“I know it’s terrible, what happened to his father,” the housemaster continued (It happened to me too, Sunny thought), “and I believe he died a hero” (his grandmother gave a mute, restrained nod, accepting this as a compliment), “but you know this kind of boy…” The sentence went unfinished, leaving Sunny wondering what kind of boy he was. Wicked, obviously, that seemed to go without saying. He had killed his father, apparently. How? How had he done that? How?
“Cors yew knows yew was with your dad when ’e died,” Mrs. Kerrich said. “An’ if yew ’adn’t been with ’im ’e wouldn’t ’ave been there, would ’e? Orn that level-crawsin’. An’ ’cos ’e saaarcrificed ’iself for yew, didn’t ’e? T’save yew from that darn train.”
Really? Sunny thought. This didn’t tally with his own fragmented, anguished memory of events, but then what did he know? (“Nothing,” his grandmother said.) This, apparently, was the version of the accident that the inquest had settled on. His father had pushed him out of the path of the train. The traumatized train driver (who was on permanent sick leave because of the “incident”) reported that “It all happened so fast. A man—Mr. Villiers—appeared to be struggling with a small boy on the level-crossing. The man—Mr. Villiers—seemed to be trying to pull them both out of the path of the train. He managed to push the boy to safety but he didn’t have enough time to save himself.” Mr. Villiers was to be commended for his heroic selflessness, the coroner said.
“HERO DAD dies saving son,” it said in the local paper. At work, Teddy had sent a junior to look up the microfiche and found the newspaper account of the accident as well as a report on the inquest. Unmanned level-crossing, three-thirty down train to Norwich, and so on. Dominic Villiers, local artist. His son was known to have behavioural problems and was “fascinated by trains,” Thomas Darnley, local gardener and handyman at Jordan Manor, the boy’s home, said.
“Dear God,” Teddy said.
The true verdict—that Dominic had killed himself while out of his mind on a cocktail of LSD and defective brain chemicals, that he had tried to take his son with him, was never proposed, although as far as Teddy was concerned this was infinitely more likely than Sunny’s father being unable to move quickly enough to avoid a speeding train.
Poor Sunny, never to know the truth, to live with the burden of guilt all his life, or at least until he became a Buddhist and sloughed off the past.
(“You were seven years old!” Bertie said. “How could you possibly have been to blame?”)
“We’ll keep him at home,” his grandmother said to the housemaster.
“In chains, I hope,” the housemaster laughed.
He wet the bed every night now and he often wet his pants during the daytime. He seemed to have no control over his body or his mind. It was frightening. They “engaged a tutor”—a Mr. Alistair Treadwell—whose method of teaching was simply to repeat things more loudly each time until he lost his patience. Mr. Treadwell spent a lot of his time talking to Sunny about “injustice” and how “the case against him” had been “trumped up” by someone with a grudge. He was never even alone with the child, he said. But once your reputation was questioned, that was it.
They had lessons at the dining-room table, which was as big, if not bigger, than Teddy’s actual dining room. Mr. Treadwell ate egg sandwiches for lunch and then breathed his eggy breath all over Sunny in the afternoon. Sunny usually fell asleep and when he woke up Mr. Treadwell was reading a fat book (“Tolstoy”). Sunny was “practically unteachable,” Mr. Treadwell told his grandmother. “Didn’t you learn anything at your last school?” he was always asking him. “Not any of the basics? The Three Rs?” Apparently not. Steiner didn’t teach the basics until you were over six and Sunny had spent his days drawing with wax crayons and singing songs about dwarves and angels and blacksmiths, the mysterious trinity of the Three Rs still a distant threat on the horizon.
And then one day while they were doing what Mr. Treadwell called “simple arithmetic” but which Sunny found far from simple, Sunny realized that he needed the toilet, but Mr. Treadwell said, “Get to the end of this sum first, please,” so that by the time he got to the end of the sum—or rather by the time Mr. Treadwell had given up on ever getting the correct answer out of him—it was becoming clear to Sunny that he was never going to make it. The nearest toilet was the “downstairs cloakroom” which was still miles away, and he set off running awkwardly and almost knocked himself out when he turned a corner and ran into his grandmother.
“I need to go,” he said.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” she said. He started to panic because he couldn’t think what it could be and he really, really needed the toilet. What had he forgotten? “Please—thank you—I’m sorry, Grandmama,” he said, desperately throwing everything he could think of at the question.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“OK,” he said.
“No, excuse me.”
“Yes, OK.”