Wilberforce (27 page)

That might have been the end of it, except that two days later John returned damp and exhausted from a run to find Burton-Lee installed on the same settee, balancing the selfsame teacup. This John found desperate and distasteful, but also oddly thrilling. A discussion ensued in which Burton employed all of his persuasive and coercive skill to convince John that he was indispensable, selfish to refuse, not to mention a key element in the soon-to-be-determined new regime. John's will had not fared as well this time; he had agreed to ponder the matter.

Pondering proved a monumental error; it cast unforgiving light on John's urchin-teaching scheme (naïve) and his circumstances (untenable). As he lay in his narrow bed against the wall that abutted Meg and Owain's, John felt almost dizzy. How could he face the Academy again? Yet, how many mornings could he sit beside Meg without putting his mouth on hers? It was one thing to pass the holidays with them, treating Meg as his friend and Owain as something better than a scoundrel; it was quite another thing to install himself indefinitely in their household.

His goddaughter commenced a heartrending campaign to convince him to stay in Saffron Walden, climbing into his lap and assailing him with every reason her seven-year-old mind could think of or invent. Meg, too, urged him to find employment nearby, though John suspected (when out of her presence and thinking clearly) that she wished him to go north, as she had before when S-K engaged him, even in his state, providing work for his hands, stimulation for his mind, and for everything else, the solace of routine.

The coup de grâce in his present dilemma was delivered by Meg's husband. If it hadn't been for Owain's loud opposition to the Academy and his imperious presentation—suddenly—of a position for John in his own firm, John might have told St. Stephen's no forever. As it was, threatened with Owain's employ and facing a future of chaste good-night kisses that would not cease at the end of the holidays, John went for a run in the rain where he spoke to himself in unvarnished terms: his own wife was seven years dead, Meg's husband was not; unless he wanted to ravage this life as he'd ravaged the life before it, his only option was to pack for Yorkshire, where he had vowed never to return.

*   *   *

He wondered if he'd survive the train journey. Having spent two ghastly intervals in the toilets, Morgan was beginning to hope he would expire, or at least be carried off to hospital at the next stop. Disobligingly, his body recovered, enough to drink black tea between Peterborough and Grantham.

He had never been one for suicide, but as the train hauled him towards the unspeakable place, the word clamored at his mind, inviting into his ill-defended fortress the memory he hoped would one day seem as fiction. He believed the things he had said about the act on that unspeakable day, but he had to stop thinking of that—rope—beam—blood—it was the worst hour of his life. He hoped there would be no worse. For so long, he'd believed that the worst hour had been that one in Hazlehurst's study, when he realized about his mother. (Had he been stupid, or had Hazlehurst been vague? He could never remember quite well enough to judge.) But that alteration, catastrophic though it was, had long been absorbed into the water table; the unspeakable day still flooded the downs. He wasn't the type to convince himself that facts were not facts, but he needed to stop living intolerable spans again. Surely it was enough to have lived them once.

*   *   *

John found the Academy in a frantic state. The opposition had formed a minority government, and somehow Burton-Lee had passed every sort of legislation. Metaphors weren't perfect, but it did have the air of a lifelong backbencher catapulted by bizarre circumstance into Downing Street—although the metaphor collapsed there since Burton hadn't moved into S-K's house. That edifice remained unoccupied save by S-K's housekeeper, the Headmaster having been removed to a convalescent wing of Scarborough Hospital, from whence it was feared he might never return. Beginnings of term were always hectic, the return to the yoke and resumption of a thousand details, but normally the disorder was the result of an old-fashioned attitude towards organization. Now the atmosphere shuddered under the weight of Burton's elaborate diktats. There was no time to unpack, Fardley informed John at the station, for the Headmaster pro tem had requested his presence post-posthaste.

Burton had thought of everything, even things that in John's opinion did not require consideration (for instance, a timetable dictating when each Housemaster would write to each parent and inform them personally of the new regime and its roaring success). S-K had always limited beginning-of-term functions to one staff meeting, followed by a generous tea in his house. Burton demanded their attendance at multiple summits. John had been careful to bring a packet of headache tablets (procured by Owain somewhere foreign), and he made liberal use of them. They reduced the pressure inside his skull but did nothing to relieve the tedium of professional gatherings or the barely suppressed current of fear.

Speaking only glancingly of S-K's pneumonia, of Spaulding, of the
Mail
disaster and the locks-and-bonfire mess, Burton did everything in his power to convince them that the school was returning to normal, or better. The Board had taken vigorous measures to calm parents (and, John suspected, to convince them not to withdraw their sons). They would find their rolls nearly full and their charges anxious to put last term behind them. This, Burton stressed, must be their first priority. To this end, he proposed a two-front attack on the decadence he claimed had led to the school's woes: increased physical discipline and increased physical exercise. No discussion was needed of the former, at least for John's colleagues. As for the latter, John wasn't averse in theory, but in practice he and the rest of the SCR objected to Burton's new rota for supervising drastically expanded Games. It was bad enough, they argued, to receive pitiful wages, to be expected to teach six lessons in a day (involving up to six preparations), to have to supervise Prep four days out of six, to have ordinary Games duty and a hundred other undefined responsibilities; but on top of all that for Burton to propose a further four hours per week, each, supervising cricket, fives, and cross-country—Burton softened his request by assuring them that the current workload was temporary, as indeed was his headmastership (though it went without saying that he hoped to become more than Headmaster pro tem once the Board had finished flirting with the notion that a more glamorous man existed who would take the helm of a foundering school). Once the Academy had been stabilized, the Board promised to organize funds to hire additional staff, but in the meanwhile, needs must have. After a third conference running over seventy minutes, they grew too fatigued to argue.

