Broken Voices

3

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

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

I shook my head. Faraday continued stroking the cat.

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

‘He’s staying here?’ I said. ‘But—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That night I heard Faraday crying.

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

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

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

‘Faraday?’ I murmured.

There was instant silence.

‘Are you crying?’

‘I’ve got a cold.’

It was the usual excuse, transparently false.

‘What is it?’ I said. And waited.

‘Everything. Bloody everything.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How much?’ I said.

‘Five pounds.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The snuffling continued. It was getting on my nerves.

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

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

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

‘So where do you go in the holidays?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You stole it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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