The Heat of the Sun (5 page)

The scandal rocked the school. Only the most stringent efforts kept it from the public prints. Admiral Ridgeway, at all costs, had to be prevented from knowing the charges; Senator Pinkerton,
defending his son, threatened legal action. In the end, Scotty Ridgeway was saved, while B. F. Pinkerton II was compelled to leave and was banned from ever serving in the US Navy.

‘Quite a story.’ Elmsley winked at me from across the table.

‘It’s the biggest secret – the biggest ever,’ said Joe Boyd, awed.

‘Not much of a secret,’ said Le Vol, ‘if all of us know it. Who found this out, anyway?’

‘Someone,’ said Elmsley, ‘who’s not fond of Trouble.’

Trouble’s glory departed as swiftly as it had arrived. He had no peace. In corridors, fellows shouldered roughly past him. Towels flicked at him in the bathroom. One
day, several fellows held his head down a toilet bowl and pulled the chain. His smallness became a curse to him. He was tripped up, pushed into walls; the stairs, which he had taken so confidently
before, became places of danger where a mischievous hand, a malevolent foot, might seek him out. More than once he stumbled and fell. ‘Watch it, little boy!’ and ‘Get away from
me!’ came the wails of outrage as he cannoned into fellows further down.

Cubicle number thirty was desecrated. First the silken quilt was hacked with knives, set alight, pissed on, then flung from a window. Obscene additions covered the colourful pictures.
Jubilantly, fellows flung Trouble’s phonograph records like discuses up and down the corridors, inundating the brown linoleum with a jagged sea of black.

They smashed the phonograph too.

In study hall and at dinner, Trouble sat alone. Of the acolytes, none remained. True, some had lingered – the Townsend twins had been the last to hold out – but the burden of
conformity was too much. To take Trouble’s part was to invite assault, derision, the vilest accusations. For a few days fellows shook their heads, wondering how Trouble had taken us all in;
then none spoke of the past any more. Trouble might never have enchanted any of us.

The masters did not know what was going on. The world of the boys, like the secret lives of animals, unfolded beneath their awareness. If Mr Gregg thought again of the incident with the
blackboard, he must have seen it as an isolated outrage, not the first in an evil chain. In class, Trouble betrayed little, sitting in silent dignity. The stares, the whispered jokes, the compasses
stabbing his buttocks, came only when the master’s back was turned.

One afternoon, as snow fell thickly, Mr Gregg made us read aloud from
Cymbeline
. The scene was a long one and the class soon grew restless; besides, Mr Gregg had
assigned a part to Trouble. Guffaws, barely suppressed, accompanied every speech that Guiderius delivered.

In the scene, Guiderius and Arviragus, the king’s disguised sons, conduct a burial service in the woods for Imogen, whom they falsely believe to be dead as well as a boy; that she is their
sister is also unknown to them. Neither the pathos nor the absurdity of the situation infused our reading. Trouble was dutiful, his voice clipped and passionless; Elmsley, as Arviragus, sounded
uncommonly nervous, stumbling often, as if in the mere act of playing a scene with Trouble he had compromised himself.

Trouble intoned:

The snorts were loud. Mr Gregg looked up from his book.

Elmsley replied, stumblingly:

Eight fellows had speaking parts. I was one of them, and we all had to stand. I resented this; I was the Soothsayer, who speaks only when the scene is almost over. Outside, glaring whitely under
the pale sun, snow covered the playing fields like an intimation of death.

We had reached the part where Guiderius and Arviragus sing their famous funeral song. Trouble had the first verse. At the direction
Song
he paused. Someone stifled a shriek.

‘Just read it, Mr Pinkerton,’ said Mr Gregg.

Suddenly I was alarmed. Trouble faced the class. In fascinated, confused longing, we all gazed back at him. From the first I had sensed his magic; now, as if all along he had been biding his
time, waiting for his moment, the magic reached out to touch us all.

