Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

The tape continues: What I remember best of all is my dearest friend at the home. His name was Nicholas. Let me tell you how we met. Once after lunch Nicholas approached me in the corridor and said he had a secret to tell me, he said it was a serious matter which no one else knew about and would put both our lives in danger. I was to meet him at the Witch’s Hat later that afternoon. He was there when I arrived and invited me to sit. He looked me sternly in the eyes and told me that he was the son of the Devil. I believed him instantly. But to prove it he pulled up his shirt and showed me a birthmark on the left side of his chest. It seemed no more than a faint web of veins showing beneath the skin, but he told me to look harder and I saw it resembled a medallion, a small circle that enclosed a tiny crenulated shape, like a rose. Have you ever seen anything like it? Nicholas asked. Of course I had not. He said the secret of his ancestry had plagued him all his life, that he had never been at home in this world, and had felt condemned to wander. But since he had told me, Nicholas continued, he felt much better both about his sinister paternity and about things in general. He asked if I had any sweets, which I did, since my mother had only recently sent a package, and I offered to share them with him. But he told me he must have them all. He opened his large eyes very wide, and I gave him my sweets. On another occasion he stole my wooden train, I knew it was him, although I was unable to prove it. Nonetheless, we became friends. I learned that in fact he wasn’t the son of the Devil but of a widower. Shortly after this, Nicholas and I became inseparable. We did everything together. I remember we made declarations of love by the Witch’s Hat, and one evening cut small lesions in our wrists and mixed the blood. Yet there was a spiteful side to our relationship. I forgave him for tricking me into giving up my sweets, but I never forgot what he told me, and I think there lived in me an impression that he was somehow connected to dark forces. He was in my mind a golem, or a child-moloch to whom my love was sacrificed. There were times when I was afraid of him, when he looked at me intensely with those large dark-brown eyes, or when he told me he had been in contact with a banshee and had instructed her to take me away.

When I was ten and Nicholas eleven something happened, which at the time seemed relatively insignificant, but which now I see was an important point in a friendship that was soon to fall apart. You see, we both had beautiful singing voices. And for each of the three years I stayed at Comerton House the children put on a Christmas play, a rendition of the nativity. There was a tradition at the home whereby one member of the class was given the part of Balthazar, the leader of the wise men, whose role was to sing a eulogy to the Lord. The lucky child was he whose voice was judged sweetest by the home staff. We each chose a verse from ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and stood in the assembly hall to deliver our recital. This was one month before Christmas. On the night of the performance the winner would sing the entire carol in front of the parents. It is hard to convey the importance of this role to the children of Comerton House. I think that most of us, though each from a prosperous family, were not used to feeling at all special, except that each of us was damaged in some particular way. Several months before the day of the competition we began to practise our chosen verse. We compared voices and judged our closest rivals. Nicholas had a very pure and natural singing voice and without effort reached the highest notes. I had a more roughly cadenced voice, although I felt I was able to inspire deeper emotion. In each of the previous years we had been overlooked, but in the third year of my stay at Comerton House I was given the part of Balthazar. Nicholas was deeply affected by my victory. I think he felt it as an insult. I was thrilled to be playing the part, yet I was careful to hide my happiness, and although I felt I concealed it well, I suppose it showed on my face and gestures and in my whole person.

If the sole effect of my winning the part of Balthazar had been the cooling of our friendship, says my father, then the event would not have lodged so firmly in my memory. But it had a second and, I now know, more destructive and significant effect on my life, an effect that, in addition to harming the friendship between myself and Nicholas, cut me irrevocably from my parents; not physically, for I was still too young to leave their care, but in my heart, which from that day on turned both from them and the Jewish faith. On the night of the performance, held in the large pine-panelled hall at the back of Comerton House, my parents arrived early. I had not told them anything about the performance, only that I would be singing a solo. They sat in the audience as we, the children, each dressed in his costume, gathered behind the makeshift stage. The performance was proceeding well, the baby Jesus had appeared among the animals. I came on to the stage and, together with my two associates, moved beside the manger. The piano began to play. I held my breath for the duration of the introductory bars. Then I started to sing. I kept my eyes focused on the bookshelf at the far end of the hall. I saw a spider on a thick volume. There was a fly caught in its web. The stage was brightly lit. Soon after the second chorus I became aware of a movement in the audience. It was my father. He had risen from his chair. People turned to look. I was singing the third verse. He walked quickly out of the hall and into the dark garden. The door slammed behind him. My eyes followed him as he walked down the garden path, and I faltered for what seemed like an inordinately long time. The piano played on without me, and when I tried to sing again, I had forgotten the words. I stood there in front of the crowd, paralysed. Later, back at our house, my father called me into his study and told me that I was no longer allowed to go to school at Comerton House. Then he said something which I have never been able to forget. He told me that Jesus was a Jew, that Matthew was a Jew, that so were Mark and John, and that Luke too was a Jew, although he had been born a Gentile. The following summer I was taken from Comerton House, and I never went back; the period of my sickness had long since ended. But I felt a sickness in my heart, which over time became a feeling of emptiness that has returned every so often.

Here, said my father, this is me in the garden at Comerton House.

That is when he handed me the photograph. I must have glanced at it at the time, even taken it to show Damaris, but I don’t remember. Sometime later I must have stored it with the tape recorder, because that is where I found it. I am holding it now, before my computer; the light from the screen reveals a small boy no more than nine years old, sitting on a swing. In the picture, taken many years before I was born, and which I look at now some three decades after my father’s death, I see him in a curious grey-blue light. He is looking fixedly at the camera. Behind him rises a stone wall partially covered with ivy. The boy has small white hands that grip the twine of the swing. He is wearing winter clothes: knitted cap, house slippers, ribbed woollen socks, kilt, tweed waistcoat beneath an open blazer. His eyes seem to stare back at me with great anxiety. The way he holds himself — stiff-necked, eyes focused intensely on the lens — expresses great worry, as if he felt like an intruder in the garden, as if he feared that at any moment someone would come to turn him out, as if the swing, the ivy, the vegetables, the paths and all the lovely things had been intended for another boy entirely, and that his enjoyment of them was eclipsed by the knowledge that at any moment now this error would be discovered, and that he would be obliged to give up what was the only truly happy period of his life.