The New Confessions

2 A Sentimental Education

Archibald Minto welcomed me and the other two newboys with a genuine smile.

“I’m a fair man,” he said at the end of his speech. He had a soft, cheery voice. “Some may say too fair.… But when I’m crossed, I flog. I rarely flog. I’ve flogged only five boys in the last two years. But when I do”—he was still smiling—“I’ll welt the hell out of you. Do I make myself plain?”

“Yessir,” we said. My fellow newboys were three or four years older than me. They looked like men, and one of them wore a beard.

“You’re welcome to Minto Academy and you’re all damned lucky to be here. Be sure and thank your parents.” He looked at the bearded boy. “I’ll allow a ‘tache, Fraser, but I can’t abide a beard on a boy. I think only of the filth it hides. Get it off at once.”

“Sir,” Fraser said, looking surprised. I shared his reaction as Minto himself was bearded. No one made any comment.

I do not know why it should have been so but Minto’s genial threat worked. He flogged only half a dozen boys in the years I was at school. By and large we behaved ourselves, and when we transgressed so arranged it that Minto remained in complete ignorance. In this we had the connivance of the senior boys. For all its strangeness it was a happy school.

Minto Academy had once been a moderately large private house. It stood in its own grounds on a rise overlooking the Tweed. From the main door terraced gardens — now grassed over — descended to a rugby pitch. The house itself was of a purplish brown sandstone that turned a dull murky mauve when wet with rain. There was a classical pedimented porch at the front with four fluted pillars, in the center of an elongated but elegant two-story facade. The top floor consisted of Mr. Minto’s apartments and those of the three masters the school employed. On the ground floor was an assembly room, a dining room, kitchens, locker and wash rooms and three large dormitories where the boys slept. It was a small school with never more than sixty pupils. Behind the house was a square stable block with a courtyard and clocktower. Two sides of the square had been converted to classrooms; the other two were still occupied with horses. To this day I associate school with the smell of horseshit. Above the classrooms and loose stalls lived the school maids and Minto’s handyman and factotum, Angus.

The school had been founded by Minto’s father in 1865, specifically established to “cater for children gifted in mathematics and music.” After the Scottish Education Act of 1892, Mr. Minto, Sr., refused to relinquish control to the Galashiels Burgh Council and struggled thereafter to remain independent. In 1898 Archibald Minto returned from the University of Göttingen — where he had been studying mathematics under Hilbert — to take over the running of the school after his father had suffered a severe stroke. Under him the school prospered modestly. He sold off some land and advertised its special facilities further afield, implying that it welcomed not only mathematical and musical talents, but also anyone, so the brochure hinted, who could not fit into orthodox scholastic environments.

Minto was a passionate rugby football enthusiast and he determined that the Minto Academy first fifteen should excel in this also. Accordingly, he granted “scholarships” to any strapping lad or nippy sprinter he fancied for his team. The school regularly triumphed in the local leagues, held up and down the Tweed Valley. This obsession explained the presence of the bearded Fraser — he was required for the second row of the scrum.

We were a curious student body. There were genuine mathematical and musical talents, but, while I was there, there was only one prodigy. Then there were people like me whose vague gifts seemed to lie only in one or the other of these directions and whose parents were despairing of getting them educated. Then there were the misfits, encouraged by Minto’s all-embracing manifesto. Boys who could draw well, boys who “were good with their hands,” boys who could run fast. Some of these types verged on the freakish. There was a brilliant juggler; there was one boy with exceptional eyesight who could read a printed page at eight feet. There was another, a thin long-armed fellow, who could hurl a cricket ball well over a hundred yards. There was a prodigious high-jumper. And so on. This category was the smallest in the school, seldom more than a dozen all told at any one time. They made up a sullen edgy population (we called them black buns for some reason) who often lasted no more than a term or two. Outside the orthodox curriculum they were encouraged to develop their specialty under Minto’s eye. He believed passionately in excellence, and if that happened in an individual case to confine itself to cricket ball throwing, then so be it. And then there was the rugby team: local lads plucked from farm or mill (rumor had it Minto actually paid their parents), provided with board and lodging, offered the notional gloss of secondary education and throughout winter and spring as much rugby football as they could take.

Most of us were averagely good mathematicians or musicians. Minto took us for maths; Mr. Leadbetter taught the musicians. The school orchestra was quite proficient and played regular concerts in council chambers and corn exchanges in the Tweed Valley, incidentally providing the Academy with another source of income. Two other teachers, forlorn-looking bachelors, a Mr. Fry and a Mr. Handasyde, made a stab at the other subjects necessary to have the Academy accredited by the regional school board. These two glum, wistful men seemed more fearful of Minto than we boys and we wondered what duress kept them at the school.

Minto himself was a smallish man in his late forties. He had dark-ginger hair — close cropped on cheeks and chin, dry and wispy on his head. He wore round horn spectacles and had a friendly light voice with a trace of rhotacismus: “Weally vey good,” he used to say in approbation.

Ostensibly there was nothing threatening about him. Any member of the rugby team could have knocked him flat, for example, but his discipline was unquestioned and would have done credit to an army barracks.

After one of his rare vicious floggings I asked the victim (a twenty-year-old wheelwright from Kelso) why he had not retaliated. His crime had been to give cheek to Mrs. Leadbetter. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

“D’ye no ken aboot that Angus?”

Angus was a big stupid man with pronounced pigeon-toes. It was his job to control the beefier pupils. He had killed a man with his bare hands in a public house brawl, so local legend had it. After his prison sentence (manslaughter) Minto had taken him on. From time to time, I was told, Angus had administered savage beatings to any member of the rugby team who questioned Minto’s authority.

In spite of these deterrents — perhaps because of them — the school was a tolerant, tolerable place. Only once did I suffer at the hands of other boys, but it was an initiation rite that everyone underwent.

This was a bonding ritual known as the “wax-bogey plate.” On his first night in the dormitory a newboy was obliged to consume a symbolic meal consisting of small balls — the size of shot — made up of earwax and phlegm. The other boys mined their orifices for the raw material, which they then diligently rolled into little balls. Collected on a plate, these were then presented to the initiate. They looked like a loose beige caviar. You had the choice of eating them individually or all at once. I selected the latter course. It was not so unpleasant. A swallow, a quick swill round the mouth with your tongue. Only the sour taste of earwax lingered for an hour or two.

Hamish Malahide was the school’s only bona fide prodigy. He was a year older than I and had been at the Academy for two years. He was so good at maths that Minto gave him private tuition. I encountered him shortly after I arrived.

One dark Sunday evening before chapel, a senior boy sent me over to the classroom block to fetch something or other. On my way back I saw a group of boys — six or seven — gathered round the railings at the rear of the house. Here there was a small basement well that led to the coal cellars and the boiler house — Angus’s responsibility and strictly out of bounds. As I approached I recognized the boys were all black buns. They were laughing with enjoyment and pleasure, holding their kilt fronts up and urinating into the basement well. I looked down and saw a figure trying to dodge the spraying streams with little success. Then he tripped and the arcs of piss zeroed in, pattering loudly on his clothes until he scrambled up again. The ordeal lasted only as long as the tormentors’ bladders held out. Soon the urinators gave up and wandered away. In the well the figure tugged fitfully at his damp clothes. I was struck by the fact that he had made no sound of complaint. He looked up at me.

“I suppose you want to have a shot now.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Give us a hand,” he said as he climbed the steps.

I grabbed his moist hand and helped him over the high railings. The gate was padlocked.

“Thanks.” He explained how he had been caught by the black buns and had been hustled into the well.

“Why did they do it?”

“Who knows.”

We walked in the back door. A maid came out of the kitchen and glanced at us curiously before walking away. In the light from the gas mantle in the corridor I took a closer look at the victim. At that stage I did not know his name, but I knew his face. Hamish Malahide had the worst acne I had ever seen, or have ever seen since. He had spots everywhere, from his forehead to his chin. They clustered thickly round his nose and below his bottom lip. His neck and jawbone were rashed with them. He even seemed to have spots in his hair. His face looked so angry and sore, not to say repellent, that one wanted to flinch. I saw later the boils on his back, the large red buttons, the hard pink wens of incipient pustules.

I did not flinch, in fact, but he would not have noticed anyway, preoccupied as he was with the state of his clothes.

“I’ll have to change,” he said. “Bastards.”

“Why don’t you tell Minto? He said we should report bullying.”

He looked at me. “New rat?”

“Yes.”

“Minto would flog them, I suppose, but he always flogs the fellow who clypes as well.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not worth it. You’ll understand when you see how Minto flogs.”

“Why does he flog the victim?”

“Makes sense. He has a quieter life. He knows that when someone does complain it’s really serious.”

He smiled. He had large uneven teeth. He had fair hair and a pale skin that somehow made his acne seem worse. He was an ugly boy.

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.”

“I’m Malahide. Thanks for not slashing on me, Todd.” He paused. “I won’t forget it. Ever.”

It was a strange thing to say. He smiled again and walked off. So began the most important friendship of my life.

Mathematics. Why was I good at it and indifferent to poor in my other subjects? I believe that sort of skill or talent is something to do with the cast of the individual mind, innate, a priori. How could I, whose imagination was first stimulated by unknown stories in an incomprehensible tongue, have a talent for mathematics? The only answer I can supply is precisely because my imagination was stimulated in that way. I went to school clear-eyed, unformed. I remember my first arithmetic class. The rear wall was covered with charts of the multiplication tables.

“Right, Todd. Six-times table.”

“What table, sir?”

Uproar in the class. I was put at a separate desk to learn my tables. The numbers crowded before my eyes. I looked at the nine-times table. I saw at once, with the clarity of instinct, that the integers in the answer to each calculation themselves added up to 9: 9 × 2 = 18, 1 + 8 = 9, 9 × 3 = 27, 2 + 7 = 9. And so on up to 10. I drew my teacher’s attention to this and received my first words of praise.

What made me notice this? What made me see the pattern? And what kind of conjuring trick in that most abstract of worlds is being played here? I am not saying that I felt in some way blessed, but I do consider that some sort of inkling was being offered to me here. Since that first day at school and since that discovery the realm of mathematics was, for me, teeming with promise. What other secrets would I find? What other insights?

It is said that there are two types of mathematicians. Ninety percent see in figures. Ten percent see in pictures. The most brilliant, the most profound, come from that 10 percent. In my own case I think that for a few early years I saw the world of numbers in pictures, that I had the gift up to the age of ten and then, for some reason, it faded into mere proficient numeracy. But the great mathematicians never lose that facility. Perhaps that is why infant prodigies occur only in the worlds of maths, music and chess. These regions can be surveyed pictorially; patterns and shapes can be perceived there. Order can be discerned among randomness, sense separated from contingency. Or at least that is what I used to think. I have abandoned explanations now. Mathematics and physics have led me to greater, more disturbing truths than these, as I shall reveal to you. Sense, order, pattern, meaning … they are all illusions.

