The main pack in the junior steeplechase had rounded the first bend, turning west and striking out across Abbot’s Common. John’s limbs protested after the previous day’s abuse, but he was grateful to S-K for allowing him to set pace for the juniors rather than the Upper School, as was his custom. The Fourth were already suffering, so he was keeping the pace in check. If necessary, he would cut the whole thing short, S-K be damned.
It would help if the rain held off another three-quarters of an hour, but it had been misting, and now, as they slogged up the slope, it began to fall sincerely. The clouds had lowered, concealing the extent of the Common, exactly the type of day that boys went missing on the moors; John kept a close eye on the snake of runners, mindful that none diverged in ignorance from the course.
In fact there were two figures ahead, across the Common, emerging from the mist. He didn’t think they could be his party; they might have come from the Upper School pack though its course ran nowhere near. John hoped he wasn’t about to encounter an absconding pair, some boys from the Upper School who’d cut away to pursue … whatever nefarious activities they could concoct. If possible, he would pretend to believe whatever excuse they offered.
The figures slipped down the slope, falling to the ground several times. He now saw they were not wearing running kit, but something else, full uniform. Like wounded soldiers, the figures helped each other across the field. The figures, he realized with dismay, belonged to boys he knew well.
The next hour blended with the hours that followed. Sometimes when John thought back on it, he recalled every detail with a horrible excitement. He could recall Rees’s senseless keening at the sight of him. Morgan Wilberforce’s steely demeanor. His own fascinated alarm seeing Wilberforce’s dislocated arm. The thrill of speaking sharply to Rees and demanding he pull himself together. How unhesitating and sharp his judgment had been, dispatching the fastest runner back to the Academy for help, halting the run, turning it around, sending it back from whence it had come. Then running as fast as he could up the brutal, slippery slope.
John was familiar with death. He was accustomed, or had once been, to shifting the corpses of young men. He was not accustomed to fashioning a makeshift stretcher to transport the body of a Sixth Former in school uniform, or to carrying the body of a pupil in tandem with Fardley across a squelching field and loading it into the back of Fardley’s lorry. He knew what it was to ride in the back of rough vehicles with bodies that shifted at ruts in the road, bodies that moaned constantly, intermittently, or not at all. He knew the sticky feeling of human blood outside the body. He had many times permitted it to soak his clothing, not, however, the bare skin of his legs in running shorts and not his clammy singlet. John had suffered cold, wet, mud, and snow in the line of duty, but all stood apart from this interval fighting chill in the back of the school lorry as his blood returned to its usual temperature, unlike the blood in the other body, which was turning fortysome degrees Fahrenheit, though as he recalled, it took several hours for heat to depart entirely.
Rees and Wilberforce he had ordered back to the school. Wilberforce had resisted, wanting to help recover the body. Of the two, Wilberforce looked a just-walking casualty of battle. John had snapped Wilberforce’s arm back into place there on Abbot’s Common before it did any more damage hanging crazily at his side. He had not yelped at the procedure or revealed any discomfort even when John bundled the arm roughly back into the discarded sling. He appeared not to feel the blood coursing down his cheek, which had split open, or from his mouth, an injury John ascertained as nothing more than a bitten tongue, though it looked as though he’d had his throat slit. Rees appeared essentially uninjured apart from some grazing at his collar, but he continued to wail almost hysterically, so John sent him back to the Academy under the escort of two boys from Rees’s own House. Wilberforce, having endured John’s setting his arm, insisted on leading John back up the slope, to the scene of the disaster.
John examined the body. Wilberforce, in the grip of a strange euphoria, insisted that John feel for a pulse, at the throat, at the wrist, anywhere possible. John assured him Spaulding was dead, but Wilberforce drew him back to the body several times, insisting he’d seen the chest move, or that he’d felt a pulse. Spaulding was still warm, Wilberforce kept repeating. Surely John could revive him.
John had been reduced to dragging Wilberforce physically from the scene, taking him outside, and speaking to him in the most brutal terms. Wilberforce was by this time beginning to shiver, his skin pale against the blood smeared across it. Something seemed to have shaken loose inside his brain, John thought at the time, though later he recalled many men from the trenches speaking the same way, as if every restraint upon conversation had been destroyed.
—It’s my fault, Wilberforce had said. I made him try to stop Rees.
—It was an accident.
—I should have let him go to S-K, but I wanted to be part of it.
—Wilberforce—
—I wanted Rees to die. I didn’t want to kill him, but I thought it would be easier if he was dead.
—You didn’t make it happen.
—I did try to help … I held him up while Spaulding—
John had been forced to disrupt the conversation by seizing Wilberforce’s bad arm and dragging him, through dint of physical pain, away from the barn and back to the Academy.
Wilberforce babbled the entire way back, spilling every kind of confession. John hoped he wouldn’t remember the things the boy had said. He hoped he could shortly forget the details of Wilberforce’s assignations with Spaulding, of the utterly corrosive menace that was Pearl minor and his schemes, of the appalling literature Lydon had been importing to the Academy, and of the treatment Wilberforce had endured in his youth under “Silk” Bradley, a thoroughly poisonous creature if ever there had been one. John did not shock easily, but he had to work to conceal his shock now. The state of the Academy was acutely worse than any of them imagined. It was like the body of a soldier revealed, upon cutting away clothing, to be rotted through with gangrene. At any rate, it had all blown up now. There would be no putting anything back the way it had been, the way they had imagined it to be. He felt the irrational exhilaration he’d once known in the face of destruction, the same exhilaration that was surely now coursing through Wilberforce, prompting him to divulge transgressions of the worst sort.
