The Stranger's Child

  ‘You notice D. L. Kitson?’

  ‘Oh, yes . . . ?’

  ‘Donald Kitson . . . No? Anyway, he’s an actor. The school’s main claim to fame.’ There were squeaky footsteps behind them, on the polished oak of the stairs, the Headmaster’s crepe soles. He came towards them with his usual air of having leapt to a conclusion – this time, perhaps, a favourable one.

  ‘Ah, Peter, good. Praising our famous men.’ He must have seen the car return, the stranger come in.

  ‘Headmaster, this is my friend Paul Bryant – Paul . . .’ – and he rather mumbled the HM’s name, as if it were either confidential or unnecessary. He had the keenest sense yet of breaking the rules.

  ‘Well, welcome to Corley Court,’ said the Headmaster, standing with them to look at the Honours Boards. ‘I rather fear after this term we’re going to be in need of a new board.’ It was in fact notable that the frequency had picked up, after a hopeless five years, 1959 to ’64, in which there were no honours at all. ‘Peter’s working wonders with the Sixth Form,’ the Headmaster said, almost as if speaking to a parent. It was possible of course that he’d seen him in the bank, and was trying to place him.

  ‘Is it all right if I show Paul round a bit, Headmaster?’

  The HM seemed to welcome the idea. ‘Keep out of prep, if you can. You’ll want to see the chapel. And the library. Actually,’ he said, with a glance at the window, practical and proprietary, as if regretting he couldn’t join them, ‘it’s not a bad evening for a hike round the Park.’

  ‘There’s a thought,’ said Peter, with a deadpan stare at Paul.

  ‘Get out on the Upper Tads! Get into the woods! What . . . !’

  ‘Well, we could . . .’ The old fool seemed to be chasing them into each other’s arms.

  ‘Now, I’m just going to check on the repairs,’ he said, moving away towards the door of the Fifth Form.

  ‘Well, I rather want Paul to see that too, if that’s all right,’ said Peter.

  ‘Most unfortunate, just before our Open Day,’ the HM continued in a confidential tone to Paul. He opened the left half of the double door and peered in in his brusquely suspicious way. ‘Well, they’ve made some progress’ – allowing Paul and Peter to follow him into the room, where instead of the bowed heads of boys doing prep they found the tables pushed back against the walls, sacks of rubble, and at the far end, above an improvised scaffold of ladders and planks, a large ragged hole in the ceiling. There was a smell of damp, and a layer of gritty dust over every surface. During Musical Appreciation on Tuesday evening, Matron’s bath had overflowed, the water finding its way down through the old ceiling beneath, where it must have built up for a while above the suspended 1920s ceiling before dripping, and pouring, and then crashing down excitingly in a mass of plaster on to a desk that the boys had only just vacated. The programme was still on the blackboard, in Peter’s famous handwriting, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra and the William Tell overture, which had barely hit its stride when the first warm splat of water hit Phillipson’s neck.

  ‘Have you had a chance to admire the original ceiling, Headmaster?’ said Peter, unsure if he meant to amuse him or annoy him.

  ‘My whole concern,’ said the Headmaster, with that snuffling frankness that was his nearest shot at humour, ‘has been to get the thing patched up by Saturday!’

  Peter scrunched his way among the herded chairs, Paul following, perhaps unsure of the seriousness of the event, peering around with a half-smile in the little primitive shock of being back in a classroom. ‘Matron must be mortified,’ Peter said, attributing finer feelings to her than she had given vent to at the time. He climbed up one of the A-shaped ladders supporting the platform Mr Sands and his son had been working from. ‘I’ve taken some photographs for the archives, by the way, Headmaster,’ he said, looking down with a precarious sense of advantage. The archives were a purely imaginary resource that the HM none the less wouldn’t want to deny. He and Paul gazed up at him with the usual mingled concern and impatience of the earthbound. ‘It’ll be wonderful if we can open up the whole thing.’

  ‘I advise you to make the most of it now,’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s the last chance you’ll ever get.’ And again he glanced with a rough suspicion of humour at Paul.

  ‘Perhaps we could open it all up during the long vac?’