Mr Gregg looked puzzled. Then Trouble began to sing:

On the first lines, Trouble’s voice wavered; after that, the tone became assured. I slumped into my seat, pinned down as if by oppressive gravity, yet something in me struggled to escape,
like a bird that flurries at the bars of its cage. Trouble delivered the song slowly, giving each word its due in a clear, soaring tenor. The song, in all its melancholy beauty, might have been a
summation of all that life could hold. The setting, I realized later, was the one by Sir Hubert Parry: I would come to know it well.

The second verse was for Arviragus; then the two had alternating lines. Elmsley looked about him. Terror flashed in his face, and he dissolved into the resignation of the damned as Trouble
pushed aside an empty desk, advanced upon him, and draped an arm across his shoulder. Elmsley could barely move his lips; it was Trouble who sang his parts, with Elmsley propped beside him like a
ventriloquist’s dummy:

When the song was over, there was silence, and I wondered what it meant. Time, it seemed, was stranded in its flight, as if a pendulum had swung high, hovered, and refused to sweep down. We had
been lifted out of ourselves. The fellow who had sung was no schoolboy victim, fresh from being tripped up on the stairs; the fellows who had listened were not the tormentors they had been and
would be again.

Then came the applause. Who began it I cannot say; first one pair of hands struck softly, slowly together, then another and another, until the sound surged across the room like thunder, sweeping
us all into its startling grip.

That evening it was my turn to be chapel monitor, readying the chapel for morning service. All except the most pious fellows resented this task. It was worst in winter.
Situated apart from other buildings at the bottom of a sloping lawn, the chapel was cold enough to make me shiver even as I swept the aisles, polished the brass, changed the candles, and adjusted
the hymnals in scarf, gloves, and overcoat.

I was anything but thorough. There were meant to be two monitors: Trouble had been rostered with me that evening, and I had not been able to find him. I was angry. I had left my tasks too late
and it was time for dinner.

Only as I was about to leave did I pause, slumping exhaustedly on the front pew. And what, I wondered, had become of Trouble? When the bell had rung and Mr Gregg’s class had spilled into
the corridor there had been jokes, jostlings, but feeble ones; Trouble strode away, and not a single fellow tried to hold him back.

Still his song disturbed me. In the chapel, the melody came back to me, its strange beauty burning into me like a brand. I gazed up at the lectern, at the crucifix, at the high windows. Fugitive
sunset flashed through stained glass and, resting my chin on my ashplant, I felt myself slipping into violet eyes, into a dark brightness where questions hovered over me like imponderable hanging
fruit.

I had hauled myself to my feet and was about to trudge back down the aisle when I heard a groan. At first I thought it was the wind, but the groan came again, and I swivelled towards the altar.
Perhaps someone waited there, watching me, setting me up for some cruel joke, but I stumped in that direction all the same. Carpet, thick and blood-red, sank beneath my boots. White linen concealed
the table, dropping at the corners in papery folds.

For a third time I heard the groan, a sound of pain. I paced around the table. Oh, but I had not been thorough!

Trouble lay on his side, doubled over.

I prodded him with my ashplant. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Damn, I must have passed out.’ He raised his head, wincing. ‘Who are you?’

I reminded him of my name.

‘Leave me alone.’ He shivered violently. He wore no coat, no hat; his attackers must have set upon him in another building, then carried him out to the chapel and left him here.

‘You’re blue with cold,’ I said. ‘Can you stand?’

‘Leave me,’ he said again, and coughed.

‘You’ll have to go to the infirmary. I’ll get help.’

‘No!’ He reached up, grabbing the edge of the table; I thought he would pull down the cloth, candles and all, and I flustered about him, but he waved me away. Like a drunkard, he
staggered down the steps and crashed into the railing before the first pew. He stood swaying, holding it tightly.

‘You’ll catch your death.’ I tugged away my scarf, struggled out of my coat. ‘Here, let me help you.’

Had Trouble shouted at me, I should not have been surprised; but he turned, pliantly enough. Bundling him into my outdoor things, I realized anew how small he was. Blood glistened darkly against
his blond hair.