Hamish Malahide, of course, was one of those 10 percent. I like to think we all are at birth, but the tabula rasa is quickly scored with confusing hieroglyphics that we never manage to erase again. I was lucky. I had that guileless vision for a few extra years. Hamish never lost it. He was extraordinary. Mathematicians, like artists, tend to have their peak periods. Hamish did also, and as a young man produced the celebrated Malahide Paradoxes I and II. There was a brief refulgence in the 1940s with the discovery of the Malahide Number, but after his twenties the creative power waned, almost like a form of aging. But his perception remained ever vigorous and acute, right to the end of his desperately unhappy life.

At Minto Academy it took me some time to realize his qualities. At school he was a reviled and unpopular figure because of his appalling acne. Even Mrs. Leadbetter, the matron, gave up any pretense of medical impassivity in her vain attempts to keep it under control. She wore cotton gloves when she dabbed the goo and patent lotions on his face, her nostrils tight with disgust. Some of the school wits called him Job and the name stuck. In summer we often went to the Tweed to bathe and Hamish had to swim downstream from the rest of us. Even I, his only friend, had to admit that unclothed he did look repulsive. Consequently I often found myself divided in that role. There were things about him that I found potently intriguing, but if I looked too closely at those vivid encrusted spots my scalp literally began to crawl and my eyes water. But Hamish, with his typical sensitivity, sensed my dilemma. One day he showed me a small pot of ointment.

“What’s that?”

“My mother sent it to me: ‘Dr. Keith Harvey’s Emulsion. Cures Warts, Acne, Lupus, Locomotor — Ataxy and St. Vitus’s Dance.’ She sends me these things once a month.” He smiled. “For my rotten plooks.”

“Oh yes,” I said, as if I had just noticed them. “It must be a …” I could not think of a word—“nuisance” seemed such a grotesque understatement.

“A curse,” he said. “I’ve been cursed, I know.”

The candor was sufficient to remove the awkwardness between us. After that we often spoke about his spots. I even read the Book of Job in the Bible.

“They’ll go,” I said. “My brother had spots — they all went.”

“But what’ll I look like underneath?” he asked with a weird grin. “I can’t imagine what my face’ll be like, clean.”

“Normal … won’t it?”

“I’m not so sure.”

My friendship with Hamish grew as that first term passed. Although we were both maths specialists, he was so far advanced he might have been doing another subject altogether. To take an architectural analogy: while the rest of us were designing cab shelters and public lavatories, Hamish was building Gothic cathedrals. From time to time he spoke about mathematics and I began to gain some insight into the strange and beautiful workings of his mind.

In our class Minto had set us a project to discover all the prime numbers up to 1,000,000. (A prime number, for those of you who do not know, is a number that is not divisible by any other counting number — apart from itself and 1. Eleven is a prime number, so is 19, so is 37.) The project was a long-term one and had been going on for years. Successive generations of schoolboys had been like Minto’s researchers, scrabbling away among the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000, and coming up, like gold prospectors, with the occasional nugget — a prime. As we discovered them we wrote them on a vast wall chart. We were systematically organized by Minto, each one having a few thousand numbers to sift. The project was completed shortly after I arrived. We counted up and had a total of 41,539 primes. Then Minto, with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, showed us a calculation for estimating how many primes lay between any two given numbers. But, interestingly, the figure the calculation produced was sixty-seven numbers out. Checks established that the calculation, while close, was never exactly right.

“Why is it only approximate, sir?” Hamish asked. “Why can’t we get it right?”

“Because we can’t.” Minto seemed irritated. “That’s the nature of primes.”

On his own Hamish tried to improve the accuracy of the calculation, but with no success.

“I can’t get any more accurate. Just can’t,” he said to me one day as we watched a rugby match.

“Never mind.”

“It bothers me.… There must be something significant about primes — the way they exist in the way they do. It must be telling us something.”

“Do you think so?”

“Numbers are infinite, so there must be an infinite number of primes.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“But there’s no pattern. They don’t crop up in any order. That calculation we did — it’s never exact. Why? Why can’t we pin them down? What are they trying to tell us?”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Why is there no pattern? There should be.”

“Did prime numbers exist before we thought about them?” I was surprised at my own question, unsure of its implications. But Hamish seemed to know.

“Exactly, Todd, exactly. Think of the first man who started counting, started adding up.… Look where it’s got to now.”

It made no sense to me. Now I understand more of what Hamish saw as a fourteen-year-old. For him the world of abstract mathematical explanation was like an entrancing, enchanted forest to an avid explorer. He was already far down a jungle path, beckoning me to follow.

I soon settled into the routine at Minto Academy, but because of my friendship with Hamish it was a little difficult to establish any closer aquaintance with the other boys. It did not perturb me. There was little bullying. The dormitories were segregated by age, with one senior boy appointed dormitory leader and responsible for discipline. These were, in fact, the only ranks in the school, off the sports field. There were eighteen in our dormitory. We slept on iron beds separated by thin wooden wardrobes. Hamish’s bed was four away from mine (yes, I had eaten his wax bogey). Apart from vigorous masturbation there was little vice. A few boys chose to creep into each other’s beds, but no one objected or thought it unduly strange. Food was plentiful but unimaginative. Porridge, milk and bread in the morning. A joint of meat — mutton, nine times out of ten — at lunch, and the same joint cold in the evening with vegetables, and cocoa to drink.

At weekends, the Saturday was spent watching the rugby team win at home or away. And on Sunday the entire school was taken on an immensely long walk by a drab Mr. Fry or a sad Mr. Handasyde. Time passed, and not so slowly. I found that my homesickness had left me after a week. My only regret was that I received few letters. Oonagh could not write, my father was too busy and Thompson could not be bothered. I thought about taking up my aunt Faye’s offer but could not summon up the courage. I received the occasional postcard from my father. I still possess one. I reproduce it in full.

3 Kelpie’s Court

Edinburgh

October 21, 1913

Dear John James,

Thank you for your letter. Yes, your friend Malahide may consult me if you wish, but it sounds as if a dermatologist might be more efficacious. I regret to say that the rice diet had no significant effect on my patients. Thank you for asking.

Thompson is well; Oonagh sends her cordial greetings.

Your affect, father

I. M. Todd

I wrote once to Donald Verulam, on the pretext of some photographic business, and he replied promptly and fully asking me to write again. I meant to, but never got round to it. The school was not what I had feared; and in it, to my vague surprise, I felt I had discovered a kind of freedom. As my friendship with Hamish cemented I found I had all the companionship and stimulation I required. I was not a gregarious child and tolerance by my fellows was all that I asked.

At the end of my first term something peculiar occurred. One night, long after lights-out, Hamish woke me. Everyone was asleep, the house absolutely still.

“Come with me,” he whispered.

I got out of bed and followed him out of the dormitory.

“What is it?”

“Ssh.”

He led me down the corridor to the locker room. I went through the door after him. Suddenly he turned and clamped a damp rag over my mouth. My head filled with a rank chemical smell. Before I blacked out the room went bright yellow, then scarlet, then purple. I thought I saw my father’s face.

I came round, so Hamish told me later, after half an hour. I opened my eyes. I was nauseous and cold. He was squatting beside me. My head boomed with a headache. Feebly, I punched him in the ribs.

“Steady!” he said.

“Shagging Job!” It was the first time I had used his nickname. “Shagging maniac!” I sat on the floor, head hanging. My brain seemed to steep in some alchemical brew. I suddenly felt uneasy.

“What did you do to me?”

“Chloroform. I chloroformed you.”

“Great. You didn’t do anything while—”

“No, no. I just watched. Checked your pulse from time to time.”

“For heaven’s sake, Malahide, you can’t just chloroform someone when you feel like it!”

“I had to test it. I knew you’d never volunteer. It has to be a secret.”

“Test it? What for?”

“Something we’re going to do next year. I’ll tell you after the holidays.”

There was a science lab at the school where elementary chemistry and physics were taught. Hamish had lately been spending a lot of time there. He told me he had made up the chloroform himself. An unsuspecting Minto had ordered the chemicals himself. The ambush of me was to test the strength of the potion.

I sulked for a couple of days, but Hamish’s insouciance confirmed that my role as guinea pig had been solely in the interests of science. Besides, I was by now intensely curious to know what plan he had in mind. But he would not tell me, said merely that all would be revealed next term.

We had a quiet Christmas that year. Thompson was away, for some reason, and my father seemed even more preoccupied with his patients. I went with Oonagh to a tedious pantomime at the King’s Theatre and, with more enthusiasm, to a noisy variety show at the Pavilion in Leith. The dark winter nights and the low gray days seemed to hold Edinburgh in a hunched frozen posture, as though pinioned by the cloud blanket. A scowthering east wind lashed the streets at all hours of the day and night, numbing your face in seconds. Now that I had been away from it for a few months I discovered a strange affection for my home and was content to stay indoors. Oonagh disguised her pleasure at seeing me again and said she was sure I had grown. My Christmas present (was my father guilty?) was developing equipment and an enlarger and I converted one of the spare bedrooms into a temporary darkroom. From time to time I ventured out in search of pictures.

Hamish wrote to me from Perth, where his family lived. We had made plans about a visit, but in the end nothing materialized.

The New Year—1913—arrived and our first visitor was Donald Verulam. We had quite a jolly party that night when various of my father’s colleagues and their wives appeared. My father drank more than I had ever seen him do before. At the bells he sought me out. I was the only member of his family present (Thompson was still away — in Birmingham, I think — on church business).

“Happy New Year, Father.”

He shook my hand and would not let it go. I remember vividly the texture of his grasp: his palm cool, dry, oddly farinaceous. He looked at me, his eyes a little glazed, maudlin. Did he see his wife in my face?

“How are you, boy?”

“Fine.”

“How’s school? It’s not so bad, is it?”

“It’s fine.”

“That’s the spirit. My son the mathematician, eh?”

Then he did something I can only describe as an attempt at an embrace, though from my point of view it resembled more a cross between a cuff and a shoulder charge. In the event he managed to brush roughly against portions of my body with certain portions of his. It was odd — I remember thinking even at the time — for we never touched each other, except to shake hands. He moved off, and I was taken up by the wife of one of his colleagues and made a fuss of. People allowed themselves to feel sorry for me at occasions like these — I became a legitimate catalyst for selfless fellow feeling. I was kissed, had my hair ruffled, was praised and flattered. I wondered if, had I looked like Hamish, I would have received the same treatment. I felt a sudden intense liking for my curious friend and for an instant experienced vicariously what his life must be like. At this very hour people would be avoiding him as industriously as they sought me out. I could not imagine any professor’s wife pressing her lips to his livid cheeks.

