Pilcrow (66 page)

The rumour came round the school’s bush telegraph, so that I felt like somebody near the end of the circle in a game of Chinese Whispers, hearing a formula so garbled it bore no relationship to the original. ‘Old Rabies is tying the knot with Ponky-doodle.’ What on earth could that mean? A little later it was made official. Alan Raeburn was marrying Millicent Baxter, she of the sensitive sniffer and the blue-pencilled swear-words. There was going to be a party laid on to celebrate the happy event.

By chance Kim Derbishire, the school’s first pupil, primal Vulcanian, was paying a visit just then. He attended the party. To me he was a figure from legend. I was trying to get the meat of a walnut out of its shell, wrestling with the little vice provided for the purpose. A crotch wrapped in brown corduroy entered my field of vision. The very limited movement of my cervical spine made it hard for me to look at tall boys’ faces. It was a pain in the neck. It was much easier to look at their groins. With an effort I followed this particular pair of trousers up to the shirt and beyond, to his smiling face. He reached into the nut dish and picked up a handful. There was a noise like bones crunching and I realised to my amazement that he was
breaking
them in one hand. He handed them over to me with a gallant flourish, and then he quietly continued his walk round the dining tables. He was like an ambassador or minister, but to me he was little short of a god.

Kim radiated sex appeal, not musk but aura. Everyone except Miss Willis knew that Kim was having nightly trysts in the school library with one of the new helpers, little Dagmar Bosch from Oberammergau who hardly came up to his shoulder. It wasn’t hard to pull the wool over Marion’s eyes when it came to her pets. And if Kim didn’t get enough of a frisson from having sex after lights-out on the premises of his old school, he could tickle himself even further with the thought that Dagmar’s brother had played Christ in the Oberammergau Passionsspiel.

Marion’s eyes had been shining all evening at the engagement party for Millicent and Alan. Emotion wasn’t necessarily out of place on such an occasion, but of course it depends on what the emotion is. She seemed very restless, moving from place to place, but she
happened
to be near me when the speeches started, and I could hear quite clearly what she said.

‘Oh Alan, please, don’t do this to me. I can’t bear it.’ Then with a sob she hurried away.

It was the smallest possible outburst, swallowed up by the noise of the party, a genteel death-rattle kept well back in her throat. Teachers learn to project as a matter of course, clarity of articulation an
occupational
requirement, but this was something that her divided larynx fought with, half to shout out to the castellated roof-tops and half to swallow down like a cyanide pill. Even in a culture that hated scenes above anything, where murmuring ‘For God’s sake, m’dear, don’t make a scene’ could bring all but the most hysterical or actively
foreign
to their senses, it didn’t count as an unwarrantable parading of emotion.

‘Oh Alan, please, don’t do this to me.’ Very similar words to what she had said when Alan had brandished the Board of Education that time, and just as ineffectual. Alan turned a deaf ear to Marion. He hadn’t laid down the B of E then, and he wasn’t going to give up pretty Millicent Baxter now.

Marion uttered only a handful of words, unheard by the man to whom they were addressed, and then she dashed from the room. It was hardly Dido’s lament.

Seen from another angle, of course, Dido’s lament was exactly what it was. The wail of a woman departing from love and life.
All will be
darkness soon
… It was even the ‘
Liebestod
’ from Wagner, but played in the key of
Brief Encounter
.

All the same, Miss Willis would not have wanted to think of
herself
as Dido. Dido was selfish. Dido didn’t look beyond her own needs. She was a distraction on the way to Æneas’s true destiny (as I had learned at Vulcan) which was the journey to Italy and eventually the founding of Rome. By this reckoning Dido wasn’t Marion. Dido was Millicent. Dido put love before duty, and did all she could to divert a great man from his true course.

In the version of the story being played out at Vulcan School, Dido was triumphant. Dido won. She detained him on his way to where he was meant to go. She would want children, she would want a home. Marion Willis was keening from the other corner of the triangle,
voicing
all the spectral sorrow of a city that would not now be founded, the lasting utopia where the disabled and able-bodied would find common ground, and where Miss Willis would wake up next to Alan Raeburn, kiss him and hand him his canes.

Superficially the school kept running as before, but everything beneath the surface was different. If it was true that Marion and Alan were the mum and dad of the school, then beyond a certain point we were all living in a house of divorce. Raeburn and Willis were our Shiva and Parvati, and now there was grief in Heaven.

The finances of Vulcan had always been precarious, but by this time they were becoming desperate. The governors began to realise that even an extra ten boys or another appeal (rather soon after the last one) wouldn’t be enough to resolve the difficulties. They began to look into the possibility of setting the school up on a different basis. One idea was that the Department of Education and Science, which had declared the school an invaluable asset, might step in with a grant. This turned out to be wishful thinking. There was no
precedent
for making such a grant to a school outside the state system. Nor would the department take over the running of the school, turning it into a national resource and funding it out of national taxation.

This would have been the fairest and most logical way of
proceeding
, but again unprecedented. Instead the department brought
pressure
to bear on the County of Berkshire, successfully in the end, to take over a school which drew most of its pupils from outside the county. A price was agreed that would enable the school to pay off its debts.

