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14

Choices

Theo’s flare-ups with Esmond didn’t stop them being friends, but they were symptomatic of a tension between them that escalated when they returned to Saint Gregory’s at the end of the summer.

Theo had passed the school certificate with distinction and now entered the sixth form, which meant that he was entitled to his own study. For the last week of the holidays, Elena took Theo on a round of the best London department stores, shopping for bedding and furnishings, to which was added a bespoke silk waistcoat rushed through by Sir Andrew’s tailor in Savile Row after Sir Andrew received a letter from Father Laurence informing him that Theo had been selected to be a prefect, the youngest in the house. Success warmed relations between Theo and his stepfather, at least temporarily, although tensions still simmered underneath.

Away from Esmond’s influence, Theo’s attitude toward Saint Gregory’s had undergone a change during the summer, and he was surprised to realize that he was looking forward to going back. Most of all, this was because the rugby season would be starting again, and his hopes were rewarded when he was selected for the first fifteen for their first match of the season away to Saint Chad’s.

Five minutes from time with the scores level, he received the ball on the wing and put up the high kick that he had been practicing throughout the summer and ran through the opposition to catch it and touch down in the corner. Almost immediately afterward, the whistle blew and he was surrounded by his teammates, who practically carried him from the pitch, while the opposition looked on disconsolately, having tasted defeat in the fixture for the first time in three years. And then on the way back in the bus, they sang “Land of Hope and Glory” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and Theo experienced again that same happiness he used to feel coming back from running meets on Coach Eames’s battle bus—the happiness that comes from a sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself.

The story of his exploits on the pitch spread like wildfire through Saint Gregory’s and led to a further surge in his popularity. Alwyn Thomas and Cattermole—transformed into a happy schoolboy since the departure of Barker—followed him about, bringing him tea and toast even when he didn’t ask for it and competing with the other juniors for the honor of cleaning his football boots. His study was always full of people, and he had to throw them out when he needed to work.

Theo enjoyed his success, but it came with a feeling of dissatisfaction that he couldn’t shake off because he could not share it with Esmond. Worse than that, he knew, without Esmond having to tell him, that his accomplishments were creating a barrier between them that he didn’t know how to overcome.

He tried. He knocked on the door of Esmond’s study and Esmond didn’t turn him away, but nor did he make him tea like he used to before or talk to him about the cause. Esmond was polite, but it was as if he was waiting for Theo to leave so he could return to the thick Leninist tome that he had been reading before Theo came in. Theo would have preferred Esmond to attack him for selling out, like he used to before. That would at least have given him something to respond to, but Esmond’s withdrawal left him in limbo.

He felt judged, and it rankled because he thought Esmond’s silent reproach was unfair, but he couldn’t dismiss it on that basis, because he had spent the previous year allowing Esmond to become his conscience. He noticed how Esmond wore his moth-eaten sweater with pride and looked askance at Theo’s fancy waistcoat, and Theo began to feel ashamed of wearing it. All his accomplishments felt tarnished by Esmond’s irony.

Beneath his resentment, Theo missed his friend. He missed his brilliance and unpredictability and his extraordinary humor, which no other boy in the school could even begin to rival, and above all he felt the loss of his sympathy. He forgot now how he had questioned Esmond’s compassion for the poor and remembered instead how Esmond had been alone in consoling him for the death of his father and for all that he had lost and left behind.

But he would not give up the rugby. He remembered the despair he had felt when his parents took away the running. It didn’t matter what Esmond said. He couldn’t let that happen again.

In November, Saint Gregory’s finally won the Challenge Cup, prevailing over Saint Augustine’s in a hard-fought final played out in the driving rain. “Get it out to the wing, let Sterling have it!” Theo heard Father Philip shouting, and he loved the headmaster as he caught the ball cleanly and accelerated away toward the posts.

Late that night, he wrote to Lewis to thank him for all he’d done for him, but at midnight he was still wide awake and tiptoed down the corridor to Esmond’s door so as not to wake anyone up. It was closed, but there was a crack of light between the bottom of the door and the floor and Theo could faintly hear Bing Crosby singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

It was too much. He tapped softly and went in.

