My Lovely Frankie Read online

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ Those glorious eyes opened, he turned to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For this.’ He waved towards the sea. ‘For showing me!’

  ‘But you would have seen it anyway.’

  ‘Not today. Not now! Not this very, very minute. Sometimes I think that’s all that matters.’ He tore at the laces of his boots, pulled them off and slung them round his neck.

  ‘What’s all that matters?’ I pulled off my own boots and let the little waves run over my feet. They were warm.

  ‘This very minute. This!’ He waved towards the sea again. ‘The lovely, lovely world. Oh, let’s go!’ And off he went, racing along the tideline, and I ran after him and we yelled and shouted to the sea and the sky as if there really was only this very minute to be happy in. Sometimes we’d stop for breath and then Frankie would study the lacy edges of the waves or pick up a string of seaweed and sniff at it, or turn a shell or smooth stone over and over in his hand. Or he’d simply stand silently and look out at the vast expanse of sea and the glossy waves rolling in. ‘And they come in, and come in and come in,’ he whispered, ‘on and on and on—’

  Somewhere over in the town a clock struck the half-hour. Half-past five. It was time to go. With a great regretful sigh and a sudden shake of his head he turned from it all and we made our way back up the sand, struggled into our boots and set off down the Esplanade and the narrow streets which would take us back to St Finbar’s. We were almost at the turn-off to the seminary when something happened on the other side of the street. A long crocodile of girls emerged from the gateway of St Brigid’s. They wore blue tunics and blazers, black stockings and panamas with a blue stripe around the brim. Four teachers, nuns in black habits, escorted them, two in front and two behind. The teachers ignored us, though there were glances and giggles from the girls. I lowered my head and walked on fast; it was a few minutes before I realised I was walking alone, and when I looked round I saw that Frankie had stopped and was staring across at the girls. As I began to hurry back, a girl halfway along the crocodile turned to look at him, a girl with laughing eyes and heavy black curls tumbling from beneath her hat. She smiled at Frankie and when he saw that smile he took a step towards her, simply walked out into the road like any ordinary boy who’d seen a girl who looked like she might fancy him. I could see he’d totally forgotten the other girls were there, staring, and the teachers, and the looming bulk of our seminary up there on the hill. The girl kept on smiling and Frankie went on walking until he was right in the centre of the road. There was a hush, a stillness—perhaps I imagined it but I don’t think so. You could hear the clap of Frankie’s boots on the tarred surface of the road, and a long way off the sound of the sea—the long slow wash of it against the shore. Then one of the teachers called, ‘Eyes front, please!’ and the dark-haired girl turned away from Frankie and skipped into line and the crocodile walked on; one of the teachers shooting a brief, startled glance at Frankie, who stood there in the middle of the road, staring after them. A single car appeared from one of the holiday cottages and edged slowly round him before driving on towards the town. Frankie barely noticed it.

  I walked across to him. ‘Frankie?’

  He swung round. He was fizzing with excitement, his eyes filled with light. ‘Did you see her? That girl? The one with the black curls? Did you see how she was smiling at me? I’m in love with her! Oh, love!’ He sang the word out loud and I felt suddenly afraid, as if somebody was watching. We were not allowed to love, unless it was God we loved. Human love was marred by lust, and sex was sin; we were not allowed even to look at girls we passed in the street. One day we would make our vows of celibacy.

  ‘Tom? Did you see her?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ he whispered. Another car edged round us. I touched his shoulder. ‘Come on, or we’ll get run over.’ I steered him back to the footpath and the second we got there he stopped and looked back down the road for the girls. They were turning the corner towards the town, the dark-haired one already out of sight.

  It was then I saw Etta. He was close. I had never seen him so close before and I couldn’t take my eyes from him: the pallid face with its tiny snub nose and little crimped baby’s mouth, the eyes so deep-set they were hardly more than a watery gleam. He was neither tall nor short, there was nothing remarkable about him except for his head—it seemed too big for his body and its strange domed shape was emphasised by the way his hair was cut, shorn so close you could see the pinkish scalp beneath. I was reminded of photographs of half-formed babies I’d seen in my father’s medical books; Etta looked to me like something that might need protection from the light.