Alan Raeburn opposed all the suggested alternatives. He would have preferred the school to close down rather than lose its
independence
. He felt particularly betrayed that Marion took another point of view. He fought a long rearguard action against the changes. First he resigned as co-principal, leaving Marion in sole charge. He was the only governor to vote against the proposed take-over by the County of Berkshire, and when – eventually – the motion was passed he resigned from the committee, severing his connection with the school. After that he and Millicent moved north.

It’s hard not to side with Marion Willis on the level of economic realism. Closing the school would deprive future pupils of the closest approach to mainstream education they were likely to get, quite apart from throwing the present school population back into a system with a marked tendency to let them down – which was why the school had been founded in the first place. There were personal consequences, too, attached to the defiant line Raeburn was advocating. Alan and Marion would have been left with huge personal debts, and the whole little army of sponsors and patrons would have been badly let down.

It’s easy to imagine that her emotions were involved, all the same, in the decision to take the school in a direction that Alan would never have been able to accept. I don’t mean that she was motivated by revenge, to pay back one betrayal with another. She was different after the engagement party, that’s all. Once upon a time she would have voted with Alan without question, and to hell with the consequences. Bankruptcy wouldn’t have frightened her from his side. Now Millicent was by his side instead, and he couldn’t count on Marion’s loyalty in the old way. They had been more than friends once, and much more than allies, but he had re-drawn those lines in a way which excluded her. It wasn’t Alan and Marion against the world any more, and it could never be the same way again.

The secret marriage between Alan and Marion was real, as was proved by the wounds it left, the pain of its ending. He came to regard her as a traitor who had allowed his dreams to be sold off, and she saw him as a sort of bigamist even though their association had been purely professional. He had made her no promise.

I tried to avoid Luke Squires after the week at Woodlarks camp, an adventure which had been mainly a disappointment. He wasn’t easily avoided if he wanted to see you, though, any more than he could be found if he had decided to disappear. I was leaving the new toilet block one day when he appeared before me. He swerved his
wheelchair
to a halt in front of mine, as if it was a police car smoothly
intercepting
a car making its get-away after a bank robbery.

‘This is the third week of term,’ he said lazily. ‘And we’ve hardly had a chance to see each other … There are lots of things we have to catch up on …’

Even now I don’t know why he was pursuing me. Perhaps he was so unused to anyone saying no to him that it piqued an interest which would otherwise have died down.

‘What catching up is there to do?’ I asked, rather lamely.

‘Well, there’s the problem of my German,’ he drawled carelessly. ‘Miss Willis likes me a lot – you know it, I know it, the whole school knows it. But she says the days are long gone when you could get good marks just because a teacher likes you. She says that I must stop being so lazy, and get down and do some work.’ His hand played over his knee and thigh, coming to rest on the magnetic hill between his legs. ‘But it’s a tough language, you know. The way all those words keep changing depending on what they are doing or what is being done to them. It’s very confusing …’ His prehensile wrist–hand
complex
gave two or three thoughtful squeezes to his crotch, while I tried to keep my eyes on his face.

‘Then Miss Willis had a brain-wave. She said, “I don’t know why you don’t get more pally with John Cromer. He’s easily the best
student
of German we have and I’m sure you would both benefit from chumming up together”…’

I was impressed all over again by Luke’s shamelessness. If this
didn’t
take the Peek Frean! He had recruited poor trusting Marion into his scheme. Miss Willis had the saving grace of many autocrats – she was quite unable to tell the difference between like-minded
lieutenants
and charmers who would tell her exactly what she wanted to hear. She was supremely vulnerable to double agents.

Now Luke began to imitate Miss Willis’s speech, just as I had the first night I became aware of him. ‘… “I know it’s a little hard, my dear…”’, he said, ‘“no boy ever likes to receive help from a boy
junior
to himself …”’ He squeezed his crotch again, so that it swelled by a good half-inch. ‘… “But in this day and age there comes a time for everyone when they have to bow to someone younger than
themselves
. Besides, I think that you two would be very good for each other. John has a keen brain, but he doesn’t make friends easily. You on the other hand are strong and frightened of no one, but a little mental sharpening would do you no harm at all …”’

Luke was a brilliant instinctive strategist. There he was, acting out the part of Miss Willis and speaking perfectly loudly, not caring if anyone heard. He knew exactly what he could get away with. He was parroting educational platitudes all the time he was arranging an assignation with me, while pretending to be carrying out the sole principal’s wishes!

I felt his charm but fought its pull. What was it about me, really, that he wanted so much?

‘Well,’ I said, trying not to let my voice shake. ‘If you really feel I could be of any use to you, I’ll gladly help you with your German. When shall we start?’

‘Well, I’m a bit tied up tomorrow,’ he said, still in a Willis tone of voice, ‘but I’ve plenty of time for the day after. Check and see if you’ve some time then. Tell you what, go for a pee about fifteen minutes before the end of class on Thursday. I’ll do the same, and we can meet up in the toilet and make a study schedule … I’d better get back to my class,’ he went on, rather as if he was teaching it.

