The Floating Body (17 page)

Leaving Geoffrey Douglas to his pipe, his brandy and his leisurely preparation for the evening, we made one final attempt to visit Henry Beard.

This time he was at home and he let us in in response to our knock. His manner was again impatient and sullen. He looked like an ill-tempered tapeworm that had just received bad news in the post.

Once again he showed us into his untidy, cluttered study, where he had to remove a pile of essays from one chair and books from another to give us somewhere to sit.

Jack drew attention to Beard’s vast and impressive, if somewhat dusty, collection of sporting trophies, just as I had done on my last visit.

As a way of making conversation, I asked Beard if he had kept any of his sporting equipment, and by way of answer he threw open a cupboard which proved to be packed with golf clubs, fishing lines and all the rest of the equipment the trophies referred to.

Anxious to get beyond small talk, Jack said, ‘I’d like your honest and frank opinion, please, Mr Beard. What did you make of the dead man, Dave Fowler?’

‘Not much,’ Beard shot back quickly. Then he added after a longish pause, ‘I suppose he struck me as a bit of a low-life . . . an untrustworthy man lacking in decency.’

And although Jack pressed him to expand on this for the next few minutes, that was all Beard was prepared to say.

As we were leaving, Jack noticed a photograph of Beard and his wife on the hall table and remarked, ‘She’s looks to be a lot younger than you.’

To which Beard only said that he got married later in life than most men—because of the war, he said. Then he urged us to leave as he had to get changed.

I left Jack at the Dean’s front door and went back to my rooms to put on my dinner jacket.

The dinner itself was one of those affairs best passed over in silence. Warnie turned up in full dress uniform, which made the dinner jackets worn by Jack and myself almost shabby by comparison. Dr Rogers was most impressed by the display of medals and brass buttons and the crown indicating his rank. He immediately decided to shift Warnie up several places in the rows of dignitaries to be seated at the front of the cathedral during the official proceedings.

The conversation over dinner was of the kind that Jack always labelled dull. There was no talk of literature, no challenging ideas, no wit and no word play. So Jack applied himself to his meal and made such polite remarks as were required of him.

Dinner ended with coffee and cigars. Then the Head dispatched me on my way to take care of my assigned task of rounding up the junior school, while the official party made their leisurely way to the robing room at the rear of the cathedral, from where they would, in due course, process down the main aisle.

I went back to my room to drape my academic gown over my dinner jacket, and then began rousing the boys out of the junior school dormitories.

The more responsible boys, the floor monitors, had already done their job of chivvying the lads along and making sure they were dressed neatly in full school uniform in time for my summons to gather in the quad.

In the corridors of the dorms the boys were scurrying around me, and order was slowly forming out of the chaos, when I looked down and saw young Stanhope at my side.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, in that half strangulated voice of his that always sounded as if he had a hot potato in his mouth.

‘As you can see, Stanhope, I’m busy right now.’

‘Just one question, sir,’ he persisted.

‘As long as it’s a quick question.’

‘It’s about the building going on in the field behind the school.’

‘What about it?’ I asked impatiently.

‘Do they work all night, sir?’

‘Of course they don’t!’ I snapped. And then I stopped and thought again—I had no idea at all what their working hours might be. So I added, ‘I don’t really know when they work. Why do you ask?’

‘One of their trucks woke me up, sir.’

‘Really? When was this?’

‘Two nights ago, sir. It was in the middle of the night. It was still dark. But it was all right really, because it woke me up from a nightmare.’

Just then Blake, the floor monitor, arrived to announce, ‘All the boys are assembled.’

‘Very well, Blake—march them downstairs and tell them to line up, in two straight lines, in the cathedral close. And Stanhope—you should be with your class group. Step lively.’

A long, winding snake of boys made its way down the stairs and out into the close. There I ordered them to line up in their Forms, and conducted my own inspection to ensure their uniforms were in order. For small things like unbuttoned blazers the Head had an eagle eye, and I didn’t want to get into his bad books.

