Fireside Gothic

‘You could read a book, I suppose,’ he suggested. ‘That’s what I generally do. Or perhaps you would like to unpack. You mustn’t mind me – just as you please.’

I was standing near the chair on which Mordred lay. The first I knew of this was when I felt an acute pain in the back of my left hand. I cried out. When I looked down, the cat had folded its forelegs and was staring up at me with amber eyes, flecked with green. There were two spots of blood on my hand. I sucked them away.

‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I do apologize.’

Freedom is an unsatisfactory thing. I had longed for the end of term, to the end of the chafing restrictions of school. But when I had freedom, I did not know what to do with it.

Mr Ratcliffe set no boundaries whatsoever on my conduct. In this he was perhaps wiser than I realized at the time. But he made it clear – wordlessly, and with the utmost courtesy – that he and Mordred had their own lives, their own routines, and that he did not wish me to disturb them if at all possible.

On that first day, I went into the town during the afternoon. During term time, we boys were not allowed to leave a College except when specifically authorized – to walk to the playing field, for example, or to visit the home of a dayboy, or to go to one of the few shops that the school authorities had licensed us to patronize. We were allowed to go shopping only on Saturday afternoons, and only in pairs.

So – to ramble the streets at will on Christmas Eve, to go into shops on a whim: it should have been glorious. Instead it was cold and boring. The hurrying people making last-minute purchases emphasized my own isolation. Everywhere I looked there were signs of excitement, of anticipation, of secular pleasures to come. I had a strong suspicion that Mr Ratcliffe would not celebrate Christmas at all, except perhaps by going to church more often than usual.

I tried to buy a packet of cigarettes in a tobacconist’s, but the man knew I was at the King’s School by my cap and refused to serve me. I had a cup of tea and an iced bun in a café, where mothers and daughters stared at me with, I thought, both curiosity and pity.

In the end, there was nothing for it but to go back to the College, to Mr Ratcliffe’s. At the Sacrist’s Lodging, his door was unlocked. I hung up my coat and cap and went into the sitting room.

Mr Ratcliffe wasn’t there. But a boy was sitting in Mordred’s chair, with Mordred on his lap. He had a long thin head, and his ears stood out from his skull. His front teeth were prominent and slightly crooked.

The cat was purring. They both looked at me.

‘Hello,’ said the boy. ‘I’m Faraday.’

3

That was the start of my acquaintance with Faraday. It’s strange that such a brief relationship should have had such a profound effect on both of us. He was very thin – all skin and bone – but there was nothing remarkable in that. The school food was appalling and few of us grew fat on it. Some people called him ‘Rabbit’ because of his teeth.

The front door opened. Mr Ratcliffe came into the house. ‘Ah – there you are. I see you’ve met Faraday. But perhaps you two are already friends?’

I shook my head. Faraday continued stroking the cat.

‘As you see, he has already established a friendship with Mordred. How long it will last is another matter.’ Mr Ratcliffe sat down and began to ream his pipe. ‘Mrs Thing is making up the other bed.’

‘He’s staying here?’ I said. ‘But—’

‘I’m not in the choir any more,’ Faraday interrupted. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

I noticed two things: that Faraday’s face had gone very red, and that his voice started on a high pitch but descended rapidly into a croak.

‘Yes,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, tapping his pipe on the hearth to remove the last of the dottle. ‘Poor chap. Faraday’s voice has broken. Pity it should happen just before Christmas, but there it is. Dr Atkinson decided it would be better not to take a chance: so here he is.’

Even then I knew there must be more to it than this. The brisk jollity of Mr Ratcliffe’s voice told me that, and so did Faraday’s face. Even if Faraday’s voice had reached the point where it could not be trusted, they could have let him stay with them, let him walk with the choir on Christmas morning with his badge of honour around his neck.

Faraday looked up. ‘They chucked me out,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair.’

At the time I pitied only myself. Now I realize that all of us in that house deserved pity for one reason or another.

Faraday’s voice had betrayed him. His greatest ally had become the traitor within. He had lost not just his place in the choir but also his sense of who he was. Mr Ratcliffe must have loathed the necessity to share his house with two boys, disturbing his quiet routines and upsetting his cat. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he was probably very poor. He must have received some money from the school for housing us. Perhaps he had felt in no position to refuse. After all, he was old and alone; he lived a grace-and-favour life in a grace-and-favour house.

