John’s eyes were aching in the bright afternoon. He ought to have worn a hat. He made sure that Wilberforce caught sight of him, and then he set himself to observing the practice of Hazlehurst’s Upper School. Batting was not an exact science, and for the most part, if asked, John would have told them to carry on. The most essential factor in learning to do a thing well, he struggled to convince his pupils, was practicing the thing repeatedly over a long period. Youth was impatient and hungry for gratification, but if they weren’t prepared to hit fifty thousand balls, they would never get anywhere with a bat. Ditto with bowling and fielding.
But batting practice at the Academy was an unserious affair, something they did amidst banal adolescent chatter. John watched from a distance and evaluated each boy’s stroke. A few attracted his attention for their obvious flaws. He took out a snub pencil and notebook and listed the boys whose batting needed adjustment sharpish; there were four in addition to Wilberforce. Beginning with the easiest, he sidled up to Colin Frick, who regarded him warily but appeared faintly intrigued by John’s suggestions. When Wilberforce finished, John cornered him out of earshot of the others.
—Does your left shoulder still hurt?
Wilberforce frowned:
—It’s all right. Sir.
—There’s a hiccup in your stroke.
Wilberforce finished removing his pads. He looked as though he couldn’t decide if John’s remark was an embarrassment or an affront.
—I’m here. Practicing. Sir. Isn’t that what you wanted?
—Practice is all very well, John said, but if you’re practicing a poor move, it’s worse than no practice at all.
Wilberforce stood still, tolerating him. Or perhaps he was using all of his energy to stop himself from uttering an impertinence.
—It’s the follow-through, John continued. It looks as though it hurts.
—It doesn’t.
—But?
The boy crossed his arms.
—Sometimes you think it’s going to?
A blush answered the question. John took up Wilberforce’s bat and mimicked his stance. He tried to imitate Wilberforce’s stroke, slowing down to magnify the hesitation in the follow-through.
—You’ve got to stop thinking about your shoulder. Instead of wondering whether it will hurt, imagine that the bat has a will of its own. Imagine it is pulling itself up, like this—
John demonstrated.
—and your arm is only along for the ride.
—You mean some kind of mental mumbo jumbo, Wilberforce retorted.
John handed him the bat. Wilberforce took it with a glare and practiced his drive. John stood behind him, and when the bat crossed his body, John called out:
—Up! You hesitated again. Concentrate. The bat’s will.
The second feint was better. John fetched a ball and bowled it gently to him. A quiet but firmly seated thwack announced success.
—That … that worked, sir!
—Right, John replied, same again fifty thousand times. Carry on, Wilberforce.
* * *
In Chemistry, Morgan’s shoulder was tired and stiff. Grieves had lurked like some dark agent, intruded into his batting, and then had the nerve to offer advice that actually improved his drive. This after treating him in the most abominable manner over the godforsaken lines. As far as the lines were concerned, Morgan hoped his composition on the Industrial Revolution would provide ample revenge. At any rate, he had amused himself writing it, and with the current state of affairs, if he could amuse himself now and again, he was doing better than average.
The new timetable was another objectionable development. Very little free time appeared in it. Even Prep, which had long been de facto free time for the Upper School, had been curtailed on several evenings in the interests of cricket. Morgan liked cricket, but to have to spend an hour and a half after tea playing it or watching others play it when he might be absconding to the Keys simply turned a good thing into a burden. Besides which, having to retrain his stroke by overcoming instinct fifty thousand times (according to Grieves’s arithmetic) promised no joy whatsoever. On top of that, to have to endure Alex’s not-very-subtle schemes running bets and extorting cash from his brother and who knew how many others, not to mention the fags’ blatant conceit and everyone else’s unspoken but obvious sense of tragedy about matters that were nothing to do with them—his father had been mistaken, utterly mistaken, to send him back to the Academy.
As REN droned on about acids and bases and various words Morgan couldn’t spell, Morgan’s mind slipped back to the Hermes Balcony, to its promise and its miraculous reprieve, to its green-and-brown—to—to London, its foggy air and foggier parties, its crush of people, its brash independence …
He couldn’t have said when they appeared to him exactly, but at some point, there the two boys were. At his right elbow, a suave-seeming, knowledgeable boy. Frequenter perhaps of sensational London parties, the kind Morgan had found so taxing. This boy seemed the type to get effortlessly on with bright people. He could flirt without thinking and see everything in its correct proportion. The little man wittering at the front of the room ought to be pitied, the boy told him, not resented. Even more dismal was the earnest character who had sued for Morgan’s attention on the cricket pitch just now. That person had relinquished self-respect and had, inexplicably but wretchedly, chained himself to a cabal of old men whose sad lives were devoid of novelty, dynamism, and zing.
