Wicked! (109 page)

When it came to the two-hour maths exam the following day, Xav was determined not to let Pittsy down. Ex-alkies should stick together.

‘If Mrs Rock borrowed £2,000 at ten per cent compound interest and paid it back together with total interest after two years, what would be her total repayment?’ read Xav.

‘£2,420’, he wrote a minute later.

Over at Bagley, the Philippine gremlin whispered £2,420 in Jade’s ear, in answer to the same question. Jack Waterlane, utterly defeated by the same paper, was relieved to receive a text message on his smuggled-in mobile, saying Kylie Rose had gone into labour.

When in doubt, take the easier option. As Jack ran out of the exam hall, Biffo, who was invigilating, leapt down from his chair and chased after him. The best way of stopping Biffo following him, decided Jack, was to take Biffo’s car. Although he was only sixteen, Jack had been driving tractors round his father’s estate since he was ten and, leaving a furiously windmilling Biffo, set off at ninety miles an hour for the hospital.

Kylie Rose’s face when he walked into the maternity ward made everything worthwhile.

‘I thought you’ – groan – ‘was in the middle of a maffs paper,’ progressed to, ‘Oh’ – groan – ‘of course I’ll marry you.’

Chantal spent the rest of the labour crying with joy.

Lord Waterlane, when he rolled up some hours later, was in a towering rage. On the other hand, Jack’s mother, Sharon, who insisted on referring to herself as Lady Shar, had once been a nightclub hostess and a hell of a goer. David had always suffered from
nostalgie de la boue
and found Chantal, who was only thirty, extremely pretty and, after all, Kylie had given birth to a boy.

‘We’re going to call him Ganymede David,’ she told her future father-in-law proudly.

The first English paper, which also contained literature questions, was on 10 June. Dora, knowing this was a crucially important subject to Paris, had finally tracked down five four-leafed clovers and, with Patience’s help, had glued them on a card. ‘Dear Paris,’ she had written inside, ‘Good luck in English and all your other exams, you’ll do brilliantly. Love, Dora’.

Her timing, admittedly, was lousy. A thoroughly strung-up Paris, flanked by Junior, Lando and Jack, was just going into the exam when Dora had rushed up, thrusting the card into his hand. Paris glanced down.

‘What the fuck?’

‘Please open it.’

Paris gazed at her in disbelief.

‘Just fuck off, can’t you see I’m busy? Get out of my life and leave me alone.’

Dora cried great rasping sobs all round the pitches, missing French. Artie Deverell, who’d picked up on the exchange, dispatched Bianca, not the ideal person, who found Dora sitting on a log sobbing into Cadbury’s shoulder.

‘Good thing Labradors like water,’ observed Bianca.

Dora went on crying.

‘Paris is heartless, Dor. Even when he was crazy about me, he couldn’t show it. It’s his upbringing; he doesn’t know how to express love, he hasn’t had any practice. He’s got a slice of ice in his heart.’

‘Put not your trust in Arctic Princes,’ sobbed Dora.

Jade Stancombe, in the evening, was more brutal. ‘You were like an autograph-hunter interrupting Tiger Woods as he teed up at the eighteenth hole. Paris just tore up your card and chucked it in the bin. Stop making a fool of yourself; he’s out of your league.’

In the sports hall earlier, Paris dispatched Housman and Hood’s rosy view of childhood: ‘Lands of Lost Content’. Poets all seemed to have had wondrous childhoods and gloomy, insecure old ages.

I’ve had a gloomy, insecure childhood, thought Paris; God help me if the rest of my life is even worse. I remember, I remember the children’s homes where I wasn’t born.

He turned to the next question: ‘Describe a place you hate.’

I hate my own heart [wrote Paris] because it is cruel and hard. My best friend, Dora, is honourable and good like Piggy in
Lord of the Flies
. She has helped me revise all my exams: where the world moves and sits in space, Martial’s recipe for happiness, drumlins, the Battle of Arginusae and the trials of the Generals. She gave me a beautiful good-luck card decorated with four-leaf clovers, but I tore it up and told her to piss off, because I was uptight. I would like to apologize to Dora on behalf of all my sex. Where women are concerned, we always get things wrong and I most of all. Dora is well named because she is adorable.

