Read Mrs Midnight and Other Stories Online
Authors: Reggie Oliver
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (39 page)
Margetson would sometimes mention the scholastic achievements of his youth in a tone which suggested a grievance that he had not risen higher in the world. He had taken a good degree at Oxford, and had once played cricket for his university. He had taken holy orders; he had married the daughter of a bishop. Caverner studied the appropriate reference books and discovered that the bishop had died shortly after his daughter’s marriage. Perhaps, thereby, hopes of preferment had been dashed. Caverner tried to imagine the brilliant, hopeful young curate Margetson might once have been, but failed. Something had happened to him. Had it been an event; or was it simply the heavy foot of time that had trodden him into the mud?
Once or twice Caverner thought he had caught glimpses of the old Margetson, the fine classical scholar. There were times during a lesson when Margetson would quote Horace or rhapsodise over the gobbets of Virgil they were construing; then with a sigh he would return to the dreary business of drilling his charges for the scholarship examinations, or for Common Entrance. At this stage of his education Caverner did not quite understand how a piece of Latin could be regarded as a thing of beauty, which was mainly Margetson’s fault because most of the time learning was taken simply to be a means to a marketable end. Scholarships on the honours board of St Cyprian’s attracted parents: another pupil, another fee.
For a Christian cleric, Margetson was curiously obsessed by pagan mythology. The legends even entered his sermons, which were long, rambling and might, for all Caverner knew or cared, have been brilliantly erudite. In these discourses Jesus remained the blonde-bearded, white-gowned aryan scoutmaster of the sunday school poster; even the bloody warriors and thundering prophets of the Old Testament remained pale and sickly figures. But when, in an odd aside, Margetson turned to the classical legends, it was as if he had turned a light on in a strange but very real world. Caverner remembered Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds, Agave holding the severed head of her own son believing it to be that of a mountain lion; here were Odysseus and Aeneas venturing underground and visiting the land of the dead. The boys of St Cyprian’s became oddly familiar with the geography and personnel of Tartarus.
To Margetson the Greek and Roman Hells were more interesting than the Christian one whose torments, even in Dante, were seldom entirely bespoke. Margetson revelled in the particularity of pain. So Caverner and his fellows heard about Ixion on his wheel, Sisyphus and Tantalus, or Tityos whose liver perpetually regenerated itself in order to be pecked to bloody fragments again and again by vultures.
Caverner did not question the validity of this world of punishments, even after his encounter in the cricket pavilion. He only questioned Margetson’s justification of his own activities: that pains were to be inflicted in this life in order to warn the offender against those of the life to come. Caverner, who could summon up no great affection for the scoutmaster Jesus with which he was presented, saw himself as more or less doomed in any case. One punishment more or less in this life would make no difference in the life to come.
Once, towards the end of his time at St Cyprian’s Caverner had found himself on what was called ‘the private side’, that part of the school buildings that was reserved for the Margetsons’ domestic use. He had been sent to The Head with a message by one of the masters. Not finding Margetson in his study he ventured further into this secret domain than he had ever been before. It was not particularly exciting. Margetson’s home territory was not exactly Spartan—certainly not by comparison with the conditions in which his charges existed—but they were drab. Ornament was discarded in favour of severe and unostentatious conformity. What pictures there were consisted mainly of monochrome steel engravings of church buildings, or portraits of ecclesiastical dignitaries. Then Caverner saw, in a corridor, a picture that he actually liked. He could not help but stop before it. This picture was different from the others. It was admittedly not in colour, but it was the sepia print of a recent painting.
In front of a vague, rocky landscape were seven tall beautiful young women, one of them bare breasted, draped in flowing, classical robes. They carried rounded metallic water pots which some of them were emptying into a cauldron in the centre of the picture. The general atmosphere was one of slow, dreamlike tranquillity. The only slightly troubling element in this scene was that the cauldron had an opening in its bulbous side in the shape of a grotesque head, like a flattened mask of tragedy, from whose wide, angry mouth the water poured away into a dark hole. The activity of these beauties appeared to be futile.
‘Do you know who they are?’
Caverner started violently and his back brushed against something. It was Margetson’s rusty black suit; he had crept up unheard close behind him. Caverner, blushing and terrified, turned round to face The Head, who seemed, however, to be in a genial mood and appeared almost amused by Caverner’s obvious discomfiture. Caverner rapidly explained his presence there and presented the note to Margetson who put it in his pocket without even a glance at the contents. His steel blue eyes, slightly magnified by heavy round spectacles, fixed themselves on Caverner.
‘Do you know what is being represented?’
Margetson was not a handsome man, but he was impressive looking. He was tall, loose-limbed and spare, with a beak of a nose, a long neck and an unusually prominent Adam’s apple. His skin was the colour and texture of polished ivory. Caverner had always felt that there was something not quite real about the man.
‘Well, boy?’
Caverner shook his head.
‘Then I shall tell you that you may be better informed.’ Margetson often talked in this ironic, stylised way. It contributed to the air of remoteness and unreality.
‘These are the daughters of King Danaus of Egypt,’ he said pointing to the seven beauties. ‘They were commanded by their father Danaus to murder their husbands on their wedding night. All but one did so. The murderous daughters were subsequently killed, and in Hell they are condemned by the inexorable judges of that place perpetually to pour water into a leaking vessel which will never be filled. This is the scene which that excellent modern artist Mr John William Waterhouse has chosen to depict.’
Caverner stared at the picture again. What had seemed like serenity was now shown to be a profound melancholy sadness. For Caverner it overwhelmed all the dreamlike beauty he had once found in it. If Margetson had not been there he might have wept; instead he fought back the tears. His grief was tinged with indignant anger: whatever these lovely creatures had done they did not deserve this.