After a while I went through to the kitchen. Oonagh sat on one chair, her legs stretched out upon another. She was drinking whiskey from a sherry glass and munching on a square of shortbread.

“C’mere, darlin,’ ” she said. “Happy New Year, Johnny.”

Without getting up she pulled me to her. I smelled her whiskey-sweet breath, felt her strong grip around me, heard the starch crackle on her pinny. She kissed me again and again on my left temple, muttering Gaelic endearments. I hugged her in return, my forearm innocently squashing her breasts. My face was crushed against her cheek. I pouted my lips. My first kiss freely given. That gentle pressure made her turn her head and as she did I kissed her again, quickly, full on the mouth.

“Happy New Year, Oonagh,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s better than the last one.”

There was the briefest knowing pause before she spoke.

“Aye,” she said. “Let’s.”

If anything, Hamish’s spots looked worse in cold weather: something to do with the skin tightening, making the knobbled quality of the pustules more evident. In the oblique washed-out afternoon light, his skin looked more like bark or a section of wall from a pebble-dashed villa.

It was four in the afternoon, night coming on fast. We were crouched behind some bushes, shivering slightly as we waited for the light in the art rooms to go out. The art rooms were in a small cottage some distance beyond the stable block. Hamish held some rag wadding in one hand and a small bottle of his homemade chloroform in the other. We were waiting for the object of his revenge.

This was a boy named Radipole. He was one of the black buns, possessing both a talent for drawing and the ability to run very fast. He was a tall, fit youth with reddish hair and curious slanted eyes — almost Eastern in configuration. He was known, imaginatively, as Chink. Apparently he had been the chief instigator of the urine soaking Hamish had received the previous term. It was he who had encouraged the mob to bundle Hamish over the railings and he had been the first to lift up his kilt and let fly. Hamish had never forgotten, never forgiven. But his mind worked with its own cool logic. Hamish decided to postpone his getting even for many months. So he presented to Radipole a face of resigned amusement, a grudging acceptance of the rag — sure, it had not been very pleasant, but still, no point in making a fuss over a bit of good-natured horseplay. Radipole duly forgot all about it. He and Hamish were not friends but there was no animosity between them. The whole point of this, Hamish reasoned, was that when he did eventually strike he would be one of the last people Radipole would suspect. No one could recall a four-month-old slight, and Radipole, being a boisterous unfeeling lout, had made many enemies since.

“He’s coming,” Hamish said. A light had gone out in the art room. “Remember,” he said to me, “count to three after he goes past.” Hamish crept off.

By now the light was almost gone. The evening meal and evening roll call were an hour away. The gloomy pines and ash trees that lined the path to the schoolhouse made it even darker here. I saw Radipole coming down the path. He was whistling through his teeth, kicking at fir cones as he went. I crouched behind a tree. He passed by. One, two, three.

“Hey, you!” I called in a deep voice.

Radipole stopped and turned, looking back curiously. Hamish stepped up behind him and clamped the rag over his mouth and nose. Radipole gave a shudder, an arm flailed and he went down. We dragged him off the path and further into the small grove of trees. We heaved him upright against a trunk and, with Hamish holding him fast, I ran a length of washing line several times around him and the bole of the tree and tied it secure. We stepped back and looked at him. He was semi-upright, his head lolling, making small snoring sounds. He had all the inert limpness of someone shot by a firing squad. A long string of drool hung from his bottom lip.

“Well,” I said, “what do we do now? Piss on him?”

“No. We don’t want to remind him of that.” Hamish looked at Radipole. “I’m going to hit him a few times, then cut his hair.”

Hamish slapped Radipole’s face with some brutality, making the drool jerk into the grass, and punched him in the torso. Then he took a small pair of nail scissors from his pocket and swiftly cut — transversely — half of Radipole’s hair away, leaving an uneven gingery stubble.

“Let’s go,” he said.

At roll call that night Radipole’s absence was discovered. Minto sent Angus in the trap to Galashiels and Thornielee stations to determine whether any boy answering Radipole’s description had been seen boarding a train. During the evening meal Hamish initiated a rumor (which he attributed to somebody else) that boys from the Innerleithen orphanage had been seen in the school grounds. Later that night, at about nine o’clock, one of the maids in the stable block heard Radipole’s desperate bellows and he was released. By this time Angus had returned from Galashiels, irritated by his fruitless journey.

For some reason, Minto decided to flog Radipole: he was offended by his bizarre appearance and maddened by his inability to remember anything more than a bass shout of “Hey, you!” I suppose Minto thought he was lying and, on the principle that everyone involved in a misdemeanor was punished, considered that he might as well thrash Radipole forthwith as wait for the eventual truth of his culpability to emerge. Which it never did, of course. By this time, the orphan gang rumor was rife. Minto sent a rude letter to the principal of the orphanage and received a ruder rebuttal in reply (he was accused, I later learned, of being “unchristian”). Both Hamish and I commiserated with Radipole about his torment and the flogging (an unforeseen bonus, Hamish admitted) and the fact that he was gated until his hair grew back. I know he never suspected us. He rounded on a few people but the hysterical veracity of their innocent protestations convinced him. He ended up believing in Hamish’s rumor and swore vicious revenge on all orphans.

I was, I confess, mightily impressed by Hamish’s subterfuge. Not so much by the audacity and neatness of its execution but by his sinister patience. From that day on I stopped worrying about him. I only wish he could have shown as much confidence in himself as I did. Later in life when he was at his lowest I would remind him of the Radipole incident, hoping it would cheer him up, offering it to him as a sign of his own self-composure. “But I was a child then,” he would say. “It’s a different world, the adult one — I was never cut out for it.”

In any event, the besting of Radipole made Hamish a kind of hero in my eyes. He was not just a brilliant mathematician, I felt he had it in him to be something great.

“Wait till your spots go,” I said. “It’ll be different then.”

“No. Not me. You. You’ll be the one.”

He had his own faith in me, I now realize, although I have no idea of the evidence he based it on. Perhaps he was biased by our friendship — that I was not repelled by his pustular mask. After Radipole a real bond formed. It survived many years and many separations.

The school terms passed with no significant upheavals. In the spring of 1914, Minto flogged three boys in one week and for a while we thought we might be on the brink of a reign of terror. Minto bought a motor car, a Siddeley-Deasey, on the profits — we whispered — of the Minto Academy orchestra’s tour of six Scottish cities. Angus severed two fingers from his left hand while chopping kindling. One boy died of meningitis. Mrs. Leadbetter produced twins.

And at home Oonagh became pregnant and miscarried—“the Good Lord’s will,” she said with a beaming smile. My father developed and patented an antiseptic spray pump for operating theaters that blew a fine mist over the general area that was to be operated on. I spent many hours as a docile “patient” while my father perfected the smooth functioning of the mechanism. By now he had abandoned his faith in diet as the key factor in the fight against sepsis and had become convinced that a nostrum would be found in a distillate of pine resin. In the summer of 1913 and ’14 we rented a house on Sir Hector’s estate at Drumlarish, where I was impressed as chief resin gatherer in the copious pinewoods that grew round about. Our apartment in Edinburgh became suffused with the smell of brewing vats of resin. Even today the scent of certain soaps and deodorants brings on an attack of nausea. Miraculously, Father managed to produce a resinous solution that was at once non-adhesive and easily vaporized. He published an article in The Lancet and a chemical company in Peterborough purchased a license from him to produce Todd’s Antiseptic Resin commercially. I believe at one time its use was fairly widespread in the Northeast of England. I once got a nasty shock in a field dressing station near Dickebusch when I saw a shelfful of Todd’s Antiseptic Resin bottles. As far as I know, the resin spray had no adverse side effects and may even have been of some benefit. While it was being developed no one in our household ever suffered from a cold. The major advantage accrued to Father: he made rather a lot of money.

Hamish visited us twice. Once at Drumlarish, once at Edinburgh, where my father sent him, vainly as it turned out, to eminent dermatologists. To Hamish’s intense pleasure, one specialist had him photographed for a medical textbook. Donald too visited us on the west coast during the summer of 1913. We went walking together many times, visiting remote crofts where we took pictures of vanishing aspects of Highland life. It was like the old days of the Barnton village school and our intimacy soon reestablished itself. He said I could call him Uncle Donald if I wished (he had asked my father’s permission) and I said I would. But I preferred not to, and consequently called him nothing. “Mr. Verulam” would have been too formal after such an invitation, so I simply stopped using his name. He seemed not to notice. Several times that summer I considered asking him directly about my mother but I was restrained — by my youth and shyness. I sensed that I would know instinctively when the right moment occurred.

Sometime during that summer I passed through puberty. I do not remember my voice breaking; it seemed to deepen gradually. The fine hairs on my groin curled and thickened and, one warm afternoon, masturbating alfresco, lying on a bed of springy heather, my imagination making breasts out of the clouds above, I was rewarded with a meager spurt of semen.

That September, when we returned to Edinburgh prior to the start of the school term, Thompson said to me across the breakfast table one day, “Get that disgusting bum-fluff off your face, will you? Makes me sick.”

Oonagh came with me when I went to buy shaving soap, brush, safety razor and a supply of double-edged blades.

“Quite the young man,” she said, trying not to laugh. But she could not help herself when I emerged from the bathroom oozing blood from a dozen nicks and grazes. I looked as if I had shaved with a nutmeg grater. Thus began a lifetime’s torment. I have always hated shaving, and yet because of the density of my beard I am obliged to shave twice a day if I am to look presentable in the evening. From time to time I have grown a beard but I have never managed to get it to stop itching. I am condemned to be clean-shaven.

My father had brown hair. So too had Thompson. My mother was fair. I, on the other hand, am exceptionally dark in coloring. My skin is not olive but it has a curious dun-whiteness to it. It’s not the translucent pallor of the classic blue-eyed, dark-haired Celt. There is a hint of sludge about it. Also, as a boy, I was aware of the fine down of black hair that covered my body. Even my spine was furred in this way and when I was wet you could see a sharp line of matted hair running from the nape of my neck to my coccyx. Once I was past puberty these hairs began to grow: on my chest, stomach, legs — but also on my shoulders, shoulder blades and buttocks. I looked at my father and Thompson and noticed the difference. (I deliberately barged in on Thompson in his bath once and saw his plump girl’s breasts and shiny folds of hairless belly, and his surprisingly long, surprisingly thin penis. I got my ears boxed, two dead legs and a Chinese burn for my indecorum.) Then I looked at Donald Verulam, at what hair he had on his head, and noted its darkness. He never bathed, or at least I never saw him, not even on the hottest days at Drumlarish, but when he removed his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves in the darkroom I saw the dense black hair on his forearms, glossy and springy.

