“Pinchbeck?”
My voice startles him. A voice of authority, coming so unexpectedly out of the night. He looks up instinctively—his grip breaks. Maybe he calls out; begins to reach up; his heel stropping against a foothold that is already half rust.
And then it begins, so slow at first and yet so impossibly fast, and there are seconds, whole seconds for him to think of that gullet of space, that terrible darkness.
Guilt, like an avalanche, gathering speed.
Memory, snapshots against a dark screen.
Dominoes in a line—and the growing conviction that perhaps it was me, that if I hadn’t called out just at that precise moment, then maybe—just maybe—
I looked up at Miss Dare and saw her watching me. “Tell me,” I said. “Just whom do you blame?”
Dianne Dare said nothing.
“Tell me.” The stitch-that-wasn’t clawed fiercely into my side; but after all these years the need to know was more painful still. I looked up at her, so smooth and serene; her face in the mist like that of a Renaissance Madonna. “You were there,” I said with an effort. “Was I the reason Leon fell?”
Oh, how clever you are, I thought. My analyst could learn a trick or two. To throw that sentiment back at me—hoping perhaps, to gain a little more time . . .
“Please,” he said. “I need to know.”
“Why’s that?” I said.
“He was one of my boys.”
So simple; so devastating. One of my boys. Suddenly I wished he’d never come; or that I could have disposed of him, as I’d disposed of Keane, easily, without distress. Oh, he was in a bad way; but now it was I who struggled to breathe; I who felt the avalanche poised to roll over me. I wanted to laugh; there were tears in my eyes. After all these years, could it be that Roy Straitley blamed himself? It was exquisite. It was terrible.
“You’ll be telling me next he was like a son to you.” The tremor in my voice belied the sneer. In fact, I was shaken.
“My lost boys,” he said, ignoring the sneer. “Thirty-three years and I still remember every one. Their pictures on my living room wall. Their names in my registers. Hewitt, ”72. Constable, “86. Jamestone, Deakin, Stanley, Poulson—Knight—” He paused. “And Mitchell, of course. How could I have forgotten him? The little shit.”
It happens, you know, from time to time. You can’t like them all—though you try as best you can to treat them the same. But sometimes there’s a boy—like Mitchell, like Knight—whom, try as you may, you can never like.
Expelled from his last school for seducing a teacher; spoilt rotten by his parents; a liar, a user, a manipulator of others. Oh, he was clever—he could even be charming. But I knew what he was, and I told her as much. Poison to the core.
“You’re wrong, sir,” she said. “Leon was my friend. The best friend I ever had. He cared for me—he loved me—and if you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t yelled out when you did—”
Her voice was fragmenting now, becoming—for the first time I had known her—shrill and uncontrolled. It occurred to me only then that she planned to kill me—absurd, really, as I must have known it from the moment of her confession. I supposed I ought to be afraid—but in spite of that, in spite of the pain in my side, all I could feel was an overriding sense of irritation with the woman, as if a bright student had made an elementary grammatical mistake.
“Grow up,” I told her. “Leon didn’t care about anyone but himself. He liked to exploit people. That’s what he did; setting them off against each other, winding them up like toys. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been his idea to go up on the roof in the first place, just to see what would happen.”
She drew a sharp breath like a cat’s hiss, and I knew I’d over-stepped the mark. Then she laughed, regaining her control as if it had never been lost. “You’re fairly Machiavellian yourself, sir.”
I took that as a compliment, and said so.
“It is, sir. I’ve always respected you. Even now I think of you as an adversary rather than an enemy.”
“Be careful, Miss Dare, you’ll turn my head.”
She laughed again, a brittle sound. “Even then,” she said, her eyes gleaming, “I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know.” She told me how she’d listened in at my classes, gone through my files, built her store from the discarded grains of St. Oswald’s generous harvests. For a time I drifted as she spoke—the pain in my side receding now—recounting those truant days; books borrowed; uniforms pilfered; rules broken. Like the mice, she’d made her nest in the Bell Tower and on the roof; collecting knowledge; feeding when she could. She had been hungry for knowledge; she had been ravenous. And all unknowing, I had been her magister; singled out from the moment I first spoke to her that day in the Middle Corridor, now singled out again to blame for the death of her friend, the suicide of her father, and the many failures in her life.
It happens, sometimes. It’s happened to most of my colleagues at one time or another. It’s an inevitable consequence of being a schoolmaster, of being in charge of susceptible adolescents. Of course, for female members of staff it happens daily; for the rest of us, thank God, it is only occasional. But boys are boys; and they sometimes fixate upon a member of staff (male or female)—sometimes they even call it love. It’s happened to me; to Kitty; even to old Sourgrape, who once spent six months trying to shake off the attentions of a young student called Michael Smalls, who found every excuse to seek him out, to monopolize his time, and finally (when his wooden-faced hero failed to live up to his impossible expectations) to disparage him on every possible occasion to Mr. and Mrs. Smalls, who eventually removed their son from St. Oswald’s (after a set of disastrous O-level results) to an alternative school, where he settled down and promptly fell in love with the young Spanish mistress.
Now, it seemed, I was in the same boat. I don’t pretend to be Freud or anyone, but it was clear even to me that this unfortunate young woman had somehow chosen me in much the same way that young Smalls had chosen Sourgrape, investing in me qualities—and now, responsibilities—that were quite out of proportion with my true role. Worse, she had done the same with Leon Mitchell, who, being dead, had attained a status and a romance to which no living person, however saintly, might hope to aspire. Between us, there could be no contest. After all, what victory can there ever be in a battle with the dead?
Still, remained that irritation. It was the waste, you see, that troubled me; the confounded waste. Miss Dare was young, bright, talented; there should have been a bright, promising life stretching out ahead of her. Instead she had chosen to shackle herself, like some old Centurion, to the wreck of St. Oswald’s; to the gilded figurehead of Leon Mitchell, of all people, a boy remarkable only by his essential mediocrity and the stupid squandering of his young life.
I tried to say so, but she wasn’t listening. “He would have been somebody,” she said in a stubborn voice. “Leon was special. Different. Clever. He was a free spirit. He didn’t play to the normal rules. People would have remembered him.”