The next morning she drew him a bath and let him shave, dress, and come downstairs. Legs weak, head vacant, he felt descending the stairs that he had left something behind, something beyond his vocabulary but in any case unmourned. He sat at a table with his nurse and her son. The boy’s attire—half slovenly school uniform, half ill-fitting pullover—jarred him but at the same time sharpened a hunger that had just arisen, almost as he used to get when discovering an author he’d not yet known.
Nurse Riding instructed them both to eat their breakfast and then pestered as if they might disobey. The boy did not meet his eye (whether he would not or could not, John couldn’t say), and he resisted his mother in small but persistent ways: dropping a piece of sausage as if by accident onto the floor (not a whole sausage, only a piece); cutting his food into the smallest possible bites and trying her patience with the length of time he proposed to spend eating them; getting up in the middle of the meal to put her pans to soak in the sink; asking her to repeat herself as if he’d been too lost in thought to hear her the first time—a parade of silent dissent.
After breakfast, they sat by the fire in the room she called a parlor. She read him headlines from the morning newspaper but refused to let him peruse it himself: Sufficient unto the day are the headlines thereof. The boy took an inordinate time over the dishes and then breezed through the parlor announcing a bicycle outing.
—Sit down and behave, his mother admonished. You aren’t going anywhere in this snow.
John was surprised to see flakes blowing past the window and piling up on the gate. His chest ached again, but with pleasure for the simplest details in the living world.
Being forced to sit in a small, close room with one’s Housemaster and mother, any concentration for reading broken by their intermittent chatter, would be enough to drive anyone round the bend. Add to that the memory of the girl’s voice down the telephone and the picture of her at the Christmas tea, her godfather’s arm on her shoulder—his nerves buckled, and he was forced to banish her from his mind as long as this man remained in his presence. No one had said how long that would be, but when he asked his mother when Peter would arrive, she looked up from her knitting in a way that made him feel she’d been biding her time:
—Didn’t I tell you, darling? The wire’s somewhere.
She rummaged in that sinister workbasket, emphasizing with each rustle that she had her own correspondences and would conduct her affairs without regard to him.
—Ah, here it is.
He took it, jealous and ashamed, wishing he could say he didn’t care to read it. BESIEGED BY WEATHER STOP. Stuck in Shetland, no boats out, Peter wished them a happy Christmas and promised to come down in the New Year. He sent Gray his love, and she’d never told him.
—I thought Peter didn’t write letters.
—A wire is hardly a letter, darling.
Mr. Grieves was staring at him in a way he didn’t recognize, one that made him feel examined. The man sat with his legs crossed on the settee beside his mother; he wore a dressing gown over his shirtsleeves, an unseemly costume that would have been almost scandalous were they not holed up in a let cottage as if on holiday together. Earlier Grieves had drawn a chair up to their table and eaten their breakfast as if it were natural to do so. He had complimented his mother’s cookery and now he was chatting with her like some old family friend. At other moments, he behaved as her patient, placid and compliant, as if he might reply Yes, Matron. All morning he had bowed to her commands, stirring in Gray the disconcerting feeling of being a fellow subject with him.
Even though the boy couldn’t look at him, John could look back, with leisure in the coal-warmed cottage for things he’d lacked the patience or capacity to perceive before. He could see how little the boy resembled his mother after all, and how indifferent he was to her beauty. He could see how tightly the boy held himself, even at leisure, as if a moment’s failed vigilance would allow the escape of … who knew what? He could see that the Sullen & Resentful he’d experienced at school was merely a restrained version of what the boy performed for his mother. And John could see that the mother didn’t understand her son, or that if she had understood him once, she had no notion now of what he’d become, a state of affairs that repulsed and frightened her in equal measure. She didn’t recognize the boy’s provocations for what they were, and instead took every slight as confirmation of their estrangement. They recoiled, the pair of them, from confrontation or indeed any closeness, clinging instead to a polite armistice, which John found chilly and exhausting. They were lost, these two, like Odysseus at the hands of Poseidon—or were they Penelope and Telemachus, their Odysseus lost to them? His brain was too feeble for analogies, but it was nevertheless obvious that this family, what remained of it, was adrift. The fact that they had no home and had chosen to spend the Christmas holidays in this unlikely cottage in such an unlikely spot seemed to John opaquely symbolic. It was all colley-west and crooked, as Morgan used to say. It could take, John thought, a long time to set right. More time than he possessed even in the long holiday.