Faraday and I went to the verger’s house at six in the evening, where Mrs Veal gave us Welsh rarebit, blancmange and a glass of milk. We ate in the Veals’ parlour, a stiff little room smelling of polish and soot. On the mantelpiece was a mynah bird, stuffed and attached to a twig, encased in a glass dome.

On that occasion we saw only Mrs Veal, apart from near the end of the meal when Mr Veal came in from the Cathedral, still in his verger’s cassock; he wished us good evening in a gruff voice and opened the door of a wall cupboard. I glimpsed two rows of hooks within, holding keys of various sizes.

‘Enjoy your supper,’ he told us, and went into the kitchen, where we heard him talking to his wife.

Faraday rose from his chair, crossed the room to the cupboard and opened the door.

‘Dozens of keys,’ he whispered. ‘And all with labels. It’s the keys for everywhere.’

I pretended not to be interested. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Or he’ll catch you.’

That night I heard Faraday crying.

I remember in my first term at school I would lie in bed, listening for other boys crying and stuffing my handkerchief in my own mouth in an attempt to muffle my tears. There were about twenty of us huddled under thin blankets in a high-ceilinged dormitory, the windows wide open winter or summer. Sometimes one of the older boys would round on one of the weeping children.

‘Bloody blubber,’ he would whisper, and the rest of us would repeat the words over and over again, like an incantation, lest we be accused of blubbing as well. Little savages.

But that had been years ago. I wasn’t a kid any more and nor was Faraday.

‘Faraday?’ I murmured.

There was instant silence.

‘Are you crying?’

‘I’ve got a cold.’

It was the usual excuse, transparently false.

‘What is it?’ I said. And waited.

‘Everything. Bloody everything.’

We lay there without speaking. The room was not quite dark – the curtains were thin and the light from a High Street lamp leaked into the room.

‘But it’s my bloody voice really,’ he went on. ‘Everything would have been all right if it hadn’t been for that.’

‘That’s rot,’ I said, with the loftiness of fourteen to thirteen. ‘Everyone’s voice has to break sometime, unless you’re a girl. You don’t want to be a girl, do you?’

This was an attempt at comfort but it seemed only to make Faraday start crying again.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can’t just blub.’

‘You don’t understand. I was going to sing the Christmas anthem. There’s a solo, you see, and it’s usually the head chorister that does it, and the Bishop gives him a special present afterwards. Some money.’

‘How much?’ I said.

‘Five pounds.’

I whistled. ‘For a bit of singing? That’s stupid.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Faraday’s voice rose in volume and, suddenly, in pitch. ‘It’s a tradition. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Some old bishop left money in his will for it. And now Hampson will do it instead.’

‘Don’t talk so loud. The Rat will hear you.’

‘It’s lovely, too,’ Faraday whispered.

Lovely was not a word we used much. ‘What is?’

‘The anthem. It’s for Christmas Day. It’s called “Jubilate Deo”, and we only sing it on Christmas morning.’

Rejoice to God. Both of us had enough Latin to translate that.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s beastly to lose five quid. But is it that bad? I mean, it was never yours in the first place.’

Faraday started crying again. I was spending Christmas with a cry-baby. I curled myself into a ball to conserve heat and thought how perfectly miserable everything was. Or rather, how perfectly miserable I was. Boys are selfish little brutes. While I was wallowing in self-pity, however, my curiosity was still stirring.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I can see it’s a shame your voice is broken and all that. But why are you like this about it? And why are you here?’

The snuffling continued. It was getting on my nerves.

‘Why aren’t you still at the Choir House? Or why didn’t Dr Atkinson send you home to your people?’

‘My parents are dead,’ Faraday said, and the waterworks increased in force.

That jolted me out of my own misery. I knew what it was to miss your parents, you see, and even I could imagine how infinitely worse it would be if you could never, ever see them again. Or not until after you died and went to heaven, assuming heaven was real, which in those days I still considered to be a sporting possibility.

‘So where do you go in the holidays?’

‘To my guardian’s, in Wales. But this year he’s had to go away. So I was going to stay with the Atkinsons until he comes back.’

This deepened the mystery. ‘Then why aren’t you there now?’

