The Bell (24 page)

Toby fell silent and they drove along for a while without speaking. Michael could hear him yawning. At last he said, ‘That cider has made me quite sleepy.'

‘Well, go to sleep then,' said Michael.

‘Oh, no,' said Toby. ‘I'm not as sleepy as all that.' In a few minutes he was asleep. Michael could see from the corner of his eye the boy's head hanging forward. Days of hard physical work followed by the dose of potent cider had knocked him out completely. Michael smiled to himself.

The Land-Rover proceeded more slowly than on the journey out. Michael still felt a bit drunk though perfectly capable. The exaltation and delight which he had felt in the pub had faded into a purring contentment combined with a most luxurious heaviness of the whole body. He leaned upon the steering wheel, turning it with the length of his forearm, and singing inaudibly to himself. Toby hung forward, obviously dead asleep. Then on a corner he slumped quietly sideways and Michael could feel his weight against him. The boy's head descended gently on to his shoulder.

Michael drove on in a dream. He could feel Toby's knee touching his thigh, the warmth of his lean body against his side, his hair brushing his cheek. The unexpected delight of the contact was so great that he closed his eyes for a moment and then realized that he was still driving. He tried to breathe more quietly so as not to disturb the boy, and found that he was taking long deep breaths. He slowed the Land-Rover down a little, and calmed his breathing. He could feel distinctly, as if his frame were suddenly magnified, the rise and fall of his ribs and the corresponding movement of Toby's body. He was afraid his heart-beat alone might wake the sleeper.

He drove on slowly now at an even pace. If he didn't have to stop there was no reason why Toby shouldn't sleep all the way to Imber. He manoeuvred the Land-Rover gently round corners. Fortunately the roads were clear. That Toby should just go on sleeping seemed the most desirable thing in the world. Michael felt an ecstasy of protective joy; and for a moment he remembered an old peasant he had once seen high in the Alps sitting on a green bank and watching his cow feeding. The absurd comparison made him smile. He went on smiling.

On a piece of straight road he ventured to look down at Toby. The boy was curled against him, his legs drawn up, his hands touchingly folded, his head lying now between Michael's shoulder and the back of the seat. The white laundered shirt hung open almost to his waist. As Michael looked at him, and then returned his gaze to the road, he had a very distinct impulse to thrust his hand into the front of Toby's shirt. The next instant, as if this thought had acted as a spark, he had a clear visual image of himself driving the Land-Rover into a ditch and seizing Toby violently in his arms.

Michael shook his head as if to clear away a slight haze which was buzzing round him. He began to realize that he had a headache. He really must control his imagination. He was surprised that it could play him such a trick. He was blessed, or cursed, with a strong power of visualizing, but the snapshots which it produced were not usually so startling. Michael felt solemn now, responsible, still protective and still joyful, with a joy which, since he had taken a more conscious hold on himself, seemed deeper and more pure. He felt within him an infinite power to protect Toby from harm. Quietly he conjured up the vision of Toby the undergraduate, Toby the young man. Somehow, it might be possible to go on knowing him, it might be possible to watch over him and help him. Michael felt a deep need to build, to retain, his friendship with Toby; there was no reason why such a friendship should not be fruitful for both of them; and he felt a serene confidence in his own most scrupulous discretion. So it would be that this moment of joy would not be something strange and isolated, but rather something which pointed forward to a long and profound responsibility, a task. There would be no moment like this again. But something of its sweetness would linger, in a way that Toby would never know, in humble services obscurely performed at future times. He was conscious of such a fund of love and goodwill for the young creature beside him. It could not be that God intended such a spring of love to be quenched utterly. There must, there must be a way in which it could be made a power for good. Michael did not in that instant feel that it would be difficult to make it so.

He realized with intense disappointment that they were nearing Imber. He must have been following the road without noticing it. He wondered how drunk he still was. Thank heavens there had been no mishaps. He turned smoothly onto the main road and in a few minutes the high stone wall of the estate appeared on the right. Michael was deeply sorry to arrive. Toby was still heavily asleep. It was a shame to wake him. The Land-Rover began to slow down. Following some instinct Michael did not drive it as far as the Lodge gates. He stopped some hundred yards short of the Lodge and turned off the headlights. Then he switched off the engine. A terrible silence followed.

Toby stirred. Then he rolled back in his seat and opened his eyes. He became at once wide awake. ‘Good heavens, was I asleep?' he said. ‘I'm so sorry!'

‘Nothing to be sorry for,' said Michael. ‘You had a good sleep. We're home again now.'

Toby exclaimed with surprise. He stretched, yawning. Then he said eagerly, ‘Look, we can do that thing with the headlights now. Do you mind? You turn them right up and I'll come walking towards you looking straight into them.'

Michael obediently turned the headlights full up, while Toby jumped out of the Land-Rover. He saw the boy running away down the road until he was nearly beyond the range of the beam. Then he turned and began to walk slowly back, keeping his eyes steadily fixed on where Michael was behind the blaze of the lights. His brightly illuminated figure approached at an even pace. His dark eyes, wide open and strangely like those of a sleepwalker, were unblinking and clearly visible. They did not gleam or glow: he walked with a graceful slow stride, very slim, the white sleeves of his shirt uncurling on his arms. He was a long time coming.

When he reached the van he leaned his head in through the window towards Michael. Michael put one arm across his shoulder and kissed him.

It happened so quickly that the moment after Michael was not at all sure whether it had really happened or whether it was just another thing that he had imagined. But Toby remained there rigid, where he had stepped back, pulling himself away from Michael's grasp, and a look of utter amazement was to be seen on his face.

