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I pretended not to be interested. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Or he’ll catch you.’
That night I heard Faraday crying.
I remember in my first term at school I would lie in bed, listening for other boys crying and stuffing my handkerchief in my own mouth in an attempt to muffle my tears. There were about twenty of us huddled under thin blankets in a high-ceilinged dormitory, the windows wide open winter or summer. Sometimes one of the older boys would round on one of the weeping children.
‘Bloody blubber,’ he would whisper, and the rest of us would repeat the words over and over again, like an incantation, lest we be accused of blubbing as well. Little savages.
But that had been years ago. I wasn’t a kid any more and nor was Faraday.
‘Faraday?’ I murmured.
There was instant silence.
‘Are you crying?’
‘I’ve got a cold.’
It was the usual excuse, transparently false.
‘What is it?’ I said. And waited.
‘Everything. Bloody everything.’
We lay there without speaking. The room was not quite dark – the curtains were thin and the light from a High Street lamp leaked into the room.
‘But it’s my bloody voice really,’ he went on. ‘Everything would have been all right if it hadn’t been for that.’
‘That’s rot,’ I said, with the loftiness of fourteen to thirteen. ‘Everyone’s voice has to break sometime, unless you’re a girl. You don’t want to be a girl, do you?’
This was an attempt at comfort but it seemed only to make Faraday start crying again.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can’t just blub.’
‘You don’t understand. I was going to sing the Christmas anthem. There’s a solo, you see, and it’s usually the head chorister that does it, and the Bishop gives him a special present afterwards. Some money.’
‘How much?’ I said.
‘Five pounds.’
I whistled. ‘For a bit of singing? That’s stupid.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Faraday’s voice rose in volume and, suddenly, in pitch. ‘It’s a tradition. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Some old bishop left money in his will for it. And now Hampson will do it instead.’
‘Don’t talk so loud. The Rat will hear you.’
‘It’s lovely, too,’ Faraday whispered.
Lovely was not a word we used much. ‘What is?’
‘The anthem. It’s for Christmas Day. It’s called “Jubilate Deo”, and we only sing it on Christmas morning.’
Rejoice to God. Both of us had enough Latin to translate that.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s beastly to lose five quid. But is it that bad? I mean, it was never yours in the first place.’
Faraday started crying again. I was spending Christmas with a cry-baby. I curled myself into a ball to conserve heat and thought how perfectly miserable everything was. Or rather, how perfectly miserable I was. Boys are selfish little brutes. While I was wallowing in self-pity, however, my curiosity was still stirring.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I can see it’s a shame your voice is broken and all that. But why are you like this about it? And why are you here?’
The snuffling continued. It was getting on my nerves.
‘Why aren’t you still at the Choir House? Or why didn’t Dr Atkinson send you home to your people?’
‘My parents are dead,’ Faraday said, and the waterworks increased in force.
That jolted me out of my own misery. I knew what it was to miss your parents, you see, and even I could imagine how infinitely worse it would be if you could never, ever see them again. Or not until after you died and went to heaven, assuming heaven was real, which in those days I still considered to be a sporting possibility.
‘So where do you go in the holidays?’
‘To my guardian’s, in Wales. But this year he’s had to go away. So I was going to stay with the Atkinsons until he comes back.’
This deepened the mystery. ‘Then why aren’t you there now?’
‘It’s because of Hampson Minor. Bloody Hampson.’
‘Yes, you said – he’ll get the five quid because he’s going to sing the anthem, and I suppose he’s the new head of the choir, too.’
Faraday’s bed creaked. ‘It’s not that. He had a postal order from his uncle. Ten bob.’
I whistled softly in the darkness. Not in the same league as the Bishop’s five pounds, but still pretty decent. I wished my aunt would give me ten shillings sometimes.
‘He was swanking about it all the time. The postal order and being head of the choir and the Bishop’s money. He just went on and on and everyone was sucking up to him. He said he was going to buy a big cake from Fowler’s for everyone. I just wanted to kick him. You know what he’s like.’
I only knew Hampson Minor by sight. He was a fat, pink-faced boy with small delicate features and prominent lips. When he sang, he made his lips into a perfect O.
‘He left the postal order on the floor. It must have fallen – it was with his exercise book. So I – I picked it up and put it in my pocket.’
‘You stole it?’
‘No,’ Faraday wailed. ‘I was just going to keep it for a bit, until he found he had lost it, and then give it back. To teach him a lesson. That’s all. Honestly.’
