Snowleg - Couverture souple

CHAPTER ONE
She led the way along the bridle path, through a field of blackspotted stones and blackberry bushes that glistened with rain. Peter’s favourite walk.

They climbed in silence. Near the summit they came to a steep chalk verge dotted with yellow and red bee-orchids – “one of the few places in England where they grow”, according to his father. Once, taking a specimen to draw, his father had found embedded in the chalk a twisted scrap of aluminium, the relic, he maintained, of the Heinkel that had blazed into the ridge in the last months of the war. He kept it on a shelf in his studio, a precious metal flower.

At the lookout on the ridge – which Peter for ever after dubbed “Revelation Hill” – his mother paused.

The Friday before, Peter sat in Mugging Hall waiting to hear his name.

“Liptrot?”

“Sum.”

“Leadley?”

“Sum.”

“Hithersay?”

“Sum.” His presence confirmed, he drew the tangerine curtain of his “toyes”, the wooden stall – a jumble of horsebox, Arab tent and cupboard – that encompassed his private world away from home. He was meant to be writing an essay on Henry VIII’s secession from Rome in preparation for History A level. Instead, he listened, on headphones, to Morrison Hotel, while his eyes drank in the freckled young woman with a thin fox’s face pinned to his wall. The first woman to catch his fancy.

Peter had boarded at Southgate House since the age of twelve. It had taken him until this, his fourth year, not to feel alienated by its customs and chronically homesick. His school – St Cross College, outside Winchester – had its own confusing language in which something desirable, such as the image on his wall, was known as “cud”. Parents were “pitch-up”, and when walking between his House and classroom it was compulsory to wear a “strat”, a straw boater bought at phenomenal expense from Gieves & Hawkes in Winchester that served as a barometer, according to its state of disintegration and width of hatband, of a boy’s seniority. Then there was the “tub-room”, with its high-backed Edwardian tin baths of a sort Peter had never seen outside the school except at a plasterer’s in Salisbury. At St Cross you measured your progress towards manhood also by your ability to lift – and tip out – the weight of your dirty bathwater. When he was twelve, Peter had needed both hands. Now, at almost sixteen, he could empty his tub with one finger.

On those first Sunday afternoons, to escape the torpor that descended on his House and sharpened the smells of instant coffee and rancid milk and locker-room mud and the thick grey whiff of masturbation, Peter would wander beside the Itchen with no sense of connection. Four years on, this fretfulness had diminished. He had grown to admire the flint and brick buildings which he could see from the riverbanks, the beauty of worn stone and ritual, the emerald playing-fields which extended into water meadows that Keats had written a poem about. On these days he felt at one with St Cross, involved.

Only later did Peter appreciate the depth and saturation of the school’s Englishness. When he did at last consider it, he realised there were hardly any boys from outside the southern half of England, let alone from overseas. One exception was Tweed, a Greek boy in his House whose parents were so desperate to join the English Establishment that they had changed his name from Nikoliades. Apart from Tweed, a wealthy mathematician with weirdly blond hair and a loud voice, Peter had encountered few foreigners.

His own parents weren’t well-off. His father’s distress at the sight of a bill made Peter overly conscious of the fact that had he not won a scholarship they couldn’t have afforded the fees. Certainly they weren’t able to afford the same kind of school for Rosalind, who, not being “academically minded” as they put it, attended the local comprehensive together with her friend Camilla Rickards.

“‘At first flash of Eden, we rush down to the sea, / Standing there on freedom’s shore.’”

One part Rimbaud and two parts nonsense, it still gave him a buzz. Eyes closed, dreaming of Camilla, he didn’t hear the curtain snap open. Seconds passed before Peter was aware of Mr Tamlyn. Briar clamped in mouth, his housemaster surveyed the wooden stall.

“Sir!”

Peter struggled to turn off his tape recorder while Mr Tamlyn’s waxy gaze roamed over the “Abolish the House of Lords” sticker, took in the electric filament in his mug and moved up the photographs stuck on the toyes wall: Jim Morrison, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape – and the women he craved to sleep with. Like Camilla, whose meek response on learning that Peter went to St Cross – “You must be clever” – inspired the wild grain of hope that she would be the one to ease his sexual desire.

