The boy’s mother is rapt – so, indeed, is the father. Father Foley is rather pleased with this little homily himself. ‘The second word, or actually two words,’ he says, ‘is, or are, “team sports”. In the days of the Roman Empire…’
Afterwards, he waits outside the Automator’s office while his parents have a private interview inside. Darren Boyce and Jason Rycroft come along and stand across the hallway, just staring at him. When his parents come out he walks them down to the van. They would like to stay longer, but Father is terribly busy. In the car park, Mother cups Ruprecht’s face in her hands. ‘Dearest Ruprecht, we love you very much. Promise me you will remember that one thing, that whatever happens, Mama and Papa will always love you.’
‘Let’s have no more of this silliness, Ruprecht,’ Father says. He wipes his mouth with a paper tissue.
Ruprecht returns to his room alone. On his pillow has been laid, neatly, a toilet brush. He removes it and lies down.
Mother loves Ruprecht. Lori loves Skippy. God loves everybody. To hear people talk, you would think no one ever did anything but love each other. But when you look for it, when you search out this love everyone is always talking about, it is nowhere to be found; and when someone looks for love from you, you find you are not able to give it, you are not able to hold the trust and dreams they want you to hold, any more than you could cradle water in your arms. Proposition: love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an organizing myth, of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left.
When he gets up he spends an hour kicking and stamping on his French horn so he will not have to play it again. Music, maths, these are things that no longer make any sense to him. They are too perfect, they do not belong here. He does not know how he ever believed this universe could be a symphony played on super-strings, when it sounds like shit, played on shit.
With the revelation of his true origins the last vestiges of Ruprecht’s dignity are torn away. Wherever he goes now, a wave of plumbing-related ridicule pursues him; his head is forced so often down the U-bends of Seabrook commodes – ‘It’s a gateway to another dimension, Ruprecht!’ (flush) – that it never fully dries. The worse it gets, the worse it gets, because in school your enemy is anyone you can’t fight off, so the more enemies you have, the more you’ll find queuing up to join the fun. Ruprecht lumbers through it like some elephantine Golem. He does not cry out when someone flicks his ear with a rubber band or slices his arse with a ruler or jabs it with a compass point or mushes wet tissue in his ears or spits on his back or leaves a dump in his shoe. He does not complain when Noddy boards up the door of his laboratory; he does not protest when he is given detention after several of his non-water-resistant possessions are found blocking one of the dorm toilets; he does not show any signs of caring when his room is festooned yet again with toilet roll. Instead he merely withdraws further into himself – into the ever-expanding cellulite fortress he buttresses daily with doughnuts and a new Ed’s milk-shake called SweetDreamz, which contains no milk and more calories, somehow, than pure sugar.
‘I’m just concerned that the school’s attitude might come across as somewhat confrontational…’
‘Van Doren’s the one who’s being confrontational, Howard. Firm but fair, that’s what we’re being. Am I right, Brother?’ A svelte ebony nod from the sentinel in the corner.
‘But the boys – there does seem to be some evidence that the boys may be ganging up on him.’
‘The boys know the rules, Howard, and if they’re caught breaking the rules they’ll be punished for it. At the same time, they’ve all put a lot of time and effort into this concert, and if one person is spoiling it for everyone on a whim, then I can understand why they’d be angry. And I can understand that they need to express that anger.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘No one’s bigger than this school, Howard.’ The Automator’s attaché case snaps closed like the jaws of a crocodile. ‘Van Doren’s going to find that out sooner or later. I just hope for his sake that it’s sooner.’
And so Howard merely looks on, as by the day the glutinous orb of Van Doren’s face grows wider, paler, converging on a dinner-plate blankness, his yearning to take him aside – to comfort him, simply to speak to him – cancelled out by an equally agonizing guilt. For what could Howard possibly say to him that wouldn’t be a barefaced lie? And if he told him the truth, how would that help him?
So he says nothing, instead goes in the opposite direction, burying himself in his history books just as Van Doren cocoons himself in hydrogenated fats. He delivers his lessons mechanically, not caring whether the boys are listening or not, quietly loathing them for being so predictably what they are, young, self-absorbed, insensate; he waits for the bell just as they do, so that he can dive once more into the trenches of the past, the endless accounts of men sent to their deaths in their tens of thousands, like so many towers of coloured chips pushed by fat hands across the green baize of the casino table – stories that seem, in their regimented wastage, their relentless, pointless destruction, more than ever to make sense, to present an archetype of which the schoolday in its asperity and boredom is the dim, fuddled shadow. Womanless worlds.
Outside, meanwhile, the winter turns sadistic, cold rain flaying him whenever he steps through the door; he wakes each morning with a mouth full of gravel, like he’s just coming off a three-day bender. He remembers Halley’s magical camera, which can turn anywhere into California. Every night he hopes that she will call, but she does not.
And then one day a package arrives for him at the school. Inside is a letter, written in a neat, crimped hand. It is from Daniel Juster’s mother.
My husband tells me that Daniel’s class is studying the Great War and I thought your boys might find this of interest. It belonged to my grandfather, William Henry Molloy. After leaving Seabrook he fought at Gallipoli with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He never spoke about his experiences, and he kept the uniform hidden in a box at the top of a wardrobe where he thought none of us would find it. Daniel was too young to remember his great-grandfather, nevertheless he was very excited to learn about his participation in the war and would have enjoyed sharing this with his class.
Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, is a khaki military uniform. Howard holds it up to the light of the staffroom windows. The rough cloth is spotlessly clean, and smells gently musty; he passes it through his hands like bolts of pure time.