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  “Did they ever say anything about what Jack Page said to them?” asked Graham interestedly.

  “Only one thing”, muttered Stephen. “They said I was an ungrateful little sod for not being suitably impressed by all the time everybody’d been spending on making plans for me. The fact that I’m not party to something isn’t supposed to make any difference to that. Yes, they said that after all they’d done for me it was bloody ungrateful to treat their comfortable home like a doss-house. That was the word they moored on — ungrateful is what I am.

  “Not that they used precisely those words, mind you. They’re far too respectable to use language like that. But you could see that’s what they’d have liked to say, if it wasn’t letting themselves down in front of me. When the old man was giving me a dressing down for saying ‘bullshit’ he actually said ‘there’s no need whatever for language like that’. ‘Whatever’ — can you believe it? Prissy bastard.”

  “You’re not very happy at home?” said Graham. He said it in a casual tone; but he watched closely as the boy pondered the question.

  After some time Stephen spared a few moments from the cricket to glance at him. “Is anybody?” he said lightly. Graham looked sharply at him, but his expression was inscrutable. He let it go for the time being, and they continued ambling round the boundary.

  A few minutes later, however, somewhat to his surprise, Stephen returned to the subject. He had obviously been thinking about it while they strolled. “It’s not exactly that I’m unhappy”, he said, sounding anything but happy as he spoke. Graham stopped, briefly applauded a cover drive and prepared to suspend interest in the match. If the boy needed someone to confide in he was willing to abandon his planned afternoon’s spectating in a good cause. He gave attention.

  “It’s more that I feel as if…” Stephen trailed into silence as he strove to find words. “As if, somehow, I’m alien”, he said at last. “That’s it, really. Alien. I feel like some sort of cuckoo, as if I was the milkman’s, and they both know it, but they’re preserving a decent silence about it, for the sake of the family name, you know.” He stared gloomily at the ground for a moment, but then, suddenly, he laughed. “Come to think of it”, he said, in a much merrier tone, “that’s just about what they would do if that was the way things were. Like I said, they’re a pair of prissy bastards. A pair of Pooters”, he said, laughing again. “I’ve just been reading that book, and I kept wondering why everybody else raved about it while I just found it horribly depressing. I was wondering what was wrong with me. Of course! Why didn’t I realize?

  “Does that tell you anything about how it is at home, sir?” he asked after a further pause.

  Graham found himself considering the boy with more interest than he had shown in him before. He had always considered him an agreeable, bright member of his year, with a friendly manner and a pleasant look about him; but he had never paid him any special attention, other than marking him down as a cricketer of promise, and therefore to be watched closely as an investment for the House XI, which Graham ran. Now he perceived an unsuspected depth of articulacy, and even wit, in him which, he thought, would repay attention.

  “To begin with, I really wish you’d drop the ‘sir’”, he opened. “It’s a pretty formality in classes, a little tiresome but necessary in the main; but you’re too old for it here — and I’m too young for it, I hope.” He saw the boy acknowledge the small privilege with a brief smile, no more, and Graham’s dawning respect for him took another small step forward. “I’m Graham to my friends”, he went on. “As for what you say about your home, I know all too well what you’re talking about. I’m constantly appalled by what I see and hear of people’s families. I really do wonder if Plato’s idea of state crèches wouldn’t be a better bet sometimes. I’ve got a private theory that if we took a poll of the entire middle and upper school, somewhere round eighty per cent of the boys would vote for the idea…” He fell silent for twenty or thirty yards. “There aren’t many who are desperately unhappy”, he said quietly, as if he was thinking aloud more than addressing Stephen. “But the sense of alienation, of not belonging, is the commonest childhood ailment among the prosperous British middle class, I think…”

  There was a further long silence, which they were both too occupied with their own thoughts to break. It was broken instead by a sudden howl from the middle, which made them both jump. “Hmm. Pity”, commented Graham as the school’s star opening bat began the walk to the changing room, swiping his bat against his pads in annoyance. “Still, forty-six for one, that’s not bad. Shall we go on?” They continued their walk.