We were on holiday at Drumlarish when war began in August 1914. Donald and I were returning from a photographic expedition to Loch Morar. My father had walked out along the Glenfinnan road to meet us.

From a distance I saw him waving the telegram at us and suddenly became convinced that he bore bad news, destined for me in particular. I felt sure that Hamish had been killed and never stopped to ask myself why his parents would have taken the trouble to telegram me. We rode up to him and dismounted.

“It’s the European war,” my father said. “We’ve declared war. Telegram from Thompson.”

“My God!” Donald said.

“Thank goodness,” I said, vastly relieved.

“What do you mean by that?” my father asked.

“I thought it was Hamish.”

“What’s it got to do with Hamish? Stupid boy!”

He was genuinely irritated and I could not convince him I was not being flippant. There was a discussion about whether we should abandon the holiday and return home, but after due consideration it was decided that nothing would be gained by this course of action. So we stayed on at Drumlarish until the end of August as planned. I do not recall feeling apprehensive or troubled, but it took some time for my father and Donald to relax. They both went into Fort William to make unnecessary telephone calls and speculated endlessly about what was to come.

At school, matters were somewhat different. Minto, a staunch Germanophile who had studied in Germany for many years, addressed us with uncharacteristic emotion. This was a great tragedy, he said, the worst to afflict Europe since the French Revolution. The whole thing was a conspiracy between the Russians and the French. The Russians wanted war to distract the population from thoughts of insurrection and they were being encouraged in this by the French because, if there was revolution in Russia, she would renege on her massive debts to France. Germany and Britain, Minto said, were the most natural allies in all Europe. To find two such countries at war was a travesty.

It was rather over our heads, and indeed not what we wanted to hear, as we boys were virulently anti-German and highly bellicose. Minto’s futile propaganda diminished as the year progressed. He entered a profound depression from which he never recovered. He cut his throat in 1919.

War all too easily becomes remote to those not engaged in or suffering from it, and in 1914 and ’15 the Tweed Valley was particularly conducive to that point of view. Thompson tried to enlist, was refused and returned to his studies. Donald Verulam left the University for some undisclosed job in the War Office. At school the most obvious effect was the decline in our numbers. By the summer of 1915 most of the rugby team had joined the army or had been recalled to their now-essential jobs in the mills and on the farms. The student body dwindled to just over thirty and economies began to be introduced. The Siddeley-Deasey was sold. The hot-water heating was more often off than on. We got joints of mutton every other day, and then only at weekends. Our diet was supplemented by black pudding, an increase in root vegetables and a regular mincemeat stew of dubious provenance, with a coarse texture and a gamy smell.

As far as Hamish and myself were concerned, the worst consequence of the war was that we were drafted into the rugby team. We were not keen sportsmen, though neither of us was weak or frail, but preference or inclination had no influence on Minto. I was instructed to play center three-quarter, where I was relatively content. I kept out of the scrum, could run quite fast and got rid of the ball as soon as I received it. Hamish was on the wing at first, but then after one match Minto switched him to hooker. He had no aptitude for the position at all, but his shocking acne proved to be a potent disinclination to the opposing front row. Nobody wanted to rub cheeks with Hamish and as a result the binding in the rival scrum was dangerously loose. We got a lot of possession from set play, and with the various talents of the black buns we actually won a few matches.

Hamish and I did not enjoy this extra rugby (regular coaching, a match every Saturday and extra coaching on Sunday if we lost), as it cut heavily into our free time. Normally on a Saturday we would sneak away from the compulsory spectating of the school game and climb Paulton Law, the hill behind the house. There we would sit in the shelter of a dry-stone wall, smoke cigarettes and talk. We talked about everything but, inevitably, Hamish would bring up the subject of mathematics. He did most of the talking. He was already at home in conceptual words I would never penetrate. In fact, I sensed the end of my tether once we started doing quadratic equations. The maths gift was dying on me fast. The terrain ahead seemed shrouded in an opaque mist. By this time Hamish was aged seventeen. I could no longer understand him but I was beguiled by the way his mind worked. Mathematics was for him an entrancing playground. On one of our last Saturday afternoons, I remember, he had become obsessed with the idea that numbers were infinite. He was always fascinated by immensely large numbers. It was a sign of the gulf between us. My brain seemed to seize up at anything over a million.

It was October 1915, I think. The Saturday match had been canceled due to heavy frost. It was a fissile, sharp day. A blue, washed-out sky and hard clear views of the Tweed up as far as Thornielee and downriver to the smoke from the mill chimneys in Galashiels. We sat huddled in our usual spot, smoking Turkish cigarettes and taking sips from a flask of rum that Hamish had smuggled into school.

“Do you remember that time,” he asked, apropos of nothing, “when you said, did prime numbers exist before anyone had thought of them?”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.… Well, I was thinking. Is maths something we invented or something we discovered? And I thought, we couldn’t have invented something as complicated as maths. The history of maths is a history of exploration. As we go we find out more. It is all there”—he waved at the general scene—“waiting to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“And what does that tell you about the world?”

I said nothing.

“If maths in some way is already there … who created it?”

“I don’t know.… God?”

“Yes. Maybe. Maybe maths proves God exists.” He looked at me. The cold air was having its usual unfortunate effect on his face, but his eyes were wide with the intensity of his thought. To my astonishment, I suddenly felt a little frightened.

“What I think,” he began slowly, “is that maths is the key to everything.” He paused. “If you go far enough, perhaps you’ll discover the meaning of life.”

I was going to scoff, but I saw that he was caught in a strange fervent mood. He drank from the flask. He was intoxicated, but not as a result of any spiritous liquor. That afternoon he went on to tell me about a mathematician called Georg Cantor, a man, he said, who had organized the infinite. He talked about set theory, transfinite and irrational numbers, and the square root of 2, and the mysteriously potent designation aleph-null that Cantor had devised. He told me many things, most of which I understood not at all, or which promptly slipped my mind, but I will never forget the passion of his monologue. It had a quality that was rare, and, although it may be bizarre to talk about it in association with an abstract academic subject, I can find no better word to describe it than “faith.”

It was shortly after that day on Paulton Law that my uncle Vincent Hobhouse died, not from apoplexy or heart failure as we might reasonably have supposed, but from being run over by a motor bus in Charlbury High Street. I wrote a clumsy but sincere letter of condolence to Aunt Faye. She replied at once, saying how “touched” and “moved” she had been by my sympathy and concern. Perhaps her own bereavement reminded her of mine, but whatever the reason she began to write to me regularly once a week. At first I thought this a little strange, but gradually I grew to look forward to her letters with impatience. I started writing back too, and our correspondence was soon in full spate.

You will understand that, the average seventeen-year-old boy has little or no power over his affections. In my case this impotence was singular. I lived under the sway of my emotions. Even as an adult I find the struggle to resist exhausting. I possessed no resilience then. This sort of nature is both a curse and a blessing. Try to understand me as I was and do not judge too harshly when you hear what happened next.

I have always felt vividly and instantly with no mediating influence of reflection or logic. My nature gives to all my work an impulse and a motive that, however the critics may have carped, they have never denied is my prime and most valuable asset. It is a propensity that has brought me the happiest moments of my life and wreaked terrible devastation. Oonagh was the first to receive my love, and my aunt Faye was the next. She initiated my first adult, equal discourse. I fell in love with her through print. I had not seen her since that day in Waverley Station when she kissed my cheek. Now, those seconds of contact returned — and with what transforming force. I saw her dark, bruised eyes, humid and alive; smelled the odor of her perfume; felt the soft contact of her cheek with mine. I realized, with thrilling hindsight, that I had in fact loved her, unknowingly, since that moment. When the post arrived and was distributed, I held the letter unopened for minutes, my heart clubbing my ribs, my breath painfully constricted. “All my love, Faye.” I derived a hundred nuances from those four bland monosyllables. This was my first blind passion and I celebrated it nightly with physical release.

I began to take more care over the composition of my letters, expanding them from tedious itemization of the school news into what I hoped were stylish intimations of my own character and personality. I told her of Minto’s deepening gloom about the war, of Hamish’s speculations about mathematics as the key to all nature; I whimsically embellished and exaggerated our own roles in the rugby team, as if we were a couple of knowing aesthetes pretending to be bloods for a dare. I presented her with myself stripped of any secondary defining role — child, pupil, nephew. It was a test, in its way, and I took the increasing candor and intimacy of Faye’s replies as a sign that I had passed.

In the spring of 1916 I asked her for a photograph. It required some courage, and until it arrived, I was in a constant sweat of trepidation that I had gone too far. But it came, a snapshot. Faye, in the country, leaning on a five-barred gate, her curly hair in a loose bun, her smudged, debauched eyes narrowed by her smile. One hand held the top of a dog’s leash and the other the knuckly end of a blackthorn walking stick. On the back she had scribbled, “Shipton-Under-Wychwood. March ’16.” Who had taken it? I wondered. Probably Peter, her son. It was too well composed to be little Gilda’s or Alceste’s work. I opened the accompanying letter and began to read.

Dear John,

Photograph duly enclosed; I hope you like it. Donald took it for me. He comes down most weekends from London. I cannot tell you what a support and kindness he has been since Vincent died. He is sorting out all the dreary problems to do with the will and estate. He sends his best wishes.

There was more stuff about Donald, sweet Donald, but I could not read on. I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I experienced a sense of such towering injustice that I could hardly speak. What gave Donald Verulam the right, I demanded, to occupy a place in my aunt Faye’s good favor? For what possible reason could he have taken on these responsibilities? On what conceivable grounds did he ingratiate himself with a member of my family, whom he hardly knew? I was outraged, brimming with hurt and disappointment. I, who could only write to her, had to accept that Faye’s life was not centered on my weekly letters as mine was on hers. I was in the grip of an irrational jealously so intense it made me want to vomit.

We like to laugh, do we not, at the baroque passions of high adolescence, but we cannot deny that they control and guide us during those few hot palpitating years. It is an unsettling, overwhelming power and one that most people will never feel so vehemently again, indeed, will never want to be so ruthlessly led by. Adult life, if it is to function at all, demands a moderation of these extremes. From time to time, however, they break out — lava cracking the pumice — and dominate with the same rampaging potency. What is lust, adult lust, after all, but the desire to recapture the heady sensations of adolescent sexuality?

Personally, I have never lost that youthful capacity to feel, in its raw vital state. Thank God. This is what sets me apart from the many, hamstrung by decorum and convention, stifled by notions of respect and status. Even today, I can reexperience my seventeen-year-old jealousy, feel its grip at my throat, its claw in my guts. It was unfocused and indiscriminate. I did not see Donald Verulam as a rival, more as an interloper, destroying an ideal duality. But it would not let me go. I could not forget my love for Faye, could think only that he was there with her, and I was apart. One idea came to dominate my thoughts: I had to see her, if only for a few hours. I had to run away.