Michael said, and found his voice suddenly thick and stumbling, ‘I'm sorry. That was an oversight.' The remark was idiotic, not what he had meant to say at all, that was not the word he wanted. There was a moment's silence. Then Michael said, ‘I'm sorry, Toby. Just come round the other side and get in and I'll run you to the Lodge. We're still a little way away.'

Toby came round the front of the car, averting his face. As he had his hand on the door on the other side, someone came into view on the road, another figure vividly revealed and walking slowly up into the beam of the lights. It was Nick. As soon as Michael saw him, following an instinctive desire for concealment, he switched the lights off again. Nick's form loomed up near the car. Toby was still standing in the road.

‘Hello you two,' said Nick. ‘I thought you were never coming. What's the game, stopping such a long way from the gates?'

‘I made a mistake,' said Michael. ‘Perhaps you'd see Toby in. I'll be off now. Cheerio, Toby.' He put the lights up, started the car with a jolt, and moved off down the road and in through the Lodge gates which fortunately were open. He and Toby had been behind the headlights; but Nick might have seen something all the same. As he drove up to the house, which was by now entirely in darkness, it was this thought which tormented him most.

CHAPTER 12

IT WAS LUNCH-TIME ON the following day. As was customary, the meal was taken in silence, while a reading was made by some member of the company. Lunch usually took about twenty minutes, during which the reader sat at a side table, while the others sat at the long narrow refectory table with Michael at one end and Mrs Mark at the other. Today the reader was Catherine and the book from which she read was the Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Catherine read well, in a slightly trembling voice, with deep feeling and patently moved by the matter of her reading.

‘This is that Great Deed ordained by our Lord God from without beginning, treasured and hid in His blessed breast, only known to Himself: by which He shall make all things well. For like as the blissful Trinity made all things of nought, right so the same blessed Trinity shall make well all that is not well.

‘And in this sight I marvelled greatly and beheld our Faith, marvelling thus: Our Faith is grounded in God's word, and it belongeth to our Faith that we believe that God's word shall be saved in all things; and one point of our Faith is that many creatures shall be condemned: as angels that fell out of Heaven for pride, which be now fiends; and man in earth that dieth out of Faith of Holy Church: that is to say, they that be heathen men; and also man that hath received christendom and liveth unchristian life, and so dieth out of charity: all these shall be condemned to hell without end, as Holy Church teacheth me to believe. And all this so standing, me thought it was impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord showed in the same time.

‘And as to this I had no other answer in Showing of our Lord God but this:
That which is impossible to thee is not impossible to me: I shall save my word in all things and I shall make all things well.
Thus I was taught, by the grace of God, that I should steadfastly hold me in the Faith as I had aforehand understood, and therewith that I should firmly believe that all things shall be well, as our Lord showed in the same time.'

Toby, who had soon finished with his meal, sat crumbling his bread and pushing the crumbs into cracks in the old oak table. He did not dare to turn his head in case he caught Michael's eye. He felt tired and listless after a bad night. His morning's work had been irksome. He was not listening to the reading.

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. Toby had passed, it seemed to him in an instant, from a joy that had seemed impregnable into an agitation which he scarcely understood. He could not, during the long night and when he awoke from intermittent sleep in the morning, quite make out whether anything very important had happened or not; at least, at the surface of his mind he debated this. Deeper down he knew that something extraordinary had occurred though he did not yet know what it was.

As he walked back with Nick to the Lodge, after Michael's abrupt departure, he had felt extreme confusion, but had managed all the same to speak calmly to Nick and answer with cheerful casualness his questions about their journey. He wondered if Nick could possibly have seen the incident, but decided that he had not. Toby and Michael had been well behind the headlights, and Nick, even if he had emerged from the gates in time, would have been dazzled by the strong beam. He might have guessed from Michael's odd manner that something was up; but there was no reason why he should guess it to be something as remarkable as
that
. Nick was possibly curious: and showed, Toby observed, during their conversation that followed, a sharpened interest in him and a desire to keep him talking. But Toby maintained his composure, and cut their talk short, though not too short, and hurried up to bed. He wanted passionately to be by himself.

When he was alone he sat down on his bed and covered his face. His first emotion was sheer amazement. He could hardly think of anything he would have expected less. Toby's knowledge of homosexuality was slight. His day school had yielded him no experience of this sort, nor even the remotest approach to such experience. The matter had been the subject of certain simple jokes among his school-fellows, but their ignorance was as great as his and little information could be obtained from this source. As his education had included Latin but no Greek his acquaintance with the excesses of the ancients was fragmentary; but in any case it was all different for them. What he did know came mainly from the more popular newspapers, and from remarks he had heard his father make about ‘pansies'. In so far as he had up to now reflected on this propensity at all he had regarded it as a strange sickness or perversion, with mysterious and disgusting refinements, from which a small number of unfortunate persons suffered. He also knew, and differed here from his father, that it was more proper to regard these persons as subjects for the doctor than as subjects for the police. And there his knowledge ended.

Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgements. Whereas previously he had regarded Michael as a paragon of virtue and had not dreamt of speculating about whether his life could contain blemishes or failures, he now attributed to him homosexuality
tout court
with all that it involved of the unnatural and the nameless. At least this was his first reaction. He found that his thoughts moved fast and in the direction of greater complexity. His immediate emotion had been surprise. It was soon succeeded by disgust and an alarming sort of fear. He felt a definite physical repugnance at having been touched in that way. He felt himself menaced. Perhaps he ought to tell someone. Did the others know about it? Obviously not. Oughtn't they to be told? Yet it was certainly not for him to speak. Besides, it was a matter also of protecting himself. He was thoroughly alarmed to find that he was the sort of person who attracted attention of that sort. He wondered if that showed that there was something wrong with him, an unconscious tendency that way which another person so afflicted would divine?