The Triple Goddess (115 page)

O! how many were the occasions when Bonvilian longed to sneak away from school after lunch, and go home to tea and the solicitude of his mother! To where there was no Hitler, and no games; and no having to go to the “rooker”, or prefects’ room, when a banging on the heating pipes summoned whoever was the most junior person in the Day Room at the time to answer the call, and do whatever he was ordered, such as taking the prefects’ congealed cookware, greasy plates, and cutlery—they cooked instant meals on the Baby Belling stove that they were allowed in their private quarters to supplement the canteen food—in a plastic washing-up bowl down to the “courts”, or toilet block, scrub them with rags in the cold water basin without gloves or washing-up liquid, and dry them with a dishcloth encrusted with filth.

But it was illegal to leave the school premises, on penalty of being caned or gated, which meant abrogation of the right to go home for one weekend per thirteen week term; or both. Nonetheless, on a few carefully chosen afternoons Bonvilian would invoke the once-a-week option of saying that he was going for a solo run—an approved physical activity, either a team sport, or squash or tennis, or running, when no team sports were scheduled, had to be done every week day.

The only exception was when it was a Corps day, meaning drilling of the school’s 2nd Battalion Royal County Regiment’s cadet unit, in which everyone participated. Bonvilian played oboe in the Band, attempting the almost impossible feat of marching while blowing a double-reeded instrument.

Instead of going on his run, Bonvilian would sneak his bicycle out of the communal corrugated-iron bike shed next to the breeze-block music practice-room building, and ride off the premises and down and along the banked and hedged sweet-smelling lanes that surrounded the campus.

Energized into a euphoric athleticism, he pedalled for miles past fields and orchards, across little hump-backed bridges over streams, past the peaceful lake on private property where he used to go coarse fishing during the holidays, when he could get up the courage to brave the guard dog and ask the gorgon of an owner for permission; and finally up the steep winding drive to his parents’ ill-furnished rented flat in what had formerly been the kitchen quarters of an Edwardian mansion…where he could stay until he had to leave in order to be back at the Academy in time for Chapel.

And O! how that return journey made him yearn for the future, for the independence of adulthood.

As oxymoronic as it was in this day and age—although no religious feeling attached to it, and no sense of the irony of such services not having been discontinued—every weekday traditional Evensong was still held in the soaring Gothic-style chapel. Sabine Baring-Gould, author of the words to the hymn
Onward, Christian Soldiers
set to music by Arthur Sullivan, had been a master at the original school, which had been founded and constructed in the early 1860s and over a hundred and fifty years later redesignated as the Academy for Gifted Boys.

Bonvilian liked Chapel. He was able to lose himself in the pleasant drone of the plainsong psalm that it opened with, and the surprisingly mature-sounding English Hymnal roar of the pupils that overlay the choral harmonization, and the inspirational double-diapasoned swell of the organ. The one bad thing about Chapel, which only happened occasionally, was when as a member of the choir Bonvilian was obliged to sing the first verse of the psalm, unaccompanied, before the rest of the boys and masters joined in, and the organist opened in a key too high for his narrow range; whereupon he experienced a sports-like dread at the likelihood that his voice would crack on the top notes.

Then, after queuing for supper in Hall, the manacles and irons were once more clapped upon his arms and legs, for Prep time. But as the boys sat silently doing their teachers’ assignments in their dark horse-boxes around the Day Room, under the supervision of a glowering prefect who had his own Prep to do, Bonvilian hugged the secret of that afternoon at home, and felt altered and refreshed, recalling the glorious interlude that would end before his flash-tempered father returned, overqualified from whatever job he had not yet managed to get fired from, smarting from the indignities that he had been made to suffer by rude boorish upstart uneducated fools who were senior to but so much younger than him.

