‘Makes you wonder why you’d even bother,’ Howard says.
‘There must have been an element of self-punishment to it, I think. Graves had always suffered tremendous guilt over his part in the war, the men he’d killed and seen killed. And then, you see, his son died – his son David was killed in Burma, in the Second World War. Graves had encouraged him to sign up, and helped him to get into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his old regiment. It was directly after the death of his son that he started writing about the White Goddess, all this business about suffering and sacrifice in the name of poetry. Trying to make sense of it all, in his own barmy way.’
Howard says nothing, recalls Kipling and Ruprecht Van Doren.
‘But that’s what was interesting about this essay,’ Slattery says. ‘Near the end of his life Graves met a Sufi mystic, who told him about another goddess, a Black Goddess. Mother Night, the Greeks called her. This Black Goddess existed beyond the White. Instead of desire and destruction, she represented wisdom and love – not romantic love, but real love, as you might say, reciprocating, enduring love. Of those who devoted their lives to the White Goddess, and this endless cycle of ravagement and restoration, a very few, if they managed to survive it, would eventually pass through her to the Black Goddess.’
‘Good for them,’ Howard says. ‘And what about everybody else? All the mugs who don’t manage to transcend or whatever?’
Slattery’s face crumples into a smile. ‘Graves said that the best thing to do was to develop a strong sense of humour.’
‘A sense of humour,’ Howard repeats.
‘Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it’s our own expectations that crush us.’ He raises his glass, sending ice cubes tumbling about his upper lip, and drains it. ‘I suppose I should be getting along, before my own goddess starts to wonder. Goodbye, Howard. Keep in touch. I hope I’ll see you before too long.’
Just as the door closes behind Slattery, the lights go out in the pub, and the sudden darkness is filled by a dim but quite unearthly noise – at once eerie and, somehow, mechanical… but it lasts for only a few seconds, and then power is restored, and all returns to normal. The drinkers settle back into their chat; Howard, with no one to talk to, contents himself with nursing his drink and watching the lounge girl as she crosses and recrosses the floor, tray in hand – another muse-in-waiting, another goddess who would transform everything, whose beauty you could surely never get tired of…
Muses, goddesses, it sounds so preposterous, but wasn’t that how Halley had appeared to him in the beginning? A fragment of pure otherness, a radiance who burned through the stale facts of his life like a flame through an old picture? She told him stories of her home and he heard something transcendental; he looked at her and he saw another world – America! – a magic soil where dreams, like seeds, would alight and instantly take root – far away from this tiny island where you never lost your old nickname, where people couldn’t help sliding into the positions left by their fathers and mothers, the same ones at the top, middle and bottom all the time, the same names in the school yearbook.
And she, no doubt, had done the same with him. She had looked at him and seen Ireland, or whatever she thought that was; she had seen history, paganism, romantic landscapes, poetry, and not a man who needed help to love. From the beginning, each was for the other first and foremost a flesh-and-blood representative of a different life, a passport into a fresh new future; what had happened since then was nothing more or less cruel than the real person seeping through the illusion – not a gateway to anything, just somebody like you, fumbling their way through the day.
A sense of humour, he thinks. A sense of humour. If only someone had told him before.
Two hours after the chaos that closed the Seabrook College 140th Anniversary Concert – when it seemed that nothing could ever be quiet again – and the school is calm once more, although anyone who was present at the Quartet’s performance is still experiencing it as a ringing in his ears, and over the next few days a lot of people will be talking IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Everyone else has gone to bed; Geoff, Dennis and Mario are sitting on the slatted benches of the unlit Rec Room.
‘What did he say?’ Mario asks. ‘Are you going to be expelled?’
‘Probably,’ Dennis says.
‘We have to go and see him first thing on Monday,’ Geoff says. ‘He said he needed time to think before he decided what our punishment should be?’
‘Shit-o-rama,’ Mario says. ‘This is a high price to pay for a foolish experiment that did not work.’
‘Totally worth it,’ Dennis says. ‘Best thing Von Boner’s done in his whole useless overweight life.’
In terms of the comprehensive destruction of a night’s entertainment, Ruprecht’s experiment was an unqualified success. The multifrequencied Pachelbel loop, building and building so unendurably, was merely a starter, noise-wise. Just as the Automator took the stage, the Van Doren Wave Oscillator crashed. Instantly, the Sports Hall was filled with a jangle of indescribable static: keening, popping, crackling, hissing, tweeting, belching, roaring, gurgling, a bedlam of utterly alien sounds unleashed at such a volume as to be palpable physical presences, a menagerie of impossible beasts marauding through our reality, disembodied, robotic voices interspersed among them, like a demented mechanical Pentecost…
Too much for this audience; they fled for the doors. Hats were lost in the jostle, spectacles crushed, women knocked to the ground; they ran until they reached the entrance to the car park, where, a safe distance away, they turned back to view the still-ululating Hall, as though expecting it to implode or lift off into the sky. It did not; instead, after a couple of moments, the noise came to a sudden halt, as the sound-desk shorted out and with it the school power supply, at which point a large minority of them stormed back in again to track down the Automator and ask him what the hell kind of bloody game he was playing at.
‘I’m damned if I’m paying you ten thousand a year to turn my son into a terrorist –’
‘This never would have happened in Father Furlong’s day!’
It took nearly an hour of placating, assuaging and mollifying before the Automator could return to his office, where the Quartet had been confined. When he did, he made little effort to disguise his fury. He railed; he roared; he pounded the desk, sending photographs and paperweights flying. There was a new tone in his voice tonight. Before he’d treated them as he treated all the boys – like insects, flimsy and inconsequential. Tonight he spoke to them like enemies.
Ruprecht got the worst of it. Ruprecht, a deviant who had brought his parents nothing but shame; Ruprecht, whose brilliance covered a deep-rooted degeneracy of which this farrago was merely the latest example. You know what I’m talking about, Van Doren. The Acting Principal stared across the desk at him, like a ravenous animal through the bars of its cage. A lot of things have become clear to me now, he said, a lot of things.
The others were all crying; but Ruprecht just stood there, head bowed, while words fell on him like axes to the chest.
I’ll be honest with you, boys, the Automator concluded. For various legal reasons expulsion can be difficult to arrange these days. It’s not impossible you’ll get away with a long suspension. And in a way I hope you do. Because it means I will have the next four and a half years to make your lives hell. I will make them a living hell. You assholes.
‘Mamma Mia,’ Mario says now.