‘It’s because of Hampson Minor. Bloody Hampson.’

‘Yes, you said – he’ll get the five quid because he’s going to sing the anthem, and I suppose he’s the new head of the choir, too.’

Faraday’s bed creaked. ‘It’s not that. He had a postal order from his uncle. Ten bob.’

I whistled softly in the darkness. Not in the same league as the Bishop’s five pounds, but still pretty decent. I wished my aunt would give me ten shillings sometimes.

‘He was swanking about it all the time. The postal order and being head of the choir and the Bishop’s money. He just went on and on and everyone was sucking up to him. He said he was going to buy a big cake from Fowler’s for everyone. I just wanted to kick him. You know what he’s like.’

I only knew Hampson Minor by sight. He was a fat, pink-faced boy with small delicate features and prominent lips. When he sang, he made his lips into a perfect O.

‘He left the postal order on the floor. It must have fallen – it was with his exercise book. So I – I picked it up and put it in my pocket.’

‘You stole it?’

‘No,’ Faraday wailed. ‘I was just going to keep it for a bit, until he found he had lost it, and then give it back. To teach him a lesson. That’s all. Honestly.’

I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

‘But he told Dr Atkinson it was gone, and Dr Atkinson made us all empty our pockets and open our boxes.’ Faraday paused for a long moment. ‘And they found it.’

I didn’t know what to say. Stealing was a sackable offence at the King’s School.

‘I was going to give it back, I swear it. I didn’t know he’d tell old Atky straight away. The rotten sneak.’

‘What will happen?’ The scale of the offence awed me. ‘Will they chuck you out?’

‘I don’t know,’ Faraday whimpered. ‘I just don’t know. And even if they let me stay, everyone will know. So that’ll be almost as bad. And then there’s Hampson’s brother. I’d be in the senior school.’

I was beginning to take a warped pleasure in having a ringside seat to the tragedy which was unfolding on such a grand scale. Faraday, the golden boy, had lost his singing voice, his five pounds and his pre-eminent role as head choirboy. He was now faced with a hideous pair of alternatives: if he was expelled from school he faced a lifetime of shame and whatever punishment his guardian cared to mete out; if he was allowed to stay, his remaining years at the school would be made a living hell, particularly by Hampson Major, a gorilla of a boy who played second row forward in the First XV, and who had a well-deserved reputation for brutality verging on sadism. He was bad enough as a casual tyrant over anyone smaller than himself. He would be a figure of nightmare if he chose to persecute you seriously.

‘God,’ I said as the full horror of Faraday’s situation hit me. ‘You poor bloody kid.’

He was crying again, softly, continuously, a sort of moaning and sobbing that at last moved me to pity, and even to a desire to help.

‘Look here, Rabbit,’ I said. It was the first time I called him by his nickname. ‘Perhaps it won’t be as bad as you think.’

The crying stopped. I heard Faraday’s ragged breathing.

A sense of power filled me. He believed I might be able to help, and that almost made me believe it too.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We’ll think of something. I promise.’

4

For every child, I think, there must be a day when Christmas loses its magic. By ‘magic’ I don’t mean an unquestioning belief in Father Christmas or a foolish attachment to improbable ideas about reindeer and chimneys and so on. Nor does the magic I mean reside in the religious connotations of the day, though of course, for many people, the one cannot be separated from the other and Christmas is always the birthday of Jesus. I envy them.

The magic has more to do with a sense that this is a special day, when nothing is allowed to go wrong. When you are given presents, good food and a licence to enjoy luxuries and activities that lie beyond the reach of most of us for 364 days of the year. When people are kind to each other and there is a sense of holiday.

The illusion is strongest in infancy, and most of us lose it gradually during childhood. But we cling to it, we fool ourselves, as long as possible. In the end there has to come a day when we are forced finally to acknowledge the truth: that Christmas is a day like any other, potentially neither better nor worse, but actually almost always worse because it trails in its wake the ghosts of its lost magic.

For me it was that Christmas at Sacrist’s Lodging: that’s when at last I accepted that a Christmas Day could be as miserable as any other.

The morning began when we went downstairs to find Mr Ratcliffe making tea in the kitchen. On the mat by the back door were the hind legs and tail of a mouse; Mordred had already celebrated Christmas in his own special way.

