Night of Fire Read online

  His idols remained lonely fixations. He bought a life-size silicone sex doll with a Japanese gaze, which was lying beside him on the night the fire broke out. He was laughing before he choked into unconsciousness, the hysteria of someone high on cannabis. And the flames melted his photographic files and disused equipment long before they reached him, and peeled away the floorboards where her imagined body lay.

  6

  Schoolboy

  In summer, when sunlight flows through the upper windows of the house, and bathes the faded plush of the stair carpets, a tenant might pause in the landing’s silence and imagine an old age of healed memories and a forgiven past. But in winter the seagulls, pristine and a little threatening, alight on the fire escape railings, adding their guano to the rust and peeling paint. The cold seeps through the window cracks, and damp patches appear on the passage walls. Even at night the gulls come mewing and wailing on to the rooftops, and you can hear their hooked feet scratching the tiles, and the droning of the wind. Then a feeling of siege descends: of things pulling slowly, irreversibly apart.

  The oldest tenant, barely younger than the landlord, would hear from his bed the gulls’ crying, and imagine them in sleep to be the screech of cats or children. He had been bedridden for a week. His right knee had swollen to twice the size of the other. He listened to classical music on the radio, and slept away his pain. When he hobbled to the lavatory, his knee threatened to buckle, and he waited for its surgical replacement with the nostalgic relief of parting from an old enemy.

  As a boy he had seemed harmlessly accident-prone. A fall from tree-climbing twisted his lower back, but he appeared to recover almost overnight. And he remembered his knee cartilage slipping in and out on the football field: an event so routine and painless that he paid it no attention. But fifty years later the weakness returned like a ghost, and ached, and grew frailer with more years, while his thigh and calf muscles shrank. Half amused, half appalled, he imagined his whole body filled with memory traces from that time before adolescence when his parents sent him to boarding school. While walking too briskly on winter nights years ago, a chill would start up in his windpipe from a rugby collision, seventy years before, with the biggest boy in the class, and a morning ache now rankled in the base of his spine. If he examined his arms he could see that their skin had never quite absorbed the spattered burns from a prankish campfire, and the scar from a slipped penknife still creased his knuckles.

  Perhaps it was some returning wound that put him in mind of school that night, the preparatory school like others on the edge of Berkshire heaths, where his boyhood years were spent in alternating triumph and misery. Or perhaps the wisp of smoke that seeped beneath the bedroom door resurrected for a moment the ceremony in the woods, by the rhododendron lake at night, when he was eight.

  He found it hard, even now, to realise how crude it all was: that the Wizard’s throne was only a wobbly scaffold of sticks tied together with frayed string, and the sacred fire no more than a foot-high pyramid of smouldering twigs. Yet it was astonishing that they had dared assemble there at all, he thought, climbing through a classroom window near midnight, to crouch in the shelter of the trees where any master might have found them. And Matron, checking the dormitories, would have come upon six empty beds. It was this shared peril – rather than the passwords or titled hierarchy – that knitted the Serpent Society together.

  Nothing in later life equalled the thrill and terror of his own initiation. After they took off his blindfold, he did not know which face was whose behind their masks, only recognised the bulk of Fatboy grasping his stick like a sceptre. And enthroned above him hovered the firelit apparition of the Wizard. His death-white mask dangled tawny hairs and sprouted bull horns, while the voice behind it was no longer that of Tansley, but a hollowed incantation. ‘You will say the secret words of the Serpent Society after me . . . Step forward now, raise your left hand . . .’ And the prick of the ceremonial pin sealed him to them all for ever.

  Springdown was less like a boarding school than a run-down country house, whose grounds beyond the playing fields descended to a wooded lake and thickets hollow with boys’ dens. Its self-containment was near-complete. Beyond the lake, if you climbed a wooden fence, you might glimpse a high road, and the mystery of the adult world passing. And sometimes, trespassing down the school drive, he would slip through a hedge and find himself staring on to a cemetery, where once, appalled, transfixed, he saw a coffin lowered into the ground.

  Tansley the Wizard, his best friend, told him that bodies did not rot in the ground. ‘You know, Squit, they stay the same for centuries. I’ve seen them.’