In the chapel porch, we paused. The snow had stopped falling and lay beneath the moonlight in pillowy drifts. From the dining hall, across an upward slope of whiteness, vertical strips of light
shone through cracks in the curtains. The infirmary was further still: across a quadrangle, two flights up.

‘Careful on the steps,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit of a way.’

He said to me suddenly: ‘Who are you? Who are you, really?’

‘Come on, you’re light-headed. Infirmary!’

‘No, no infirmary.’ He strode towards the dining hall, and all I could do was try to keep up. In the vestibule, he paused. Before us stood a set of swinging doors with portholes in
the upper halves, like twin cheery faces. The clamour of voices, the clatter and scrape of cutlery, sounded from within.

He pushed through the doors. A clear, wide track led to the dais at the end of the hall, where masters and senior fellows, Scranway included, dined together at the high table. Trouble progressed
slowly, my too-long coat dragging on the floor behind him like a cape.

Silence fell. Under sickly electric light, the dishevelled, bloodied Trouble was an apparition: Banquo’s ghost.

At the foot of the dais, Trouble stopped. He stretched out an arm and pointed. His voice, when he spoke, was steady.

‘Fight me,’ he said. ‘Fight me yourself.’

He dropped his arm, swayed, and crumpled to the floor. Cries broke out. Frantically the headmaster tried to quell the uproar, as Mr Gregg rushed towards the prone boy.

They kept Trouble in the infirmary for three days. The cut on his forehead was long, but not deep; his ribs were bruised, but none was cracked, and he had caught a chill. On
the afternoon of the second day, I visited him. I found him sitting up against pillows. Circling his temples was a white bandage. He held a pen and resting on his thighs was a portable escritoire,
with a sheet of paper at the ready.

‘A visitor. Isn’t that dangerous?’ he said.

‘For anyone else, perhaps.’

‘Compassion for the cripple? I wouldn’t bet on it. How’s Eddie Scranway?’

‘The masters wondered why you pointed at him,’ I said. ‘Scranway was in class all that afternoon.’

‘I
was
light-headed. You said so.’

The infirmary occupied an attic under the eaves, with creamy walls sloping between dormer windows. I thought of the hospital ward where I had lain for weeks in Paris. I hated hospitals. I hated
sickrooms. I never wanted to be in a sickroom again. ‘They must have asked who did it, didn’t they?’

‘Do you think they want to know?’

There were five other beds, four of them empty, pillows crisp as untrodden snow. A mousy boy slept in the bed next to Trouble’s; disturbingly, he reminded me of Billy Billicay. Under the
window gleamed a spindly hoop-backed chair. I perched on the end of Trouble’s bed. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ I said. ‘How
can
you stand what
they’ve done to you?’

‘Don’t you think I deserve it? You’ve heard the stories.’

‘Stories are stories.’

‘Oh, the test paper, that’s true. Maybe it was stupid of me, but it seemed so unfair, Scotty being kept out of officer training, all for the sake of some silly set of questions. But
the diary? Come on! Let’s just say there are people who hate the senator. They’ll do anything to disgrace him.’

‘They failed, though. It wasn’t in the papers.’

‘But the story’s spreading.’ Cries, like birdcalls, echoed from the playing fields. The boy in the next bed shifted, murmuring; he must have been dreaming. Trouble reached for
a handkerchief, sneezing into it lustily. The bed squeaked and shook, and I asked, too urgently, how the story could have spread. His nonchalance maddened me.

‘At Navy school, there was a fellow from Kentucky or Tennessee, somewhere like that, who’d never seen the sea before. They called him Landlubber and ragged him about what sort of
sailor he’d make. His real name was Elmsley – Dan Elmsley. Guess whose cousin he is?’

‘I’ll kill that little rodent.’

‘Relax. It wasn’t Elmsley. Not really.’

‘What? Elmsley heard it from Cousin Dan.’

‘Well, he might have let slip a few things. But he didn’t do this.’ Trouble sneezed again. ‘Listen,’ he went on, between wipings of his nose, ‘there might
be... a favour you can do for me. Would you like that?’