  “I… er… I think there’s something a bit more to it than just middle-class-itis with me, si… er, Graham”, said Stephen, a little tentatively, after a few more paces. He halted and watched as the incoming batsman took guard, twiddled his bat nervously in the crease and prepared to receive his first delivery from the county side’s rather fast, and very hostile opening bowler. “Well kept out”, they said in chorus, as the batsman played a nasty rising short ball down into the gulley. “Nasty one to get first ball”, said Graham, clapping the stroke as the batsman wrung his jarred bottom hand. They watched in silence as the boy played out the rest of the over without mishap.

  “What’s the extra problem, then?” Graham asked as the field changed.

  Stephen half turned towards him and he just caught the tail end of a sharp, speculative look in the boy’s large grey eyes. He deliberately turned his attention to the game to give the boy the chance to decide whether to confide or not. Eventually Stephen said “It’s really just that they disapprove of everything I do, or even think, as far as I can see.

  “For instance”, he went on after a pause, “I joined the Labour Party about a year ago. I never said anything, just did. I wasn’t particularly keeping it a secret, or anything silly like that. I didn’t really think about it much… just joined, because I’d decided I wanted to, and — well, if I’d thought about it I suppose I’d have realized they wouldn’t like it specially, but I really didn’t think it would matter —you know, make any difference to anything. But the first time the party newspaper came through the letterbox, well, really, you’d have thought I’d… well, it was as if I’d signed up for the IRA, or stuck a poster of Colonel Gadaffi in the front window or something…

  “Well, there was a proper bloody Spanish inquisition about it. You wouldn’t believe it, sir — Graham. Really, you would not have believed the fuss it caused. It was like a Victorian melodrama…”

  “I’ve got a private theory”, said Graham softly, “that life doesn’t imitate art. It imitates melodrama. I used to think, for many years, that Othello was one of the silliest plays Shakespeare wrote. All that catastrophe, and all caused by something as piddling as a handkerchief. Well, I’ve long since revised that opinion. I now think he was closer to reality with that one than most. Nearly all the really dramatic rows and crises in your life will be sparked off by something just as trivial and piddling as that, I think you’ll find. And you seem to have started finding that out pretty early. Not a bad thing, I’d say, Stephen… Dear God in heaven, look at that!” he added in a groan as the new batsman played an atrocious cross-batted smear at a perfectly innocuous, but perfectly straight long-hop and was bowled neck and crop. He glanced at the distant scoreboard and grunted. “Humph! Fifty-eight for two. What in God’s name did he think he was doing…?”

  They strolled on, watching anxiously as the fourth batsman took guard and then as he negotiated the first two overs and began to look a little more confident, before Stephen resumed his confidences.

  “Then there was another almighty bust-up when I refused to go to church any more”, he said. Graham watched his face as a series of expressions chased each other across his fair, regular features. Anger followed dismay, and was followed by a baffled, puzzled frustration, and the lot were replaced by a strangely old and wise half-grin, suggesting to the increasingly admiring Graham that the boy possessed a strong and
invaluable sense of the ridiculous. “I’d been going ever since I was a kid”, he eventually continued, “and I’d carried on going mainly because I couldn’t be bothered to stop — to break the habit, you know?” Graham nodded, understanding.

  “Well, I hadn’t actually believed any of it for years”, he went on. “I’d decided by the time I was about ten that it was all a lot of superstitious nonsense. But I quite enjoyed the hymns…”

  “I like the hymns myself’, assented Graham. “They’re bloody good tunes, and it’s a good yell, as a very fine choral singer of my acquaintance would put it. Sorry. Go on.”

  “Well, I started to feel a couple of years ago that I simply couldn’t sit there and listen to all that crap any more. I mean, in a way, I think I felt that I had too much respect for the church to carry on… you know what I mean? As if I was insulting decent, sincere people, who really believed in what they were doing, and meant what they said: it seemed — oh, I don’t know, just somehow not right, that I should be sitting there silent, me, an atheist, and not — not saying anything. And yet there’s no way I could do anything. I tried getting the vicar into conversation one Sunday after the service, and he obviously didn’t mind discussing things. But my parents did. I got a royal bollocking for it when we got home. Not for trying to argue theology with him, but for…” He hesitated, searching for the word.

