Mr. Fox (11 page)

M
adame de Silentio takes in delinquent ruffians between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and turns them into world-class husbands by the time they are twenty-one. You’re admitted to Madame de Silentio’s Academy if you answer at least eighty-five percent of her entrance exam correctly, and you graduate with a certificate that is respected in every strata of polite society. No one can ever remember any of the questions that were on Madame de Silentio’s entrance exam. I know I can’t—I tried my best to fail the exam. I preferred not to be educated, fearing it wouldn’t suit me. Of course, I know better now. I won’t lie, it took me half a year, but I now realise how lucky I am to have this opportunity to become a man of true worth, to have the man I will be intercept the boy that I was.

What is her secret, you may ask. How did Madame de Silentio attain her ranking amongst the great educators of the modern world? It’s simple. Madame de Silentio knows what’s best for young people. She knows what’s appropriate. She refrains from cluttering our minds with information we don’t need to know. Here at Madame de Silentio’s our textbooks get straight to the point—European history is boiled down to a paragraph, with two sentences each for the histories of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Australasia doesn’t count. Young men at Madame de Silentio’s Academy learn practical skills that set us in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women. Here is a sample of the things we are taught:

Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence.

It says in the prospectus that Madame de Silentio’s students eat, sleep, and breathe good husbandry. That’s true. We’re taught to ask ourselves a certain question when we wake up in the morning and just before we fall asleep:
How can I make Her happy?
“Her” being the terrible, wonderful goddess that we must simultaneously honour, obey, and rule (she’d like us to rule her sometimes, we’re told)—the future wife. In our Words of Love class we learn all the poems of Pablo Neruda by heart, and also Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields lyrics. Love Letters, a compulsory extracurricular course of study, involves a close reading of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the entire class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanour.

We sleep eight to a dormitory, and our dormitory bedsteads are iron, with shapes from the end of days twisted into the headboards—lions lying alongside lambs, children caressing serpents. Some of the boys sit up in these dormitory beds and scream in the night, but then the matron comes with a cup of warm milk and puts a few drops of her special bittersweet medicine in it, and the screaming boy drinks deep and the trouble goes away. Madame de Silentio understands that becoming a man of true worth is a difficult process. And we understand that once we’re in the Academy we’ve got to stay here for as long as it takes—there’s no recourse to parents or guardians, as they’ve signed their rights to us away in their contract with Madame de Silentio, and it’s our own stupid fault for having been so unmanageable. Eighteen is the age at which any student is free to leave the Academy, but by then we’ve become used to the place. This is no philanthropic institution, mind you—the families of heiresses pay Madame de Silentio considerable sums of money, sums that we students can only guess at and whisper about, to ensure that they get the perfect husband for their precious Elaine, to ensure that their wayward Katherine is settled with the right life partner. The Academy is in many ways a business, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Madame de Silentio has found her niche, and the way of the world is such that if she did not demand recompense for her efforts she would receive none. So, good for Madame de Silentio.

Having recently been made Head Prefect, it’s my duty to write a new chapter of the handbook that each new pupil is given on his first day, that awful first day when you just think you’re not going to be able to stand it. I take this responsibility very seriously, just as seriously as I take keeping the juniors in order and being a good ambassador for the Academy when we have to leave the grounds to round up the runaways. I’ve consulted the annals of school history, and I found mention of an act of disobedience committed by two moderately promising students—it happened twenty-five years ago, and the consequences were quite grave. I conducted interviews with Madame de Silentio herself, and with those teachers who remembered what had happened, and I’ve pieced together a narrative that I’d like to try out on you. I think it makes an invaluable cautionary tale for any new boy who is thinking of defying our headmistress.

 

 

Charles Wolfe and Charlie Wulf met in their second year of studies at Madame de Silentio’s, when they were assigned neighbouring beds in the same dormitory. Charlie, at seventeen, was Charles’s elder by a year. By all accounts the boys took notice of the fact that they essentially had the same name. In diaries, and in correspondence intercepted by staff, each boy declared that there must be meaning in the similarity between their names. They felt they were brothers. Interesting, because they were very different.

Photographs reveal Charlie Wulf to have been a bit of a pretty boy. Eyes like great big puddles, Byronic waves of hair, the spare frame of a longtime drug addict—before joining the student body he had been forcibly and abruptly weaned off opium in our soundproof music room, which was placed off-limits for three weeks. It seems favouritism brought Charlie to the Academy. I refer to the letter written to Madame de Silentio a full year before he was admitted, in which his mother and father, taking turns to write a word each, explain that in the silence of the heart every parent chooses a favourite. In Mr. and Mrs. Wulf’s case they chose the same one, much to the jealousy and rage of their other nine children. Siblings always detect these things, but without proof there’s not a lot they can do. Charlie seemed to have been born an escapist; at the age of seven, having complained of a boredom that made him “feel sick in his tummy,” he broke into his father’s liquor cabinet and drank himself into a state of catalepsy. By the age of fifteen he was seeking oblivion in opium dens, and since his wealthy parents made him a separate allowance twice the size of that allotted to each of his siblings, Charlie was able to buy almost as much oblivion as he desired, running through a month’s allowance in less than a week and beatifically starving until the time came for the next installment. The letter from Mr. and Mrs. Wulf also lists certain diseases Charlie had contracted and been treated for, ending with a deadly scare that was the last straw. He’d been sent to rehabilitation clinics and boot camps, and each time he had escaped with the aid of his captors. Mr. and Mrs. Wulf believed Madame de Silentio’s Academy was the only institution without a trace of indulgence at its heart, and therefore the Academy was the only place that could clean their son up. They would give custody of their son over to Madame de Silentio if it would save his life.
Charlie’s life shall be saved,
Madame de Silentio assured them.
Better than that—his life shall be made useful.
Charlie Wulf was weak of character, consistently receiving D grades or lower for his Decisive Thinking. He was also a cheat when it came to exams, and a plagiarist when it came to essays—he was punished for the latter two faults twenty-seven times in his first year alone. These faults aside, he was well liked for his easy manner and the way he successfully avoided snitching on others, even when it was easier, perhaps even advantageous, to do so.

