1

The Headmaster brought the new boy into the classroom several weeks after the term had begun. He stood alone, the centre of the children’s curiosity, as the class-teacher, a squat, kindly-faced matron, talked quietly with the Headmaster by the open door. At first he returned the solemn gaze of the children, but as the time passed he began to blush and look urgently away, the stares slowly changing to open expressions of amusement. Eventually several of the children burst out laughing at his plaintive isolation.

He was a small boy, very slight with an intense, Spanish kind of face, narrowly featured and pale, and with eyes of such a dark liquidity that they suggested an almost permanent expression of condolence. It was the kind of bland transparency seen in people of little sophistication or self-assertion, and in certain peripheral conditions of idiocy. He had thick, straight black hair and thick black eyebrows which, in private moments of despair such as this, gave his face the imitative irony of a mask. It was as if he guyed his own emotions. It amused the children intensely.

Eventually the Headmaster gave the teacher a certificate and a letter which had been flapping in his hand, and left the room. The teacher closed the door and came back to her desk. The class watched in silence as the new boy responded to her instructions, walking quickly to her chair and standing stiffly beside it while she ordered them to work. She sat down and, turning to him with a sympathetic smile, began to ask him the relevant questions.

His full name was Leonard Radcliffe, he was nine years and seven months old, and had been transferred from a private school in the centre of town. His father was a caretaker. As she copied down this final piece of information in the Register under the heading ‘Father’s Occupation’ the teacher paused, and glanced at the boy then put down her pen and wrote the word in pencil. The gesture itself, made almost absent-mindedly, caused a fresh suffusion of blood to creep up his face, and after looking hurriedly at the class he stared down at his feet in confusion.

He was given a place at the front, close to the teacher’s own desk, until he should become more familiar with his surroundings. But as the weeks passed, his single desk, protruding irregularly from the set pattern behind, tended to confirm that isolation, a nervous shyness and detachment, which the children had instinctively recognised, and been amused by, when he first came into the room. Yet he was an alert boy, with an anxious alacrity, and a condoling, private kind of humour, so that when the teacher was belabouring some child at the back of the class he would twist round, his arm crooked over his chair, and watch with a slight smile of consolation. Frequently, as the teacher came to recognise his unusual if erratic intelligence, he was called upon almost as her accomplice to provide those answers which the children themselves had been unable to suggest.

One day, shortly after his arrival, the teacher had glanced meaningfully at the class then out of the large windows of the room, and pointing her broad, slightly inflamed arm, said, ‘Why do you think it is that chimneys, factory chimneys, are so tall?’ It was a question characteristic in its simplicity of her relationship with the children, as if she sought some way of antagonising them, or of suggesting the preposterous nature of knowledge itself. She was that not unusual paradox in her profession, a sympathetic yet didactic person at heart.

Radcliffe’s hand had risen immediately; but not satisfied with this response she searched round the class for others, prompting them by name and even by drawing a chimney and a factory, roughly, on the blackboard. The question defeated them: there were so many tall chimneys visible at that moment through the classroom windows, their black streamers furled over the ranked houses of the estate. Chimneys were tall. Eventually, as if acknowledging her oblique success, she turned to Radcliffe. ‘Well, Leonard? Can you tell us?’

‘They’re tall so that they can carry the dirty smoke well away from the ground.’

Someone laughed; it was as if this simplicity confirmed the teacher’s own eccentricity. She looked up amusedly.

‘Well? Can anyone else think of a better reason?’

She sought a sudden and ironical confederacy in Radcliffe whenever she was opposed by the class, and as if stimulated by their amusement she turned to a large, muscular boy at the back of the room and posed a similarly disarming question: ‘Why are roofs pointed and not flat like in the pictures in the Bible?’ And when he could give no hope of an answer she moved towards the class, coming to a stop by Radcliffe’s desk, and asked the large boy to stand up.

Tall and thickset, with dark, tightly curled hair and a frank, unwittingly surly face, he stood facing the teacher as if the question demanded some physical retaliation. His muscular figure was set in an instinctively aggressive pose. Then his eyes rolled slowly upwards in search of the answer.

Radcliffe, his head close to the teacher’s thighs, had twisted round to stare almost grievedly at the boy as though his enforced furtiveness were directly his fault.

‘Now, Tolson … Victor,’ the teacher said as if his inability served as a further illustration in her didactic pursuit of the class. ‘Do you know?’

He nodded, continuing his search of the ceiling while a gradual blush lit his powerful cheekbones. And, as though disregarding his male pride, or out of some innate desire to take advantage of such an exposed muscular confusion, the teacher pressed her inquisition. ‘Well, come on then, Victor. Let us all hear.’ A deeper look of humiliation gave way to one of helplessness. The boy suddenly stared round guiltily at the class.

