Jamie broke into his lesson and dropped a black-edged notice on his desk. The form stood up as John twigged the Marlborough letterhead.
—Cab at quarter to three, Jamie said.
John told the class to sit back down as he stepped into the corridor to absorb the news: their former Housemaster at Marlborough had died, the man who had later recruited Jamie to the staff.
—I’ve rung the supply agency, Jamie said. They’re sending Johnson.
—But—
—He was fine last month for Henri.
Lessons, John explained, were the least of his concerns. He was never quite coherent when put on the spot, but he tried to get across to Jamie that joining him for the funeral was out of the question.
—We’ll be gone two days, Jamie said. Nothing is going to happen to the woman in forty-eight hours.
At the mention of Meg, John’s words tumbled: of course nothing would happen to her, but … Jamie gave him the expression he used with boys digging themselves into craters. When he dried up, Jamie revealed that he’d already rung Marlborough and said they were both coming.
—If you don’t turn up, people will wonder.
John hadn’t set foot on Salisbury Plain since leaving it for Cambridge, and by design. Now he’d been ambushed by death, which always got you from behind.
Of course, Marlborough wasn’t something they discussed, but attending a funeral did not mean discussing anything. Jamie had taken John’s excuses as the usual blathering, or at worse a sulk at being diverted from his correspondence with a woman who would be the death of him. John hadn’t been as close to their Housemaster as Jamie had been, but the man—Ali as everyone called him, after his penchant for quoting Dante—had been as fond of John as a Housemaster could be of a Games captain who’d also won the scholarships John had won. Since John had not kept in touch after leaving, he’d no notion of the way Ali had later hauled Jamie into line, how he’d helped secure his commission, how, ages later, he’d stood by him in his disputes with his father over ordination and his degree, or how he’d moved behind the scenes to get him the post at Marlborough. John probably considered Ali a tedious figure of the previous generation, views outmoded, prejudices unsavory, a stumbling block to progress.
It was unwise to dwell on Ali while sharing a railway carriage with John. They had a long journey ahead—hours on the train, a room at the club tonight, more railway tomorrow—and plainly they couldn’t speak of Ali, any more than they could speak of Marion.
John didn’t see the point of having come to the funeral itself. Most people had arrived for the luncheon, which spilled out of the Master’s garden into the quadrangle. As John predicted, Jamie was quickly surrounded. The staff knew him and greeted him fondly, half as former colleague and half as protégé made good. John left him surrounded by Sixth Formers who plainly knew and adored him.
Out on the lawn, Old Boys—now old men—squinted in the sunshine and gulped stiff drinks. John didn’t recognize anyone. Those who’d survived the war would be balding, paunchy, or maimed, and they would expect a war story from him. Perhaps it would be easiest simply to invent one? He felt ashamed as soon as he thought it; he hadn’t stood white feathers to crumble before these people.
—Grieves?
A man in a crisp linen suit was standing before him. John froze.
Plenty of people had accused him of shirking. He was a pacifist out of cowardice, they said, or at best for the love of a girl. How could he claim conscience, they asked, when nine months earlier he’d won his school’s shooting plaque?
—Grievous! the man said. It is you!
The man’s neck had thickened, but John suddenly knew him: Merewether, fellow prefect 1913–14, Head Boy to John’s Captain of Games. Could he say a heart murmur had kept him off the lines?
—What are you drinking? Merewether asked.
John finished his lemonade:
—Scotch.
Merewether snagged a servant, John’s glass was replaced, and Merewether was not asking about the war but was taking his arm and leading him through the arches to the House that had been theirs. John hadn’t imagined he could remember how it smelled, but stepping inside, he did. The current pupils were outdoors in the fine weather, leaving the House eerily empty.
—Do you remember, Merewether asked, when we were fags and Malpass told me to stand still and have my face slapped?
It had been a classic phrase.
—Then I ducked and he broke his wrist on the doorframe.
They were standing, John realized, before that very door. Despite himself, he smiled, as he had then.
—They came down on you like a ton of bricks.
—Oh, but it was worth it, Merewether said. Brute couldn’t bowl straight all summer. This is still, to my mind, the perfect door. Do you think they’ll let me have it when they tear the place down?
John and Merewether had gone up the school together, Jamie a year behind them, and it seemed natural to fall back into the friendship, as if seventeen years hadn’t passed in silence. When other people approached, Merewether peeled John away as if he meant to monopolize him for the day. To his relief, John found that his former companion had grown into a stylish version of his better traits. He struck a certain figure. Unlike other acquaintances, amusing as children, insufferable as adults, Merewether appeared to John as someone he ought to have maintained. Merewether remembered sport, pranks, their late Housemaster in his comical prime. He kept up a monologue as they roamed the corridors, one that would never comprise or admit the darts silently stabbing John.
Back on the lawn, his thirst had grown.