This done I checked my watch, and then marched them to the cathedral. We halted at the door until the verger, old Ashley Brown, indicated he was ready for us. Then we processed, in a more or less orderly fashion, down the main aisle to the seats, just behind the front rows, reserved for the juniors.

With my boys settled I made a leisurely patrol of the whole cathedral to see that all was in order.

The senior boys were allowed to sit with their parents—those, that is, who had chosen to honour us with their presence for Speech Night. People were still drifting in. The big doors on the town side of the cathedral were standing open, with knots of parents gathering, gazing up and down the vast building looking for their sons. Others were ambling the length of the main aisle and the side aisles, looking for a vacant pew with enough room for their (often large) families.

I made my way down the full length of the main aisle to the back of the building. Here the door to the robing room was standing open and the Head Master was watching the crowd slowly gathering.

‘Everything in order, Mr Morris?’ he asked. I was impressed that he appeared to have learned my name at last.

‘The juniors are all settled, Head Master,’ I replied. ‘And I have the floor monitors seated at the end of each pew to keep an eye on them.’

‘Jolly good, jolly good,’ he murmured, then something else seemed to cross his mind and he wandered off deeper into the robing room. His place at the door was taken by Jack, now with his Oxford academic gown draped over his dinner jacket.

‘All prepared?’ I asked. By way of reply, Jack patted the jacket pocket that contained the text of his speech.

‘How long before we begin?’ he asked.

I looked at my watch and told him at least ten minutes, possibly fifteen.

‘Then I’m going to take the weight off my feet,’ he said as he lowered himself into the vacant back pew. I sat down beside him.

‘I think I agree with Geoffrey Douglas,’ I said. ‘I’m not overly fond of these big events, these formal occasions. At least, not in my role as a schoolmaster—too many small boys to keep an eye on all at once.’

Jack asked, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, if I thought he could get away with smoking his pipe in the cathedral. Then he chuckled with delight at the shocked expression on my face.

‘Human nature can’t be basically bad,’ I said, to steer the conversation in other directions. ‘Look at those small boys from the junior school. They’re full of energy and always hard to control, but tonight they’re on their best behaviour and sitting quietly—no doubt bored to their back teeth, but doing as they’re told and waiting for the show to begin.’

‘That, my dear Morris, is exactly the point,’ Jack responded. ‘It’s discipline and the rule of law that makes human behaviour orderly and decent. Take that away and pride and selfishness take over, and, inevitably, the strong exploit and hurt the weak.’

‘This is, I take it, that bizarre doctrine you call “the Fall”,’ I remarked, finding it hard to keep the sneer out of my voice.

‘Not I, young Morris—the whole of classical, mainstream Christianity. The Fall is at the heart of the Christian explanation of why the world is the way it is, and why human nature is the way it is.’

‘Very well then, explain the Fall to me,’ I challenged.

‘In effect I’ve already done so—when you and I read Milton’s
Paradise Lost
together in tutorials. You’ll recall that in the poem Milton simply follows Saint Augustine, who in turn says what the church as a whole believes.’

‘Yes, I remember you making me read
De Civitate Dei
to understand Milton!’ I complained.

‘And thereby expanded your intellectual horizons,’ said Jack with a warm smile.

Then he continued, ‘God, Milton tells, created all things good—everything, without exception. Which is why, in the world around us today, there is much that is good, much that we can delight in, much that gives us joy. But the sad truth is that this world is not good enough.’

‘How does the Fall explain that?’

‘Because Good is a positive while Bad is a negative. Bad is the absence of Good. The Fall might be thought of as the Great Subtraction—the negative action withdrawing Good from human hearts and from the human world.’

I waited patiently until Jack resumed—as always, weighing each word carefully.

‘The Fall consists of disobedience—of human beings withdrawing themselves from the ultimate Good, from God. The Fall was humanity rejecting the notion of being subject to God by rebelling against God’s authority. The Fall was the human race’s cosmic cry of “No!”—the Great Negation, the Great Subtraction, that brought Bad out of Good.’

