Pleasure and a Calling (3 page)

Quick though my heart beat in these moments, my mind beat quicker. But I still had a lesson to learn.

My fascination with a boy called Marrineau was hardly unique. Captain of all sports, aloof in his physical prowess and cool air of threat, everyone admired him. Our paths never crossed. I was just one of the many lower creatures who knew to keep a respectful distance from him and the entourage of bullies and jeerers – like him, rugger men and cricketers and rowers – that tumbled in his wake. On Saturday mornings we cheered as he led his team to triumphs on the sports field. I saw him in Joy’s coffee bar in town with girls. There was talk that he owned a motorcycle that he kept in a secret lock-up outside the school. Whatever he had, everyone wanted it. He was untouchable.

But in the lower sixth, Marrineau and I shared a history set and a teacher, the diminutive Mr Stamp, who in the first class of spring term paired us up as ‘study buddies’. That didn’t happen. Marrineau only ever spoke to me twice: once, after that class, to warn me to stay out of his face; and again, a week or so later, when he pushed me up against the wall of the gym changing room with my tie and collar in his fist and said in a low voice full of meaning that if I kept following him I was dead.

Which was a pity, because this simply made me even more resolved to breach the Marrineau defences and enter his golden sanctum, a room and study beneath the south-facing gable of Hooke House. Unfortunately there seemed no way in. I knew Marrineau’s timetable as intimately as my own and I pored over
sporting lists and fixtures and practice schedules. There was little overlap in our movements, few chances even to bump along in his slipstream without running into his personal guard, whom Marrineau would unleash whenever he saw me hovering. Two of them sent me sprawling in the science block one afternoon, prompting laughter from the outer chorus line of sycophants. Everyone was starting to sniff blood. I retreated again to the periphery. I was in danger of exposing myself, of losing my hard-won powers of invisibility. And yet the more impossible it was to get close to Marrineau – the more hostile his demeanour – the more he became my Holy Grail.

And then I saw a way. All boys were encouraged to develop extracurricular interests. I myself had joined the film society (I grew to like westerns: nothing moved me more at this time than a languid stranger with a gun coming to the aid of respectable townsfolk beset by whooping, lawless rowdies). Also the chess club. Chess allowed sport-resistant boys to embrace the school’s competitive ethos without getting hurt, but for me it was also a way to be seen to be sociable without giving anything away. As usual, I tried not to win too often, though needless to say I was three moves ahead of the class. One afternoon I spied Marrineau, square-shouldered and erect and proprietorial, moving along the main corridor like a swiftly rowed boat. I ducked into a niche to watch him. He was carrying something, though it seemed he was trying to conceal it. It was a portable chess set – not an expensive one but a plastic set in a chequered tin of the kind sold in town. I had no idea he played chess. Was he ashamed of being thought uncool? It was inconceivable that he would join the chess club, so who did he play against? Maybe he was new to the game – had caught the bug from a cleverer younger brother over the holidays and dare not yet reveal himself to the club players.

Then I knew what I had to do, and found myself running, my heart giddy with excitement. I caught up with him just as he reached one of the side doors to his block. ‘Marrineau …’

He turned and stared at me.

‘I saw you with your chess set. I thought we might have a game.’

The stare remained. ‘Are you kidding me?’

‘Or, if you’re just getting the hang of it – I’m not saying you are, but I could teach you some openings, if you like. I’m in the chess club. People say I’m pretty good. What do you say?’

Marrineau didn’t say anything. He pushed me away firmly and closed the door in my face. Had I embarrassed him? It was a good sign that he hadn’t said no, I thought. There was still hope.

As things turned out, a less obvious opportunity arose in the history class we took together. Marrineau was no great scholar, contributing little and usually to be found gazing out over the quad while Mr Stamp talked about Oliver Cromwell’s unfair war on the Irish. But on the day in question Marrineau was reading something beneath his desk – a letter written on pale-yellow stationery, though the envelope was white and had the look of a greetings card. Was it his birthday? He was so engrossed with the letter, and I with watching him from the row behind, that neither of us saw the diminutive Mr Stamp (or heard the sudden quiet that heralded his approach) until he tapped Marrineau’s desk with the rolled-up map he used to point at illustrations and troop movements on the whiteboard. Now he was using it to point at the letter, and held out his hand for it. Marrineau handed it over.