Esmond was sitting at his desk, looking out into the starlit night as the record played to its end, but he swung his chair around as Theo entered.

“The conquering hero honors me with a visit!” he said, the irony even heavier than usual—it was as if Esmond had himself grown tired of it. “What can I do for you?”

“Tea, maybe,” said Theo, sitting down in the armchair under the picture of the Kremlin. He remembered how they had talked about it the first time he’d been in the study and how bowled over he had been by Esmond, and he wished that he could turn the clock back and that everything between them could return to the way it had been before.

Esmond looked at Theo for a moment as if he were a banker weighing up a decision that could go either way and then smiled. “All right,” he said, leaning out of the window to get his milk. “I think I can stretch to that.”

“You were playing the song you bought for me to listen to,” said Theo.

“Yes. It’s powerful, although Bing Crosby wouldn’t have been my first choice as the singer. Not exactly a revolutionary, is he?” said Esmond.

“A bit like me?”

“You were more promising material. But now you seem to be rapidly turning into Father Philip’s star pupil, so yes, I don’t think you have much of a future on the barricades, either, do you?”

“It’s not as easy for me as it is for you,” said Theo. “I’ve lost more in my life, and so it’s harder for me to stand alone.”

“You need to belong, as do all collaborators. When the tribe calls, you come running,” Esmond retorted harshly.

“Perhaps,” said Theo. “But you are your own man because it’s who you are. You are apart. You don’t feel the pain of others. You care about their suffering, but you can’t share it. It’s why you can toss me aside as you have.”

Esmond didn’t respond straightaway. He handed Theo his tea and sat back in his chair, thinking.

“You’ve said this before about me,” he said eventually. “And you may be right that I am more mind than heart. But it doesn’t change what I believe in, or what I would give up for it. I know for a fact that you can’t serve two masters. You have to choose.”

“And you’re angry with me because I won’t?”

“Not angry,” said Esmond. “Perhaps I was, briefly, but not anymore. And I think you have chosen. You just don’t see it yet.”

“Well, I’m asking you to keep an open mind,” said Theo. “To remain my friend. To be patient. I need to find my way, that’s all. I think it’ll be easier when the rugby’s over in the spring. There’ll be more time then.”

“Rugby or the class struggle? A choice for our times!” said Esmond, laughing at the absurdity of the dichotomy and breaking the serious spell of their conversation.

Theo laughed, too, and they drank their tea and forgot for a moment that they were at such loggerheads with each other.

Theo didn’t know whether Esmond had decided to give him a second chance, because neither of them referred again to their nocturnal conversation. It was as if it stood outside their lives in a place to which they could not return. But Esmond did seem more friendly when Theo passed him in the halls, and he saw more of him after Christmas, when the upper sixth Latin teacher ran off with the assistant matron and the two sixth forms—upper and lower—were briefly taught the subject together, while Father Philip scoured the universities for a suitable replacement.

The lower sixth teacher was a thin, birdlike, shortsighted man called Bandy, who had had severe difficulty keeping control of one form and found the task impossible when he was handed responsibility for two. Years before, he had had pretensions to be a classical scholar, and he had never been able to get used to the daily dismemberment of the literature that he had once loved at the hands of boys bored to distraction by the poems of Virgil and Horace. It would have been better for Bandy if he had accepted failure and fallen back on a detached amusement at the hand fate had dealt him, but he couldn’t. Instead, he got up each day hoping that everything would be different, only to collapse back into his chair in renewed despair when the first boy began to construe, making the same awful mistakes that Bandy had heard a thousand times before.

The boys laughed at Bandy’s melodramatic groaning and mocked him behind his back, but he was not faced with outright rebellion until Esmond arrived in his class. From the outset, Esmond seemed determined to make trouble. He was clever and asked questions edged with sarcasm and ridicule, but then looked innocent and perplexed when Bandy lost his temper and began to shout and rant. But all this was no more than a softening-up process, and at the beginning of the second week, when news filtered down that a new classics master was on the way, Esmond moved in for the kill.

He was sitting next to Theo at a desk near the window at the back of the classroom, and when Bandy turned to write on the blackboard, Esmond opened the school bag that he had brought to class and produced two medium-size rocks. One he deposited on the floor under the window and the other he placed on Theo’s desk.