‘Perhaps there’s no reason for Victor to think at all. We already know where he’s going to end up, don’t we?’ She gestured at the factory chimneys outside about which Radcliffe had already been so articulate. ‘There are places waiting for him out there already. Well, never mind. Just you stand there a moment, Vic, and let me see you paying attention and listening.’

She left him exposed in his quaint destitution and continued her questioning further, but more superficially, round the rest of the class.

‘Well, Leonard. Can you tell us?’ she said eventually, almost revengefully.

‘No.’ He shook his head, blushing.

‘Are you sure?’

He shook his head again, looking down at his desk.

‘Now, you’re not going to let me down?’

He looked away in confusion. Then he said hurriedly, almost inaudibly, ‘So that the rain can run off.’ His look continued across the room until it reached the muscular boy at the back of the class. Their eyes met. The boy’s expression was one of such incoherent humiliation, half-blinded with reproach, that Radcliffe swung round to stare fixedly at his desk, his face red and peculiarly tortured.

‘Roofs are pointed so that the rain can run off,’ the teacher said, wiping her hands free of chalk on her smock.

It was in this way that he became associated in the class’s mind with her cynical didacticism. He was, in fact, one of her instruments of instruction. In answering at all he suggested that certain naïvety and defencelessness which only knowledge and intelligence can give. Certainly it was a vulnerability in him which his white, starved face and his narrow features readily confirmed. He was a natural victim of children of this age, and always very much on his own. Occasionally, however, he was reprieved from his bullied situation by a facility for drawing, a gift from which he appeared to derive unique pleasure and amusement, emotions that scarcely showed on his face so clearly at any other time. During art lessons, whenever the teacher was inattentive or called from the room, a small queue of frustrated and bored children would form at his desk and in a warm daze of service he would draw or outline whatever subject was required. It was only later, when he saw that his gift served no other purpose than expediency, tinged with some curiosity, and in no way brought him closer but encouraged the separation he had learned to dread, that he began to refuse to draw for other people, and would sit at his desk crying and shaking his head at the now malicious attempts to make him perform.

He became the particular victim of one group of boys who throughout each dinner hour encouraged him to carry them in turn around the playground. At first, recognising no way of avoiding this imposition, he responded to it ambitiously, even conscientiously; bowed deeply forward, he carried each kicking and shouting burden safely round the vast perimeter of the yard. It was the deliberation and care with which he did this – a seriousness the boys interpreted as a perverse willingness – that created the demand to outrage it.

This infliction, interrupted occasionally by puzzled or amused teachers, continued for several weeks until a point was reached when he began to fall on his knees, and no amount of kicking and punching could persuade him to rise. Like any attempt to retaliate, this docility antagonised the boys, and such moments became the focus of their frustrated ambitions. They would gather round him with their curious attacks as if he were some strange creature washed up on a beach.

One particularly cold day, several months after his sudden appearance at the school, when he had lain for some time in white-faced prostration, his huge burden shouting excitedly astride his back, Tolson had come across and lifted the boy off. There was a brief argument and within a minute a fight had started.

Tolson had remarkable strength and agility; an almost adult assurance, and a kind of cool ferocity which, in its degree of control and direction, was as intimidating as his violence itself. He seemed, through his strength, deliberately to prolong the fight. When Radcliffe had dazedly risen to his feet he stood watching with a frozen expression, a down-like impersonation of grief, which amused the boys not directly concerned with the conflict.

When it was over and, bruised and crying, the boy had gone, Tolson stood some distance away and stared sulkily at Radcliffe. His fists hung down at his sides, the knuckles crested white in his hard, chapped skin, his look at first an uncertain one of contempt; then, almost imperceptibly, growing into that same expression of bitterness and reproach which he had levelled across the classroom. Then, quite suddenly and without any sign, he began to cry.

Whether it was an accumulation of hurt and pain at the fight, or whether some inarticulate desolation implicit in Tolson, Radcliffe at that moment appeared unable to decide. He stood watching Tolson crying for some time; then, as he began to move towards him, Tolson turned abruptly away and disappeared in the crowded yard.

The fight seemed to disturb Radcliffe far more than the persecution which had preceded it. He was absent from school for several days and when he returned it was with the remains of a slow, coughing illness. His unusual, ascetic face had a blue tinge around its temples. The bullying itself continued, but in less noticeable forms, and he managed to preserve his meagre existence by his own wiry resilience and strength.

He began to pay Tolson a solemn yet distant attention which, through a kind of surly aloofness, was obscurely returned. Relaxed, Tolson was slow and methodical, with an almost premature muscularity: already he looked a little workman. There was something intensely likeable about him, a physical assurance that, when he worked, provoked people into smiling at his sturdy, self-absorbed independence. The leader of a large gang of boys, he monopolised a corner of the playground by an ominous, though sometimes amiable, use of his strength; and with a kind of lethargy, a slowness that exaggerated his physique into an almost parental indulgence, he would watch smilingly over the territory and the friendships that his remarkable strength had secured.