We fell into silence at this point—Jack watching me keenly while my mind was racing. Around us was the hushed murmur of people finding their places in the cathedral, but within, upon the ‘inward eye’ as Wordsworth put it, I was seeing a much bigger picture.

‘One way of putting it would be to say that the Fall broke the supply chain,’ Jack continued. ‘Warnie could explain how an army depends on its supply chain. And we broke our “supply chain”.’

Jack pulled the papers containing his talk out of his pocket, contemplated them for a moment and then said, ‘By rejecting God’s authority over him, man lost his own authority over all that he should be controlling: including his emotions, his mind and his own body. Look down the length of this cathedral, Morris, and imagine the authority of the school over those young boys ceasing to exist and being replaced by anarchy.’

‘Unpleasant thought.’

‘Unpleasant for you as a master—but, in the end, also unpleasant for the boys themselves. Anarchy would, in the long run, deliver more pain than pleasure. It would be a case not just of the punishment fitting the crime, but of the crime and the punishment actually being the same thing. That’s what happened in the Fall. Our primeval parents desired anarchy by rejecting God’s authority. And God allowed them to have it.’

In silence I chewed this over until Jack resumed by saying, ‘The anarchic world that resulted was a world in which the Good was marred by the Bad—in which the Great Subtraction of the Fall “hollowed out”, so the speak, both human nature and the human world. The garden ceased to be Eden and became, in Milton’s words, “these wilde Woods forlorn”. It was disobedience driven by pride that gave us all the fallen, corrupt human nature we now have.’

‘Pride?’

‘Our primeval parents were too big for their boots. Their disobedience consisted of announcing that “No one tells me what to do, not even God”. Addison says somewhere that “the great moral which reigns in Milton is the most universal and most useful that can be imagined, that Obedience to the will of God makes men happy and Disobedience makes them miserable”. That explains the corruption of human nature. That explains those ghastly bounders Conway and Wynyard. But it also explains the snobbery of young Stanhope, and it explains you and me, Morris.’

‘Us?’

‘The prosecuting attorney at our trial before the High Court of Heaven, Morris, will be our own conscience. This is the dazzlingly simple fact about human nature.’

The Head Master opened the door of the robing room and beckoned.

As Jack rose to go he said, ‘Conscience does not, as Hamlet would have us believe, make cowards of us all—it makes convicts of us all. It convicts us of our faults of pride and disobedience. The truth is that the human heart is not now as it once was. The fact of disobedience, driven by pride, has produced corruption.’

The Head Master now stood beside us, interrupting our conversation. As he and Jack walked away, I heard Dr Rogers say, ‘We’re about to begin, Mr Lewis.’ Then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘And Mr Morris, would you do a final sweep of the cathedral close please, and the school buildings, so as to ensure there are no boys lurking elsewhere who should be here?’

Jack took his place beside the Head Master in the procession down the aisle while I made my way through the north door into the chill evening air outside. Walking quickly across the quad, I entered the dormitory building and checked both floors, finding them completely deserted. Next I mounted the stairs to the Old School and walked swiftly down one corridor after another. I pushed open closed doors and glanced into every study cubicle. Every wing of the building I found to be empty.

It appeared that even the School Cads and Bounders had fallen into line and joined the rest of the student body in the cathedral.

Coming back down the stairs from the Old School, I found myself on the far side of the quad, facing the cathedral across the empty expanse in between.

The cathedral itself was glowing with light, and I could hear the school hymn being sung as I stepped out into the cool evening air. Between me and the cathedral building was an ocean of darkness—deep purple shadows fading to utter blackness in corners and crevices.

The cloud cover was heavy that night, and a thin sliver of moon made only fleeing appearances. The quad presented the appearance of shadow falling upon shadow, like waves rolling upon each other on a low shoreline.

I began to make my slow way around the close, doing a thorough job of the ‘final sweep’ that I had been asked to do. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the blackness of the night, and I could just make out the slinking form of the cathedral cat slipping through the town gates—presumably bent on a night on the tiles.