Darkness Visible (3 page)

“Pascoe, dear friend, I wonder if you would mind changing places now with Jameson so that when Barlow comes back—you don’t mind being just a
little
further from the seat of judgement? Now, what about you, Henderson. Eh?”

Henderson was in the middle of the front row. He was a child of bland and lyric beauty.

“You don’t mind being close to the seat of judgement, do you, Henderson?”

Henderson looked up, smiling, proudly and adoringly. His star was in Mr Pedigree’s ascendant. Moved inexpressibly, Mr Pedigree came out of his desk and stood by Henderson, his fingers in the boy’s hair.

“Ghastly, dear friend, when did you last wash all this yellow stuff, eh?”

Henderson looked up, still smiling and secure, understanding that the question was not a question, but communication, brightness, glory. Mr Pedigree dropped his hand and squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then went back to his desk. To his surprise the boy behind the cupboard had his hand up.

“What is it? What is it?”

“Sir. That boy there. He passed a note to him, sir. That’s not allowed is it sir?”

For a while Mr Pedigree was too astonished to answer. Even the rest of the class were silent until the enormity of what they had heard penetrated to them. Then a faint, increasing booing sound began to rise.

“Stop it you men. Now I said stop it. You, what’s your name. You must have come straight out of a howling wilderness. We have found a cop!”

“Sir you said—”

“Never mind what I said, you
literal
creature! My goodness what a treasure we’ve come across!”

Matty’s mouth had opened and stayed open.

It was odd indeed after that, that Matty should adopt Mr Pedigree. It was a sign of the poverty of his acquaintance that he should begin to dog the man and irritate him, since attention from Matty was the last thing he wanted. In fact, Mr Pedigree was on the slope of his rising curve and had begun to recognize where he was in a way that had not been apparent to him in the long distant days of the choir school. He knew now that points on the curve signalled themselves precisely. As long as he admired beauty in the classroom, no matter how overt his gestures of affection, everything was safe and in order. But there came a point where he began—
had
to begin—to help boys with their prep in his own room, forbidden as it was, dangerous and delirious; and there again the gestures would be innocent for a time—

Just now, in the last month of this term, Henderson had been elevated by nature herself to that pre-eminent beauty. Mr Pedigree himself found it strange that there was such a constant
supply of that beauty available, and coming up year after year. The month was strange both for Mr Pedigree and Matty, who dogged him with absolute simplicity. His world was so small and the man was so large. He could not conceive of a whole relationship being based on a joke. He was Mr Pedigree’s treasure. Mr Pedigree had said so. Just as some boys spent years in hospital and some did not, so he saw that some boys did their bounden duty and reported on their fellows and some did not, even though the result was desperate unpopularity.

Matty’s fellows might have forgiven or forgotten his appearance. But his literal-mindedness, high-mindedness and ignorance of the code ensured that he became an outcast. But baldy Windup yearned for friendship, for he did not only dog Mr Pedigree. He dogged the boy Henderson too. The boy would jeer and Mr Pedigree would—

“Not now, Wheelwright, not now!”

Quite suddenly Henderson’s visits to Mr Pedigree’s room became more frequent and unconcealed and the language in which Mr Pedigree addressed the class became more extravagant. It was the top of the curve. He spent most of one lesson in a digression, a lecture on bad habits. There were very, very many of them and they were difficult to avoid. In fact—and they would find this out as they grew older—some of them were impossible to avoid. It was important however to distinguish between those habits which were thought to be bad and those which were actually bad. Why, in ancient Greece women were thought to be inferior creatures, now don’t laugh you men, I know what you’re thinking, you nasty lot, and love reached its highest expression between men and between men and boys. Sometimes a man would find himself thinking more and more about some handsome little fellow. Suppose for example, the man was a great athlete, as it might be nowadays, a cricketer, a test player—

The handsome little fellows waited to find out what the moral of this discourse was and how it related to bad habits but they never did. Mr Pedigree’s voice trailed off and the whole thing did not so much end as die, with Mr Pedigree looking lost and puzzled.