  Sometimes Squit (everyone called him that) only half believed what Tansley said, but would nevertheless sink hypnotised into his vision, because Tansley had access to worlds that Squit could not imagine. Tansley was cleverer than him; he was cleverer than everybody. His high, retreating forehead, and long, receding chin gave him the look of some prehistoric bird, supernaturally gifted. In fact Tansley the Wizard was so clever that he had been moved to a form one year higher than his age. But he shared Squit’s dormitory, and told strange stories at night, and only Fatboy dared occasionally to contradict him, or challenge his infallibility in the secret society. But then Fatboy was stupid.

  Theirs was a world without women. A pretty art mistress beguiled the boys for a term, but never came back, and the middle-aged matron they nicknamed Cabbage White, who wore the starched headdress of a district nurse, did not count. Twice a term, on Sunday afternoons, the boys’ parents took them away to drive in the countryside and eat cream teas; but Squit’s parents lived in Cyprus, where his father was an engineer, and his visitors – dutiful aunts and family friends – seemed pallid replicas of his mother and father. His holidays, spent on the beaches of Limassol or in the Troodos Mountains, would end at Nicosia airport, where his anguish at walking out of his mother’s arms across the airstrip continued that night in private tears beneath the bedclothes at Springdown. To Squit, his devastation seemed unique. It marked him as different. His elder brother Dick, who went to a school nearby, sneered at him as a crybaby, and increased Squit’s sense that there was something wrong about himself. He was in love with his mother.

  To his schoolmates he found himself pretending that his parents were dead. They were two thousand miles away, and it was easier to imagine them no longer living. Perhaps he was avenging himself for their desertion. But at morning service in the school chapel – a darkened chamber near the headmaster’s rooms – he asked God for their return. Sometimes he slipped in here alone. Inside the entrance, inscribed in silver letters, were the names of ex-pupils killed in two world wars. He knew them by heart. And beyond them the silent sanctuary stretched into dimness: seven rows of boys’ pews, the facing stalls of the choir, and the altar with its golden cross. He knew he was not meant to be here. Yet he imagined its protection round him, as if the school rules ended at the threshold of the silver names. Fearfully once, he stepped up to the altar. A dead butterfly lay in its dust. He eased this on to his palm and tossed it into the air, where it fell into the darkness. Then he laid beneath the cross a snapshot of his mother sunbathing in Limassol. For weeks afterwards, at morning service, he noticed it still lying undetected under the golden cross.

  Tansley the Wizard said he could resurrect Squit’s parents, if only he knew the spells. He would work on discovering them. Squit was touched by a fear as to what effect these spells might have on those still living, but he said nothing, and sometimes he believed his own fantasy: yes, his parents were dead. This inspired a sadness in his other friend Wynne, which he guiltily cherished. Wynne was beautiful, with blond curls and a slight stammer. Often they sat together in the long grass by the playing fields – grasses shifting with butterflies in summer – and Squit had a familiar sensation that he had been here before, among these musky scents and flickering wings, while other people were only far-off voices. Wynne was delicate. The other boys were warned not to be rough with him, b
ecause he had a hole in the heart. He was let off games, and even Fatboy did not push him around. The mystery of his heart separated him. He was studious and quiet, and they never enrolled him in the Serpent Society. It must be his frailness, Squit thought, that turned him so sensitive. He was most like a girl. When Wynne said: ‘I’m sorry they’re dead . . . I’m v-very sorry’, and his eyes watered as they gazed at Squit, imagining his orphanhood, Squit would stare back at him, transfixed by his sympathy, and worried that Wynne might soon die instead. Squit did not understand this hole in the heart, since Wynne’s heart seemed more complete than anyone’s.

  Tansley the Wizard, on the other hand, killed butterflies to scrutinise under a classroom microscope. The science master was benign and often absent, and Tansley and Squit would sneak into his room and peer at fantastical magnifications of whatever the Wizard had collected. This was the heart of everything, Tansley said, this was what things were made of. You thought them solid, didn’t you, stupid Squit? But no, they were continually charging around. A drop of fluid is a whirlpool of tiny cells.