  “Rocking the boat?” suggested Graham. “Introducing a wholly unwanted element of questioning and thought into a comfortable, reassuring Sunday ritual? Oh yes, you won’t be forgiven lightly for that. You have to understand these rituals — for a start you have to understand that virtually the whole of English middle-class life is governed by such rituals. They don’t mean much — most of them go so far back into the mists of antiquity that they lost whatever meaning they ever had — if any — several centuries ago. But disturb them, and God help you.”

  Stephen grinned, from the sheer pleasure of finding himself understood, and hearing his own incipient, barely formulated yet strongly felt convictions so clearly and precisely enunciated. “You’ve got it, s… Graham”, he said excitedly. “That’s exactly the feeling I had. And it’s exactly what my parents didn’t like me doing. So, of course, I said I wasn’t going to church again, and honestly, you’d have thought I’d sprouted horns and a tail on the spot! And d’you know what hurt and irritated me the most of all?”

  “I think I could have a shrewd guess.”

  “Go on then, sir. Graham.”

  “That it wasn’t that you were no longer a believer that was important, or that you thought the entire apparatus of religion was absurd self-deceiving superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but that you weren’t going to church. I imagine there was quite a lengthy part of the proceedings devoted to the text of ‘What The Neighbours Were Going To Think?”’ .

  “Spot on, sir”, cried Stephen, laughing aloud in his delight at finding such understanding. “I suppose”, he said, calming and looking shrewdly at Graham, “that we all think we’re the first one this sort of thing’s happened to… and then we’re all ridiculously surprised when we find that someone else has been through it all before, and it’s all old hat?”

  This time it was Graham who felt a frisson of pleasure at the quick intelligence revealed. Without thinking about it at all, he gave Stephen a grin, expressing pure delight in his company; Stephen spontaneously gave an identical grin in return; and that was the moment when the first bond was formed. Until that moment they had been master and pupil, an ordinary, pleasant

  schoolboy, fair of face and able in class, but one who did little in general to stand out from the hundreds of others around him, and a master, sharp of wit, tongue and intelligence, who had no special favourites and no victims at all, who had marked the boy’s presence and his attainments, but otherwise taken no special notice of him in the crowd. From the moment when they exchanged grins, acknowledging each other’s intelligence and marking out the common areas of their experience, they were on the first steps towards becoming friends.

  They walked on once more. As they made circuit after circuit of the field, commenting on the match as it progressed unevenly on its way, the talk became general. It was the experience that comes the way of many people when, often apparently by the merest chance, they strike up an unexpected friendship with an especially enlightened schoolteacher, or by some genetic accident chances to be on similar wavelengths. In that afternoon as they watched the cricket Stephen’s horizons began for the first time in his life to broaden in distances large enough to be measurable. Graham talked of numerous things, never like a schoolmaster, and often descending to flippancy when he felt it judicious; but he managed to implant into Stephen’s mind a series of suggestions for future reading that the boy declared happily would be regarded as positively subversive by his parents. When they parted at the end of the afternoon Stephen would please Graham by heading straight for the library in search of John Stuart Mill.

  Meanwhile Graham felt certain that there was something else that Stephen had not yet felt confident enough to speak of which was at least a part of the underlying unhappiness at home. But he was far too wise to risk undermining the boy’s new-found confidence by pressing him, and he let it lie, feeling fairly sure that it would come out when the boy was ready, and that it was almost certainly nothing to necessitate any anxiety in the meantime.

  “…ah, it’s tea”, said Graham. “Come on, let’s go and swipe a bun. I want words with that Roger Hillier. He ought to be disembowelled with a blunt pig-sticking device for that shot he got out to.” They turned off the boundary and walked across the field to where the teams were milling about on the grass and taking their tea from trestle tables. “Who do you play for at weekends?” Graham asked as they arrived at the wicket and stooped simultaneously and automatically to press fingers into the strip, assessing the surface.

