Wilberforce (22 page)

John tried again to explain: He couldn't join the War because he couldn't kill another person. To do so was murder. But he had helped as he could, he told the Bishop, who was growing bored with him and opening the window to call Jamie.

—Come here, boy! the Bishop barked at his son. I want a word with you.

Jamie jogged in from the garden wearing cricket flannels and a pajama top. He met John's eye, and then, rather than coming into the study as he had been bid, he dashed away down the staircase.

John tried again: he couldn't be confirmed because the light of God was in every person, and he couldn't kill it, but he had driven ambulances, he had felt death in his hands, his very arms.

But the Bishop was standing in the downstairs hallway, addressing an assembly of John's father, Jamie's sisters, and the servants:

—I have given my life. My life. And cowards like this one—

He waved in John's direction.

—break down what I have spent a life building up. By their fruits shall ye know them. They destroy. They mock.

John tried to protest, but his mouth made no sound. The Bishop pointed at him:

—This one is a double-dealer, a liar, and an apostate.

Everyone turned to look at him except his father. His father, as he had that terrible Christmas, turned his gaze away, turned his chest away, turned his entire self away and walked out the door, where the summer swallowed him up.

John ran after, but the air was filled with fireflies, dazzling him and pounding like the guns had, night after night. A trench was at his feet, and at the bottom lay Jamie, bloodied, groaning, gangrenous. John scrambled down to help him, and Jamie turned to him in agony and regret, his body now lifeless, wet with blood, heavy as mud. The body was still warm, but John knew he could not revive it. He knew the absoluteness of death, its sudden arrival and its silent, eternally silent, face—

*   *   *

Morgan turned over. His shoulder ached. He wanted to wake up. He needed to wake up. Something urgent was happening, something irretrievable that he needed to attend.
Wake up.
Even this tendril of thought spun like spirochete, spirit-chete, spirillum, Spitalfields, where Jack the Ripper cut those women, cut them up, cut them out of the fabric of life, the living coat of colors.

—Do you renounce Satan and all his works?

He had to wake up, or he would get it wrong, the things the bishop chap had asked him in S-K's study that day.

—My godparents did promise three things in my name.

The bishop chap had come to the Academy so they wouldn't have to go to York for the laying on of hands. He couldn't go to York, for hands or anything. They didn't live there anymore, and no hands lived in that minster, minister, sinister—

—How many commandments are there?

—There are ten.

—And can you say them?

One, one God; two, idolatry; three, blasphemy; four, Sabbath; five? Like the fingers on his hand, which he used to grasp himself, what was the fifth?

The bishop chap wore frock coat and gaiters like in picture books. They had to say the creeds, all of them, with the right words in the right order, but his throat was closing and he was swallowing to keep it open.

—Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?

If there was a Holy Ghost, it would open his throat and fill his lungs with wind. S-K said the Hebrew word meant spirit and also wind, but Morgan's throat refused both. Something pumped blood through him, but his throat let nothing by, as if a fist had him, fit to strangle.

—Do you renounce—

Gasping …

—Do you—

Gasp …

—Wilber—

Gasping gas more foul than the sulfurs of hell. But he wasn't in hell. He was on the bench outside S-K's study as he had woken that day, Matron looming as she had. Like then, he was choking back to life, coughing dinosaur ooze, retching from the smell.

That day, he'd refused to go back into the room and face the bishop again. But now, this time, he could say a different thing. Spaulding stood in the window, the sun fell warm on his back, and Spaulding watched him learn to breathe again and waited to hear what he would say. Spaulding had come specially, not because he pitied him but because he believed in him. Spaulding knew what was true, and he was telling S-K he needed to see Morgan, it was a matter of life and death, and he was taking Morgan to the balcony where Hermes had gone as a boy, when he'd learned the secrets of the Academy and winepressed them into wish slips; Spaulding was opening the door, and there was nothing more to pretend, nothing more to resist, and he was wanted and wanting and reaching and reached for—

*   *   *

John inhaled and sat up in his bed. Dawn was breaking. He was exhausted from dreaming, and for what? It was all nonsense. The Bishop had taken him to task countless times—him and Jamie both for their adventures and misadventures, the tree, the pond, the canal after dark, what they'd seen in Flora's bedroom, what they'd done to Lucy's dolls, everything Jamie had lured him to and inducted him in—but never had John resisted confirmation; indeed, he'd been eager for the Bishop to prepare him. Later, the Bishop had not examined him over his pacifism as John was no longer visiting the Rectory. And Jamie Sebastian, so far as John knew, had not died in the War. John had neither seen nor heard from any of them in twelve years. Twelve years was nearly half his life. It ought not to feel like no time.

