‘You mean a homosexual phase?’
‘Roy, please,’ said Ms Buckfast. ‘I think you ought to step away.’
There’s something about her tone of voice when she uses my Christian name. A kind of soothing, coaxing note, as if addressing an old horse. I found myself bristling at the sound, and the invisible digit that always lurks, ready to prod at my breastbone, gave an angry little twitch.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We’re here to teach the pupils, not to determine their sexual orientation. It seems to me that Call-me-Jo and Harrington are far too interested in things that are not remotely their business. I’ll deal with my pupils in my way, as I’ve always dealt with them, which means that unless their predilections affect their Latin homework, I shall ignore them completely. And I’ll thank you and the other Suits not to interfere.’
That would have worked against Dr Blakely. Ye gods, it was my Bell Tower voice, the one that reduces boys to pulp. But La Buckfast held my gaze.
‘I’m sorry you think of it that way,’ she said. ‘But this isn’t a suggestion. You’re a fine form-master, Roy, but I think you have a blind spot regarding certain members of your form. Nowadays, it’s considered unwise for a teacher to spend quite so much time with the boys. After all, isn’t that the mistake made by your friend, Harry Clarke?’
‘Who told you that? Was it Harrington?’
La Buckfast shook her head.
‘John’s at a seminar today. But you’ll see him on Monday, of course.’ She smiled, and once more I saw a gleam of that feline, disconcerting charm. ‘Believe it or not, Roy, I sympathize,’ she said, and touched my shoulder. ‘Perhaps you ought to take a break. You’re really looking quite unwell.’
The old Straitley might have protested. But I was feeling a little tired. Do I spend too much time with my boys? In Harry’s day, to spend time with boys was a natural, even a good thing to do. How quickly things change. There were School trips; field days; informal chats over tea and cake. To be a St Oswald’s Master was to be available at all times; to be at the same time a teacher; social worker; detective; confessor; father, sometimes, even a friend. At least, Harry Clarke was all those things. Others, like myself and Eric, settled for a lesser role. But even we had our share of that. In my case, it’s my Brodie Boys – Allen-Jones, Sutcliff, Tayler, McNair. Where would I be without them? Where would they be without me?
‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I think it’ll do you good. Take the weekend off. Clear your head. Get a bit of perspective.’
Perspective. Is that what I lack? In the old days, we ran on instinct. But now, we have guidelines to follow, for our safety and that of the boys. Between them, Bob Strange and Dr Devine have removed the peril from teaching. Never speak to a boy alone. Always keep the door ajar. No physical contact with boys, not even to offer comfort (or, as Eric would have preferred, to clip them around the ear). No fraternizing at the pub, as generations of Games teachers were wont to do in Harry’s day. No impromptu trips, or at least, not without risk assessments, consent forms, dietary sheets and a mass of assorted paperwork designed to predict (and likely, prevent) any possible diversion from the humdrum. And yet, as any Master knows who doesn’t spend his time staring at a computer, teaching is the essence of risk, the home of the unpredictable. There is no risk assessment for Life. And Life is what we are teaching.
I walked home through the park again, hearing the sounds of night in the trees. The cold air smelt of woodsmoke; the leaves were wet beneath my feet. I’d almost reached the end of the park, where Millionaires’ Row turns on to Westgate. A little group of teenage boys in hooded sweatshirts and knitted hats were standing under the lamp-post near the swing-set in the children’s playground, looking up to no good. Of course, that’s how teenage boys always look whenever adults are around. It’s a kind of default setting, comprised partly of guilt and partly of resentment. But sullenness breeds more of the same, and I have always made a point of treating teenagers the same way I would treat any adult. My boys tend to appreciate it, and although I could see that this little group was made up of Sunnybankers, I assumed that they would too.
I smiled and said: ‘Good evening.’
The boys said nothing, but stared at me. One of them, a freckled boy with long hair under his knitted cap and a cigarette stub between his fingers, smirked and said something under his breath. The other boys sniggered unpleasantly.
