Wilberforce (11 page)

—They wouldn't like the truth!

—And what is the truth?

Morgan felt there should be a falling sensation to accompany the dreadful precipice on which he stood. The truth, if he ever could explain it, would destroy everything.

Yet, wasn't everything worthwhile destroyed already?

—Love, sir.

—Yes?

—Yes.

—Loving people you oughtn't?

Morgan nodded.

—Go on.

—Love is perhaps a dramatic way of putting it.

—Perhaps.

How could he explain whom he had loved? Silk, Nathan, his mother, his sisters, that girl with the tennis serve, Mr. Grieves himself, and that was just off the top of his head, not counting those for whom he had only lusted. Was it right to love and wrong to lust? Wrong to love Silk Bradley, who had been so wicked and desolate, who had nobody perhaps to love him besides Morgan?

Silk had told him to pour a second cup of tea that day Fletcher had been in the Tower. Morgan had filled Fletcher's cup and set it beside the parcel wrapped in brown paper, which had appeared in the study that morning.

—If you tell anyone, you'll be sorry, Silk had said. Even Fletch.

Morgan had nodded, uncomprehending, and sat at Silk's command, like those other times, but not like those other times. Silk had sliced open the package, revealing Kendal Mint Cake and a letter he pocketed without reading. He broke the cake in two and set half before Morgan.

—Go on, he said, dipping his own into the tea.

Tentatively, Morgan took a bite. The mint was fresh, potent.

—Wiggie, Silk explained. Takes pity once a year.

—Lent?

—Birthday.

Morgan's head had spun wondering why Silk didn't have a hamper if it was his birthday, why no one knew, and why he wasn't sharing his godmother's present with his best friend.

—I can see what you're thinking, Silk had said, and it's a bore. Fletch thinks my birthday's in the hols. And the antecedents never send presents.

Morgan drank from Fletcher's cup, sharing Silk's only present, bound to secrecy in the gray light of day.

*   *   *

Morgan Wilberforce sat at his table, eyes swollen and red. Outside, daylight crept implacably towards them. John had only seen him shed tears once before, in that odd encounter over the boy's birthday his first year. Wilberforce had waited all day for his birthday hamper and then heard Fardley declare the hamper wasn't coming, and what's more had never been ordered. It was shortly after the boy's mother had died, John recalled, the oversight surely due to the father's distracted grief; but it was custom at the school for parents to send birthday hampers, and when Fardley destroyed all hope, Wilberforce had buried his face in John's coat and wept, stirring in John a feeling both paternal and avuncular. John had killed that feeling after the Gallowhill business, but now—like divine reprieve after years of hopelessness—John could see that Wilberforce had been telling the truth after all. The night was wiping the slate clean of all dust, requiring neither contrition nor atonement. Like a simple misunderstanding, the past was being blown away, and John was sitting at a table with the same boy, albeit taller, inside the same cloister of rapport.

He wanted more than anything to sort this boy out, but his position at the Academy was ancillary at best. He had no authority outside his classroom and not much inside it. He had never done a dorm round, never communicated freely with a parent, never had a study to which he could invite boys for … what could it be called? Moral influence? For whatever it was men gave to boys. For the kind of thing the Bishop had given him before—but he made it a rule never to think of that time. He had never comforted (counseled? catechized?) any boy in the night. The closest he'd come was the odd night terror when his goddaughter was small. She would enter his room in the dead of night, take his hand, and begin conversing with him. It always took him longer than it ought to realize that she was failing to make sense and that she was not, in fact, awake. Morgan Wilberforce was most certainly awake. Would John be capable of such a sorting out, even if he possessed the means?

The boy had confessed to loving someone he oughtn't. Well, he wasn't the first boy, and he'd hardly be the last. John couldn't encourage him, but he didn't see the point in making a fuss over it.

—Has loving this person led you to do things you oughtn't?

Morgan Wilberforce went confused behind the eyes:

—Which…?

He dried up.

—Which one? John supplied.

A blush. John was beginning to see the problem. Not an ardent public school friendship, but a whole raft of unsuitable attachments. He thought he knew something about both.

—Do you know what I think, sir? I think God's made a balls-up of this whole business.

—Oh, yes?

