Lord Byron lay on his deathbed. Around him stood a munitions officer in gleaming white breeches and a red coat, as well as several Greek soldiers wearing mournful expressions (these latter were Shells, heavily made up with big black mustaches).
After a few moments of dialogue and a pregnant pause, the comforting figures froze in a tableau. Byron stood. Dusted himself off. (The audience tittered; it was a comical touch, to puncture the moment.) He stood up and came downstage. The lights tightened around him. The audience in Speech Room hushed, prepared to give the actors one last burst of attention. Under the blanket of darkness, Lord Byron recited, in a calm, cool tone, a final spell:
The dinner and the soiree too were done
The supper too discussed, the dames admired.
Byron’s eyes winked at one section of the audience, center left, as if he were tempted by some of the girls he’d seen there over the course of the evening. But he moved on.
The banqueteers had dropped off one by one—
The song was silent.
And the dance . . . expired.
He cast another glance around the room, fully in control. Then he turned. Slowly and deliberately, he climbed back into his place in center stage, amid the peering forms of the Greek soldiers, and under the munitions officer’s concerned gaze.
“The last thin petticoats were vanished, gone,” declared Lord Byron, with a wan gesture at the sky. “Like fleeing clouds into the sky retired. And nothing brighter gleamed through the saloon . . .”
The lights narrowed on the stage tableau.
“Than dying tapers,” he said, dreamy now, reclining into death. “And the peeping moon.”
The spotlight faded and . . . extinguished.
The applause in Speech Room was polite, even warm, though from his spot in the back row, Fawkes wondered if it amounted to a sigh of relief. Piers Fawkes had not scandalized the crowd with his potty mouth and vulgarity, or included X-rated references too raw for the grandmothers in attendance. No, for Fawkes it had been a rather conservative affair, befitting the stack of thin trade paperbacks arranged on the card table in the corridor on the way out, the ones with the oil painting of Byron on the cover along with The Fever of Messolonghi (a title he had come to despise) scribbled across it in what was meant to be a nineteenth-century-inky effect. Tomasina’s idea. Seven pounds ninety-nine from Barking Press, with a blurb from Andrew Motion. Not bad, in all. Still, Fawkes, in his sport coat, sank down into his seat. While he had been the guest of honor for drinks in Colin Jute’s office with the governors, the evening was really for the students, and the audience said so with their applause. Cheers for the thirteen-year-old Greek platoon and their comic relief officer with the pillow-stuffed belly (Fawkes could not resist applauding; he liked his own broader jokes; and the boy’s performance had been winning); grateful applause for Hugh; huzzahs for the ladies, especially the battle-ax Lady Melbourne, an unexpected audience favorite.
But the real roar came at the end, for Byron. The actor now stood at the front, his curly hair gleaming with sweat, gobbling up the attention. One section of Speech Room rose in enthusiastic applause—girls squealing in that unattractive way—as well as Sir Alan Vine and the Headland boys. Byron made a gesture, as if to rip off his clothes. The young males in the audience thundered; nervous laughter followed. Byron blushed, then coyly unbuttoned his Regency coat. The effect was anticlimactic, since Persephone Vine was of course still wearing a shirt, and had strapped down her breasts in a very tight athletic bra; even she was not going to flash her tits to three hundred parents and students in Speech Room.
Fawkes saw a middle-aged couple, sitting one row in front of him, look confused. The wife leaned over to another couple nearby. Fawkes could partly read her lips and suspected he knew her question: I know it’s really a girl, but who is she? What’s all the excitement about? The reply, he could partially hear over the curtain calls: She’s one of the ones who was sick. She and the other boy survived. Woman Number One shook her head, moved; hard to believe, that poor girl, Fawkes read in her expression; and the woman applauded harder. Fawkes had had enough. He ducked through the row and out a back exit, into the December night.
Once there, he did not quite know what to do. The right thing would be to stay, mingle, drink in the attention, store it up for later, thank his hosts and former employers. But then there would be the awkward goodbyes. That feeling of everyone else having someone to go home with, somewhere to go, but him. And there was Persephone. Looking at her, and the rest of the cast, up close, was knives to him. The missing face . . . well, it was best just to avoid the whole scene. He lit a cigarette, circled around Speech Room, and started down the hill.
“Sir,” piped a voice behind him.
It was the tiny form of a Shell in his straw hat. He squinted up at Fawkes in the glare of the streetlight.
“Hello.”
“You’re Mr. Fawkes.”
“I am.”
“Are you still teaching here?”
“No, I’ve left.”
“Why?”
Why? Fawkes asked himself. Because I was fired. Because I was a drunk. Because I battled the inexplicable, when no one asked me to. Because I lost precious things that did not belong to me.
“I’m pursuing other opportunities,” he said drily.
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Piss off.”
Fawkes dug his hands in his pockets and restarted his journey, then reproached himself—hadn’t he vowed to be better than that? He stopped and turned, but the boy had vanished.
An old sense of panic gripped Fawkes. Where had the boy gone? Who—what—had Fawkes been speaking to, out there in the darkness? He stood, bewildered. Then a giggle caught his attention. He turned again, and saw that the Shell was watching him, and had been joined by a friend: another tiny man, with pale skin, long white fingers, in his white shirt and black tie and bluer. The two regarded him with undisguised, gleeful malice, exchanged a whisper, and giggled again. He supposed he deserved it. They turned their backs to him and resumed their journey. Fawkes noticed that the two boys were holding hands. He watched them, surprised: their fingers intertwined as they walked away, one of them actually skipping. It was a delightfully innocent sight, in such a cynical, rowdy, bullying environment. A young friendship, born at Harrow: a good thing, he reassured himself. Yet Fawkes found a familiar fear pulsing through him. He watched them, until the two straw hats vanished into the black.