His classmates were celebrating the end of the examinations by boasting of their sexual exploits or telling dirty jokes, Fowler wasn't sure which. He wandered onto the sports field, where a lone footballer was playing cat and mouse with a ball. "Are you there?" Fowler whispered.
Only the sky murmured a response, an airliner passing overhead. "Are you there?" he repeated, and didn't realize how loudly until the footballer stared at him. Fowler covered his mouth and made for the gates.
What voice could he have been hearing except the voice of his own mind? His mother was constantly telling him to be true to himself, though he knew that she was really telling him to live up to her image of him. He hurried home to stop her worrying about him.
As he let himself into the house she darted out of her room, onto the dingy landing. She gripped the creaking banister and leaned down to scrutinize him. "You did well, didn't you? You did your best?"
"I think so, mother."
"I know you did. You'll never let me down." She frowned at him and pinched her nightgown closed over the tops of her freckled breasts. "Just let me rest now until your father comes home. He's bringing one of your favorite dinners and a cake."
Fowler read Dickens in the front room, where the antimacassars smelled of mothballs and the window looked out onto a gardenless terrace like a reflection of the one that contained the room. Two chapters later he heard his father cursing the front door, a birthday cake in one hand and a packet of fish and chips in the other. It sounded to Fowler as if he hadn't had much of a day at the accountancy firm where he worked as a clerk.
Later, once they'd moved the chairs into the corners of the front room so as to unfold the dining-table, Fowler's father shared a bottle of beer with him. "That's enough," his mother cried, hairclips rattling between her teeth as she tidied her hair in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece. "Do you want him developing a taste for alcohol before he's even gone to university? Anyone would think you didn't want him to make the most of himself."
"I made the most of myself today," Fowler blurted.
"I knew you would after all I taught you."
"Just so long as he's passed in a few other subjects as well."
"Of course he has. Anyone would think you resent his abilities, your own son's. Not that I haven't seen a few howlers in your handwriting over the years."
"I'm starving," Fowler said, hoping that dinner would require a truce. At the table, however, his parents talked at each other through him. He went to bed early, pleading a headache brought on by the examinations, and listened to the muffled sounds of the television downstairs, of his mother in the next room complaining about the noise. He was vaguely expecting to hear the voice that had helped him, but instead he fell asleep.
He forgot about it as the school term drew to a close. He spent most of the holidays reading or at the local library. Sometimes he encountered schoolmates, usually with girls to whom they would introduce him as if they were doing him a favor by acknowledging him. Once a group of schoolmates followed him, scoffing because he was reading a book as he walked. He felt most at home in the library, and managed not to stammer when he gave his name to the blue-eyed young woman at the counter.
Her name was Suzanne. She liked cycling, Indian food and jewelry and music, mountain walks where the clouds came to meet her, films with endings so happy that they made her cry or so sad that she had to smile at them. This much he learned from overhearing her conversations with her colleagues, especially with Ben, a broad-shouldered man in his twenties with hairs in his ears. Ben stood closer to Suzanne than Fowler liked, though she sometimes flicked her variously blonde hair back until it seemed likely to sting Ben's eye, and crossed her arms over her breasts whenever he approached. Once, as Ben marched away with the trolley from which Fowler was selecting books, Fowler saw her heart-shaped pink-lipped face wrinkle its snub nose in a comment he was almost sure had been meant for himself alone.
He ought to have said something. Each time he went to the library he tried, hanging back in the queue to ensure that she would deal with him, and each time he felt more helpless, his failures to speak blocking his mouth. Every time he gave his name it sounded more like an admission of defeat. No wonder, he thought, that his schoolmates used to call "Fowler Noll sleeps with a doll" after him.
One day he was staring in embarrassment at the books he was returning, which his mother had frowned at and none of which he'd had the enthusiasm to finish—a cyclist's guide to the surrounding countryside, a collection of stories by Tagore, a book about mountaineering and a study of Hollywood weepies—when she said, "Waiting for results?"
He wanted to grab his tickets and run. "Fowler Noll," he repeated, massaging his windpipe and feeling as if he were trying to strangle himself.
"I know," she said with a friendly laugh. "Waiting for your exam results, are you? I remember feeling just as nervous as you look."
"They were supposed to come this morning. I hung around the house till after lunch and never saw the postman."
"You should have done well, you read more books than I do. Will you be celebrating?"
"I might have some fish and chips."
She laughed and handed him his tickets. "Tell me how you did next time you're in."
Fowler grinned painfully and lurched toward the shelves. Had she meant him to invite her to celebrate with him? He wandered blindly up and down the aisles of books, tilting his head to make it appear he was examining the spines. At last he launched himself towards the counter, swallowing a breath which he vowed he would use to ask her, and saw Ben leaning over her, propping himself with his fists hairy as pork. Fowler sneered at him, and fled.
His mother would want to know why he hadn't borrowed books. He could only sneak up to his room and pretend that he had. But as he stepped into the hall she came out of the front room to meet him, smiling so thinly that her lips were even paler than the rest of her face. For a moment he was sure she knew about Suzanne, and then he saw the envelope that she was thrusting at him—his examination results.
How bad must they be to make her look like that? His fingers almost wouldn't close on the envelope. Even more disconcertingly, .it proved to be still sealed. He tore it open and unfolded the typed sheet. He'd passed in all six subjects that he'd taken, and could hardly have done better in English Language and Literature. He showed her the page, but her smile grew even grimmer. "You're thinking this will be your first step on the way to university, aren't you? Now you ask your father why it can't be."
His father was sitting amid the smell of mothballs. As he met Fowler's eyes he looked unexpectedly young and responsive to him, more like the father who used to play with him before his wife's disapproval had intervened. "They've brought in computers at work, son. They've been trying to show me the ropes but it's beyond me. I'll still have a job with the firm, but not up to the one I've been doing. It's good of the young boss to keep me on at all."
"Never mind, dad," Fowler said awkwardly, and was about to go to him and touch him, though he hadn't for years, when his mother cried, "Never mind never minding. You'll mind that he won't be earning enough to pay for you to go to university and yet he'll be paid too much for you to get a grant. That's where he's left you after all the trouble I've taken with you."
At once Fowler thought of a solution to their problems. "I can get a job. I know what I want, to work in the library and do all their exams and be a head librarian like you were going to be, mother, before you were ill."