There were reasons—unassailable reasons!—why he made it a rule not to dwell on the middle chapter. To be assaulted by it in sleep, and in such a vexing time, was tremendously unjust.

He hurled himself from bed, stumbled into his other room, lit the burner, and singed himself. He was not the person from the middle chapter. He was the person from the current and final chapter, the Convinced Quaker, the man Meg had drawn into her family, when his own had—this time was not that time, and the last thing he needed was to wake drained of energy and morale by absurd dreams. Morgan Wilberforce was the confirmation refuser, not he. S-K accepted John's pacifism and had from the beginning. No one was dead today, no one would be dead tomorrow, and in any case he lacked the time to discuss it with himself since he needed to get to the Academy as soon as possible on this already hectic Saturday in March. His dreaming mind could just consider what he said—mark, learn, and inwardly digest. That was all!

 

16

S-K absented himself from morning prayers, which should have felt like a bigger relief. The Flea read announcements as if the previous day had never happened: Laundry for REN's House would not be ready until teatime. Games would commence half an hour early and would consist of two steeplechases, junior and senior. A murmur of protest from the Fourth and Remove went unremarked by the Flea, who dismissed them with the air he adopted when he was too fed up to bother.

In History, Grieves made them read a dense chapter on the Hundred Years' War and write out the answers to questions from the blackboard, as if they were Third Formers. The Flea oppressed them with an unseen, and so the morning progressed, punishing them with work and silence. At break, Colin approached with the latest rumors, but Morgan scanned the crowd for Spaulding … there amongst friends, sovereign with loyal retainers. Standing in the tuckshop queue, Morgan watched him, but Spaulding never once looked his way. When his turn came, Morgan bought a kill-me-quick and ate it without tasting. Across the quad, Spaulding laughed in a way that made Morgan want to go and—

—Get your skates on, Laurie said.

The bell was ringing, but rather than ignore it, Nathan crammed two kill-me-quicks into his pocket.

—What's the idea? Morgan protested.

Nathan took his arm and broke into a jog.

—Keep up, Wilber. Didn't you hear?

Morgan hadn't heard a word, and he couldn't bring himself to care. At the toilets, he broke away:

—Meet you.

—REN! Laurie called after him. Lines!

The concerns of aliens. He inhabited a different world, one in theirs but not of it.

*   *   *

Was it too much to jape Spaulding a second day? If he tried and Spaulding refused, yesterday's world would disintegrate, leaving him prisoner in a flat and lethal land. The heaviness of nightmare pressed on his shoulder, which throbbed from being slept on wrong. He splashed water on his face. One didn't make a try every time one had the ball. To do so guaranteed defeat.

The cloisters had cleared as if the entire school had spontaneously acquired the habit of punctuality. It granted sixty seconds' peace and quiet, anyhow. He ambled down Long Passage, but just as he reached the classrooms, someone appeared on the center grass, exclusive preserve of prefects and masters. He couldn't endure bollixing from the JCR, but it was too late; he'd been seen. He braced himself for censure.

Except it wasn't a prefect. It was Alex. Morgan groaned.

—Released or evicted?

—What's it to you? Alex retorted.

—You're an impertinent little sod.

—Such is my aspiration.

Alex hopped off the grass and stood before him, a taunt. Morgan seized him by the collar and pulled him into the alcove beneath the library:

—Don't suppose you heard about S-K last night.

—You suppose wrong, Alex said. Old Howitzer's gone off his dot. I'm certainly not impressed.

—If you'd heard S-K, you wouldn't talk that way.

—I suppose you're going to set me straight.

—You suppose right.

Alex relaxed against him:

—Get on with it.

—I think, Morgan said, twisting Alex's arm behind his back, you had better start by telling me what you're going to do about this whole mess.

—Nothing, Alex said serenely.