“Throw it!” he said, pointing at the window. “Throw it and I’ll know which side you’re on.”

He sat back down at his desk, watching Theo, not encouraging or discouraging him, but just waiting to see what he would do. All the other boys were in front of them, and no one seemed to be aware of what was going on.

Theo had no idea afterward why he threw the stone. Perhaps it was simply that he could not resist Esmond’s challenge, but he did it straightaway without thinking, and the glass shattered.

Immediately, all hell broke loose. Bandy spun around, dropping his chalk, and rushed to join Esmond, who was standing at the window, holding up the second rock and pointing frantically toward the elm trees that dotted the green slope of the hill behind the classroom building.

“I can see him, sir!” he shouted. “It’s one of the local boys. I think he’s going to do it again.”

“Where?” Bandy demanded, seeing nothing.

“I think he’s gone behind that tree over there, sir,” said Esmond. “Shall we go after him?”

“Yes,” said Bandy and took off through the door and down the stairs with his gown billowing out behind him and his class following in hot pursuit.

And then for ten glorious minutes they ran from tree to tree with Esmond permanently at Bandy’s shoulder, telling him that he’d just seen the stone thrower again.

It was cruel. Theo understood that, but it was side-achingly funny, too, and it was the dawning awareness that everyone except Esmond was laughing at him that finally brought Bandy to a halt.

He went over to the ground under the window and picked up and examined the stone that Theo had thrown, lying amid the shattered glass, and then climbed the stairs to the freezing classroom and examined the internal damage.

“This window was broken from the inside,” he announced. “Whoever did this better own up now, or you’ll all go to the headmaster. I mean what I say!”

Silence. Esmond had his eyes fixed expectantly on Theo, and then he smiled when Theo raised his hand and immediately did the same.

Bandy was shocked. Theo was one of the few pupils in the class who seemed to have any feel for the language, and there had been several times after lessons when he had come up to his desk and they had talked about Aeneas and the fall of Troy. But here he was now, revealed as the worst kind of vandal.

“Sterling, I’m disappointed in you,” he said. “I know Lisle’s a troublemaker, but what could have possessed you to do such a thing?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Theo. He really didn’t. Now that the craziness was over, he couldn’t believe that he’d thrown the stone. It was as if he’d been possessed by a demon of some kind.

“You don’t know! I see. Well, we’ll have to find out what Father Philip thinks about it. I can’t imagine he’ll be best pleased.”

The summons came less than an hour later.

“What do you think he’ll do?” asked Theo as they crossed the quadrangle on their way to the headmaster’s study. He felt sick with apprehension, whereas Esmond walked with a spring in his step, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Beat us, of course, and maybe write to our parents. But nothing more than that. You’re his blue-eyed boy, and he wants to keep on the right side of my father.”

They waited outside the headmaster’s door, sitting on two hard-backed chairs. Theo looked up at the portrait of the founder and remembered Sergeant Raikes’s lurid description of his execution. At least they weren’t facing “’angin, drawin’, and quarterin’,” he thought, trying to find some silver lining in the black cloud hanging over their heads.

“Where’s the sergeant?” he asked Esmond. “I thought it was his job to drag us over here.”

“It’s probably his day off,” said Esmond. “But you know what he’d say if he was here, don’t you?”

“T’aint the agony; it’s the disgrace,” said Theo, and they both started to laugh.

And it was just bad luck that Father Philip chose that precise moment to open his door to call them in.

Afterward, Theo thought that Raikes was right: the agony was entirely secondary to the disgrace. Father Philip hit hard, albeit not with the tied-together canes that turned out to be a figment of Alwyn Thomas’s overactive imagination, but the pain was transient. What stayed with Theo was his self-disgust at his willingness to submit to the punishment. That was the disgrace.

