That evening the Headmaster himself spoke at compline, which on rare occasions he did. He told a parable of his own invention: how a man, repeating every day of his life a certain pattern of behaviour, made the pattern richer. He told of how, in a dream, this man had deviated once from his chosen way and been harshly judged by God, and punished with failure where all his life there had been success before.
Olivier recognized in the words a faintly apposite note and wondered if inspiration for them had perhaps come from his own deviation, and subsequent failure, in the realm of science. In ending his address, the Headmaster did not omit to include a reference to the value of tradition, claiming for it and for the school it ruled a potency that must surely be the approval of the God who punished when displeased. The Headmaster’s philosophy did not vary except in the allegorical garb of his discourse. It was a circle that came full, ending where it had begun: with the school and its time-worn customs, tried and true, that made men of boys.
Later, in scanning a Horace ode with the aid of a Kelly’s Key, Olivier found himself distracted, in turn, by the Headmaster’s overwhelming confidence in the established rites of passage through his school and by the dining-hall maid’s transgressions. Were her sins the weaponry of insurrection, intended as such or simply so because they happened? What passed through her thoughts as she implemented another disturbance or discomfort? And why was it that the Headmaster’s beliefs and a woman’s recidivistic stratagems seemed now to cling together like proximate jigsaw pieces? Angustam amice pauperiem pati, robustus acri militia puer condiscat, Horace had written; and Olivier matched Latin and English as best he could, his key’s translation not being word for word.
Of course, the Headmaster did not know – as authority before him had not known – that the dining-hall maid had in her girlhood been, herself, a fragment of tradition, supplying to boys who now were men a service that had entered the unofficial annals. There was that too, Olivier reminded himself, before he returned to winkling out which word went with which.
*
At the end of the day the dining-hall maids, and the dormitory maids, and those with diverse duties, went home, some sharing the available space in the cars that a few of them drove, others on bicycles, some on foot to the village. Among those who walked was the girl who was now a woman. She smoked on the leafy back drive, a little behind two of her colleagues, one of whom lit the way with a torch. The skin of the boy she admired was still as smooth as porcelain though not as white, and without the blush of pink that porcelain flesh went in for. She loved the sallow tinge, the dark eyes gazing out of it, the fringe that so perfectly followed the forehead’s contour.
His image filled her consciousness as she walked on, his voice the voice of boys who had long ago tenderly spoken her name. He knew, as she had guessed he would be the one to know, because he was the kind. She’d always known the kind.
*
The first of the late bells sounded, rhythmically clanging. Younger boys gathered up their books, and then their footsteps were muffled in the corridors, no conversation exchanged because noise was forbidden while the Upper and Middle School classes continued their preparation. Olivier read Cakes and Ale, the orange-backed book hidden from view behind Raleigh and the British Empire and a guide to laboratory experiments. Was it Chapman, do you think? a note interrupted this, passed along the row of desks to him. Maybe, he scribbled and passed the scrap of paper back to New-combe. You had to lie. They’d be suspicious if you kept denying it whenever they mentioned anyone.
Someone would guess: one after another she had caused the incidents to happen so that someone would guess. As certain as he was about everything else, so he was certain that this last conjecture was not fanciful. He knew no more; he doubted that he ever would. In his mind’s eye he saw her as once or twice he had when he’d been out and about at this time himself: in her navy-blue coat, the belt tied loosely, a headscarf with horses on it.
*
‘Cheers, Bella,’ the two in front called out, one after the other, as they turned into Parsley Lane. ‘Cheers.’
She loathed that cheap word, so meaningless, used all the time now. ‘Good night,’ she called back.
Voices and the occasional laugh accompanied the bobbing torchlight in Parsley Lane. She went a different way and heard only the hooting of an owl. She came to the Railwayman, where there were voices and laughter again, and then the television turned loud in Mrs Hodges’ front room.
Her mother, still alive, would be in her bed: she pretended that. And he would be silent among the churchyard yews, and would say nothing while she went by. Then when she had brought the tea upstairs and had sat a while to watch the old eyelids droop, she’d slide back the wooden bolt and move the curtain an inch to the right, leaving it for just a moment. He would come in without a knock.
Someone leaving the Railwayman called after her, saying good night, and she called back. She could have had any of them; she still could, for all she knew. My God, she thought, the stifled life it would have been, with any one of them!
She didn’t mind the short cut by the churchyard, not any more. She’d passed through the lines of gravestones too often, the Greshams’ great family vault damaged and open in one place, the smashed, forgotten wreaths eerie when there was moonlight. The odour she’d once associated with the dead was old leaves rotting.
The cottage where all her life she’d lived was the last in the village. Her father had left it every morning of her childhood to go to work at the quarry; he’d died upstairs, where her mother had too. A boy had come on the day her mother died and she’d had to send him away, head of St Andrew’s he’d been, Tateman. La même chose: it was he who’d taught her that, and chacun à son goût, making her pout her lips to get the sounds. Long afterwards she’d imagined travelling with him, all over France and Germany, saying la même chose herself when she was offered a dessert, wanting what he’d had. Fair-haired he’d been, not at all like the present one, whose name she did not know.
She turned the latchkey in her front door and drew the curtains in the room she’d walked straight into, the heavy one over the door to keep the draught out. Two bars of the electric fire warmed her ankles when she sat down, with tea and Petit Beurre. The secret side of it they’d always relished, as much as the other in a way. And she had, too – not quite as much but almost.
*
When the dormitory had quietened Olivier thought about her again. He wondered how, when she was young, her expression had changed when her mood did. He imagined her demure, for there was about her sometimes in the dining hall a trace of that as she stood waiting for Grace to be said, while the others were impatient. Conjecturing again, he saw her in a different coat, without a headscarf, hair blown about. He saw her uniform laid out, starched and ready on an ironing board, a finger damped before the iron’s heat was tested. He saw her stockinged feet and laughter in her eyes, and then her nakedness.
Justina’s Priest
Only Justina Casey made sense, Father Clohessy reflected yet again, shaking his head over the recurrence of the thought, for truth to tell the girl made no sense at all. The contradiction nagged a little in a familiar way, as it did whenever Justina Casey, sinless as ever, made her confession. It caused Father Clohessy to feel inadequate, foolish even, that he failed to understand something that as a priest he should have.
Leaving the confessional she had just left herself, he looked around for her: at the back, near the holy-water stoup, she trailed her rosary through her fingers. ‘Father, I’m bad,’ she had insisted and, allotting her her penance, he had been again aware that she didn’t even know what badness was. But without the telling of her beads, without the few Hail Marys he had prescribed, she would have gone away unhappy. Of her own volition, every few days she polished the brass of the altar vases and the altar cross. She would be there on Saturday evening, a bucket of scalding water carried through the streets, the floor mop lifted down from its hook in the vestry cupboard. On Fridays she scraped away the week’s accumulation of candle grease and arranged to her satisfaction the out-of-date missionary leaflets.