A Pleasure and a Calling Read online

  Across the street from my bedroom window I see Mrs Damato, busy with dinner. The kitchen looks bright and steamed up. How I’d love to be down there, behind the door in her pantry, hedged among the jars and strong-smelling packages and the sausages hanging like stiff arms from the ceiling. I crept in, though she knows nothing of this, during the long holiday, when the weather was hot and the kitchen door had been left open for the breeze. Mrs Damato was vacuuming upstairs. Her little boy, Anthony, was playing in his playpen in the sitting room. Little Anthony saw me and scrambled to his feet when I came in. I waved to him, like an angel just landed. He was still standing at the bars of his cage when I came out. There were cakes still warm on a wire rack, so I took one and gave him half. The drone of the vacuum cleaner stopped abruptly and we both looked at the ceiling. We could hear Mrs Damato up there, warbling on in her high Italian voice.

  * * *

  These are the days I remember. After the troubles with cousin Isobel, my father sent me to a school far from Norfolk. It was an opportunity, he said. My mother had left money when she died, and he said that I had to try hard for her. Even then I knew a line when I heard one. In fact I had more brains than I needed to succeed, but never quite the heart. Instead, I worked at my camouflage. I took care to avoid the extremes of triumph and failure, kept my head down in class, endured enough knocks in play to escape the casual torments of the large-thighed sporty boys, who ruled the house under the neglectful myopic gaze of our house-parent, Mrs Luckham. I shunned cliques, laughed when the others laughed, shrank from the scrutiny of masters. Neither in nor out, I cultivated a middling, willing sociability, waiting my turn, playing my part. But when, once or twice a term, I feigned mild illness or injury, it was not (as with other boys) with a view to skipping afternoon games or PE, but to secure a half-hour of freedom in which to walk the creaky, waxed corridors of Winter House or Bentham or Wood, drawn by the odour of unattended, unlocked dorms – familiar as my own in basic décor, layout and dimensions but redolent with the aura of their legitimate, absent residents. Now that was what I called an opportunity.

  I hadn’t much of significance to say to my fellow pupils, and vice versa, but I came to know them, or a good sum of them, through their comic books and collectables and playthings, and the letters and cards from mothers and siblings and generous godparents whose gifts of money and sweets were accompanied by witty, affectionate greetings and exhortations to prosper and enjoy life. I winkled out their secrets – their family nicknames, who among them had had an appendix or tonsils out, who was going skiing that winter, which family had a Jack Russell (picture enclosed) called Dobb, who had a new baby sister, who needed to be reminded to use their asthma inhaler. Occasionally there would be an unimaginative diary to pore over; the same tattered November issue of Penthouse turned up in several locations during the spring term of Year 10. I filled a spiral notebook with my findings and conjectures (Tomerton was gay, I surmised; Faulkes’s stammer was the product of torture as a child), spilling into two notebooks, which became three, four, five and more as my enterprise gathered weight. I kept their lives, all of them – the weaklings, the bullies, the dolts, the young Mozarts and Einsteins – locked in my chest.

  Was it too wild to think of it as a hobby? An obsessive sport? Even accounting for the allure of Penthouse, it was as exhilarating a thing as a boy could experience to be given a few moments alone in a cave of forbidden treasures. A sharp eye might have noticed me leaving the table before pudding, or slipping out of the library during free study. I wasn’t complacent. My impulses were supported by risk assessment. I planned. I made exit strategies. I could trot out a well-rehearsed line to explain – to a cleaner or half-interested passing master – why I was where I oughtn’t to be. But, of course, danger was part of the appeal. What is life without the unexpected crash of something to remind us of how the rug can be pulled from under you in an instant? At assembly Mr Williams read out a mesmerizing report in the Yorkshire Post of a local young man who had plunged to his death from a mountain in the Lake District. The whole town, he said, was in mourning for a lost son. My fellow pupils fell into an uncomfortable, shuffling silence, but I thought immediately of my own heedless self, walking my own ledge, beset by bracing winds above the abyss of sudden discovery – a kindred, fearless presence in the shadow of the glorious, remembered lost son. We did it – the lost son and I – because it was there, and because we both knew it felt like nothing else on earth.

  * * *

  In the lower sixth, and very nearly grown-up, some of us had our own room and a lockable study, though it was the work of a moment to lift a key – sometimes a small bunch on a novelty ring, with their promise of a secret something squirrelled away in a tin or wooden box – from the pocket of a blazer hanging in a changing room or on the back of a chair, or lying on the playing fields at lunch break, its contents half spilt on the grass. Hurrying to the victim’s quarters, I could then safely give myself up to ten minutes’ judicious foraging or just spend the time absorbing the rays of an alien atmosphere. There was often something to eat. Only on two occasions was I interrupted by the occupant returning unexpectedly – the rattle of the door handle, a muttered ‘Shit…’ as the boy searched again for his key, then the echo of his footsteps as he retreated to the school office to face the wrath of Mrs Blake, the senior housekeeper. These were moments to test the nerve, though Mrs Blake was slow to acknowledge a careless adolescent’s sense of urgency, and by the time she had followed him grimly back to his room with a master key, his own was safely in her lost-property basket, miraculously restored by an unknown hand. I carved my mark everywhere you couldn’t see, everywhere I shouldn’t be.

  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 bes
et 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.

  3

  MY 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 tenn
is 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.’