“You didn't get me into it, sir.”
“But I didn't get you out of it, did I? And perhaps I should have. I ought to have known.”
“Nobody could have known, sir.”
“Sometimes I think Stanley knew.” The words came out very slowly, almost as if he had forgotten how to talk. “Instinctively, I mean. He's got good instincts, that boy.” In the streetlamp's silver light, cut through with blind man's black as jagged as a shard of glass, I could make out a sad smile upon Carton's face. “That new woman of his, for example. At his age, I'd have fallen in love with her myself.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, but the truth was, I could not imagine him being in love with anyone, or anyone being in love with him, either. He seemed too much larger than life for that, even broken down as he was now.
“It would be easier for me,” continued Carton, “if Stanley was simply a dead loss. Then I could content myself with giving him the occasional pat on the back and a box of cheap cigars at Christmas. But he's not a dead loss. He's capable.” He nodded in agreement with himself. “He can do anything he sets his mind to. It's his father, my own brother, who spoiled him. Let him do anything he wanted and, what's worse, got him out of doing anything he didn't want to do. Since my brother's death, I've tried to mend things, but I think perhaps it is too late. I tried to get him interested in mountaineering again, but he seems to have made up his mind about that.”
“No one would climb with him,” I said. “Not after Sugden spread the word about his refusing to come with us. Stanley could have gone off on his own, but he was too proud for that. So he just walked away.”
Carton looked up and down the alleyway, as if to see his nephew disappearing. Then, slowly, he turned back to me.
“And now that you've walked away as well, Bromley, what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you sane?”
Instinctively, I reached into the right pocket of my jacket, pulled out the old ration tin, and felt the rubbed metal in my hand. “I don't know if I am keeping sane, sir. To be honest, I'm not sure I am keeping going. My thoughts never used to go back there. To that place.”
We both knew what I was talking about.
“But lately,” I said, “things have been reminding me.”
The way the light struck his face now, Carton's eyes had disappeared. What remained was only the darkness of empty sockets. He looked like the skeleton who, I realized, had in all likelihood become his closest companion apart from Stanley.
Carton let go of my shoulder.
I felt the warmth where his hand had been. Now I shuddered in the cold.
“Don't let the demons drag you down,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Carton didn't answer my question. Instead, he gently set his hand against the side of my face.
Against my cheek, I felt that his fingertips were callused, the way all mountaineers had callused hands. It was as if, in some secret way, he had tricked the world and never quit his climbing.
“Do they still call you Auntie?” he asked.
“Sometimes, sir. Those who are left.”
“Of course,” he said. Then, almost in a whisper, he added, “You'll be fine. You wait and see.”
Before I could ask what he was talking about, Carton turned away into the dark. A rectangle of light appeared in the wall as he opened the door, and disappeared again as he closed it behind him.
Alone in the alley and hidden by the night, I felt an unfamiliar lightness in my heart. Part of me could not help believing that Carton's words would come true, even if I did not know how, simply because it was Carton who had spoken them.
For the first time in as long as I could recall, the simple act of drawing breath into my lungs became a pleasure. It was as if, for a moment, I had been set loose from the confines of my body, free to drift above the rooftops of the city and out among the hilltops of the clouds.
I
WAS SITTING IN the faculty lounge at St. Vernon's, slumped with a lukewarm cup of tea on a tired leather couch. Miss Kidder, the headmaster's assistant, was delivering mail to the faculty pigeonholes. I studied the way her dress rode up her calves as she stood on her toes to reach the higher boxes. The dress was off-white with little red flowers printed on the cloth. Her short black hair was stark against the pale skin of her neck.
“Would you like some help?” asked Higgins, who sat in a mirror image of myself on the couch against the opposite wall.
We'd just had our lunch and, with half an hour still to go before the next class, Higgins and I were trying not to fall asleep. Houseman, on the other hand, had wangled his class schedule so that he had the next period off. He lay dozing on a wooden bench behind the table in the corner, a copy of Caesar's
De Bello Gallico
over his face.
Higgins and I did not bother to lower our voices, because
Houseman could sleep through anything. One night, we'd gone into his room, which was on the ground floor of the faculty housing block. The two of us had carried his bed, with Houseman in it, out into the middle of the playing fields. And that was where he'd woken up in the morning.
“Would you like some help?” repeated Higgins, making no effort to get up.
Miss Kidder turned and glanced at him. “No, thank you,” she said, and flashed him a humorless smile.
When she left, Higgins would have something to say about that smile.
