Wilberforce (57 page)

—Morgan.

—What! he yelled.

It felt better. He sat up straight. Yelling let the fire out. Let it burn the Bishop to a crisp.

—I don't know her date of birth! Happy?

—No.

—Neither am I! he shouted. You can say what you like about … about what happened later, but everything else was nice. She knew what she was about, and it was the nicest thing that's happened to me in donkey's years. It's only dirty old men who fixate on the precise age of girls.

—The law happens also to concern itself with the age of consent.

—Oh, that!

—Yes, said the Bishop, that. Let me be sure I have this straight. Your acquaintance with Polly this term took on a new dimension, one pursued mutually. You felt affection towards her, as well as a powerful sensual attraction, which you typically labeled as romantic love.

—It was love!

—Love that did not trouble itself to find out anything about Polly, her interests, her family, her hopes, her prospects. Or even whether fornicating with her constituted unlawful carnal knowledge.

—It wasn't like that!

The Bishop got to his feet and stood, eleven feet tall.

—Yes, Morgan, it was.

The fire poured down, searing every inch of skin.

—I do believe it didn't occur to you, but the fact is—the truth is—that Polly is not yet even fifteen, at least according to my son's sources.

Which had to be … Grieves. Morgan's lungs walked out on strike again.

—And, as you confessed earlier, in the moment of penetration—

If he never breathed again, this would stop.

—You proceeded … Morgan?

He glowered at the man.

—Breathe in and out! the Bishop commanded.

No longer consoling, the man handled him without pity.

—I won't have you dodging out of this with self-induced hysteria.

The Bishop towered above him. Would he not momentarily break?

—Please, sir, he gasped. I can't bear it.

He couldn't bear it, and yet he did. There was no retreat. No hiding from everything his heart dressed up. No reason not to hurl upon the flame the last, sheltered pieces of the wreck called Morgan Wilberforce.

—There's something more, said the tongue in his mouth.

—Go on.

And so he began to tell the Bishop about Alex.

*   *   *

The telling kept the panic at bay. He named the things he'd done, the knocking, kicking, twisting, hang-the-rabbiting, kitty-deadlocking, sorcerer's-apprenticing, so many times they blurred together, and then in the barn, how he'd—how given full rein—how easy, how ardent—how vital it had seemed to make Alex behave (to make himself behave?).

—Behave yourself, how?

A tickle in his throat. He coughed.

—To stop from—

Another cough.

—He really is the most infuriating—

The tickle wouldn't stop and neither could he, cough upon cough. The Bishop got to his feet without urgency. He drifted to the door, where he rang a bell. The spasm spread to Morgan's entire windpipe. The Bishop, unalarmed, waited for Mrs. Hallows to arrive and then held a half-tone conference. She disappeared, and the Bishop stood languidly against the frame, arms crossed:

—Enjoying yourself?

—If you think—I'm—doing this on—on purpose—

—Save your breath. You're going to need it.

He continued coughing, eyes streaming, breath in knots. The Bishop stood aside for Mrs. Hallows, who brought in a water jug and deposited it unceremoniously on the table beside their empty whiskey glasses. She murmured something to the Bishop about the hour and then clomped away. The Bishop filled the glasses and handed one to Morgan.

When, at length, Morgan had calmed the tickle enough to speak, the Bishop opened a window. The rain had stopped driving but still fell steadily.

—Now, the Bishop said, what was it you had to stop yourself doing to Alex?

Morgan poured himself another glass of water and drank it. Then he started to tell the Bishop about Silk.

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Dicky, were no crime.

Peter Fanshawe Bradley, protégé of the doomed Gordon Gallowhill; Silk Bradley, who had shown him what his cock was for, who had with Baker's Dozen pressed from him the tears that built like meltwater behind an insufficient weir.

Accounting, both parts: payments first at the edge of a cane. Then—
let us sport us while we may
—lessons—
like am'rous birds of prey
—lessons in a different register, from a different Bradley, the one he showed only to Morgan, then and only then. Lessons played in every key but acted quite in concert.
Let us roll all our strength, and all our sweetness
(had there ever been a time he protested and meant it?)
and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life.

The one night he boycotted Accounting, Silk had not come to the dorm to fetch him. Eventually Morgan had grown afraid, afraid that something had happened to Silk, something like the shadow, only he hadn't known it then. He'd gone to the study and found Silk at the window huddled under a rug, empty bottle in hand. Morgan had brought him another, but rather than take it, Silk had asked Morgan what he wanted. When Morgan reminded him about Accounting, Silk had said,
Accounting is canceled
. The emptying out happened in a moment, instant as bereavement, only who was he to compare—
the grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there—

Colleywest and crooked, that's what it was, and then after The Fall, Silk had scarcely spoken to him, which was a relief—wasn't it?—because …

He felt so terribly confused regarding it from this distance.

The Bishop asked no questions. Had he been talking for minutes or hours? At some point Mrs. Hallows had brought a tray with tea and biscuits. Their cups stood empty now, his voice rasped raw. Still the Bishop didn't speak but merely reclined by the window.

He stopped talking. One of their silences developed. His head spun as if fighting sleep.

—You cared for him, the Bishop said quietly, very much, I think.

Morgan stretched his neck. His muscles threatened never to return to their plastic state.

—Perhaps even as much as he cared for you.

—He didn't care for me.

—Even you don't believe that.