  For Squit there was a magical collusion about these stolen minutes, when the Wizard’s head bent over the eyepiece and announced a new miracle. The butterfly’s skull was a gush of dishevelled feathers and sprouted feelers like trees, and its eyes were as huge as melons. The texture of its silken wings resembled overlapping roof tiles, and a mountain ridge blistered with hairy craters turned out to be the abdomen of a caterpillar. Squit sometimes felt his head swimming. Nothing was as it appeared. Flies and ants shone in burnished armour, like the Black Prince in Our Island Story, and flower petals turned into intricate textiles. At any moment the puny might become enormous, the beautiful grotesque, and insects transform into malevolent robots.

  But the most amazing moments arose when the Wizard brought along bottles of liquid. After he splashed a drop of pond water on to the microscope slide, Squit gazed into a seething universe of unknown creatures that jittered and darted across his vision, scuttling back and forth with revolving arms, or moving through their green world with ghostly precision. There were organisms with embryonic heads and transparent tentacles, pale emerald; others with revolving hands or predatory spears for antennae; still others like serrated trumpets. Squit remembered how once, on a thirsty woodland walk, he had gulped down a mouthful of just such water.

  One evening, when the science room was dark, lit only by the microscope’s bulb, Tansley moved successive slides of milk and pond scum on to the microscope’s stage. Then a shimmering mass of protozoa hung in space: orbs and globules that moved about one another in slow procession, and seemed to turn in their orbits. It made Squit dizzy to look at them, as if he was pitching forward into space.

  ‘They’re like the stars,’ he said.

  The Wizard was suddenly grinning. ‘That’s the secret, Squit. They’re called cells. The stars and the ants and you and me and Wynne and Fatboy . . . we’re all made of the same cells. And when we’re dead we’ll all be swimming around together, you and your mum and me, and Cabbage White. Did you know that human beings are mostly made of water? I read that.’

  Squit was confused now. ‘How can my mum be the same as Cabbage White, and swimming around?’ Anyway, Squit knew his parents were in Cyprus.

  Tansley made a gesture of despair. ‘How did I come to have such a stupid best friend? They’re not the same at this exact minute, see. But we could change at any moment . . .’

  Squit thought: so we might become another person, and not even realise. This was his and Tansley’s secret. Even the sixth-form boys, the only ones allowed to do science, might not realise it. He might even become a priest, and talk to God. But if he ever got the spell right, he thought, he would choose to be a scientist who knew about these things.

  Squit wanted to see everything of beauty and strangeness that existed. Across his classroom wall, behind the teacher’s desk, a huge map of the world distracted him through many lessons. During maths class, bored by trying to multiply fractions, he would gaze instead at the different-coloured countries, and imagine a journey from the pink speck of Cyprus down the length of Africa, or eastward through those lands of impossible yearning – Persia, India, China, Japan. The maths master might mistake his dreamy stare for an attention to decimal fractions, but Squit only became conscious of him at all when the teacher stood up to write on the blackboard. Then his enormous bulk would interrupt Squit’s journey along some pagoda-haunted river by obliterating Burma or Siam.

  But Squit’s reveries, as he scanned the map, were shadowed by a nagging foreboding. Distorted by Mercator’s projection, the pale green immensity of the Soviet Union was advancing like a glacier out of Asia. It might overrun western Europe in its sleep. That year the Cold War was settling into the classrooms of Springdown. Beyond Russia the haunting presence of a multitudinous Red China was coloured violent yellow, and a terrible war had broken out in Korea.

  Springdown stood on the edge of heathland that had once been a military training ground. When school walks snaked over it on Sundays, they were following the tracks of tanks. Tansley the Wizard reckoned the army still trained there in secret, and Fatboy said he had heard the tank treads churning at night. Yet when the Wizard called an emergency meeting of the Serpent Society, they all guessed what it was about. On these summer nights, peering from the dormitory windows, they had seen a figure silhouetted on the parapet above the masters’ quarters. They could not make out who he was, but sometimes they saw the flash of a torchlight, as if he were signalling to someone, and glimpsed his stooped back as he dropped from view. By day you could just discern on the roof a pair of radio antennae, one upright, one aslant, and the bulk of something concealed alongside.