It was understood that not only Higgins but Houseman and I, too, were in love with Darcey Kidder. Each of us had settled on a different tactic to win her heart. Higgins chose the route of polite conversation, which never worked because he ended up talking to himself. Houseman played hard to get, which so far had proved completely effective, although not in the way he was hoping.
As far as I was concerned, she was so beautiful that I could barely bring myself to look her in the eye. From the first time I'd seen her, she'd had, in the delicate contours of her face and the electric blue of her eyes, a beauty that seemed so familiar that I felt sure I must have met her before, even though I knew I hadn't.
We had all agreed that we didn't stand a hope in hell with Darcey Kidder. Sooner or later, someone with better prospects than three underpaid teachers would come along, and that would be the last we'd see of her.
Secretly, I refused to give up hope. Instead, I prayed for a chance to be alone with her, away from the magnifying glass under which any rumor of love among the faculty was placed. But those chances were hard to come by, and the risks of being
made into a fool were great on either side. The time will come, I told myself. An opportunity will present itself. The hard part was learning to be patient.
I heard footsteps in the hall.
A moment later Stanley appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Stanley had never stopped by St. Vernon's before. The fact that it was a school seemed enough to make him steer clear of the place. He looked a little flustered. “Where did you disappear to last night?” he asked me. “Helen and I searched all over the place.”
Rather than go into it just then, I introduced him to Higgins, who nodded hello over the rim of his chipped and brown-stained tea mug.
Darcey Kidder took the opportunity to duck out. The clip-clop of her feet faded away down the corridor.
“That there is Houseman,” I said, pointing to
De Bello Gallico.
Houseman's eyes flickered open, a flash of mahogany brown, then closed again.
“Looks like he's laid out for a wake,” said Stanley.
“Ah,” sighed Higgins.
“Quid dicam de ossibus? Nihil nisi bonum.”
Stanley fixed him with a look he reserved exclusively for people who quoted Latin or poetry or anything in any foreign language.
Higgins was not paying attention. Instead, he leered at the pigeonholes, as if Miss Kidder were still standing there, returning the desire in his stare.
Stanley and I walked out into the school courtyard.
A line of boys emerged from a classroom and shuffled by, clutching their armfuls of books. One by one they greeted me.
Stanley watched the little troop go past, a combination of pity and disgust whittled into the creases around his eyes. When they had gone, he turned to me and asked, “How on earth do you remember all their names?”
“It's not that hard,” I said.
“School,” said Stanley, and shuddered. “Well, I'm not calling you Mr. Bromley, except when I am drunk or about to get that way.”
“And I will not assign you any homework.”
He winced. “Homework! God. I'd forgotten about that.”
I was about to say that he had been forgetting about it for as long as I had known him, but he had obviously come here on another matter, so I let the moment pass.
We walked out of the courtyard and onto the playing fields, where the groundskeeper was busy repainting the lines of the cricket pitch with a one-wheeled machine that looked like a cross between a plough and a baby's pram.
At the far end of the fields, ranks of chestnut trees lined the horizon like green clouds.
The peaceful scene drew a sigh from my lungs.
But Stanley did not sigh. For him, the world of academic institutions was racked with painful recollections.
I was used to this uneasiness in people who came here from the outside. I'd felt it myself when I'd first arrived at St. Vernon's. I had never given any thought to teaching before and had only taken the job to buy myself some time before moving on to somewhere else. The longer I'd waited for the answer about what that somewhere else might be, the more I'd realized that the war, and the changes it had brought to my life, had removed not only a plan for the future but even the future itself.
I woke up each morning surprised to find that I was still
alive. This phenomenon had thrown me into a permanent state of amazement. The smallest things, like the blue flame balanced in the old spoon in which I melted black polish for shining my boots on Sunday afternoons, or the smell of toasted granary bread, or the sound of a distant train clattering along the tracks in the middle of the night, would bring to life in me a bewilderment that lasted for days. Such apparently trivial details, I had to remind myself, had long since been taken for granted by most people around me, or else had never been noticed at all.
The result was that while they ploughed ahead with their lives, I was content to drift, without the ambition, lust for money, or the need for recognition which so underpinned these other lives that anyone not caught up in the same pursuit must, these people assumed, be either mad or lazy or hiding even greater ambitions than their own.
There was a faint squeaking sound behind us, and a moment later Darcey Kidder rode past on her bicycle. She was heading alongside the playing fields to the little house she rented on the other side of the road which bordered the school grounds.
Higgins could see her house from the living room of his flat above the school library. The ceiling of this flat was sharply angled, since it was, in effect, the attic of the building. This meant that Higgins spent most of his time moving around it hunched over like Quasimodo. Despite the ridiculous level of discomfort, he kept the room because it meant that he was, by his own calculation, only fifteen seconds in a flat-out run from his classroom. This meant he could roll out of bed at 7:50 for an eight o'clock class and still get there on time.