Charles Wolfe was fair-haired, and secretive. His features were crooked and unattractive. Much less is known about him, much more conjectured. Charles’s father was a government official in India; his household included several guards and a poison taster, all of whom were present at every meal. Major Wolfe’s very brief letter to Madame de Silentio, referring to Charles simply as “the boy,” indicates disgust at Charles’s habit of stealing things.
Blue things—always blue things—the boy seems to reckon there isn’t enough blue in the world. See what you can do with him.
Mr. Curie, one of our science teachers, recalls seeing Charles Wolfe leaning against the Academy railings during recreation, drinking Coca-Cola through a blue straw, with such a tough look in his eyes that no one dared mock the dainty way he took his refreshment. Mrs. Engels, one of our English Literature teachers, recounts her suspicion, unsupported by any documentation, that it had taken Charles Wolfe much longer than normal to learn how to speak. He seemed to have learnt to read long before he learnt to speak. Mrs. Engels says that she sometimes remarked on the unusual way Charles Wolfe formulated his sentences, and when she did he fell silent and seemed ashamed. Charles Wolfe held grudges. He wrote in his diary that he would like to kill Mrs. Engels. It seems Charles Wolfe was capable of hating with a single-mindedness that sometimes took him into trances.
Subdue this,
he wrote several times in his diary.
Subdue this.
Charles Wolfe took every prize and passed every test and exam with distinction. He was going to make a first-rate husband. The teachers weren’t sure about him, though. They kept an eye on him. There had been incidents in the first year—there had been no evidence that the incidents were connected to him. But still. We won’t blame them for their vigilance.

The grounds of the Academy are extensive. One asset we used to boast, but are now denied access to, is the lake. A thirty-year-old prospectus shows a group of prefects boating on the lake as a treat, but the lake has a dark and forbidding aspect, and the prefects don’t seem to be having much fun. The boys were allowed to boat occasionally, but they were forbidden to swim. And Charles and Charlie seem to have been magnetised by the lake.
The water is very green and has a sweet taste,
both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times. Exactly the same phrase at different times. Charles Wolfe goes on to conjecture that it’s a vial of the lake water that the matron carries around with her and uses when someone needs medicine in his milk. He notes that after a few mouthfuls of the lake water you “feel fine. Like a king.” He also notes that Charlie Wulf guzzled the lake water in a manner that worried him slightly. If you’re wondering about the diaries, Madame de Silentio insists that we keep them, and that we write full accounts of our thoughts and our days. Then she spends all Sunday reading them. It’s a tricky business, writing the diaries. Madame de Silentio doesn’t want to be acknowledged in our diaries, so we have to write them as if we don’t know anyone’s going to read them. It’s like prayer, somehow. She never comments or acts on what she reads in our diaries, no matter what’s in there—that makes it even more like prayer.

In his diary, Charlie, a weak swimmer, records the afternoon he leant too far into that sweet green taste and fell:
Into the shock of the water. My mouth opened and the lake rushed into me, a strong, cold, never-ending arm rammed down my throat. I didn’t know you could fall like that inside a body of water, that when you fall it’s as hard and helpless a thing as falling through air.
Charles Wolfe dived and retrieved his pathetic friend, and they both saw something incredible. I say incredible even though during my interview with her Madame de Silentio shrugged and spoke of it as something quite commonplace. In swimming to shore, the boys stirred the water with open eyes, and beneath them they saw a bed of silt and rock with a shape pressed into it. Each stroke was firm and clear, even the gap between the emaciated thighs. It was a man down there. A man trapped at the bottom of the lake, wrapped round and round with a great rusty padlocked chain. His face seemed very white and stiff to them at first, then they realised that a mask had been forced over it—a commedia dell’arte mask, with its thick ivory grimace. Under the weight of all that water, the man was alive, and he saw them seeing him, and he struggled, and struggled. “Yes, I had a prisoner out there,” Madame de Silentio says. “Thought it was the safest place, but no. Reynardine was his name. No use dwelling on all that, though. Won’t do a blind bit of good.”

The next seven days of each boy’s diary hold the dutifully scrawled lines: “Nothing today,” the bare minimum required to meet Madame de Silentio’s demand that we record something every day. Matron Seacole, who has since retired, very kindly responded to my written enquiry with the recollection that Charlie Wulf kept the dormitory up three nights in a row with the shouting and kicking he did in his sleep, and had to be dosed a total of ten times. Charles Wolfe was wakeful but didn’t fuss and said he was fine. The boys wrote notes to each other, in a code that I have been unsuccessful in cracking. I can draw no firm conclusions as to what was happening inside the heads of these boys during the seven days of what they described as “nothing.” Charlie’s schoolwork slipped badly. Charles’s schoolwork remained at an excellent standard.

On the eighth day, both boys meticulously recorded a “conversation with a prisoner” in their diaries. They had learnt the prisoner’s name, and they had learnt that he had been a prisoner a long time, longer than he could remember. They had learnt that Madame de Silentio had imprisoned this man, and that the man wished to be freed. And they wished to free him.

Madame de Silentio,
Charles wrote in red ink, beneath that day’s diary entry.
Why did you do this to Reynardine?

Madame de Silentio stuck to her policy of not responding to diary entries.

The teachers suggested keeping a close watch on the boys, but Madame de Silentio insisted that they were intelligent boys undergoing a thought experiment, that they were not seriously planning to do anything.