He never forgot the instructions on where and how to bend over the ugly Victorian hard-backed chair in the corner of the room, whose purpose was now revealed, the tap of the cane on his upended buttocks as Father Philip set his mark, and, worst of all, the shaking of hands at the end that legitimized the assault. It was true that he’d been in a state of shock at what had just happened when he’d taken the headmaster’s outstretched hand. But it was a poor excuse. He should have turned away, keeping his hands in his pockets like Esmond said he had. But instead he’d given in and then listened deferentially while Father Philip had told him that he hoped he’d learned his lesson and would go back to being the credit to Saint Gregory’s that he’d been up to now.

He hated Father Philip and he hated Saint Gregory’s and he hated himself, and he wished he’d ripped the stupid cane out of the headmaster’s hands and broken it over his knee.

“He might have expelled you for that, although I’d say on balance it’s unlikely,” said Esmond, who’d been patiently listening to Theo rant for the previous ten minutes. “You won him the Challenge Cup, which is what he cares about more than the Second Coming, and he needs you to retain it next year. The old bastard knows which side his bread is buttered. I’ll say that much for him.”

“Why don’t you care?” asked Theo, outraged by Esmond’s lack of reaction to what had happened.

“I’m used to it. I’ve been beaten so many times and I suppose I welcome it in a way. It reminds me of what I’m up against—something which you seem to have been blissfully unaware of up to now.”

“It feels like you set it all up,” said Theo sourly.

“You didn’t need to throw the stone.”

“I knew what you’d do if I didn’t.”

“I wanted you to see what this place is really about. And I’m happy that the lesson does not seem to have been lost on you,” said Esmond. “You asked me to keep an open mind, and that’s what I’m doing. I think on the evidence of today that there’s hope for you yet, Comrade Sterling.”

Theo looked away, refusing to meet his friend’s eye. He felt no hope at all at that moment, just a rage against everyone and everything boiling up inside him with no outlet for expression.

Father Laurence took Theo aside several days later and suggested that they should take a walk.

To Theo’s surprise, they went up to the abbey, entering through the narthex and sitting on two chairs at the back. It was early evening and the building was cavernous and empty, except that far away on either side of the high altar, Theo could see a few monks in their black habits sitting in their stalls. Some had hoods over their heads, giving them an otherworldly appearance in the twilight coming in through the high windows of the clerestory. Silence hung like a presence in the air.

All at once, a bell rang somewhere out of sight, and the monks began to sing, or rather chant: a pure music that rose and fell with no apparent harmony or rhythm, but with a timeless beauty that felt like a balm to Theo, soothing away the agitation that had been gripping him for days. The notes seemed to have a life of their own, independent of those giving voice to them.

Across the aisle from where Theo was sitting, a single candle was burning in a votive stand at the entrance to a side chapel that was barely the size of an alcove. Above the empty altar, a dark baroque picture of a saint was barely visible in the gloom, eyes raised expectantly toward heaven. Theo wondered who the candle had been lit for as it flickered now toward extinction, dripping wax down onto the black iron of the stand. The small act of remembrance touched him and he thought all at once of his father, whose face appeared vivid in his mind’s eye after months when it had become amorphous, dissolving with time. The physicality of the sensation jolted Theo, who felt for a moment as if his father was there beside him in the church.

And then as quickly as he had appeared, the ghost of his father was gone, and the chanting voices of the monks seeped back into Theo’s consciousness like water washing away a picture from a slate. But the candle that had sparked the vision was still alight and, looking hard at its guttering flame, Theo adopted it as his own: a pledge against time to keep the past alive.

When vespers were over, Father Laurence took Theo to a side door in the north transept, and they walked out into the monastery garden that Theo had never entered before and sat on a bench beside a white marble statue of Mary set in a bed of Christmas roses. The moon had risen, illuminating the gravel walks and the snowdrops under the wintry trees, and, looking up, Theo was able to pick out the window of the room that had been Lewis’s, high in the eaves of Cardinal Newman House.

He missed Lewis’s plain-speaking benevolence. His obvious decency and natural enthusiasm had been a counterweight to Esmond’s insistence on unraveling every aspect of school life and holding it up to adverse judgment. Without him, Theo was finding it hard to resist Esmond’s gravitational pull on his heart and mind. Even when Esmond was not there, he was aware of it like a recurring whisper in his ear.

“Life can be very confusing sometimes,” said Father Laurence, breaking the silence.

