Mefisto (3 page)

– Say hello, he said, to teacher’s pet.

The thing lolled in his hand like a parched and blackened tongue. Each boy could hear his neighbour swallow. Suddenly all of life up to this seemed a heedless, half-drunk frolic. Outside the window there was a stricken tree, then a field, then firs, then the hurt blue of a bare September sky.

I sat at the front of the class, appalled and fascinated. Each master, even the mildest, seemed mad in his own way. All were convinced that plots were being hatched behind their backs. They would whirl round on a heel from the blackboard, chalk suspended, and fix one boy or another wordlessly with a stare of smouldering suspicion. Without warning they would fly into terrible rages, diving among the desks after a miscreant and raining down blows on him as on some blunt obstruction against which they had barked their shins. Afterwards they were all shamefaced bluster, while the rest of the class averted its gaze from the victim slumped at his desk, hiccuping softly and knuckling his eyes.

At first I tried placating these distraught, violent men, offering up to them my skill at sums, tentatively, like a little gift. They were strangely unimpressed, indignant even, as if they thought it was all a trick, a form of conjuring, gaudy and shallow. I puzzled them, I suppose. I could do all sorts of mental calculations, yet the simplest things baffled me. Dates I found especially slippery. I was never sure what age I was, not knowing exactly what to subtract from what, since my first birthday had fallen not in the year in which I was born, but in the following year, and since, halfway through the present year, when another birthday arrived, I would find myself suddenly a year older, with half a year still to run on the calendar. It all had too much of actuality sticking to it. I felt at ease only with pure numbers, if a sum had solid things in it I balked, like a hamfisted juggler, bobbing and ducking frantically as half-crowns and cabbages, dominoes and sixpences, whizzed out of control around my head. And then there were those exemplars, those faceless men, measuring out the miles from A to B and from B to C, each at his own unwavering pace, I saw them in my mind, solitary, driven, labouring along white roads, in vast, white light. These things, these whizzing objects and tireless striding figures, plucked thus out of humble obscurity, had about them an air of startlement and gathering alarm with which I sympathized. They had never expected to be so intensely noticed.

– Well, Swan, how many apples does that make, eh?

A ripe red shape, with a sunburst trembling on its polished cheek, swelled and swelled in my brain, forcing out everything else.

– You are a dolt, my man. What are you?

– A dolt, sir.

– Precisely! Now put out your hand.

I would not cry, no matter how hard they hit me. I would sit with teeth clenched, my humming palms pressed between my knees and the blood slowly draining out of my face, and sometimes then, gratifyingly, it would seem the master, not I, who had suffered the worse humiliation.

Yet I did well, despite everything. I came top of the class. Every year I won the school prize for mental arithmetic. At home I kept such things dark. On the last day of every summer term, I would stop at the sluice gate behind the malt store on my way home, and tear up my report card and scatter the pieces on the surge.

Then without warning I was summoned one day to the headmaster’s office. My mother was there, in hat and Sunday coat, with her bag on her knees and her hands on her bag, motionless, looking at the carpet. The room was cramped and dim. On a pedestal on the wall a statue of a consumptive Virgin stood with heart transpierced, her little hands held out in a lugubrious gesture. It was a spring day outside, windy and bright. Father Barker’s big feet stuck out from under his desk, shod in lace-up black boots with thickly mended soles, and uppers worn to the texture of black crape paper. He was a large unhappy man with a moon face, blue-jowled and ponderous of gait. His nickname was Hound. This is a bit-part. He rose, delving under the skirts of his soutane, and brought out a grubby packet of cigarettes. He smoked with a kind of violence, grimly, as if performing an irksome but unavoidable duty. He had been saying, he said, what a fine scholar I was. He came from behind the desk and paced to and fro, his soutane swinging. At each turn he swerved heavily, like a horseman hauling an awkward mount. Grey worms of ash tumbled down the shiny black slope of his belly. He had high hopes, he said. He stopped, and loomed at my mother earnestly.

– High hopes, ma’am!