Morgan was bigger than this, declared the boy on his right, toying with his exercise book by folding its pages into cunning little figures. He’d be much the better off when he could face reality face on—in the face. Romantic instincts were all very diverting, but only reality was real. And reality was this: He, Morgan Wilberforce, was no longer a boy. His mother was gone. Childhood home, gone. Other frail attachments had likewise passed away. He was a man. He stood six feet tall and was still growing. He possessed comfortable accommodation in a glittering metropolis and was under no compulsion to waste his time in this prison. Whatever he imagined he would miss by leaving the Academy, in reality he would not miss it. The world was far more entrancing.
Morgan could think of no objections. Indeed, he longed to stand up, now, in the middle of REN’s lesson, to leave the room, walk out the gates of the Academy, and board a train to London.
He did not move. Perhaps this boy, smooth and attractive in modern-cut suit, was not endowed with power beyond the mental realm. Or perhaps it was the other phantom, the second boy, who had sat silently through the first’s manifesto. Morgan could not see the second boy quite as clearly since he took care to remain near the edge of Morgan’s vision, but he could tell the boy wore school uniform. He was younger than the first, Morgan thought, younger than he was himself. Yet, this wasn’t a past version of himself. This seemed another boy entirely, old enough to attend St. Stephen’s Academy and to grasp what it was about. This boy ignored REN’s lecture as thoroughly as the boy on Morgan’s right, but not out of derision; he ignored it because something more important commanded his attention, something to do with Morgan.
REN pulled down a squeaking blackboard and instructed them to copy the revealed pane into their exercise books. The boy on Morgan’s right unfurled an amused lip. They both of them knew—Right and Morgan—that REN’s command was nothing more than menial labor for villeins to undertake whilst REN contemplated his newspaper. There were a thousand and one ways to pass an April afternoon without wearing out their hands, or indeed their shoulders, with futile exercise. Right put his feet on the table and began to speak to Morgan of Polly.
Polly, Right said, was looking extraordinarily fine. Morgan could not disagree, but he recalled her new chilliness and her refusal to meet his eye. Right lowered his head as if he might expire with disappointment. Surely Morgan had understood the thrust of her behavior? Morgan had assumed that she was tired of him. Right sighed with the pain of a martyred saint and resumed his handicraft with Morgan’s copy paper, fashioning crane, toad, vase, tarantula. Morgan really had to learn to use the brain he was born with, Right complained. It was perfectly obvious that Polly fancied the trousers off him. Why else would a girl avoid his eye? Why else, Right argued, would she dress so fetchingly to work the pumps at her father’s public house? This theory sounded dubious to Morgan. What, he wondered, made Right so sure Polly wasn’t besotted with Nathan or with Laurie? Right begged him not to be funny. Nathan was attractive (as they both knew), but his inveterate puritanism and dour conduct could hold no interest for a girl such as Polly, who yearned for someone scintillating to brighten her horizons. As for Laurie, he had many charms, but he was still a boy, interested in little besides the foul (and delicious) texts his Uncle Anton sent him. Oh, had Morgan not realized that had continued? What did Morgan imagine Laurie was reading so intently just now (yes, across the aisle under REN’s nose) if not the latest installment of Etoniensis or Lady Pokingham? If Morgan doubted Right, he could just consult Lydon’s trousers (not intimately, external ocular inspection would suffice, young wag) and tell Right if he was mistaken. Morgan could not, after consultation, tell him any such thing.
So, Right concluded, Polly fancied him. She was surely expecting him to return to the Keys on his own as soon as possible. In all likelihood she had plunged into dejection as a result of Morgan’s nonappearance this afternoon. Morgan asked hotly what Right expected him to do about it with Grieves badgering him in the most boring fashion imaginable. Right refused to respond, the answer beneath his dignity.
The second boy had listened silently to the conversation. Morgan asked him what he was about. The day was difficult enough without having to endure two phantoms in one lesson. The second boy swallowed and rubbed one of his palms, which was raw in a way that indicated vigorous cricket.
