Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (38 page)

MINOS OR RHADAMANTHUS

The sun was sinking behind the cricket pavilion, extending its long shadows over the grass of what had once been called ‘The Great Field’. Caverner remembered how when he had first arrived as a homesick boy of seven in the summer of the year 1901 it had indeed seemed like a Great Field. Now after fifteen years the place looked to him very little and forlorn, transfigured though it was by the light of a perfect August evening. Caverner wondered why there were no small boys there, playing on the pitch or practising in the nets which adjoined the pavilion, until he remembered. Of course, it was August; it must be the summer holidays.

Caverner was beginning to ask himself why he had come. His time at St Cyprian’s had not been a notably happy one, though it had been shot through with fragments of idyllic joy. There had been moments of ecstasy which had come upon him quite without warning and fled in the same way. Later, when he called them to mind, he had never been able to put those occasions into a succinct metaphysical category. Neither ‘Oneness with God’, nor ‘Communion with Nature’, nor even ‘Youthful Exuberance’ had ever satisfied as explanations or definitions of these experiences.

He remembered how at the end of his last summer term at St Cyprian’s he had been allowed to roam pretty much as he wished. He had gained his scholarship to Eton and during the end of term examinations he became what was termed ‘a leavite’, a piece of pedantic facetiousness used to denote someone who was still at the school but free of its academic shackles. He spent this time riding his bicycle along the Kent coast, stopping where he wanted to, spending his pocket money on whatever he chose to eat or drink, lying in the long grass by the roadside or on the short springy turf of cliff tops. He knew even while he experienced it that this strange unburdened interlude was to be savoured, bitten through to its core.

One cloudless afternoon he had come in his wanderings to a church not far from the sea and parked his bicycle in the porch. The church itself with its knapped flint walls and its plain Early English windows was not very exciting; equally, the interior had been pleasant enough but had offered little of interest. There were no ancient tombs or brasses for him to rub; the glass was intensely Victorian and would not do. Caverner, at thirteen, was beginning to suffer from a slight case of antiquarian snobbery. As he came out of the church, he suddenly remembered that he had not yet had the lunchtime sandwiches with which he had been provided, so he decided to eat them in the churchyard which was on a slope with a view through trees of the sea. There it was, deeply blue below the paler blue of the sky.

He sat down facing it, resting his back against a tombstone that tilted gently away from it and stretched out his legs on the long, nodding summer grass that glittered in the heat. The sandwiches had contained some kind of meat paste and were not very palatable, but the apple which he had been given by way of dessert seemed to taste of the summer that surrounded him. When he had finished he remained sitting. A deep calm entered him, not soporific at all, but wide awake, like a glass of clear cold water. He had the feeling that he could see to the end of the world. It occurred to him that it would be more accurate to say that he could see to the end of time. That was the quality of the experience, a very particular quality like no other: it was absolutely of the moment and the place, yet, as he put it to himself, ‘ancient’. That word ‘ancient’ had always seemed to him one of the loveliest in the English language. The sea before him, the warm lichened stone at his back, the bright sun above him, the dead beneath him under the grass all contributed to the flavour of the instant. It was a thing as unique as himself; not in time, nor out of time, but somehow for all time. For a few seconds he seemed to have in his grasp the meaning of eternity. It was no longer the shapeless cloudy entity that it had been in sermons and hymns and drowsy bible readings before bed time. Above all, there was, for once, no fear in it, no fear at all.

A breeze stirred and with it the sensation began to drift away. He tried to retain it even while he knew it was as useless as trying to hold smoke in his hands. He got up and bicycled down into Sandgate where he bought an ice cream and wandered along the pier. The feeling had gone, never to be recovered in exactly the same form, but he knew he had been changed by it. When he arrived back at St Cyprian’s later that afternoon, he was expecting, rather absurdly, that people would see the change in him, that he would appear transfigured. A part of him, though, knew that this was laughable.

At evening prayers in the chapel some of the exalted state of the afternoon came back to him. It was rather unexpected because he had come to loathe the unctuous tones with which the headmaster, the Rev. C.W. Margetson conducted the rite. Sitting almost opposite Margetson, he watched the man closely as he knelt at his desk praying, as he always did, extempore. The hands like polished yellowed ivory were knotted together; the balding cranium sprinkled with sparse black hairs nodded in tune with his holy ejaculations. Caverner who had once been impressed and frightened by these pieties now knew more of the man inside, or thought he did.

That evening Caverner saw him without the usual feelings of revulsion. He saw a hypocrite, but he also saw what a hypocrite was: a man in torment. Pity and compassion was not what he felt; perhaps, he thought later, such things are beyond a thirteen year old, but he did have a fleeting intuitive understanding. Caverner had been momentarily touched by the suffering behind the cant. The thin, bony, mean looking man opposite him was somehow appropriate to the occasion, part of the necessary furniture of evening prayers in St Cyprian’s chapel, even of the world and universe beyond it.

Then Margetson had announced the hymn:
The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended
, and Caverner allowed the drowsy sentimentalism of the tune and words to wash over him and carry him away. His cheeks burned from his day in the sun and the wind from the sea. All was well, even Margetson.

As far as he could remember, Caverner had never actually hated Margetson; his feelings towards him were always more complex. He had begun his life at St Cyprian’s by fearing him and his punishments. Margetson possessed two canes of differing thickness and suppleness which he called Minos and Rhadamanthus after the judges in Hades, the Classical Land of the Dead; then there was the wooden paddle with which he would punish his very youngest charges, and this he called Cerberus after its guard dog. None of the boys knew why Margetson had given names to his instruments of torture, nor did they understand the significance of those names, beyond the fact that they had to do with final judgement and retribution. No-one would have dared to ask The Head, as he was called; but the very fact that these instruments had names invested their exercise with an additional and sinister terror.

