In the Time of Greenbloom (7 page)

“I say, you haven't forgotten about my swimming lesson, have you?” Marston's smooth cheek remained in profile; he did not even turn to look at him.

“What swimming lesson?”

“You know, you were going to teach me the crawl.”

“Well, don't whisper about it,” said Marston loudly as he closed his locker with a bang. “Fleming! I say Fleming! Shall we teach Blaydon how to do the crawl?”

Fleming came waltzing in from the dark passage, his swimming trunks in his hand and his towel round his neck. He looked at John sharply for a moment, as though he were unused to giving him his serious consideration, then his eyes turned up and his mouth opened slowly like a clown's showing his wet tongue and large white teeth.

“Oh no,” he sang, “we never teach worms how to do the crawl, do we?”

“Oh no,” said Marston.

Fleming seized him round the waist and together they executed the dance they were rehearsing for the end-of-term concert: a high kick to the left, a high kick to the right, and then a pause on tiptoes.

“Not even when tomorrow
is
their wedding day!”

“Not even then,” shrieked Marston.

“Oh no,” said Fleming. “And anyway he likes
girls
, doesn't he?”

“Does he?”

“Yes,” cooed Fleming. “He writes letters to them and dreams about them in the si-hilence of his cu-hubicle.”

“Fishy! fishy! fishy!” said Marston. “In Madeira we call them—”

“And he's a holy holy Roman,” said Fleming.

“I'm not!”

“Yes you are! You were confirmed by His Warship the Boss-shot of Lourdes last term, wasn't he?”

“Yes he was,” said Marston.

“So if he wants to learn the crawl,” said Fleming, “he should get the Holy Father to let him practise in the font.”

“He should,” said Marston, “in Madeira he'd be in the choir with all the dagos, and everyone knows what
that
means.”

“In Madeira they're even queerer,” shrieked Fleming, who had spent part of the Summer holiday with Marston in Funchal. “Come on, let's get up to the baths and turf some other worm out of a cubicle.”

They smiled at each other then as John had seen them smile
after the Summer sports, when they went up to get their prizes for three out of every five of the events. Then side by side, they rushed up the staircase leaving him in the dimness of the locker-room heavy with its scent of old home-made cakes and incarcerated fruit.

He was still standing there trying to collect the absurd hurts of his grief into one recognisable whole so that he could deal with it adequately and make some plan for the remainder of the day when Spot Fisher came in and found him.

John looked with distaste at the small circular blemish on the tip of his nose. He hated Fisher both because he was a vicarage boy like himself and because he was a prowler and snooper who had never been found out by the masters. He was a Bishop's son and clever too, head of the School and by dint of his large pear-shaped head and Summer tuition from his father had managed to get a scholarship to Eton. Next term, like John himself, he would be leaving; and already an ever more unsmiling air of responsibility was accompanying his every action and gesture.

“Ah there you are Blaydon,” he said. “I've been searching the school for you. Mr. Bedgebury wants to see you in his study.”

“You mean the Badger.”

“I meant what I said—Mr. Bedgebury.”

“Suck-up,” said John. “We can always
spot
a suck-up especially when he's got one on his nose.”

It was weak and crude, unsatisfying, not nearly so good as the retort he would think of later; but it annoyed Fisher. His round mouth closed and he blinked as he leaned odiously forward.

“That's guff,” he said. “I've half a mind to take you along to the Badger myself—to Mr. Bedgebury, to make sure you don't sneak out of it.”

“Try it,” said John. “I'll kick and scream all the way.”

“You'll be doing that this afternoon; you've got two hours drill and the Sarn't will be swiping your bottom every ten minutes.”

“One of these days when I'm grown up I'll come back to this filthy school and I'll swipe the Sarn't's behind every
five
minutes; and if you're anywhere about, I'll squash your nose so flat that no one will be able to see the spot any more.”

“You're a nasty little squirt,” said Fisher, “just what one would expect from a High Church Vicarage; but I've no time to argue with you now. You'd better watch out for the rest of the term though, because I shall be on the lookout for you.”