Morgan was hard and his mouth watered. He almost fancied he could smell something—was it leaves strewn across the cloisters? the bite of floor polish? the deepness of the chapel?—something earlier, something previous to the Academy, previous even to the life he could remember, almost like a whiff of life as it had been when S-K founded the Academy and built it up, with the aid of men such as Clement, Burton-Lee, and the heroic, doomed Gallowhill.
REN’s classroom adjoined the cloisters, and his windows, high on the wall, revealed a limited but bright square of sky. The late-afternoon sun had turned the tiles of Burton-Lee’s House a fiery hue, and in the moment Morgan gazed at it, the light intensified, as if someone had turned on another bulb, or as if a cloud had passed away from the source, allowing this brighter, redder sun to burn across the roof, emblazoning it like the banner of St. George, the sign of diverging paths.
The second boy was looking where Morgan was looking but still said nothing. Morgan felt himself losing patience with this mute apparition. Who was he to sit there stirring sentimental quasi-yearnings?
Indeed, Right rejoined. And honestly, how long did Morgan intend to fester in this moldy den, gazing at rooftops? The next thing they knew, Morgan would be attributing portents to the designs of sunbeams, followed shortly by the contemplation of horoscopes and entrails.
The clock above REN’s head promised only five more minutes of limbo. Morgan slouched across the table and assured Right that a fleeting moment of aesthetic appreciation did not equate to taking leave of reason. Right was glad to hear it but cautioned Morgan not to put too high a value on the aesthetic. It was deceiving. Morgan did not disagree. For example, Right replied, if Morgan insisted upon gazing at x’s out the window, just what did he intend to do at this crossroads? Would he seize his reason, discard his prehistoric mind and his feeble inhibition before the crusty carapaces of authority, and proceed into an amusing and stimulating future? Morgan thought that sounded desirable. Well, then? Right demanded. Well, Morgan replied, he would do just that. He would, for starters, eschew Prep and proceed to the Keys after tea to turn his energies towards the seduction of Polly. Polly was more than fetching. The past had passed, along with juvenile hopes. Now was the age of men.
Right nodded cautiously, but, Right wanted to know, what about the other one? That relic, the child at Morgan’s elbow? Oh, him, Morgan replied. He wasn’t worth bothering about. On the contrary, Right rejoined. That other one, that sickly soi-disant spiritualist, he would not simply vanish when Morgan stood up at the end of the lesson. Wouldn’t he? Morgan replied. Not a bit! Was Morgan deaf or simply stupid? What had Right been speaking of the whole time? What did Morgan imagine this crossroads was, a crossroads literally broadcast from the rooftops? Morgan assured Right that he comprehended the options before him and had already taken a decision: Right was right, no more need be said.
The bell jolted Morgan in the pit of his stomach as the room burst into commotion. Right vanished, and the other boy was no longer there when Morgan looked.
* * *
After tea they adjourned, per the Flea’s new timetable, to yet more cricket. At eight o’clock, the sun only just dipping behind the woods, they dismissed to Prep. Nathan hurried to the study, eager to catch the last of the London programs on the wireless, and Laurie paid his customary visit to the library. Without consulting either one, Morgan made for the woods, and the Keys.
Polly was behind the bar wearing another alluring frock, this time in pale green. She nipped into the kitchen as he approached, so he was forced to give his order to her father. Pa (as Polly called him and as Morgan always thought of him) pulled Morgan’s pint but did not banter with him as he did with other men. Perhaps Pa did not consider Morgan a man. If that was the case, then Pa did not know Morgan. And if that was the case, it would serve the brute right if Morgan did seduce his daughter then and there! Not that he was the kind of man to deflower a girl to spite her father (not, if he was honest, that he was the kind of man to deflower a girl, full stop), but the evening had a charge about it, a charge Morgan recognized, one that always accompanied great events. The last time he had felt such a charge was the day he and Spaulding— What was the point of cultivating sanity if it flew out the window at the most haphazard junctures?
Polly returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of pies, which she delivered to a group of men clad in rural fashions. Morgan flagged her as she passed. She hesitated only briefly before approaching his table.
—Evening, Polly.
—Evening.
They exchanged pleasantries in call-and-answer fashion. Morgan inched his stool closer to her, and when she dropped her napkin, he fetched it. When she asked if he’d like anything to eat, he asked her to choose something for him. More flustered than ever, she returned to the kitchen.
