The Guardians Read online

  He left her cleaning and rearranging the living room and went into his father’s bedroom. The bed was made, but a towel had been left lying carelessly across the foot, and two bedroom slippers were at opposite ends of the rug. There was a half-empty pack of cigarettes on the bedside table, a glass with a little water in it, and the miniradio which his father had sometimes listened to at night. He remembered waking and hearing the sound of music through the dividing wall.

  He still could not properly grasp what had happened. The suddenness was as shocking as the fact. His mother had been continuously ill for a long time before she died—he could scarcely remember a time when she was not ill. Her death had been no less horrifying for that, but even then, when he was ten, he had known it to be inevitable. His father, on the other hand, had been a strong, active man, always in good health. It was impossible to imagine him dead. He could not be.

  Rob opened the wardrobe. The clothes would probably be sold, too—they would fit Mr. Kennealy. He felt his eyes sting, and pulled open one of the drawers at the bottom. More clothes. A second drawer. Folded pullovers, and a cardboard box. On the outside was written “Jenny,” his mother’s name. He took it out and opened it.

  The first thing he saw was her photograph. He had not known one existed: he remembered his father once trying to get her to have a photograph taken, and her refusal. This was an old-fashioned 2-D print, and it showed her as much younger than he had known her—scarcely more than twenty, with brown hair down her shoulders instead of short as she had worn it in later years.

  He looked at it for a long time, trying to read behind the slight, anxious smile on her face. Then he heard Mrs. Kennealy calling him. He had time to see that there were other things in the box—a curl of hair in a transparent locket, letters in a bundle held together by a rubber band. He closed the box and put it with his own things before going to see what Mrs. Kennealy wanted.

  • • •

  Rob was called from geography to the principal’s office. They were without a master at the time, though of course under closed-circuit TV observation at the main switchboard; and the holovision set was taking them on a conducted tour of Australia, with a bouncing, breezy commentary full of not very funny little jokes. The voice blanked out though vision continued, and with a warning ping a voice said, “Randall. Report to the principal immediately. Repeat. Randall to the principal’s office.”

  The commentary came up again. One or two of the boys made their own even less funny jokes about possible reasons for his being summoned, but Mr. Spennals was on the switchboard that morning and the majority kept their attention firmly on the screen; he was not a man to trifle with.

  Assemblies apart, Rob had seen the principal twice before; once when he joined the school, the second time when they met in a corridor and he was given a message to deliver to the masters’ common-room. He looked at Rob now as though wondering who he was. This was not surprising since there were nearly two thousand boys in the school. He said, “Randall,” tentatively, and then more firmly, “Randall, this is Mr. Chalmers from the Education Office.”

  The second man was broad where the principal was thin, with hairy cheeks and a quiet watchful expression. Rob said, “Good morning, sir,” to him, and he nodded but made no reply.

  “Mr. Chalmers has been looking into your case, following the regrettable death of your father,” the principal said. “You have only one close relative, I understand, an aunt living in”—he glanced at a pad in front of him—“in the Sheffield Conurb. She has been consulted. I’m afraid she does not feel able to offer you a home. There are difficulties—her husband is in poor health. . . .”

  Rob said nothing. It had not occurred to him that this would even be suggested. The principal continued, “Under the circumstances it is felt that the best solution to your problem—in fact the only solution—will be to have you transferred to a boarding school where you can have full care and attention. We feel . . .”

  Rob was so surprised that he interrupted. “Can’t I stay with the Kennealys, sir?”

  “The Kennealys?” The two men looked at each other. “Who are they?”

  Rob explained. The principal said:

  “Yes, I see. The neighbors who have been looking after you. But that would not be suitable, of course, for the longer term.”

  “But they have a spare room, sir.”

  “Not suitable,” the principal repeated in a flat, authoritative voice. “You will be transferred to the Barnes Boarding School. You are excused classes for the remainder of the day. Transport will be sent to pick you up at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  • • •

  Rob took the bus to the stadium where he knew Mr. Kennealy was on duty. On the way he thought about the State boarding schools. Some were supposed to be not quite so bad as others, but they were all regarded with a mixture of contempt and dread. They catered to orphans and the children of broken marriages, but also to certain types of juvenile delinquents. There were ugly rumors about the life there, particularly about the terrible food and the discipline.

  Rob sent in a message asking for Mr. Kennealy, who came out to the leisure room ten minutes later. Rob had been watching the closed-circuit holovision which showed what was happening in the arena. It was gladiators in high-wire combat. In this, men fought with light, blunt-ended fiberglass spears from separate wires that approached each other at differing heights and distances. The wire system was complex and changed during the contest. The drop could be into water or onto firm ground, which in this case was covered with artificial thorn bushes, glinting with murderous-looking spikes. A loser always got hurt, sometimes badly, occasionally fatally. There were three men in the present fight and one had already fallen and limped away with difficulty. The remaining two swayed and probed at each other in the bluish light cast by the weather screen which at the moment covered the top of the stadium.

  “Well, Rob, what are you doing away from school?” Mr. Kennealy asked.