But the boy wasn’t as impossible as all that, not when John recalled, with an astringent kind of relish, the heart he had discovered in the father’s box and the chapel’s floor, the one loved by those John loved still. And as for his mother, John felt almost light-headed contemplating the persons recent hours had grafted onto her—the widow, his correspondent, his nurse, the friend who kept watch and read him back to life. Through it all he could see that a shadow lingered near her, a pain only dimly concealed, and John thought, with a chivalrous indignation, that the shade had overstayed its welcome and that someone ought to show it the door and keep her from following, someone who knew what shadows were but who nevertheless had the bloody-mindedness to lure her into intercourse with the living, as he was doing chatting over newspaper headlines and playing Black Maria. John knew little of cards, but he found her a hawkish player. When the boy pleaded headache after losing four hands, she retired, claiming the game wasn’t suited for two. A pity, John thought; he would lose to her all the day if he could.
Mrs. Riding, speaking only through a telephone, had pulled her father together as he’d not been pulled before. Uncle John would not be coming for Christmas, her father reported, but she was not to worry even in the least. Uncle John was in the best of hands and wanted more than anything for her to have the grandest Christmas. They would go and visit him in the New Year with Dr. Sebastian, but meantime, her father told her, they would have a change of scene. She reminded him that she had only arrived in Cambridge the week before; it had scarcely had time to get old. He conceded she was right as always, but was she sure she wouldn’t fancy a chalet in Bavaria, sledding, gingerbread houses, a museum of cuckoo clocks? Or perhaps Lapland, reindeer, Father Christmas, Eskimos. Did they have Eskimos in Lapland, or only Laps? He began to hum a tune, and she had to tell him that wasn’t how it went.
She purchased an empire map to decorate her empty wall but took it down after one night. Its pink places seemed to suffocate the world, promising journeys arduous and bland.
His first-ever letter had come. It fed and it teased, leaving her more vexed than before. Who was this boy signing himself Me? He didn’t acknowledge the return of his letters (her letters? theirs?), nor did he allude to her final dispatch, but only wished her a happy Christmas and signed off, More later, Me.
She, like her husband, addressed her son as Gray, when she addressed him at all. John couldn’t bring himself to follow suit, yet the look on her face when he once called the boy Thomas—as if he’d uttered an obscenity—was enough to scald the name from his vocabulary. He couldn’t very well call the boy Riding, not there, so he tried to avoid the direct address altogether.
When the boy retreated upstairs after cards, John picked up the book he’d left behind, a specimen of the penny dreadfuls John was often forced to confiscate. He’d never actually read one, and he spent an absorbed hour with the florid, high-pitched prose. At tea, he tried to make a joke about it, but this only prompted the mother to request that he cure her son of his ghastly taste. When John had said mildly that he’d always found the boy capable of directing his own reading, the boy had scowled as if John had betrayed him.
Yet beneath the scowls, John recognized something else, something he’d seen in the treasure-mapped box: an outsize heart and a mind bewildered by its exertions. The sullenness, he realized, was not insolence but self-recrimination. John watched as bedtime neared and the boy, worn out by the day and its demands, believed himself unobserved. A terrible longing seemed to fill him, but before it could overflow its banks, it was seized in iron fist and turned to imagined accusation.
—Another day wasted! the boy declared.
His mother glanced up from her knitting:
—You needn’t take that tone.
—I’m not! he protested. I’ll start on the holiday task tomorrow.
The boy hadn’t looked at him, but John felt the comment as rebuke.
—I haven’t the slightest interest in your holiday task, his mother said icily.
The boy took umbrage and made for the other room:
—All right, I’ll start now!
The door closed loudly, knife edge between slamming it and not.
