Another World by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online

to wander off like that.
    Geordie’s getting tired. Nick takes over, spooning mashed potato and gravy into the toothless mouth. Sometimes the pap’s regurgitated, and has to be caught on the spoon and reinserted. It’s like feeding Jasper; he’s an expert. He gets half a dozen spoonfuls in before Geordie waves him almost angrily away. ‘That’ll do,’ he says.
    Nick pushes the wheeled table to the foot of his bed and settles him back more comfortably on the pillows. ‘Tea?’
    ‘Aye, go on.’
    Nick tips the beaker and a little dribbles into Geordie’s mouth. He watches the bulbous Adam’s apple jerking as he drinks.
    ‘That’s enough, son.’
    Son, Nick thinks. Yes. Fair enough.
    *
    When Nick was growing up Grandad’s silent presence in the house had been only one more oddity in the way their lives were lived.
    Nick’s father was the Headmaster of a small preparatory school; his mother was the Matron. As a small boy he was always aware of another world on the other side of the door in the hall, though until he was seven he was forbidden to enter the school.
    Every Sunday, in term, half a dozen boys would come to tea, sitting out on the lawn in summer on their best behaviour, making polite conversation in high-pitched self-confident voices. Once when Nick was almost seven one of the boys met him accidentally in the hall and gave him a Chinese burn. Not for any reason. He just did. Nick’s eyes watered. ‘Don’t tell,’ the boy said, going out on to the lawn. Nick stared at the red marks left by his fingers and pulled his sleeve down to hide them. Then he went and sat at the table and watched the boy’s mouth moving delicately up and down as he chewed a piece of cake. He didn’t say anything, and when Mummy came in to say goodnight he didn’t say anything then either. He lay in the dark, not bothering to wonder why the boy had done it. It was just something that happened. He hadn’t known that before, but he recognized it now.
    When he was seven he went through the door in the hall and into his father’s school and the door closed quietly behind him, with a small puff of sound.
    The two worlds smelled different: furniture polish, Mummy’s scent, good cooking, clean carpets one side of the door; custard, boiled cabbage, gym shoes, Jeyes fluid, grey wool, small-boy smell on the other. His father, who was immensely tall and towered over the bed when he came upstairs to say goodnight, became an even taller man on a platform saying prayers. When you met him in the corridors you had to remember to call him Sir. For the first few weeks he was ‘Da-Sir’, but Nick learned quickly. He had to. ‘Mummy’ was more difficult because it started with the same letter as Matron. He never called her Mummy at school, but he often called her Matron at home, once at a family tea party and all the aunts and uncles laughed. Nick didn’t think it was funny. (Forty years on, with children of his own, he knows it wasn’t funny.)
    Life was full of traps. Nick’s father had the essential apparatus of a good disciplinarian: eyes in his arse. He knew about the smoking in the copse behind the school, he knew which boys slipped out between prep and dinner to lay bets at the local betting shop, he knew who was being bullied and who was doing it, just knew, but the boys didn’t believe that. Nick was always suspected of telling tales, though he said nothing, clammed up about school as soon as he was safely on the other side of the door. All the temptations to betray were the other way round.
    Very few boys were prepared to risk the charge of ‘sucking up’ by becoming his friend, and he was desperate to belong. Once, when he was eleven, they were all talking about sex. Did the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh do it? No, they unanimously decided. The Vicar and his wife? No. Mr Halford and Matron? Sidelong glances at Nick, giggles.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard them.’
    Later, one of the boys, the one he most wanted to have as