Mr Stamp glanced through the contents and smiled sadly. ‘Love letters will not help you in your English Civil War paper,’ he said.

Marrineau, his eyes fixed on the letter, could not speak.

‘Well?’ Mr Stamp waited for an answer, though technically he had not asked a question. ‘Mr Marrineau?’

‘No, sir,’ said Marrineau.

‘No, sir,’ Mr Stamp repeated. ‘Seven days.’ He made a show of folding the letter into the envelope and slipping it into the pocket of his shabby jacket, its cuffs rimmed with leather.

Something dawned in Marrineau’s grey eyes that was more despair than defeat. What was in the letter that was so important? A love letter, Mr Stamp had said. A girl from the town, for sure. Was he afraid Mr Stamp would read it, and reveal those sweet nothings to the staff room or, worse, the headmaster, with who knew what repercussions? Perhaps Marrineau planned to elope! My imagination raced with possibilities.

You might only wonder what satisfaction I took from Marrineau’s unexpected fall, I who had so recently been the victim of his harsh words and manhandling. And yet, for all Marrineau’s imperious disdain for his inferiors – perhaps because of it – this humiliation at the hands of Mr Stamp now cast him in a tragic light: a broken, blinded Samson; or a lion in chains, dispossessed of its roar. A tense, nerve-tingling silence hung over the room for the rest of the period, as if with one last superhuman effort our adored and feared captain of everything might suddenly burst the powerful bonds of his ingrained respect for authority, hurdle the line of desks and devour Mr Stamp whole. Who could not have wished it?

In fact, Marrineau sat motionless except for an angry pulse, visible in the outline of his clamped jaws, his ears red with shame. When the tea bell rang, he hung back to speak with Mr Stamp. Loitering outside the door, I couldn’t hear his mumbled plea, but Mr Stamp, in a high barking tone that indicated little respect for Marrineau’s obvious wish to keep things hushed,
said, ‘And shouldn’t you have thought of that before you decided to read it in my history class?’ He looked up with a long, pained expression at the towering Marrineau, waiting for him to yield to the logic of this unarguable position – as if the punishment was now nothing and only submission would fully satisfy. But Marrineau said nothing and Mr Stamp dismissed him, his face angry and stiff but his eyes full of sadness.

Marrineau scowled at me as he passed in the corridor, though he could hardly blame me for his ignominy – or rather, he could hardly guess that if I hadn’t been watching his clumsy subterfuge with such rapt curiosity it was quite possible that Mr Stamp would never have noticed what he was up to at all.

Poor Marrineau. Where were his large-thighed, laughing cronies now who daily insulated him from the buffetings of mortal inconvenience? Who were they against the might of the diminutive Mr Stamp?

The truth was, only I had what it took to save this day. Was it in the hope of winning Marrineau’s gratitude at last, of creeping into his affections, that I loitered outside while Mr Stamp closed his briefcase and switched off his audio-visual equipment and vacated the history room, the letter still peeping out of his jacket pocket? I cannot deny it. I had invested more than I ought in trying to get my nostrils closer to the elusive Marrineau essence to be indifferent now to this turn in his fortunes. But there was more. Think of the philatelist’s sudden, gut-quivering glimpse of a rare Treskilling Yellow in a bundle of nineteenth-century Swedish correspondence; or the birdwatcher’s sighting of a nesting corncrake; or the climber who discovers a harder way up the mountain. Here, in the very opportunity to close in on the
grande bouffe
of Marrineau, was an unexpected appetizer, another beckoning of the never-had experience, the
never-before-encountered quarry, and it was at least partly this that drew me after Mr Stamp, who was already quickening his step along the corridor, thinking perhaps of jam and toasted crumpets, but unwittingly trailing an altogether sweeter scent.

But I might as well tell you right now that things didn’t go well; that I let myself down with a moment of what I can only call inattention; and that before the week was done I had bidden farewell to Mr Stamp and Marrineau and his fools and indeed the whole place for ever. I was out.

