Page 20

Barker had no friends. In fact, he had never had any. At some point in the distant past, he may have wanted to reach out and form such a relationship, but no longer. Experience had taught him that boys were cruel, and he had yet to meet any girls. Indeed, he hoped that he would never have to, as their looks of disgust would be even harder to cope with than the daily aversion he experienced at school.

He had learned early on that life was a battle for survival. He bore the scars of a thousand torments that had begun at the age of eight when he was sent away to board at a preparatory school in the North. There he had been subjected to water tortures that came close to simulated drowning and an ordeal called roasting, in which he had been tied to a board and tilted backward and forward in front of a roaring fire with water being periodically thrown on his back by his persecutors as a form of basting.

There seemed no rhyme or reason why he should be singled out for this treatment while other boys his age sailed through unscathed. Perhaps it was a lack of self-confidence—a scent of fear that attracted the bullies like dogs.

Barker had always been anxious. His father, a colonel in the Horse Guards, had a military temper and ruled his family with a rod of iron. He dressed in full uniform for dinner and banged the table to make his points. It was therefore unsurprising that he took a stern line when his wife reported her son’s misery.

“The boy needs to stop sniveling and learn to show some backbone,” said the colonel. But it was easier said than done, particularly when his son developed acute acne and psoriasis in response to puberty and stress. The bullies rejoiced in Barker’s disfigurements and refined and redoubled their cruelties, requiring everyone to keep an elaborate distance from him at all times on the basis that he was suffering from a highly contagious form of bubonic plague.

But Barker was a survivor. The acne didn’t go away. In fact, it got worse, but he grew taller and stronger and able to defend himself. He fought back when he could and otherwise tried to ingratiate himself with his tormentors. At Saint Gregory’s he had to start over, but the school wasn’t as barbaric as where he had come from and he concentrated all his energies on the goal of becoming a prefect.

He volunteered for everything he could volunteer for. Dressed in a spotless white surplice, he carried the big brass cross in processions and held up the Bible in church for Father Philip to read the Gospel, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays he was the most dedicated member of the Officers’ Training Corps. No cadet’s boots shone like Barker’s; no one’s rifle bore was cleaner. He snapped to attention and stood ramrod straight on parade, proud to demonstrate that he had acquired the backbone that his father had demanded of him.

He received his corporal’s stripe and his prefect’s silk waistcoat on the same day—the best day of his life. His long years of struggle were over. He could no longer be hurt or humiliated. Now he was the one with the power to make or break the lives of others. He strutted the halls with his silver-handled swagger stick—a gift from his now-proud father—and enjoyed the cowering fear he could see in the juniors’ eyes as they made way for him, scuttling away like rabbits in search of their holes. No more scorn, no more derision. Power changed everything. It was as if he had crossed the Jordan and reached the Promised Land.

Until the American boy attacked him.

Barker still could not quite credit what had happened that night. He had been deputed to get everyone up the stairs, and when Cattermole refused, he had had to force him. That was his duty, and for carrying it out he had been assaulted by this Yankee hick and had his authority undermined in front of all the brats by that prig, Lewis, who had chosen to believe a new boy and that dirty troublemaker, Lisle, over him.

Barker had always hated Esmond de Lisle. The boy had no respect for anyone or anything. He was an atheist and a Communist and probably a degenerate, and he wanted to tear down the system that had enabled Barker to succeed. But it was more personal than that. Barker sensed that Esmond saw through him and understood his weakness. Coming back from corps in the late afternoon, he would catch sight of Esmond imitating his marching steps, and sometimes in the study corridors he could hear his enemy mimicking his voice and people laughing. But there was nothing he could do. Prefects had power over brats but not sixth formers.

But with Lisle’s protégé, it was different. Theo Sterling had defied him and was now being treated by the other brats as a hero for doing so. Barker had seen the way they gathered around him, hanging on his every word. That made him a threat to everything Barker had so painstakingly built. His authority was leaking away. Soon juniors would be laughing at him again. He needed to crush the mongrel boy before he lost any more respect, and after he’d finished licking his wounds, he set out to do so.

Fagging was Barker’s chosen method of persecution, and Theo soon found himself spending every minute he wasn’t in class running pointless errands for Barker or cleaning his uniform and spit-polishing his boots. It didn’t matter that he got there first for the brat call when custom dictated that the last to arrive should do the work. Barker still always chose him for the task, and then watched while he performed it, sitting back in his armchair with his long legs stretched out, tapping his thighs with his swagger stick while he goaded Theo with well-chosen insults about his lack of class and breeding.

“I feel sorry for you, Sterling,” he told Theo one afternoon as he was shining the brass buttons and badges on Barker’s corps tunic for the second time that day (the first hadn’t passed muster). “Everyone knows that the only thing Americans are good for is money, and you haven’t even got any of that. No wonder you’ve been packed off here. I can’t imagine your stepfather wanting you at one of his garden parties, letting the side down, and now of course he’s got your pretty mother all for himself. I wonder what he’s doing to her in that big four-poster bed of his. Have you thought of that?”