  Rob told him what had happened. Mr. Kennealy listened in silence.

  “They said I couldn’t stay with you, but it’s not true, is it?”

  Mr. Kennealy replied heavily, “If that’s what the regulations say, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “But you could go and see them—you could apply for me.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “There was a boy at school last year—Jimmy McKay. His mother went off and his father couldn’t manage. He went to Mrs. Pearson in your block and he’s still living there.”

  “The Pearsons may have adopted him.”

  “Couldn’t you? Adopt me, that is?”

  “Not without your aunt giving consent.”

  “Well, she won’t have me herself. She’s said so.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’d be ready to sign you away. She might be thinking things will change later, that she can take you then.”

  “They could ask her, couldn’t they? I’m pretty sure she’d say yes.”

  “It’s not as easy as that.” Mr. Kennealy paused and Rob waited for him to go on. “What I mean is, this may be the best thing for you. You’ll be safer there.”

  “Safer? How?”

  Mr. Kennealy started to say something, then shook his head.

  “Better looked after. And with boys of your own age. Mrs. Kennealy and I are too old for a boy like you to have to live with.”

  “You said ‘safer.’ ”

  “It was a slip of the tongue.”

  There was a silence. Mr. Kennealy was not meeting Rob’s eyes. Rob felt he could see the truth of the matter. All these were excuses, attempts to conceal the central fact: the Kennealys did not want him. He felt a bit as he had when Mr. Kennealy had not spoken up for his father against the man who had said that he was to blame for getting killed, but now it was more a feeling of desolation than anger.

  “Yes, Mr. Kennealy,” Rob said.

  He had turned away. He found himself grasped by the shoulders, and Mr. Kenneal
y stared into his eyes.

  “It’s for your good, Rob,” he said. “Believe that. I can’t explain, but it’s for your good.”

  Inside the holovision screen one figure lunged, the other parried and struck back and the first dropped ludicrously on his back, into the thorns. Rob nodded. “I’d better go back and see about packing my things.”

  2

  A Disgrace to This House

  THE BOARDING SCHOOL STOOD ON land enclosed by a bend in the River Thames. The main part, including the games area and most of the classrooms, was in late twentieth century style, bare and sprawling. The boarding houses which marched along the inner perimeter were more recent, austere within but their exteriors colored and ornamented. Rob had been allotted to G-House, which was pastel blue crossed by broad transverse stripes of orange.

  For the first few days he was too confused to take in much beyond an impression of constant activity. The day was filled to overflowing. Broadcast alarms woke the dormitories at half past six and there was a scramble to wash and dress and reach the games area by seven. They were nearly a quarter of a mile from it—only H-House was farther off. You had to run in wet weather, with a cape flapping around you. On arrival there was roll call. Latecomers, if only by half a minute, were put on report and given extra gymnastics in the evening.

  The half hour of exercises in the morning was theoretically followed by half an hour’s free time before breakfast at eight o’clock. But you quickly learned the importance of queuing in advance outside the dining room because the food, apart from being poor and badly cooked, was never sufficient to go round. For those at the end of the queue the horrible lumpy porridge was further diluted with hot water, there was half a portion of reconstituted egg or half a rissole, and there might not even be a slice of bread. Senior boys pushed their way to the front at the last minute; juniors had no option but to stand in line.

  Morning school was from 8:45 till 12:30, when there was a break for lunch and more queuing. In the afternoons they had games—gymnastics again, in bad weather—until tea at half past four. Then there was evening school from five to seven, after which you were free until lights out at nine. Free, that is, if you had not been detailed for extra gym, or for one of the hundred jobs which prefects or any other seniors required to have done. Rob went to bed exhausted each night and slept soundly on a lumpy three-section mattress resting on the metal slats of his truckle bed.

  Gradually he took stock of his surroundings. There were thirty boys of roughly his own age in his dormitory. He was aware of something going on at the far end on the first night, of voices and cries of pain, but he was too tired to pay much attention. It happened the next night, and he realized that there were bigger boys present and that one of the younger boys was being tormented. D’Artagnan, he thought, would not have lain quietly in bed. He would have done something—tackled the bullies. Nor was it much good putting up the excuse that he had no Porthos, Athos or Aramis, and no prospect of finding them among the unfriendly jostling boys in the dormitory. D’Artagnan would have acted on his own. The tormentors left in the end. He could hear the boy sobbing after they had gone, and fell asleep with the sound in his ears.

  He asked a ginger-haired, pale boy called Perkins about it the following day while they were waiting to go into class.

  “Simmons, you mean? He was just getting the Routine.”

  “The Routine?”

  Perkins explained: it was a ritual bullying conducted on new boys.

  “I’m new, and they haven’t done anything to me,” Rob said.

  “Too new. The first three weeks they leave you alone. You’ve got your turn to come.”

  “What do they do? What did they do to you?”

  “Various things,” Perkins said. “The worst was tying string around my forehead and tightening it. I thought my eyes were going to pop out.”

  “Did it hurt a lot?”

