Mr. Fox (12 page)

The teachers kept the boys under close observation anyway.

Charles and Charlie didn’t return to the lake for quite some time. If it were not for the fact that they knew the man’s name was Reynardine, I would say the “conversation with a prisoner” recorded in their diaries is a fabrication, and an artless one at that. It looks fake to me; the tone of the exchange is almost unbearably stilted. But then the entire situation is unusual. And if the conversation was indeed a fabrication, it’s difficult to establish where else they could have got the name Reynardine from.

The boys must have developed some system of passing notes that made them feel safe—perhaps they found a hiding place—either way, they stopped corresponding in code. Flurries of extant notes are filled with guesses at the relationship between Reynardine and Madame de Silentio and, oddly, a semi-serious argument about Reynardine’s face beneath his mask.
He must be like a freak—a fish,
Charles wrote to Charlie.
He can breathe down there. He can speak.
Charles writes to Charlie of having swum down with a diving light between his teeth and spoken face-to-face with the prisoner, of having held the padlock that bound him in both hands, of testing the mechanism inside with a fingernail while Reynardine breathed bubbles in his ear. This in the darkness of three a.m., while the rest of the school—including the heavily dosed Charlie Wulf—snored. . . . I can’t imagine.

I reckon he looks like you or me,
Charlie responded.
The question is, which?

What do you mean by that?
Charles wrote back to him, in very precise, very black lettering, the handwriting of hostility.

Thinking that the boys had been reduced to mere squabbling over aesthetics, the teachers relaxed. That was their mistake, because when the staff relaxed, the boys struck, bribing three first-years to report a sighting of rats in a first-floor broom cupboard and locking Madame de Silentio and Miss Fortescue, the deputy head teacher, into the broom cupboard when those two worthy ladies went marching in to investigate. After that Charlie stood guard outside Madame de Silentio’s office. Within, it was the work of a few minutes for Charles, the experienced thief of small items, to unobtrusively comb Madame de Silentio’s belongings and pocket two keys. He knew his padlocks but was too pressed for time to exercise proper Decisive Thinking—all he could be sure of was that one or the other of these keys would free Reynardine.

When imagining such relationships—prisoner and gaoler—you’d imagine that the gaoler is always aware of the whereabouts of the key that gives her her power. You—or I; let’s say I—imagine her stroking the key and gloating over it, taking it out nightly and admiring it. Not so. Madame de Silentio says she’d just tossed the key into a drawer somewhere and hadn’t looked for it for years. She didn’t miss it. Her office was in the order she’d left it in, and the baffling time spent in the broom cupboard was brief enough to be passed off as minor mischief on the part of the first-years, all of whom she punished with a severity disproportionate to the crime. “Can’t be slapdash with these things. Got to let them know it’s not on.”

And so Reynardine was freed. That simply, that easily, because Madame de Silentio was unable to believe that she could be disobeyed, Reynardine was freed by a boy who conspicuously asked for a dose and let the milk run out of his mouth and soak his pillow once the matron had walked down to the other end of the dormitory.

Reynardine rose up amongst the loose chains, his legs twitching, as he had forgotten how to walk. Neither of the boys record this; that’s just how I think those first few seconds of freedom were. He told Charles he would be gone by morning. He flexed his hands in a way that worried Charles but gave a gurgling laugh and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, boy.”

He told me he won’t forget what we did for him,
Wolfe wrote to Wulf.

By the middle of the next day, Madame de Silentio knew that Reynardine had been released. This wasn’t due to any psychic connection; it was due to the local news. “The thing about Reynardine,” Madame de Silentio explains, “is that he is a woman-killer. He doesn’t do it joyously—oh, no, he does it with dolour and scowling. Women upset him. He said to me once that he hates their Ways, that from the moment he encounters one of them he’s forced to play a Role, and he won’t stand for it. Paranoid nonsense.” The night he was released he passed through Greenwich, killing and killing. Forty women gone between two-thirty and four a.m., and he went quickly on throughout the country, doing more. Worse, in the days that followed, other killers, killers of children and aged parents and love rivals and husbands, they, too, swelled the murder rate, as if inspired. A bad week in time, an awful week of red shivers, the streets empty of civilians and full of police.