  He was standing in front of a small chemist’s shop. He was all by himself and for a confused moment I wondered what he was doing there; it didn’t cross my mind till later that he might have been following us, that the dark movement I’d seen earlier in the trees by the seminary gates could have been him. When we’d passed the chemist’s shop he must have been inside—had he come out in time to see Frankie walk across to the girl? Had he heard him saying, ‘I’m in love with her!’?

  Of course he had. He was close enough to have heard every word, and there was a tautness to his spindly body that made me sure he’d seen it all. And that was bad. I knew Frankie’s small, eager encounter with the girl—no more than a smile and a few steps across a road, an excited exclamation—was of a different order to any other small breaches of rules we might have committed today: running in public, shouting, wasting our time at the beach. I thought it might even be the sort of thing for which you could be asked, or told, to leave the seminary. To be expelled, to be found unworthy and thrown out was almost the worst that could happen at St Finbar’s. There was only one thing worse, and that was leaving of your own accord: no one ever spoke of those boys, it was as if they’d disappeared from the earth. They were the lowest of the low. ‘You may count your life a success,’ the Rector had told us on our first day, ‘if on your coffin the title “Father” is inscribed.’ I knew at once I didn’t want Frankie to leave. I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to be near me. I needed him there. I didn’t ask myself why.

  It was then the fear began, the fear about losing him. It would go on for as long as I knew him, changing, growing, lightening a little, then darkening again, always there, constant as the hum of blood in my ears. In that first moment it was like a person standing outside your house, you haven’t heard him coming yet already his hand is lifted to knock on your door.

  For a split second I had the mad idea of going up to Etta, telling him some story (that the girl was a cousin?), pleading, even though I knew it would be no use—there was no cousin, they would find that out soon enough. I stood there, paralysed, while Etta geared himself up—or so I thought—to walk across to Frankie, seize his shoulder, tell him he was on report and march the pair of us straight up the hill to St Finbar’s and the Rector’s office.

  Yet he did none of these things. Like me he simply stood there, his eyes fixed on Frankie, a gaze so intent that I could almost see the line of it drawn between them through the air. It made me shiver.

  Frankie began to turn towards me and I stepped in front of him, obscuring his line of vision so he couldn’t see Etta. If fear is a kind of wickedness then that is where my wickedness began, because I said nothing about Etta. I thought if I did it would make things worse; it was possible, even likely, that Frankie would confront him. He was fearless. That was the great difference between Frankie and me. He was afraid of no one except his father, from whom he so deeply wanted love. To someone like Etta, he might say anything.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’d better get going or we’ll be late.’ He came with me easily; the girl had gone. ‘I don’t think I can stand it if I don’t see her again,’ he said, and I half expected quick footsteps behind us, and Etta’s reedy voice crying out, ‘Stop, you boys!’ There w
as nothing. I started running, and then Frankie was running too and he didn’t say anything more about the girl. As we reached the turn-off to St Finbar’s, I glanced back over my shoulder, quickly. The pavement outside the chemist’s shop was empty. Etta had gone.

  7.

  Nothing happened. There was no summons to the Rector when we got back to the seminary, nothing all evening long.

  Etta had returned from Shoreham, I saw him at dinner, seated at the seniors’ table, calmly eating his meal. He never once looked in Frankie’s direction, or in mine. We didn’t sit together—that kind of easy arrangement between friends wasn’t possible at St Finbar’s, where each of us had our allotted places for meals and classes, study and chapel.

  Announcements were made before dinner began; I’d expected our summons to be amongst them. When it wasn’t, I thought that perhaps the Rector hadn’t had time to speak to Etta; and then I expected it to come after evening study, and then after rosary, then last thing after night prayers, and when there was still nothing, I thought it would come in the morning after breakfast when more announcements were made.