It was only in the summer, when examinations were held to facilitate the division of the classes the following year, that Radcliffe made any direct approach.

It was a hot afternoon, just after the school had been dismissed for the day. Tolson was playing with several boys in the deserted playground. He was always there. Although he had several brothers and sisters at the school, he never seemed to go home, just as his thin clothes never seemed to vary from winter to summer. And after watching for some time until he was sure he had been seen, Radcliffe approached him and asked him if he’d like to go home with him. Tolson at first didn’t answer. Suddenly arrested in his game, he frowned and looked away. Radcliffe was peculiarly confident, even adamant, and no longer shy. The demand was like the outcome of a long and familiar friendship.

‘Don’t you want to come?’ Radcliffe said. The building where he lived was a frequent subject of the children’s speculation.

‘I don’t know.’ Tolson looked at him shrewdly, his first embarrassment giving way to curiosity, as if there were now some advantage to be gained. The boys were playing against the school wall, one line stooped down and the others running to leap on their backs. They were screaming and shouting. Tolson, red-faced and sweating, stood beside this undulating mass. He suddenly shouted at the boys, ‘Are you coming?’

‘Where to?’ One or two stopped playing but were quickly jolted back into the game.

‘They won’t come,’ Tolson said after a while.

‘You come, then.’

‘Nay, I don’t know.’

Radcliffe looked at him darkly. It was like some loyalty he was being pressed into acknowledging; or a weakness.

‘Come on, Vic. Come on, stay here.’ The boys burst out laughing as the line of crouched figures began to break under the bucking weight of the jockeys. ‘Hi-jig-a-jig, who’s little pig? Hi-jig-a-jig, hi-cockalorum!’ The boys collapsed on their knees, laughing and fighting.

‘Come on, then,’ Radcliffe said. ‘We’ll go.’ He seemed afflicted by the noise.

Tolson looked at his face as if recognising something that aroused his resentment as well as his curiosity. He suddenly punched Radcliffe violently on the shoulder, running past him as he cried, ‘All right, then … I’ll come for a bit.’

Radcliffe turned and, suddenly anxious, hurried after him.

The school stood at the foot of a vast escarpment crowded with the houses of a council estate. At the summit of its ridge, and raised over the symmetrical roofs like a huge and irregular extension of rock, was the black outline of the Place. One of a string of manor houses and halls which occurred every few miles in this northern part of the country, some still isolated amongst trees and pasture, others more frequently embedded in belts of factories and houses, it stood now like the detritus of a forgotten geological cycle. The estate, its twenty thousand inhabitants a small facet of forty unbroken miles of industry absorbing over three million people, had been built on the original park and farmland of the Place itself, and had in fact taken its name – Beaumont. Once the home of a prosperous family of cloth merchants and bankers whose business had gradually been displaced by the mammoth engineering and mining interests of the area, it had survived the first twenty years of the century as a farm, its main rooms and entrances shuttered, and a small section at the rear, along with its outbuildings, converted into living and working accommodation. The war confirmed the industrial domination of this landscape, and in 1921 the last of the farmland was sold.

During the following decade the red houses of the estate crept slowly up the broad escarpment, absorbing first the stone cottages of a heathland village, then several towering oak trees and a wide avenue of elms, and finally surrounding the Place and its attendant church within a denuded perimeter of shrubbery and trees. The building had been retained by the original family under a trusteeship, and while the housing estate expanded and forced its way over the remaining green park and pasture, a caretaker was installed in the converted rooms at the rear to safeguard the structure from the curiosity of the growing army outside.

Speculation about the building’s purchase, its imminent demolition, or its long-term conversion was dispelled when the old caretaker, under whose erratic supervision the Place had been gradually despoiled, was removed and a younger person introduced who began an immediate renovation and repair. All the more obvious signs of damage disappeared and no longer were the cavernous rooms and passages accessible to any casual intruder.

It was in a solemn and speculative manner that Radcliffe now followed Tolson up the various crescents and avenues of the estate, the bigger boy rushing ahead as if it were his invitation that had inspired the visit. Then, as the chimneys of the Place came into view over the lower roofs of the houses, he began to lose his impetuosity and was soon walking quite slowly, glancing behind him occasionally with an almost disowning expression. As they passed a class-mate walking home on the opposite side of the road, Tolson suddenly called out to him and ran across. For a while they talked together confidingly, Tolson laying his arm on the boy’s shoulder and resting his weight against him.