  The Headmaster grunted, drawn against his will into a slightly undignified game. ‘When Sir Dudley Valance covered it up he knew exactly what he was doing.’

  But Peter got Paul to climb up too, the planks jumping and yielding under their joint weight, and gripped his arm with insouciant firmness as they raised their heads and peered into the shadowy space between one ceiling and another. Their shoulders blocked most of the light through the hole, and towards the far end of the room this unexpected attic stretched away into complete darkness. It was perhaps two foot six high, the old dry timber smell confused with the rich smell of recent damp. ‘It’s hard to see,’ said Peter. ‘Hold on . . .’ and moving slowly he felt for his lighter in his jacket pocket, brought it up to head height and thumbed the flint. ‘Ruddy thing . . .’ Then he got it going and as he swept his arm in a slow arc they saw festive gleams and quickly swallowing shadows flow in and out of the little gilded domelets overhead. Between these there was shallow coffering, painted crimson and gold, and where the water had come through, bare laths and hanging fragments of horse-hair plaster. It seemed far from the architecture of everyday life, it was like finding a ruined pleasure palace, or burial chamber long since pillaged. Where the ceiling joined the nearest wall you could make out an ornate cornice, two gilded capitals and the murky apex of a large mirror.

  ‘Don’t set the place on fire, will you,’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘I promise not to,’ Peter said.

  ‘Fire and flood in one week . . .’ the Headmaster complained.

  Peter winked at Paul by lighter-light, gazed slyly at his prim little mouth, slightly open as he peered upwards. ‘I’ve worked out this used to be the dining-room, you see,’ he said, the sound echoing secretively in the space. Then stooping down, ‘I was talking to the former Lady Valance about it the other night, Headmaster, she said it was her favourite room at Corley, with these absolutely marvellous jelly-mould domes.’

  ‘I’m not happy about you being up there,’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘I’m sure she’d love to come and see it again.’

  ‘Now, now, come on down.’

  ‘We’re coming,’ said Peter, squeezing Paul’s shoulder, and snapped the lighter shut. He wasn’t sure Paul was any more interested than the Headmaster himself. But the vision of the lost decoration, a glimpse of an uncharted further dimension of the house he was living in, was so stirring to him that it hardly mattered. It was a dream, a craze, put aside now almost ruefully in favour of his other craze, his bank-clerk friend.

  ‘Well, good to have met you,’ said the Headmaster as they went back into the hall. ‘And do bear in mind, if you want us to have your boy, put him down early: a number of OCs have been putting their boys down at birth – which is really the best advertisement a school can have.’

  ‘Oh . . . well, um . . . putting them down?’ said Paul – but the HM turned, and with a glance at his watch crossed to the huge hall table, an indestructible relic of the Valance days, snatched up the handbell which stood on it and rang it with implacable violence for ten seconds, as if repudiating by his stern management all the nonsense Peter had just been talking. And at once another old noise, high-pitched, echoing, with just a tinge of sadness for the lost silence, rose to life in the rooms beyond. Paul shivered, perhaps surprised by memory, and Peter pressed his hand in the small of his back as they moved towards the main stairs. Almost instantaneously, doors opened, and boys appeared in the hall. ‘Steady!’ the Headmaster shouted wearily. ‘Don’t run,’ and the boys curbed themselves and looked curiously at Paul as they went past. There was a strange atmosphere whenever someone from the outside world appeared
in school, and Peter knew it would be talked about. He didn’t normally mind the lack of privacy, but for a moment it felt like being back at school himself. ‘Let’s get upstairs and have a drink,’ he murmured, with a pleasant but unencouraging nod to Milsom 1 as he filed past, clutching his Bible.

  ‘But what about Cecil?’ said Paul, hanging back on the third or fourth stair, with a regretful look.