The freckled boy said: ‘Pervert.’
I felt a trickle of unease, all the more galling for the fact that I was on my own ground, less than three hundred yards from home. But boys are like house-cats, gentle by day, unpredictable by night. A schoolmaster, on the other hand, is always a schoolmaster; at home; in town; in the post office queue; in the park in the evening. Boys do not really believe, deep down, that Masters have a life outside St Oswald’s. They secretly imagine us hanging like bats, upside-down in our stockrooms, emerging only to mark books, to collect detention slips or to hatch inscrutably evil schemes to bring about the downfall of the young.
I summoned my best schoolmaster’s voice and levelled my sternest gaze on the boy. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The freckled boy sniggered again. He looked about fourteen; half-grown, with nicotine stains on his fingers. ‘Fucking pervert, chatting up lads.’ He gave me a look like that of a dog unsure of whether to bite or run. Alone, he probably would have run; but the presence of the other boys gave him a kind of bravado.
‘Give us a tenner and I’ll not report you,’ he told me, his grin broadening.
‘Give him twenty and he’ll suck you off,’ chimed in one of the other boys. ‘Assuming you can still get it up.’
For a moment, I stared at them. Yes, I’ll admit it, I was shocked. Not so much by the language – after all, St Oswald’s boys can swear as roundly as the best of them – but by the hard and cynical look in those teenagers’ faces. Some of it was a joke, I knew; but beneath was a stratum of knowledge. Boys may be children during the day, but at night they can become predators. And in a world that turns on fear, suspicion and entitlement, they have learnt to manipulate those levers that make adults afraid.
Afraid of what? They were only boys. I work with boys almost every day. And yet, boys have an instinct for fear; they sense it as a shark scents blood. I’ve seen it happen often enough at St Oswald’s – at St Oswald’s and elsewhere. Teaching is a game of bluff, in which the smallest weakness shown can mean the end of authority. And everyone has a weakness. Mine was a word. Just a word, but a word that can tear a schoolmaster apart.
Pervert. There’s a dangerous word. Of all the accusations that could be made against a Master, that’s the one that does not need the slightest shred of evidence. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words – that word – can obliterate every part of a man’s life; every good deed; every kindness; as if the man had never lived.
I tried to summon my schoolmaster’s voice, but for once there was nothing. No sarcasm; no anger; no joke; not even a Latin epithet. I’m ashamed to say that I actually ran – head down, as if against the wind – hearing their laughter behind me and with the invisible finger pressing against my breastbone with a dreadful persistence.
A thirty-second run is as long as I manage nowadays. Even so, it was enough to take me out of their orbit. I slowed to a shamble behind a row of laurels and finally reached the gates of the park, my heart now beating uncomfortably fast, and bent over like a runner at the end of a long race.
I must cut down on the Gauloises, I thought. And maybe the cheese, and the claret. I remember a time when I could have run from St Oswald’s to the clay pits without so much as breaking sweat; but that was a long time ago. The clay pits are gone, and so is that boy, whom Eric called ‘Straits’ because he was constantly falling foul of the authorities.
Well, I’d rather not fall foul of them now, especially not for chatting up boys in the park on a Friday night. I went back to my house on Dog Lane w
ith a fluttering sense of doom, almost expecting to find those boys waiting for me with the police.
I know. It was ridiculous. But as I opened my garden gate to see the shadow of a man in blue standing by my little porch, I felt all the air in my lungs rush out. The only coherent thought in my mind was once again: Just like Harry Clarke.
11
October 1988
Seven years had passed since the Nutter affair. That’s twenty St Oswald’s terms: cut grass; rainy lunchtimes; cups of tea in the Common Room and stacks of books in the Quiet Room; School plays and small dramas; Open Days; Parents’ Evenings; sporadic invasions of Mulberry girls and sleepy Friday afternoons. St Oswald’s is its own world; what happens in the world outside is of far less significance. In the world outside our gates, Margaret Thatcher was at the helm; but inside, we had Shitter Shakeshafte, and a kind of stable anarchy.