Radcliffe, walking parallel, watched them. Then seeing that the boy was to accompany them, he continued up the road alone. Tolson, his arm securely round his new companion, was content to walk some distance behind, deliberately slow. The two boys talked to one another quietly, then laughed. A moment later they began to kick stones, swinging from the single axis of their interlocked arms. Some distance down the road behind them an elderly bearded man was leading a large black dog.

When they reached the twin black columns of the gateway they stopped indecisively and stood watching while Radcliffe pushed between the metal gates. Then Tolson followed. He pressed back the gates, stooping with his back to them. But they were secured immovably, and only slightly apart, in the guttered debris from the drive, and after a moment’s frustrated activity he and his companion followed Radcliffe up the heavily shadowed track.

In the treetops on either side rooks fluttered like rags, then sprang up, swaying, as the boys’ feet crunched on the firmer part of the drive. As the path suddenly turned to one side, Radcliffe glanced back and, apparently reassured by the look on Tolson’s face, hurried forward more expectantly. They came out into the sunshine on a gravel terrace at the front of the building.

Tolson’s face turned upwards. He was sweating more heavily: perspiration streamed down his face, his eyes screwed against it and the strong light. His body had taken on a characteristically aggressive stance, his legs set firmly apart, his fists partly raised. Then his head sank back into his thick shoulders and turning slowly he gazed up at the full breadth of the crumbled façade.

A familiar look of perplexity crossed his face, and suddenly flushing he glanced behind him reassuringly at the brick houses of the estate where he lived. Then he glanced at Radcliffe.

Radcliffe was staring at him with an aloof, impassioned scrutiny, as if he’d simply brought him here to see his reaction. The other boy was forgotten. It was in that moment that Tolson’s look changed. It was immediately replaced by one of threat, an instant violence and force as if he’d been secretly abused. Radcliffe, with a sudden expression of alarm, glanced away.

At the same moment the bolts shot back on the front entrance, a key turned, and the two heavy doors swung in slightly before one was pulled fully open. Radcliffe’s father came out, a tall, slender man who stood frowning, his hand to his forehead, staring out into the strong light.

‘Hello, Leonard. Have you brought your friends to look at the place?’ He came down the steps from the deep portico, his narrow, almost military face amusedly alight. He was in rolled shirt-sleeves as if he’d just interrupted some work.

‘Hello, Vic,’ he said as they were introduced. ‘Leonard’s told me a lot about you.’ He stooped slightly and held out his hand, which Tolson looked at confusedly and didn’t take. ‘Would you like to see around the inside of the monster?’

‘No. It’s all right,’ Tolson said with a thick accent. He backed stubbornly away, looking up at the bruised rock of the façade. Then, blushing deeply, he picked up a stone and threw it amongst the trees. Its crashes echoed against the branches.

The other boy stood some distance away, watching. After a while Radcliffe’s father went in, vanishing like a magician into his cave, the bolts and locks slamming back into place. Radcliffe watched him go. Then he turned to the drive. Tolson and the other boy had disappeared.

He hurried down the rutted track and soon saw Tolson plunging ahead, kicking at loose stones with short, powerful swings of either leg, tearing off twigs and flowers, and jumping over the low, stooped branches that encroached and almost blocked the drive. He was a small black animal leaping in the dark shadows, his arm intermittently flung up to send large stones crashing through the trees.

The other boy waited in the road. He seemed in some way embarrassed. When Tolson reached the gate, he climbed onto it and dragged it to and fro within its brief arc of suspension; as Radcliffe came up he started swaying the gate on its rusted hinges, letting the weight of his body fall from it to be retrieved by his extended arms. Then he tugged at the eroded metal with a sudden burst of laughter. Radcliffe stood watching in silence, white and exhausted by Tolson’s energy.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then,’ he said.

‘Aye. When’ll it be?’

Radcliffe stated a time, raising his hand as if precisely to indicate its significance. ‘At the end of the avenue.’

Tolson dropped off the gate as though amused by the gesture itself, its minuteness. He squeezed through the narrow opening. ‘All right.’ He stood back a moment, watching Radcliffe through the lattice of the ironwork.

Suddenly he laughed. ‘All right.’ He put his arm round the other boy’s shoulder, glanced at Radcliffe a moment longer then, pulling the boy slightly, ran off down the road. For a second Radcliffe could see through the bars their locked figures, running. Then they disappeared beyond the high wall.

He turned back up the drive. The boys’ feet echoed under the heavy branches. ‘Radcliffe!… Radcliffe!… Radcliffe!’ His name was called several times. The rooks rose in the air, antagonised, cawing, and drifted restlessly over the heavy eaves of the house. The name crashed through the trees like a stone. When he went round the back of the Place and into the kitchen his father looked up expectantly. But Leonard had nothing to say.