The Outcast (19 page)

After the tension and the quiet of the actual fight, once Lewis was held down, there was a cocktail party buzz of conversa- tion, and the other boys inspected themselves for injuries, which were slight and made much of. People craned past each other at the door and talked about it, and reported back what

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they could see of Lewis, who, after being so angry, had gone away into himself and was very quiet.

Kit hadn’t watched any of it. She had waited in the big drawing room by the fire. She made herself stay still and not follow them. Tamsin had been vague about the detail and not blamed anybody, but Kit knew the way it would have gone and didn’t want to see Lewis held down like that, undignified and empty.

‘Come along, everybody – let Gilbert deal with it,’ said Claire and everyone regretfully went back into the drawing room, not wanting to make a fuss.

Gilbert got carefully to his feet, dusting off the knees of his trousers, and Lewis, released, didn’t move.

‘Alice, would you wait for us in the car, please,’ said Gilbert, and Alice went, without a word, not looking at Hilary Johnson and Claire Carmichael, who were standing in the hall.

Gilbert looked down at Lewis. ‘Can you get up?’

Lewis got up.

‘We’re going home now,’ said Gilbert and started to say some- thing else, but Lewis walked away from him and out of the house, not looking up. Hilary and Claire drew back as he passed.

Gilbert came out of the room. ‘Hilary—’

‘Let’s not say anything about it, Gilbert,’ said Hilary. ‘You take Alice home.’

Gilbert took his hat from the stand by the door and left.

Hilary Johnson and Claire Carmichael would have liked to watch Gilbert’s car following Lewis down the road, but there was no excuse to keep the door open.

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‘I didn’t want him in the house,’ said Hilary, closing it.‘David insisted, for Gilbert.’

‘I thought it was so bad of Dicky to say that in the churchyard at the time, but perhaps it’s the only way. One doesn’t feel safe, and perhaps it’s best we all say so. I mean, for heaven’s sake! Did you see his face? There’s something wrong there.’

‘You know, it’s Gilbert and poor Alice I feel sorry for.’

‘I was there just after Elizabeth died,’ said Claire. ‘He was unnaturally quiet then, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s a dreadful thing to say, but you’d think a child losing its mother like that – in an accident – would be terribly distressed. He seemed so calm. Just strange and calm. It was very unnerving.’

‘None of us saw the accident, did we? Of course it’s unthink- able. But he is unnerving. He makes people uncomfortable.’

‘It must be terribly hard with a stepchild.’

‘Well, nobody expects one to love a stepchild, but really, imagine it, having to deal with this.’

‘Mind you, Alice isn’t terribly strong.’ ‘Sh! Did you notice her drinking today?’ ‘Don’t! I know . . .’

They joined the others in the drawing room and the lunch party was a big success, with so much to talk about. Ed andTom were the heroes of the afternoon and were fêted.They had faced up to evil.They had found it and cast it out.

Gilbert and Alice drove past Lewis, who was walking through the village. At their own house they stopped, and Gilbert reversed the car halfway into the driveway and turned off the engine. He could still see the road. Lewis would have to pass the

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house if he wanted to get to the station and Gilbert wouldn’t allow him to do that.

Alice looked over at Gilbert at the wheel of the car, sitting in the driveway and not driving, or parking, or getting out of the car. It seemed a powerless thing to be doing, just waiting at the wheel like that.

After a while they saw Lewis. He was still quite far away.

Alice felt entirely cold. She felt she had come to the end of something. It was as if she and Gilbert had been fixed in time by their childlessness, and Lewis and his vile damage were binding them too. She wanted to be released. She had bandaged his arm and wiped away his blood too many times, fighting her pity and disgust, while Gilbert led his pristine office life. She was like a nurse in a war patching up soldiers so that they could go out and fight again, but it was his war, and his father’s, and she didn’t want to be locked into his secret.

She glanced at Lewis walking towards them. He was nearer now and had seen them, and kept walking. She decided she would tell.

Gilbert didn’t believe her at first. Lewis’s mutilations had become normal to Alice and she felt shame describing them as if they were her own.

‘What are you telling me?’ said Gilbert. ‘That he does this thing to himself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just to hurt himself?’ ‘Yes.’