I hate my heart because it lets me down; its beat quickens when I hear beautiful music or poetry, but when a friend tries to get close, it freezes over. To twist Catullus: whenever I love, I seem to hate or resent as well. We dissected a pig’s heart in biology, but if you dissected my heart, it would pump not blood but poison.

‘A place I hate,’ wrote Boffin Brooks, ‘is the headquarters of the Tory Party.’

The place I hate is my deputy headmaster’s drawing room. He calls it a lounge, which is a complete misnomer because no one could lounge in such an uncomfortable place [wrote Lando]. The chairs are ramrod hard; the sofas murder your coccyx. No parents stay more than five minutes because he offers such tiny glasses of indifferent sherry and doesn’t want anyone to linger. There are no pictures, no books except the very odd scientific manual. When you enter, you always get a lecture on bad behaviour.

‘The place I hate is a vivisectionist’s laboratory where the animals’ vocal cords are cut on arrival so their screams cannot upset the staff or visitors,’ wrote Amber and made herself cry even more cataloguing other iniquities.

Glancing round, Primrose Duddon smiled sympathetically and shoved a box of Kleenex in her direction.

I like Primrose, decided Amber, I like her much better than Milly or Jade. Primrose had helped her with revision beyond the call of duty. Amber resolved to buy her a cashmere jersey as a thank-you present. On the other hand, it would take a lot of cashmere to accommodate Primrose’s splendid bosom and might be rather expensive. Better to give her scent instead.

111

The sun had long since set, but it was still so hot that, despite wearing only shorts, a cotton shirt and loafers, Theo had left his study windows wide open. In the past month, he had been soothed by the ‘liquid siftings’ of the nightingales in the laurels. Tonight they had all departed – like pupils at the end of term. Would he still be alive next year to hear them?

He had been wrestling with a difficult letter in answer to a telephone call telling him one of his favourite old boys, Jamie Pardow, had been killed in Iraq.

‘We knew you were fond of each other,’ Jamie’s father had said, ‘in fact in his very last letter home, he said: “If you see Theo, tell him I’m still not tucking my shirt in.”’ The father’s voice had cracked then and he’d had to ring off.

Such a lovely boy. Theo shook his head. He should be writing reports. He should be working on Sophocles. Instead, he poured another large Scotch to wash down a couple more painkillers. A bottle of morphine, illegally prescribed by James Benson, was hidden behind the books, for when things became unendurable.

Would he could take something to ease the ache in his heart that after the end of term he wouldn’t see Paris for eight weeks. In a way it would be a relief. He needed to be alone to calm his fever, to think about the boy. He knew Ian Cartwright, Cosmo and even Dora were jealous of their friendship. He must try not to favour him next term.

On a positive side, he was delighted Paris was on course for A stars in Greek and Latin. Hengist, who had a key to the school safe and, against all the rules, often looked at finished papers, had reported exquisite translations of Homer and Virgil, wise, witty, lyrical comments on Ovid and Horace and Iphigenia’s pleading for Orestes and flawless unseens in the language papers. How Socrates would have loved him.

Paris, according to Hengist, had also submitted brilliant papers in other subjects, including a matchless first history paper. ‘He writes so entertainingly.’

Paris had science tomorrow morning and a second history paper in the afternoon, covering the Russian Revolution and Nazi Germany, which had both fascinated and haunted him. Then it was all over.

Although it was after eleven, golden Jupiter was the only star visible in a palely luminous blue sky. The trees on the edge of the golf course, olive green in the half light, seemed to have faces, hollow-eyed, too, after a month of exams. The mingled stench of rank elderflower and decaying wild garlic was overwhelming.

As Hindsight padded in, leaping on to the table, Theo grabbed his glass – there was enough whisky spilt over the reports and his translation of Sophocles already – and guided the cat’s fluffy orange tail away from the halogen lamp. A mosquito was whining around his bald head looking for a late supper; Theo lit yet another cigarette to deter it.