—Someone has to own up or we'll never get any peace.

—Hurrah.

Morgan kicked him.

—What if someone else confesses to S-K?

—If they do, they'll be killed by the Covenant.

—Someone outside your Covenant.

Alex wriggled away:

—You?

Morgan scowled.

—You'd best look after your own skin, Alex said, straightening his jacket. You can start by keeping your nose out of other people's affairs and your arse out of other people's changing rooms.

—Pardon? Morgan responded with his best imitation of Grieves in a strop.

Alex did not flinch:

—And remember what happens to people who interfere with the Revolution.

A smirk:

—They find their necks under the falling blade of the guillotine.

*   *   *

—Wilberforce! REN bellowed as Morgan let himself into the classroom.

—Good morning, sir.

—Don't you give me cheek, young man. Just what do you have to say for yourself?

—Only what a pleasure it is to see you, sir.

—Sit down, reprobate. I suppose you've an elaborate excuse for your tardiness?

—Not at all, sir.

—Then you may do me the honor of three hundred lines, by Primus tomorrow, if you please!

—It will be an honor, indeed, sir.

Morgan sat.

—And another fifty for your impudence!

Morgan nodded, as to the victor in a fencing bout. The Fifth chortled. REN relieved his frustration with several minutes of invective, but Morgan calculated he had come out ahead. His cheek had amused the form, and his sangfroid in the face of three hundred and fifty lines had drawn grins from Nathan and Laurie, so presumably it was a reasonable facsimile of the Morgan Wilberforce they expected.

The lines themselves were an inconvenience. He loathed lines on every ground and had not actually done any the entire term. He could not abide being chained to a desk writing useless words when he ought to be out doing something, though of course lines were intended to produce just such irritated discomfort, to waste one's time, and to force a sort of manual obedience. They lacked the Sturm und Drang of corporal punishment and deprived one of the praise that came with courageously enduring the cane. One had to complete them alone, excluded from general attention and interest, and then, when one submitted them, the master or prefect typically tore them up before one's eyes, emphasizing the futile nature of one's labors. This, the gesture said, was for nothing. You suffered for nothing. You sacrificed time and effort, and you have absolutely nothing to show for it. The mental suffering of watching one's labors destroyed, however meaningless one considered them whilst doing them, always struck Morgan more deeply than he expected. The first time it had happened to him, in prep school, he had actually burst into tears, to his mortification. He hadn't blubbed over lines at the Academy, but he had felt several times that he could.

—Amaurotic ambitions of amoeba, REN spat.

Morgan was fed up to the back teeth with talk of the Fags' Rebellion. He would have liked to spend Prep in the Hermes Balcony with Spaulding or, failing that, in Fridaythorpe talking with Mr. Grieves. But Spaulding was refusing to know him, and Grieves had that morning treated him as coldly as he treated anyone else.

—Rampant as rhizobium, REN continued.

Morgan needed to rein himself in. Grieves was his history master, not his Housemaster, not his father, and certainly not his friend. The sooner Morgan's mind grasped that fact and adjusted his behavior accordingly, the better he would be, all of him—heart, mind, body, even soul if he possessed one. As for Spaulding, Morgan had better not deceive himself. He might lie to other people, and increasingly it was of the utmost necessity to lie to an increasing number of people, but he could hear his father now:
You can lie to other people, boyo, but not to yourself.
Actually, Morgan retorted, you could very easily lie to yourself. Most people did.
You know what I mean
, his father's voice replied.
Don't be contrary.

It was the height of absurdity to speak obstreperously to oneself in one's head, even if one imagined one side as one's father. And at any rate, he agreed with his father. He didn't want to lie to himself. He wanted to know the truth, and the truth was he had yesterday endowed a chance encounter with inflated significance. Spaulding had paid him attention for less than half an hour, and he had leapt to exaggerated conclusions about his exaggerated self, his exaggerated purpose, and his exaggerated place in the vacuous world. He had permitted a bit of changing-room-style muck-about to raise in him the most callow of hopes. He had lapsed into the naïve. Such was the bald truth. The sooner he detached himself from Spaulding—memory of him, sight of him, thought of him—the sooner he could recover his sanity. Lines that evening would therefore prove a boon. An irritation certainly, but perhaps after all a salutary irritation.