Higgins held weekly blackjack tournaments in this flat for anyone who cared to join. Usually, it was just him and
Houseman. Only rarely did I give up my Saturday evenings to join in, since I saw enough of them during the week.
Even while we played cards, Higgins kept a huge pair of binoculars on the table. They were made by Busch-Rathenow near Berlin, and the right lens was fitted with a ranging grid. He had gotten them off a German artillery officer at a place called Sidi Rezegh in North Africa. The artillery position had been overrun and most of the crew had surrendered, but the officer had pulled out a broom-handled Mauser and, aiming wildly, shot the cap off Higgins's head. “It was a new cap, as well! I'd just had it sent down from Hobson's!” he'd told me. There was no need to ask whether the German's binoculars had outlasted him.
Now and then, Higgins would lift the binoculars and peer through his living room window at Darcey Kidder's house across the playing fields.
He never saw anything except a light behind closed curtains, but when her lights went out, he would announce with a sigh, “She's gone to bed.”
Then each of us would silently imagine what it might be like to lie beside her, to hear her breathing, and to see, in the soft glow of the streetlamp through the curtains, the pulse of her heart beneath the milky skin of her neck.
“Tamam,”
Houseman would say quietly. This meantâin Arabic, I thinkâthat everything was as it should be.
Stanley watched Miss Kidder floating past, his eyes fixed hungrily upon her.
“One at a time, Stanley,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“I'm glad you're here, Stan,” I told him.
“Yes?”
“I'm actually a bit worried about your uncle.”
“Are you?” he laughed. “Well, you're always fussing over people. But I wouldn't trouble yourself about him.”
I told Stanley about finding Carton in the alleyway.
Stanley shrugged it off. “He's always coughing. He can't help it. I think he spends a fair amount of time spluttering away out there in the alley. That's where he goes to be alone.”
“It's just that he seemed ⦔ And then I did not know how to go on.
Stanley waited patiently for me to find the words.
“Fragile,” I said, eventually.
Again, he laughed at me. “I've heard him called a lot of things, but never fragile. Good Lord, William, he's as tough as old boots! He's practically indestructible. He gets in his dark moods from time to time, but he's not fragile. There's nothing wrong with him that hasn't been wrong for as long as anyone can remember. That's just who he is. Trust me.”
I had no choice but to do just that. I hadn't seen Carton in years, and Stanley saw him all the time. Who was I to guess at the old man's mental state? I felt a little foolish even for bringing it up. “So how are you and Miss Paradise?” I asked, glad to change the subject and guessing that this was what Stanley had come to discuss.
But instead of launching into his usual tirade, he merely shrugged, jangled the change in his pockets, and jabbed at the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“Oh,” I said sarcastically, “so now, after years of telling me everything whether I wanted to hear it or not, you have decided to tell me nothing.”
“This time is different. I told you it was.” He was watching the groundskeeper rather than making eye contact with me.
“She's not like those Melancholy Angels,” I admitted. “But what do you see in her? That's what I don't understand.”
The groundskeeper turned and began to make his way slowly back along the length of the cricket pitch, white paint striping the close-cropped grass. With each footstep, the brass watch chain hanging from his waistcoat pocket swung and glinted.
Stanley began to pace along the white line of the cricket-pitch boundary, as if walking a tightrope. “All the other women have shared two things in common. They all knew exactly what they did not like, which amounted to just about everything. The other thing they had in common was that they had absolutely no idea what they did like. They could have anything, of course. If their rich parents didn't pay the bill, they could easily find someone gullible like me who would. But they didn't know what they wanted. Mostly they waited for other people to tell them what they should want, and then they wanted that for a while before moving on to something else.”
I tried to recall the faces of the women who had passed in and out of Stanley's life. They flickered before me like a shuffled deck of cards.
“But Helen knows exactly what she wants. How can I not fall in love with that? How can this time not be different?”
Everything he said made sense. I understood perfectly why Stanley could become attached to someone like Miss Paradise. But in the end, it would make no difference. This time seemed as doomed as all the rest. More doomed, even, if that was possible. I could see it all happening in slow motion. The uncorrectable imbalance of emotions. The inevitable disaster, despite the promise that this time would be different. With Stanley, every time would be different. But the difference this time would be that his heart might get properly broken.
“And she likes me,” said Stanley. “It's not the same old dog-and-pony show where I spend all my time trying to keep
them amused because I know they'll leave the minute they get bored. That was why I wanted you to stay last night. So you could see that we really do get along together.”