Rupert took time planning his revenge. Three weeks to the day, on a cloudy afternoon, he took a friend’s cricket bat and walked over to the rugby field. Practice was breaking up. Spotting his assailant, Rupert stepped in front of him, holding the bat down with both hands on the handle, poised to swing. The player stopped and laughed. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Looking him in the eye, Rupert brought the bat back, and, angling it with the edge leading, struck his lower leg so hard his shinbone cracked. The player went down writhing and howling. Rupert stood still over him. “I’ll kill you next time, you cunt,” he said. The player’s teammates, having watched the spectacle, made no move toward Rupert or his victim, recognizing in the ways of honorable schoolboys that justice had been done. After a minute of silence, two of them lifted the wailing boy by his arms and carried him to the infirmary. The rest walked back to their houses. No one told. After that, Rupert was left alone; there were many more scared and docile little boys to prey upon.
Self-abuse was rampant at Longleat. One of the masters called it “a cursed bugaboo, more heinous than cheating, a crime against the temple of the body, made in God’s image.” The boys called him Old Bugger-Boo, which Rupert realized by his third year was neither mocking nor affectionate. The boys knew the masters knew what went on in the houses at night. Their rooms reeked of semen. They reasonably concluded that mutual masturbation was not self-abuse, a relief for the boys with religious scruples or Victorian parents or homosexual desires.
Growing up in an orphanage had made Rupert dislike the close company of other boys. He took up boxing at Longleat so he wouldn’t have to wrestle; touching other boys’ bodies was repulsive to him, like touching someone else’s snot or vomit. When Harry, at two months, peed on him, he almost dropped him. He never changed a diaper; he couldn’t. “I was the tenth person in the bathwater,” he told Eleanor. “I can never get clean enough.” Eleanor mildly objected. “I didn’t know little boys minded being dirty.” Rupert shook his head. “I didn’t mind being dirty. I minded bathing in other boys’ piss and shit.”
American bathrooms, with their endless hot water pouring from the ceiling, were a refuge and revelation to Rupert. He showered twice a day. When he and Eleanor moved into the Hotel des Artistes, Eleanor saw that he had his own bathroom. It was the best gift ever, he told her. His bathroom was off limits to everyone in the family, including Eleanor. Only the housekeeper was allowed in. When he was made managing partner at Maynard, Tandy, he moved into an office with a private bathroom. “I’d have given up fifty thousand dollars a year years ago for a private bathroom at the office,” he told Eleanor. He regarded American plumbing as the pinnacle of its civilization, more impressive than its dentistry, its skyscrapers, even its air-conditioning. He loved air-conditioning. “It can never be too cold in summer,” he would say. He thought American homes were overheated and, in the winter, he was always opening the windows in the apartment, to let in fresh air. What fresh air? Eleanor thought. She followed behind at a discreet distance, closing them. Brought up in the city, she was most comfortable, summer or winter, at eighty degrees.
—
Rupert arrived by freighter in New York in July 1955, with two hundred pounds sterling, the remnant of his legacy from Father Falkes. The exchange rate was in his favor, providing him with more than five hundred and fifty dollars, enough, he reckoned, to carry him at least six months. He had read the classified ads in the New York newspapers regularly before he left England. He thought he would be able to rent a room with two meals a day, pension-style, for sixty-five dollars a month in Manhattan, less in one of the boroughs. He was confident he would find a job in six months. He could teach history; he had read history at Cambridge. If he had to, he’d wait tables or tend bar, anything except clean. He needed a job to get a green card, a green card to get a job. He’d find a cricket club or a bar where English expats hung out. He’d offer his services to an Episcopal church with a serious choir; he’d sing for his supper and other meals as well. Someone would help him; someone always had.
His first night in New York, Rupert slept in a Times Square hotel, one step up from a flophouse. He checked in as Robert Fairchild, under a wary premonition that he might not want to be remembered by his earliest New York acquaintances. The admitting clerk sat in a cage. The charge for a private single with a toilet was seventy-five cents. The bathtub was down the hall. Rupert had put two crumpled dollars in his pocket so he would have to reach inside it only to pay the bill. He flattened out a one carefully, giving the impression that he was hoarding his last dollars. He had worn an old pair of khaki trousers, a worn tweed jacket, a fedora, and an oversized shabby raincoat, a legacy from Father Falkes. The rest of his clothes and his toiletries were in a straw suitcase. He didn’t look like someone worth robbing, though he was clean and unblemished and not drunk. The room smelled of stale cigarettes, the bed was unmade, the sheets stained with food and human emissions. Rupert locked the door and moved the dresser against it. He slept on top of the bedspread with his money belt, underwear, and shoes on. He checked out at seven a.m. and walked to Penn Station, where he brushed his teeth and washed his face. He then walked ten blocks down Seventh Avenue to the McBurney Y. A room there was a dollar fifty. He figured he could stay four nights. He checked in again as Robert Fairchild. He took a twenty-minute shower.
Everyone spoke English, but no one was. He was in a foreign country where no one knew him or understood him. He felt light-headed. Anything was possible.
—
Stefan, one of the Y lifeguards, told Rupert about a room in a house in Brooklyn, in Greenpoint. “It’s a Polish neighborhood, nice people mostly,” he said. “They don’t like blacks or Jews, but you’ll be fine. They’ll like your fancy accent. Where’d you get that?”
Rupert phoned the owner, Ruta Wolinski, and made an appointment to see the room. “I don’t let just anyone stay, Mr. Fairchild,” she said. “Stefan said you were nice, clean. I run a decent house. I cook simple food. Two meals a day, breakfast at seven thirty a.m., dinner at five thirty. You share a bathroom. I clean the house. I keep it very clean. I make your bed and give you fresh sheets and towels once a week. Two dollars a night. Some months sixty dollars, some months sixty-two. February, a bargain, fifty-six.” Her voice had a slight inflection, not a full-blown accent, as if she were a native speaker who had learned English from immigrants. She sounded not warm but not unpleasant, which suited Rupert. He didn’t want a relationship with his landlady.