He didn't know what to believe. He had said everything there was to say about Bradley, past, present, and to come, and the Bishop was sitting there running his fingertips along the lead in the windowpanes. Morgan had never spoken of Bradley, except diffusely to Grieves, but now he had put words to it in the most concrete manner. To judge by the Bishop's demeanor, Morgan had conveyed nothing at all. Perhaps Bradley had in truth been nothing. Perhaps the disorder had been always in his own mind. Nathan and Laurie never dwelt upon characters from that time. Only he quailed encountering Bradley in the quad. Only he had imagined himself trapped between Grieves and Bradley, a pincer of cricket balls and longings. The Bishop saw nothing out of the ordinary in the tale even though Morgan had talked of him for longer than he'd talked of anything else. A high tide of shame engulfed him, not the shame from the garden, but the shabby, naked shame of mistakes and mistakefulness.

—I'm sure I've made too much of him, Morgan said.

The Bishop put both feet on the floor:

—I'm sure you haven't.

Relief and weight in one.

—I'm sure, if anything, you haven't made enough.

And the alluring desire to sob, loudly and at length.

—The entanglement you describe was grave, the Bishop said.
Is
grave.

A wash of horror and embarrassment as sustaining as it was caustic.

—You say you saw him recently?

Morgan nodded.

—Three days ago?

Was it?

—But he'd never come before?

—Never.

—Why now?

Why indeed. Bradley had given no answer:
Do you have to ask?
As if Morgan ought to understand Bradley's every motive. Certainly that day he had shown himself partial to Morgan's success even though he'd been playing for the other side. But if Bradley wanted to put things right between them, why had he not come sooner? Why had he come two months after Spaulding, surely knowing that Morgan had seen Spaulding's head spill blood, as Bradley had seen Gallowhill's, when Gallowhill was mighty in his eyes.

—He, too, had seen someone die?

—Yes.

—So he was a person bereaved?

—I suppose.

—Just as he was a person who misused his position.

Morgan nodded.

—And his charisma.

Oh, yes.

—A person capable of cruelty. A person capable of love.

A person capable of both. And a person without anyone to sort him out.

—What was it he said to you, when your bat broke?

—All he said was …

In undertone, as they'd switched sides,
Well stuck, Dicky
.

—He was being sarcastic, Morgan said.

Yet Morgan had flushed when he said it, a flood of pleasure from the times Bradley would say that thing.

—Was that a name he used to call you when he was being sarcastic?

Perhaps at first, when Silk had chanced on the nickname, but mostly when he used it …

—It's what
he
called me, in private. It isn't right that—

Dark edged in.

—Has someone else been using the name?

—Yes—No. I mean—

And the Bishop was on his feet, no longer static, dragging a footstool to sit directly beside him, their knees at the same level. He smelled of the ineluctable something he'd smelled of all the other times he'd come near—hauling him through the house, whacking him across the shoulders, acting as though his hands could conjure things and make them do his bidding. The Bishop did not touch him. He spoke near a whisper:

—Are you ready to tell me about him?

Morgan froze, a claw at his ribs. The Bishop leaned forward.

—Remember, you're in my hands.

The Bishop could say that. He could sit there with his nearly silent voice and his nearly remembered smell, but nothing gripped his chest.

—I can't.

Bent tighter like bows, like sticks too far.

—But?

Squeezed breath, crushed undersea, life pressed nearly out—but then, like a hook, a minuscule yet potent fishing hook, the Bishop's ring brushed against him.

—What has he told you?

Don't you dare, you bloody peaching girl of a
—

—Alex was trespassing.

Worm. Slave.

—On sacred ground!

And it was spilling out, the blackmail, the bets, the unnerving nerve. Had he delivered those punches, or had he only watched as someone else threw them? Had it been his fist that felt bone crack beneath it? And had he really seen the other one in Alex's face? Could he have blacked those eyes—all his heart, all his mind, all his strength—obliterating the face he never wanted to see again?

—Which face did you never want to see?

He sounded like a lunatic. For all he knew, he was a lunatic. Lunatics imagined things that weren't there. Lunatics entertained figments of the imagination, two boys, like something from that painting in Uncle Charles's corridor of the young man—was he a scholar?—with a winged figure on one shoulder, horned on the other.

—Which is which, though? the Bishop asked.

It wasn't as simple as that, Morgan protested. Droit didn't spend all his time tempting him to pleasures of the flesh. Some of his time, perhaps, but to be perfectly honest, Morgan wasn't convinced that sensual pleasure was so awful.

—I don't believe I said it was.

He couldn't keep his place in this debate. He'd never been good at argumentation. That was Nathan's line. If you needed something argued, you sicced him on it. But even though a dreary person might accuse Droit of devilishness, Morgan agreed with what he said most of the time.

—The most dangerous untruths, the Bishop said, are truths moderately distorted.

But if that were the case, then the other one ought to have been prattling away, urging him to turn from wickedness, scolding him for his sloth, his drunkenness, his wrath, his lies; whereas he rarely spoke at all, and what he did say was unmemorable.

—What does he do, then, this other one?

—He turns up when everything's gone wrong, and instead of suggesting anything useful, he just moons at you.

—When was the last time you saw him?

—Not since Alex.

Deserter.

The Bishop rubbed his forehead:

—And that time you say he was mingled with the boy you were beating?

His teeth ached at the words, but he couldn't deny them.

—And the other times he turned up when you were weak?

Whenever circumstances were beneath Droit's dignity. On the way back from the JCR. Alone in the pavilion. Out by the ditch. Things of that nature.

—So, the Bishop summarized, Droit exists to make things jolly and to advise you about people's motives, whereas the other one seems to have no purpose other than to stand with you when nobody else will.

—I wouldn't put it like that.

—Why not?

He wouldn't put it like that because it made the other one sound … like someone he ought to view differently.

—Why does this other one distress you so much?

—He doesn't! And please will you stop using that word, sir? It makes one sound hysterical.

—I apologize.

The Bishop didn't say whether he apologized for suggesting that he was hysterical, or for drawing attention to his actually being hysterical.

—I don't like him because he gets on my nerves. And before you ask, he gets on my nerves because he barely speaks.