‘What are you doing in there?’ asked Anselm.
‘I’m not entirely sure, to be honest,’ said the boy emerging with a trombone case in his hand. On his back was a leather satchel. He whistled nonchalantly and looked around, as if he often made irrational excursions into nearby woodland, instrument oiled for action just in case he came across a brass band. He, too, had been crying. Anselm understood at once. His parents had gone, and, unable to let anything else go, the boy had wandered about the school grounds clinging on to his music and his books as if they were someone’s hands, finally hiding in the trees when the weight of isolation grew too heavy, when the indignity of tears erupted into this grown up world of boys who didn’t cry, least of all for love of one’s family.
‘Are you new?’ asked the boy.
‘Yep.’
‘Good.’
There was nothing else to be said for the moment. They’d each found their Man Friday They were going to survive. They shook hands and swapped names.
Neither of them, in the true sense, had been abandoned, though from Anselm’s perspective there’d been an element of shipwreck. Two years earlier his mother, Zelie, had died of cancer, leaving her husband, Gilbert, bereft in his soul and all fingers and thumbs in the home. A chancery lawyer not gifted in the management of emotions, least of all those of other people, he’d been unable to handle the grief of his five children. They’d all started swearing in French with shocking ingenuity. There was no obvious link, but boarding school for the three oldest eventually surfaced like a message in a bottle, bobbing up and down on the waves of unchartered feeling.
For Anselm the passage of bereavement had been smoothed by treachery. Gilbert, clumsily had instructed his children not to reveal that an operation to save their mother’s life had failed. ‘Let the end come like an unexpected guest,’ he’d said, like General Custer sighting the Indians. But within days of Zelie’s return home, Anselm broke rank. Handing her a cup of tea, he said, ‘You’re going to die.’ From that moment she was free — free to say goodbye. Free to look upon her family with the clarity of vision that comes from knowing the last grains of sand were falling fast through the egg timer. In public they kept up the pretence that she would survive while, as between themselves, there grew an excruciating pain, a liberating simplicity coming, on occasion, mysteriously close to joy They’d grieved while she was still alive — a gift lost on the others who’d taken refuge in the numbness of make-believe. In the two years that followed Zelie’s death, all that Gilbert had noticed, as he pondered what to do and how best to manage his own incipient breakdown, was that Anselm had sworn the least.
‘So that’s why he sent you here,’ said John, with a sigh.
They were walking around the cricket square. In fact, they’d walked around it three times, ultimately missing one of the most savage displays of fast bowling attack the school had ever known. All John had done was to try and open up the territory between them by asking, off-hand, ‘Why did you come to Roper’s Hall?’ and Anselm had delivered what John later called a long and sparklingly honest confession. He’d evidently been scared off, since (Anselm surmised) most disclosures work on a quid quo pro basis and John hadn’t wanted to say anything beyond the commonplace. After all, there was a match on.
‘What about you?’ asked Anselm, vaguely hearing another cheer from the field.
‘Eh?’
‘Why Roper’s Hall?’
‘The price.’
‘Sorry?’
‘No story such as yours,’ explained John, ruefully looking over Anselm’s shoulder. ‘My father just went for the cheapest prison he could find.’
Of course, Anselm hadn’t sought any treaty by mutual revelation. He’d simply answered the question, but in so doing he deepened the contract of friendship between them. Regardless of John’s personal reticence, or being irked at missing seven wickets in two overs, their alliance shifted level. They became blood brothers, even though Anselm was the only one who’d opened up his skin. They looked out for each other. They ambled round the school corridors, hands in pockets, planning dark mischief against the dorm prefects on the top floor.
John’s quip had nonetheless intrigued Anselm, and did so for years. What John didn’t seem to realise was that holding back anything important from a friend always communicates something profound. It wasn’t that term ‘prison’ or the jibe at the cost. Rather it was the silence within the words. As life at Larkwood confirmed, silence has a shape and content, but even back then as a twelve year old Anselm sensed in John’s rejoinder something momentous and defining, another manner of shipwreck. Anselm didn’t find out what it was, or why John had come to Roper’s Hall, until they were about to leave it, some six years later.
Final exams were approaching and, all classes being finished, John invited Anselm to his parents’ home in Cornwall, a large, white house that faced the sea at Bude Bay There, protected from the wind and soothed by Atlantic sunsets, they might revise by day and revel by night. The idea was to occupy the building without the benefit of adult interference, an objective happily guaranteed by John’s father’s diplomatic career. Without dropping any particular clangers, George Fielding had singularly failed to attract any major promotions, finding himself exiled to a basement office in the outskirts of Washington dedicated to trade and foreign licence agreements. ‘Not that happy a man,’ John had said. ‘He never found his way out of first gear, so now he’s just waiting to retire… prior to which the house is empty and available for our undisturbed occupation.’
Except that things didn’t work out that way John’s American mother, Melanie, insisted on coming over to ‘cook, clean, and entertain’. It was the latter that took Anselm’s orderly — one might say restrained — life by storm.
‘Okay boys, you’ve been working too hard,’ she said on the first night before they’d even opened their books. ‘Time to play’
‘Mother, no,’ said John, closing his eyes.
‘C’mon, you old bore,’ she replied, winking at Anselm. ‘Follow me.
She swept down a corridor, opened a door that led to a basement, and vanished down the stairs. Anselm tracked her descent, John groaning to God from behind. Entering a low, windowless room Anselm saw a pool table, centrally placed beneath a frame of harsh lights. Mel — as she insisted on being called — placed a cigarette into a long, black holder, flicked open a silver lighter and settled a hard stare upon the two friends. ‘Forget exams, degrees, and the ladder to high office. All that matters, for sure. But there’s something else you need to learn. Misery Sometimes called Alabama Eight-ball.’ After lighting up, she took a slow, deep draught and blew a stream of smoke towards the cue-rack. ‘Let’s go to school.’
Moments later Mrs Fielding — Anselm couldn’t quite make it down the Mel route — crouched over the green felt, tossed back a fringe of brown hair and smacked the ball, her dazzling teeth biting the cigarette holder.
‘By the way’ she said, reaching for the blue chalk, ‘I play to win. In effect a tournament began which threatened to take over the object of coming to Cornwall. Each evening they played Misery, cracking open bottles of Budweiser, the day’s revision dramatically pushed into the background. Anselm would have enjoyed himself without equivocation — and not just because Mel played to lose, handing the victor’s mantle to Anselm — if he hadn’t noticed that John was three steps removed from the fun, that his smile was half forced, that he was — to use his mother’s term — an old bore. With the same puzzled eye Anselm also noted, very gradually that Mrs Fielding’s capering wasn’t so simple or spontaneous: that it had a target; that her verbal tricks were dealt towards John; that she was trying, desperately and unsuccessfully, to please him, to win him over. She was too much an extrovert to show her disappointment but, as Anselm’s French grandmother used to say, the skin speaks, too. And at the corners of Melanie Fielding’s eyes were fine lines of suffering, deepened by a ready laugh that they might be hidden. Anselm let the matter pass.
It was John who raised it, two weeks later when they were back at school, drinking the remnants from a bottle of altar wine lifted from the school’s sacristy.
‘I just love her,’ said Anselm, pouring an inch into two mugs stained with coffee. They’d locked the door to their shared room facing the second floor showers.
‘Who?’
‘Your mother.’ Anselm shook his head at the memory of her face, the twang in her soft voice. ‘She’s clever, rude, funny and irrepressible. She’s good company She’s-’
‘Not my mother,’ inserted John.
He walked over to the sink and poured the wine down the drain.
‘Too sweet,’ he said.