We wished each other happy Christmas. Mr Ratcliffe was wearing an ancient suit, once a uniform black but now shiny and even green in places, in honour of the day.

He gave us cups of strong, sweet tea, with very little milk in it.

‘I thought we would go to Matins and then the Eucharist afterwards,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually eat before taking communion, if I can avoid it. It seems rude somehow.’

‘What about Christmas dinner, sir?’ I asked in alarm.

‘Mrs Veal will have something for you at lunchtime, I’m sure. Don’t worry about that. I’ll have mine at the Deanery.’ He hesitated, and I guessed that he had remembered the Dean also entertained to lunch those members of the choir who had not left immediately after the morning services. ‘We’ll meet again in the evening, I expect, when you are back from the Veals’.’

Mordred sauntered into the room and picked up the remains of the mouse. He wandered into the hall.

‘I’ll let him outside, shall I?’ Faraday said in a rush.

He dashed after the cat. I heard him fumbling with the front door with clumsy urgency, as though trying to escape.

I suppose that was what we all wanted – Faraday, myself and even, perhaps, poor Mr Ratcliffe: to escape.

There was no snow that Christmas.

It was very cold. The grass around the Cathedral was a hard, sparkling white, and frost clung to the leafless branches of trees and bushes. The flagged paths were treacherous – any moisture had turned to ice overnight.

Mr Ratcliffe strode slowly along, his stick tapping the pavement. ‘Beautiful,’ he said over his shoulder to Faraday and me, trailing behind him. ‘Quite beautiful.’

The College was crowded with groups of people making their way to church. On Christmas morning, the Cathedral had one of its largest congregations of the year, even though the King’s School wasn’t there to swell its ranks.

We sat in the presbytery, the rows of seats on either side near the high altar, to the east of the choir stalls. Above us were the pipes of the organ and the wooden cabin of the organ loft, clinging like a growth to one bay of the choir aisle.

I don’t remember much about the services except that they seemed to go on for ever and that I seriously thought I might faint or even die from hunger. It must have been hell for poor Faraday to see the choir processing through the chancel gates, filing in two by two, and peeling off into their stalls in the choir.

Hampson Minor led them in, with the head boy’s medal resting on his surplice. He looked larger and pinker than before, as if his promotion had inflated him a little further than nature had done already. His eyes darted about the chancel. I guessed he was looking for Faraday. As he turned to lead his file into the choir stalls, he found us. For a fraction of a second he paused. Beside me, Faraday stiffened like a threatened animal.

The moment was gone. The choir flowed smoothly into the stalls and the service began.

I had attended many services in the Cathedral – the school used it as its chapel – but I had never been there on Christmas Day. The Bishop was there enthroned, a gaudy, overstuffed doll with his mitre and crozier. Each seat was full.

I concentrated on not fainting from starvation; on standing, sitting and kneeling; on mouthing the hymns in a soundless but visually convincing way, a skill I had perfected in my first term; and, most of all, on thinking about what Mrs Veal might provide for our Christmas dinner.

But I did notice when the choir sang the anthem, the ‘Jubilate Deo’. The first part was sung by Hampson Minor alone: I could see him, his mouth an O of surprise, his face pinker than ever with the effort. Then, one by one, the rest of the choir joined in, and then the organ thundered into life and they all made a dreadful racket until it was time for us to kneel down and pray again.

Faraday leaned towards me undercover of shuffling as the entire congregation was sinking to its knees.

‘He muffed it, the silly ass,’ he muttered. ‘The end of bar sixteen. He couldn’t hold the E flat.’

For the first time, I saw Faraday smile.

Mrs Veal had bought us Christmas cards, and I felt guilty that we had not thought to do the same for our hosts. Mr Veal carved the beef and the ham. We ate late – Mr Veal had plenty to keep him busy after a service – but Mrs Veal took pity on us and gave us a preliminary helping of Yorkshire pudding and gravy.

In his capacity as head verger, Mr Veal was a figure who inspired fear and mockery in equal parts. Now, however, Faraday and I saw the domestic Veal, his dignity put aside with his verger’s gown. In private, with a good meal inside him, a glass of port in one hand and his pipe in the other, he revealed himself as almost genial. I remember he told us a story about one canon who grew so fat that it was only with difficulty that he could squeeze into his stall; in the end they had to make a special chair for him. He laughed so hard that his face became purple.