  I should have warned Frankie, of course, so he’d know Etta had seen him down in Shoreham and be prepared. But I had a feeling that if I mentioned Etta to him it would be like pressing the button on some dreadful mechanism which could never be stopped in time. When I thought of the way Etta’s gaze, fixed on him, had seemed like a line drawn between them through the air, I felt a strange pricking sensation. Much later, when I told this to Miri, she quoted to me the famous words of the second witch in Macbeth: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. And yes, it was like that.

  Lying in my bed that night I heard Frankie wake next door. It was surely the perfect time to warn him; we could talk through that thin partition as easily as if we were in the same room. There’d be no one to hear us, even in the middle of the Great Silence. Our rooms were the last ones in that corridor; on the other side of mine was the landing and stairway, then the bathroom—it was only past the bathroom that the rooms began again, a row of them, exactly like my own. Occasionally you would hear someone going to the bathroom, and once I’d heard footsteps on the landing—I’d guessed they were Tim Vesey’s, going to look out of the window at his house across the bay. He’d told me he liked to watch the lights go out in his old home, first of all the living room, then the bathroom, then the bedrooms—‘so then I know they’re all in bed,’ he’d said. ‘And safe.’ Even if he heard Frankie and me talking together, I knew Tim Vesey wouldn’t tell.

  ‘Frankie?’

  ‘Tom!’ His bed creaked as he moved up closer to the wall. ‘Tom, guess what! I dreamed about her! I dreamed about that girl down in Shoreham. You know?’

  I swallowed. ‘Yes, but—’ I was going to warn him then, I swear it. Only he was so excited, so happy—the words flew from him. ‘Oh, nothing happened. We didn’t do anything—in the dream, I mean. She just turned round and smiled at me, like she did down in Shoreham. Did you see?’

  ‘Yes. Frankie, there’s something—’

  ‘She’s beautiful. Did you see her hair—I loved the way it sort of swung when she turned. It was so soft and thick! You could almost feel it, just by looking—like it was in your hands, all soft and alive.’ He gave a long, happy sigh. ‘She reminded me a bit of Manda—’

  ‘Manda?’

  It was then he told me the story of Manda Sutton. Right then, when we’d only really met that afternoon, he told me how he’d had sex with a girl. Casual sex between young people wasn’t as common in those days, and when it occurred it was kept secret unless there was a pregnancy, and even then it wasn’t talked about. There were boys at St Finbar’s who would never have spoken to Frankie again if he’d told them about Manda Sutton. There were boys who’d never been told anything about sex, who didn’t know what was happening to them when they had their first erection, their first wet dream. They kept quiet, they kept it to themselves, and some of them would have thought they were monsters, or amongst the damned. Looking back, I think that Etta would have been like this. He was clever, and if a child was clever in those days he was often skipped past grades in primary school and could be in sixth class when he was only nine. People said Etta was barely ten when he entered St Finbar’s. We saw his parents once, Frankie and I, through the window of the library; they were pale and proud and pious, the very pattern of well-off respectability—fearful people, I think now. Etta wouldn’t have been told a thing.

  I lay there that night and listened to Frankie’s story, to that bright, untroubled voice which made me think of light. I heard about that spring evening when he’d been kept in and had taken the long way home because he was scared of his father, the long way down Jellicoe Lane. The images crept inside my heart and stayed: the dusk that was like sooty flour falling from an enormous sieve, the bridal cherry trees, the little green stars the colour of new apple leaves. I heard how he’d taken his shirt off to feel the warm air on his skin, how he’d started singing, and how Manda Sutton had heard him and walked out through the trees. ‘We made love,’ he said simply, as if he was speaking in these modern days and not in that narrow time in the middle of the last century, when for boys from his kind of family, sex was only for marriage. I heard how his dad had found out and punished him, and how he’d come to St Finbar’s because he’d ‘offended Heaven’ and wanted to make up for being bad.

  Except it hadn’t felt bad, he said, ‘it didn’t feel bad, Tom, what we did—I don’t think—’ His voice tailed away into a sleepy murmur, in which I heard faintly the single word ‘good’.

