‘Yes sir, yes, that’s it,’ Gemmy would splutter, delighted, since the minister was, at having done so well, and Mr Frazer, another fierce struggle ended, would look relieved and say, ‘Good, I thought that might be it.’ With the tip of his forefinger on the fleshy place between his nostrils, he would consider a moment, then give George the sign to dip his pen and write.
A young man of just nineteen, in a jacket and tie, his nose peeled with sunburn, George Abbot resented the role he was being forced to play in this pantomime, and the more so because Mr Frazer was in his eyes such a fool. He felt his authority was undermined by his being put to use, and in front of his own pupils too, as a mere clerk. When they surged in the window-space and would not be silenced by hard looks, he felt his temper rise and would have intervened to restore order; Mr Frazer was a man who did not inspire respect. But he dared not challenge the older man, despised himself for it, and resented the occasion all the more.
It was hot under the roof. He had a tendency to sweat. He hooked a finger under his collar, worked it round a little to ease the tightness, and while Mr Frazer once again put his questions, and agonised and prompted, and the man clenched his jaw and his knuckled fingers and hummed, let his gaze drift beyond the crowd of heads in the window-space to the stunned landscape, and in a dreamy way into its depths.
When one of his charges did this, he would, with stinging accuracy, fling an inch of chalk at his head, then make the culprit, still rubbing the smart of it and glaring under his greasy pudding bowl, kneel with his nose to the wall.
There was no one to fling chalk at him. Young enough to respond, as his pupils did, to the drowsiness that stole over your senses in the airless heat, and to the heaviness and constriction of his clothes, especially the thick cloth between his thighs, he found himself losing hold of Mr Frazer’s voice. The thrumming of his blood was curiously at one with the shimmering, out there, of the landscape and the shrilling of insects, a sound so continuous, so dimly insistent in these late-summer days that it stilled the senses and drew you irresistibly into its own drawn-out –
‘Ready George? George?’
He started.
‘Ready sir.’
Drawing a handkerchief from his cuff, he mopped the meat of his palm, then crumpled and replaced it, dipped his pen, and casting an amused glance over the happy couple, who had come to an end for the moment of their shouting and spluttering, bent his neck to the task. As each sheet was filled he passed it to the minister, and Mr Frazer, holding it at arm’s length while Gemmy looked on blinking, read it through.
They came to the third sheet, and while Mr Frazer ran his eye over it, muttering a little, George Abbot made a pretence of examining his nib. A smile played on his lips.
Out of boredom, but also to set himself at a distance from the occasion and to register, if only in an obscure and indirect way, the contempt he felt at the minister’s smugness, he had introduced into what he had just set down a phrase or two of his own.
Hidden away in Mr Frazer’s orotund periods, they were an assertion of personality, of independence, of his refusal to be a mere tool. He waited to see if Mr Frazer would notice. When he did not, he resolved next time to be bolder. The imp of invention gave a gleeful kick in him and what he added now was not a change of phrasing but an alteration of fact — nothing blatant. The thought of this scrap of mistruth, deliberately introduced among so much that was mere guesswork on the minister’s part, not to say sentimental fantasy, appealed to his sense of the absurd; he delighted in it, even if he was the only one who would ever know it was there. In this way he appropriated a little of the occasion to himself, stepped in and concealed himself, a sceptical shade, at this and that point of the minister’s Colonial fairytale.
When all was done, and Mr Frazer had read over the half-dozen or more sheets and nodded his satisfaction, he invited Gemmy, who had been craning his neck to follow the proceedings, to take the sheets and handle them; out of a sense, a weird one George thought, but the minister did have these fits of weirdness, that in doing so the man might grasp a little of what they had been doing here and what the seven closely-written pages represented.
To George’s vast amusement, Gemmy, as he received the sheets, put on a solemn expression very like Mr Frazer’s own, shuffled the pages according to his own taste, and holding them, as Mr Frazer had, at arm’s length, and making the same little humphing sounds of grave approval, ran his eyes down one page, then the next. When this ritual was completed he raised the sheets to his nose and sniffed them, and might have been preparing, till Mr Frazer intervened, to lick and maybe swallow them. He looked puzzled when Mr Frazer gently took them back.
Mute now, but with his tongue making shy appearances at the corner of his mouth as if the tip of it was the real faculty of observation in him, he watched the sheaf of pages go into the pocket of the minister’s coat, and continued to watch, believing perhaps that the magic they had been practising here was not yet over, and Mr Frazer, with a flourish, might bring them forth again, but in the shape this time of a plump white pigeon or a line of gaudy handkerchiefs.
This last conceit was the schoolmaster’s, not Gemmy’s, but was more accurate than he knew. Magic, as Gemmy understood it, had been the essence of the occasion.
He knew what writing was but had never himself learned the trick of it. As he handled the sheets and turned them this way and that, and caught the peculiar smell they gave off, his whole life was in his throat — tears, laughter too, a little — and he was filled with an immense gratitude. He had shown them what he was. He was known. Left alone with the sheets, to brood and sniff, the whole of what he was, Gemmy, might come back to him, and he began to plot, as he thought of his life out of sight there in the minister’s pocket, how to steal it back.
It did not surprise him — it was the nature of magic — that all that had happened to him, all his fortune good and bad, and so much sweat and pain, and miles travelled and bones picked and nights of freezing dew, and dreams, and dreams — all, over the long afternoon that he had glimpsed and recognised, glimpsed and shied away from, and intended and failed to tell, should be reduced now to what a man could hold in his hand and slip into a pocket; a few sheets in which, if he could only identify where they were among the squiggles, he might find Willett with his bristling red hair, and the rats, and old Crouch, now that he thought of it, and his daughter the silkie — had he mentioned that? Not Mosey and The Irish. He wouldn’t want them in it. Not them.
He hugged himself. What came back to him was the strong-smelling, earth-smelling black stuff he had caught a whiff of when he held the papers to his nose.
Was that the smell of his life, his spirit, the black blood they had drained out of him? No wonder he felt weak.
All the events of his life, all that he had told and not told, and more, much more, now that it had begun to stir and move, which he was just beginning to recall, had been curled up in him like an old-man carpet snake. It was awake now. Lifting its blind head it was emerging coil on coil into the sun.
2
LYING HALF IN salt and the warm wash of it, half in air that blistered. Eyelids so puffed with light that no more light struck through them, and what did blinded him. Nostrils crusted, the air without moisture between his lips, each shallow mouthful of it a flame in his throat.