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Theo couldn’t help but admire Esmond’s insatiable curiosity about what life was like for the poor. Not content to sit in his study, reading books and spinning theories, he pushed his way into the town’s most blighted neighborhoods and asked questions, storing up all he was told for future analysis.

Theo was impressed, too, by his friend’s fearlessness and candor. He didn’t try to disguise his upper-class accent, and he told the men he met that he wanted to know what their lives were like, so he could find ways to change them for the better. He didn’t lecture and he listened to the men’s stories with care and respect, expressing sympathy at all the right moments. And yet, despite all this, Theo saw that Esmond remained detached. It was not that he was insincere but rather that he had a deficiency that he wasn’t aware of and so could not overcome: he couldn’t feel what these men felt and so he couldn’t share their pain. Sometimes, this grated on Theo, who often found it unbearable to hear their stories, because it brought back his own experience of poverty in New York, when he, too, had felt the gnawing anxiety of not knowing where the next meal was coming from or how he and his mother were going to pay the rent. At such times he would look up and feel ashamed when he saw the avid eagerness of Esmond’s expression as he probed for more detail. He looked like a collector of rare butterflies, Theo thought, viewing specimens through a microscope.

It was against school rules to even enter a pub, but Esmond had been able to overcome Theo’s reluctance by pointing out that it was virtually impossible that they would meet anyone from Saint Gregory’s in such down-at-heel locations. But the other side of the coin was that these small, out-of-the-way taverns on Carborough’s dismal back streets were not the most fruitful venues for meeting interesting members of the working class. They were too wretched: inside the dilapidated bars there was an atmosphere of stupefying torpor, with the regulars staring morosely into the bottom of their pint glasses, measuring how much they had left before they would be forced back out into the cold. Like windup automatons, most of them stayed talkative for a minute or two after Esmond had bought them a refill of mild beer, but then relapsed back into dormancy, showing no interest in the copy of The Daily Worker that he had given them and answering his questions with grunted monosyllables.

“We need to go where the life is,” said Esmond as they came out of a particularly dreary taproom and looked across the dirty cobbled street to where a group of ragged children were kicking a blown-up pig’s bladder about on a piece of waste ground.

“And where’s that?” asked Theo with a hollow laugh. “This is Carborough in February, for God’s sake—there is no life. Let’s go to the movies. At least we might have some fun there.”

“No,” said Esmond. “I haven’t come all this way to go back empty-handed. We need a change of direction, that’s all. Let’s go up to the High Street.”

Theo was too cold to argue, and fifteen minutes later he was happily gorging himself on a plowman’s lunch washed down with a pint of best bitter beside a roaring fire in the public bar of the Eight Bells, while watching Esmond pit his billiard skills against a huge bald man with meaty hands, called Alf, who uncomfortably reminded Theo of Easey Goldstein in New York.

This pub was a going concern. Outside, there were red geraniums cascading down over the golden bells on the sign and across the tops of the etched glass windows. Inside, the brass fittings on the bar shone and the different-colored liquor bottles on the shelves behind sparkled in the bright light, reflected back in the ornate mirrors covering the walls.

Theo glanced up at the one facing the door and saw the reflection of Sergeant Raikes coming through.

“Get down!” he suddenly shouted, half knocking over his drink as he grabbed hold of Esmond and pulled him down onto the floor behind the billiards table.

“What the hell are you doing?” Esmond asked, looking at Theo like he’d lost his mind.

“Raikes,” whispered Theo, putting his hand up to Esmond’s mouth to keep him quiet. “He just walked in.”

“Did he see us?”

“No, I don’t think so. Look!” he said, pointing under the billiards table toward the bar, where they could see the bottom of the sergeant’s wooden leg. He was waiting to buy a drink and had his back to them.

As they stared, their view of the leg was obscured by the appearance of a big eye and part of a head.

“Are you takin’ the mickey?” Alf demanded, looking down at them belligerently. “Because I won’t stand for it, you ’ear? You’ve forfeit the game goin’ under there, and now you owe me that drink.”

“ Shhh! ” said Esmond, putting his index finger desperately to his mouth as he passed up a shilling. Alf disappeared, and then his big legs joined the sergeant’s wooden one in front of the bar.

Esmond turned back to Theo. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “He’ll see us when he turns round.”

Theo nodded.

“Okay,” said Esmond. “On the count of three, run. One. Two. Three.”

Keeping their heads down, they rushed for the door, knocking over a table and an ashtray on the way. Once outside, they ran up the street and turned the corner, catching their breath and peeping their heads back around to see if Sergeant Raikes was in pursuit.