M
Y FATHER HAD DIED
the year before, so it was Aunt Lillian who arrived at school to pick me up, having parleyed with the headmaster and agreed that the best thing would be for me to leave without further discussion or consequence. It seemed rather a waste after all these years of trying hard for my dead mother.

‘But what did you expect, William?’ she demanded. ‘What else could we do? What on earth were you thinking?’

So many whats. I couldn’t imagine Aunt Lillian put up much of a fight. The headmaster had surprised her when he described me as normally quiet and hard-working, though he added that his hands were tied, in view of evidence from eye witnesses and my own inexplicable refusal to explain myself (I had reverted to the trusty tight-lipped defence mechanism of childhood).

‘You were lucky they didn’t bring charges,’ Aunt Lillian said.

In fact I had ridden my luck in all sorts of ways in this final episode at school.

My absence as duty prefect on the Minors’ teatime rota went unnoticed as I shadowed Mr Stamp to his own tea at the Servery and afterwards to his rooms as housemaster on the
second floor of Winter. And then he didn’t keep me waiting but reappeared ten minutes later wearing a different, lighter jacket – clearly minus the letter – and casual trousers. He walked briskly, slapping a folded newspaper against his leg. I followed him out to the hard tennis court beyond the pond and founder’s statue, where a quartet of mid-schoolers were playing doubles in the late-afternoon sun. He settled in one of the summer chairs on the lawn, crossed his legs and opened the paper. He didn’t seem to read it very closely, scanning the headlines and licking his thumb as he turned from one page to the next. He kept looking up smilingly to watch the game, and every now and then would call to one or the other of the boys, offering praise or advice. The boys cheerfully shouted something back, though it was hard to see how they could actually hear Mr Stamp’s remarks. Two or three times he returned a ball that sailed over the fence.

There wasn’t much I could do. It was warm rather than hot. It seemed unlikely Mr Stamp would take off his jacket. And if he did, what then? Should I start a fire in the trees or some other diversion? Across the lawn in the mid-school block I could see Miss Stiles, the secretary, moving about in her office. A scenario popped into my head in which I watched myself retreat from my cool spot under the colonnade and call Miss Stiles from the payphone outside the hall using my adult voice (‘I’d like to speak to Mr Stamp, if I may. Yes, it
is
rather urgent, I’m afraid. Yes, it’s Doctor
Bluther
’). There would be some enquiring in the background, during which someone with eyes in their head, perhaps Miss Stiles herself, would see Mr Stamp sitting not a hundred yards away. By the time Miss Stiles had sent some Minor duty boy scurrying across to summon Mr Stamp, I would be back in position, ready to pounce, and then, provided Mr Stamp didn’t take his jacket with him, which of course he might well do …

But now the scene in front of me was changing. The tennis players had stopped for a drink, and one of them had flopped on to the grass, red-faced and panting. Mr Stamp immediately leapt to his feet. ‘I say …’ he shouted. ‘I say … Perhaps
I
could take Thomson’s place.’

The boys looked at one another and politely mustered the will to match Mr Stamp’s enthusiasm for the idea. Only then did I see that Mr Stamp was actually wearing tennis shoes – that, clearly, he had come prepared for precisely this moment. And now he pulled off his jacket and threw it excitedly over the chair before jogging stiffly off to join the boys.

Sod Miss Stiles. The moment Mr Stamp had his back to me on court, his brown, balding pate catching the afternoon light, I sauntered towards the court, paused by his chair, waited until he tossed a yellow ball in the air to serve … then fished his keys right out of his pocket.

I hurried to Winter House. There was barely a soul around. After tea, boys would be in their dorms or watching TV or out practising sport. I unlocked the door to Mr Stamp’s rooms and locked it behind me. The interior was very different to our own rooms – older and darker and woodier. There was a sitting area with an armchair, and a kitchenette, and I could see a study with a desk and books. It was no problem to find Marrineau’s letter. Mr Stamp’s shabby school jacket was on a hanger in his neat bedroom. The envelope was in the pocket, presumably untouched. I took out the yellow sheet inside and quickly read it.