I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.
‘But he told Dr Atkinson it was gone, and Dr Atkinson made us all empty our pockets and open our boxes.’ Faraday paused for a long moment. ‘And they found it.’
I didn’t know what to say. Stealing was a sackable offence at the King’s School.
‘I was going to give it back, I swear it. I didn’t know he’d tell old Atky straight away. The rotten sneak.’
‘What will happen?’ The scale of the offence awed me. ‘Will they chuck you out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Faraday whimpered. ‘I just don’t know. And even if they let me stay, everyone will know. So that’ll be almost as bad. And then there’s Hampson’s brother. I’d be in the senior school.’
I was beginning to take a warped pleasure in having a ringside seat to the tragedy which was unfolding on such a grand scale. Faraday, the golden boy, had lost his singing voice, his five pounds and his pre-eminent role as head choirboy. He was now faced with a hideous pair of alternatives: if he was expelled from school he faced a lifetime of shame and whatever punishment his guardian cared to mete out; if he was allowed to stay, his remaining years at the school would be made a living hell, particularly by Hampson Major, a gorilla of a boy who played second row forward in the First XV, and who had a well-deserved reputation for brutality verging on sadism. He was bad enough as a casual tyrant over anyone smaller than himself. He would be a figure of nightmare if he chose to persecute you seriously.
‘God,’ I said as the full horror of Faraday’s situation hit me. ‘You poor bloody kid.’
He was crying again, softly, continuously, a sort of moaning and sobbing that at last moved me to pity, and even to a desire to help.
‘Look here, Rabbit,’ I said. It was the first time I called him by his nickname. ‘Perhaps it won’t be as bad as you think.’
The crying stopped. I heard Faraday’s ragged breathing.
A sense of power filled me. He believed I might be able to help, and that almost made me believe it too.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We’ll think of something. I promise.’
4 (#ulink_fe10e427-6251-5716-8e7b-6f208fa9e7b3)
For every child, I think, there must be a day when Christmas loses its magic. By ‘magic’ I don’t mean an unquestioning belief in Father Christmas or a foolish attachment to improbable ideas about reindeer and chimneys and so on. Nor does the magic I mean reside in the religious connotations of the day, though of course, for many people, the one cannot be separated from the other and Christmas is always the birthday of Jesus. I envy them.
The magic has more to do with a sense that this is a special day, when nothing is allowed to go wrong. When you are given presents, good food and a licence to enjoy luxuries and activities that lie beyond the reach of most of us for 364 days of the year. When people are kind to each other and there is a sense of holiday.
The illusion is strongest in infancy, and most of us lose it gradually during childhood. But we cling to it, we fool ourselves, as long as possible. In the end there has to come a day when we are forced finally to acknowledge the truth: that Christmas is a day like any other, potentially neither better nor worse, but actually almost always worse because it trails in its wake the ghosts of its lost magic.
For me it was that Christmas at Sacrist’s Lodging: that’s when at last I accepted that a Christmas Day could be as miserable as any other.
The morning began when we went downstairs to find Mr Ratcliffe making tea in the kitchen. On the mat by the back door were the hind legs and tail of a mouse; Mordred had already celebrated Christmas in his own special way.
We wished each other happy Christmas. Mr Ratcliffe was wearing an ancient suit, once a uniform black but now shiny and even green in places, in honour of the day.
He gave us cups of strong, sweet tea, with very little milk in it.
‘I thought we would go to Matins and then the Eucharist afterwards,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually eat before taking communion, if I can avoid it. It seems rude somehow.’
‘What about Christmas dinner, sir?’ I asked in alarm.
‘Mrs Veal will have something for you at lunchtime, I’m sure. Don’t worry about that. I’ll have mine at the Deanery.’ He hesitated, and I guessed that he had remembered the Dean also entertained to lunch those members of the choir who had not left immediately after the morning services. ‘We’ll meet again in the evening, I expect, when you are back from the Veals’.’
Mordred sauntered into the room and picked up the remains of the mouse. He wandered into the hall.
‘I’ll let him outside, shall I?’ Faraday said in a rush.
He dashed after the cat. I heard him fumbling with the front door with clumsy urgency, as though trying to escape.
I suppose that was what we all wanted – Faraday, myself and even, perhaps, poor Mr Ratcliffe: to escape.