He was stepping out of his bedroom at Swan Cottage. December air drifted along the floorboards, encircling his toes, and he heard the crunch of shovel against snow and glimpsed through the window his mother below, clearing the walk in dressing gown and Wellington boots. Behind the door at the top of the stairs, faintly then louder, his father’s voice was singing a Christmas carol. The latch was warm. The door fell open. His father looked up from his work and smiled.
John woke with a gasp. Everything hurt. The vial stood on the dresser, empty his whole long life. His slippers were lost under the bed, but the corridor floor was warmer somehow. He felt his way along it towards the bathroom, but behind the other door, a sound like a howl.
The door was ajar, and moonlight painted the wall. The boy lay on his front, one arm exposed and wrapped around the mattress as if clinging to a raft. His eyes were closed, but there were tears, and a strained sobbing. John sat down on the edge of the bed.
—Gray?
With a cough, the boy turned his face into the pillow. Did he know he was there, or was he weeping out of his sleep? The sound was jagged, throttled, almost—he realized like a blow in the dark—the same as the sound from that other pillow, the cushion in his study where the boy had also cried out, also choked, undergoing something at least as sore and categorically more immediate. He wanted to pull the boy out of his dream, and he wished against all possibility that he could pull him also out of that day, to stop him before it went too far, to shield him from the man he had been.
Another blow then, as sudden as the first but given in the light: What if the fault had not been the orders but the way they had been executed? What if the punishment had wrecked not because it was wicked or because he himself was wicked, but because he had hardened his heart, because he’d hated him, because he’d abandoned the boy when he’d been the most desolate?
Once during a late-night chat, Morgan had been talking of some boy (Pearce?) when he shifted into the confidential tone he used for things he thought John already knew:
—Sometimes it’s hard, sir.
—Hard?
—To hurt them.
John remembered the shock of hearing it spoken without the veil of euphemism.
—Or rather, Morgan continued, it’s hard to hurt them and not harden your heart.
John remembered his deep unease.
—But that’s what it takes, isn’t it, sir?
—A strong arm and a soft heart?
John had said it ironically, but Morgan took it straight.
—Better from someone who minds than someone who doesn’t, sir. Better than what they do to themselves if left on their own.
—To themselves?
—There are people, Grieves Sahib, who go their whole lives holding on to mistakes, their own cruelest master.
John remembered changing the subject to escape the flood of shame. He felt shame now, but this time he didn’t flee. He sat on the bed and withstood it until the boy’s tears were replaced by a deep and regular breathing.
This boy had never hated him. This boy had never mocked him. This boy had only needed him, and did even still.
The sun flooded the kitchen window as John lit the stove and made the tea. He was sweeping out the grate when she emerged from the little study, hair loose and tangled.
—You must let me sleep downstairs tonight, he said.
She rubbed the back of her neck and claimed she’d grown fond of the chaise. He wished he could rub it for her, there where she couldn’t get purchase.
—Anyway, she continued, someone needs to play Father Christmas.
His mind raced.
—It’s Christmas Eve, she said as he realized it.
He had known he would spend Christmas there—she’d told him as much when relating the telephone calls—but it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder how it would go, here in this remoteness with these two.
—You’ll come with us, I hope?
To church, she explained. Across the road at half past ten. A late supper, she’d thought. He was ready, she judged, to go out.
He poured out the tea as his mind began to fire. They hadn’t prepared to have Christmas together, but she had been knitting a stocking cap, and he thought it was almost done. He had nothing to give either of them.
—I need a favor.
—Oh?
She regarded him with hopeful curiosity. He asked if he remembered a motorcar. One that might drive him to the Academy.
—You won’t find what you’re looking for.
—That isn’t what I’m looking for.
He swept snow off the car as she coaxed it to life. Through thick lanes she steered them, undamaged, to the school. He told her to keep the motor running, he wouldn’t be long.