  ‘Do you want to see him first? Okay, just a quick peek’ – Peter smiling narrowly at him and wondering if perhaps Cecil wasn’t a codeword after all. He led him back down, and off through the arch into the glazed cloister that ran along the side of the house. Work had already been put up here for the art exhibition. He bumped into Paul, as he halted politely to look at the watercolour sunsets pinned to boards. Here and there there was a sign of talent, something hopeful among the childish splodge. Art, which required technique as well as vision, was the subject Peter found most frustrating to teach; he wasn’t much good at it himself. He taught them perspective, in a strict way, which was something they might be grateful for. He wanted the warmth of Paul’s body, he leant on him and laid a hand along his shoulder, peering at a blotchy jam-jar of poppies by Priestman, which was thought to show promise. On what Neil McAll called ‘the sex front’ Peter’s time at Corley had been a desert, apart from a drunken night in London at half-term; it was shamingly clear that the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys had more fun than he did. Well, that was the age he’d started himself – he’d been at it ever since. He squeezed the back of Paul’s neck, a claim and a promise. Again it seemed strange that he fancied him as much as he did; and the mystery of it, which he had no desire to solve, only made the whole episode more compelling. In the chapel he was certainly going to kiss him, and get inside his clothes in one way or another; barring of course some possible rectitude of Paul’s about places of worship. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking his arm. But then as he turned the iron ring and eased open the chapel door, he heard the flagging wail of the harmonium. ‘Oh, Christ . . .’

  Dusk came early to the chapel, and in the gloom a little tin lamp lit up the anxious features of a boy, in such an odd way Peter couldn’t see at first who it was. ‘Ah, Donaldson . . .’ – the sound faltered and broke off with a squeak.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘That’s all right . . . Carry on.’ The boy, not bad at the piano, had been given permission to explore this more troublesome instrument. ‘Don’t mind us!’ But he had lost confidence for a moment, he was all arms and legs with the treadles and the knee-flaps and pinning down the music. He picked a respectfully nasal stop, and began again on ‘All is safely gathered in.’

  Paul had already gone towards the tomb, which seemed to float forward among the dark pews. Peter reached behind the door to click the stiff old switches, but no light came on. Donaldson glanced at him, and said, ‘I think the fuse must have gone, sir.’ Well, so much the better, it would be a twilit visit. The vivid glass by Clayton & Bell had closed down, in the sad way of church windows when the light is going, into sombre neutrality; the colours had become a dignified secret. This seemed somehow religious, a renewable mystery. Peter crossed himself as he approached, and frowned because he wasn’t sure what he meant by it, or even if he wanted Paul to see. It was certainly an unusual setting for a first date, and very different from others he had had, which had tended to be in pubs.

  To fit in the whole school they had a line of chairs in the space on either side of Cecil. It was evident that the tomb, which the school was more or less proud of, was also a bit of a nuisance. The boys fixed pretend cigarettes between the poet’s marble lips, and one particularly stupid child long ago had carved his initials on the side of the chest. Peter moved chairs out of the way, with a foul scraping noise. Paul went up close, followed the inscription round, ‘CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC . . .’ Peter saw it freshly himself, second-rate art but a wonderful thing to have in the house; he felt happy and forgiving, having someone to show it to, someone who actually liked Valance, and perhaps hadn’t noticed he was second-rate too. The tomb made some grander case for Cecil, in the face of any such levelling quibble. ‘What do you think?’

  It was still hard to tell if Paul’s solemn, self-conscious look expressed emotion or mere beetling politeness. He came back close to Peter to speak, as if the chapel imposed a certain discretion. ‘Funny, it doesn’t say he was a poet.’

  ‘No . . . no, that’s true,’ said Peter, moved himself and aroused by their repeated touching; ‘though the Horace, I suppose . . .’

  ‘Mm?’

  He touched the plaited Gothic letters. ‘Tomorrow we shall set forth upon the boundless sea’ – trying not to sound too like a teacher as he translated.

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’

  Getting into his stride, Donaldson pulled out something bigger, the Bourdon stop perhaps, for the next verse of the hymn, its loud plonking drone giving them a kind of cover. ‘Have you seen the Shelley Memorial in Oxford?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Surely the only portrait of a poet to show his cock,’ said Peter, and glanced over at Donaldson’s mirror to see if he’d been heard.