“Well mind you don't get spots in front of your eyes,” said John edging quickly past the flying kick Fisher sent after him.

He made his way slowly up the stairs, whistling purposely out of tune and rasping his hand along the worn rail of the bannisters. Reaching the corridor he straightened his tie and pulled out the flaps of his grey flannel pockets. The door to the gymnasium was open and the wide brown space empty. At the far end he could see the rack in which the wands were kept when not in use for punishment drill. Two hours, he thought, with the Sar'nt smoking that disgusting tobacco and strolling round flicking the tight little seats with his cane. Up and down, round and round, in and out, then places again, then up and down with that tense feeling at the back of the knees as the muscles stretched: the tickle of sweat and wool round the neck, the slow sickly thumping in the head keeping time like a metronome with the tick of the unmoving clock on the far wall.

Next door there was water cool and blue in the indoor baths; but there would be no swimming for the drill class. At the half hour some would go; at the hour, he would be left alone with only the Sarn't behind him.

Mother had never met the Sar'nt, neither had Father nor David nor any of them. Yet they had sent
him
here and given the Sar'nt complete control of him for two hours this afternoon. The Sar'nt, the Badger and the Toad, all of them or any of them could do what they liked to John here in the far South whilst they, the Family and the home people, carried on their normal lives in the North where everything was perfect.

He could not even write to them about this afternoon, about Marston, about the interview with the Badger. By the time he wrote, it would be all over; it would be back in time, nothing could be done about it; and anyway, if he were to put it all in a letter,
everything
, it would take him weeks to write it, to make it sound real.

Outside the Badger's door he paused. Suddenly he was totally unconcerned with whatever might await him on the far side. He no longer even minded about the wedding tomorrow. If the Badger stopped him going it could make no real difference, might in fact be better in the end. What was the good of getting out of this world for a day when you knew you had to come back to it at night? It only meant more difficulty in stifling thoughts and longings afterwards, more difficulty in getting to sleep at night, in keeping alive and alert to it during the day.

They were none of them real; not the cricket matches, nor the Toad's Latin prose classes when he slung you about in your desk by your collar, nor the Sussex hens with their huge green turds and suspicious glances, nor the polite Church services, nor the giant matron, nor Spot Fisher, nor any of them. They were all just a punishment which everyone had to undergo, a taste of unhappiness to make home all the more real and desirable; all except Marston of course. Marston was real, because you loved him. He was beautiful like a girl and strong like a man. Only Marston could really hurt or harm you in this place because he was the only one you loved, and that meant that only the things you loved could be real; what you hated was always unreal. In future he would think only of the things he loved; he would no longer discourage them when they tried to sneak into his cubicle at night; he would welcome them and discover them afresh.

With one last tug at his tie he knocked on the door and the Badger's voice said “Come in.”

Above him, as he sat at his desk, there hung the portrait painted by the Old Boy who had worked in the Gym last year putting in the finishing touches to the picture which the
School were presenting in commemoration of the Badger's fifty years at the Abbey. Beneath it, in unreal and somehow lifeless replica of the wizened face which looked out of the canvas, the Badger sat at the bottom of his glasses gazing through their bone-rimmed tunnels from the shadows which surrounded him.

The Badger rarely spoke; he was an old man of the night. Meticulously clean in his morning coat, gold-linked cuffs and high wing collar, he waited. A watch chain straddled the concavity of his sunken waistcoat and round his face the white hair stood out like a ruff.

The Badger waited as he had always waited; as thirty years ago he must have waited for Fleming's or for Fisher's Father to commit himself and walk unwarily over one of the many deep caverns he had dug on the outskirts of his lair.

Behind his glasses the milky eyes blinked once and then resumed their distant vigil over John's forehead whilst he too waited obstinately knowing that there was plenty he could think about.

There were the “Doctor's” boxing-gloves for instance there on the window-sill behind him with the dust a little thicker than this time last year.

