The cramp in my side came again, and I gave a smothered gasp. Miss Dare broke off at once. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a gentler voice. “None of that’s important now. Knight can wait. It’s not as if he’s going anywhere, is it? Just breathe slowly. Keep walking. And for God’s sake, look at me. We don’t have much time.”
And so I breathed, and I looked, and I kept walking, and slowly we limped, I hanging like an albatross around Miss Dare’s neck, toward the sheltering trees.
2
Bonfire Night, 9:30 P.M.
There was a bench under the trees. We staggered there together across the muddy grass, and I collapsed onto the seat with a jolt that set my old heart twanging like a broken spring.
Miss Dare was trying to tell me something. I tried to explain that I had other things on my mind. Oh, it comes to us all in the end, I know; but I’d expected something more than this madness in a muddy field. But Keane was dead; Knight was dead; Miss Dare was someone else, and now I could no longer pretend to myself that the agony that flared and clawed at my side was anything remotely resembling a stitch. Old age is so undignified, I thought. Not for us the glories of the Senate, but a rushed exit in the back of an ambulance—or worse, a doddering decline. And still I fought it. I could hear my heart straining to keep moving, to keep the old body going for just a little longer, and I thought to myself, Are we ever ready? And do we ever, really believe?
“Please, Mr. Straitley. I need you to concentrate.”
Concentrate, forsooth! “I happen to be rather preoccupied at the moment,” I said. “The small matter of my imminent demise. Maybe later—”
But now that memory came again, closer now, almost close enough to touch. A face, half-blue, half-red, turning toward me, a young face raw with distress and harsh with resolve, a face, glimpsed once, fifteen years ago—
“Shh,” said Miss Dare. “Can you see me now?”
And then, suddenly, I did.
A rare moment of overwhelming clarity. Dominoes in line, rattling furiously toward the mystic center. Black-and-white pictures leaping into sudden relief; a vase becomes lovers; a familiar face disintegrates and becomes something else altogether.
I looked; and in that moment I saw Pinchbeck; his face upturned, his glasses strobing in the emergency lights. And at the same time I saw Julia Snyde with her neat black fringe; and Miss Dare’s brown eyes under her schoolboy’s cap, the red-blue flashes of the fireworks illuminating her face, and suddenly, like that, I just knew.
Do you see me now?
Yes, I do.
I caught the moment. His jaw dropped. His face seemed to slacken; it was like watching rapid decay through time-lapse photography. Suddenly he looked far older than his sixty-five years; in fact in that moment he looked every bit the Centurion.
Catharsis. It’s what my analyst keeps talking about; but I’d never experienced anything like it until then. That look on Straitley’s face. The understanding—the horror—and behind it, I thought perhaps, the pity.
“Julian Pinchbeck. Julia Snyde.”
I smiled then, feeling the years slip from me like deadweight. “It was staring you in the face, sir,” I said. “And all the time you never saw it. Never even guessed.”
He sighed. He looked increasingly ill now; his face was hung with sweat. His breath rattled and churned. I hoped he wasn’t about to die. I’d waited too long for this moment. Oh, he’d have to go in the end, of course—with or without my killing knife I knew I could finish him easily—but before that, I wanted him to understand. To see and to know without any doubt.
“I see,” he said. (I knew he didn’t.) “It was a dreadful business.” (That it was.) “But why take it out on St. Oswald’s? Why blame Pat Bishop, or Grachvogel, or Keane—and why kill Knight, who was just a boy—”
“Knight was bait,” I said. “Sad, but necessary. And as for the others, don’t make me laugh. Bishop? That hypocrite. Running scared at the first breath of scandal. Grachvogel? It would have happened sooner or later whether I had a hand in it or not. Light? You’re better off without him. And as for Devine—I was practically doing you a favor. More interesting is the way in which history repeats itself. Look how fast the Head dropped Bishop when he thought this scandal might damage the school. Now he knows how my father felt. It didn’t matter whether he was to blame or not. It didn’t even matter that a pupil had died. What mattered most—what still matters most—was protecting the school. Boys come and go. Porters come and go. But God forbid that anything should happen to besmirch St. Oswald’s. Ignore it, bury it, and make it go away. That’s the school motto. Isn’t that right?” I took a deep breath. “Not now, though. Now, at last, I’ve got your attention.”
He gave a rasp that could have been laughter. “Perhaps,” he said. “But couldn’t you just have sent us a postcard?”
Dear old Straitley. Always the comedian. “He liked you, sir. He always liked you.”
“Who did? Your father?”
“No, sir. Leon.”
There was a long, dark silence. I could feel his heart pumping. The holiday crowd had long since dispersed, and only a few scattered figures remained, silhouetted against the distant bonfire and in the near-deserted arcades. We were alone—as alone as we could be—and all around us I could hear the sounds of the leafless trees; the slow, brittle creaking of the branches; the occasional sharp tussle of a small animal—rat or mouse—in the fallen leaves.
The silence went on so long that I feared the old man had gone to sleep—that, or had slipped into some distant place to which I could not follow him. Then he sighed and put out his hand toward me in the darkness. Against my palm, his fingers were cold.
“Leon Mitchell,” he said slowly. “Is that what this is all about?”
3
Bonfire Night, 9:35 P.M.
Leon Mitchell. I should have known. I should have known from the start that Leon Mitchell was at the bottom of this. If ever a boy was trouble incarnate, he was the one. Of all my ghosts he has never rested easy. And of all my boys he haunts me most.
I spoke to Pat Bishop about him once, trying to understand exactly what had happened and whether there was something more I might have done. Pat assured me there wasn’t. I was at my balcony at the time. The boys were below me on the Chapel roof. The Porter was already on the scene. Short of flying down there like Superman, what could I have done to prevent the tragedy? It happened so fast. No one could have stopped it. And yet hindsight is a deceitful tool, turning angels into villains, tigers into clowns. Over the years, past certainties melt like ripe cheese; no memory is safe.
Could I have stopped him? You can’t imagine how often I have asked myself that very question. In the small hours it often seems all too possible; events unspooling with dreamlike clarity as time and again the boy falls—fourteen years old, and this time I was there—there at my balcony like an overweight Juliet, and in those small hours I can see Leon Mitchell all too clearly, clinging to the rusty ledge, his broken fingernails wedged into the rotting stone, his eyes alive with terror.