Back in his disarranged rooms that first night, John realized that Burton had given no sign of what he expected of John personally. Had the man gone to all that trouble to retain him merely to fill the duty roster? It was possible. Probable. Only a dolt could have believed Burton's flattery.

But the anxiety growing even as he cleaned his teeth had nothing to do with his gullibility. It rooted in Burton's plans for the school, specifically in his emphasis on physical discipline. S-K, having registered disapproval of John's pacifist methods, had tolerated them from beginning to end (Was it really the end?), but Burton had given no such assurance. If they came to blows over it (figuratively speaking!), would Burton undermine him before the boys or even sack him? It had been absurd to imagine he could find suitable employment elsewhere, but he couldn't live in Saffron Walden, and neither could he bow to Burton's wishes and revert—he'd abandoned those errors when he abandoned that self. He was a Quaker and a pacifist, Meg and Cordelia were his family, these boys his vocation. That was the truth and nothing else.

At least Burton had succeeded at one thing: he had distracted them from the grotesque reality of the school without S-K, and the world after Spaulding.

*   *   *

Piling out of Fardley's car and into the quad was like staggering into some clearing station just back from the front. Nathan and Laurie pounced with forced bonhomie. They peppered him with questions about his shoulder and behaved as though he had merely been rusticated for injury. Still, it was preferable to the way they had treated him after his mother, with that infuriating delicacy that had forced him to bloody Nathan's nose.

All the talk was of S-K, where he was, what was wrong, when and whether he would return, and how the Academy would proceed without him. Morgan refused to care. Instead he recounted with pulverizing detail the objectionable parties he'd been forced to attend in London, the pompous opinions he'd been forced to endure, the tedious exercises he'd been forced to undertake, and the tyrannical decrees he'd been forced to accept under pain of paternal wrath.

*   *   *

As John was not a Housemaster, Burton conscripted him for a stack of administrative tasks he would normally have undertaken himself: preparing notice boards, drawing up rosters and timetables, coordinating supplies. By the time John made it down to the quad, most of the boys had arrived, but rather than dispersing to their Houses, they were milling about in the courtyard. Masters, too, lingered outside, greeting boys and mumbling with one another. Soon Burton appeared, surrounded by prefects, and announced that tea could be found in the refectory. John was impressed, and relieved. S-K had never offered such refreshments. The prospect would lift the general mood.

The Eagle drifted over and stood beside him:

—Once more unto the breach.

—Sinews stiffened?

—Teeth set, the Eagle said.

John saw him then, strolling towards them, flanked by his friends. John's brain stopped working for a moment, and his heart.

—Hands out of pockets, please, Wilberforce, the Eagle said.

Wilberforce scowled and, in slow motion, complied. Catching sight of John, he shoved Pearl and Lydon and exploded with the two of them into raucous laughter.

—Gods preserve us, the Eagle muttered.

—But, I thought S-K disposed him. What's he…?

The Eagle adopted the philosophical air he turned against all Academy follies:

—Board rescinded. They don't like disposing.

—But—

—Neither does Burton.

John didn't know where to start—what Burton had done, when, whether, how—but they were being swept into the refectory where tea and food awaited them, and before John could disappear down the foxhole of his rage—that they could stand aside as he single-handedly managed Wilberforce and the barn that day, that they could allow him to resign and then strong-arm him into returning without once mentioning the
essential
detail of Wilberforce's reinstatement (he'd almost refused!) and then, without having the decency to tell him what the rest of the SCR plainly knew, to leave him flat-footed discovering Wilberforce in the quad—before his temper could run away with him, a rush of sugar from the cake combined with a rush of something else, something radically humane and incongruous, yet—he realized in an instant—familiar. It was like that afternoon at Cambridge when he'd first cast eyes upon Meg; how she'd huddled with him against the mantelpiece (no witness from before), how the molding supported his neck (Jamie left behind) like a hard pillow, her voice, dense and melodic like Elgar, her eyes, as if she forgave him without even knowing why, how when she told him of the Peace Testimony, his longing for the Front was evicted by a longing for—how she kissed him on the cheek and called him her friend, how in an hour he was rescued—mercifully, miraculously—into the person she saw and loved. That person now stood along the wall of St. Stephen's refectory. That person was being given tea and a second chance, a chance with this boy to show just a portion of that grace. All right, he wasn't the boy's Housemaster, but Wilberforce had not passed away from him after all. And even if Wilberforce was fixing him across the room with a hostile expression, warning him in no uncertain terms to keep his distance, John's pulse raced with eagerness and gratitude. He could wait for the boy to approach him. There was world enough and time.

*   *   *

He was just about averting Bedlam, and then the bell fag came through to wake them Sunday morning. They'd endured the beginning-of-term service the day before, its relentless optimism enough to drive a chap to drink, if a chap didn't drink already, and now they were due for the Eucharist, normally the second Sunday of the month, but also at the start of term and on other tedious occasions that littered the season after Easter. Morgan cared nothing for the service itself, but when the vicar came, it all lasted long enough to kill a chap with boredom.

His nerve decamped when they got to Christ Church Militant; luckily they were kneeling. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger as the vicar went down the list: King, bishops and curates, this congregation here present, all in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness—

—especially our Headmaster, Andrew Saltford-Kent.

And any other adversity … Fingernail pressed—

—For all thy servants departed this life—

Knife—

—in thy faith and fear—

Ice—

—beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples …

Wait.

—Partakers of thy heavenly kingdom …

Wait
 … had they not…?

—Our only mediator and advocate.

Wait, wait,
wait
 … but they were on to the next, bewailing sins and wickedness.

—Burden of them is intolerable …

They hadn't said it, the name that began with
S
.

—Forgive us all that is past …

They were supposed to—

—Newness of life …

Had they said it before, last term when he wasn't there?