Madame de Silentio called the boys into her office and took the key back from Charles. Useless now, but still, it was hers. The boys didn’t know what they’d done, they didn’t connect this red week with Reynardine, until Madame de Silentio explained it to them.

For the rest of their time at the Academy they were in hell, without her even laying a finger on them or saying another reproving word to them. The two boys went around together, always together, without speaking to each other, their hair limp, their eyes bulging, their faces the faces of drowned men. Each day brought news of Reynardine’s work in the world.
He didn’t look like what he was,
Charlie Wulf wrote in his diary. That was his last entry before all the leavers’ diaries were handed in. Charles Wolfe didn’t mention the lake incident again.

Upon their graduation Madame de Silentio sold Charles to a beautiful woman named Helene. She had blue eyes, which it thrilled him to look into. He believed that the petty thievery of his childhood had simply been impatience for the day when he would have two blue eyes like these to adore. But Helene was haunted by her past self. She’d been a fat child; even her ankles had been fat. In a letter to Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote that Helene had a serious fit of the hysterics when she saw him making supper for her—he was frying fish fingers in oil. She was unable to accept a hot meal as a gesture of love; she was convinced Charles was trying to make her fat again. He was able to soothe her—our training covers all emergencies, but he wished he hadn’t had to draw upon it. Helene didn’t like introducing Charles to her friends, either, because she found him ugly. She left him at home, or if she entertained at home she left him skulking around in the kitchen. As a test, Charles went missing for two weeks, roaming London, sleeping under newspapers on park benches. When he came home, Helene spoke of a party she’d recently been to, running rapidly through a list of anecdotes connected to names he didn’t know, and she looked irritated when he asked her to slow down and explain who was who. “I already told you,” she said. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been gone. She’d probably come home from her parties and chattered away to thin air, believing that he was hidden in it somewhere, listening attentively. She hadn’t been worried at all during his fourteen-day absence, hadn’t looked for him.

“How can I be a better husband?” he asked her humbly.

Helene gave Charles Wolfe a mask to wear. A white mask. Not flat white; rather, a colour suggestive of earth, brilliant but faintly fibrous, as it is beneath the skin of a pear. The mask’s expression was neither happy nor sad. Its lips ran in a straight geometric line, a humanly impossible one. It was a heavy mask; it changed the way Charles held his head, and, by extension, it changed the way he moved. As long as Charles wore the mask, Helene allowed him to escort her to dinners out, friends’ weddings, etc. Helene’s friends tried to behave as if her masked husband didn’t bother them, but he bothered them tremendously. I suppose it’s difficult to find a face friendly if you see it every day and it never smiles at you.

Charlie Wulf . . . Charlie Wulf was sold to a plainlooking woman. Plain but wholesome and good-hearted. Laurel. She turned her back on the frivolous pursuits of her class and trained as a nursery school teacher. She wore long skirts and always found a kind word and a hug for even the most tiresome of the children who played at her feet. Charlie had absorbed more training than anyone had credited him with, and he had no trouble speaking Words of Love to his wife. Laurel didn’t like to hear them. It was all too insincere. She worried about how they looked as a couple—on the street, in their home. She turned all the household mirrors to the wall. She heard people making fun of her, even though Charlie assured her that she was imagining things. She became jealous if he appeared to take too much of an interest in conversation with her female friends. Laurel wrote Charlie tearstained letters, turned him out of the house again and again, arrived unannounced at his hotel room in the early hours of the morning, just to check that he was alone. She couldn’t believe in him.

At his wits’ end, he asked her what he could do to help her believe.

And Laurel gave Charlie a mask to wear. . . .

Reynardine might have come to the rescue. (That would have been unfortunate for Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Wulf.) But favours aren’t always returned. Charles and Charlie don’t seem to have communicated at all after graduating. Not a word, not even an attempt at a word. They no longer had need of each other.