Theo stayed quiet. Alwyn had told him that Barker could beat him for insubordination, and he didn’t intend to give Barker the excuse he was obviously looking for. But he couldn’t stop his fists clenching as he imagined the satisfaction he would feel, knocking Barker to the floor.

Barker saw the movement, and it encouraged him to worse slanders. “Think about it,” he said, pushing his swagger stick backward and forward along his knee in slow simulation of the sexual act.

It was too much. Theo got up and threw his rags and polish on the floor and walked out of the study.

Barker followed him, close behind. “Come back here,” he ordered, making it sound like a parade-ground command. “I haven’t released you.”

Theo stopped, turning around to face Barker. He wasn’t going to be seen running away. “No,” he said. “Not until you apologize for what you said.”

All along the corridor, doors were opening as prefects and sixth formers came out of their studies to see what the noise was about.

“Go to the bathroom,” Barker said. “You’re going to get the beating you deserve.”

Theo could hear a breathlessness in Barker’s voice and saw a drip of saliva forming at the edge of his mouth. He felt disgust as well as anger. He wasn’t going to let Barker do this to him. Not willingly and not ever. All he had left was his dignity, ragged but intact, and that would be gone if he did as he was told and bent over a bath while Barker hit him with his swagger stick. Alwyn had told him that you had to shake hands afterward. Better to die than do that, thought Theo. He didn’t care what happened. He stayed where he was in the middle of the corridor, digging his hands into his pockets.

“Damn you, Sterling,” shouted Barker. “You do as I say.”

“No,” said Theo.

“Help me,” said Barker, calling down the corridor to the other prefects. “This boy’s been grossly impertinent. He’s refusing to clean my tunic.”

Nobody moved. “It’s about you too,” Barker told them. “If you let him get away with this, they’ll all refuse ...”

Theo felt hands taking hold of him, and he was being dragged backward. Past the closed door of Esmond’s study. He was like Cattermole now and his struggles were useless. Up ahead was the swinging door of the bathroom. Someone was opening it and then they stopped.

“What are you doing?” asked a familiar voice, soft but commanding. Theo couldn’t see him, but he knew it was Father Laurence.

“I’m going to punish Sterling,” said Barker.

“Punish him for what?”

“For refusing to work. This isn’t a matter for you, Father. You know it isn’t.”

“I’m afraid I don’t agree,” said the housemaster. “Let Sterling go, please, gentlemen. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Theo almost fell back on the floor as the hands that had been gripping his arms and shoulders suddenly released him. He got unsteadily to his feet.

“Did you refuse?” asked Father Laurence.

“No, Father.”

“He ran out of my study. Everyone here saw him,” said Barker.

“And why did you do that?” asked Father Laurence, keeping his eyes on Theo.

“Because ...” Theo stopped, tongue-tied. It wasn’t his honor code, but nevertheless it held him back. He wouldn’t have told the housemaster what had happened if it hadn’t been for Barker, who had no such inhibitions, jumping in.

“He’d done a bad job cleaning my uniform. I pointed it out to him, and he threw it down and walked out,” he lied.

It was intolerable. “I did no such thing,” said Theo. “I left because of what he said about my mother and my stepfather.”

“What did he say?” Father Laurence asked, continuing to focus his attention on Theo. He hadn’t even looked at Barker when he was speaking.

“He talked about them together.”

“Where?”

Theo searched for a euphemism and gave up. “In bed,” he said flatly, feeling ashamed, as if he had betrayed his mother in some way.

Now, at last, Father Laurence turned to look at Barker. He didn’t say anything. Just watched him and waited. To Theo, he seemed more like a trial lawyer than a scholarly monk in that moment.

“He’s lying,” Barker said, but he sounded uneasy now.

“Is he?”

“Yes. And besides, it doesn’t matter what I said,” Barker went on quickly. “Sterling refused to do the work. That’s what matters. And for that I have every right to punish him.”

“But you won’t,” said Father Laurence.

“Won’t! Why not?”

“Because I forbid it. And not only that: you will have nothing more to do with Sterling. From now on, you will treat him like he doesn’t exist. There are plenty of other juniors for you to call on to shine your boots if you feel unable to carry out that task yourself. Do you understand me, Barker?”

“No, Father, I don’t,” said Barker, who was now shaking with rage. “Prefects deal with brats, not masters. That’s how it’s always been.”

“But not anymore,” said Father Laurence evenly. “Not in my house. You can take it up with the headmaster, of course, Barker. But somehow I don’t think you will.”