—Double, thank you, neat.
Jamie looked brilliant across the quad, like the sun reflected off tea trays, and John felt the old urgency. Jamie chattered effortlessly, making friends at will, as if he actually were the cast-off from Heaven John had always imagined. How else to explain the way things never marred him, whereas John always emerged more damaged than before, diminished and compromised. Worse.
Ali’s widow looked better than Jamie expected. She sought him out and made him sit with her. She asked after Marion, knew her name although they’d never met. She asked if they had children. Children were essential, she said. It wasn’t life without them.
John walked with Merewether to the station, where Jamie promised to meet him later.
—So, Merewether said, you’re up at the Bastion’s college.
John hadn’t heard that nickname since school, and despite a day rehearsing those times, Merewether hadn’t mentioned Jamie, any more than he’d mentioned the war. Now, outside school bounds, Merewether was showing that he knew things.
—Housemaster there, yes, John said.
—Always thought it would be the other way round.
The lilacs were drooping like fruit along a fence.
—Still, Merewether said, Sebastian always had face, even if he was too much of a scoundrel to make prefect.
—Top face and plenty. Turned the place around, John said, like a top.
—Went religious, did he?
John tugged at the blossoms, but they wouldn’t come. Magic Merewether conjured a penknife.
—Tell me, Grievous, you married?
Presented them, laurels, to John.
—Passed away, in the flu, just after—
—I am sorry.
His arm was being touched, but not as in the House. Then as fellow tourist, now a touch that meant a feeling.
—And you?
—Confirmed bachelor, Merewether laughed. Too much fun in the FO, you know. Females, children, no idea how you stand them.
The flowers were bopping him in the face. He tried to explain, his boys were hardly children.
—Never mind, Merewether said. It only seems a waste of you, an usher, for Sebastian of all people.
They were thirsty again at the station, but when five o’clock came, Jamie had not arrived.
—Come down with me, Merewether suggested. I can give you a bed for the night.
But Jamie had the tickets for a sleeper, and he had books to mark—
—Keep in touch this time, won’t you, Grievous?
Merewether handed him a card and then boarded the train. A harpy screamed. Down came the window:
—When you’re ready for proper work, let me know.
The whistle had stopped, but his ears still hurt.
—There’s a group I’ve got. Clever, like you.
Steam fogged around.
—You’d find it amusing.
He was late to meet John, and it was all because of that man: once a pupil of Ali’s and, it emerged, later protégé of Jamie’s godfather, so of course acquaintance of Overall, the Chairman of the Academy’s Board. Jamie supposed he shouldn’t be surprised by the tangle of associations between men at gatherings such as these. This man, name of Arents, had funded a chapel for the prep school where Ali had once taught. He knew the firm that had built the Academy’s organ. He knew a firm that would build them another.
The cab dropped Jamie at the station with only minutes to spare. He clipped up the stairs, bursting to tell John about the organ. No John. On the platform were cases but still no John. Inside, slouched at the bar, aha, John, looking as though he’d be lucky to stagger out on two feet. Bill, porter, cases, John’s unwieldy bouquet.
—I’m never going back there, John moaned.
—Don’t be silly. Was Merewether a bore?
John crossed his legs as if he would curl up in the seat:
—He tried to seduce me, away from you.
—I thought you didn’t drink anymore.
John snorted:
—I’ve given up abstaining. Filthy habit.
—Quite.
—Wouldn’t want to be a Puritan!
Jamie decided to unfold the newspaper. The man came for their tickets.
—I just wonder what it’s all for! John resumed when the man had left.
—Don’t confuse drink with a philosophical turn of mind.
Jamie said it lightly, but John leaned forward, clutching Jamie’s actual knee:
—I’m being realistic. Facing things in the face.
Jamie shaded his eyes against the sun, which was pouring into the carriage. Reunions were strong drink generally, but one couldn’t take them seriously, which John would know if he’d had any practice. As a first outing, had reunion plus funeral been too much? Jamie had probably known it was, but time had been too short to reconsider. Now, before him, the fruits of his carelessness: more than a flap, John had been drinking, who knew how much, but given that he didn’t, enough to unfasten latches.
—You’re the last person I’d expect to get jaded, Jamie said consolingly.
But John lurched to his feet and yanked down the sash. A sooty wind pounded the carriage and knocked John’s flowers off the shelf, scratching Jamie in the face.
—Watch it!
Newspaper was flapping everywhere. Jamie shut the window. His temple stung.
—You’ll have someone’s eye out!
John crushed the wretched flowers into the rack, the smell of lilacs thick about them.
—You’ve always been at war with the world, Jamie said, exactly like your father.
He wanted to shut up and stop making things worse.
—If you can’t stop unclipping grenades, at least don’t lob them at friends, he said.
