Psychology and Other Stories (2 page)

This scheme allowed the boys' parents to say to their friends things like, “My Arthur has just scored a beta-alpha on his Tenth-Form A-levels,” which sounded more lovely to their ears than its American translation (“My boy just passed grade ten with a B average”). They could also say that their boys “up at” Parcliffe were on the rowing team and in the First Eleven at cricket. This, indeed, was a privilege bestowed upon every parent—included, as it were, in the price of tuition—because participation in both these impressively English-sounding sports was mandatory; and, by the same sort of linguistic legerdemain that made every hall monitor a house prefect, every cricket team was called a First Eleven.

Cricket, indeed, was a perfect example on a small scale of the school's philosophy of style over substance, or nomenclature over reality. The cricket played at Parcliffe (unbeknownst to any of the boys who played it there) bore only the most superficial resemblance to the bona fide article. It was nearer to baseball than perhaps any other sport, but it was not very much like baseball. The returning boys knew the rules, or claimed to (though it soon became clear that there was as much scope here for interpretation as in biblical exegesis); the new boys were put in the harmless outfield positions and assured that they would “pick it up.”

Archie, who at Templeton had been excused from all team sports as a conscientious objector to their symbolic bellicosity, watched the game closely at first—demonstrating his active interest in the proceedings by hunkering down into a limber half-crouch; occasionally slapping his hands together with rugged alacrity, like a lumberjack
preparing to climb a tree; calling out scrupulously generic encouragement to his teammates; and expressing his chagrin, when the opposing First Eleven stole a wicket or scored a base, in the catchphrase then popular at Parcliffe: “Suck my
cock
,” or simply, “
My cock
.” Like a scientist working in the best Baconian tradition, he began by merely collecting data, without presumption; but soon this approach yielded, under a prolonged barrage of bewilderment, to wild conjecture. Desperately he tried to impose upon the scene of intermittent bedlam before him some underlying logic or rationale, some hypothesis that could guide his behavior or at least streamline his options should the ball come near enough to him and to no other player that he was forced to interact with it. But when this did not happen and continued to not happen, he found himself unequal to the effort of sustained attention. His mind began to wander.

Freykynd the Elvin Warrior, who wielded his dagger like a sword, observed from a safe remove the goblins performing their strange and barbarous rituals
…

At Templeton in the dorm they had played a sort of game after lights out. Perhaps, he thought, it originated in a reflexive flouting of authority: to go to sleep when they were
told to
would be to surrender a portion of their priceless autonomy. So, instead of sleeping, they talked. It didn't matter what one said, as long as one made one's voice, the voice of revolt, heard. (On second thought, perhaps the game had even deeper roots in a simple fear of the dark?)

As the game and the night progressed, the boys' eloquence waned, and words deteriorated into mere noise—grunts, animal calls, belches. The goal, at least as Archie saw it, was to be one of the last to make a sound—but not
the
last, because if no one replied you never knew whether your witticism (or sound effect) had been deemed unworthy of reply or whether you were the only one still
awake. The best outcome, the clearest victory, was to say something, ideally after several minutes of silence, and be greeted with a chorus of groans, laughs, or weary and defeated
shut UP alreadys.
Then at last you could sleep, secure in the salience of your individuality.

They did not know this game at Parcliffe. One night, five minutes after lights out, Archie moistened his lips, raised his hands to his face, and blew a great sloppy mouth-fart into his palms. He held his breath, trembling with mirth, in the absolute silence that followed. When the silence continued, the twitching worm of suppressed hilarity in his guts became a twitching worm of apprehension. Why was no one saying anything? They couldn't be asleep, surely, not all of them, not already! The only explanation was that they did not think it was funny. Well, it wasn't meant to be brilliant—only an opening move, something to get the game started, like pawn to king four.

He pretended to be asleep, praying that no one had traced the sound to its origin. He lay there on his bunk, stiff with shame and loathing, for an hour before the dense, rotating knot of his thoughts finally began to break up and fly apart. He was given a moment's respite in which he was almost no one and nowhere; then his eyelids became transparent and the nightmares began.

He sat in the crowded dining hall, eyes on his book, and listened disdainfully, despite himself, to the stupid boys around him telling jokes.

“What's the difference between Master Perkins and a rock?”

“I'll buy.”

“Perkins smells like shit.”

“How can you tell Fatty Roberts from a bouquet of roses?”

“How.”

“Fatty Roberts sucks your cock.”

“Oh, hey, um, hello?”

Archie looked up. He recognized the boys who stood over him as Ambrose Tench and somebody Greaves from the Ninth Form—a year below him. (Tench, with his slouching posture and close-set eyes, Archie had already transported into the Kingdom of Yllisee as a minor character, Harpnox the Man-Bear, a dim-witted shopkeeper whose every line of dialogue was “snuffled.”) Like everyone else at Pervcliffe, these two did not, apparently, know his name. He felt a pang of refreshingly pure hatred.

“Yes?”

“You
are
a catamite, aren't you?”

Though he did not recognize the word—that was the point—he did recognize the game. He and Lyle had played it at Templeton. The idea was to find some scurrilous word in the dictionary, then try to get other boys to admit that they were, for instance, steatopygous coprophiliacs or anencephalic monorchids or whatever it might be. The trick was to pose the question casually, as if only seeking confirmation of some humdrum, well-known fact.

“Oh, you know, I
used
to be,” he said, “but then your bloody union fees just got out of hand.”

The boys stared at him, faces slack as masks. “Yes, well, uh, all right …” They giggled uncertainly and moved off in search of their next victim.

“Clever clever,” said a voice Archie recognized.

