Once Again Assembled Here Read online

  ONCE AGAIN

  ASSEMBLED HERE

  SEAN O’BRIEN

  PICADOR

  For Paul Harrison

  Lord, behold us with thy blessing,

  Once again assembled here;

  Onward be our footsteps pressing,

  In thy love and faith and fear…

  Break temptation’s fatal power,

  Shielding all with guardian care,

  Safe in every careless hour,

  Safe from sloth and sensual snare;

  Thou, our Saviour, thou, our Saviour,

  Still our failing strength repair,

  Still our failing strength repair.

  Henry James Bucknoll, 1843

  ‘Why’, he asked himself, ‘am I always lost?’

  Derek Marlowe, Nightshade

  ‘There should have been fictions to be real in.’

  Peter Porter, ‘Story Which Should Have Happened’

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  PART THREE

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  PART FOUR

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  2010

  This is a story about murder. I think I can safely tell it now, but it’s never possible to be quite sure, so the manuscript will go to a safe place – that is to you, for you to deal with as you see fit. Dispose of it if you think it wisest. I will not be around to comment on what you decide.

  In those remote days, in the 1960s, when this story took place and when I grew up, peacetime was by some means always wartime. It should not have been surprising that there were casualties. I remember the day before, and I remember the day it happened, when I entered another world, adjacent to this one but impossible to come back from, the one where everyone lives, death notwithstanding. I say I can tell this story, but, as they still used to say then, you had to be there to get the benefit.

  History, in a statement whose own provenance is disputed, is said to be ‘one damn thing after another’. It’s an idea whose unreasonableness can at times seem rather satisfying. Hurl the stupid newspaper aside, switch off the idiots on television, or, perhaps more likely nowadays, click to be somewhere else on your laptop. But I don’t believe it: history, at least as it presents itself to my imagination, can be any number of things taking place at once, however dispersed in time they may originally have been. When I try to tell this story straight, I stall; therefore, in order to get anywhere, to get started, I have to digress, folding one incident inside another and another as though inside the brackets of an interminable equation of the sort I never properly understood.

  I sleep badly, in small episodes. Nowadays what sleep I get is dry and thin, but to be wakeful by night is worse. Somebody once recommended that thinking of a walk through a familiar setting was a cure for insomnia. Not for me. More and more often I find myself lying there and repeating the following episode.

  I cross the railway track and open the gate into the grounds. It seems to be November. If I stay here, I think, nothing will happen. The leaves will fall. The fog will persist, with occasional damp birdsong and the faintest sound of traffic from the city. But nothing else. I cannot be compelled to go either forward through the wood past the lake, where the raft is tilting and slightly adrift of its mooring, or back across the track to where I should never have been in the first place. With luck, if I stay here long enough, I will simply vanish, one more cloudy breath dispersing in the frosty air. But this is not true, and as ever I will walk on, and events will take their course. Carson will still be dead, and others will follow.

  The dream-walk is, I suppose, a kind of advice: insofar as it is in your power, tell the truth.

  The subject matter follows me into the waking world. I sit at my desk in the window of my flat, looking across Fernbank Avenue, through the trees and into the grounds of Blake’s. And I find myself back in the woods by the lake once more. When the reverie fades I am still at the desk, my pen put down beside the creamy manuscript book in which I am allegedly writing volume two of the history of Blake’s School, Wartime and Reconstruction, 1939–1979.

  Progress is slow. The problem lies in some of the facts.

  There is no official place to put them. In another of my interior travels, I picture a classroom that everyone has forgotten about, on a high upper corridor, an old part of the library that has been locked and forgotten. I should not have a key, but here it is in my hand as I make my way along the corridor late in the evening when no one’s around. I turn the key in the lock and open the door and go in. Once again I am crossing the railway line. Once again I come to my senses and the page before me is still empty and the history unwritten.

  But now, in an identical manuscript book, see, I am writing it. This is it, I hope.

  How fine it is, to speculate at leisure. Larkin feared the ‘thin continuous dreaming’ that would occupy the old age he did not live to experience. Less of the ‘thin’, if you please. If anything, I find that the textures of reverie grow denser. They put the present in the shade. I can sit here at the window all day, if I choose. As far as the here and now is concerned I have no more urgent matter in prospect. One thing is clear to me: the past – every morning on waking I discover with alarm and excitement that my life is now mostly the past – is more substantial and beguiling to me that anything else, despite what it holds. Each day I write looking out between the bare plane trees on to a setting I have known for fifty years, but the place is not what it was. Mere persistence has earned me the right to say that.

  Tomorrow it will all begin again at Blake’s. If I happen to be strolling in the grounds after breakfast I may hear them singing ‘Lord Behold Us With Thy Blessing’. They cannot possibly be real, can they, these people? Autumn term. The whole idea is implausible. I shall sniff the bright September air for the first hint of frost and fog and bonfire to come.