People find it remarkable when they discover how little one man knows about another. Equally, at the very moment when people are most certain that their actions and thoughts are most hidden in darkness, they often find out to their astonishment and grief how
they have been performing in the bright light of day and before an audience. Sometimes the discovery is a blinding and destroying shock. Sometimes it is gentle.

The headmaster asked to see the report books of some boys in Mr Pedigree’s class. They sat at a table in the headmaster’s study with the green filing-cabinets at their back. Mr Pedigree talked volubly about Blake and Barlow, Crosby and Green and Halliday. The headmaster nodded and turned the reports over.

“I see you haven’t brought Henderson’s along.”

Mr Pedigree lapsed into frozen silence.

“You know, Pedigree, it’s most unwise.”

“What’s unwise? What’s unwise?”

“Some of us have peculiar difficulties.”

“Difficulties?”

“So don’t give these private lessons in your room. If you want to have boys in your room—”

“Oh but the boy’s welfare!”

“There’s a rule against it, you know. There have been—rumours.”

“Other boys—”

“I don’t know how you intend me to take that. But try not to be so—exclusive.”

Pedigree went quickly, with heat round his ears. He could see clearly how deep the plot was; for as the graph of his cyclic life rose towards its peak he would suspect all men of all things. The headmaster, thought Pedigree—and was half-aware of his own folly—is after Henderson himself! So he set about devising a scheme by which he could circumvent any attempt on the part of the headmaster to get rid of him. He saw clearly that the best thing was a cover story or camouflage. As he wondered and wondered what to do, he first rejected a step as impossible, then as improbable, then as quite dreadful—and at last saw it was a step he would have to take, though the graph was not falling.

He braced himself. When his class was settled he went round them boy by boy; but this time, beginning with awful distaste at the back. Deliberately he went to the corner where Matty was half-hidden by the cupboard. Matty smiled up at him lopsidedly; and with a positive writhe of anguish, Pedigree gave a grin into the space above the boy’s head.

“Oh my goodness me! That’s not a map of the Roman Empire
my young friend! That’s a picture of a black cat in a coal cellar in the dark. Here, Jameson, let me have your map. Now do you see Matty Windrap? Oh God. Look I can’t spend time loitering here. I’m not taking prep this evening, so instead of going there you just bring your book and your atlas and the rest of it to my room. You know where that is don’t you? Don’t laugh you men! And if you do particularly well there might be a sticky bun or a slice of cake—oh God—”

Matty’s good side shone upwards like the sun. Pedigree glanced down into his face. He clenched his fist and struck the boy lightly on the shoulder. Then he hurried to the front of the classroom as if he were looking for fresh air.

“Henderson, fair one. I shan’t be able to take you for a lesson this evening. But it’s not necessary is it?”

“Sir?”

“Come here and show me your book.”

“Sir.”

“Now there! You see?”

“Sir—aren’t there going to be any more lessons upstairs, sir?”

Anxiously Mr Pedigree looked into the boy’s face, where now the underlip stuck out.

“Oh God. Look, Ghastly. Listen—”

He put his fingers in the boy’s hair and drew his head nearer.

“Ghastly, my dear. The best of friends must part.”

“But you said—”

“Not
now
!”

“You said!”

“I tell you what, Ghastly. I shall be taking prep on Thursday in the hall. You come up to the desk with your book.”

“Just because I did a good map—it’s not fair!”

“Ghastly!”

The boy was looking down at his feet. Slowly he turned away and went back to his desk. He sat down, bowed his head over his book. His ears were so red they even had a touch of Matty’s purple about them. Mr Pedigree sat at his own desk, his two hands trembling on it. Henderson shot him a glance up under his lowered brows and Mr Pedigree looked away.

He tried to still his hands, and he muttered,

“I’ll make it up to him—”

Of the three of them only Matty was able to show an open face
to the world. The sun shone from one side of his face. When the time came for him to climb to Mr Pedigree’s room, he even took extra care in the arrangement of his black hair so that it hid the livid skull and purplish ear. Mr Pedigree opened the door to him with a shudder that had something feverish about it. He sat Matty down in a chair but himself went walking to and fro as if the movement were an anodyne for pain. He began to talk to Matty or to someone, as if there were an adult understanding in the room; and he had hardly begun when the door opened and Henderson stood on the threshold.