But the sidewalk was empty and Esmond burst out laughing. Soon, he was doubled up, clutching his sides.

Theo looked down at him sourly and lost his temper. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here, but you wouldn’t listen,” he shouted. “Oh, no, Esmond knows best. Like always.”

“It doesn’t matter. He didn’t see us,” said Esmond and started laughing again.

“It does matter,” said Theo furiously. “I don’t want to get expelled, even if you do.”

“Because you’ve got so much to lose, haven’t you?” said Esmond nastily. “Golden prospects: a prefect’s waistcoat, captain of rugby, idol of the new boys. You’ve sold your soul for a few trinkets. I thought you were better than that. Really, I did.”

“And you’ve got no soul to sell,” Theo shot back. “You’re a fake, Esmond. That’s what you are. Making people think you care when all you want is information for your stupid notebooks.”

He turned and ran away down the road, feeling his heart beating fast and already wishing he could take back what he’d said.

Theo stood alone at the bus station, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands to try to keep warm. A harsh wind was blowing across the concourse, whipping up empty cigarette packets and other rubbish and dropping them again as it changed direction. There were no trees. Everywhere was concrete and asphalt, and the whole place was deserted under a darkening sky. He peered again at the timetable fixed to the iron post beside which he was standing. Yes, the bus was due in five minutes, but that didn’t mean it would come. He could be stranded here all night, he thought, and freeze to death without anyone being the wiser.

He wished he hadn’t quarreled with Esmond. He’d gone in the pub of his own free will and the sergeant hadn’t seen them, and the whole escapade had been funny. He could see that now. Raikes and his wooden leg and Big Alf’s big eye. He wished he’d laughed instead of running off, but it was too late now.

It was Carborough’s fault, he decided. If he ever got out of this hellhole, he wasn’t coming back. Not for love or money ...

Suddenly he went rigid. There were footsteps behind him, or rather a step and a clump, like the walking sound a man with a wooden leg might make.

“I got you now, Sterlin’,” said Sergeant Raikes as he gripped Theo’s collar. “’Eadmaster’s goin’ to beat you black and blue, you mark my words. You’ll be regrettin’ the day you was born by the time ’e’s finished with yer.”

Theo turned around and faced—not Sergeant Raikes but Esmond.

“You bastard!” he said, bursting out laughing. “I really thought it was him.”

“You did, didn’t you?” said Esmond, laughing too.

“How do you do it? You’re like a parrot! It’s unbelievable.”

“I guess I’m a natural when it comes to sergeant-majors, and Raikes is a mimic’s dream. He’s come out with some great lines over the years. Not to be forgotten,” said Esmond, tapping his forehead.

“Such as?”

“Well, it’s hard to choose, but I suppose my all-time favorite is from this time last year when he was escorting me to the Old Man for a flogging—I’d done something blasphemous in church, I can’t remember what—and he stopped outside the door, turned to me, leaning close, and told me: ‘T’aint the agony, Lisle; yer know that, don’t yer? It’s the disgrace .’”

Again, the mimicry was perfect, combined, too, with the leaning close and a great deal of hand rubbing, so that Theo almost felt as if he could see the sergeant and feel his awful joy.

“Come on,” said Esmond. “Here’s our bus. I hope the driver’s got the heater on.”

Theo refused to go to any more pubs with Esmond after their narrow escape from the Eight Bells, but he did eventually agree to break his vow and return to Carborough, this time to go to the cinema. The Scala was showing The Public Enemy , and he wanted Esmond to see the movie and to experience again for himself that visceral feeling in his chest that had kept him going back to watch it in New York. But this time around, he felt nothing except a weary sense of treading old ground. He was disappointed but thought, too, that his lack of reaction was because he was starting to heal and no longer needed Jimmy Cagney to pierce the wall that he had built back then around his tortured emotions.

Esmond was unmoved too. His interest lay in what he could use. American gangsters meant nothing to him, and so he switched off, waiting for the Pathé newsreels that would follow the movie. And when they came, he was suddenly alert, sitting on the edge of his seat with his eyes glued to the screen as he watched the Reichstag burn and Hitler swoon over his microphone, brushing his hair back off his sweating face as he hammered out his hate. The camera panned down Berlin streets with JUDE scrawled across the shopfronts in white paint, and stopped to linger over a grainy shot of an old Jew being beaten by SA Brownshirts with swastikas emblazoned on their arms.