Theo drew in his breath. It was as if Father Laurence had been reading his mind. “Why did you bring me here, Father?” he asked.

“So you could see that there can be beauty and peace in the world if you choose to look for it. There are places where you can go to be quiet and to pray, and then in time the best way forward in your life becomes easier to perceive.”

“I don’t pray,” said Theo. “I can’t.” There was something about the still silence of the evening that stimulated him to honesty.

“Then you can just be still. Esmond is never that. He is in a hurry to change the world, and perhaps he will. He is brilliant and magnetic. But he is selfish, too, and you should remember that, Theo, because he could take you to places you don’t wish to go.”

“He won’t,” said Theo. “I make my own decisions.” It came out harshly, which was not what he intended, but his need to push back against Father Laurence’s advice was instinctive. He denied Esmond’s influence over him because he didn’t want to think about whether it might be malign. Esmond was his friend. That was what mattered.

Father Laurence sighed. “I spoke to you before about this,” he said. “But I fear that what I said was not enough, although perhaps stronger words would only have made matters worse. You were always going to be vulnerable to someone like Esmond.”

“Why?”

“Because you have lost your father and are looking for a new leader, and because you have known the bigger world and have suffered in it. Such an experience can make school seem absurd, but you need education because you are still only sixteen. You are too young to be trying to change the world.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” said Theo, withdrawing into himself again. He recognized the truth of his housemaster’s insights, but that just made them seem more threatening and invasive.

Father Laurence nodded. He looked weary as he gazed out across the twilit garden.

“Is that all, Father?” Theo asked.

“Yes, I’ll show you the way out.”

Theo had wanted to be gone, but now he felt a stab of sadness as Father Laurence let him through a door on the other side of the garden that led back to the school. It was as if he were leaving a magical kingdom behind, to which he would not be able to return.

He walked away but then stopped and turned, calling to Father Laurence by name.

The door opened again just as it had been about to close and Father Laurence reappeared, framed in its arch.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m sorry, Father,” said Theo. “I just wanted to thank you. That’s all. I liked the singing and the garden. They are beautiful, like you said.”

“And peaceful,” said Father Laurence with a smile. “There’s value in that.”

“Yes,” said Theo. “Good night, Father.”

“Good night, and may God bless you.”

Theo felt Father Laurence’s eyes on his back and he longed with a sudden ache to turn again and ask to be readmitted to the twilit garden, but he knew that that moment had passed. A breeze had picked up, and he felt it cold on his face as he walked away down the path toward the school.

In May, Theo received a letter from Frank. In the almost two years since Theo left New York, his old friend had remained a faithful correspondent, and letters covered with heavily postmarked American stamps regularly arrived every couple of months, but they were always disappointingly short, consisting of a series of pithy remarks about the weather and the fact that Frank and his mother were keeping well, and sometimes a reference in baseball season to how the New York Yankees were performing in the race for the Major League pennant. Frank had many talents, but Theo had soon realized that letter writing was not among them.

But this letter was different. It was much longer, and Frank had compressed his handwriting to fit more words on the page. After thanking Theo for his last letter, he wrote that his mother had been in the Jewish hospital for two weeks after suffering a fall. It had been touch and go for a while, but he was pleased to say that she was now making a good recovery. God be thanked.

Then he went on:

But while my mother was there, an old woman died in one of the other wards.

Death happens all the time in these places, of course, but this one was different, because that evening, her husband didn’t leave when visiting hours were over. He must have hidden somewhere—under the bed maybe—and in the morning, the nurses found the two of them lying side by side in the narrow bed. Both dead, and he was holding her hand.

There was a lot of talk because something like that hadn’t happened before in the hospital, and I suppose that was why the nurses mentioned their names—Yossif and Leah Stern. They’re not uncommon names so I went to the Registry and found out their address because I wanted to make sure. They’d been living with another family in a tenement off Essex Street and the man there said that they had had a son, Micah, who’d married a gentile. So, I knew then that it was them—your grandparents—and I thought I ought to tell you because you’ve got a right to know.

I’m sorry, Theo. More than I can say. They’re buried in the same cemetery Michael is. I thought you’d be pleased about that. I can show you where when you come back.