Out of place at the centre of this gallery was Peter’s No. 1 hero, and the most prosaic. St Cross owned a copy of the Malory manuscript, and this explained the presence on his wall, next to a tanned young woman in a rubber swimsuit advertising Lamb’s Navy rum, of a reproduction of a Victorian painting of Sir Bedevere, last Knight of the Table Round and scourge of the Germanic hordes who had dared to threaten England.

Peter was drawn to the knight whom the dying Arthur entrusted with his sword. He recognised elements of himself in Bedevere, someone who was not a natural leader but who had pockets of this quality which allowed him to advance and retreat. He envied Bedevere his experience of the miraculous: the hand that dolphined out of the water – brief confirmation of a calm and secure order – before it sank back into the depths, to vanish for ever. He loved the story and sometimes wished he might come across a dragon-threatened damsel so that he could display a courage which his surface hid.

Rosalind mocked his obsession. She preferred Bedevere as played by Terry Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film which their parents had taken them to see at Christmas. She was twelve, but considered it juvenile of her brother to have “a comic-book fart as a pin-up”.

And yet if Peter believed in anything, it was in the paternal spirit embodied by King Arthur and his chivalric knights. The fact that the school – itself founded in the fourteenth century – had custody of the manuscript which told their stories consoled him hugely.

Without divulging by one facial muscle his opinion of bold Sir Bedevere, Camilla Rickards or the desirability of the House of Lords, Mr Tamlyn removed the damp pipe stem from his mouth.

“Your mother’s on the telephone, Hithersay.”

Peter followed his housemaster down the red-tiled corridor and through a studded swing door. Into the only part of Southgate that resembled a normal house.

“Take your time,” Mr Tamlyn said, his voice kind. It was always stressful to receive a call.

Peter went into the study. The telephone on the desk reeked of “Malvern mixture”.

“Hello?” uncertain whether to sit in his housemaster’s swivel chair.

“Darling, it’s Mummy. Your grandfather’s not very well.” She spoke quickly. “Don’t worry, he’s absolutely fine at the moment. But instead of us taking you out on Sunday, it might be better if you came home.”

He started to ask for more details, but she cut him off. “I’ve spoken to Mr Tamlyn and he agrees. It would give your grandfather enormous pleasure if he could see you on your birthday. We can have a lovely picnic.”

Peter was walking back into Hall when a curtain twitched and a face stuck out: close-set eyes, jutting nose, the corners of a mouth raised in an expression of crafty hope.

“Anything wrong?”

“No, Leadley.”

“Well, Hithers? What was it about?” Leadley persisted. His family owned a substantial estate 3 miles from Peter’s parents. “Your pitch-up OK?”

“If you must know, I’ve been invited to a really smart party.”

He continued towards his toyes, a short Achilles tendon causing the bounce in his step that people sometimes mistook for good cheer.

For the two days following his mother’s call, Peter lost himself in the curriculum. Routine pulled him back from introspection. Worries about his grandfather faded.

On Saturday he played cricket on Lavender Meads, his favourite pitch. He took three wickets and scored 54 with the Slazenger bat his father had given him for Christmas. An hour after being caught at slip, he was sent out as a temporary substitute for an injured fielder and in the very next over sparked thunderous applause when a ball he threw in from the boundary hit the stumps. Delighted to have run out Leadley, he retreated to his position on the edge of the river, “saving four”, as the visiting school captain had instructed him to do.

The Itchen here was known as Old Barge and this was a dream of long waving weeds, the occasional trout lying like a torpedo in the depths, particularly under the bridge beside the playing field. Standing in the weeds, an untidy figure cast out a line in an effortless harmony of rhythm and balance.

“Brodie!”

Brodie, eyes on the water, didn’t hear.

Back on the pitch, a new batsman occupied the crease. Peter knew that he ought to walk in, but he lingered to watch Brodie cast again. Emboldened by his unexpectedly accurate throw, by six centuries of chalk streams and certainty and Englishness, he looked at where the plump trout flared a...

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