  “Did it hurt! I’ll give you a tip: yell just a bit. If you don’t yell they keep at you till you do. And if you yell too much they keep on as well. If it’s just a bit, they get bored.”

  They went into class—history of engineering. The master was a small, neat, gray-haired man who rattled through his talk quickly and perfunctorily. He was dealing with rocket propulsion, flashing slide after slide through the projector. He asked for questions in a way that did not invite response, but Rob said, “It’s not much used now, is it, sir?”

  The master looked at him with some surprise. “Hardly at all. In terraplaning, of course, but there are no really useful applications.”

  “It was chiefly intended for interplanetary exploration, wasn’t it, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was that given up? Men landed on the moon, and probes reached Mars.”

  The master paused before replying. “It was stopped because it was pointless, Randall. It is Randall? Billions of pounds were spent on utterly useless projects. We have different priorities now. Our aims are the happiness and well-being of mankind. We live in a saner, more ordered world than our fathers did. Now, if you have satisfied your vanity by interrupting, we will get on with the lesson. A much more useful invention, and one that is still used in an improved form, is the jet engine. The origin of this . . .”

  Some of the other boys were looking at him with disgust. In his old school it had not been popular to ask questions. He realized it was probably going to be worse here.

  He wondered if the world really was so much happier than in the past. No one starved, it was true, and the only war was the faraway one in China. No one who stayed out of trouble had to fight in that if they did not want to. There were holovision and the Games, the carnivals—all kinds of amusements. Riots, too, of course, but they were over quickly and mostly people could avoid them. Many seemed to enjoy them. What the master had said was probably right.

  Rob came back to more immediate considerations and thought about what Perkins had told him. It was a consolation that they left you alone for three weeks. He had only been here three days.

  • • •

  The weather had been blustering and rainy when Rob first came to the boarding school. Then there were several days of warm, bright weather, more like summer than spring. On the evening of the second he succeeded in dodging a group of prefects on the prowl for slaves and made his way around the edge of the playing fields—crossing them was probably forbidden and anyway would have been conspicuous—to the river.

  It surprised him that no one had done the same. This might be forbidden too, but he was prepared to chance that to get an hour’s peace and solitude. It was also true, as he had learned long ago, that most people—boys or adults—disliked being alone. He was glad of his own company normally, at present very much so.

  He had brought a book with him and, on impulse, his mother’s photograph and the bundle of letters. The book was one of the two he had borrowed from the Public Library. He had not had time to take it back before leaving the Kennealys and he did not see how he was going to be able to return it now. The library was six or seven miles away and, in any case, boys were not allowed out of the school grounds without special permission—never granted to a junior. He supposed he would have to hand the books in for the school to send back.

  But he was not in a hurry to do this because as far as he could see they were irreplaceable. There was no library in the school, no books except those used as aids to the various visual learning techniques. He had not really thought there would be, but it was a blow all the same. He was reading the books he had as slowly as possible, drawing them out. This one was called The Napoleon of Notting Hill and was about a Victorian London in which armies of local patriots fought pitched battles in the gaslit streets. It was fantasy, of course. Even a hundred and fifty years ago London had been enough of a Conurb for that to have been impossible. But it was nice to think about. He thought of the struggles today between supporters of the different terraplane factions. It was not the same. A parish would have been something worth fightin
g for. He read half a dozen pages and closed the volume at the end of a chapter.

  He looked at the photograph instead and wondered about the smile. He had known his mother as someone not only ill, but also unhappy. She had a few acquaintances, no friends. Rob held the bundle of letters in his hands. Their very existence was a link with the past. No one wrote letters nowadays. If people did not visiphone, they sent sound-grams. It was strange, and strangely pleasant, to think of one person writing words on paper, slowly and carefully, to send to another.

  He had thought before of reading them but had held back. They were private: probably he should have got rid of them, dropped them in the nearest waste-disposer. He pulled off the rubber band and held the top envelope in his hands. They were both dead, and he was left. He pulled the sheets of paper out carefully, unfolded them and began to read.

  They were love letters as he had expected. It was not on that account he wanted to read them. The thought had been that he might somehow get closer to the memory of his mother, understand the smile in the photograph. The letter did not help though. It was conventional, telling the man how much she loved him, how slow the days were passing before she could hope to see him again. Rob felt some disappointment. He was folding the letter up to put it back in the envelope when something struck him. The address at the top: White Cottage, Shearam, Glos. “Glos.” was short for Gloucestershire. And Gloucestershire was in the County.

  He looked through other letters which confirmed it. His mother had been born in the County. She had met his father when he came in to work on a special job—there must have been contact still in those days—had fallen in love with him and come to the Conurb to marry him.

  • • •

  The County was not mentioned on holovision, but Rob had heard talk about it. The tone was usually a mixture of envy and contempt. The gentry lived in the County, the gentry and their servants. There were others, the Commuters, who worked professionally in the Conurbs but had their permanent homes in the County. Doctors, lawyers, senior officials, factory executives came into this class. Some went back nightly by private copter, others on weekends.