‘Oh yes, that’s right…’ He rummages among the papers on his desk and locates a slim sheaf of three or four pages. He holds it out to Howard. ‘This is Vyvyan Wycherley, Howard, old classmate of mine. He and Father Casey here have drawn this up for you to sign.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s your new contract. I’m pleased to offer you a position as Seabrook’s first-ever school archivist. Runs concurrently with your existing teaching duties. Money’s not enormous, but tidy enough all the same. Work the hours you want, whatever particular areas take your fancy…’
Howard flicks dumbly through the pages – job description, salary, and then, near the back, his eye catches on a short paragraph –
‘It’s a confidentiality clause. No doubt you’ll be familiar with these from your days in the City. In signing, you consent by law not to disclose sensitive information pertaining to school affairs, including what we have discussed here today.’
Howard gapes back at him stupidly. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Merely a precaution, Howard, making sure we’ve got all our angles covered. No need to rush into it right away. Take it home with you, think it over. If you want to turn it down, do the honorable thing, I can’t stop you. I’m sure you’ll find a position elsewhere easily enough. Gather there are vacancies in St Anthony’s at the moment. Teacher got stabbed there just last week.’
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, Greg,’ Howard says softly.
‘Like I say, Howard, it’s up to you. Here at Seabrook we take care of each other. Play by the rules, listen to your captain, and we’ll always find a place on the team for you. But if you can’t stick by your school when it has a bad bounce of the ball, why should it stick by you?’
With numb fingers, Howard leafs again through the pages of dense, recondite text till he arrives at the last, where he sees his own name, with a line above it for his signature, and the date already added. He can feel the surreptitious and lowered gazes on him, pressing against him like bodies in a crowded elevator.
In the closeness Father Green’s voice rings out like a bell, in a merry sing-song: ‘And will God be apprised of what has taken place?’
An irritated mutter passes around the table. The priest rephrases his question. ‘I am merely asking, as a matter of protocol, whether on the Last Day, when God demands of us our sins, our confidentiality agreement requires that we keep silent then too?’
‘With all due respect, Father –’ the Automator visibly annoyed ‘– now is not the time.’
‘You are quite right, of course,’ Father Green agrees. ‘I daresay we shall have plenty of opportunity to consider it, when we are condemned to eternal hellfire.’
The quick-eyed, foxy priest turns to him exasperated. ‘Why must you always be so medieval?’
‘Because this is sin!’ The priest’s bony hand pounds on the table so that the teacups in their saucers and the plastic biros jump, and a raging eye roves over the table to fix each of them in turn. ‘It is sin,’ he repeats, ‘a most egregious sin against an innocent child! We may hide it from ourselves with our nice talk of the good of the many. But we cannot hide it from the Lord God!’
For the rest of the day, while school continues at some invisible remove, Howard wanders alone in a clammy, evil fog. Farley asks if he wants to go for a drink after work, and Howard can barely look him in the eye. With every moment he feels the secret worming deeper into him, making itself at home, like some monstrous parasite.
When these matters arose in the past: the words spoken so casually, a parent explaining the change of seasons to a child. Is this what he’s been living in all along? Old stories rise up from the depths of his mind – the straying hands of this priest, the sadistic tendencies of another, doors that were kept locked, eyes that lingered for too long in the changing room. Stories, though; stories were all he’d ever taken them for, idle gossip made up to pass the time, like everything in Seabrook. Because otherwise how could those men still be walking around? Wearing Pentecostal doves in their lapels? Surely at that level of hypocrisy God or whoever would be compelled to swing into action! Now it’s as if a panel has been slid back and he’s glimpsed the secret machinery of the world, the grown-up world, in which matters arise – hotel doors are pushed open, pills are dropped into glasses of Coke, bodies are laid bare, while outside life goes on oblivious – and are dispatched again, by small cadres of men in rooms, the priests in their conclave, the Automator and his legal team, it doesn’t really make any difference. A little white lie for the common good. That’s how we keep it on the road.
His last period is free; today he doesn’t feel like staying around, so he gathers his things and makes his way out. At home he unsheathes the contract from its envelope and lays it on the table, from where it seems to glow at him, polar-white.
Halley’s phone rings out three times before she answers it. When she does it’s a shock to hear her voice – outside his own head, independent of his memory. He realizes he’s imagined her suspended in some atemporal state; only now does it hit him that in the moment before his call, and all the moments before that for the last weeks, she’s been doing other things, living through days that he knows nothing about, just as before he met her there were thousands more days as real to her as the hand before her face that he will never have an inkling of, in which he never figured even as an idea.
‘Howard?’
‘Yes.’ He hasn’t planned out what he was going to say. ‘It’s been a while,’ he manages finally. ‘How are you? How have you been?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you still staying with Cat? Is it okay?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘And work, how’s that going, it’s all…?’
‘Work’s fine. What do you want, Howard?’
‘I just wanted to see how you were.’
‘Well, I’m fine,’ she says. The ensuing silence has the conclusive air of a raised guillotine.
‘Me too,’ Howard says miserably. ‘Although I don’t know if you heard, we’ve had some trouble at the school, this boy, he was in my History class…’
‘I heard.’ The ice in her voice melts, if only fractionally. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks.’ He has an impulse to tell her everything, about Coach, the Board meeting, the confidentiality clause. But at the last second he recoils, not sure it’ll do him any favours at this point to show her the contaminated world he’s living in. Instead he blurts out, ‘I made a mistake. That’s what I called to say. I’ve been a fool. I’ve done such terrible things. I hurt you. I’m sorry, Halley, I’m so sorry.’
A single word, ‘Okay,’ like a barren atoll in the oceanic silence.
‘Well, I mean, what do you think?’
‘What do I think?’
‘Can you forgive me?’ Spoken out loud the question sounds laughably misjudged, as if he’d started quoting Casablanca at her. Halley doesn’t laugh, though. ‘What about your other woman?’ she says in an indifferent, uninflected voice. ‘Have you checked this with her?’
‘Oh,’ he waves his hand dismissively, as if the past were a smoky image that could be dispelled at a stroke. ‘That’s over. It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t real.’