—Look at the world, sir. Look at the War.

John sighed.

There were so very many ways this boy needed sorting out, John felt nearly breathless contemplating them. He felt even more overwhelmed considering what the Headmaster would say about his hosting a late-night, out-of-bounds confabulation with a pupil. He needed to get this boy back where he belonged before a scandal ensued, or worse.

An idea came to him then, as they did when he wasn't trying, a memory of a book he'd been reading earlier. He fetched it from the windowsill and, flicking back in the pages, found the passage. He read it aloud standing under the lightbulb:

—He said that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to try to say it was not good before we know what his purpose with it was. I don't like, he said, even my wife to look at my verses before they're finished! God can't hide away his work till it is finished, as I do my verses, and we ought to take care what we say about it. God wants to do something better with people than people think.

John could hear the question Morgan Wilberforce wanted to ask, and the boy's silence struck him as a kind of deep companionship, an acknowledgment that the question and its corollary—What did God want with Wilberforce? What did he want with either of them?—had no vocal answer. That Wilberforce appeared to know it said more about the boy than almost anything else that night.

A flurry of ideas began to come to John then, and he knew from hard-learned experience with ideas that the only thing to do was to obey without overthinking. He certainly ought not to ponder why he—dogged by insomnia and pacing his frigid rooms—should have investigated the carousing of tomcats at the same moment that a St. Stephen's boy had wandered into his garden, and not any St. Stephen's boy, but Morgan Wilberforce. The important thing was that ideas were continuing to arrive like a host of relatives. (Not that he had a host of relatives—but he made it a rule—never mind.) The ideas told him that whatever had driven Wilberforce from the Academy that night was neither single, concrete, nor precisely relevant; that the boy was compromised, but not in the way people might imagine; that the sorting out would take time and quite possibly require other hands; and that most essentially John needed to get this boy back to the Academy before his absence was discovered and circumstances became complicated by irrelevancies. John was certain as he could be that the answer to the opus called Morgan Wilberforce would not be found in his traipsing across Yorkshire, or Wales, but would grow somehow into itself after his return to ordinary life, arising this morning from the philistine dormitories of Hazlehurst's House, sleepwalking through lessons, and facing whatever else the day delivered. He had the idea that change was sweeping towards them. He didn't know what, but he could feel its breath cold on his neck.

Before any of this could transpire, however, Morgan Wilberforce needed conveying back to the Academy. A glance at the clock told him there wasn't enough time to send the boy on foot, and in any case, John didn't entirely trust him to return on his own.

He braced himself. It would have to be the bicycle. Lord, help them.

 

9

Mr. Grieves was out of his tiny mind. First, he fixed on the notion of cycling back to the Academy in the dark with Morgan perched on his handlebars. This quickly proved impossible, as Morgan had predicted. Undeterred, Mr. Grieves insisted Morgan balance on the book rack, which promptly broke, again as Morgan said it would. Mr. Grieves, ever resolute, instructed Morgan to sit on the bicycle seat whilst Mr. Grieves himself attempted to pedal standing up. Not until Morgan had fallen painfully onto the pavement did Mr. Grieves concede defeat.

By this time, Morgan knew, he could have been halfway home through Grindalythe Woods, but as he was not at liberty to explain his route, he could not dispute Mr. Grieves's view that Morgan had little chance of regaining his bed undetected even if he ran his best cross-country race of the term. Thwarted in his schemes, Mr. Grieves accepted the only logical solution.

—Right then, he said with the sternness of the classroom, you will take this bicycle and ride back to the Academy on your own.

When Morgan asked what transport that left Mr. Grieves, Mr. Grieves asserted, with stoical air, that he would walk. Morgan was to conceal the bicycle behind the disused shed some distance from the gates. Mr. Grieves would retrieve it and ride up at his usual hour. But first, Mr. Grieves enjoined Morgan to take a vow, solemnly looking him in the eye, promising that he would indeed return to St. Stephen's Academy, that he would brook no detour, that he would above all else extinguish any notions of running away—to Wales, to Westmoreland, yea even to Wetwang or Warte Wold.