Barker didn’t. Instead, he followed Father Laurence’s instruction to the letter, never addressing a word or a look to Theo. Even on the parade ground, he said nothing when Theo fumbled with his bayonet or failed to tie his puttees properly.

On rainy afternoons the cadets scrambled up and down the hills that surrounded the school, carrying out section rushes through the bracken, and then formed fours and trudged back through the drizzle, singing Great War songs of which Theo’s favorite was “We’re Here Because We’re Here,” sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” It summed up his sense that there was no purpose to his life as he passed wearily through the days, circulating from classroom to refectory to dormitory in company with the other boys.

Only on Sunday afternoons was he able to be alone, when the juniors were sent on organized runs through the surrounding countryside, escorted by prefects riding bicycles and hectoring them through bullhorns. Theo ran with the others until he knew the route and then went up a gear and left them behind, settling into an easy pace as he filled his lungs with the clean air and absorbed the beauty of the landscape almost unconsciously through his senses. His experience up to now had been entirely urban, and he felt as if he had entered a new world. He saw the hills changing colors with the light as fleecy clouds chased the November sun across the wide-open sky, and he smelled the deep-green moss and the wetness in the fallen autumn leaves mixed up with the scent of woodsmoke rising from a group of thatched cottages he passed at a turn in the road.

Pausing on a stone bridge over a fast-flowing stream, he caught sight of his reflection in the dark-blue water, framed by overhanging willow trees, and smiled, realizing to his surprise that for the first time in as long as he could remember, he was happy. Acting on instinct, he clambered down the steep bank, using tufts of grass as handholds. At the bottom, he bent down and cupped his hands in the ice-cold water and splashed it up onto his face. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the silver back of a fish as it jumped and twisted and fell, and he felt the moment as a sort of secret secular baptism—the ritual of a new beginning, which stayed with him even after he returned to the school and felt its twisting arms encircling him again.

“Yes, the countryside round here is beautiful. I like it too. But it’s a deception like everything else,” said Esmond, whom Theo had gone to see in his study, fresh from the pleasure of his run. The room with its overflowing bookshelves had become like a magnet to Theo, who had forgotten his earlier resolve to keep his distance. Not that Esmond ever treated him as an irritant. He always dropped whatever he was doing when Theo came, and made tea—black or white, depending on the state of the milk on his windowsill. His welcome and hospitality touched Theo, as he experienced it nowhere else at Saint Gregory’s.

“What do you mean?” asked Theo, who often found himself asking this question when he was with Esmond. But without embarrassment, because Esmond never talked down to him; rather, he seemed to assume that Theo knew more than he actually did.

“I mean those pretty cottages you passed are hovels with no running water or sanitation, and the thatch you like so much is letting in the rain, dripping down onto dank earth floors. They’re falling to pieces from neglect because the landlords won’t repair them or update them. And yet we call them picturesque. It’s a lie that goes back centuries, perpetrated by the ancestors of these landlords who hired landscape painters to make their estates look beautiful and then hung the pictures in their country houses while their tenants starved. It’s obscene if you think about it.”

“Yes,” said Theo, shaking his head in amazement at the shamelessness of the behavior. “It’s monstrous.”

Esmond nodded. “Capitalism is founded on lies. Its supporters never stop telling them. Take the public schools, for example—they get charitable tax status because they say they’re providing a public service, but in fact they’re just serving the rich, perpetuating their power and keeping everyone else in wretched ignorance and poverty. It’s a joke.”

“So why are they called public schools if they’re really private?” asked Theo, scratching his head. Listening to Esmond, he felt like he was in a hall of mirrors at a fairground where nothing made sense.

“Because hundreds of years ago they were founded to help the poor. And then the rich took them over and kicked the poor out. Public schools! You see—even the name’s a lie!” Esmond laughed. “You have to admire the capitalists’ effrontery, I suppose, and their success too. Ninety percent of the cabinet are public school men, and nearly ninety percent of bishops, too, and judges. And it’s the same lower down the ladder: the old school tie will get an idiot a job, no questions asked, while a clever man with the wrong tie stands about as much chance of getting hired as a man without a shirt.”

“It’s not like that in America,” said Theo, remembering Walter Chrysler’s humble workman’s tools in the case at the top of the skyscraper, and how far his father had gotten as a self-made man before the Depression ruined him.

“No, there it’s just about money,” said Esmond. “They haven’t had the time to build a system like we have yet. But they will if they can. Capitalists aren’t fools. They wouldn’t be rich if they were, and they understand that they need to control education to keep power. Schools like Saint Gregory’s are factories for the mass production of gentlemen trained up to maintain the status quo. Honor and tradition are their watchwords, but what they really mean is hanging on to what they’ve got.”

“So how do you fit in here?” asked Theo. “You’re the enemy of all that.”

“Why don’t they kick me out? Is that what you’re asking?”

Theo nodded.