John dug at his temples as if pressure were building inside his skull and only knuckles would open a vent, and then, before Jamie could collect himself, John had collapsed across the seat dead asleep, a casualty to Jamie’s rashness.
Box room, cherries, scotch. Heartbeat, heartburn, had it always been so, even in the beginning, watching Jamie climb the tree and leap down into the pond? Or did it happen years later, three weeks before the end, war waiting to strike like a fever you didn’t know you had? Peak of their careers, Merewether said, but was he joking? Did the prince of darkness really wait, looking for his chance when you thought yourself strongest? Or was that a story you told to make things not your fault?
He was getting all the prizes and winning back the cricket cup. That day he bowled Harrow off the field, took eight of their wickets and sent them home cowed. The XI celebrated all evening in John’s study. But as they broke up for dorm rounds, there was Jamie, who didn’t belong, offering a bag of cherries fresh from home. Somehow, later, they wound up in a box room like juniors, smoking cheap cigarettes. They had the scotch his father had sent, saved for prize day but begun and finished that night. Out the dormer window sky faded to ink. Jamie’s breath, smoky and sweet: Don’t be a Puritan.
Sixteen days, seventeen nights, better than he’d known anything could be. Glances across the cricket pitch. Fear and thrill. Box-room swelter-welter, mind overthrown, heart held for the first time, hands of a friend yet new; had the treasure been there all along, waiting only to be opened? Eyes flowed, when they’d long forgotten how. No one said good things could hurt so much.
Was it weakness or joy that gave the prince his chance? His heart, unschooled, never saw it coming. Day seventeen, John bowled the House to victory against their bitter rivals. The House cheered the First XI even as they repaired to the changing room, John carried by the other ten. No one told him he ought to beware. No one told him joy would be so short. The changing room should have been empty, but it wasn’t. There, even there, Jamie with another, all eleven players seeing everything on view, two boys naked to their socks, flaunting every article of their common code. John didn’t even know the other boy’s name.
Gods of the school convened, and since he was one, he had to sit in judgment of Sebastian and his Ganymede. His heart was punching him everywhere at once, but Jamie’s face lacked disgrace or even fear. Sixth form library, outraged prefects, sentence handed down: a Marlborough flogging of the first degree. Execution fell to Merewether, who dispatched the Ganymede forcibly enough but then called for a pause and drew John into the corridor.
Sweat down his collar, mind full of lies, John closed the door against the library, but Merewether, it seemed, knew nothing of his guilt or even his shabby delusions. Merewether wanted only the arm of his fastest bowler to deal young Sebastian a lesson exemplary.
There was no way to refuse, and his arm didn’t want to. There was a hip flask with enough to silence thought. Detached, resolute, but when it came to it, Jamie’s face turned spark to flame—Down with it, down with it, unto the ground—until Merewether grabbed him and made him stop. Cane clattered to floor. Person—thing—dead. Library faces all turned to him in awe and recoil.
Clock tower. Roof. Down below, the grass. Smooth, far away. Exit quick, over the edge—like his mother when she’d swing him up in her arms, whoosh, and set him down again. More! No one picked him up and no one set him down, but his shoes, when he looked, were new. Not his shoes, but others, other shoes on other feet. New feet, new man. New wine, new skin. New heart.
In London, John was nearly sick in the cab. It seemed to be a case of getting drunker after stopping. At King’s Cross, Jamie paid to get onto the train early so John could collapse in the berth.
Jamie tried to sleep, too, as they rattled past tenements, fields, and finally dark, but indigestion kept him awake, and then they were hissing into York and John required waking.
—You look like hell, Jamie said. How much did you drink?
John seemed to consider the question rhetorical, and once they’d changed trains for the final leg, John closed his eyes again. When the sun broke in at the end of the Burdale tunnel, he howled as if he’d been suffering all along and couldn’t stand it anymore.
—Dog bit hard?
—I’m done! John declared. I quit.
—That’s the spirit.
—I mean I resign.
—This again?
—I’m serious! Put both of us out of our misery. Don’t know how you’ve stood me so long.
Not pique, but self-pity. John was prone to both. Jamie mentally rehearsed the standard lines, but nothing sounded right.
—Who else can I trust? he said.
John tugged at his hair, for all the world like a madman on the heath:
—Trust? How could you trust me after—
His voice broke into a sob. Jamie froze.
—That? Don’t tell me you’re—
—It’s killing me!
—It wasn’t—
—No, John cried, my head! Someone’s drilling like …
The train slowed, and their platform slid into view. John had begun to sob. In the cab Jamie practiced detachment, and when they pulled up to the gates, Jamie helped John to the Tower, where Kardleigh gave an injection that quieted him.
—He had a bit to drink, Jamie told Kardleigh, but I haven’t seen him like this since we were boys.
—Oh?
—He used to get headaches. They were the only thing that could make him blub.
—Brought back old times, this funeral of yours?
—Something like that.