The oath embarrassed Morgan. Whatever had taken him from the Academy had shrunk to mere fancy. He had no more intention of running away than he did of hanging himself from a rafter somewhere; that is to say, none at all. The sooner he was out of the place—hideous Fridaythorpe, Mr. Grieves's squalid digs, the whole uncolored night—the sooner he would feel right in his mind again.

—I promise, sir.

Mr. Grieves relinquished the handlebars; Morgan mounted the bicycle and pedaled down the Wetwang road.

The machine needed grease. The squeaking of the brakes and noise of the gears were enough to wake the neighborhood. As he swerved to avoid the dark potholes and pumped painfully up the slight incline, his earlier embarrassment ripened into mortification. How long had he spent cracking up, saying who knew what demented things, across Mr. Grieves's table? An ordinary person would never have behaved so. An ordinary person would be asleep in the frigid dorm, or perhaps, if awake, consoling himself with—no, an ordinary person did not console himself with such things. An ordinary person would be thinking of the coming rugby match. A person such as Spaulding, for instance, were he now awake, would be reviewing maneuvers, pondering his opponents' weaknesses, or retiring to the toilets to do press-ups.

It hurt quite astonishingly to pedal a bicycle with one squiff arm. Mr. Grieves had worried like a flapping sister over that as well, but Morgan had assured him that his arm was nearly better. Now, having spent the whole, torturous night out of its bandages, the arm was staging a fit of temper, extending its cramp across both shoulders and down his rib cage. He'd never noticed until just that moment how much one used one's arms to pedal a bicycle.

There remained the more nauseating task of facing Grieves in lessons. How would someone like Spaulding manage it? Spaulding would flash that grin of his, the one that drew everyone to him as magnets drew pins. Spaulding might even proceed to slack twice as hard in History and treat Grieves with as much coolness as he'd treated Morgan in the changing room. Spaulding would put the past behind him. He would permit no one—no undermaster, Housemaster, Headmaster, or friend—to perturb his calm. Whatever the circumstances, Spaulding would carry on—

Two figures moved in the darkness ahead. He clamped the brake and skidded to a halt; the figures froze, but after an exchange of whispers, they continued down the lane.

His hands shook. Both he and the figures were less than half a mile from the gates. Down this path, the figures could be headed nowhere else. He couldn't see any detail of their appearance except to notice that they were neither stooped nor juvenile. Morgan waited until their footsteps faded and then dismounted to push the bicycle the rest of the way.

He soon gained the disused shed where he was to store the thing. Thus unencumbered, he jogged as best as he could through the alley of trees. Darkness was fading, and he had no trouble seeing that the two figures had reduced to one. He had no trouble observing that single figure climbing through the Tower window, the window Morgan had used to escape, the one he required to return. And he had no trouble now recognizing that figure. Spaulding: ordinary, extraordinary.

A light appeared in Fardles's window. The gatekeeper was rising from sleep, preparing to extinguish the lamp and unlock the gates. As the Tower window closed behind Spaulding, Morgan dashed for it, confident that he could haul himself through before Fardles could stuff wrinkly legs into trousers. As he reached for the casement, though, he encountered firmness, a firmness hitherto unknown.

This window had never greeted him firmly. Ever since he had made its acquaintance in the Fourth Form, proud in his stewardship of the poacher's tunnel, it had treated him as friend and accomplice, permitting him to depart and return more evenings than he could count. But now, as Fardley stirred in his rooms, the window ignored the prying of his fingers. It stood latched in its frame, resolute against the likes of him—a boy who had shrunk off in cowardice, who had abandoned the Academy and all it had asked of him. Spaulding may have transgressed in the night, but Morgan had quit the field, and even though he was now returned, the Tower knew his traitorous heart. It knew what had caused him to charge Spaulding during that match. The Tower knew every dream he'd dreamt while lying unprotected within it. The Tower knew the covenant he had entered into with the Academy, whether or not he had realized it at the time, when Silk had passed to him the secret of the poacher's tunnel, making him its guardian, the heir of Hermes, that prankster Old Boy who had discovered the route. The Tower knew of wish slips in the Hermes Balcony; it knew of Mr. Grieves and the trenches they had dug that first year; it knew of every Old Boy to enter and depart, of Silk, of Gallowhill, of Hermes himself. And yet, the Tower refused him entrance, no longer caring for such a one, a boy who ran away.