Room wasn’t so pitch dark from here, the window being so small, one could see him in the act.

He decided to wait another ten minutes.

The likeliest thing was that the Doctor had already captured Gower and taken him up to his room. In his excitement he was perfectly capable of forgetting that Carleton was spending the afternoon in the long grass.

When the ten minutes were up, he put on his coat and, with his heart racing, approached the Common Room window and looked in.

The fruit salad tin was gone!

He pulled himself up on to the sill and jumped into the room. There was no one there. He dashed out into the empty corridor, and threw open the doors of both the dormitories. There was no one in either of them. He ran down the corridor, and turned and went into the washroom; and there was an immediate bark from behind the shower door – ‘Carleton, what in blazes do you think you’re doing?! Get back out there!’

‘There’s no point, Sir . . .’ Carleton was trying to talk into the mirror.

‘He came in from the jacks twenty minutes ago,’ came the Doctor’s urgent whisper. ‘He must be in the Common Room. Get back outside, you damn fool!’

‘It’s no good, Sir. It’s gone. He’s gone.’

There was a long silence, from the shower.

The door flew open. The Doctor looked explosive.

‘How in arsehole
can
he be gone?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Come and see.’

As they hurried down the corridor, Carleton felt a sharp rap on his back.

‘Turn round!’ said the Doctor.

He turned.

They were both looking along the corridor to the door at the end, opening into the Big Schoolroom.

‘Why in hell didn’t you think of that way out, Carleton?’

‘Gosh, I don’t know. . . . You didn’t think of it either, Sir.’

‘We must both be going stark arsehole crackers,’ said the Doctor.

Ashley was the Master on Duty that day; which meant that he had to preside over Tea, and also over Prep afterwards in the Big Schoolroom.

The late evening meal was called ‘Tea’, because something resembling that beverage was poured out by the skivvies. They went along with huge teapots that were more like great kettles with long thin spouts; and as they bent between the boys, to pour, those superior beings would lean away or ostentatiously hold their noses, in defence against the proximity of black-garbed armpits. Miss Bull ladled baked beans on to toast from a steaming vat. It was altogether a more boisterous affair than lunch: voices were raised from table to table, and stale bread occasionally flew. Fresh air and exercise had raised everyone’s temperature. There were no dampening presences: the High Table was deserted. Instead, a Prefect sat at the head of each of the commoners’ tables, as the masters had sat at lunch.

Ashley strolled benignly up and down the aisle, with a book tucked under one arm, running his fingers through his hair. His brown shoes were turned outwards, and moved in slow portentous steps, from under his gown. His blond hair was straight and thick at the back. He would be evading the four Demon Barbers on their visit next week. Occasionally he paused, and looked down fixedly at someone, with that tense half-sneer which they all found consistently entertaining; and said something sarcastic which even New Boys could tell at once contained no sting. A sufficiently good riposte was likely to make him smile in a most satisfying way. At the same time he would always flush a little, and seem embarrassed, and make a mock-outraged retort, as if he felt he shouldn’t be amused by a mere boy. In another way, they found that he was invariably, and with pleasure,
surprised
to find that they could amuse him. It was like no other master.

There was something a bit sad . . . no, a bit cut off, about old Ashley. Why was it that he was cut off from them, and from almost everybody? Many had noticed that the only person he seemed not entirely cut off from was the most unlikely of all – Jimmy Rich.

Was he happy with it? Did he cultivate it? Those who thought about it, thought not. The slow paced steps and the air of remoteness, and the stiff and strained expressions did not convince. The boys were expert at separating true from assumed eccentricity. It may have been that Ashley was too young to have developed and surrendered to his own posture. Perhaps that would happen in time. At the moment there was a human being there who kept on emerging – with embarrassment and surprise.

No one had framed this verdict. But a perhaps surprising number among this rude assembly had sensed it.

‘Is it absolutely necessary to remonstrate with your knife, Metcalfe?’

‘ ’Fraid so, Sir.’

‘Can you not command attention by voice alone?’

‘No, Sir, that’s my awful problem, Sir, it’s been like that since I was very, very small. I remember my mother coming rustling into my room all dressed for the Ball, and wearing a bottle of scent, and she couldn’t
find
me, Sir. . . . and I’d been shouting out . . . so I took out this . . . it’s not a bit funny, Sir, listen to me. . . .’

‘Silence, Sir! We are not interested in the squalid details of your infancy. Keep your knife down, or I will have you savagely punished.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

At Prep, Ashley paraded too; but more out of necessity than as a performance. The Big Schoolroom was enormous, and it was very difficult to tell what was going on down at the far end, or even in the middle distance, from the remoteness of the desk on the dais. So from time to time he descended and stalked slowly among their desks, glancing over shoulders to see that what they were doing was, in fact, Prep.

As he did so, books, magazines and bags of sweets, went in under desk-lids, and notes were thrown behind his back, with such address that it was almost impossible to spot any of it happening. There were too many of them: the whole School was there, except for the Prefects, who did Prep in the Library.

A constant whispering also defied detection. Voices were raised only in requests – which had to be granted – to ‘leave the room’. These were incessant, and seldom genuine. Such was the sense of restraint and travail for some of them that a mere breath of the night air was irresistibly tempting.

Most of the time he sat at his desk and tried to write a letter –

My dear Joan,

That astonishing interruption – for which you need not blush – came at a painfully inappropriate moment. I was about to state a thesis which I have since come upon in Wilde’s ‘Decay of Lying’. What is interesting about people is ‘the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask’. You can see, it was not exactly the moment for stripping.

‘Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.’

I had thought that we were above. . . .

‘May I leave the room, please Sir?’

‘Again, Pembroke?’

‘I know. I can’t help it, Sir.’

‘Silence, all of you! Very well, but not again.’

No, it was revolting. It bore a horrible resemblance to – ‘Let us rise above the sins. . . .’

She must be kept away, and he had no intention of going to London. The bird was determined to fly.

Where, finally, to?

Where to?

Later, when Carleton came wandering in from the Library, Rowles caught him by the forearm, as they stood amidst a bedlam of naked boys scampering in and out of the steaming shower-room, and delivered an invitation in his customary words, and in a lowered voice –

‘There’ll be a kettle on later, Carleton, if you happen to be passing.’

‘Righto, Sir. Thank you.’

‘Easy with that damn door, blast you! It goes right through my head!’ shouted the Doctor, turning red and making a tentative gesture towards his ears with his cupped hands.

A boy with three straight bruise lines on his bottom had dashed in, sliding it after him with a bang. (Many of the Doctor’s sudden barks went unheard, the boy having already flown. This made them all pretty certain that his idiosyncrasy was deliberately displayed). This boy and three others had failed to turn up at the end of a Run, where Pryde was waiting with his list. Carleton and the others had vacated the Common Room, and Pryde had dealt with them there in a morning Break. He had hit them hard, because he was missing his session of Love in the dispensary.

Carleton had beaten no one yet. This was bad. He would have to pick on someone soon, or Rowles would begin to notice.

Up in the dorm he had to tell Johns about the invitation. This was awkward, because there was a sense of competition about these night sessions. (What did Rowles and Johns talk about? Carleton had a suspicion that he himself might be the object of their irony). However, Johns appreciated that this was altogether a Rowles-Carleton day.