  For a long while after he’d gone to sleep those images went round and round inside my head: the smoky dusk and the trees and stars and Frankie standing with his shirt off, singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. He was bright and beautiful, I thought. And Manda Sutton in her shiny petticoat, coming through the trees—she was the reason he’d come here, so I should have felt grateful to her. Only I couldn’t. I heard her breathy voice saying, Is that you, Frankie Maguire? and I heard the rough crunch of Mr Maguire’s footsteps over the sticks and stones. I had never seen Frankie’s father, I would never see him, and yet I felt a kind of loathing for him. Beating children was fairly common in those days, but I couldn’t bear that Maguire should take his belt to Frankie. ‘Three mornings running,’ Frankie had said. ‘Before he went off to work. And you wouldn’t believe it, but he never got a spot of blood on his clean shirt.’ Blood. It horrified me. And the casual way Frankie said it, as if it wasn’t important that his father should treat him this way. When I thought of Maguire’s belt coming down on Frankie’s legs, his poor back, I felt sick with fury; my own skin seemed to burn. I wanted to cry out.

  Of course there was more to my feelings about the story than my loathing for Mr Maguire. I felt jealous and confused. I say jealous, yet I wasn’t sure what I was jealous about: it wasn’t that I envied Frankie having sex with Manda Sutton, it wasn’t that. I didn’t want to have sex with Manda or even the beautiful dark-haired girl down in Shoreham. Yet jealousy was there, fierce and sharp; I recognised it right away, like a needle pushed into a nerve, even though I’d never felt it before. And when I thought of Manda taking Frankie’s hand and leading him through the trees, a longing spread all through me. I felt weak and soft. Was it the landscape I envied, the beautiful evening on the edge of spring, as if I wanted to be with Frankie there: in Jellicoe Lane beside the cherry trees, with the warm breeze promising summer and the sooty dusk falling and the little green stars beginning to show in the sky. Was that it? Was that what I wanted? I didn’t know.

  These days I can go to Jellicoe Lane any evening I choose, I can stand in the dusk beneath those trees, I can look up and see the little green stars. Only Frankie isn’t there.

  8.

  When Etta stood to make the announcements at breakfast I still hadn’t been able to warn Frankie. Though I’d woken early, I could tell from the silence behind the wall that he wasn’t in his room, nor could
I find him in the bathroom. I realised that I’d only ever seen him once in the early mornings, on that day after I’d first recognised him in the chapel, and then he’d been hurrying up the stairs, not down them like the rest of us. His face had been flushed, he’d looked happy, his hair and cassock were damp, as if he’d been out walking in the rain, though the sun had been shining outside.

  When I reached the refectory Frankie was there in his place. It was too late to say anything to him; at the head of the prefects’ table Etta was getting to his feet, the sheet of announcements ready in his hand. In the few seconds of silence before he spoke I noticed how small his hands were, no bigger than a child’s, and his feet were small too, and everything about him was immaculate—his cassock looked freshly washed and ironed, and his small polished boots shone almost fiercely beneath its hem. There was something of the creature about him. He reminded me of those animals dressed in neat human clothing you see in kids’ picture books: Mr Stoat or Mr Vole.

  He read the announcements and there was no summons for Frankie, no summons for me. A couple of kids whose names had been called got up and sidled quickly to the doorway, the passage that led to the offices of the Rector and the Dean of Discipline. I should have felt relieved, and I was—yet I felt apprehensive too. Etta had seen us down in Shoreham, he’d probably seen us on the beach, boots off, yelling, mucking round. He’d seen Frankie walk across to the dark-haired girl—if the teacher hadn’t called out Frankie might even have touched her. I’d noticed on the beach how he liked touching, smoothing the shape of a shell or a sea-berry, letting the sand trickle slowly through his fingers, as if to feel each grain. And Etta had surely heard him cry out, ‘I’m in love with her! Oh, love!’