Mr Pedigree shouted,

“Get away, Ghastly! Get away! I
won’t
see you! Oh God—”

Then Henderson burst into tears and fled away, clattering down the stairs and Mr Pedigree stood by the door, gazing down them until he could no longer hear the boy’s sobs or the noise of his feet. Even then, he stayed where he was, staring down. He groped in his pocket and brought out a large white handkerchief and he passed it over his forehead and across his mouth and Matty watched his back and understood nothing.

At last Mr Pedigree shut the door but did not look at Matty. Instead, he began to move restlessly round the room, muttering half to himself and half to the boy. He said the most terrible thing in the world was thirst and that men had all kinds of thirst in all kinds of desert. All men were dypsomaniacs. Christ himself had cried out on the cross, “
ΔιΨάω
.” The thirsts of men were not to be controlled so men were not to blame for them. To blame men for them would not be fair, that was where Ghastly was wrong, the foolish and beautiful young thing, but then he was too young to understand.

At this point Mr Pedigree sank into the chair by his table and put his face in his hands.

“
ΔιΨάω
.”

“Sir?”

Mr Pedigree did not reply. Presently he took Matty’s book and told him as briefly as he could what was wrong with the map. Matty began to mend it. Mr Pedigree went to the window and stood, looking across the leads to the top of the fire-escape and beyond it to the horizon where the suburbs of London were now visible like some sort of growth.

Henderson did not go back to his prep in the hall nor to the
lavatories that had been his excuse for leaving it. He went towards the front of the building and stood outside the headmaster’s door for whole minutes. This was a clear sign of his misery; for it was no mean thing in his world to bypass the other members of the hierarchy. At last he tapped at the door, first timidly, then more loudly.

“Well boy, what do you want?”

“See you, sir.”

“Who sent you?”

“No one, sir.”

That made the headmaster look up. He saw the boy had been crying very recently.

“What form are you in?”

“Mr Pedigree’s, sir.”

“Name?”

“Henderson, sir.”

The headmaster opened his mouth to say
ah!
then closed it again. He pursed his lips instead. A worry began to form itself at the back of his mind.

“Well?”

“It’s, it’s about Mr Pedigree, sir.”

The worry burst into full flower, the interviews, the assessment of blame, all the vexations, the report to the governors and at the end of everything the judge. For of course the man would plead guilty; or if it had not gone as far as that—

He took a long, calculated look at the boy.

“Well?”

“Sir, Mr Pedigree, sir—he gives me lessons in his room—”

“I know.”

Now it was Henderson’s turn to be astonished. He stared at the headmaster, who was nodding judiciously. The headmaster was very near retirement, and from tiredness as much as anything switched his determination to the job of fending the boy off before anything irremediable had been said. Of course Pedigree would have to leave, but that could be arranged without much difficulty.

“It’s kind of him,” said the headmaster fluently, “but I expect you find it a bit of a bore don’t you extra work like that on top of the rest, well, I understand, you’d like me to speak to Mr Pedigree wouldn’t you, I won’t say
you
said so, only say that we don’t think you’re strong enough for extra work so you needn’t worry any
more. Mr Pedigree simply won’t ask you to go there any more. Right?”

Henderson went red. He dug at the rug with one toe and looked down at it.

“So we won’t say anything about this visit to anyone else will we? I’m glad you came to see me, Henderson, very glad. You know, these little things can always be put right if you only talk to a, a grown-up about them. Good. Now cheer up and go back to your prep.”

Henderson stood still. His face went even redder, seemed to swell; and from his screwed-up eyes the tears jetted as if his head was full of them.

“Now come along, lad. It’s not as bad as that!”

But it was worse. For neither of them knew where the root of the sorrow was. Helplessly the boy cried and helplessly the man watched, thinking, as it were, furtively of what he could not imagine with any precision; and wondering after all whether fending off was either wise or possible. Only when the tears had nearly ceased did he speak again.