His face moved – like a shadow passing over it – and in that moment Alice thought he would do something, some uncon- trolled thing, and she felt terror; but Gilbert didn’t do anything. He looked steadily at his son getting closer and

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closer and waited. Alice realised she was holding her breath. Lewis reached them and Gilbert got out of the car. Alice wished she had gone into the house and didn’t have to watch. Gilbert bore down on Lewis, who was trying to pass him. She couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t need to. Gilbert was shouting at Lewis, who was backing off; he made a grab for Lewis and grasped his arm, and they struggled, with Gilbert trying to force up Lewis’s sleeve to look for himself.They were out of sight of the village and there was no-one to see, but Alice hid her face in shame at all of them anyway and didn’t see Lewis, pulling away from his father, cast one quick look at her.

Gilbert, gripping Lewis’s hand, yanked his sleeve up. Lewis’s arm was bared and they were both still.

Gilbert had no way of demonstrating his feelings at seeing his son’s scars, or about the day, or about the things that Lewis had done in all the years he could remember since Elizabeth’s death. For just a moment, like a brightly lit photograph, he remembered the son he thought he would have.Then he let go of Lewis’s marked up arm and looked into his face and Lewis saw himself reflected. Gilbert told him to cover himself and walked away.The worst had happened between them, it seemed.

Waterford lay in darkness.The cold wind and the warm spring air moved quietly between themselves. Kit was sleeping in her bed and dreaming and pleased with her dream. Alice and Gilbert were sleeping and holding hands, which sometimes they did without knowing they did, and never woke up like that.

The doors to the drawing room were open and swinging slowly in the moving air. Lewis was walking – or trying to walk

– and drunk, and the darkness was making the being drunk like

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being unconnected to anything. He seemed to see the village from above and the sleeping people in their beds, and seemed to move over the ground fast sometimes and couldn’t feel it when he fell, which was sort of funny and sort of not.

The village was asleep, with all the people behind the walls and through the windows and up the stairs of the little houses, blind and deaf in their beds while anything might happen. Lewis headed down the middle of the road and he kept falling and had to remember to get back on his feet.

He reached the churchyard and stood in the dark with the church even darker above him.

The main door wasn’t locked and opened very easily when he turned the iron ring on it.The blackness in the church was like something dense and he stepped into it. He stood as well as he could with the inside air of the church touching him, and then he leaned on the pew and dropped his head and went to his knees.

He stayed like that, with bowed head, and waited. He thought God might come and heal him. He waited and was ashamed for waiting, because God never came and Lewis didn’t think with his black heart he’d have known him if he had. Still, he waited with his desperate hope and nothing came.

He stood up, still holding onto the back of the pew. He saw the razor in his mind, but didn’t have it. He couldn’t feel his arm whatever he did to it. He had to have something. He put his hand into his pocket and found matches.

The bibles were easy to light and the velvet curtain behind the choir stall was dry and old, but he couldn’t find a way of lighting the wood of the pews with just matches, so he broke into a storeroom at the back and found the paraffin for the

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heaters that were kept there. The paraffin lit easily and there was enough of it to douse the whole place, and he poured it over everything and the floor, and watched the flames racing and meeting each other.

When the fire had really got started, when the flames were huge and nothing was going to stop them, it still wasn’t enough. The wood was blistering in the heat, the varnish bubbled, and giant candles ran liquid clear over the floor. The heat was pushing him back to the door. It wasn’t enough. It was nothing. Outside, the night was calm and he drenched the unmoved graves with paraffin, and the flaming grass was smoky and green-smelling. He tried to tear the gravestones loose and to break his hands and his head against them. It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough and he was at the end of it. He had lost, and there was nothing left, and he lay on his mother’s grave and cried, and tried to climb into the ground, because in his stupid

drunkenness he thought that was the only way to find peace.

The first people to see the church hadn’t seen Lewis in the dark behind the bright fire. When they did see him they didn’t go near him, they called the police. He was vacantly unresisting.