There was no snow that Christmas.
It was very cold. The grass around the Cathedral was a hard, sparkling white, and frost clung to the leafless branches of trees and bushes. The flagged paths were treacherous – any moisture had turned to ice overnight.
Mr Ratcliffe strode slowly along, his stick tapping the pavement. ‘Beautiful,’ he said over his shoulder to Faraday and me, trailing behind him. ‘Quite beautiful.’
The College was crowded with groups of people making their way to church. On Christmas morning, the Cathedral had one of its largest congregations of the year, even though the King’s School wasn’t there to swell its ranks.
We sat in the presbytery, the rows of seats on either side near the high altar, to the east of the choir stalls. Above us were the pipes of the organ and the wooden cabin of the organ loft, clinging like a growth to one bay of the choir aisle.
I don’t remember much about the services except that they seemed to go on for ever and that I seriously thought I might faint or even die from hunger. It must have been hell for poor Faraday to see the choir processing through the chancel gates, filing in two by two, and peeling off into their stalls in the choir.
Hampson Minor led them in, with the head boy’s medal resting on his surplice. He looked larger and pinker than before, as if his promotion had inflated him a little further than nature had done already. His eyes darted about the chancel. I guessed he was looking for Faraday. As he turned to lead his file into the choir stalls, he found us. For a fraction of a second he paused. Beside me, Faraday stiffened like a threatened animal.
The moment was gone. The choir flowed smoothly into the stalls and the service began.
I had attended many services in the Cathedral – the school used it as its chapel – but I had never been there on Christmas Day. The Bishop was there enthroned, a gaudy, overstuffed doll with his mitre and crozier. Each seat was full.
I concentrated on not fainting from starvation; on standing, sitting and kneeling; on mouthing the hymns in a soundless but visually convincing way, a skill I had perfected in my first term; and, most of all, on thinking about what Mrs Veal might provide for our Christmas dinner.
But I did notice when the choir sang the anthem, the ‘Jubilate Deo’. The first part was sung by Hampson Minor alone: I could see him, his mouth an O of surprise, his face pinker than ever with the effort. Then, one by one, the rest of the choir joined in, and then the organ thundered into life and they all made a dreadful racket until it was time for us to kneel down and pray again.
Faraday leaned towards me undercover of shuffling as the entire congregation was sinking to its knees.
‘He muffed it, the silly ass,’ he muttered. ‘The end of bar sixteen. He couldn’t hold the E flat.’
For the first time, I saw Faraday smile.
Mrs Veal had bought us Christmas cards, and I felt guilty that we had not thought to do the same for our hosts. Mr Veal carved the beef and the ham. We ate late – Mr Veal had plenty to keep him busy after a service – but Mrs Veal took pity on us and gave us a preliminary helping of Yorkshire pudding and gravy.
In his capacity as head verger, Mr Veal was a figure who inspired fear and mockery in equal parts. Now, however, Faraday and I saw the domestic Veal, his dignity put aside with his verger’s gown. In private, with a good meal inside him, a glass of port in one hand and his pipe in the other, he revealed himself as almost genial. I remember he told us a story about one canon who grew so fat that it was only with difficulty that he could squeeze into his stall; in the end they had to make a special chair for him. He laughed so hard that his face became purple.
The Christmas dinner was the only time that I saw Faraday looking really happy. The Veals were kindly people: they gave us food, warmth and a welcome. Perhaps there was a little Christmas magic after all.
‘A lot of queer stories about the Cathedral,’ said Mr Veal on his third glass of port. ‘And I could tell you a few, if I had a mind to. Have you heard about the bells?’
‘But there aren’t any,’ Faraday said. ‘Not in the Cathedral. Only the clock chimes.’
‘Ah. Not now. But there were bells, once upon a time.’
‘Get along with you, George,’ said Mrs Veal. ‘Save it for later. I need to clear the table and these boys need to get back or Mr Ratcliffe will be wondering where they are.’
‘He knows about it, all right,’ Mr Veal says.
‘Who does, dear?’
‘Mr Ratcliffe. He knows about the stories.’
5 (#ulink_20a611aa-b56d-58eb-9b64-5dca4ba1a648)
In the evening of Christmas Day, we made mugs of cocoa together and sat around the fire in the sitting room at the Sacrist’s Lodging. Like Mr Veal, Mr Ratcliffe had drunk a few glasses of wine with his dinner and was unusually expansive.