He smiled briefly as he caught sight of a poster on the wall Paris had had framed for him for his birthday, which showed a woman with a balloon coming out of her mouth saying: ‘I’m voting for Martial, he’s not clever, he’s not honest, but he’s handsome.’ Alex had banished it from Theo’s classroom as being too sexist.

Theo had seen a lot of Paris in the last ten days. Not entirely, he was realistic enough to recognize, because Paris relished his company. The boy, it appeared, had been so gratuitously cruel to poor little Dora that that dear, kind, soul Patience Cartwright had ticked him off roundly. This had so shocked Paris, he had since shunned the Cartwrights’ and spent his evenings working in the library or talking to Theo. Theo suspected and genuinely hoped Paris was much fonder of Dora than he let on. He could do worse. Dora was brave, resourceful and good-hearted.

The evenings together had been an exquisite pleasure. They had listened to music and discussed books and Paris’s choice of AS levels: Greek, Latin, theatre studies and English. Paris also brought Theo the latest gossip. How Lando had been caught listening to the Empire test match on his walkman during science, how Anatole had mistaken downers for uppers and slept peacefully through French, and how Boffin, ‘stupid twat’, was already immersed in one of next year’s set books:
The Handmaid’s Tale
.

Hengist was in Washington, due back this evening, but grounded by a strike. He had nevertheless rung in to wish Paris luck in his final history paper tomorrow.

Theo emptied the bottle into his glass. On his desk lay an advance copy of Alex’s
Guide to Red Tape
(or
Tape
as it was now known), which the self-regarding idiot had presented to Theo to illustrate that he, Alex, despite being busier than anyone, was capable, unlike Theo and Hengist, of meeting deadlines.

Theo, instead, turned to Aeschylus, whose
Philoctetes
, covered in drink and coffee rings, he’d been reading earlier. Philoctetes, driven crazy by a snake bite, as he was by his ransacked spine. How admirable was Maurice Bowra’s translation:

Oh Healer death, spurn not to come to me.

For you alone, of woes incurable, are doctor,

And a dead man feels no pain.

Theo hoped this were true. Awful to reach the other side and immediately find oneself bound on a wheel of fire, like Ixion.

Back in his cell, Cosmo peeled off his mother’s blond wig, which she’d worn for
Norma
and in which he had disguised himself in his walk down to Bagley village to pleasure Ruth Walton.

He had finished
The Secret History
, the best book he had ever read, in which young people had totally waived morality and taken justice into their own hands. He had put on Matthias Goerne, a voice of unearthly beauty, singing Bach cantatas and was flipping through scores for the end-of-term concert. But he was not happy.

He had spent half an hour earlier mending Theo’s DVD machine, but Theo’s eyes still didn’t rest on him with as much tenderness as they rested on Paris. No matter that he was going to get straight A stars and one for shagging from Ruth Walton, Cosmo wanted to be loved best by all the people by whom he wanted to be loved best. Even Hengist had rung from Washington to wish Paris luck.

He never rang me, thought Cosmo bitterly.

Cannoning off the walls on his way to bed around midnight, Theo saw a light on in Paris’s room and went in. On the Thomas the Tank Engine duvet lay the boy’s dark green history revision folder. In his sleeping hand was clutched the Greek Epigrams which Theo had given him for his sixteenth birthday. Theo was touched.

Paris looked so adorable with the lamplight falling on his long blond lashes and silky, flaxen hair. Playing cricket without a cap had brought a sprinkling of freckles and a touch of colour to his pale face. In sleep, the wolf cub relaxed and one could appreciate the beauty and casual grace of his body. Theo removed the Greek
Epigrams
.

Cosmo, skulking on the landing on the lookout for trouble, froze at the sight of Theo’s battered copy of Philoctetes and his late-night whisky outside Paris’s bedroom.

Suddenly terrible screams ripped the night apart, followed by anguished sobbing, which slowly subsided. Five minutes later, Cosmo, lurking in the shadows, saw Theo, a faint smile on his cadaverous features, coming out of Paris’s room and going through the green baize door into his own apartment.