  Stephen stared at him, momentarily taken by surprise by the question, and by its underlying assumption that he must play for someone in his leisure time. “Oh! Well, I, er… I don’t play for anybody, actually”, he said, causing Graham to stare back in his turn, in considerably greater surprise. “You don’t?” he said, astonished. “Good lord. Don’t you want to, then?”

  “Er, well, no, it’s not that”, said the boy in mild confusion. “It’s just that I’ve never really got to know a club. I suppose I’ve always had other things to do, and…” He hesitated, then blurted out “It’s my parents, I’m afraid. They don’t approve of cricket. I have thought about it, actually. A lot. But when I’ve mentioned it, well, it’s always got such a frigid reception… They said cricket clubs were dens of iniquity where they’d try to get me drunk and… and… well, to be honest, si…Graham, I’m not sure quite what they’re afraid of. All I do know is, they’ve never wanted me to join one, and I… well, I’ve just never found one, I suppose.”

  “They don’t want to lose you, I’d suspect”, murmured Graham. “That’s the usual reason.” He straightened up. “Ought to take spin in the second innings”, he said, and began making for the tea-drinkers. “Look here”, he said as they reached the boundary, “would you like to play for my club? It’s local. You live in the town, I take it?” Stephen nodded. “Well, you must know of us — we’re very strong: we play in the local league, and won it the season before last. I’d be glad to put you up for membership, and I reckon, from what I’ve seen of you in the last couple of House matches, you’d walk into our Twos. We’re a friendly crowd, and you don’t have to get drunk after the match. Most of them do, but it’s not actually compulsory. I’ll be quite happy to reassure your parents, if they make trouble for you. I’m sure you’d like us.”

  “Which club is it?” asked Stephen, his eyes alight as he thought about the proposition. “The Town?”

  Graham snorted in derision. “Huh! That bunch of National Westminsters? Good God no, my dear child. We stuff them twice a year as regular as clockwork. No, I play for Elderton Park — we’re far stronger than the town. You must know whe
re we play. So why don’t you give us a try? You’re going to have to find a club to play for some day soon, when you leave here if not before, and I’d hate to see a good off-spinner wasting himself on the Town or somebody like it. At least you’ll get a bowl with us. We’ve got a club captain who values spin. Why don’t you come along this weekend and at least have a look at us?”

  Stephen thought it over for three tenths of a second before looking up at Graham, his eyes shining. “I’d love to”, he said. Graham looked very pleased. “Good”, he said. “That’s settled, then. And now, by sheer chance, look over there — you see the man with the glasses and the MCC sweater? That’s Don Parker. He opens for us, and for Hertfordshire — and he’s as stylish a batsman as there is in Hertfordshire. He could play for a first-class county if he really wanted to, without any question. But he’s too used to making serious money to be willing to play cricket for ten thousand a year, so we’ve got him instead. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  * * *

  By the simple act of accepting Graham’s invitation to join the cricket club he added an entire new dimension to his life. He made friends outside school and his own age group for the first time, and that helped him in his determined attempts to extricate himself from the coils of his narrow family; but it also eased the tensions between him and his parents, whom he had been rapidly coming to see almost as enemies. Once he had an outlet for his exuberant energy, and other groups of people with whom he could share interests radically different from any he had encountered in his parents and their circle, he was able to take a more balanced view, and there was an instant drop in the temperature at home.

  Even his parents were rather relieved to find him less prickly, less sulky and more ready to take some part in the life of the household. It was increasingly a minor part, but such part as he did take he took willingly and generally pleasantly. It took less time than either he or they had expected for them to become used to the idea that he was not going to return to the church. There were occasional grumbles when he took to coming home after midnight on match days, and more when he began to gravitate to the club on Friday nights as well, but they were halfhearted and didn’t last long.