John Banville - Mefisto

ST STEPHEN’S SCHOOL stood on a hill in the middle of the town, a tall, narrow, red-brick building with a black slate roof and a tin weathercock. I think of damp flagstones and the crash of boots, rain in the yard, and the smell of drains, and something else, a sense of enclosure, of faces averted from the world in holy fright. On my first day there I sat with the other new boys in solemn silence while a red-haired master reached into an immensely deep pocket and brought out lovingly a leather strap.

— Say hello, he said, to teacher’s pet.

The thing lolled in his hand like a parched and blackened tongue. Each boy could hear his neighbour swallow. Suddenly all of life up to this seemed a heedless, half-drunk frolic. Outside the window there was a stricken tree, then a field, then firs, then the hurt blue of a bare September sky.

I sat at the front of the class, appalled and fascinated. Each master, even the mildest, seemed mad in his own way. All were convinced that plots were being hatched behind their backs. They would whirl round on a heel from the blackboard, chalk suspended, and fix one boy or another wordlessly with a stare of smouldering suspicion. Without warning they would fly into terrible rages, diving among the desks after a miscreant and raining down blows on him as on some blunt obstruction against which they had barked their shins. Afterwards they were all shamefaced bluster, while the rest of the class averted its gaze from the victim slumped at his desk, hiccuping softly and knuckling his eyes.

At first I tried placating these distraught, violent men, offering up to them my skill at sums, tentatively, like a little gift. They were strangely unimpressed, indignant even, as if they thought it was all a trick, a form of conjuring, gaudy and shallow. I puzzled them, I suppose. I could do all sorts of mental calculations, yet the simplest things baffled me. Dates I found especially slippery. I was never sure what age I was, not knowing exactly what to subtract from what, since my first birthday had fallen not in the year in which I was born, but in the following year, and since, halfway through the present year, when another birthday arrived, I would find myself suddenly a year older, with half a year still to run on the calendar. It all had too much of actuality sticking to it. I felt at ease only with pure numbers, if a sum had solid things in it I balked, like a hamfisted juggler, bobbing and ducking frantically as half-crowns and cabbages, dominoes and sixpences, whizzed out of control around my head. And then there were those exemplars, those faceless men, measuring out the miles from A to B and from B to C, each at his own unwavering pace, I saw them in my mind, solitary, driven, labouring along white roads, in vast, white light. These things, these whizzing objects and tireless striding figures, plucked thus out of humble obscurity, had about them an air of startlement and gathering alarm with which I sympathized. They had never expected to be so intensely noticed.

— Well, Swan, how many apples does that make, eh?

A ripe red shape, with a sunburst trembling on its polished cheek, swelled and swelled in my brain, forcing out everything else.

— You are a dolt, my man. What are you?

— A dolt, sir.

— Precisely! Now put out your hand.

I would not cry, no matter how hard they hit me. I would sit with teeth clenched, my humming palms pressed between my knees and the blood slowly draining out of my face, and sometimes then, gratifyingly, it would seem the master, not I, who had suffered the worse humiliation.

Yet I did well, despite everything. I came top of the class. Every year I won the school prize for mental arithmetic. At home I kept such things dark. On the last day of every summer term, I would stop at the sluice gate behind the malt store on my way home, and tear up my report card and scatter the pieces on the surge.

Then without warning I was summoned one day to the headmaster’s office. My mother was there, in hat and Sunday coat, with her bag on her knees and her hands on her bag, motionless, looking at the carpet. The room was cramped and dim. On a pedestal on the wall a statue of a consumptive Virgin stood with heart transpierced, her little hands held out in a lugubrious gesture. It was a spring day outside, windy and bright. Father Barker’s big feet stuck out from under his desk, shod in lace-up black boots with thickly mended soles, and uppers worn to the texture of black crape paper. He was a large unhappy man with a moon face, blue-jowled and ponderous of gait. His nickname was Hound. This is a bit-part. He rose, delving under the skirts of his soutane, and brought out a grubby packet of cigarettes. He smoked with a kind of violence, grimly, as if performing an irksome but unavoidable duty. He had been saying, he said, what a fine scholar I was. He came from behind the desk and paced to and fro, his soutane swinging. At each turn he swerved heavily, like a horseman hauling an awkward mount. Grey worms of ash tumbled down the shiny black slope of his belly. He had high hopes, he said. He stopped, and loomed at my mother earnestly.

— High hopes, ma’am!

She lifted her gaze to me at last, reproachful, mute, a minor conspirator who has just found out the enormity of the plot. I looked away from her, to the window and the bright, blown day. Far trees heaved in silence, hugely labouring. I said nothing. Father Barker, lighting up again, was swallowed in a swirl of smoke and flying sparks.

Later, when I came home, a terrible silence reigned in the house. My mother stalked about the kitchen, still wearing her hat, buffeted by a storm of emotions, anger and pride, vague dread, a baffled resentment.

— Like a fool, I was, she cried. Like a fool, sitting there!

She had a horror of being singled out.

In the senior school our mathematics master was a man called Pender. He was English, and a layman. How he had come to St Stephen’s no one seemed to know. Elderly, thin, with a narrow, wedge-shaped head and long, curved limbs, he moved with the slow stealth of some tree-climbing creature. His suits, of good broadcloth greased with age, had the loose, crumpled look of a skin about to be sloughed. His taste was for the byways and blind alleys of his subject, for paradoxes and puzzles and mathematical games. He introduced into his lessons the most outlandish things, curved geometries and strange algebras, and strange ways of numbering. I can still recite a litany of the queer names I first heard in his class: Minkowski and Euler, Peano and Heaviside, Infeld, Sperner, Tarski and Olbers. He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. He would circle the room at a slow prance, his long arms intricately folded, surveying with a sardonic grin the rows of faces lifted up to him in attentive blankness. Common words when he spoke them — set, system, transformation, braid — took on an almost religious significance. He had a liturgical aspect himself, when he stood by the window, his profile lifted to the day’s pale light, a halo of white hair aglow on his gleaming pate, and spoke in his thin, piping voice of the binomial theorem, or boolean algebra, or of the mysterious affinity between the numbers of a fibonacci sequence and the spiral pattern of seeds on the face of a sunflower.

He was delighted with me, of course, but wary too, as if he suspected a trap. He tiptoed around me with nervous jocularity, swooping down on me suddenly as if to grab me, the wattles of his scrawny neck wobbling, and then quickly drawing back again, with a hissing laugh, darting a grey tongue-tip through a gap in his teeth where an eye-tooth was missing. By now I knew differential calculus, could solve the most delicate problems in trigonometry.

— Amazing, Mr Pender would sigh, chafing his papery hands. Quite amazing!