French windows he found closed but unlatched, his study smelling carbolic. The whole place seemed reduced in size, like a childhood haunt visited years later. He went to his room and packed a few items of clothing. From the box on his dresser, he removed a pink broach, coral, his father had claimed, carved in a pattern he’d always seen as lace. Of her bones are coral made, nothing of her that doth fade—he wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
From his study, treasure box. And since they needed something to read, he dug through pigeonhole detritus for magazines that had escaped the inferno, amidst which—he wasn’t even surprised anymore—yet another letter for Thomas Gray Riding, postmarked the day term ended, hand of Wilberforce, M. Boxes within boxes, secrets within secrets, hearts within minds, and in them all…?
The taps were running upstairs when they came in. Eventually, the boy slouched downstairs, and his mother took in his ill-rested appearance.
—Sat up late with those playing cards, have you?
He shrugged.
—The day’s half over, she complained.
The boy’s gaze darted to the fireplace, which John had laid but not yet lit. Anxious & Pleasing, John thought, at its peak, though the boy hadn’t even spoken. John watched as he bustled, checking the kitchen stove, laying the breakfast table, even tidying the parlor, as if he expected disaster to have ensued in the night.
—Did you sleep well? John asked.
—Yes, sir.
The sir stung, though it had been uttered casually enough. It seemed to unsettle the boy, too, and he made for the other room.
—Just sit down, please, John said.
The boy froze.
—I won’t bite, not today at any rate.
The boy sat, rigidly, fiddling with a cuff link. John puzzled over something to say, something to put the boy at ease or at least discover whether he recalled his tears in the night, but before anything occurred to him, Elsa called them to breakfast.
At the table, the boy announced that he would forgo church that evening.
—I beg your pardon? she said with lethal calm.
—I think it would be better for me to rest, he continued less confidently.
He produced a yawn and a cough as evidence, but she declared that he could have a nap instead.
As the day wore on and they made an effort to decorate the parlor, such as they could without a tree or, as the boy plaintively reminded her, without their usual ornaments, John saw how much the boy curried her disapproval, yet how her barbs stung him and how her coldness veiled as pleasantry advanced the gears of the A&P until it hardened into the S&R, or something more grim.
—Can’t we go to York Minster instead? the boy tried.
—It’s much too far.
—We could take the train.
—And how would we get back?
—You brought the motorcar right across the country, yet you can’t see a way to get to York tonight?
She plunged her needle into the pincushion, cranberries dangling from the thread:
—I’ve no idea what I’ve done to deserve this treatment!
Her eyes brimmed, her voice rose:
—Whatever it is, I’d rather you say it. I’m sure I can’t stand any more of your—
She broke off in tears.
John found himself curiously cool, as if he were merely watching a play, one in fact he’d already seen. He felt sure he could write the rest of the script, and indeed the boy was rising silently, taking the coal scuttle, and slipping meekly outside.
How long would it continue, the frankly predictable skirmishing? When both were in the room, the air fairly seethed, but when the boy went upstairs to lie down, a weight seemed to leave his mother, and John’s friend returned, the woman he could make laugh. When later he sat alone with the boy, the mother having gone upstairs for a bath, John wordlessly passed him a half-completed crossword. The boy attacked it with zeal, and they passed it between them, silently correcting each other’s errors and leaving tentative answers in the margins, until together they mastered it. Were things always this way between the mother and son, or was his presence making things worse? Was he truly a bystander, as he’d been his whole life long?
Sometime after ten, the church bells began to play. John unstuffed his shoes and found them dry enough. He was just taking off his slippers when the boy appeared wearing pajamas and dressing gown.
—Don’t, his mother began, don’t even—
—I told you I’m not going.
—Thomas Gray Riding, you most certainly—
—I don’t believe in it.
—I beg your pardon?
—I’m an atheist.
It was all John could do not to laugh. There had been a time, perhaps, when such a declaration might have moved him to ire, but now he found it distinctly ridiculous.
—Atheists are welcome, I’m sure, he said.
She inhaled sharply, and the boy turned on him with a murderous expression. John had meant to diffuse the moment, but now he saw he’d accomplished the opposite.
—Why don’t you, the boy said slowly, just shut up.
John blinked.
—Gray! his mother cried.
—And you! the boy continued in the same venomous tone. If you want to go on worshipping someone who’s dead, then please yourself, but I’m not doing it.
