5

“Accident?” Benson said. “A white owl lodged in my chimney, waiting for my one fire of the year, succumbing to my sacrificial smoke, just at that moment? Just as the scarab ignited, just as I was commencing my invocation? Never.”

Not for the first time the red-faced, heavily-built man to whom he was talking, instead of replying, opened his mouth wide and bellowed words of encouragement and exhortation to the slight and spindly boys playing rugby. “Come on, Jones!” he shouted. “Come on, Andrews! Get in there and tackle, boy. This is school ground, you know,” he said to Benson.

In late afternoon, slightly the worse for drink but still fairly steady, Benson had passed through a gate and found himself standing on the touchline with this discourteous man in sudden, transfiguring storm sunshine that lit the rugby field with vivid green, burnished the bare poplars fringing the far side. Beyond, the clouds were massed, black with rain. The shirts of the players made patterns of colour, now clustering, now thinning, one team blue, the other red.

“Never in this world,” Benson said, “Do you know Baudelaire’s theory of correspondencies, nature seen as a temple of living pillars? I think there’s a lot of truth in it myself.”

“No, I don’t,” the man said. “I don’t know anything about Baudelaire. I’m trying to concentrate on this game. This is a trial game for the second fifteen.”

“They look very young.”

“Well, they are juniors.”

“They don’t look more than nine or ten,” Benson said.

In this strange escape of sunshine the shirts and the white shorts had a wild brightness about them. The players were too slight to enact the formal patterns of the game, they fluttered about the field, vivid and weightless, like creatures prompted to swarm by the burst of light, wavering after the ball with high-pitched cries. Tackles brought them down in the space of a stride, like butterflies alighting. A taller boy was acting as referee, one of the seniors presumably. His whistle sounded often and the children grouped and regrouped in obedience to it.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Billings!” the man beside Benson shouted in a tone of furious disgust.

Benson was having difficulty now in focussing across the bright field at the wavering players. The pitch kept blurring into abstract patterns of red and blue. “They used to make them dance,” he said. “Some of the skippers did. Every morning, weather permitting, they would bring them up on deck in batches and make them dance. One of the ways they kept them alive.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about. Oh, well-done!”

“Children too,” Benson said. “Gladstone was born not very far from where I live. W.E., the Liberal statesman. He was born in Rodney Street in 1809, two years after the last legitimate slave ship sailed out of Liverpool.”

“I’m aware of that,” the man said. “I teach history.”

“You teach these boys history?” Benson blinked at the man wonderingly. It seemed incongruous.

The man had barely looked at him before, but he did so now. “I have a degree in history,” he said.

“Ah,” Benson said. “Well, I was thinking, you know, when Gladstone was about the age of these lads, slaving from British ports had been illegal then for about ten years or so, but the implements of slavery must still have been about. I mean, they wouldn’t have disappeared overnight, would they? They were still being sold over the counter in 1807. They went on being sold under the counter for another fifty years or so. They would have lingered on in curio shops, junk shops, scrap metal places. It is quite conceivable that little William Ewart, out with his nurse, pressing his nose against the shop window, would have seen strange metal objects, the purpose of which might have baffled him. What is that, nurse? That is a branding iron, dear, so they would know who the slaves belonged to. And that is a pair of iron handcuffs, and that is a thumbscrew in case they refused to eat or were otherwise recalcitrant. Imagine the effect on an impressionable lad. It is entirely possible that Gladstone’s generous sympathy for oppressed races began right here, in the streets of Liverpool.”

“Fanciful, very fanciful. What on earth do you think you are doing, Rogers? I try to give them a balanced view.”

“A balanced view of the slave trade?”

Abruptly, as Benson spoke these words, the clouds descended, cutting out the sun at one stroke, as if it had never been. And with this eclipse it became at once apparent how the sunshine had been abetting the illusion of day. It was suddenly evening, the trees at the far side of the field had taken on some quality of darkness, the boys’ shouts and the sounds of the whistle seemed more distant, as if they had faded with the light.

“We tend to think a balanced view is virtuous,” Benson said. “Especially when it is applied to our crimes. We are not so keen on it when there are profits to be made. Have your pupils any concept of the ruin and devastation visited on Africa in the course of the eighteenth century, have they any notion of the scale of it?”

“Look,” the man said. “I don’t intend to stand here arguing. These boys haven’t reached the eighteenth century yet, they’re doing the Wars of the Roses. I’ve got to go over and get a closer look at the game before the light is gone. I don’t know what you are doing here. You’ve been drinking.”

“Forty million deaths at a conservative estimate. The Nazis were nothing to it.”

Without replying the man began to walk away from him towards the centre of the darkening field, where the wavering game continued. It seemed to Benson, in the moments before he turned away, that the cries of the children had grown wilder, more piercing, as if in regret at the approach of night.