There was more, but Theo couldn’t bear to read it. He crunched up the letter in his hand and began to cry. Hard, wrenching sobs that racked his body. He had to get out, to walk, feel air on his face. He staggered blindly up from his chair, knocking over a coffee table that was in his way, pulled open the door of his study, and collided head-on with Esmond, who was coming the other way.

“What is it? What’s happened?” Esmond asked.

“Nothing. I need to be alone. That’s all,” Theo muttered as he pushed past his friend, heading toward the staircase.

But after a moment, he heard running feet behind him and felt a hand on his arm, pulling him back. “What are you doing, Esmond?” he demanded angrily, turning around. “I told you I need to be alone.”

“No, you don’t,” said Esmond, using his free hand to open the door of his study, before pushing Theo inside. “What you need right now is a friend, and that’s why I’m here.”

Theo was too surprised to resist. He stumbled into the room and collapsed heavily into the familiar armchair where he’d sat so many times before, and watched as Esmond pulled the mutilated Bible out of the bookcase and extracted the hip flask from inside, just as he had that first time when Theo had cried about his father.

He had been a frightened greenhorn brat back then, and now he was the most popular boy in the school. But how much had really changed? he wondered as the brandy hit the back of his throat, flooding him with a sudden softening warmth. It was still only Esmond who really knew him, still only Esmond who really cared. The news he’d just received would mean nothing to anyone else. Except his mother, who’d probably be dancing for joy when she found out that her hated father-in-law was gone from the world.

“My grandparents died,” said Theo. His voice was flat, drained of emotion. “A month ago, I think. Maybe more. I don’t know how long it takes an airmail letter to get here.” He held up Frank’s crumpled letter and began straightening it out. The date didn’t matter. It was just a way not to have to think about what had happened.

“How?” Esmond asked.

“In the Jewish hospital in New York. Here, you can see for yourself,” said Theo, holding out the letter.

Esmond read it twice before handing it back. “I’m so sorry,” he said, putting his hand on Theo’s arm. “Your grandfather must have been an extraordinary man. To be able to let go of life like that when so many cling to it for no reason. It’s like the end of a great love story. The two of them together in the bed, hands entwined.”

“You’re right,” said Theo, looking up. He felt unexpected comfort in Esmond’s words. His grandfather had been extraordinary. The day he’d spent with him had been the most memorable of his childhood, and the things the old man had told him were still vivid in his mind.

One day! That was all he’d had, when there could have been so many more. It hurt Theo to the quick to know that his grandparents had been only a few streets away all that time he’d been living in the Lower East Side with his mother. If she’d only allowed him to carry on looking, then surely he or Frank would have found them. But instead she’d made him promise to forget them, just the same as his father had done in Washington Square. They were both selfish, thinking only of themselves. Not like Esmond, who was the only one who really cared about him. Apart from Frank, of course, who couldn’t help him because he was on the other side of the world.

“What are you thinking?” Esmond asked, holding out the hip flask.

“That Father Laurence is wrong and that you are my one true friend,” said Theo, raising the flask to his friend in salutation before drinking a deep draft to wash away his tears.

In the days that followed, Esmond spent every waking hour with Theo, going out of his way to be the best possible company. They played jazz records and drank beer, and Esmond even came up to the playing fields and watched a rugby match during which he stationed himself at an inaudible distance from Father Philip and delivered with perfect mimicry an exaggerated imitation of the headmaster’s exhortations from the touchline. It wasn’t one of Theo’s best games, as his attention to the ball was frequently distracted by Esmond instructing him and his teammates to “kick the opposition where it hurts” and “beat the swine to a pulp,” but laughter made him not care, and he felt a grim pleasure when Father Philip marched off enraged at the end after Saint Gregory’s ended up losing by a heavy margin. Theo hated the headmaster now and would have liked nothing better than to kick him where it hurts if he’d had the chance.

He was grateful to Esmond for the distractions, knowing that his friend was trying to help him get through the first period of mourning when the news of his grandparents’ deaths had left him raw with grief and anger. But by the end of the week, he was calmer and wanted to talk about them.