He wasn’t going to get anywhere toying with the poor girl, Right said. Had Morgan learned nothing since Rosemary? Morgan froze, disconcerted by Right’s refusal to remain a lesson-time daydream, and embarrassed by the allusion to his failure with girls. Right helped himself to Morgan’s pint and suggested Morgan refer to him in continental style as Droit. Morgan liked the sound of it. Did that make the other one Gauche? he wondered. Droit exhorted Morgan to concentrate on the matter at hand, namely Polly (the scrumptious piece) and not childish figures or his missteps with Rosemary.
Morgan cringed at his own ineptitude, though in his defense, he’d been a boy then, only fourteen, and incapacitated by a broken arm, a concussed skull, and six cracked—
Droit declared his medical history monotonous and his memory inflated. But Morgan remembered Rosemary perfectly! Everything about her, especially her strawberry lips and her devastating tennis game. There had been tennis all holiday at Longmere that spring. Eventually he’d recovered enough to return her balls, almost, and then—
Yes, yes, she was a nymph with a fatal serve, but what Morgan most needed to remember—what Droit urged him to recall—was that while Rosemary had allowed him to kiss her (once) and to fall instantly in love with her, she had never let him any further than the outside of her blouse or the vestibule of her mouth. Morgan felt it was unfair to expect him to have conquered a sixteen-year-old siren when he was still in the Third Form, not even entirely out of Silk’s—
Droit implored Morgan to make an effort with linear thought. If he would insist on summoning the past, he’d forever remain its captive. The point of it all was that Rosemary had marred his record, but now if Morgan would simply concentrate, everything would come right. Now, here, tonight, if Morgan would take himself in hand, ho-ho, he could and would enter the invigorating reality he had just that afternoon envisioned.
Morgan threw back the rest of his pint, strode nonchalantly to the bar, and asked Pa for a whiskey. Pa pulled a second pint. Morgan took it with a smile, as if he’d only been joking about the whiskey. He drank half of it at the bar and then set it at his table and went down the back of the pub. He glanced at himself in the glass of the hunting sketch. He looked irresistible. He cut out the back, but instead of proceeding down the garden to the toilets, he leaned against the heavy door of the kitchen.
Polly was there. Her face flushed over a gargantuan stove as she dished something out to a plate. When she saw him, she gave a little gasp. Morgan flashed her a fifty-watt smile:
—Hallo, gorgeous.
She failed to mask an embarrassed grin and fumbled the spoon she was holding.
—That for me? Morgan asked, sidling up to her.
She nodded.
—You haven’t spoken to me at all, Poll. Why’s that?
She looked away. He leaned over the table and retrieved the spoon for her.
—Whatever I did, can’t you forgive me, Poll?
—It weren’t nothing you did, she protested.
—Weren’t it?
—No!
He proffered the spoon, and when she took it, he grasped her hand.
—I’ll be in an awful mess if they find out I’m here tonight, he said.
Concern flooded her face.
—Oh, no, pet. What was you thinking?
Morgan mirrored her expression:
—Only of you, Poll.
—Me?
The flush now flooded down her neck and across the bit of her chest that escaped the clutches of her spinster-aunt frock.
—You know they sacked me from school, didn’t you, Poll?
—Oh, no, pet! Whyever for?
—Something happened, Poll, something bad. And they think it was to do with me, but it weren’t.
—Sommat in paper?
Morgan wasn’t sure he approved of this glimmer of shrewdness.
—The point, Polly, is that I’m back now, and if I can tell you a very great secret…?
—Aye.
He inhaled, as if preparing to leap off a cliff.
—I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.
A grave expression came over her. She asked him what he meant.
He didn’t need shoving. He’d had enough of being a boy, enough wafting about, a bystander in other people’s stories. She gasped as their lips touched, but then she was melting against him, or perhaps he was the one melting. Her lips parted and he didn’t know what to do with his hands, but again he could only think, I want it—it her mouth, it her waist, it her frock and what lay beneath—her chest, her legs, her …
Her tongue reached for his, and his cock was hard, which didn’t distress her as it had Rosemary—linear thought, linear thought—but his mind suddenly fixed on the problem of what to call it, that place between her legs where boys were supposed to go. The authors of The Pearl called it several things, but Morgan was having trouble thinking those words towards Polly. Polly was not Lady Pokingham. Neither was she one of those first-name-only victims of male lust, fit only to flog, deflower, and sell into white slavery. Polly was wholesome. Polly’s mouth tasted of ale, and her hair smelt of the mouthwatering scents in that kitchen.