She lifted her gaze to me at last, reproachful, mute, a minor conspirator who has just found out the enormity of the plot. I looked away from her, to the window and the bright, blown day. Far trees heaved in silence, hugely labouring. I said nothing. Father Barker, lighting up again, was swallowed in a swirl of smoke and flying sparks.

Later, when I came home, a terrible silence reigned in the house. My mother stalked about the kitchen, still wearing her hat, buffeted by a storm of emotions, anger and pride, vague dread, a baffled resentment.

– Like a fool, I was, she cried. Like a fool, sitting there!

She had a horror of being singled out.

In the senior school our mathematics master was a man called Pender. He was English, and a layman. How he had come to St Stephen’s no one seemed to know. Elderly, thin, with a narrow, wedge-shaped head and long, curved limbs, he moved with the slow stealth of some tree-climbing creature. His suits, of good broadcloth greased with age, had the loose, crumpled look of a skin about to be sloughed. His taste was for the byways and blind alleys of his subject, for paradoxes and puzzles and mathematical games. He introduced into his lessons the most outlandish things, curved geometries and strange algebras, and strange ways of numbering. I can still recite a litany of the queer names I first heard in his class: Minkowski and Euler, Peano and Heaviside, Infeld, Sperner, Tarski and Olbers. He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. He would circle the room at a slow prance, his long arms intricately folded, surveying with a sardonic grin the rows of faces lifted up to him in attentive blankness. Common words when he spoke them – set, system, transformation, braid – took on an almost religious significance. He had a liturgical aspect himself, when he stood by the window, his profile lifted to the day’s pale light, a halo of white hair aglow on his gleaming pate, and spoke in his thin, piping voice of the binomial theorem, or boolean algebra, or of the mysterious affinity between the numbers of a fibonacci sequence and the spiral pattern of seeds on the face of a sunflower.

He was delighted with me, of course, but wary too, as if he suspected a trap. He tiptoed around me with nervous jocularity, swooping down on me suddenly as if to grab me, the wattles of his scrawny neck wobbling, and then quickly drawing back again, with a hissing laugh, darting a grey tongue-tip through a gap in his teeth where an eye-tooth was missing. By now I knew differential calculus, could solve the most delicate problems in trigonometry.

– Amazing, Mr Pender would sigh, chafing his papery hands. Quite amazing!

And he would laugh, his thin lips curling in a kind of snarl and the tip of his tongue darting out.

The class began to call me Pender’s pet. But I did not welcome this cloying and somehow perilous connection. The beatings that I used to get were less embarrassing, less difficult to manage, than Mr Pender’s furtive patronage. I tried retreating from him, made deliberate mistakes, pretended bafflement, but he saw through me, and smiled, with pursed mouth and cocked eyebrow, and pinched the back of my neck, and passed on blandly to other things.

Then one afternoon he appeared unannounced at our house. He sported a louche felt hat and carried a cane. Away from school he had the raffish, edgy air of an out-of-work actor.

– Mrs Swan? I was passing, and …

He smiled. She backed away from him, wiping her hands on her apron. Our square, she knew, was not a part of town Mr Pender would find himself in by chance. Sudden strangers worried her. She put him in the parlour and gave him a glass of sherry, bearing the thimble of tawny syrup from the sideboard with tremulous care.

– Ah, so kind.

She stood as in a trance, her hands clasped, not looking at him directly, but absorbing him in bits, his hat, his slender fingers, the limp bow-tie. He spoke quietly, with intensity, his eyes fixed on the table. She hardly listened, captivated by his delicate, attenuated presence. She had an urge to touch him. He sat, one narrow knee crossed on the other, fingering the stem of his glass. He had the faintly sinister self-possession of a priceless piece among fakes. Around him the familiar succumbed to a dispiriting magic. The flowered carpet, the wrought-iron firescreen, the plaster ducks ascending the wall, these things would never be the same again.

– An extraordinary phenomenon, Mrs Swan. Such a brilliant gift. A miracle, really. What can I say? One feels privileged.