  ‘Mm, I expect it is,’ murmured Paul, but seemed too startled to catch his eye. He went up to look at the poet’s head, with Peter close behind him, blandly pretending to share his curiosity. Again he put his arm lightly across Paul’s shoulders, where his red sweater was slung round – ‘Handsome fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’ – and then with tense luxuriance let his hand drift slowly downwards, just the thin shirt here between his fingers and the warm hard curve of his spine – ‘I mean, not that he really looked like that’ – to that magical spot called the sacral chakra, which an Indian boy at Magdalen had told him one night was the pressure-point of all desires. So he pressed on it, tenderly, with a little questioning and promising movement of his middle finger, and felt Paul gasp and curl his back against him as if in some trap where the effort to escape only caught you the more tightly.

  ‘Fell at Maricourt,’ said Paul, now leaning forward as though he was going to kiss Cecil.

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Peter. He was entranced by his secret mischief, the ache of expectation like vertigo in his thighs and his chest. Paul half-turned towards him, flushed and shifty, worried perhaps by his own arousal. There was a comically disconcerting suggestion that Cecil himself had something to do with it. Now they had to be careful. As if archly colluding, Donaldson engaged the octave coupler for a further verse. Peter half expected to see his smirk in the mirror, but the boy was responding too hard to the querulous demands of his own instrument. Under the piping blare (‘free from sorrow, free from sin’) Peter said humorously and straightforwardly, ‘I really think we’d better go up to my room, don’t you.’

  ‘Oh . . . oh all right.’ Paul seemed to think ahead, as if at an unexpected change of plan.

  Peter took him up the nearest back-stairs, and the first-floor corridor brought them past the laundry-room – at some point he wanted to take Paul up through the skylight there and on to the roof, which was for good reason the most out-of-bounds thing in the whole school. But he saw at once that the door was open – Matron was fossicking round in there, just her large white rump showing now to the passer-by. ‘Well, if you come again,’ he murmured; and saw Paul himself uncertain of such a prospect, eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment. They went on, climbed the grand stairs to the second floor, there was the creak of the floorboard that Paul was hearing for the first time, and then they were in Peter’s room, with the door snapped shut between them and the world. He pulled Paul towards him and kissed him, and the door he was leaning on rattled in its lock at the sudden impact of their two bodies.

  What he’d forgotten was that Paul would immediately start talking – his mouth two inches from Peter’s cheek, about how nice this first kiss had been, and how he liked Peter’s tie, and he’d been thinking all week . . . his colour at the happy end of the spectrum of embarrassment, his head h
ot and glowing, and the string of words, half-candid, half-senseless, a jerking safety-line . . . so Peter kissed him again, a long almost motionless kiss to calm him and shut him up and then, perhaps, to break him down. Focused as he was, he took in the familiar creak and rustle, way off behind him, through a mere thickness of oak, and then the short groan, like a polite but determined cough, of the floorboard just outside the door. There was a sharp knock, which they both felt. They froze for one second, Peter letting Paul slide out of his arms, then quickly buttoning his jacket, while still leaning heavily against the door. The handle turned, and the door budged slightly. None of the rooms at Corley had a key. He saw Paul had picked up a book, with a horrified pretence of calm, like a schoolboy about to be caught. Peter called, ‘Sorry, Matron!’ in a hollow voice, and with a funny impromptu kick at the door spun round and snatched it wide open.

  Matron was holding a stack of folded sheets, with the grey starchy gleam of all the laundry at Corley. She peered into the room. ‘Oh, you’ve got a visitor,’ she said, apology and disapproval struggling uncertainly. There was her slight wheeze, having toiled up from the laundry-room, and the almost subliminal whistle of the clean sheets against her white-coated bosom. Peter smiled and stared. ‘I’m giving out clean sheets tonight, because of Open Day,’ Matron said. There was quite a charge of antagonism, a combative resistance to Peter’s charm, and, to be fair, his mockery.

  ‘I hope my room’s not going to be open too, Matron,’ he said. She grappled off the top sheet. ‘Here, let me . . .’ Really he should introduce Paul, but he preferred to excite her suspicion.

  ‘We all need to get ahead,’ she said, with a tight smile.

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’ It wasn’t clear if she expected him to change the bed right now. She looked narrowly towards it.