Or—

I realise I’m reading very finely between the lines here, but maybe those two had fallen in love, and wanted to spare each other the anxiety of speaking with subtext, each wondering what the other wanted. A boy of weak character and his strong-minded friend: Neither would have been likely to declare themselves first. It’s not impossible, is it, that what I’m saying could be true? It’s the abruptness more than anything. In the first place they seem to have chosen each other to confide in, out of all the boys in the Academy, when actually it would have been safer to do as most of us do and confide only in our diaries. For many months these two found something to say to each other every day. Then they married, and nothing. There are feelings of some kind in this matter, even if I don’t know what they are. The lake deeper than either of them had supposed, Charles kicking for shore with Charlie in his arms, the seconds without light or breath before both heads rose up and claimed them . . .

I’m surprising myself. I’m not a romantic.

At any rate, I’ve derived some interest from finding out about my father’s time at the school. Before this I had been looking for answers. I’d wondered about the cloud that seems to hang over my name when it’s called in the register, and I’d wondered why the murder rate is so high nowadays, and I’d wondered about the mask, and about the difficulty my father had in looking at me and speaking to me. My mother didn’t speak to me, either—she was always busy; she sat on committees and things. Only after years of schooling do I talk as others do. Even now Mrs. Engels sometimes looks more thoughtful than usual when I volunteer an answer in class. And I wondered, of course, why I was sent here when I hadn’t done anything wrong. It must have just been Decisive Thinking.

 

M
r. and Mrs. Fox were hosting a dinner party. Downstairs, a motherly-looking woman with fat grey pin curls laid the table and checked on the various items being cooked in the kitchen. Upstairs, the Foxes were engaged in a dispute. Mrs. Fox had left her dressing-room blinds up, and Mary Foxe stood on a block of air and observed the scene with interest. Mrs. Fox had a lot of nice things, and she was careless with them—perfume bottles with plush atomisers peeped out of embroidered pillowcases. Silk stockings tangled themselves around ivory combs shaped like castles. A gleaming sable fur rippled in the light. Mrs. Fox seemed to be using it to protect the carpet from her pots of face cream. The lady herself sat at her dressing table, her hair swept up into a chignon, her eyes downturned. She spoke, then her husband spoke, then she spoke again, with stubborn emphasis, and all the while she toyed with a brooch, a pink-and-white gold fox, complete with filigreed brush tail. Its eyes were two garnets.

Mrs. Fox pinned the brooch to the collar of her dress, stood, and made for the door, which Mr. Fox promptly closed and leant against with his hands in his pockets.

Mrs. Fox said something sarcastic. Her husband looked into her eyes and said nothing. Mrs. Fox laughed nervously until the gaze ended. Then Mr. Fox saw Mary. He grimaced slightly, and winked. Mary grimaced and winked back.

“What do you care whether I wear it or not? No one will notice.”

“You know what our friends are, D. Everyone will notice. So shut up and put it on.”

“What did you say to me, St. John Fox?”

“Shut up and put it on.”

“You can’t tell me to—”

“Shut up and put it on. Or I’ll phone round and cancel.”

“Appearances,” Mrs. Fox said. “Got to keep up those appearances, haven’t we?”

“What do you want, a slap?” He made his offer in a tone of flat pragmatism, like an expert barterer at market; it was as if he was saying,
Let’s face it, you’ll be lucky to get a slap.

“Ha, ha!” Mrs. Fox’s voice rang out scornfully. “Go ahead!”

He took a step towards her and she ducked behind a standing mirror. He moved it aside and scooped her up in his arms. Within moments Mr. Fox was pacing around the room with his lady wife over his shoulder, kicking ineffectually.

“I can’t wear it,” Mrs. Fox said breathlessly. “I told you.”

“Yes, you said it gives you a rash.” Mr. Fox exchanged disbelieving glances with Mary.

“It’s true.”

“Why now? You’ve had it awhile.”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t love me.”

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Mr. Fox said, in a voice that was both hearty and hollow.

“What’s ridiculous is you bullying me like this. Put me down, please. I’ll wear the stupid ring—I’ll wear it, I said, even if it makes my finger swell up to the size of my head. Then you’ll be sorry.”