“It’s fine.”
“That’s the spirit. My son the mathematician, eh?”
Then he did something I can only describe as an attempt at an embrace, though from my point of view it resembled more a cross between a cuff and a shoulder charge. In the event he managed to brush roughly against portions of my body with certain portions of his. It was odd — I remember thinking even at the time — for we never touched each other, except to shake hands. He moved off, and I was taken up by the wife of one of his colleagues and made a fuss of. People allowed themselves to feel sorry for me at occasions like these — I became a legitimate catalyst for selfless fellow feeling. I was kissed, had my hair ruffled, was praised and flattered. I wondered if, had I looked like Hamish, I would have received the same treatment. I felt a sudden intense liking for my curious friend and for an instant experienced vicariously what his life must be like. At this very hour people would be avoiding him as industriously as they sought me out. I could not imagine any professor’s wife pressing her lips to his livid cheeks.
After a while I went through to the kitchen. Oonagh sat on one chair, her legs stretched out upon another. She was drinking whiskey from a sherry glass and munching on a square of shortbread.
“C’mere, darlin,’ ” she said. “Happy New Year, Johnny.”
Without getting up she pulled me to her. I smelled her whiskey-sweet breath, felt her strong grip around me, heard the starch crackle on her pinny. She kissed me again and again on my left temple, muttering Gaelic endearments. I hugged her in return, my forearm innocently squashing her breasts. My face was crushed against her cheek. I pouted my lips. My first kiss freely given. That gentle pressure made her turn her head and as she did I kissed her again, quickly, full on the mouth.
“Happy New Year, Oonagh,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s better than the last one.”
There was the briefest knowing pause before she spoke.
“Aye,” she said. “Let’s.”
If anything, Hamish’s spots looked worse in cold weather: something to do with the skin tightening, making the knobbled quality of the pustules more evident. In the oblique washed-out afternoon light, his skin looked more like bark or a section of wall from a pebble-dashed villa.
It was four in the afternoon, night coming on fast. We were crouched behind some bushes, shivering slightly as we waited for the light in the art rooms to go out. The art rooms were in a small cottage some distance beyond the stable block. Hamish held some rag wadding in one hand and a small bottle of his homemade chloroform in the other. We were waiting for the object of his revenge.
This was a boy named Radipole. He was one of the black buns, possessing both a talent for drawing and the ability to run very fast. He was a tall, fit youth with reddish hair and curious slanted eyes — almost Eastern in configuration. He was known, imaginatively, as Chink. Apparently he had been the chief instigator of the urine soaking Hamish had received the previous term. It was he who had encouraged the mob to bundle Hamish over the railings and he had been the first to lift up his kilt and let fly. Hamish had never forgotten, never forgiven. But his mind worked with its own cool logic. Hamish decided to postpone his getting even for many months. So he presented to Radipole a face of resigned amusement, a grudging acceptance of the rag — sure, it had not been very pleasant, but still, no point in making a fuss over a bit of good-natured horseplay. Radipole duly forgot all about it. He and Hamish were not friends but there was no animosity between them. The whole point of this, Hamish reasoned, was that when he did eventually strike he would be one of the last people Radipole would suspect. No one could recall a four-month-old slight, and Radipole, being a boisterous unfeeling lout, had made many enemies since.
“He’s coming,” Hamish said. A light had gone out in the art room. “Remember,” he said to me, “count to three after he goes past.” Hamish crept off.
By now the light was almost gone. The evening meal and evening roll call were an hour away. The gloomy pines and ash trees that lined the path to the schoolhouse made it even darker here. I saw Radipole coming down the path. He was whistling through his teeth, kicking at fir cones as he went. I crouched behind a tree. He passed by. One, two, three.
“Hey, you!” I called in a deep voice.
Radipole stopped and turned, looking back curiously. Hamish stepped up behind him and clamped the rag over his mouth and nose. Radipole gave a shudder, an arm flailed and he went down. We dragged him off the path and further into the small grove of trees. We heaved him upright against a trunk and, with Hamish holding him fast, I ran a length of washing line several times around him and the bole of the tree and tied it secure. We stepped back and looked at him. He was semi-upright, his head lolling, making small snoring sounds. He had all the inert limpness of someone shot by a firing squad. A long string of drool hung from his bottom lip.
“Well,” I said, “what do we do now? Piss on him?”
“No. We don’t want to remind him of that.” Hamish looked at Radipole. “I’m going to hit him a few times, then cut his hair.”
Hamish slapped Radipole’s face with some brutality, making the drool jerk into the grass, and punched him in the torso. Then he took a small pair of nail scissors from his pocket and swiftly cut — transversely — half of Radipole’s hair away, leaving an uneven gingery stubble.
“Let’s go,” he said.
At roll call that night Radipole’s absence was discovered. Minto sent Angus in the trap to Galashiels and Thornielee stations to determine whether any boy answering Radipole’s description had been seen boarding a train. During the evening meal Hamish initiated a rumor (which he attributed to somebody else) that boys from the Innerleithen orphanage had been seen in the school grounds. Later that night, at about nine o’clock, one of the maids in the stable block heard Radipole’s desperate bellows and he was released. By this time Angus had returned from Galashiels, irritated by his fruitless journey.
For some reason, Minto decided to flog Radipole: he was offended by his bizarre appearance and maddened by his inability to remember anything more than a bass shout of “Hey, you!” I suppose Minto thought he was lying and, on the principle that everyone involved in a misdemeanor was punished, considered that he might as well thrash Radipole forthwith as wait for the eventual truth of his culpability to emerge. Which it never did, of course. By this time, the orphan gang rumor was rife. Minto sent a rude letter to the principal of the orphanage and received a ruder rebuttal in reply (he was accused, I later learned, of being “unchristian”). Both Hamish and I commiserated with Radipole about his torment and the flogging (an unforeseen bonus, Hamish admitted) and the fact that he was gated until his hair grew back. I know he never suspected us. He rounded on a few people but the hysterical veracity of their innocent protestations convinced him. He ended up believing in Hamish’s rumor and swore vicious revenge on all orphans.
I was, I confess, mightily impressed by Hamish’s subterfuge. Not so much by the audacity and neatness of its execution but by his sinister patience. From that day on I stopped worrying about him. I only wish he could have shown as much confidence in himself as I did. Later in life when he was at his lowest I would remind him of the Radipole incident, hoping it would cheer him up, offering it to him as a sign of his own self-composure. “But I was a child then,” he would say. “It’s a different world, the adult one — I was never cut out for it.”
In any event, the besting of Radipole made Hamish a kind of hero in my eyes. He was not just a brilliant mathematician, I felt he had it in him to be something great.
“Wait till your spots go,” I said. “It’ll be different then.”