She gasped. John almost gasped, but before he could think:
—Apologize to your mother.
—It’s true and she knows it.
John got up:
—I said apologize to your mother.
He stood where he was, wondering what he’d do if the boy refused again, but then the boy was turning pink and, inexplicably, grinning.
—It isn’t funny.
A smile still, as if he couldn’t wipe it from his face.
—Well? John said icily.
Gaze cast to the floor. A graceless apology.
—Thank you, John said. Now you can go in there and wait for me.
He gestured to the small room off the parlor. The boy gaped.
—Go on.
But went, kicking the ottoman on the way. When the door closed, John turned to his mother:
—Go ahead without us. This could take a while.
—But—
—Trust me, this once, please.
He was still smiling even though he knew it was making things worse. When Mr. Grieves came into the room, he tried to compose himself, but Mr. Grieves, too, looked out of character, his face mild and inscrutable. Rather than bark at him, the man busied himself lighting the other lamps in the room, spreading the glow across the whole book-lined chamber.
He felt almost as he used to with Morgan despite the strangeness of the scene. A room that wasn’t a study, quite. Housemaster and boy that weren’t, quite. His costume the same as he sometimes wore to see Morgan, and Mr. Grieves in his Sunday suit, an outfit Gray knew but not in this way. It was all like a stage set ineptly provided. He threw himself into the armchair in vexation.
—I don’t remember telling you to sit down, Mr. Grieves said.
He stood:
—I don’t have anything to say to you!
The man turned to face him but said nothing further, leaving him in the middle of the carpet feeling distinctly uneasy, not in the usual way, yet in a way he knew, quite.
John had no plan what to say or do. He trained all his concentration on the lamps. Finally when no more remained to be lit, he sat down in the armchair with a slow deliberation. Each breath brought him further into the scene, the real one they were making together here, and with each breath he admitted another fraction of the truth: he did know what he was doing; it hadn’t always been beyond him.
—I have had quite enough, he began mildly, and if you think I’m going to stand by and watch this nonsense, then you’re mistaken, I’m afraid.
He let this sink in, for both of them. The boy’s frame tightened:
—You’re not my father!
Dear God, the gauntlet already?
—And yet, John said, here we are.
The boy gaped:
—It’s none of your business!
—And yet, here we are.
—You’re not even my Housemaster!
—Yet, here we are.
The calm repetition pushed the boy to his limit.
—I don’t have to stand here and listen to you!
—You can leave, of course.
The boy turned furiously and made for the door.
—But I think, somehow, you won’t.
Hand on latch:
—Won’t I?
—No, John said. Because you know you’ve been wrong. And you know you deserve it.
—Deserve what?
—What I’m going to give you.
He hadn’t planned any of it, yet here he was removing his jacket, unfastening a cuff link, and rolling up a sleeve. One did it only for effect, of course, a signal of intent and a first move in the assertion of authority. Now, having done it, he had no choice but to carry it through. Literally, of course, there was always a choice, but despite the boy’s petulance, or perhaps because of it, he could see the boy had already joined the pact. He had not left the scene. He was standing at the door, scanning the room—for the customary objects?
—Oh, John said, we can get along perfectly well without that.
The boy looked startled, and John’s hands felt unsteady, not in the way they’d been lately, but in the way they used to be before a trial began. He placed a chair in the middle of the rug and took from his foot a carpet slipper.
—Sir…!
—We’ll have to make do.
His voice sounded bizarrely cheery, and even as part of him was looking for a way out, another part plunged forward with instincts no less keen for having been forgotten.
—I’m too old for that! the boy cried.
—You aren’t too old.
He thought the boy might bolt, but he didn’t.
—And it isn’t too late.
It wasn’t like the time with Halton. They were nearly the same size, but with Halton he’d done it to bring him to his senses, done it with vigor, surprise, and a school plimsol that meant business. Now, although the boy was still protesting, John felt strangely relaxed. This would take as long as it took. He told him to hold still, and then he began.
—Your mother doesn’t know what to do with you, does she?
He built a certain rhythm that made the words sound natural.
—Does she?
—No, sir.