Before, provoked into a ranting rage by an imagined insult from his son, in an oft-repeated sequence when Hugo was still living at home, his pater, unable to control his emotions, would storm off and sequester himself in his bedroom until wife and mother—after lengthy soothing mediation interrupted by more outbursts and tirades, which the quaking lad could not help but overhear from the living room of the small flat—could persuade the inarticulate ogre to return.

There was still time for Bonvilian’s home thoughts to be ruined, however, before evening Prep was over, and the boys went upstairs to the dormitory for the too-brief oblivion of sleep. As they laboured to translate Latin and French into English, and vice versa; wrote their E-Lit, history, and geography essays; did mathematical exercises, and wrote up science experiments, the prefect would interrupt—he never forgot, worse luck—to interrupt by calling out each pupil’s name. This was the prompt for each to say what sport he had done that day, so that the prefect could enter it in the Games Book.

‘Run,’ Bonvilian would mumble, alphabetically exposed after the single “A” student, Anderson, who was just as unsporting as he was, but good at responding quickly before anyone else had tuned in. Healthful solitary runs being antisocial exercises, and unverifiable, were allowed no more than once a week. Upon which the Day Room, pleased to have an opportunity to express its frustration at how unlucidly Julius Caesar had written up his military campaign in
De Bello Gallico
, groaned and jeered in disbelief, as the prefect frowned and entered the lie before moving on to Brown minor, the supremely naturally talented Colts cricket captain.

But even life at the Academy had eventually to come to an end; and, in his report to Central, Doctor Stölwiesel 2739J recorded grandly, as if the achievement had been his alone, that 4285Q had graduated with the highest honours ever, and was indisputably a genius. The boy’s failure to shine at sports, which was of no interest to anyone in that Bonvilian would never again need to be either good at them, or required to practise them in whatever he was going to go on to do, was neither mentioned, nor missed by the recipients.

What was also of no consequence, to Hugo Bonvilian 4285Q, was that when, bearing his diploma, he departed the prison that he had occupied for more than a decade, Stölwiesel did not make a point of saying goodbye and wishing him well. Instead the doctor retired to his quarters, sat down at his desk, filled his pipe with Ogden’s St Bruno Flake, lit it with his petrol flame-thrower lighter, and sucked the tobacco red-hot.

Chapter Five

After Hugo Bonvilian 4285Q’s distinguished final examination report had been brought to the attention of the Chief Officer at Central’s Department of Educational Furtherment, Tony Urban-Fox 5554C, the young man was summoned for a viva voce examination in which he demonstrated a precocious aptitude for serve-and-volley verbal tennis by responding to his inquisitors’ questions with contemptuous ease, before posing more complicated ones back to them, so that they had to reframe them back to him cogently enough to avoid a sizzling cross-court or down-the-line return that would end the exchange and the match.

When Urban-Fox 5554C, who was a past master at not sticking his neck out, referred the case for further evaluation to Central’s Department of Operations, headed by Herman Feingold 7930A, Feingold was equally undecided as to how best to make use of the “marvellous boy”, as Wordsworth had described Thomas Chatterton.

This much was clear: that his future lay in some scientific specialty yet to be determined.

Feingold 7930A’s people put Bonvilian in the care of a supervisor, a professor of biology called Strom Livermore 0063I, with instruction to ensure that he was constantly challenged in his curriculum as he embarked upon the next stage of his education, and undistracted by the sort of external influences that plague young men of similar age.

Although Livermore was a hard taskmaster, he was a fair man, as pleasant and knowledgeable as Stölwiesel had been unpleasant and ignorant, and the relationship thrived. Bonvilian showed that he had a particular aptitude for Medicine, especially in the areas of physiology, biochemistry, and immunology. He approached dissection of his first cadaver without squeamishness: no sooner had he made his first long incision with a #23-blade scalpel, and picked up his first post-mortem knife, than he knew that the dead human body, male as well as female,
pace
John Donne in his poem
On Going to Bed
, was his America! his new-found-land.