He was brought out of his reverie by some commotion. Instantly he was overwhelmed by the dread, so familiar to him from his nightmares, that some specific but mysterious action was required of him, and that if he flubbed it he would be exposed before everyone as the fraudulent and altogether inadequate specimen that he was.

He looked up; there was the ball; he ran to meet it.

It seemed he would never reach it. His legs were heavy and uncooperative, as if he were running through some invisible fluid—

As he climbed to his feet, dazed and ashamed, the ball landed, with a prim
pat-pat
, on the turf a few feet away. It had not, after all, been his moment. He had run clear across the field and collided with Mawthorn who, with his eyes on the ball that was rightfully his, had not seen Archie coming.

He began to help the other boy up, but dropped him like a leper when his teammates' screams revealed to him that the ball was still in play! He lunged at it with simian abandon, snatched it up with both hands, drew back his arm and … Where? Where to throw it? The boys were all shouting at him but he was far beyond the reach of human language.

He hesitated for only a moment. His arm knew what to do, if he did not. He fired the ball, as hard as he could, at the bobbing, unhelmeted head of the running batsman.

He had time to admire his throw—its speed, its precision, the geometrical perfection of its arc, like the illustration in a physics textbook—before a twinge of disquiet tugged at his guts.

Luckily, his arm had not taken into account the fact that its target was moving. The ball missed the oblivious batsman's head by several inches, but came close enough that the infielder who had been running to catch it felt obliged to shout at the batsman to duck. The ball swooped to earth and rolled gracefully out of bounds. The opposing First Eleven had time to capture four more bases and break seven more wickets before it was retrieved.

Archie trudged back to his corner of the field, muttering and kicking at the turf as he went. This display of remorse did not express his disappointment, but concealed it: he was playing the part of the passionately engaged and ordinarily competent athlete cursing himself, unfairly, for the sort of mistake that anyone might make.
But this pantomime could no more evoke the true depth and complexity of his anguish than a tin whistle could perform a symphony of Rubbra's. To truly give vent to his feelings, he would have had, at the very least, to die.

No one chided him; no one even tried to cheer him. It was as if he did not exist.

He hated Parcliffe at first. Then he met Clayton Fishpool.

Fishpool was, in Archie's scheme of classification, perhaps the most stuck-up boy at the school. He wore an ascot and socks with sandals—either of which in isolation would have qualified him as the most eccentric character Archie had ever laid eyes on. He was idiotically handsome, with just the kind of soft lank hair that Archie believed, on his own head, would have made him look rakish, carefree, and sensitive, yet with a capacity for beautiful cruelty—but which, on Clayton Fishpool, only looked foppish. Aside from his physical appearance, Fishpool had about him an aura of self-sufficiency and complacent grandeur. He was sixteen, and he carried himself as though he had arrived at this sublimely remote age through his own foresight and diligence. For
The Lyre
, the school's snobbish literary newspaper, he wrote poems and editorials which he signed “C.S. Fishpool.”

(He was known, in the gold and green groves of Yllisee, as Dartagnan the Disreputable, Dartagnan the Demi-Mage.)

“What's that you're reading?”

Archie held the book at arm's length and eyed it indifferently.

Fishpool emitted a high-pitched squeak. “Oh,
Strachey's
all right, but if you go in for that whole Bloomsbury thing you should really read Firbank.”

Archie told his face to take on the expression of a man who had long ago resolved to look into Firbank and was now grateful for this
reminder. In fact, he was appalled: He had chosen this book, as he chose all his books for public consumption, for its obscurity. He would not read “classics”: to do so was, first, to admit unfamiliarity with them, and, second, to reveal a prosaic and unoriginal soul. In the dining hall he therefore read
Two Noble Kinsmen
instead of
Hamlet, The Holy Sinner
instead of
The Magic Mountain, The Eternal Moment
instead of
Howards End
, George Meredith instead of George Eliot, Edward FitzGerald instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William James instead of Henry James, and someone like Lytton Strachey instead of someone whose work he actually enjoyed, like John Buchan or Aldous Huxley. He believed, or anyway sometimes imagined himself saying he believed, that the duty of the serious student of literature was not to tread the same old well-worn paths, but to blaze new trails, to seek out the unknown and unsung masterpieces. (Or was he simply afraid to read any book that someone might know better than he did?) He had thought Strachey safe; but now here was C.S. Fishpool, not only wearily familiar with Strachey, but able to name an even more obscure author whom Archie should have been reading instead.

“Well yes, Strachey's
all right
all right,” Archie began his prepared statement with heavy if undirected irony, “though I do find at times that his prose can be a bit what you might call flowery in spots.” (Twelve hours later, lying in bed and replaying this conversation in his head, he was wracked by remorse that he had not said “florid.”)

Clayton Fishpool pushed his chair back and narrowed his eyes at Archie. “You say that like it's a bad thing, Archer old cock.”

“Well, I suppose,” Archie drawled, becoming defensively more languorous the more fretful he felt, “it's just that I feel sometimes that he's a bit, well, pleonastic.” He fairly vibrated with tension as he waited for this bomb to drop; he had never said or heard the word spoken aloud and had no idea if he was pronouncing it correctly.

Fishpool threw back his shoulders. Archie would soon come to recognize this gesture as characteristic: it always preceded a diatribe. As Fishpool spoke, his shoulders would slowly roll forward again; periodically he would throw them back again, as if winding a clock.

Archie listened to him talk, his attention cutting in and out at random, as if by some mysterious physiological process. On a conscious level, he found Fishpool's apparently impromptu speech on the role of language in literature clever and thought-provoking. But on an unconscious level? Perhaps he was only flattered to have someone talking to him at all—and someone who knew his name, no less.