John wished ardently that he had a study, a room, anything, where he could lock Wilberforce until his senses returned. He would have settled for passing the boy into the custody of his studymates, but in the chaos of the quad he had to abandon Wilberforce at the gates and go immediately with Fardley to recover the body from the barn.
John hoped he would be able to agree with himself, in the future, not to think of that day. He decided, rattling back to the Academy in Fardley’s lorry, that he would indeed scour the paper for advertisements. He would box his things before the holidays, and once he had installed himself in Saffron Walden with Meg and Owain and his goddaughter, he would not leave that refuge until some other establishment had accepted his services. Perhaps he could teach urchins. Perhaps the maiden aunts could be persuaded to furnish him a few hundred pounds to establish himself in some impoverished parish. At any rate, he would not return to the East Riding of Yorkshire after Easter; whether or not the Academy continued in its existence mattered not to him.
His presence was demanded at nearly every confabulation over the following forty-eight hours. Burton-Lee resented this, and John did not begrudge him the ill feeling. Rees was sent away the first evening. In his distress, he confessed everything to his Housemaster, and Burton arranged his removal before the Headmaster could involve himself.
S-K, deprived of the chance to unleash fear, grief, and fury upon Rees, vented them instead upon Morgan Wilberforce. John tried to insert himself as a kind of counsel for the defense, but the Headmaster only turned his wrath upon John, repeating to him in florid, Old Testament rhetoric a sampling of Wilberforce’s unfiltered confessions. Pearl minor was summoned and interrogated, but he denied all charges as the ravings of a distraught witness.
Wilberforce would be made an example, S-K announced to the SCR, Wilberforce, without whom no tragedy would have come to pass! Even Burton-Lee in his impaired state protested. Wilberforce was certainly compromised, Burton conceded, but his chief crime, besides an unprecedented lack of common sense, was inserting himself into business that wasn’t his own. S-K changed his mind at least eight times on the day following the accident, informing poor Wilberforce each time of his newest fate. He would be flogged publically! (S-K had Fardley dig up some ancient birching block and arrange it prominently in the chapel.) He would be expelled in the night! He would be flogged every day that remained in the term but permitted to stay! He would be flogged daily and then disposed! Finally Wilberforce’s father arrived from the London night train. John did not catch sight of the man, but he learned that Wilberforce had been taken away. Disposed or not, reports varied.
On the afternoon of Wilberforce’s departure, S-K fell into a fever and was consigned by Matron to his bed. Only two more days remained to the term. They carried on with lessons because they had nothing else to do. Lockett-Egan accepted the post at Pocklington, and when John asked if they needed anyone else, the Eagle actually wrote his new employer to inquire, but returned the news that all posts had been filled. John was invited to send along his particulars in case something should open up.
He boxed his things—a motley collection of clothing, books, and mismatched crockery, fitting into three suitcases, his trunk, and a crate his landlady supplied—and arranged for them to be posted on to Saffron Walden. He drafted the simplest of resignations, copied it in a fair hand, and placed it in his pocket, intending to give it to S-K’s housekeeper as he left for the station with his bicycle and rucksack.
The final morning of term he arrived at the gates with the last of his worldly possessions only to discover an atmosphere of renewed sensationalism. He made for the SCR, where the commotion was half outrage, half thrill. The Daily Mail had got hold of the story and plastered the Academy’s woes across the bottom of its front page. Public School Boy Dead. Tragic accident or lovers’ tryst gone awry? A photograph of the interior of the barn (still standing, rafter fallen) accompanied the article, which aired every prurient rumor and unfortunately mentioned all the real details of the case, including the school’s poor discipline, one boy’s attempted suicide after having been spurned—John could not stomach a black-and-white recital of the sinking ship that was St. Stephen’s Academy.
During breakfast, three gentlemen arrived at the gates, not fathers, but apparently representatives of the Board, which in all of John’s time had maintained a policy of complete nonappearance. These men convened the Housemasters and, after nearly an hour’s conference, emerged only to disappear again into the Headmaster’s house. The boys departed for the holidays, leaving the halls empty and unnatural.
That afternoon John was cross-examined by the Board. They seemed almost as anxious to determine who had informed the press as they were to decide S-K’s ability to carry on as Headmaster. John did not care. He could not care. He told them what he knew, left his resignation on the Headmaster’s desk, and got into the cab he had called to transport him to York.
The car bumped along the Wetwang road, his bicycle wedged into the boot. Through Fridaythorpe they jumbled, past the rooms where he had spent the last years cloistered from the world, occupied, he’d thought, in something worthwhile. Behind them now the Cross Keys, where he had spent so many evenings poring over schoolboy compositions, observing their gradual improvement. Gone now the two evenings he spent with Morgan Wilberforce, who had confided, amidst the things John hoped to forget, that he wished ardently for John to be his Housemaster, that he wished to come to him of an evening and talk things over, that there were things, so many things, he longed to discuss.
The cab rattled away from St. Stephen’s, John’s home of six and a half years. He had left another school after six years and had never—would never return. His childhood and youth had passed away, along with both parents and the person he had been. The Bishop had passed away, if not literally then for all practical purposes. Jamie had passed away. Now Morgan Wilberforce was passing away. What the future held, John could not fathom beyond the dark road, the swaying cab, and the lights on the walls of York, glowing in the distance, a beacon in the meanwhile.