He continued, reading the breath, the tension, the weight he gave over.
—And your father, what did he do with you?
—Nothing.
—When you’d done wrong?
A gasp, though certainly not from anything he was doing. He sensed the art of it, showing him he wouldn’t relent without pushing him over to defiance.
—Gray?
The name sounded as strange as in the night, but judging from the breath, some arrow had gone home.
—I’m waiting.
—He …
Don’t stop, not yet.
—He wouldn’t talk, that’s all.
—To anyone?
—To me.
—And when he died?
The boy erupted into coughing. John paused, and the coughing continued, not a performance, though certainly a reaction. John pulled him up and gave him a handkerchief as he fought, as if drowning, for breath. John fetched the wastepaper basket and stood beside him, holding his shoulder and trying to overcome the fear that was rushing in: no one was going to be hurt by a carpet slipper. He’d used it smartly but still, no one. This crisis of respiration had to have been conjured by the theater of it, though which part? The assertion of this particular style of authority? The domesticity of it, here in the little book-lined room? The closeness that forced them both into their roles, insisting that he wasn’t too old and that it wasn’t too late (though, God, for what?). Could it even be the mildness of the act when the boy expected something worse that had unlaced these strings so long knotted shut?
He coughed something into the wastepaper basket, and his breath began to come back under control.
—It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?
The boy winced, and John let the ambiguity stand. The boy’s shoulders had softened, and the impulse to petulance was gone, but he still held something, there in his chest, protected by his arms, which clutched one another.
—Right, John said. Get ready for bed.
—But—
A protest without conviction, issued for form’s sake.
—Clean your teeth, wash your face, come back to the kitchen.
This would take, John thought, a long time. More evenings. Many more, perhaps.
He heated water for steam inhalation and prepared the mixture the boy’s mother had been giving him. When the boy returned, John administered both.
—It would mean a lot to your mother, I think, if you went to church with her tomorrow.
The boy hacked loudly under the towel.
—I can’t.
—Won’t, you mean? Have a little charity.
The boy said nothing more, but when it came time for the mixture, he protested. It was vile and useless and he couldn’t be forced to take it.
—Don’t you think this is wearing a bit thin? John said.
The boy looked caught between cursing and laughing.
—You have my attention, so you can just calm down.
He handed him the mixture. The chin wavered, and he drank it.
—Right, John said, passing him a glass of water. It’s time you were asleep before Father Christmas passes us by.
He meant it as a joke in which the boy might play along, but to his dismay it summoned everything he’d labored to repel.
—I wish it weren’t Christmas! the boy exclaimed.
—You what?
—I hate Christmas.
Who was he to hate Christmas?
—You aren’t too old for presents, surely?
—I don’t want them!
—Whyever not?
Eyes threatening tears again, then retracting them, alchemy.
—I don’t deserve them.
He took him upstairs, watched as he got into bed. He was too exhausted to read to him, and suddenly too sad. He ought to make him say his prayers, but it seemed too pat and shallow a response. The sorrow that abided in this one answered the same that he carried. He’d been teased about his surname since he was old enough to know what it meant. The old Adam sat on them both. Neither singly nor together did they have the strength to cast it off.
He sat down again on the edge of the bed, and the boy lay with his face turned away. John turned down the lamp and waited for something to say, but his mind was filled with a scouring silence, a limitless nothing when he most needed aid.
The Bishop used to put his hand on John’s head, like this. He didn’t speak, but he held it this way, fingers on the crown. Sometimes his head seemed to tingle, even like this. Did the Bishop feel it, too, as his fingers were feeling it now, something potent and alien, fierce and good, flowing through him, through the same fingers that tipped the vial that almost stopped his heart, through the same hand that tried to kill this boy, or at least kill him off that day, through the same arm that wrapped around Meg as their lips told silent truth. His hand was touching the top of the boy’s head, and the thing that overshadowed was quickening him—real things never happened the way you expected. Cataclysms were all the same that way. You were living a life and then everything was different. The telegram fell, the rock rolled aside, and you were in a cottage as Christmas bells rang, and it was dark, and a star appeared.