He surged off in his wonderful chair, taking my assent entirely for granted. Just before he reached the corridor, he span his chair
gracefully
round and called out, ‘Don’t forget your
Deutsches Leben
, old man!’

I wondered what would happen if I didn’t turn up. I could say that the teacher wouldn’t let me go to the loo, or just tell Luke flat out that I wasn’t interested. It’s true that Luke was prone to wild rages, but I wasn’t actually afraid of him.

Up to a certain point Luke would be quiet and soft-spoken, but if he lost his self-control then there was no going back. His face became so contorted he could hardly be recognised. He would clear the room. People didn’t stick around – the sense of danger was palpable. Mr Nevin had sometimes been able to handle him, speaking gently and taking him by the arm. Biggie could also sometimes get through to him. Each of them had riddled him with bullets of pure love. After they had left the school his rages were much more intractable.

If Luke decided to thrash out, it wasn’t the legs you had to watch out for but his strong arms. Charged up with energy from the heat source in his groin, Luke’s fists could pack quite a punch. Sometimes two or three members of staff were needed to subdue him. Judy Brisby had boasted once that she could calm him single-handed with her nerve-punching technique, but she was thrown off like a straw doll, and ended up bruised herself. Threats had no effect on him.

If I wasn’t actually afraid of Luke, then there’s no denying that I was tense when the appointed day arrived. I made my excuse to the teacher at the agreed (actually the dictated) time. It was only as I approached the sliding door that I realised that I had forgotten to bring my copy of
Deutsches Leben
. I was stymied. I couldn’t go back and collect it, or the English teacher would certainly wonder why I needed a German text-book in the loo. There was no turning back.

‘
Kann ich dick helfen?
’ Luke said in greeting, with that slow
drawling
smile. I was so flustered that I failed to consider the possibility that he was playing with me. It’s well-known that the English have a real problem with the soft German ‘ch’, but I had Gisela Schmidt’s example to follow. In that school I was accounted sharp, but it didn’t occur to me that Luke was pronouncing the second word of his
sentence
exactly as he intended.

‘It’s not “
dick
”, it’s “
dir
”,’ I corrected him. ‘“
Helfen
” takes the dative because you’re giving help
to
someone.’ I was relieved to see that he had his copy of
Deutsches Leben
with him, pressed lightly against his groin. At least one of us had an alibi.

I had assumed that he had thought of a discreet place for our
explorations
, but he seemed to think the toilet block was a discreet enough venue. It was a newly built facility but already seemed neglected. There was a constant hissing and spluttering from some sort of
maladjusted
cistern, and water lay in pools on the floor.

The door to the block slid and could not be locked. There were
urinals
for the ABs, and I suppose for some pupils like Julian whose
callipers
meant that any unnecessary sitting down was a chore. There were also cubicles, which had locks and could accommodate a
wheelchair
. One wheelchair, not two. Luke’s solution was to lever himself out of his chair and install himself inside, supporting himself on the door. From there he called out, ‘Come on, John! What are you
waiting
for?’

Doubtfully I approached the toilet in the Wrigley. There was room for me to get past Luke’s distinctive machine, but I still wasn’t keen. Luke’s sense of invulnerability was impressive but not contagious. Anyone coming into the toilet block would guess how matters stood from the silent testimony of that chair.

In even the most benign scenario of discovery, there would be no sherry. Raeburn was still on the staff, pending the vote on the Berkshire take-over, but the reins were held in Marion’s sole hand. I was aware as Luke got down onto his knees before me – and how would he explain the damp patches on his smart trousers? – that St John was only two classrooms away savagely tweaking some poor kid’s ear, and if that’s what you got for making a mistake, Heaven knows what he would do if he knew that boys were being indecently gross and grossly indecent right now in the school’s new toilet block.

It was probably true that anyone asking permission to go to the toilet this late in a lesson would be told to wait for break, but I knew that ABs like Roger Stott who helped serve elevenses sometimes jumped the gun, leaving before the bell was actually rung. So I felt absolutely unsafe while Luke got busy with the symbolic transfer of fluids. On the level of sensation I probably enjoyed it more than I had at Woodlarks, when I had hardly been able to take in what was
happening
, but this was not a peak experience. Luke’s excitement made the Wrigley rattle, but I didn’t even get a glimpse of what he had hauled out of his trousers, while he tested to the limit the
manufacturers
’ claims about their permanent crease. I tried to project more congenial images onto the cubicle walls, jungles, mountains and clouds, or even the tent at Woodlarks, impregnated with the erotic scent of marshmallows. Nothing worked. The ambience of sanitary porcelain and leaky water-works could not be blotted out.

Luke gasped and shuddered. He had got what he wanted before the bell rang or the first AB was sighted, but he was too smart an
operator
to delude himself. He knew that I would want no repetition of our session of private study. Those few minutes in the toilet block were the first and last seminar that we had, and his performance in German O-level, good or bad, owed nothing to me.