Who had the ‘Doctor' really been? And what had he really done? They said that he had loaded one of the gloves with a shoe of his sister's Shetland pony and that the Sar'nt had found him out. There were slits in the gloves all right, and they looked under-stuffed as though some of the horsehair had been removed. But there had been more than that about the ‘Doctor'. Perhaps, after an interview like the one John was just beginning, he had been expelled for something; for something worse than cheating and more serious even than fouling at boxing. But no one really remembered the ‘Doctor'; he was just a name perpetuated by the older boys who remembered having heard about him when they first came to the school. There were stories about his nickname; that it had been given him because he had been so good at Biology. It was said that he had performed brilliant but terrible operations
on the guinea pigs, toads, and white mice which then, as now, the boys were allowed to keep in the School stable.

He might even be dead. He might have been the ‘Doctor' in the time of Fleming's father; a legend going back beyond Disraeli and Gladstone to the very founding of the School by Badger the First or further than that. But even if he had never really been at the Abbey he was still inordinately there, a more powerful and frightening personality than any of the boys who had succeeded him.

In the outside lavs where the striped ‘joeys' could be picked off the surrounding bushes in the Summer, they still pointed out the ‘Doctor's Mark' high on the wall of the standups just beneath the never-silent cistern; and whether or not its significance was what they implied, no one, even after three glasses of lemonade had ever been able to reach it.

But the ‘Doctor' had never been solely ‘funny'. One version of his story was that he had circumvented his expulsion by committing suicide in the indoor baths. He had come down the Brown's stairs early in the morning, they said, stolen the keys from the Badger's study and entered the swimming bath whilst it was in process of being cleaned: only two or three feet of water and sediment covered its glazed white tiles; and the ‘Doctor' had climbed up onto the high board and then dived.

They even said that the little mound in the Toad's rose garden, carefully tended by his wife Kay, the Badger's daughter, was not the grave of a dog at all.

Thinking of it John shuddered; no matter what they did to him they should not do that. He would leave instructions as Shakespeare had, putting a curse on anyone who prevented his body from being put on a train for burial in Northumberland on the wide curlew-called moors. To be buried at the Abbey! To spend the rest of one's life, or rather one's death, at the School under the shadow of their lovelessness—

“Well?” The Badger had spoken at last; John, or rather the doctor had won.

“Yes sir?”

“I asked you what you wanted Blaydon?”

“Did you sir? I'm sorry; I didn't hear you. I was told that you wanted me?”

“And you do not know why I should want you?”

“Yes sir, I think so.”

“Well?”

“About the Drill sir, this afternoon.”

“You mean tomorrow afternoon, Blaydon.”

“
Tomorrow
, sir? I thought it would be this afternoon as usual.”

The Badger blinked. His heart beginning to thump, John realised that beneath him the thin surface soil was already subsiding; in a moment it would give way and he would be deep in the rooty darkness of the trap.

“You are quite right, Blaydon. Drill will be this afternoon as usual for
those
who have the usual amendment to make. For others, and I believe you are the only one this year to have transgressed so far as to have been awarded the very unusual punishment of
two
hours drill, it will be tomorrow, Saturday; and Saturday as you know is a half holiday, and will therefore permit of the School Sergeant taking so long a period of detention without dereliction of his many other duties about the grounds.”

“But sir—”

Now that it had happened he realised how false had been his nonchalance of a few minutes before; how loud and unavailing his whistling at the wedding in London where they would all most magically be: Mother, Father, Melanie, his brothers—and Victoria. And the train, the wild train hurtling over the marshes towards the tawny smokiness of London, he would not be on it; he would be here stooped under the shadows like the ‘Doctor' in the rose garden.

The horror was deeper than tears. He did not want to cry; he wanted to call out loud to whatever gods there were, powerful listening gods who would hear and understand and explain to the Badger and to them all that this was wrong;
that no one had any right to behave like this, that the knots in the net spreading out from that one word in Monsieur Camambert's class, were knots tied by Blind Men in nothing more binding than cotton, and that they should be instantly broken.