They paused to breathe and he wondered what to say, but she set upon him again, running her hands through his hair in a way that gave him shivers. Then she was running her hands down his back and touching the back of his trousers.
He gasped. He was meant to be running his hands over her. She took his lower lip between her teeth and bit it. He yelped, his mouth in hers, and she gave a kind of laugh. Was he succeeding with her? She took hold of his hand and guided it to the buttons on the front of her dress, which she hastily unfastened, continuing with his hand past the edge of her frock, beneath it, beneath yet more fabric, her chemise probably (what did girls call their inexplicable bits of wardrobe?), to the indescribable part inside. It was soft, malleable, warm, like … thinking had no place! This was the time for feeling. Her hands fumbled with his flies, and he pressed his hand farther into her chemise as she conquered his buttons and released him. A moment of panic ensued as he wondered whether Polly would admire his cock quite as much as some boys seemed to, but whether she admired it or not, she took it in her hands.
She didn’t handle him as he handled himself, and her touch quickly pushed him to the point of—
—Wait, he begged.
—Polly?
Pa’s voice from without—she froze.
—Where’s that pie?
She hesitated.
—Coming.
And as she pulled away, her sleeve caught his buttons. Morgan tried to help but only succeeded in banging his head against hers. When she finally pulled free, he could see her pulse beating in her throat.
—You’re gorgeous, he said.
—Go on.
He did up his trousers. Blood coursed across his face and down the back of his neck. He ached.
—When can I see you again? he asked.
Polly hauled two pies out of the oven and clattered them onto a tray. Winking, she hoisted the tray to her shoulder and disappeared with it through the door to the bar. Morgan, too dazed to think, stumbled into the back garden, through the gate, and into the street. The town clock informed him Prep had just ended. He forced himself to jog to the woods, where he slipped into its darkness and broke into a run.
* * *
As Prefect of Hall, Kilby demanded to know where Morgan had been. Morgan opined that it scarcely seemed any of Kilby’s affair as Morgan was in the Upper School and had therefore been trusted to do his prep independently all year. This weak-chinned item refused to accept Morgan’s rational defense and pressed for details. It appeared Morgan’s studymates had not been able to enlighten the flunky, and he claimed Morgan’s whereabouts had become his business when Morgan had failed to turn up for prayers. Morgan suggested that Kilby have his eyes checked, for Morgan had indeed attended evening chapel, but due to having been detained in consultation with Mr. Grieves—perhaps the bobby-in-training would like to question their illustrious history master? Oh, had Mr. Grieves departed? How inconvenient—due to their protracted conference on the subject of cotton mills, Morgan had been forced to sit apart from his companions. Kilby considered this alleged state of affairs implausible seeing that he was rigorous with chapel attendance, always making sure to check boys on exit as well as entrance. Morgan confessed this difficult to believe as he had on several occasions noticed Kilby’s esteemed eminence conferring with his counterparts in other Houses on the matter of wagers. Perhaps he had been similarly engaged this evening when Morgan had passed into and out of the chapel amidst the Academy’s two hundred and twelve other denizens? Kilby lost his patience at this point, and unfortunately, Nathan and Laurie chose that moment to emerge from the washrooms and utter sounds, albeit brief, which betrayed their surprise. Morgan was therefore invited to visit the JCR at his earliest convenience upon changing for bed and performing his evening ablutions.
—Thanks a lot! Morgan said when Kilby had left.
—Where on earth were you? Nathan demanded.
Morgan glared at them both and began to undress. Laurie sprawled across the bench:
—I thought you said you weren’t going to the Keys alone anymore.
—It was spur-of-the-moment.
—A promise is a promise, Nathan insisted.
—It was a solo expedition.
Nathan and Laurie took great exception to this claim. They followed Morgan into the washroom, which was emptying as Lower School lights-out was called.
—Whatever you call it, Laurie said, I hope it was worth it. Kilby looked incandescent.
—Sod Kilby, Morgan said. It was worth ten JCR whackings.
They drew near, curiosity fired. Morgan wet his toothbrush and dipped it in powder:
—Polly.
—What!
Nathan looked as though he’d forgotten how to breathe.
—Did you…?
Morgan began to clean his teeth.
—Don’t imagine you’re stopping there!