Theo was transfixed too. He remembered the photographs in his grandfather’s book and the wooden house that had burned with his ancestors inside. The newsreel made the idea of pogrom real. It made him angry, and frightened too.

Later, as they walked back to the bus station, Esmond was energized, fired up by what they’d seen.

“It’s just beginning,” he said. “Hitler will stop at nothing and nor must we—”

“You need to know something,” said Theo, interrupting. “My grandparents are Jewish. My father said that that doesn’t make me a Jew and he didn’t want to be one either. He changed his name, but it didn’t change who he was or who I am. You are what you are. My grandfather told me that, and he was right.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Dead, perhaps. I only met him once, and he was an old man then. But he said I would remember him, and I do, as if it was yesterday.”

“He obviously made quite an impression.”

“Yes, he did. He gave me a sense that I was part of something bigger than myself,” Theo said thoughtfully. “That I belonged somewhere, and seeing that newsreel just now makes me feel that the Nazis are attacking me too.”

“They are. You’re mixed race as far as they’re concerned, and soon they’ll be calling you Jewish, too, because there can be no half measures with their hatred. Hitler needs someone to blame, and the Jew is his scapegoat. The persecution will get worse soon, much worse, and your blood will tell you that you cannot stand aside and do nothing.”

“But what can I do?” asked Theo, opening his arms to express his impotence.

“I don’t know,” said Esmond. “But there will be something. That I am sure of.”

A week later, Theo and Esmond were listening to a package of new jazz records that Esmond had just received in the mail from London when Theo caught sight of a black shoe out in the corridor, extended just beyond the half-open door of the study.

Putting his finger to his mouth, he got up silently from his chair and yanked open the door, jumping out to seize hold of the eavesdropper. He had expected it to be Alwyn or one of the other junior boys, and was shocked and dismayed to find himself with an arm around the waist of his housemaster.

He backed away, stammering out apologies, but Father Laurence didn’t seem offended.

“No harm done,” he said. “I stopped because of the beautiful music. When I was a boy, one of my ambitions was to play the trumpet, but it came to nothing, I am afraid. And perhaps it’s for the best.”

“Trumpets and monasteries don’t go together, you mean?” asked Esmond, grinning.

“Perhaps,” said Father Laurence, amused too.

“But you like Louis Armstrong?”

“Yes, very much. He’s an extraordinary improviser. A natural genius.”

“Well, come in and listen to some more,” said Esmond warmly. “I can make you some of my horrible tea if you like.”

Father Laurence hesitated. It wasn’t normal for housemasters to keep company with boys in their studies. But then he smiled and sat down in the chair that Theo had vacated, opposite the statue of Karl Marx, while Theo moved to the bed. Theo wished he had a camera so he could take a photograph.

“You have quite a library,” said the monk, running his eyes over the bookshelves crammed with Communist texts.

“I do, don’t I?” said Esmond. “Marx and Engels are not really your line, though, I expect?” It had made his day to discover that Father Laurence was a fan of Dixieland jazz, but he thought it safe to assume that Marxism would be foreign territory.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I’m not an expert like you,” said Father Laurence, “but I do try and keep up to date as much as I can. Renouncing the world does not mean that we monks have taken a vow to remain ignorant of what is happening in it.”

“And what do you think is happening?” asked Esmond.

“I think that evil is spreading through Europe like a cancer. In Germany and Italy and in Russia too. I fear for the future—your future,” said Father Laurence, glancing over at Theo.

“Russia too! Well, I suppose we can’t expect a monk to like a state that says there is no God,” said Esmond. There was a meanness about his smile now that Theo didn’t like, and he also objected to Esmond’s obvious attempt to rope him in on his side, but he said nothing, wondering what was coming next.

“It’s not just their persecution of the priesthood that concerns me, although that is obviously an evil,” said Father Laurence. “I was more thinking of the peasantry who have been forced into collectives that don’t work, with those that refuse being shot or loaded into cattle trucks to take them to icy northern camps where they freeze to death or die of disease. My understanding is that millions have died, and that this horror is getting worse every day because the peasants that are left are starving, scrabbling for weeds and roots and even eating each other, while Comrade Stalin sells their grain to buy technology for his Five-Year Plan. The cruelty and suffering are unimaginable.”

Theo noticed the expression of pain that briefly passed across Father Laurence’s face as he finished speaking, before his features became composed again, and he sat sipping the lukewarm tea that Esmond had poured him from the pot.