“My grandfather showed me a photograph album that day he took me to his apartment,” he told Esmond. “There were pictures of my ancestors who died in the pogroms. He said that when he and my grandmother were gone, then I would be the only one left to know who they were and where they came from. He wanted me to honor them, I think.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Theo, shaking his head in frustration. “I don’t even know their names. Just that they were Jewish and that they wouldn’t give it up, even to save their lives.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t just about them that he was talking. Perhaps it was about all Jews,” said Esmond thoughtfully. “Because the persecution is still going on, you know. In Germany, Hitler is taking away their rights, shipping them off to concentration camps. There’s one near Munich called Dachau where they’re worked and starved to death. The SS beat them with clubs and hang them from iron posts if they try to resist.”

“But there’s nothing I can do about any of that,” said Theo. “This is England, not Germany.”

“It’s happening here too. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists has got fifty thousand members already. Mussolini’s filling its coffers, and the right-wing newspapers are telling their readers to join. Here—look at this!” said Esmond excitedly, pulling an old copy of The Daily Mail from a stack of newspapers on his desk and pointing to the banner headline: Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

“Mosley’s as antisemitic as Hitler. I can promise you that. Once he’s got power, there’ll be Dachaus all over England, so we have to stop him before it’s too late. That’s how you can honor your ancestors.”

“I don’t understand,” said Theo, shaking his head. “What can we do?”

“There’s a BUF rally at the Kensington Olympia in London next month. They’re expecting fifteen thousand to show up, which will make it the biggest one yet, and if we can get enough of our people there, then maybe we can halt them in their stride. But it’s not just that. This is the best chance we’ve had to show the bastards up for what they really are. Most of them are vicious thugs like Hitler’s Brownshirts, and if people here can see that, then they’ll turn against them. The British aren’t like the Germans—they don’t like that kind of street violence. But we have to invite it to make it happen; we need to put demonstrators inside the hall, as well as outside.”

“We—who’s we?”

“The party’s organizing the protest, but yes, I’m talking about us being a part of it. This is what we’ve been waiting for, Theo—an opportunity to do something that really matters. Not like handing out The Daily Worker to down-and-outs in Carborough.”

“But we could get hurt?”

“Yes, but not too badly, I hope,” said Esmond with a reassuring smile. “And afterward, if it all goes as we hope, then we’ll be able to feel that we made a real difference in the world. What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” said Theo, overwhelmed by the enormity of the decision he was suddenly being asked to make. “When’s the rally?”

“In two weeks’ time—the seventh of June.”

“That’s a Thursday,” said Theo, calculating the days.

“Yes.”

“The weekend would have been better.”

Esmond nodded. They both understood the significance of the day. If the rally had been at the weekend, then they might be able to find an excuse to get a leave of absence from the school and go to London. On a Thursday, they’d have to play truant and take the consequences.

“They’ll probably let you back,” Esmond said. “The Old Man won’t want to lose his best rugby player, and you can blame it all on me for leading you astray, if that helps. I’m not coming back, so I won’t need to defend myself.”

“Not coming back! But I thought you were going to try for Oxford.”

“That was my parents’ idea, not mine, and I’m done with all that now. I’m not going to be any help to the cause, stuck inside an ivory tower.”

“Jesus!” said Theo, feeling that everything had accelerated away from him suddenly. It was as if his whole relationship with Esmond had led up to this moment, which had crept up on him completely unawares.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” said Esmond, opening his hands in a gesture of release. “I’ll understand if you don’t.”

But he wouldn’t. Theo knew that. And he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Esmond again. His friendship and good opinion mattered more to Theo now than any other consideration. He felt that no one else cared about him, and the school had been poisoned for him by the beating he’d been subjected to by Father Philip. The soft words of Father Laurence in the garden couldn’t change any of that.

He remembered what his grandfather had told him about his Jewish ancestors and the importance of being true to who you are. “ Because without that you are nothing, worse than nothing. ” The Fascists wanted to hurt Jews and deny people their democratic rights, and this was a chance, perhaps the only chance he would ever have, to be true to himself and strike a blow for all that he believed in.

“I’ll go,” he told Esmond. “Count me in.”