“Oh, Mum,” I sobbed, sinking my face into her furry coat, feeling her mouth against my hair, smelling cigarette smoke and Cinnabar and the dry, musky scent of her as inside something small and clever slipped its hand into my heart and squeezed.
4
In spite of Mrs. Mitchell’s insistence that Leon would never have gone on the roof alone, her son’s best friend—the boy she called Julian Pinchbeck—was never found. School records were searched; door-to-door enquiries made, but to no avail. Even this effort might not have been made if it had not been for Mr. Straitley’s insistence that he had seen Pinchbeck on the Chapel roof—though sadly, the boy had got away.
The police were very sympathetic—after all, the woman was distraught—but secretly they must have believed poor Mrs. Mitchell to be slightly off her rocker, forever talking about nonexistent boys and refusing to accept her son’s death as a tragic accident.
That might have changed if she had seen me again, but she didn’t. Three weeks later I went to live with my mother and Xavier at their home in Paris, where I was to remain for the next seven years.
By that time, though, my transformation was well under way. The ugly duckling had begun to change; and with my mother’s help it happened fast. I did not resist it. With Leon dead, Pinchbeck could not hope or wish to survive. I disposed rapidly of my St. Oswald’s clothes and relied upon my mother to do the rest.
A second chance, she had called it; and now I opened all of the notes, the letters, the unopened parcels waiting in their pretty wrappers under my bed, and made full use of what I found inside.
I never saw my father again. The investigation into his conduct was only a formality, but his manner was odd, and it aroused the suspicion of the police. There was no real cause to suspect foul play. But he was aggressive under questioning; a Breathalyzer test revealed he’d been drinking heavily; and his account of that night was vague and unconvincing, as if he hardly recalled what had happened anymore. Roy Straitley, who confirmed his presence at the scene of the tragedy, had reported hearing him shout—I’ll get you!—at one of the boys. The police later made much of this, and though Straitley always maintained that John Snyde was running to help the fallen boy, he had to admit that the Porter had had his back turned to him at the time of the incident, and that he could not therefore have known for sure whether the man was trying to help or not. After all, said the police, Snyde’s record was hardly untarnished. Only that summer he had received an official reprimand for attacking a pupil on St. Oswald’s premises; and his uncouth behavior and violent temper were well known around the school. Dr. Tidy confirmed it; and Jimmy added some embellishments of his own.
Pat Bishop, who might have helped, proved strangely reluctant to speak on my father’s behalf. This was partly the fault of the New Head, who had made it clear to Pat that his principal duty was to St. Oswald’s, and that the sooner the Snyde fiasco was cleared up, the sooner they could distance themselves from the whole sorry affair. Besides, Bishop was beginning to feel uneasy. This business threatened both his new appointment and his growing friendship with Marlene Mitchell. After all, he was the one who’d befriended John Snyde. As Second Master, he’d encouraged him, believed in him, defended him, knowing that John had a history of violence against my mother, against myself, and on at least one documented occasion against a pupil of St. Oswald’s—which made it all the more plausible that the man, goaded to breaking point, had lost his head and had chased Leon Mitchell across the rooftops to his death.
There was never any real evidence to support the claim. Certainly Roy Straitley refused to do so. Besides, wasn’t the man afraid of heights? But the papers got hold of it. There were anonymous letters, phone calls, the usual public outrage that accumulates around any such case. Not that there ever was a case. John Snyde was never formally accused. All the same he hanged himself, in a bed-and-breakfast room in town, three days before we moved to Paris.
Even then I knew who was responsible. Not Bishop, though he was partly to blame. Not Straitley, not the papers, not even the Head. St. Oswald’s killed my father, just as surely as St. Oswald’s killed Leon. St. Oswald’s, with its bureaucracy, its pride, its blindness, its assumptions. Killed them and digested them without a thought, like a whale sucking up plankton. Fifteen years later, no one remembers either of them. They’re just names on a list of Crises St. Oswald’s Has Survived.
Not this one, though. Last time pays for all.
5
Friday, 5th November, 6:30 P.M.
I passed by the hospital after school, with some flowers and a book for Pat Bishop. Not that he reads much, though perhaps he should; besides, as I told him, he ought to be taking it easy.
He wasn’t, of course. I arrived to find him engaged in a violent discussion with the same pink-haired nurse who had dealt with my own problem not long before.
“Christ, not another one,” she said, on seeing me. “Tell me, are all St. Oswald’s staff as awkward as you two, or did I just get lucky?”
“I tell you, I’m fine.” He didn’t look it. He had a bluish tinge, and he looked smaller, as if all that running had impacted him somehow. His eye fell on the flowers in my hand. “For God’s sake, I’m not dead yet.”
“Give them to Marlene,” I suggested. “She could probably do with cheering-up.”
“You could be right.” He smiled at me, and I caught sight of the old Bishop again, just for a moment. “Take her home, will you, Roy? She won’t go, and she’s tired out. Thinks something’s going to happen to me if she gets a good night’s sleep.”
Marlene, I discovered, had gone to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of tea. I caught up with her there, having extracted a promise from Bishop that he wouldn’t try and check himself out in my absence.
She looked surprised to see me. She was holding a crumpled handkerchief in one hand, and her face—unusually clear of makeup—was pink and blotchy. “Mr. Straitley! I wasn’t expecting—”
“Marlene Mitchell,” I said sternly. “After fifteen years, I think it’s time you started calling me Roy.”
Over polystyrene cups of a peculiarly fishy-tasting tea, we talked. It’s funny how our colleagues, those not-quite-friends who populate our lives more closely than our closest relatives, remain so hidden to us in the essential. When we think of them, we see them not as people, with families and private lives, but as we see them every day; dressed for work; businesslike (or not); efficient (or not); all of us satellites of the same lumbering moon.
A colleague in jeans looks strangely wrong; a colleague in tears is almost indecent. Those private glimpses of something outside St. Oswald’s seem almost unreal, like dreams.
The reality is the stone; the tradition; the permanence of St. Oswald’s. Staff come, staff go. Sometimes they die. Sometimes even boys die; but St. Oswald’s endures, and as I have grown older I have taken increasing comfort from this.
Marlene, I sense, is different. Perhaps because she’s a woman—those things don’t mean so much to women, I’ve found. Perhaps because she sees what St. Oswald’s has done to Pat. Or perhaps because of her son, who haunts me still.