* * *
Something was seriously the matter with his balls. They’d ached countless times before, but this was another order of magnitude. Having to see the JCR was a massive impediment to the release his body so urgently required. He sauntered downstairs but his lungs failed to pump with conviction. It had been a long time since he’d had the cane and even longer since he’d had it in pajamas. He cared nothing in principle for the JCR’s fatuous displays, but he had not been prepared to suffer them today.
JCR be hanged, it was worth it for Polly. Her lips, their heat, their strength, the fullness of her tongue, the aggression of her teeth, and—God!—the agility of her fingers and the unspeakable flesh beneath her buttons. Even thinking of her was returning him to—
—Wilberforce, what the hell are you doing?
Morgan pressed against the window and composed his face before his Captain of Games.
—Pondering the ecstasies of cricket, Barlow.
—Don’t you think you’re in enough hot water? Move, so we can be done with this wretched day.
As Barlow hauled him down the stairs, Morgan tightened the cord of his dressing gown and hoped his cock would get itself under control. It wasn’t the worst thing to feel that kind of hunger before being whacked. The worst thing, Silk taught him, was to spunk first. Everything hurt worse after spunking. Still, it wouldn’t do to be obvious with the JCR, that meddling, self-important trio of morons.
—Right, Rabbet began, are you going to tell us where you’ve been?
—I’ve already told Kilby, but he don’t like facts.
—That’s because they aren’t facts, Kilby snapped.
—Do you fancy yourself Sherlock Holmes, Kilby? Can you read the history of my evening on my trouser flies?
—You need taking down a peg, Barlow told him.
—Do I, Barlow? Do you reckon that with the same cunning intellect that’s led our great House to ruin twice this week?
Barlow stepped forward:
—You don’t even belong here, Wilberforce.
—I’m glad we agree. Good night.
Morgan turned on his heel, but Kilby blocked the door.
—Things have changed, you impertinent little pip.
—The Academy is under new leadership, said Rabbet.
—Read that on a notice board, have you? Funny, but as you three are still here, efficient as ever, you’ll excuse me if I can’t believe everything I’m told.
—Look! Barlow exclaimed. We aren’t going to gas around with you all night!
—That is a relief. Can I go?
Rabbet roused himself from his chair and took up the cane, which had been lying across the table.
—Leave off the bravado and touch your toes, Wilberforce. Unless you’d rather speak with Burton-Lee.
Courage draining, Morgan summoned a final bluster:
—I do wish you’d quit flapping like hens and get it over with.
He stepped forward and touched the toes of his slippers.
—Dressing gown off, Rabbet said.
Morgan stood, sighed contemptuously, and removed his dressing gown. Rabbet passed the cane to Kilby.
—Bend over, Kilby said sonorously.
Morgan did, feeling a chill.
—Let’s start with six and see how we get on.
* * *
John dropped his satchel at the foot of his staircase, collected his post, and retreated to the Keys. The room was more crowded than usual, and Polly informed him that they were out of pies. Tea at the Academy had been inedible, and John felt frantic. Would peas and chips do? Polly asked. They would, John replied gratefully, they would indeed. He collapsed into his usual seat and massaged the base of his skull.
The day was over. He’d marked three sets of books during Prep. Only agreeable things remained.
Polly brought him his tea, and he ran his penknife under the flap of an envelope addressed in his goddaughter’s hand. Enclosed was a sketch: two figures (“you & me!”) fishing for … stars? (“a fishey picknick in boats”). His eyes stung. Things were getting better, and not just generally. The afternoon had delivered his first affirmative encounter with Wilberforce since last term. The boy had taken John’s batting advice and appeared buoyed by the results. He would likely be stiff and sore after the day’s practice, but tomorrow John would present a regime of exercises and stretching.
The hubbub in the room was growing louder as debate about the looming strike turned to quarrel. John knew he should be concerned about the plight of the miners, and he was of course—of course—but Wilberforce had listened to him! John had managed to say the right things and in the right tone. Rehabilitation had begun. For once John felt neither restive nor grim, but only rather pleasantly drained, as he had felt at Marlborough in the good season, when the younger boys had looked to him for direction and he had given it with the kind of warmth and rigor the Bishop had shown him.
It didn’t necessarily follow that he’d abandoned every single thing. Maybe some things, the good things, were such a part of his fabric that they couldn’t be discarded.
It was a thought.