“What do you expect’s going to happen?” Hamish asked unsympathetically, when I told him my plan. “Do you think she’ll want to marry you the instant she claps eyes on you?” This was what I did not want to hear. I knew he was right. Faye Hobhouse, attractive widow, was being comforted through her period of mourning by Donald Verulam. They were two adults. I was a seventeen-year-old boy. But a darker fear, a more profound dismay tugged at me, unarticulated. All I knew was that I had to see her, present myself to her as I now was, erase the image of the child she had kissed at Waverley Station. I tried to make Hamish see this.

“But then what?”

I did not know and confessed as much. All I knew was that I had to interpose myself between Faye and Donald Verulam. I had to see her and let her see me.

Hamish agreed to help, even though he thought I was a complete fool. In fact I think he admired my single-mindedness, however crazily motivated. We made plans for my escape. We pooled our financial resources, which proved more than adequate. The subterfuge was simple. Before dinner on Sunday there was a roll call, as there was at every meal. After dinner I would cycle not to Galashiels or Thornielee but in the other direction to more distant Innerleithen. There I would buy a ticket to London and board a 10:30 train, which, after a couple of changes, would get me to Reston, arriving there in plenty of time to meet the 11:55 overnight express from Edinburgh to London, King’s Cross. I chose Innerleithen to forestall for as long as possible any information emerging about my destination. People buying tickets to London were rare enough events as it was on that Tweed Valley branch line. I would be easily remembered. Minto would send Angus to Thornielee and Galashiels as soon as my absence was discovered. I might get a day or two’s start before they thought of asking further up or down the line.

There lay between us the unspoken knowledge that Hamish would become implicated. He would do his best to cover up my absence in the dormitory. A simple lie — that I had been taken ill and put to bed in the small sanitorium upstairs — would be sufficient. Our dormitory leader, a simple lad called Corcoran, would think nothing untoward, especially if Hamish made the pretense of taking my toothbrush and pajamas upstairs. Such complicity would inevitably result in a flogging from Minto. As we discussed the details of the escape (where to hide a bicycle, where to get enough carbide for the lamp — it was a fourteen-mile journey to Innerleithen), I became more upset at the price Hamish would have to pay.

“He’ll flog you,” I blurted out.

“Bound to happen one day.”

“Look, just promise me, don’t let him flog you twice. Tell him everything straightaway.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not that brave.”

I wanted to touch him in some way — show my immense gratitude — but I knew it was out of the question.

“I won’t forget this, Malahide,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.

“You helped me once,” he said. “Just paying you back.”

A fortnight after Faye had sent me her photograph, I left school to join her. It was May 24, 1916. That night for dinner we had mutton broth and rabbit and onions. Hamish gave me most of his portion. After dinner we had an hour of free time before we were required to be in the schoolhouse. Lights-out was at 9 P.M.

Hamish and I met by the side of the stable block and walked through the small wood, past the art rooms, and on to a spinney of trees where we had hidden the bicycle. It was a fresh cool evening with high, heavy cloud. There was a smell of honey in the air from the sycamores and a circling wood lark whispered high above us. A dull, bluey light lay over everything.

I was going to cycle along a dirt track that led to the home farm, skirt that and its noisy dogs on foot, then freewheel down the steep lane that led to the Galashiels-Innerleithen road. If all went well I should arrive at the station just after ten. The one obstacle we had not managed to overcome was my apparel. I still wore my kilt (hunting Stewart) and my short coat. We arrived at school in our uniforms and departed thus: our own clothes were forbidden. I was by now quite unselfconscious in my kilt, but for the first time in my life was leaving Scotland for England. Somehow, the thought of being kilted in London unsettled me. But there was nothing to be done. I had a long overcoat and with a bit of luck anyone catching sight of my stockinged legs beneath it might think I was wearing plus fours.

I pulled the bicycle out from a clump of bracken. We debated whether to ignite the carbide, but I decided to wait until it got darker. I felt a sudden foreboding: my reason belatedly asserting itself. Fool, it seemed to say, abandon this mad idea.… But it was too late now.

“You’d better get going,” Hamish said. “Good luck.”

“Right,” I said. I got on the bicycle. “Now, remember—”

“On you go.” He grinned, showing his large teeth. I felt hot-eyed with inarticulate gratitude. He gave me a shove, and I bumped off down the track towards the home farm. I would not see him again for three years.

Everything went as planned, at least on my side. The ride to Innerleithen was actually quite entrancing. The road followed the Tweed, and to my excited eyes the slow river and its fragrant meadows grew ever more hauntingly beautiful in the darkening, dusky light. I bought my ticket to London, one way, third class, price one pound fifteen shillings, and made my connection successfully at Reston.

Sometime after midnight, sharing a smoky, blurry compartment with two sailors and someone who looked like a commercial traveler, I crossed the border into England. I left Scotland behind me and along with it my youth. Even at the time it seemed epochal enough. I knew somehow that nothing would be the same after this particular adventure. I did not think of the future, of my meeting with Faye. I was happy in the present moment, and there was nothing in my past, I felt, to make me want to cherish it. I hunched into my overcoat collar and tried to go to sleep. It took me an hour or so to achieve it. The sailors talked (they were rejoining a dreadnought in Southampton) and drank something from a bottle. The commercial traveler tried to engage me in conversation, but my taciturnity proved too much for him. I looked out at the dark countryside and tried to memorize, as if taking a talismanic inventory, the strange names of the stations we flashed past — Pegswood, Morpeth, Croft and Northallerton — as we traveled down England.

I recount the following events exactly as I recall them happening. I make no excuses for myself or my bizarre behavior. I was seventeen. Please remember.

The sun shone in London. I was astonished at how much warmer it was than Scotland. I felt I had entered another climate. I was not overawed by the city; if anything, the traffic in Edinburgh seemed heavier, though here the noise was more concentrated and the streets were distinctly less clean. I took an underground train from King’s Cross to Paddington. My kilt drew few curious glances. I realized at Paddington, where I saw a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry disembarking, that kilts had become reasonably commonplace south of the border since 1914.

But on the train to Charlbury my neutral composure began to desert me. I looked out of the window at the bland and innocuous countryside and told myself to calm down. Faye would be surprised but glad to see me, I reassured myself. Everything would be fine.

At Charlbury Station I secured directions to the Hobhouses’ address from a cabby. I walked up the hill through the small town, its dullocher buildings looking quite peculiar to me, I recall. It was just after luncheon and the shops were being reopened. I had not eaten since the evening before and, as I passed a baker’s, almost swooned from hunger. I bought a slice of veal and ham pie and checked I was going in the right direction. Everyone appeared to know where Vincent Hobhouse had lived.

I walked on up through the town eating my pie. It was too warm for my overcoat. I took it off. The sky was milky, the sun invisible. The dust on the verge was white. My heavy boots crunched on the gravel of the unpaved road. At one point two small barefoot urchins chased after me, laughing at my kilt and shouting insults at me in their incomprehensible dialect. I shied a couple of stones at them and they ran away.

The Hobhouse home was a large, solid, late-Georgian building set on a hill overlooking the town and the Windrush Valley. It had a spacious garden with many mature trees — a gloomy cedar, two monkey puzzles, elms and limes — and was surrounded by a tall beech hedge. Further down the hill was a small nursing home, past which I walked, and beyond it a row of cottages. The house was set back from what I later learned was the Oxford road, and beyond it lay open fields and countryside.

I walked up the drive. Two lolloping spaniels, followed by a little girl in a sailor suit, ran to intercept me. I stopped. I felt myself perceptibly weaken. I was suddenly appalled by the full audacity of what I had done.

“Hello,” I said, with fake bonhomie. “Is your mother in?… You must be Alceste.”

“I’m Gilda. This is Ned and this is Ted.” She introduced the dogs. “My father’s gone to heaven.”

I felt sick. “I know. I’m your cousin. John James Todd. Come to see you.”

Gilda took me indoors. We went through an entrance hall and an inner hall. I was left in a cool pale drawing room, heavy with the scent of potpourri and encumbered with the ornaments and collectibles of long inhabitation. On a round table was a group of leather- and tortoiseshell-framed photographs. I saw my mother’s face. I closed my eyes.

“Johnny?”

I turned round, blood booming like surf in my ears. Faye. I felt my stomach rotate with stupid love. She wore a green apron over her dress and I found myself wondering — absurdly — if she had been cleaning silver. Her hair was tied loosely at the back with a velvet bow. She looked younger even than her photograph. I felt like laughing. I had never seen anyone more beautiful. Instantly, all my doubts disappeared. I had done the right thing.

“What are you doing here?” Her tone was puzzled. Her eyes took in my kilt, my socks, my boots. All my doubts returned. I had made a ghastly mistake.

“I’ve run away from school.”

“But why?”

Because I love you, I wanted to shout.

“Because … I want to join the army.”

* * *

What in God’s good name made me say that? What malign fate put those words in my mouth? If I had only told the truth, think what I would have avoided. I am not sure how the subconscious mind works but this was no long-repressed ambition; nothing could have been further from my wishes. After the first flush of war fever, Minto Academy’s aggressive instincts had faded rapidly, partly as a result of waning interest, partly encouraged by Minto’s passionate neutrality. Every old Mintonian who died prompted another melancholy panegyric in favor of peace. Tones of “I told you so” seemed to hang in the air for days after every futile battle. By the end of 1915 everyone’s enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I must have blurted out my “reason” as a consequence of an instinctive association of ideas. My embarrassment. Faye’s eyes on my kilt, the Highland Light Infantry at Paddington—ergo, soldiering.

At first, as it turned out, it did its job admirably. All Faye’s suspicions and surprise were allayed. To my vague disappointment she did not try to dissuade me. She reminded me I was too young, but perhaps I could join up next year. Possibly, her zeal arose from the fact that I was her nephew and not her son. In fact she told me that Peter had volunteered immediately on leaving school in the summer of 1915 and he had joined a public school battalion. Faye thought this might be just the place for me. Peter would be able to supply all the right information and advice — might even get me into the same battalion. I found myself agreeing with diminishing enthusiasm. Peter, it transpired, was coming home on leave that very weekend, I should wait in Charlbury at least until then, Faye counseled, when I could ask him anything I wanted.

Four days. Four days alone with Faye (if one excluded the servants and Gilda and Alceste). I experienced a temporary relief. Problems and decisions could be postponed for a while. I was here, I was with her, living under the same roof. That had been the immediate aim of my running away and I had achieved it. I allowed myself to sink into the warm pool of her welcome.