  I should explain at the outset that while some people are drawn to schoolmastering, as we used to call it, I seem to have thrust it on myself out of uncertainty as to what I should make of my life. I wanted to write novels – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say to be a novelist – but these pages are as close as I shall come to that, and these pages are, of course, not (really) fiction but instead a memoir of a time and a place and some people. Self-destruction; demented antagonism tended with loving care long after its alleged time; some deaths; some killings: all of them were undoubtedly real. I was a witness to much of what took place and a participant in some of it. The school was a killing ground then.

  In the daylight hours these events, pondered and rehearsed and rubbed at for so long, have begun to invite my incredulity now, even as they grow more insistent. By night they arrive as with their full original force, no longer as ideas but as invasions of the senses, in three dimensions. A street
corner as it stood before it was demolished; a pub with its nightly actors, though it has long since changed out of recognition; a shade of lipstick glimpsed on a woman in the crowded street; even the smell of Belgian chocolate, or of mud at low tide in the creek. Most people say the sense of smell is not available in dreams, but perhaps they do not have the dreams I have. Is there an age beyond which it is no longer possible to go mad?

  Concentrate, Maxwell. Focus, as they say.

  Schoolmastering turned out to suit me. I had the necessary ability either to excite interest or to impose obedience, but the work also encouraged my tendency to procrastinate. The ritual cycle of the school year allowed for indefinite postponement. In a bleak mood I might say that in the event I managed to postpone my entire life. But I hope I managed to do some good amid the temporizing and despite what may come to seem the larger failure set out in these pages. That sounds like a rather ragged piety, doesn’t it?

  Let me describe the place. Blake’s. The main school building, the tall redbrick-and-masonry ship, a church in light disguise, is still moored against the field, with the various smaller additions, the restored Memorial Hall, labs, a sports hall, the library and even nowadays a theatre (or ‘Performing Arts Centre’, though the Memorial Hall was good enough for our productions), clustered around its foot like a town about a castle. In the official history I shall note these recent developments as signs of Blake’s readiness to meet the challenge of the future while cherishing the inheritance of the past – as if I were writing a script for one of those grim Look at Life shorts we used to yawn through at the cinema while waiting for the shooting to start.

  The central thing is still there, the Main Hall with the classrooms opening off it on three sides of two floors, beneath a hammer-beam roof. Everything passes through that space, gets its warrant from that cold, high-windowed climate of Victorian medievalism. When I walk through it today it will be empty and silent, the old elongated desks that doubled as benches long gone, rows of grey stackable chairs in their place. I pause by the foot of the wide staircase, then go up to the balcony and along to the far corner to what used to be the history classrooms and the adjacent bookroom where Captain Carson held court. I come here a lot, out of term-time.

  Yet now that I am nearly done with Blake’s, and thus done with everything else, I find that, when the pupils and staff are on the premises, the place lacks solidity somehow, and authority, and my selfish motive in this is to revisit at least the ghosts of those qualities in the lives of those who moved through this setting, all of them – the major actors and their attendants, I mean – gone now, dead, or vanished, which amounts to the same thing. Which makes me a sort of rearguard.

  So I walk the boundaries, around the wooded pond, along the railway line until it crosses the broad creek, known to the boys as Shit Creek because of its dangerous and foul-smelling mud at low tide, where a few decayed small craft are all that remains of the sailing club once advertised as one of Blake’s distinguishing features. On the far side the boatyard and the timber yard have long shut down. Beyond them lies the asphalted fairground where no fair has taken place in years. I follow the path along to the fence, where the creek disappears to pass under the main road, then make my way back through the woods that extend down the whole of Fernbank Avenue.

  Eventually I find myself emerging from the gigantic rhododendron bushes, among the Portakabins which are serving as temporary classrooms until the new science block is finished. Beneath one of these cheapjack huts is the site of the old Porter’s Lodge, where Sergeant Risman and his invisible wife lived. Mrs Risman was barely a rumour, in a place that ran on rumours, but on an early autumn morning, when the chill is coming downriver and across the flat, low-lying terrain, I would not be surprised to meet the Sergeant on the driveway, approaching with a guardsman’s bearing and a sceptical gaze directed at the world of subalterns and other daft buggers. But this morning he is not there. Or perhaps I’m the ghost and cannot be seen by the living.

  I pass through the gates and return to the flat on Fernbank Avenue which I have occupied for forty-odd years. I make tea and I come to the window and sit at my desk with a view of the woods and the roofs of the school beyond, and I close one manuscript book, the official one, and open the other, the one no one knows about, and I return to writing this. Or I try to, once more. I have accumulated a lot of beginnings, circlings, evasion, evocations that strand themselves among the woods and pathways of this unholy ground.