The Christmas dinner was the only time that I saw Faraday looking really happy. The Veals were kindly people: they gave us food, warmth and a welcome. Perhaps there was a little Christmas magic after all.

‘A lot of queer stories about the Cathedral,’ said Mr Veal on his third glass of port. ‘And I could tell you a few, if I had a mind to. Have you heard about the bells?’

‘But there aren’t any,’ Faraday said. ‘Not in the Cathedral. Only the clock chimes.’

‘Ah. Not now. But there were bells, once upon a time.’

‘Get along with you, George,’ said Mrs Veal. ‘Save it for later. I need to clear the table and these boys need to get back or Mr Ratcliffe will be wondering where they are.’

‘He knows about it, all right,’ Mr Veal says.

‘Who does, dear?’

‘Mr Ratcliffe. He knows about the stories.’

5

In the evening of Christmas Day, we made mugs of cocoa together and sat around the fire in the sitting room at the Sacrist’s Lodging. Like Mr Veal, Mr Ratcliffe had drunk a few glasses of wine with his dinner and was unusually expansive.

Mordred condescended to join us. He sat on the chair nearest the fire, head erect, with his back to us. It was Mordred who started Mr Ratcliffe on ghosts.

‘I am afraid he’s a little stand-offish today. You wouldn’t think it, but he doesn’t like being left alone in the house. We abandoned him for most of the day and now he’s sulking.’

‘He doesn’t look as if he’d notice if he was alone or not.’ My scratches still rankled. ‘I don’t think he likes people.’

‘You may be right,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, patting his pockets for his oilskin tobacco pouch. ‘But he finds us convenient, and not just for food and warmth. Perhaps we help to ward off the ghosts.’

‘Ghosts?’ Faraday said. ‘What ghosts?’ In those three words his voice modulated from a rumble to a squeak.

‘Do you know any stories about them, sir?’ I said. ‘Will you tell us one?’

‘Mordred used to see the ghost next door,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, nodding towards the party wall that divided this part of the Sacrist’s Lodging from the other. ‘He was just a kitten then, and he didn’t know what to make of it. In fact, that’s why he lives with me. He kept coming over here to get away from the ghost, and in the end the Precentor said I might as well keep him.’

‘Have you seen it, sir?’ I asked. By this stage of my life I had my doubts about the existence of God but I was more than willing to keep an open mind about ghosts.

‘Yes, several times over the years.’ Mr Ratcliffe had given up on his pockets. Still talking, he rose from his chair and eventually discovered the pouch wedged between the seat and the arm. ‘Of course I didn’t realize it was a ghost at first.’

‘What did it look like?’ Faraday said.

‘Like a cat.’

‘A cat?’

‘Yes, a little grey cat. One used to see it in the corner of the big room upstairs occasionally. Quite harmless. It’s probably still there, for all I know. It comes and goes.’

‘What did it do?’ I said.

‘Nothing very much. It just sat there. Sometimes you saw it moving across the room. You always glimpsed it out of the corner of your eye, if you know what I mean. But Mordred was different – he saw it directly. He behaved as if it was another cat, arching his back and so on. But then it simply terrified him, and he wouldn’t stay in the same house. So he moved here, next door. But it was odd, really – the grey cat never seemed to notice his existence at all.’

‘Perhaps it thought Mordred was the ghost,’ Faraday suggested with a giggle. ‘Perhaps he was trying to pretend Mordred wasn’t there.’

Mr Ratcliffe struck a match and paused, considering the remark, the flame flickering over the bowl of the pipe.

‘Anything is possible, I suppose,’ he said at last, and sucked the flame deep into the pipe. ‘We may haunt ghosts as much as the other way round.’

‘Or they may not even know we’re there,’ I put in, feeling that Faraday was having too much of the limelight.

‘Some of the time they certainly know we’re there.’ The light was dim and Mr Ratcliffe’s features disintegrated in a cloud of smoke. ‘Or some of them do. That was undoubtedly the case with the blue lady. She always behaved very cordially to me. On the other hand, one should not generalize from the particular.’ He must have seen our expressions, for he added hastily, ‘I mean that one ghost who behaves like that does not necessarily mean that they all do.’