The first thing Faye did was to telegram my father and the school. I felt curiously invulnerable and only wondered vaguely how Minto would react upon receipt of the news. I did not reflect too long on my father’s response, either. I was here in England; they seemed a continent away. This was, I now realize, the first indication of a dangerous tendency in my character: the long view, the long term, rarely attracts me. It is the here and now I find alluring. When I act it is because I am impelled by something irresistible within me and seldom as a result of some well-plotted strategy. This happened again and again in my life and usually brought swift satisfaction followed by disastrous remorse. Suppose I had stayed out my course at the Academy and completed my certificate exams? Who knows what would have happened?… But this is futile. How we live reflects our own natures. The prudent, cautious, sensible approach would never be the one I chose.

So here I was in the large comfortable house. Did Faye ask herself why, if I wished to join the army, I had to run away to Charlbury to do so? She must have. But she would forgive me anything, Faye, as I was the son of her beloved, late sister, motherless since the day of his birth, bereft of a maternal guiding hand and illimitable source of love. It was only natural in such a confused moment that I should turn somewhere for solace and advice. (In fact this was the first question her son, Peter, asked me. I told him I had originally planned to enlist in London, as far away from my father’s influence as possible. A sudden failure of nerve had drawn me to Charlbury. He understood completely.)

I was served up a late lunch that day (to supplement my veal and ham pie) of cold meat, bread and pickle, and then Faye called the gardener (I cannot recall his name — an old man with a limp) to drive us in the family motor to Oxford to buy some clothes for me (a light flannel suit, two shirts, collars, a tie and, my suggestion this, a flat tweed cap). Faye took a real pleasure in our jaunt. It was a mild, hazy day. The drive to and from Oxford was taken up with a chatter of reminiscence. I am sure too that Faye secretly rather admired my resolve. When you meet people like myself who act foolhardily or spontaneously it is easy, from a haven of routine and security, to mock or deplore us. But at the same time, in your heart, there is a profound and unsettling envy of the freedom that is expressed in our careless actions. And Faye, I thought that day, was in fact rather like me. We shared the same spirit, but she had confined hers to a life of provincial worthiness when she married Vincent Hobhouse. I sensed too that, after the grief and mourning an invigorating suspense and ignorance had begun to pervade her life. What now? Where next? With whom?

Two terse telegrams arrived early that evening to undermine my intoxicated mood. Minto’s forbade me to return to the Academy and instructed me to consider myself expelled. My father’s simply ordered me to come home at once. Faye advised me to ignore this last injunction. She felt that nothing would be gained by turning round and heading back so swiftly. She suggested I write explaining my motives in more detail and she would enclose a letter saying words to the effect that I was confused and upset and a few days’ unofficial holiday in Charlbury would be highly beneficial. The letters were written, sealed, stamped and taken down to the postbox. At the very least, Faye said, we had a week’s grace.

You can imagine what effect her complicity had on me. I felt she was behaving more like a game and spirited older sister rather than my aunt. I was sure it was significant. We were co-conspirators; it drew us closer.

That first evening, the two of us at dinner, adjacent, the corner of the table between us. The limping gardener doubling as a butler (the real one had been killed at Loos). Sherry, oxtail soup, whitebait in cream sauce, claret, lamb cutlets, Bercy potatoes, apple charlotte, Welsh rarebit, port. I in my new suit (I had shaved with Vincent’s blunt cutthroat), my back warm against the dining room fire, my face hot, two red highlights on my cheeks like coins. I seemed to be breathing deeper, as if my lung capacity had doubled and the circumference of my nostrils had mysteriously expanded. Faye, in three-quarter profile. Smudged eyes, winking cameo on a velvet choker, a dusting of powder on the downy hair in front of her ears, the finest lines on her face and top lip. A dress of aquamarine. Silk? It shone and shifted in the candle glow. I was bold with wine. I felt ten years older and talked to her as an equal, another adult. The game and spirited older sister had quietly stolen away. I put my fork down and smiled. This could be my house, my wife even. I felt brimful of a strange, cocksure composure.

“You know, you look so like Emmeline when you smile.”

Blood ties crept between us like chaperones. I felt both sad and irritated for a moment. But it was a useful prompt.

“I was going to ask you … that is, if you don’t mind. I was wondering — you said you had a lot of letters from her, from my mother. Could I — if it’s all right — see them?”

“Of course.” Touch on my arm. I thought the flannel would smolder. “I’ll look them out for you. Are you terribly hot, John?”

“Me? No, no. Fine, perfect.”

That night I left my own room and walked across the upstairs landing and along the corridor towards her bedroom. I stood outside the door, a faint luminescence from a nearby window highlighting the graining of the oak door and the metalwork of the latch. I sent my restless presence into her room and waited for it to be noticed. Was she lying awake, stirring beneath the sheet and blankets, thinking about me, wishing I had the courage to creep quietly into her bed? I stared at the mute and neutral door as if expecting it to become miraculously transparent.… It is at instants like these that believers in the existence of telepathic communication either win or lose disciples. If it worked at all, then it would work tonight. I stood outside and concentrated. All she had to do was call my name. I felt a pounding in my frontal lobes. My brain power could have driven an electric motor. But I heard nothing, just the creaks and settlings of an old house.

That was my moment. I should have taken it. A year or two later, I believe, I would have gone in, perhaps with some useful fabrication to hand (a moment’s grief, a night terror) to allow a plausible embrace. I cannot blame myself; it asks a lot of a person to possess that conviction and worldliness at seventeen. And yet I had run away from school; my life was already set on that frenzied precipitous course from which it never subsequently deviated. But for some reason I was stalled by inertia. After God knows how many breathless minutes I realized I was shivering vigorously, and slunk back to my room and my cold solitary bed.

The atmosphere was different the next day. Not significantly so, but definitely altered. Faye, it seemed to me, had realized that the license of the previous night was too heady and distracting. The prosaic older sister returned. I came down to breakfast and found her on the point of leaving—“visiting.” On her way out she showed me two box files full of my mother’s letters.

I took them into the drawing room and began to read them through. I ate my lunch alone and read on into the afternoon. I felt exhausted, having run gauntlets of harrowing emotions.

It is bizarre, to say the least, to read about a familiar world as yet unaltered by, and indeed indifferent to, your presence. Here was our apartment, Kelpie’s Court, Edinburgh, the High Street, my father, Thompson, Oonagh … Thompson proved the biggest strain. Here was the little plump boy, doted on, drenched in his mother’s love. I have rarely envied Thompson. Sometimes I envied his money, but only fleetingly. But that day in Charlbury I felt the writhing vicious force of envy squirm into every corner of my body. I could have killed him, then, it was so all-powerful. Killed him with glee, so consumed was I by acid resentment of his good fortune. He had known Emmeline Todd, and been loved by her.

Calmness returned gradually.

They were loving candid letters between sisters who were close friends. My mother — sweet, good-natured, generous — fully aware of all life’s pleasures … The letters were fascinating; I heard a voice, encountered a person of whom I was only dimly aware — and then only in some gaudy, sentimental idealization — but they provided me with no hard facts. They were chatty and inconsequential.

And then, quite unheralded, in September 1897:

… Donald has arrived. He seems well, all things considered. We had him to dinner last Tuesday. He is temporarily staying in rooms in Hanover Street but plans shortly to move.…

The unremarked arrival suggested mutual knowledge. Both sisters knew him. From then on Donald’s name made regular appearances: what he was doing, where he was thinking of buying a house, his disdainful reflections on the academic caliber of his colleagues …

Then: March 14, 1898.

… My dear Faye, I wish I could confide in you all that Donald says to me. I will say but this, whenever we are alone he speaks only in tones of tender moving respect. What am I to say to him? It is indeed a ghastly dilemma and I am powerless to respond in any way that will satisfy him, even though my feelings, as you will understand, are as equally engaged upon the matter.…

I noted the date. This seemed to be the moment when ordinary friendship developed into something more passionate.

April 7, 1898:

… Donald and I talk and talk of what might have been if things had only been otherwise. Oh Faye, I try to stop him but he seems so full of emotion that if I do not let him the Lord alone knows what effect continued restraint might have. Sometimes I fear for his health.…

June 13, 1898:

… Donald came with us to the Trossachs. He seemed in good spirits. I had made him promise not to unburden himself. Innes knows nothing, suspects nothing. Professor and Mrs. McNair were our companions and it was essential that Donald should remain composed.

But yesterday I stayed behind while the others went walking. Then Donald returned early and of course, the two of us being quite alone, he could not hold himself back. I cannot tell you what an afternoon it was, Faye. Let me say only that in the end he wept. It was terribly sad and yet strangely uplifting to see what power true passion has over a spirit at once so strong, civilized and intelligent as Donald. I wept too, of course, you know what I am like, and we comforted each other.…

I stopped there, my mouth dry and rank, hands visibly shaking. “… we comforted each other.…” How easy it was to penetrate the opaque euphemism. I read on. That afternoon during the walking tour of the Trossachs seemed to have been cathartic. Donald appeared to shake off his feverish melancholy. There was no more talk of weeping. The letters became full of “a splendid, heartwarming day with Donald …”; “Donald was in fine form …”; “at dinner Donald’s old warmth and humor seemed to return as he told us of …”

Sometimes there were further hints: “Donald now seems to understand the impossibility of changing anything, knows that all must continue as it is. He is resigned and says he can find a form of contentment.…” And: “We talk often of that wild, mad day last month and see it now as a final railing against frustration and heartbreak.…”

I went back through the letters and slowly charted the course of their love affair, how they were condemned by the dignity and honor of their own positions, and the impossibility of ever requiting their love. My mother never referred adversely to my father, never complained or criticized. It was clearly one of those passionate relationships not so much doomed as stillborn, both parties knowing in their hearts that nothing can come of it, but seizing a moment’s consummation as some sort of futile symbol of what might have been.

Then. July 21, 1898:

Dear Faye,

I am with child again. I do not need to tell you how fear mingles with joy. Innes is delighted, but I have not said anything to anyone else but you, not even Donald.…

Not even Donald. Why not? I watched the process of my own prenatal growth with a horrid fascination. My mother’s joyful anticipation (she prayed I would be a girl …) and her prescient fears for her own health, after the narrow escape she had had with Thompson, made ghoulish reading. But I could not finish her last letter, dated two weeks before my birth. It started:

Darling Faye,

I feel a little fitter today. Perhaps everything will be fine after all.…

I knew I could not stand the strain of those terrible, fatal ironies. I put the letters back in the box file. I felt I should cry, but I was too exhausted for tears. I had learned too much and my brain jabbered with argument and supposition. I was too preoccupied with new knowledge to weep over my dead mother. Unless I was very much mistaken, all the evidence seemed to point to one conclusion. I knew it all now — although, deep in myself, I had half-known it for years. My true father, it seemed, if the letters were to be believed, was Donald Verulam.… I rubbed my face. This needed further confirmation. It was too much to handle at this juncture.