The cold and the mildness moved over the village until the cold air was stronger and it laid a hard frost over everything. The church burned very hot.The windows blew out and showered the street with glass. The frozen road was full of people watching and the sky got paler as they watched. The dim morning, and the crowd, and the church burning were strangely reminiscent of the war. People were shocked and not wearing their normal clothes or expressions, and the sight of the still-burning church, the scorched grass and the blackened

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gravestones was surreal and appalling.The village was as it had always been, but in the centre of it was the burning church. It was an evil sight.

The Carmichaels’ house was some way from the church and they were amongst the last to know. When they found out – somebody phoned at the uncivilised hour of seven – Dicky drove them all down to see what was going on and what could be done. Kit stood with everybody else and listened to the ques- tions being asked and answered, and heard the story piece itself together and, when she knew that it was Lewis, she went to the car and sat in the back seat and covered her face and cried. She surprised herself with her tears, how freely she cried, and how sadly. She didn’t know she had such simple grief in her, she didn’t know she could cry like that. Other people were crying too, most were very angry; others were watching the firemen, and the men helping them. The crowd was smaller as people went to work or back to their houses, but all day, and for days after, people would stop and look, and the shock was unifying and gradually replaced by outrage and opinion.

Lewis was put into one of the two cells at the police station. The police station was small and the cell was small too, with a bed and window and a bucket in the corner.

Late in the morning they called in Dr Straechen and, because Lewis was only seventeen, Gilbert was sent for, too. Lewis was bruised from the fight with the boys and his head was battered from the gravestones. He had split his lip when they were putting him in the cell and his shirt was bloody, and when the doctor took it off, Gilbert saw more bruises and the cuts on his arm. His hands, too, were covered in grazes on both sides and one of them was burned. Gilbert handed Lewis the clean shirt

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he had brought for him to wear. He had to help him on with it. When he had finished, Wilson began his questions. Gilbert thought that Lewis couldn’t follow what was being said, but the interview established his name and the fact that he’d done it and that he’d been alone, and gave Wilson the means to make a report.

Lewis was put back in his cell. Gilbert had been scared of him and hated the sight of him and was relieved he was to stay locked up.

When Kit had finished her crying, she went through the village to the police station and sat on the wall opposite it and waited. She saw the doctor go in, and Gilbert, and waited there until lunchtime. She knew she wouldn’t see Lewis, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to be, and the time went by her like it does on a long journey, quite softly.

Lewis stayed in the police station until there was a hearing, the following week, when it was decided he should remain in custody until the trial, a month later, at Guildford Crown Court.

Gilbert and Alice came to the court. They hadn’t seen him since he had been locked up. With his face healed and hair damped down and with his neat tie and shirt, he looked very young, and Alice almost couldn’t bear to look at him.

He was tried as an adult, because of what he had done, and because the judge wanted to be able to send him into the army for his National Service in lieu of a custodial sentence. The army’s response gave Lewis something to smile about; they didn’t want him.

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‘We’re rather choosier than that, Your Honour, when it comes to our National Security,’ said the colonel summoned to discuss sentencing with the judge, and so Lewis was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence and sent to Brixton prison in June 1955.

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PART THREE
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C
hapter
O
ne
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August 1957

Kit arranged her records around the room so that they covered the skirting and made a border. There were fourteen of them now and they didn’t reach all the way around, or even far along the second wall, but it was a start. They kept slipping on the wooden floor and dropping, with a slapping sound, and she would go and prop them up again.The faces seemed to look at her as she went around them, and she knew them so well she almost couldn’t see them properly any more. Elvis, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Julie London, Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan . . . She had a portable record player in its own red leather carrying case and it lived on the floor next to her bed. She would sometimes hide a song from herself, in a drawer under her clothes, so she could play it again after waiting and hear it fresh. She’d done that with Julie London singing ‘Funny Valentine’, and Elvis’s ‘Mystery Train’ had waited a whole month, and it had almost been like hearing it for the first time. She never heard the wireless at home because she wasn’t allowed one, and the one downstairs was very big, in a wooden unit, and lived in the drawing room, but at school she did. Some of the older girls had them, and it was an illicit and thrilling pleasure to sneak into one another’s rooms at night and listen to music as loudly as they dared. Kit