“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, wiping her eyes. “The Head told everyone . . .”
“Bugger the Head. It’s after hours, and I can do what I like,” I told her, sounding like Robbie Roach for the first time in my life. It made her laugh, though, which was what I wanted. “That’s better,” I said, inspecting the dregs of my now-cold beverage. “Tell me, Marlene, why does hospital tea always taste of fish?”
She smiled. She looks younger when she smiles—or perhaps it was the absence of makeup—younger and not so Wagnerian. “It’s good of you to come, Roy. No one else did, you know; not the Head, not Bob Strange. Not a single one of his friends. Oh, it’s all very tactful. All very St. Oswald’s. I’m sure the Senate were equally tactful with Caesar when they handed him the hemlock bowl.”
I think she meant Socrates, but I let it go. “He’ll survive,” I lied. “Pat’s tough, and everyone knows those charges are ridiculous. You’ll see, by the end of the year the Governors will be begging him to come back.”
“I hope so.” She took a sip of her cold tea. “I’m not going to let them bury him, as they buried Leon.”
It was the first time in fifteen years that she had mentioned her son in my presence. Another barrier down; and yet I’d been expecting it; that old business has been more than usually on my mind in recent weeks, and I suppose she felt the same.
There are parallels, of course; hospitals; a scandal; a vanished boy. Her son was not killed outright by the fall, although he never regained consciousness. Instead, there was the long wait by the boy’s bedside; the dreadful, lingering torment of hope; the procession of hopefuls and well-wishers—boys, family, girlfriend, tutors, priest—until the inevitable end.
We never did find that second boy, and Marlene’s insistence that he must have seen something was always taken as a hysterical mother’s desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy. Only Bishop tried to help; checking school records and going over photographs until someone (maybe the Head) pointed out that his persistence in clouding the issue would almost certainly damage St. Oswald’s. Not that it mattered in the end, of course; but Pat was never happy about the outcome.
“Pinchbeck. That was his name.” As if I could have forgotten—a fake name if I ever heard one. But I’m good at names; and I’d remembered his from that day in the corridor, when I’d found him sneaking about near my office on some unlikely excuse.
Leon had been there then too, I thought. And the boy had given his name as Pinchbeck.
“Yes, Julian Pinchbeck.” She smiled, not pleasantly. “No one else really believed in him. Except Pat. And you, of course, when you saw him there—”
I wondered if I had seen him. I never forget a boy, you know; in thirty-three years I never have. All those young faces, frozen in time; every one of them believing that Time will make the exception for them alone; that they alone will remain forever fourteen . . .
“I saw him,” I told her. “Or at least, I thought I did.” Smoke and mirrors; a ghost boy who dissolved like the night mists when morning came. “I was so sure—”
“We all were,” said Marlene. “But there was no Pinchbeck on any of the school records, or in the photo files, or even on the lists of applicants. Anyway, by then, it was all over. No one was interested. My son was dead. We had a school to run.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It wasn’t your fault. Besides—” She stood up with a sudden briskness that was all school secretary. “Being sorry won’t bring Leon back, will it? Now it’s Pat who needs my help.”
“He’s a lucky man,” I said, and I meant it. “Do you think he’d object if I asked you out? Just for a drink, of course,” I said. “But it is my birthday, and you look as if you could do with something a little more substantial than tea.”
I like to think I haven’t lost my touch. We agreed to an hour, no more, and left Pat with instructions to lie down and read his book. We walked the mile or so to my house; it was dark by then, and already the night smelled of gunpowder. A few early fireworks popped over the Abbey Road Estate; the air was misty and surprisingly mild. At home there was gingerbread and sweet mulled wine; I lit the fire in the parlor and brought out the two cups that matched. It was warm and comfortable; by the light of the fire my old armchairs looked less shabby than usual, and the carpet less threadbare; and around us, on every wall, my lost boys watched with the grinning optimism of the forever young.
“So many boys,” said Marlene softly.
“My gallery of ghosts,” I said, then, seeing her face, “I’m sorry, Marlene. That was tactless.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “I’m not as sensitive as I used to be. That’s why I took this job, you know. Of course in those days I was sure there was a conspiracy to hide the truth; and that someday I’d actually see him, walking down some corridor with his gym bag, those little glasses slipping down his nose . . . But I never did. I let him go. And if Mr. Keane hadn’t brought it up again, after all these years—”
“Mr. Keane?” I said.
“Oh, yes. We talked it over. He’s very interested in school history, you know. I think he’s planning to write a book.”
I nodded. “I knew he’d been taking an interest. He had notes, pictures—”
“You mean this?” Out of her wallet Marlene drew a small picture, clearly scissored from a school photograph. I recognized it at once—in Keane’s book it had been a poor reproduction, barely visible, where he’d circled a face in red crayon.
But this time I recognized the boy too; that wan little face, owlishly bespectacled, raccoonlike, the school cap crammed down over the floppy fringe.
“That’s Pinchbeck?”
She nodded. “It’s not the best likeness, but I’d know him anywhere. Besides, I’ve been over that picture a thousand times, matching names to faces. Everyone’s accounted for. Everyone but him. Whoever he was, Roy, he wasn’t one of ours. But he was there. Why?”
Once more, that feeling of déjà vu; the sensation of something slipping, not quite easily, into place. But it was dim. Dim. And there was something about the small unformed face that troubled me. Something familiar.
“Why didn’t you report this at the time?” I asked.
“It was too late.” Marlene shrugged. “John Snyde was dead.”
“But the boy was a witness.”
“Roy. I had a job to do. There was Pat to think of. It was over.”
Over? Perhaps it was. But something about that wretched affair had always felt unfinished. I don’t know where the connection had come from—why it had returned to mind after so many years—but now it had, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Pinchbeck.” The dictionary gives its meaning as: (of jewelry) flashy, tawdry, counterfeit. A fake. “A made-up name, if ever there was one.”
She nodded. “I know. It still makes me feel funny, thinking of him in his St. Oswald’s school uniform, walking along the corridors with the other boys, talking to them, even being photographed with them, for God’s sake. I can’t believe no one noticed—”
I could. After all, why should they? A thousand boys, all in uniform; who would suspect he was an outsider? Besides, it was ridiculous. Why should a boy attempt such an imposture?
“The challenge,” I said. “Just for the thrill of it. To see if it could be done.”
He would be fifteen years older now, of course. Twenty-eight or thereabouts. He would have grown, of course. He’d be tall now, well built. He might be wearing contact lenses. But it was possible, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it possible?