Faye returned.

“Sorry I stayed away; I wanted you to have a chance to read them on your own.”

She glanced at me, clear-eyed and, I thought, interrogatively.

“I’m very grateful,” I said slowly. “I know they’re private … but I had to find out about her. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No. Not at all. I don’t really have the right to keep them from you. Even if …”

She did not know what to say. Now she would not meet my eyes.

“It’s all right,” I said, still with some caution. “I always half-suspected, funnily enough. Just from talking to Donald.”

She visibly relaxed, then blushed. “I’m glad,” she said.

“But I completely understand. Now. And I don’t think anything was wrong,” I said boldly. It was my turn to touch her arm. “Thank you. It was very important for me to read them.”

She looked me in the eye, seized my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek.

“You’re a special boy, John James Todd. Donald told me. Very special. I’m glad you read them. I … I telephoned Donald this morning. He’s coming down this weekend.”

* * *

I was not sure quite how to take this. I saw what she was trying to do, but it was both good and bad news. I knew at once that the weekend would hold a necessary confrontation and possible recognition, but it also meant the end of my brief sojourn with Faye. After the tense conversation about the letters, a relaxed amiability settled upon us again. But as the week passed I became more agitated at the thought of Donald’s arrival because I knew from the way Faye spoke about him that she and Donald were now more than friends. And this bothered me. Can you understand it? I felt proprietorial. Foolishly (I knew this), I was still fascinated by her. The letters had brought us even closer. I regarded her as my legitimate interest. Donald belonged to another area of my life, with which I also had to come to terms. Having the two overlap was most unwelcome.

Perhaps, perhaps I might have got through everything — Donald, Faye, my future — if I had not let myself down once again. Another crass error of judgment.

I was looking forward to my last day alone with Faye. The weather was still warm and we had planned a picnic the night before (we would have to take the little girls, but I did not regard them, properly speaking, as people). The intention was to motor to Oxford, hire a punt and punt up the Cherwell to find an isolated stretch of riverbank. We were sitting at breakfast contemplating the pleasures of the day ahead when through the door came Peter Hobhouse, a day early.

My cousin was a year or so older than I, but he looked considerably more in his uniform — khaki jacket, jodhpurs, high-laced boots, peaked cap. Peter was a big bland fair-headed fellow, with round unformed features and permanently rosy cheeks. We made a strong contrast side by side — almost two different ethnic types: prototypical Celt and pink and ruddy Anglo-Saxon. He was perfectly friendly but I instinctively disliked him, despite all the help he later gave me. I have no idea why; it was an honest — or rather, a simple — prejudice. Perhaps it was just his soft burliness, his unwarranted easy manner, as if to say, “Life holds no surprises for me.” However, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Faye told him I wanted to join a public school battalion and, to my vague embarrassment, he energetically shook my hand again and said, “Congratulations.”

Thank God, he declined to come on the picnic, despite his mother’s entreaties. But I should have recognized that his arrival altered everything. Here was her son; my role as “nephew” was firmly reestablished, just as her’s was as “aunt” and “mother.” All this was lost on me: that is the kind of person I am.

We hired our punts at the boathouse at the bottom of Bardwell Lane. The sky was cloudy but the air was sweet and cool. There was a faint breeze. Thrushes and blackbirds sang in the horse chestnuts, great green continents of leaves.

It took me about ten minutes and about the same number of collisions with both banks of the river to gain some sort of insight into the dynamics of punting. Eventually we made our way cautiously but not too erratically upstream. My clumsiness had afforded Faye and the girls much amusement and our mood as we set off was, I thought, ideally merry. They laughed again, but more circumspectly, when we were overtaken by a punt energetically and skillfully propelled by a one-armed soldier (Oxford was one large convalescent home).

We punted for half an hour up the placid Cherwell as it wound through the fields and water meadows of Kidlington. Presently, we found a suitable spot and moored the punt. We spread two traveling rugs on the bank and unpacked the wicker picnic basket. We ate cold chicken and game pie, Stilton and apples. The girls drank fizzy lemonade, Faye and I a cider cup. The weather improved, grew milder; we got some sun. The day seemed summery but there was a latent spring coolness that made it invigorating and kept away the flies and wasps. I drank too much cider cup deliberately.

After lunch I played a furious game of tag with Alceste and Gilda while Faye read a book. I ran and shouted, twisted and turned, tiring myself and them. Soon I felt flushed and sticky with sweat. I persuaded the girls to wander some way down the bank to feed a family of ducks that were swimming there. I went back to Faye. She had erected a small ivory-colored parasol with a long fringe and sat beneath it, her back resting against a pollarded willow. She was wearing a flared sand-colored golfing skirt and a coral blouse with a scalloped collar. A wide straw hat lay on the rug beside her. She looked cool and serene. I looked at her. The dark shadows beneath her eyes. I gulped cider cup. A mild fire of alcohol flared in my body. Now or never.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said. “It’s ages since I’ve done this. I’m so glad we came.”

I sat down beside her, panting slightly.

“You look hot,” she said.

“I think I’m going to have a dip. Coming?”

“No fear!” she laughed. “Brave you. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

We had brought swimming costumes as more of a gesture than indication of serious intent. Faye halfheartedly tried to dissuade me, but I snatched up my costume (Peter’s) and went farther down the bank, away from the girls. Behind a clump of hawthorn I slipped off my clothes and pulled on the costume. It was a little large; the shoulder straps kept slipping off. I thought about diving, but I did not want to distract the girls from their duck feeding, so I waded in. The water was icy — it seemed to drive the breath from my body. Here the Cherwell flowed torpidly; there was barely a perceptible current. I sank beneath the brown water up to my chin and felt the cold band my skull like steel. Out in midstream I looked over to Faye. She was watching. I waved.

“What’s it like?”

“Freezing!”

“Told you!”

I felt my throat contract in shocking anticipation of what I was about to do. I gave it no thought; there was only one path I could take. I swam to the side and hauled myself out. Behind the hawthorn I stripped off my costume. I looked down at myself. The black hair on my chest and stomach was slicked into a flat wet pelt. I could hardly see my cock and balls, so shrunken were they from the cold. My head was entirely empty of thoughts. I was a creature of guts and glands.

I heard a bird call, the distant quack of ducks, Gilda and Alceste’s thin cries of pleasure. I massaged myself back into some approximation of virility, feeling the warm blood surge. I still kept all thought at bay. I had to show her I was no longer a boy.

“Aunt Faye? Could you bring me a towel, please?”

Through the screen of leaves I saw her get to her feet, take a towel from a canvas bag and saunter over, smiling. I held the sodden costume in front of me. She came round the bush. Her face instantly tightened with surprise. She offered me the towel.

“There you are.”

As I took it I let the swimming costume drop. Just for an instant there was nothing there. She saw. I wrapped the towel around me.

“Faye, I—”

She slapped my face. Once, very hard, jerking my head round.

“Foolish … stupid …” she said in a clenched trembling voice, and walked away.

I tasted the vomit in my throat. Game pie, cider cup. I actually retched once or twice. I threw away the towel and dressed, hauling my clothes over my damp body. I tried desperately to draw up from my numb shocked brain something that would stand as a plausible explanation. I walked over, toweling my hair to hide my face. The cheek she had slapped felt pulsing and scorched. I was shivering, but not from the cold.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I … I just wasn’t thinking. It was a terrible mistake. You see, at school we … It just fell from my fingers. I was cold. It was a mistake, Aunt Faye. Honest, I swear.”

She would not look up from her book.

“Very well. Let us never talk about it again, John. It’s forgotten. Nothing.”

But it was not forgotten. How could it be? Thank God for the girls. They allowed us a formal passage of communication; we could busy ourselves with them and their demands. Faye very quickly seemed as normal as ever, and so did I, I suppose, in an attempt to sustain the credibility of the excuse. But the incident stood between us like a wall. What was worse, she contrived never to be alone with me again. I never had the opportunity to elaborate on that first feeble explanation. I could not apologize, could not explain.

Why did you do it? I hear you ask. What in heaven’s name did you think would happen? I know, I know. It makes no sense. I put the ghastly blunder down to that dangerous flaw in my nature and my naïveté. All I wanted, desperately, was to make love to her and my time was running out. But I cannot condemn myself utterly. I may have been a fool, but at least I was an honest one. I think I can safely say that this unhappy combination has held true for the rest of my life.

I think now I would have survived the shame and indignity if I had had enough time to reimpose the original basis of my relationship with her. After all, I was flesh and blood, her dead sister’s son, and she was genuinely fond of me. I am sure that if only for her own peace of mind she would have come to accept my explanation uncritically. People do make mistakes. And adolescents are notoriously and spontaneously fallible when it comes to affairs of the heart. Perhaps — even — she might have allowed herself a quiet smile of pleasure, of female pride, at her nephew’s evident infatuation. Perhaps she might even — in a private moment — have tried to recall the incident itself. My muscled, slim, glossy-haired body, dark glistening loins, the pale pendulous dripping genitals … But I needed time. I needed days at least to engineer such a rapprochement, but that was exactly what I did not have. Donald Verulam was coming.

* * *

That evening Peter Hobhouse talked to me again about enlisting (Peter was a genuine bore of the first water — a good-natured one, granted, but a bore for all that, with, astonishingly for a nineteen-year-old, all the cataleptic powers of a whiskered clubman). I must confess my enthusiasm for the idea was now firmly on the wane. I was instead formulating vague notions about returning to Edinburgh. What with my embarrassment vis-à-vis Faye, the revelations about Donald Verulam and his impending arrival, Charlbury suddenly seemed a less welcome haven. I had an unfamiliar desire to get back home — home to Oonagh. But I half-listened to what Peter had to say. He seemed to have a dogged urge to get out to France — it was not so much fervent as dutiful; and besides, all his friends were going too and it would be a shame to miss out. He said that, really, one had to have a commission, but that meant going to the Officer Training Corps if you were chosen. What he and his companions had done was to volunteer as private soldiers in one of the public school battalions. Basic training was shorter; you reached France more quickly and were almost guaranteed promotion to subaltern within months. The casualty rates being what they were, the public school battalions were constantly being drawn on to provide new officers for other regiments. His own case was typical. He had been promoted after two weeks and was now off to join the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment as a second lieutenant.