  The rooms below, they knew, belonged to Jarrold, the history master, whom nobody liked. He was a slight, pallid figure of unguessable age, who seemed to favour one or two boys at random, and victimise others, including Tansley.

  On the night of the Serpent Society meeting, Fatboy got stuck in the ground-floor window. Two of the members – the beanpole McMorris and ginger-haired Hamilton – panicked and wanted to go back; but Tansley and Squit pulled out the broken sash cord and levered up the window frame another two inches. On the far side, by a flower bed of damp lupins, they swore themselves to silence again, and stole to the ritual trees. It was a June night glittering with stars. As the ceremonial fire flickered into life and they fitted their masks, a fearfulness arose. No lights showed in the school windows. They heard the hooting of an owl. Above them the Milky Way stretched in a wash of silver. The Wizard, who had found the constellation Serpens in a star atlas, pointed in silence to its zigzag in the sky, as to divine protection. His voice rose muffled and hollow. They all realised, he said, that one of the masters was a traitor. Every night he was signalling to someone out on the heath, probably during army manoeuvres, and he kept a secret radio transmitter on the roof. The Wizard leant towards the firelight, and his eye sockets gleamed. What were they to do?

  For a moment the only sound was the spluttering of the fire. Then Fatboy said: ‘Let’s go in and bash him up. I bet we can do it. The six of us. He’s a weed.’

  But Squit reckoned Fatboy was a coward. He’d probably run. He said: ‘I think we should tell the Head.’

  The Wizard’s bull horns wavered from one to the other. He said: ‘But the Head wouldn’t believe us. He’d just joke about it to Mr Jarrold, who’d cover his tracks.’

  McMorris piped up: ‘Maybe he’s signalling the Russians to invade.’ His voice was shaking. ‘Maybe any minute.’

  The masked faces tilted in unison to the sky, as if it might rain down parachutes, and Squit felt his blood run cold. ‘We have to get him quick.’

  The Wizard said: ‘What we need is evidence.’

  ‘How do we get that?’ demanded Fatboy. It was less a question than a challenge. He was the only one who dared dispute with Tansley, which he did in habitual frustration at being merely Deputy Wizard. ‘What do you mean, evidence?’


  ‘I was in his rooms last week,’ the Wizard said. ‘I went in with Wynne to get exercise books. He’s got a coding machine there. I saw it.’ As he leant back from the firelight, his voice seemed to rise from darkness. ‘They’re called cipher machines. They make a secret language. All the Communists use them.’

  Squit marvelled at Tansley’s knowledge. How did he know what one of those things looked like? Somehow they would have to steal it and take it to the Head. Then Jarrold’s code would be deciphered, and they would all be in the newspapers.

  The Wizard went on: ‘He goes away every Sunday. That’s when we move. One of us will stand guard on his door, and the rest will go in.’ He stared round at them, and nobody spoke. ‘I know where that coding machine is. We could get the radio too. And all his papers and messages.’

  ‘Everything,’ said Squit.

  The night had turned cold. The constellation Serpens was edging westward over the sky. For a minute the semicircle of white masks stayed mute and unmoving, but the fire had died to ash, and now the Wizard descended his creaking throne, and they crept back at last to the half-open window, and to their restless sleep.

  Squit could never manage the idea of for ever. Everlasting bliss or torment made his mind split apart, just as the multiplication of fractions did. Perhaps Tansley was right that heaven and hell did not exist, but that everybody ended up in a kind of soup, and became each other. Yet at morning service in the school chapel he sang, ‘O Paradise! O Paradise! Who doth not crave for rest?’ and thought paradise a beautiful word, like Persia, and that he would like to see it. That Sunday he was relieved to notice that in the procession of masters into chapel Mr Jarrold was absent, his place taken by the visiting chaplain.

  The chaplain seemed immensely old. Grey whiskers crept down his cheeks and his eyes were watery gold. As the boys left chapel he would be waiting by the door, a pectoral cross shining against his cassock, and he would nod and smile at each boy in turn, so that when he touched Squit’s elbow and asked, ‘Would you like a word with me?’, it carried no alarm.