Nutter had left Malbry in early ’82, giving no further explanation for his disappearance. That Easter, Harrington also left, following a series of increasingly urgent letters from Dr Harrington Senior, demanding to know whether there was any truth in the rumour that his son’s English teacher, Harry Clarke, was a homosexual.
I told you, Shitter Shakeshafte was no liberal. On the other hand, like all the old guard, he believed in St Oswald’s above all else. Whatever the complaint, he would always take the side of a staff member against a parent (albeit for the privilege of being the one to wield the axe as soon as the battle was over). He duly informed Dr Harrington that Mr Clarke was an English Master of exceptional ability, and that how he conducted his private life had no bearing on his work, and that furthermore, if Dr Harrington preferred to send his son to another grammar school, then he should do so without delay, or lose a term’s fees in lieu of notice. Then, in the privacy of his cheese-fetid office, with the leather-studded double doors, he gave Harry Clarke such a rocket that all the Lower Corridor overheard him; warning Harry to keep his Gay Lib to himself, and threatening him with the most baroque of consequences if there was another complaint.
There wasn’t. Johnny Harrington left, and life went on as normal. For a time, there were whispers among the boys. Spikely also left mid-term, with no word of explanation from his parents. But staff at St Oswald’s rarely leave. We tend to go the distance. Chained to the same oar, we find our comfort in each other. Harry and I remained good friends, though some colleagues removed themselves. Devine was one of them; Eric, too; so was Satanic Mr Speight. But School scandals come and go, and all but the most judgemental eventually got used to the fact that one of our number would never look at a Mulberry girl with interest.
As for Harry, as far as I knew, he never had a relationship. Like myself, he was chained to the oar, and St Oswald’s demanded our loyalty. But he and I stayed friends, in spite of our many differences, and together we watched the passage of years, steady and, at the same time, so fast that we could barely grasp how those twenty terms had managed to slide so unobtrusively past us.
I was forty-eight. Forty-eight is the age at which we close up the shutters behind the house and watch the shadows lengthen. It is an age of uncertainty, of crow’s-feet and grey hairs and fast-expanding waistlines. It is the age at which past mistakes return to claim their pound of flesh, and at which we begin to see our parents’ faces instead of our own in the bathroom mirror.
But things were different in those days. Nowadays, fifty is young. Then, I was already Old Quaz to most of the boys in the Middle School. Harry Clarke, at fifty-three, was still younger than we were, somehow; maybe because of that smile of his. Still as popular with the boys; still with that sense of the absurd. He still wore those tweed jackets with the elbow-patches; still listened to his records at Break and wore his hair a little too long – hair that was going rather grey, but not enough to make him old.
Over the years, Harry had become a living part of the Bell Tower, just as I had. We sometimes used to joke about what would happen when we died; whether we would be buried in situ, or mortared into the parapet with the other gargoyles. But we didn’t believe it. We were still young enough to believe that death would make an exception for us; that somehow, the sun would never set, but would shine on us for ever—
And then, in the autumn of ’88, Harry was arrested.
The first any of us knew of it was when the police turned up at School, demanding to search his classroom. Harry hadn’t come in that morning, which was already unusual. In all his years at St Oswald’s, I don’t think he’d ever been absent more than a couple of days. The officers – one senior, one not – were another version of Stackhouse and Noakes, the pair who had come to see me at home when Charlie Nutter disappeared.
‘Excuse me, what is this about?’ I asked, when I saw them leaving his room with an armful of cardboard boxes.
The Stackhouse prototype shrugged. ‘Just following up an enquiry,’ he said.
‘What kind of an enquiry?’ I said.