Caverner never again knew such fear as he had known between the ages of seven and eleven at St Cyprian’s; not even in the trenches in the seconds before the whistles blew and he and his men had climbed over the parapet to begin the treacherous walk through No-Man’s Land. Then the fear had been acute, but purely physical. The terror he had known then was also moral and spiritual. When he was summoned to ‘see The Head’ he felt acutely the anticipation of physical agony, but more acutely still what he came to know as ‘conviction of sin’. The Head used the word sin a great deal and made his victims feel that the pains he inflicted were but a pale foretaste of the eternal agonies meted out to sinners in the life to come. Some boys pretended to shrug this side of the matter off, but Caverner could not. His parents were somewhat remote, god-fearing people whom he knew would be grieved to know that he was a miserable sinner and that, thanks to Margetson, he had already sampled the torments of the damned.

Margetson had a curious way of dealing with his victims. In the first instance they would be summoned to ‘see him after lunch’, and that usually rather disgusting meal would be further blighted by his reading, before Grace, of a list of those who were to see him. In this post lunch interview he would tell the boy at some length quite why and how he had offended so grievously; then he would ask the boy in question to come to see him ‘after tea’, at about six o’clock, for what he invariably called ‘a licking’, or, if he was feeling particularly judgmental, ‘a good licking’. To the day of his death Caverner could never hear the word ‘licking’ without a physical feeling of nausea rising in his throat. Its metaphorical resonances had sickened him from the very first.

So, after tea, the thing itself would happen. In the spring and Michaelmas terms sentence was carried out in The Head’s study in the main school building, but in summer Margetson chose to use the cricket pavilion on the Great Field as his place of punishment. The ostensible reason for this was convenience: the hour after tea was the time he spent coaching the first eleven in the nets next to the pavilion.

During his early years at St Cyprian’s Caverner had simply been in awe of The Head, and, at times, desperately afraid. Then one summer term, shortly after his eleventh birthday, he had been found convicted of a particularly heinous misdemeanour. Caverner could not quite remember what it was: was it talking after lights out, or laughing during one of The Head’s sermons? No, he had forgotten the crime, but not its consequence. After lunch he had been told to meet The Head in the pavilion after tea at six.

The pavilion itself was an innocent looking building of white-painted weather boards with steps leading up to a veranda, fretwork on the eaves and balustrade giving it a touch of the picturesque. Inside it was slightly stuffy after a long day in the sun, smelling of creosote and linseed oil. There were team photographs on the wall, pads and bats scattered about on the wooden benches. Caverner had waited a good five minutes for Margetson to arrive, terror and shame increasing with every derisive tick of the pavilion clock.

When Margetson came he was carrying his two canes, Minos and Rhadamanthus. He told Caverner to ‘prepare’ himself, a ghastly euphemism which meant that Caverner was to take down his shorts and underpants, then bend over one of the benches. As Caverner did as he was told Margetson asked him whether he preferred the punishment to be inflicted by Minos or Rhadamanthus. Caverner by this time was trembling so much that he could not speak, but something about the tone of Margetson’s question—‘Minos, or Rhadamanthus?’—had astonished him. There had been a higher pitch to his voice, and a tremor which Caverner could not mistake for anything other than pure excitement.

It was just as the dreadful business was coming to an end that quite by chance Caverner noticed something. His head had been bowed and turned away from his torturer, but the force of one of Margetson’s blows had shifted him slightly so that he saw what he had never seen before: The Head in action. He saw the look on the man’s face, the disarray of his clothes, the gross physical evidence of sensual excitement.

Caverner had been an innocent boy, brought up in innocence, but there are times when innocence knows and can see farther than experience. Caverner not only saw, but somehow knew. Margetson too knew that he had been discovered. He immediately stopped the beating and told Caverner to ‘get dressed at once’. Caverner did so and came out of the pavilion before Margetson. He walked down the steps in a state of numbness, almost a trance as he reflected on what he had seen. He had been horrified, but also, somehow, liberated. Conviction of sin would not torment him again. He began to understand that evil may not have a motive, but it must have a cause.

It would not be true to say that Margetson never punished Caverner again, but Minos and Rhadamanthus were rarely used on him. He preferred to give Caverner ‘lines’ instead. This meant copying out a hundred or more hexameters of Virgil, a task which Caverner, a dreamy but studious boy, found almost congenial.

Caverner kept his experience in the pavilion to himself, but he gave it a great deal of thought and, as he did so, certain aspects of Margetson’s curious character began to make sense. Long afterwards Caverner realised that it was this speculation which kept him from simply hating The Head.

In the first place there was Margetson’s wife, invariably and rather strangely called ‘Mrs Head’. Mrs Head was a lumpy, doughy woman, with deep-set, suspicious eyes, curiously dull and featureless of countenance. She acted as head matron in the school, frequently forcing castor oil, liquorice powder and hot poultices on her charges with the same dedicated ferocity with which Margetson applied Minos and Rhadamanthus. From what little casual conversation she let fall Caverner gathered that she was the daughter of a bishop and something of a snob. Childless, she lavished what few maternal instincts she possessed on the occasional sprig of nobility that came as a pupil to St Cyprian’s. Those, like Caverner, whose parents were neither rich nor aristocratic, she treated as barely tolerable nuisances.

Caverner, like most children of his age, regarded almost all adults as more or less physically repulsive, but he recognised gradations of hideousness, and Mrs Head he thought of as belonging to the lowest circles of Hades. What little he understood of carnal relations convinced him of the impossibility of their existing between The Head and his wife. This, he later realised, could have been the prejudice and aesthetic snobbery of youth, but he certainly could detect nothing tender in their relationship.