Theo was impressed by the way that Father Laurence spoke so calmly and authoritatively and, despite his devotion to his friend, he couldn’t help feeling that there was something refreshing about seeing Esmond so forcefully challenged after months of sitting at his feet, listening to him impart his pearls of Marxist wisdom.

Esmond, however, was feeling an equal mixture of surprise and fury. An unlikely enthusiasm for Louis Armstrong was one thing, but Father Laurence’s entirely unexpected and knowledgeable attack on Stalin was quite another and had left him momentarily at a loss for words. “Those are all lies, filthy lies,” he spluttered angrily.

“Yes, that’s what Stalin says too,” Father Laurence continued smoothly on. “‘Lies, lies!’ he sneers, but he is the one who is lying, and on a scale that no one before now could ever have imagined, because he’s realized that the more colossal the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. No ruler could sell grain when his people are starving, and so they can’t be starving. It’s as simple as that. And so the peasants carry on dying without their deaths even being acknowledged. The shameless audacity of the performance is truly diabolical.”

“I was wondering when you were going to get round to calling him the Devil,” said Esmond. “Because these tales of yours are the worst kind of superstition. As I’m sure you know, they’re the work of one disgruntled journalist and have been discredited by the entire press corps in Moscow, not to speak of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.”

“Who see what they’re paid to see. Malcolm Muggeridge got away from his minders. That’s the difference.”

“No, the difference is he hates Communism. That’s why he wrote those articles. I’m not saying there aren’t food shortages. Of course there are. Russia was fifty years behind the West, and it needs to catch up if it is going to survive. Otherwise, countries like ours will pick it apart just like they tried to do after the revolution. But there’s been amazing progress. Investment in industry has quadrupled and the workforce has doubled, but those workers need to be fed, and the peasants hoard the grain or feed it to their livestock. They refuse to collectivize because they are stupid and selfish and so, yes, they must be forced, if necessary. Of course they must. They cannot be allowed to hold the whole country back.”

“And that justifies murdering them?” asked Father Laurence, raising his eyebrows.

“No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying, and it’s not what’s happening. It’s you who see what you want to see; not me. You have to discredit the Communists because you’re frightened that they will do the same here and the ruling class will lose its land and money and privileges.”

“But I am not the ruling class,” said Father Laurence. “You seem to forget I have taken a vow of poverty!”

“You serve them, though, don’t you? That’s what the public schools are for, or would you deny that too?”

Father Laurence shook his head, the gesture conveying his sense that the argument had gotten out of control, and after a moment he got up to leave, carefully handing his half-drunk mug of tea to Theo.

“Thank you for the tea,” he said. “I am sorry that we have become so antagonistic. It was not my intention, and I was enjoying the music.”

“There won’t be any schools like this, or monasteries, either, when the revolution comes,” said Esmond, refusing to accept the olive branch. “And believe me, it is coming. The workers have woken up. Time is on our side, not yours.”

Standing in the doorway, Father Laurence heard Esmond out and then inclined his head without making further response and left.

“Fool,” said Esmond, spitting the word through his teeth.

“No, he’s not,” said Theo, speaking for the first time.

“What did you say?” asked Esmond, surprised by this new challenge.

“He’s not a fool,” said Theo. “It’s just so blindingly obvious he isn’t. If you can’t see that, then you’re a ...”

“Fool?” growled Esmond, finishing Theo’s sentence.

“Your word, not mine,” said Theo, getting up to go. He’d had enough of Esmond suddenly and needed to get out into the air.

But as he was leaving, Esmond called him back. “Whose side are you on?” he demanded.

The old question.

“I don’t know,” said Theo.

Outside, as he walked out into the lightly falling rain, pushing back his head to let it wash over his face, he thought of Alvah Katz for the first time in a long time. Esmond’s sardonic mocking smile when he attacked Father Laurence had been just like Alvah’s, and there was the same wanton destructiveness underlying their embrace of the workers’ cause.

Theo put his hands up to his temples, pushing his knuckles into the skin. He didn’t want to think of Esmond that way. Alvah had destroyed his father, but Esmond was his friend who cared about him and made him laugh, and taught him to see the world in new ways.

Slowly, Theo succeeded in disentangling Esmond from Alvah, but as Esmond faded from his mind, Alvah became more vivid. He saw him as he had the first time in the cutter’s room at his father’s factory, with his clipped mustache and beard and curly black hair all oiled into place, and with the memory came an intuition that he hadn’t finished with his father’s old enemy. That Alvah was waiting for him out there somewhere, around some blind corner of his future. Waiting with malice in his heart.