‘You appear to be moved, boy. What is the matter? Do you think that the dread crime of killing one’s spouse should
not
be punished with the utmost severity?’
Caverner shook his head.
‘Run along then.’
Caverner recalled the moment with vividness, standing there by the pavilion some ten years later, but the grief had somehow gone out of it. So much, so many terrible things had intervened. Again he began to wonder what had brought him back to St Cyprian’s when he could have been spending his leave in London.
He was not quite sure how long he had been there. It seemed an age to him, yet it could not have been. The shadow of the pavilion had barely lengthened, the even, golden light was not yet ensanguined by the sun’s fall towards the horizon. The only change to the scene was that it was not now entirely deserted. A small black figure was moving towards him across the Great Field.
At the opposite edge of the field from the pavilion was a line of trees masking a knapped flint wall. Behind this lay the scout huts, the carpentry shed and the school buildings to which access could be obtained through a gap in the wall. From this gap had come the black figure that resembled a strange, ragged flapping bird. As it approached, Caverner could see that this crow of a man was in fact a schoolmaster in a black suit with a black gown over it. Then he began to make out the white dog-collar below the long pale neck, the familiar slightly bounding stride, the glint of spectacles. It was Margetson.
Caverner retreated to the steps of the pavilion, then stood his ground. He was, after all, an officer in uniform; there were three wound stripes on his sleeve. Nevertheless he waited as if waiting for a battle. Margetson only noticed him when he was half way across the square of the cricket pitch. He hesitated, a puzzled frown on his face. After a while he came on again. When he was about six feet away from Caverner he stopped once more and peered at him through his spectacles.
‘Caverner, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right, Margetson.’
Margetson was taken aback by the naked use of his surname. There was a pause before he was able to say: ‘Ah. On leave, are you?’
‘On leave. Yes. A leavite, you might say.’
‘Hmm. Not a deserter, then?’ Caverner did not dignify his remark with a reply. ‘My little jest,’ added Margetson, almost apologetically, ‘Just my little jest. One of our brave boys, then, eh? Splendid. Splendid.’ Having delivered himself of this conventional piece of patriotic piety he seemed at a loss again. His rusty black suit looked to Caverner rustier and shinier than ever. Could it possibly be the same one after nearly ten years? In a lower, less confident voice, Margetson said: ‘What do you want, Caverner?’
‘I think I wanted to see you.’
‘Was that wise?’
‘It may have been necessary.’
‘Oh, you foolish boy. You foolish boy. Did you think I would be impressed? Did you think I might fall on my knees and worship the conquering hero? I am sorry to disappoint you. To me you are a grubby, ignorant little boy, I am afraid, and will ever remain so. That is the penalty of being a schoolmaster. We are invincible realists. We know that all boys are grubby, ignorant little reprobates and thus they remain. It is not the uniform that makes the man. Many are called, but few are chosen. Original sin, you see, is so very unoriginal.’
Caverner watched Margetson unmoved. He looked up at the sky which appeared, strangely, to be getting lighter. Finally, he said: ‘I read about you in
The Times
. The Coroner brought in an open verdict.’
For a moment Margetson appeared startled, then he came back at Caverner. There was now a touch of real venom in his voice.
‘Well I saw something about you. Mametz Wood, wasn’t it? July 1916?’
‘It is August now. The term is over. The holidays have begun.’
‘I did not take my own life. It was taken from me.’
Caverner looked at Margetson for a long time. ‘I think I despised you once,’ he said, then he smiled.
‘How dare you, sir!’ Margetson was silent for a time. He appeared to be struggling to articulate something. Finally he said: ‘It was not suicide, whatever the Coroner may have thought; whatever other people said. It was not.’
‘Who hanged you then?’
‘I did not mean to . . .’
The image was conveyed to Caverner, as vividly as when he had first been given the details. When he had read the bald announcement of Margetson’s death in the newspaper, he had immediately written to a friend in England and asked for further information. Though guns and death surrounded him, he burned to know. The friend, a fellow sufferer under Margetson, had been happy to oblige.
One morning, early, towards the chilly end of a Michaelmas term, when it was barely light, the boys of St Cyprian’s had trouped into the gymnasium where, according to the school’s inflexible routine, they were to line up before going into chapel. Something was dimly swinging from one of the ropes that hung from the rafters of the gym’s great beamed roof. The process of realisation that this was The Head, the Reverend C.W. Margetson, and that he had hanged himself, came to the boys surprisingly slowly but was all the more terrible for that. The Head was in his usual rusty black, with his dog collar, even his master’s gown. His long neck had been stretched still further by the rope; the face was almost black but recognisable and his spectacles clung to his nose. Stranger yet was the fact that his trousers had come loose and were gathered in exhausted corrugated bags around his ankles. The effect for an instant might almost have been comic. Witnesses declared that the vision burned itself indelibly into their minds: it remained with them day and night. It remained with Caverner too, even amid the stench of death in Flanders, even though he had received the news at second hand.
‘You cannot hurt me now,’ said Caverner.
Margetson clawed at the air around him, a gesture of such impotent rage that Caverner almost laughed.
Caverner said: ‘Very soon you will meet Minos or Rhadamanthus. Perhaps even Cerberus too.’ That was what he had come to say. It was not to see the terror in Margetson’s eyes, so he turned away from him before he could.
Margetson turned too and began to hurry from the field towards a belt of dark firs in the distance. A host of shadows followed after him. Caverner remained standing in the ancient light by the pavilion but he no longer felt alone. The Great Field was Great once more, greater even than the War in which his body had perished.
