his own cloudlands, a faint, blue-suited presence, benignly unaware of the feuds that stormed among his staff or the nature of the sixty-eight children whose immediate destinies had been placed in his care.
To Cecilia’s considerable surprise the Bull sent for her one morning, the summons interrupting one of Miss O’shaughnessy’s science periods. Miss O’shaughnessy was displaying how a piece of litmus paper had impressively changed colour, and when Mickey, the odd-job boy, entered the classroom and said that the headmaster wanted Cecilia an immediate whispering broke out. The substance of this was that a death must have taken place.
‘Ah,’ the Bull said when Cecilia entered the study where he ate all his meals, read the
‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ Cecilia eventually inquired, for the suggestion that a death might have occurred still echoed as she stood there.
The headmaster regarded her without severity. The breathy whistling of the marching song began as he reached for a pipe and slowly filled it with tobacco. The whistling ceased. He said:
‘The fees are sometimes a little tardy. The circumstances are unusual, since you are not regularly in touch with your father. But I would be obliged, when next you see him, if you would just say that the fees have of late been tardy.’
A match was struck, the tobacco ignited. Cecilia was not formally dismissed, but the headmaster’s immense hand seized the Sexton Blake adventure story, indicating that the interview was over. It had never occurred to her before that it was her father, not her mother and Ronan, who paid her school fees. Her father had never in his life visited the school, as her mother and Ronan had. It was strange that he should be responsible for the fees, and Cecilia resolved to thank him when next she saw him. It was also embarrassing that they were sometimes late.
‘Ah,’ the Bull said when she had reached the door. ‘You’re – ah – all right, are you? The – ah – family trouble…?’
‘Oh, that’s all over, sir.’
‘So it is. So it is. And everything…?’
‘Everything’s fine, sir.’
‘Good. Good.’
Interest in the divorce had dwindled and might even have dissipated entirely had not the odd behaviour of a boy called Abrahamson begun. Quite out of the blue, about a month after the Saturday on which Cecilia and her father had gone to see
In the big classroom where Mr Horan’s morning assemblies were held his eyes repeatedly darted over her features, and whenever they met in a corridor or by the tennis courts he would glance at her sharply and then glance away again, trying to do so before she noticed. Abrahamson’s father was the solicitor to the furniture- making business and because of that Abrahamson occasionally turned up in the house in Chapelizod. No one else from the school did so, Chapelizod being too distant from the neighbourhoods where most of the school’s sixty- eight pupils lived. Abrahamson was younger than Cecilia, a small olive-skinned boy whom Cecilia had many times entertained in the nursery while his parents sat downstairs, having a drink. He was an only child, self-effacing and anxious not to be a nuisance: when he came to Chapelizod now he obligingly played with Cecilia’s half-brothers, humping them about the garden on his back or acting the unimportant parts in the playlets they composed.
At school he was always called by his surname and was famous for his brains. He was neither popular nor unpopular, content to remain on the perimeter of things. Because of this, Cecilia found it difficult to approach him about his staring, and the cleverness that was reflected in the liquid depths of his eyes induced a certain apprehension. But since his interest in her showed no sign of diminishing she decided she’d have to point out that she found it discomfiting. One showery afternoon, on the way down the shrubbed avenue of the school, she questioned him.
Being taller than the boy and his voice being softly pitched, Cecilia had to bend over him to catch his replies. He had a way of smiling when he spoke – a smile, so everyone said, that had to do with his thoughts rather than with any conversation he happened to be having at the time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, Cecilia. I didn’t know I was doing it.’
‘You’ve been doing it for weeks, Abrahamson.’
He nodded, obligingly accepting the truth of the accusation. And since an explanation was required, he obligingly offered one.
‘It’s just that when you reach a certain age the features of your face aren’t those of a child any more. I read it in a book: a child’s face disguises its real features, but at a certain age the disguise falls off. D’you understand, Cecilia?’
‘No, I don’t. And I don’t know why you’ve picked on me just because of something you read in a book.’
‘It happens to everyone, Cecilia.’
‘You don’t go round staring at everyone.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry, Cecilia.’
Abrahamson stopped and opened the black case in which he carried his school-books. Cecilia thought that in some clever way he was going to produce from it an explanation that made more sense. She waited without pressing the matter. On the avenue boys kicked each other, throwing caps about. Miss O’shaughnessy passed on her motorized bicycle. Mr Horan strode by with his violin.
‘Like one?’ Abrahamson had taken from his case a carton containing two small, garishly iced cakes. ‘Go on, really.’
She took the raspberry-coloured one, after which Abrahamson meticulously closed the carton and returned it to his case. Every day he came to school with two of these cakes, supplied by his mother for consumption during the eleven o’clock break. He sold them to anyone who had a few pence to spare, and if he didn’t sell them at school he did so to a girl in a newsagent’s shop which he passed on his journey home.