An eager light glowed in his glaucous eye, and flecks of serum gathered at the corners of his mouth. She noticed the jumbled wreckage of his teeth. He stopped, and watched her, spreading the silence before her as a salesman would a sample of some wonderful costly stuff. She listened to him holding his breath. There was a wickerwork darn on the heel of his sock. She had a fleeting vision of what his rooms would be, the dust, the worn patch in the carpet, the tired light motionless in the corners. She roused herself.

– Yes, she said, smoothing her apron on her knee. Yes I see.

I sat on the sofa, looking at Mr Pender in silent amaze. His presence was an enormous and somehow daring violation. He smiled nervously when he glanced in my direction, and raised his voice and spoke rapidly, as if to hold something at bay. My mother looked at me as at an exotic, bright-plumed bird that had alighted suddenly in her parlour. First there was Father Barker and his high hopes, and now this. She felt a familiar, angry bafflement. The things he was saying, these plans, these propositions, she did not like them, she was frightened of them. They were incongruous here, like that expensive hat on the table, the cane he was twisting in his chalk-white hands. At last he rose. She showed him to the door.

– So glad, so glad to have met you, Mrs Swan.

She was suddenly tired of him and his precious manner, his smile, his gestures, the way he said her name, pressing it softly upon her like a blandishment. Outside the door he hesitated, eyeing the tender trees in the square. He should try once more, he knew, to impress this dim little woman, to wring a promise from her, but she looked so fearsome, with her arms folded and her mouth set, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. But oh, did she realize, did she, what an extraordinary – what an amazing – ? Anger and frustration reared up in him like a wave and broke, leaving a wash of sadness in their wake. How do I know these things? I just do. I am omniscient, sometimes. He smiled bleakly and turned away, lifting a finger from the knob of his cane in melancholy farewell.

When he was gone a hectic gaiety flourished briefly, as if the house like a frail vessel had brushed against disaster and survived. Then a thoughtful silence descended.

Uncle Ambrose called. He hesitated inside the door, sniffing at the strained atmosphere. He was a larger version of my father. His body was too big for the small head perched on it. He had close-set eyes and crinkly hair, and a raw, protuberant chin, deeply cleft and mercilessly shaved, like a tiny pair of smarting buttocks. He treated his ugliness with jealous attention, dressing it richly, pampering and petting it, as a mother with a defective child. Still his suits were always a shade too tight, his shoes a little too shiny. Silence came off him in wafts, like an intimation of pain. He seemed always on the point of blurting out some terrible, anguished confession. His reticence, his air of pained preoccupation, lent him a certain authority in our house. His opinion was respected. My mother told him of the teacher’s visit, flaring her nostrils and almost shouting, as if she were recounting an insult.
Put him in my hands
, Mr Pender had urged her, smiling his tense, toothed smile. Uncle Ambrose nodded seriously.

– Is that so? he said with care.

She waited. Uncle Ambrose continued to avoid her eye. She turned angrily to the stove, taking down a frying pan from a nail on the wall. My father had risen quietly and was making for the door.
Bang
went the pan. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at her over his glasses. He was in shirt-sleeves and braces, with the weekly paper in one hand and the doorknob in the other. He sighed.

– What? he said dully. What is it?

– Nothing! she cried, without turning, and laughed grimly. Not a thing!

She slapped a string of sausages on the pan, and a whoosh of smoke and flying fat shot up. My father stood breathing. Their squabbles were like that, a glitter in air, over in a flash, like a knife-throwing act.

Jack Kay, dozing by the range, started awake with a grunt. He cast a covert glance about him, licking his lips. He despised old age, its hapless infirmities. He drew himself upright, muttering. He had not liked the sound of Mr Pender at all.

My father returned from the door and sat down heavily, cracking the newspaper like a whip. Uncle Ambrose cleared his throat and considered the carious rim of the sink.

– New people out at Ashburn, he said mildly to no one in particular. Queer crowd.

Uncle Ambrose knew the comings and goings of the town. He drove a hackney motor car, and sat behind the wheel outside the railway station all day waiting for the trains.