Behind me, the boys of 3S craned their necks to see the show. Harry’s class had vacated the room, under the supervision of the young Pat Bishop – not yet Second Master, but already a jolly good Head of Year. He’d lined them up in the corridor, underneath the Honours Boards, and they watched the proceedings round-eyed, some looking uncomfortable (as boys often do when faced with the possibility of trouble); some grinning and whispering behind their grubby schoolboy palms.
‘What kind of an enquiry?’ I repeated, louder this time. ‘Has there been a break-in?’
Along the Upper Corridor, I could see Devine watching me through the glass door of his classroom. Eric, too, was watching; his round face bland with anxiety. The younger officer walked past me without answering the question; I looked into the box in his arms and saw books, records, photographs – as well as the fabled garden gnome, which had migrated to Harry’s desk, to be brought out on the special occasions when Dr Devine was teaching there.
‘Those things belong to Harry Clarke,’ I said, with increasing discomfort.
Bishop gave me a warning look, as if to say: Not now, Roy. And although it took till that afternoon for the grapevine to bring us the story, I knew right then what had happened. Instinct, maybe; or maybe the fear of something rising from the depths. The rumour mill had been working ever since the police arrived; but it was only the next day that the Head gave us the news: that Harry Clarke was under arrest following a complaint from a boy.
‘What boy?’ I demanded.
‘Not a current pupil,’ he said. After which he closed his office door and warned us not to disturb him: while outside, in the Common Room, the rumours flew like swarming wasps.
None of us believed it at first. Not a current pupil? What did that mean, anyway? It had to be some kind of mistake. Harry was devoted to his pupils. I said as much to Eric, indignantly, over tea from the Common Room urn.
But Eric was less outspoken. After nearly a decade of trying for promotion, he had become very sensitive to anything that might damage him. He never talked about politics; never discussed School policy; never mentioned his private life unless he was completely sure which side of the fence to alight on. And now, a colleague was under arrest – and I could already see him trying to shift his position.
‘Well, there was that Nutter thing,’ he said.
‘What have you heard?’
‘Nothing. But after what happened, I always thought that maybe there was something more to that business than we were told at the time.’
‘Ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘This is a storm in a teacup.’
But as the news filtered down to us – as always, from the boys themselves – it became clear that, whatever it was, the affair was not something that would simply blow away. Over the next few days we learnt that Harry had been questioned, following an accusation of sexual assault on a boy. The police had opened a helpline, urging pupils to contact them with any information. Harry’s house had been searched, and evidence had been removed, and a young man had been staying there – a young man not unconnected wi
th the investigation. Finally, we heard the news: Harry had been formally charged.
There was still no information on the alleged victim. No one at St Oswald’s knew, not even Jeffreys, the son of the Chairman of Governors, whose intimate knowledge of everything behind the scenes at St Oswald’s made him a valuable asset to any Master. As it happened, he was in Harry’s form – and in my Middle School Latin class.
‘What kind of evidence?’ I said.
Jeffreys shrugged. ‘Books and photographs and stuff.’
‘And who’s making these allegations?’
The boy shook his head. ‘No one in School. An ex-pupil.’
But who? The School declined to comment, although speculation ran rife. Could we have misjudged one of our own? What kind of evidence could the police possibly have uncovered? More importantly, who was the boy behind these allegations?
Some boys leave School like rats leaving the hold of a sinking ship. Some leave like kings; some leave in tears; some waving their shirts like victory flags. And some boys lodge in the throat like a bone, almost forgotten, but still a source of barely perceived discomfort.
Harrington. It had to be. I could feel it in my gut. Harrington, who had first come to me with his tale of possession; Harrington, whose complacency in the face of any sort of criticism made him completely immune to self-doubt; Harrington, whose church believed that homosexuality was a demon. And now that those demons were flying again, who else could be responsible?
And so, when Jeffreys told me the name of the boy who had accused Harry Clarke, it hit me like a physical blow. Not Harrington. Not Nutter, though Nutter had his part to play. But the third and least remarkable of that little trio: Nutter and Harrington’s lacklustre friend – the tattletale, David Spikely.
PART SIX