I asked some polite questions. Where should one go to enlist? Marlborough, he said, or Windsor. Ask for the 13th (PS) Service Battalion of the South Oxfordshire Light Infantry, and mention Colonel O’Dell. He had been Peter’s headmaster. Fine, I said, perhaps next year. In truth I had little desire to go to war. In 1914 it had seemed much more attractive; I thought it might be “fun” or “exciting,” but I was no zealot. Several senior boys I had known vaguely at the Academy had been killed; Minto’s melancholy skepticism too had got through to me and moreover nothing or no one in my upbringing had fostered an active sense of patriotism or selfless duty. To be honest, I wanted to live for myself, not die for my country. If I could go to war and subject myself to powerful new experiences and survive, unmaimed, then I was all for it. But I had no desire to risk my neck or any other part of my anatomy.

After dinner Faye left Peter and me with the port. Peter offered me a cigar, which I accepted. We puffed away, Peter’s weak eyes watering rather, and talked in a rather self-consciously manly fashion. Peter told a bad joke about an English curate who went to Paris and tried to shit standing up in a pissoir.

“I’m thinking about growing a moustache,” Peter said. “What do you think?”

“Sounds like rather a good idea.”

“Makes you look years older, you know. You should grow one, for the recruiting officer. How old are you, anyway?”

“Seventeen.… I was thinking of waiting till next year.”

“Wouldn’t wait too long. Might miss out.”

“Good point.”

“Say you’re nineteen. With a moustache you should have no trouble.”

He wittered on. Suddenly I wished I had grown a moustache at school. Imagine if I had arrived at Faye’s door mustachioed! What an impression of maturity that would have conveyed … I resolved to start growing one the next day.

Donald Verulam arrived before luncheon. He wore a tweed suit. Somehow, I had expected to see him in uniform. When I asked what he did at the War Office, he said he was just a “glorified civil servant.” He seemed glad to see me, and gently reprimanded me for running away from school. He advised me to go back home and promised to intercede with my father on my behalf. Instinctively, I was pleased to see him, but my own edginess, and the new information that my mother’s letters seemed to contain, made me rather cool at first. I think he sensed this and was puzzled. Several times he asked me if I was all right. I reassured him.

I was in turmoil. Mettlesome theories and hypotheses kept thrusting themselves on me. I looked closely at his behavior with Faye, but I saw no evidence for anything more passionate than a friendship. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in town with the Hobhouse family solicitor, sorting out Vincent Hobhouse’s affairs. That evening there was a small dinner party with two dull couples, one of which brought a tall myopic daughter — Nellie or Flossie — who, one sensed, was rather keen on Peter. To my relief, Faye was as good as her word. All aftereffects of the picnic incident seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps she believed it really had been a mistake. She reverted to being nice Aunt Faye. So I turned my attention to the next relationship that concerned me. What was I to do about Donald Verulam?

Sunday. Church. At one point during an incomprehensible sermon (the vicar had a speech defect: his mouth sounded as if it were full of water — all I could hear was lapping and slurping, as of a subterranean stream) I turned my head and found Donald looking at me. He rolled his eyes, and I grinned back. It was like the old days at Barnton or Drumlarish. After luncheon (soup, fish, game, joint, sweet, savory — war or no war, one ate well chez Hobhouse) he asked me if I felt like going for a walk. I agreed.

We each took a stick from the umbrella stand in the hall and set out briskly along the Oxford road. We cut off it, climbed over a stile and walked along the edge of a field of green corn that led up to a small beech wood that crowned a hill. There we could see the modest valleys and ridges of Oxfordshire unfolding sedately to the horizon. It was a sullen coldish afternoon, the cloudy sky mouse-gray with only hints of yellow. We walked on briskly for a couple of miles. Normally on a jaunt like this we would each have had a camera; today, being without them, we amused ourselves by pointing out scenes we would have taken. I felt all my reservations and suspicions of Donald slip away, and as we walked on, talking occasionally, I sensed a growing in me a sort of love that I could only describe as filial. A mixture of strong affection, respect and a happy subordination. The love that exists between a father and son is peculiar, possessing a clear hierarchical structure, the son always, as it were, looking up. And the father, for his part, then voluntarily elevating his son to a position of equality. I never felt this with Innes Todd. But that day as we strode the hills above the Windrush Valley, I sensed unspoken in the air around us that fine, reciprocal interplay of feeling. Donald felt it too, I know, felt the intimacy between us that made him want to talk to me about Faye. We stopped at a gate and looked at the view.

“I’m very fond of your aunt, you know, Johnny.”

“Yes. Well … I could sort of see that.”

“She’s a lovely person. Very like your mother.”

“Yes.” Now I could hardly speak.

He looked round at me and smiled.

“I’m going to ask her to marry me. What d’you think?”

I felt my tear ducts sting. I felt drowned in gratitude.

“I couldn’t be happier.” I paused. “Father.”

“What’s that?”

“Father.”

“Sorry?”

“Father.… You’re my father.”

Edgy laugh. “What do you mean?”

My eyes fogged with tears.

“I know about you and my mother,” I said slowly. “I know. All about the love affair.”

“Hang on a second, Johnny old chap. You’ve lost me.”

“Everything. I read her letters to Faye. I know that you and she …” I began to grow a little desperate. “You don’t know this, but she became pregnant, after that afternoon in the Trossachs, 1898.… That was me. She never told you. But it’s all there in the letter to Faye. You’re my real father.”

I could not hold it in. I bawled. I blubbed and bellowed in my happiness.

He grabbed my arms and shook me silent.

“John! John! What’re you saying? Where did you get this nonsense from?”

My head cleared. Miraculously. My tear-washed eyes dried. I wiped the snot from my nose and lips. I felt a nervous cold breeze: it seemed to blow only on my smarting eyeballs.

“I read it in the letter,” I repeated. “To Faye. You had a love affair with my mother.…”

Donald was twisting his body to and fro on the spot as if demented. He pressed his knuckles into his temples.

“John, listen. I did not. I never did.” He spoke calmly. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had, but I never had a love affair with her. Believe me, for God’s sake.” He paused. “It was Faye I loved. I always have. When she married Vincent Hobhouse I ran away to Edinburgh. If I hadn’t had your mother’s friendship and support, I know I would have killed myself.”

He spoke on, urgently, eloquently, explaining everything, all my blind idiotic misconceptions. I felt as though something had spilled inside me, like black ink. A gloom filled me as I looked at his kind, excellent face. I owed nothing to that noble nature. My fate was settled, all hope of escape denied me. I was indeed the son of Innes McNeil Todd.

VILLA LUXE, May 16, 1972

Good God, my heart goes out to my younger self. There’s an almost tragic dignity about my sheer guts and audacity. Imagine it: if you want to attract somebody of the opposite sex, expose your equipment. But I’m sure I never planned such a course of action precisely; I intended to do something that day, as or how the circumstances indicated. Perhaps I’d have touched her, or if she had joined in the tag, say, I might have caught her and held her against me for a moment. Anything to show her.… But at the time I chose swimming. It was not to be.

What a fellow I was then! I must have been crazy, the things I did. Never a pause for thought. A creature of pure impulse and instinct — like an animal. Nothing seemed impossible or ill advised. Sometimes I look back on the rawness of my youthful character with almost jealousy.

I can tell you now that those last days in Charlbury almost finished me off. I seriously contemplated suicide for a while. You may say I was being unduly sensitive, but to experience first such rejection and then to learn the truth about Donald combined radically to undermine my confidence. People like me with an excess of self-esteem suffer proportionally once it is threatened. The fiction that I had so fancifully allowed myself to construct and cherish had been exposed as exactly that, and the hard truths about myself I had to fall back on were not comforting.

Everything changed for me that weekend when my delusions were exploded. A deep unhappiness settled on me. I felt an alien in that house, felt like a monoglot foreigner in that countryside. Another world, another identity waited for me, to which I was condemned to belong forever. But my fantasies about Faye, and about Donald Verulam and my mother, only indicated how urgently I had longed to escape from them. I couldn’t go home to our dark empty flat and my dour father, at least not in my current state of mind. I was reduced to a Cartesian proposition: I couldn’t be sure of anything and so chose to rely entirely on myself.

Growth and decay. Something had decayed in me and I had to grow again. Hamish said later that I should have applied the calculus to my problems. He was only half-joking. “The calculus,” he said, “is the study of continual change.” But I wasn’t quite ready for his theories in those days. The beautiful mysteries of mathematics and physics — their profound secrets — indicated no particular direction I should follow at that time. Hamish, I knew, sensed he was heading towards some illumination, but I was still a novitiate, untutored. I could feel that something was there, instinctively; I could sense the scope and potential, acknowledge the power of numbers, but as yet was blind to their truths. The next stage of my life was to educate me better to perceive them.

Had I thought about it, I might have rebuked Hamish thus: the calculus deals with growth and decay, but it follows their elegant parabolic curves, exponentially rising or falling. It cannot deal with discontinuity, the sudden random change, which is the real currency of our lives. In due time Hamish supplied me with an answer to that. As for myself, I was about to experience discontinuity in all its strict brutal force.

My villa is quite secluded, backed into the hill that separates me from the small nearby village. If I take a few paces up this hill and advance cautiously onto a large rock ledge that overhangs the sea, I can get a good oblique view down onto my neighbor’s house. He has a large terrace with a swimming pool (filled).

The owner is a German — Herr Günther. The villa had been empty for years. Then eighteen months ago he bought it and built a swimming pool. He has a sizable grown-up family that visits him for several weeks during the summer. Two unmarried daughters, two married sons, daughters-in-law, boyfriends and four or five grandchildren.

From my rock ledge I can see them all quite clearly as they disport themselves around the pool — loud, fit young people. The girls are attractive (the very word “girl” is attractive to me these days) but, being German, they stir old uneasy memories. I managed to avoid them almost entirely last summer. They are curious about me. They have tried to talk to me when we met in the village, but I find the past seems to crowd round, jostling at our backs, like a hostile crowd or a pack of pye-dogs.… It’s all a bit of a strain. I mutter abrupt pleasantries and leave.

Around this villa there are many lizards. They are slim snakelike creatures, a dun olive-green with a chalkstripe. Some months ago, when my swimming pool had water in it, one of these lizards — a small one, four inches long — fell into the deep end. I saw it on the bottom and fished it out with the long-handled net I use for cleaning leaves and insects from the surface. To my surprise it was still alive, its mouth making tiny gaping movements. I put it on the pool surround and positioned a large leaf over it to provide some shade. It recovered fully in about half an hour and scurried off into the rocks.

In the lizard world, in the saurian scheme of things, that rescue and survival must have seemed like divine intervention of the most miraculous and inexplicable sort. Such fantastical things happen in our world too, I know. But at that stage of my life, in May 1916, I felt like that lizard. I had fallen in and was sinking to the bottom. I had some time to wait until my deliverance.

It’s still insufferably hot. Yesterday Herr Günther arrived with his family. I think I’ll take my binoculars and go and watch them turning their strong white bodies brown.