  Yesterday all the past. But tomorrow the current staff and pupils and the terrified newcomers in either category will begin afresh, convinced, as we once were, of a kind of provisional immortality, divided into three parts – until Christmas, until Easter, until the far-off green-gold sexiness of summer. I have not lived in the world: I have lived here instead, in this specialized and surely impossible place. Yesterday all the past. Tomorrow the struggle.

  To work, to work. My ostensible task – the one to which the school has appointed me in my retirement – is to write the second volume of the history of Blake’s, covering the period from the Munich crisis of 1938 up until 1979. I am not convinced that any living person other than myself has ever sat down to read volume one, A Firm Foundation 1887–1938 (Waterside Press, 1960), though after all it was James Carson who wrote it, and he could actually write; nor that any will relish volume two. Like its predecessor, that will be a book with no conversation – the kind of thing Alice found so boring, though look what happened to her. Like Blake’s itself, she was the creation of a clergyman.

  Even Carson could not make his opening description seem other than leaden:

  Blake’s was founded by Isaac Blake, an Anglican clergyman and philanthropist from the Isle of Axness, by means of a bequest enabling the creation of a school intended for the education of able boys of all classes in mathematics, science and the classics in order that they might serve the nation as Christian gentlemen.

  This aspiration must seem almost touchingly remote in its priorities. And an inspection of the records indicates that Blake’s wishes have been served only to a limited extent. The school’s twentieth-century output seems to have been more typically involved with the law and commerce, to put it mildly. Perhaps the original Blakean spirit was crushed in the trenches. As Carson puts it,

  Men of Blake’s – recent pupils, masters and groundsmen – were quick to answer the call to arms in 1914 and saw service in the local regiment on the Western Front and in Mesopotamia. A total of a hundred and forty lost their lives.

  Beyond the city itself, the Plain of Axness remains to this day in a more-than-rural quiet, like the patient green graveyard of those vanished into the conflict, a place still waiting for a returning echo that never comes. Carson would have considered that a too-literary way of putting it, though he would have agreed it was the case. And like the Plain of Axness the school has never escaped the Great War entirely, nor the second conflict that shaped so many of the staff I encountered first as a pupil and then as a colleague.

  My official history will go straight into the school library – unread, unheard, unnoticed. Its purpose will be simply to exist. Never mind: I plan to finish what I’ve started. But while I may feel that it is taking longer than expected to get the official book written, any real urgency is mine. I can take my time. All the time in the world, the present Headmaster indicated. He is perhaps forty. His name is of no importance in this story. He invited me to write the thing and then, I imagine, forgot all about it and me after the leaving dinner and the gift of a complete set of the novels of Graham Greene, which I already possessed.

  Yesterday all the past. Today the accounting. If I die in harness, he will declare it sad, but the unfinished book will not be important. The word ‘hobby’ hangs like a fart over the whole thing: it is a school story, after all.

  Like so much else about Blake’s, this second manuscript feels like a conspiracy. I first wrote down much of the following narrative forty years ago. At the time, for reasons which should
be clear from what follows, it would have been impossible to publish a factual account of the events I recorded. And to be on the safe side I made it into a novel in order to conceal the identities of those involved. I’m sure, though, that they would have recognized themselves immediately. This too would have been unpublishable. Now, after half a lifetime and more, I’m reintroducing the real names, for my own satisfaction.

  I am blending memory and desire with the secret writings of others. It’s difficult. More than that, time blends with time, recombining events and emotions, awarding a hindsight that may intensify the torment I for one probably deserve. But yes, there is something else. At the time of my central narrative, in 1968, there were those who could not have permitted this story to be told. They may themselves be dead but they were not irreplaceable. When I go, leaving you these pages, perhaps history will undergo a minor adjustment. But nothing fundamental will change. Of course not. How could it? This is Blake’s I’m talking about, Blake’s and a sort of England.

  Enough evasion. I must cease my preparations and open the blocked off-entrance to the forgotten corridor, take my place in one of the chilly classrooms and begin. Begin somewhere, anywhere. Begin in earnest. Life is no longer a preface to itself. Life is over, nearly. Then begin! Everything will lead to the same point, the core. Wish me luck.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  1968

  In a while there would be the respite of half term. Eventually it would be Christmas and the conflict would be suspended, for a while. But now it was barely October. Frost and fog, mainly fog. At least it was Friday. For now, there was assembly to be got through.

  I still found it hard to convince myself that I was a master, not a pupil. It seemed plausible that Gammon, the Acting Head, allegedly a geographer, could any second aim a dart of reproof at me where I sat on the balcony. And yet my gaze wandered away from his snappish figure at the lectern far below, and out through the windows on to the grounds which I had planned never to visit again after my initial escape from the sixth form. Bellows, who taught classics, had an apt quotation for all occasions. Bellows was dead of a heart attack now, but what would he have found to apply to a prodigal’s return? Odes i.iv, perhaps: ‘Life’s brief span forbids us to depend on distant hope.’ Gammon went on talking. I went on looking out of the window.