Chapter Eight 1891 #5
‘A village school teacher?’ said someone whose name Toby hadn’t heard, the primary openers of any conversation being what one’s father did, where one’s people were from, and what school one had gone to.
‘That’s right.’ Toby glared at the fellow until he stopped laughing.
‘Well, jolly good,’ he mumbled, cheeks mottling, embarrassed and a bit cross about it.
It was no way to make friends, Toby knew, but then he wasn’t sure he wanted to be friends with anyone who found it genuinely funny that one’s father had been a teacher. How would such a person cope if they ever met a farmer’s son? Or a tailor’s? They might die laughing.
‘Are you the Meriwether who keeps winning every blasted exhibition?’ someone else asked, shaking his hand.
‘Well. Not all of them.’
‘Near enough. You keep pipping me to the post, you dog.’ This without rancour. ‘Eric Phillips. You cost me a trip to Paris my old man had promised me, when I didn’t top out the first year.’
‘Sorry about that,’ Toby said, liking him.
‘You can start to make amends by reaching through there and passing me some bread. If I don’t eat something, I’ll fall down. How’s your eyesight holding up? Mine starts giving up by about seven in the evening . . .’
They drank more wine and talked more loudly, then drank more wine and ended up playing a game that involved standing on a chair and reciting a list of items backwards, and drinking when you got it wrong or fell off. The room was stifling; cherry-red faces, gleaming eyes.
‘Air,’ Franke-Grosvenor declared, at one point. ‘I must have air!’
‘To the roof!’ somebody suggested.
‘To the roof!’ several voices seconded.
‘Is this a good idea?’ Toby asked Womersley, as they waited their turn to climb out through a bathroom window. He had the nagging feeling that he was about to do something truly stupid.
‘Probably not.’
Tom climbed out. Toby followed.
The window opened on to a wide gutter, which Toby scuttled along, crouching low.
At the end, a narrow ladder climbed six feet up and over the parapet, on to the sloping acreage of ribbed lead that covered the Norman gallery.
It was an alien place to be, and exciting because of it.
Still, Toby felt a low murmur of disquiet.
These other young men could afford a fine.
They could afford to be sent down for a few weeks as punishment; they did not have scholarships to lose.
But his blood was racing with the wine, and he heard the stifled laughter and wanted to be part of it all.
Steeling himself, he left the shelter of the parapet and followed the others over the ridge.
They lined up along the far side of the roof, where the Bailey dropped away below and the city’s lamps speckled the darkness.
There was a tang of urine, and a guffaw; at least two of them were relieving themselves over the edge.
Then the scratch and flare of a match as somebody lit a cigarillo.
It was very still and deathly cold; a thin fur of frost made the stone and metal slippery.
Franke-Grosvenor threw his head back and took huge, noisy gasps of the crystalline air; there was some wrestling, more stifled giggles, like children out of bed.
Then someone clambered on to the parapet and stood with his toes over the edge, arms windmilling for balance, face cracked at his own daring.
‘Come down before you fall down, Beresford,’ Womersley said, with no great urgency.
With a sudden kick, Toby saw the danger. It stabbed through his hazy, drunken brain. He splayed his hands against the cold stone. The drop was dizzying, the fall would be fatal.
‘Meriwether? What’s happening?’ Tom breathed boozy fumes into his face.
Toby couldn’t reply.
The sky whirled above them, the empty air waited below like an open mouth, and he was right back there, in the ruins at Hallewell, with Kit balanced on a broken wall.
Look at me, Missy! The same shock that had paralysed him then, the sudden proximity of a terrible danger against which he was powerless.
Look at me! I told you I could do it! He heard Theo’s gasp again, saw her running across the candlelit grass towards his brother.
‘Meriwether’s gone green – is he scared of heights?’ Franke-Grosvenor said, to general sniggering. ‘Life is forfeit, you know, if a Hatfielder pukes on the castle roof!’
Then lamp beams flashed up behind them, from over near the gatehouse.
They all ducked; Beresford jumped down from the parapet and the immediate danger passed, but Toby still couldn’t move.
Fright held every helpless muscle tight; his knees were weak, his fingers clawing numbly at the parapet.
The others scuttled back towards safety.
‘Come on, Meriwether!’ Tom hissed in his ear. ‘Time to shake a leg.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’ll have to, I can hardly carry you.’
‘You go. I’ll stay.’
‘For heaven’s sake. Shut your eyes then, if the view bothers you, and I’ll lead you.’
And so they went, slowly, keeping low, Toby partly on all fours, partly on his behind, letting Tom direct him like a blind man, one wobbling inch at a time. They were the last ones back through the bathroom window, by which time there was no sign of the party. They’d scattered like mice.
Toby made it down the keep’s spiralling steps and outside before throwing up into the ornamental ivy. Luckily, there was nobody around to witness it. He was cold to the bone, and disgusted with himself.
‘Come on,’ Tom said. ‘Final furlong.’
They went back to Tom’s room in Hatfield Hall – a far less grand building, which had been a coaching inn in the eighteenth century.
They were both shivering by then; Tom pulled a blanket from the bed and threw it around Toby’s shoulders, then lit some lamps and rattled a poker in the remains of the fire.
‘What was all that about?’ he said. ‘If you’re afraid of heights, why on earth did you follow?’
‘I’m not afraid of heights,’ Toby croaked, his throat raw from vomiting.
‘What, then?’
Toby stared at his grubby hands, pale with cold.
Nobody knew the full story, not even the Warden of the university.
Most people knew nothing at all, and it was far better that way.
Once the story was out, there would be no way to get it back.
But there, in the circle of lamplight, brought low by drink and exhaustion, Toby couldn’t be bothered to keep it in.
‘It was . . . my brother. I had a brother,’ he began.
He told the whole story, not once looking up for Tom’s reaction.
Kit and Missy and the trial and the hanging, and the way he could hardly stand his parents to look at him any more, let alone go home to them.
The silence when he finished lasted a long time.
There was no right thing Tom could have said in response, and a great many wrong things.
But eventually he stood, reached out to grip Toby’s shoulder, and said:
‘That’s the saddest thing I have ever heard, my friend.’
Which was the best of a very narrow field.
Toby could only nod. He was already falling asleep.
He woke when the room was still pitch black, and listened for a while to Tom’s gentle snores.
When he remembered how much he’d revealed, he felt precarious again.
Exposed; like he was still up on the roof.
It was far too cold to go back to sleep so he decided to walk instead, setting off across Palace Green towards the steep path down to the river’s edge.
It was bitter, the path barely visible by the light of a setting moon.
At the bottom was a lamp-post and Toby stopped beside it, listening to the hiss of the gas.
When he looked up he saw snowflakes spiralling down, caught in the light as though that were the only place they were falling.
Through that shaft of light, and on to him.
He stared up at them for a long time, watching their silent dance, feeling them touch and instantly perish on his face.
Christmas wasn’t far away. He would be expected at home, in Hallewell, but knew he’d find some excuse not to go.
The snow twirled and dizzied him. He supposed he was probably still at least half drunk, which might explain why he felt like a set of badly matched parts that would never make a whole.