Spare

He did as I asked. But it was a mere stopgap.

Once or twice I’d confess to a teacher or fellow student that I wasn’t merely in the wrong class but in the wrong location. I was in way, way over my head. They’d always say the same thing: Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. And don’t forget you always have your brother here!

But I wasn’t the one forgetting. Willy told me to pretend I didn’t know him.

What?

You don’t know me, Harold. And I don’t know you.

For the last two years, he explained, Eton had been his sanctuary. No kid brother tagging along, pestering him with questions, pushing up on his social circle. He was forging his own life, and he wasn’t willing to give that up.

None of which was all that new. Willy always hated it when anyone made the mistake of thinking us a package deal. He loathed it when Mummy dressed us in the same outfits. (It didn’t help that her taste in children’s clothes ran to the extreme; we often looked like the twins from Alice in Wonderland.) I barely took notice. I didn’t care about clothes, mine or anyone else’s. So long as we weren’t wearing kilts, with that worrisome knife in your sock and that breeze up your arse, I was good. But for Willy it was pure agony to wear the same blazer, the same tight shorts, as me. And now, to attend the same school, was pure murder.

I told him not to worry. I’ll forget I ever knew you.

But Eton wasn’t going to make that easy. Thinking to be helpful, they put us under the same bloody roof. Manor House.

At least I was on the ground floor.

Willy was way upstairs, with the older boys.

17.

Many of the sixty boys in Manor House were as welcoming as Willy. Their indifference, however, didn’t unsettle me as much as their ease. Even the ones my age acted as if they’d been born on the school grounds. Ludgrove had its problems, but at least I knew my way around, knew how to fox Pat, knew when sweets got handed out, how to survive letter-writing days. Over time I’d scratched and clawed my way to the top of the Ludgrove pyramid. Now, at Eton, I was at the bottom again.

Starting over.

Worse, without my best friend, Henners. He was attending a different school.

I didn’t even know how to get dressed in the morning. Every Etonian was required to wear a black tailcoat, white collarless shirt, white stiff collar pinned to the shirt with a stud—plus pinstripe trousers, heavy black shoes, and a tie that wasn’t a tie, more like a cloth strip folded into the white detachable collar. Formal kit, they called it, but it wasn’t formal, it was funereal. And there was a reason. We were supposed to be in perpetual mourning for old Henry VI. (Or else for King George, an early supporter of the school, who used to have the boys over to the castle for tea—or something like that.) Though Henry was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, and though I was sorry for his passing, and for whatever pain it had caused those who loved him, I wasn’t keen on mourning the man around the clock. Any boy might balk at taking part in a never-ending funeral, but for a boy who’d just lost his mum it was a daily kick in the balls.

First morning: It took forever to fasten my trousers, button my waistcoat, fold my stiff collar, before finally getting out the door. I was frantic, desperate not to be late, which would mean being forced to write my name in a large ledger, the Tardy Book, one of many new traditions I’d need to learn, along with a long list of new words and phrases. Classes were no longer classes: they were divs. Teachers were no longer teachers: they were beaks. Cigarettes were tabbage. (Seemingly everyone had a raging tabbage habit.) Chambers was the mid-morning meeting of the beaks, when they discussed the students, especially the problem students. I often felt my ears burning during Chambers.

Sport, I decided, would be my thing at Eton. Sporty boys were separated into two groups: dry bobs and wet bobs. Dry bobs played cricket, football, rugby, or polo. Wet bobs rowed, sailed, or swam. I was a dry who occasionally got wet. I played every dry sport, though rugby captured my heart. Beautiful game, plus a good excuse to run into stuff very hard. Rugby let me indulge my rage, which some had now taken to calling a “red mist.” Plus, I simply didn’t feel pain the way other boys did, which made me scary on a pitch. No one had an answer for a boy actually seeking external pain to match his internal.