What remained of Bonvilian’s youth was sacrificed to operating theatres, laboratories, lectures, and solitary study. He explored a microcosm of the world that there was no time for him to become familiar with in person, and spent every waking hour peering into the mirror that reflected reality. Though he became expert in everything he turned his mind to, it was at first and more removes; for him the truth, and proof, lay in books and Petri dishes. Which it often did, but as a lawyer need not be a litigator, nor a neurologist a surgeon, all of Bonvilian’s practical forays and experience were conducted away from the empirical field.

Elevated to the N Class of citizenry upon graduating from the Academy, at twenty-three years old Hugo Bonvilian 4285N sat his final and most rigorous examinations, and was observed performing a number of experiments against the clock. His graduation papers caused a furor of excitement at Operations, because nobody understood them.

Not knowing what else to do, Herman Feingold at Operations, taking advice from 4285N’s supervisor Strom Livermore, who was now similarly out of his depth, presented the young man for further evaluation to the Nobel laureate scientist Horst Pealiker 6608B.

Professor Pealiker headed a think tank of other top scientists, all of whom he convened as a panel to interview Bonvilian and elicit from him a more detailed account of the methods, findings, and conclusions that he had used and made and come to in his recent tests, so that the experts might comprehend what his methods, findings, and conclusions were.

4285N was not fazed by the array of famous people before him, for he had already acquired the blunt arrogance typical of one who suspected that, if he was not yet in possession of all the facts, he soon would know everything there was to be known about anything worth knowing. The soul-searching and diffidence of his tentative years at the Academy for Gifted Boys were already a distant memory, and his skills as a fencer had translated themselves into academic weapons.

‘Bonvilian 4285N.’ said Professor Pealiker. Having conferred with the other members of the panel, and finding themselves unable to agree upon what to ask the interviewee, in case he were to ridicule the question, or ask them to rephrase it in a way that made sense, Pealiker 6608B had decided that it would be safe, as an opening gambit, to remind him of his name.

Having thus asserted himself, Pealiker went on to suggest that 4285N might like to tell them a little more about a recent essay of his, the one where he said that further studies into human evolutionary origins were an irrelevance and waste of time and money because biological science should be moving not backward but forward, a lot further forward, in strides rather than baby steps.

‘Darwin!’, spat Bonvilian, from the stand; and the panel, noting the contempt, felt easier.

Evolution was 4285N’s favourite topic, and it was also the favourite topic of the members of the panel because it was Central’s favourite topic, ever since Bonvilian had brought it to its attention as being of importance, in that it was now a matter of consensus at Central that
life in general
, by which it meant the lives at Central in particular being representative of those of Mankind, by which it meant the portion of them that was still outstanding, which was understood still to be an indefinite, indeterminate sort of proposition having to do not with where one had come from, which one already knew because, having departed decades ago one had been there, done that, but with what one’s direction from here and ultimate destination might be, was a matter regarding which the State was interested in understanding how Central might—on behalf of Mankind—arrange either to change the route and/or delay one’s arrival at that destination; or postpone continuation on one’s onward journey…

…in fact, hey, frankly, the whole rest of the trip might as well be cancelled on the same grounds because one was rather weary of travelling, in fact one had never been a good traveller, and consequently one was inclined to stay where one was, thanks very much; which, when one thought about it, as one had, made all the sense in the world because what was the point, if one was perfectly satisfied, as one was, with where one already was, in putting a lot of people to the trouble of making arrangements for those at Central, and others, to go on via the places in between to a terminus at yet another place where one had no reason to want to be, on the grounds that, when one did arrive, that place might turn out not to be of any interest, or same-old-same-old boring, or downright unpleasant; in which case all one would want to do is turn right round and come back again; which, given that one did not have a return ticket, might not be that easy to arrange?

As it were.

‘Listen,’ said Bonvilian to the assembled company of professors and scientists and scholars, who, being already disposed to do so, were already all ears; ‘to what Darwin had to say, and I quote: “How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organization to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe [sic].”