Free Blood and Water and Other Tales by Patrick McGrath Page A

complicated than the simple system of jointed pipes alluded to above.

    First of all, a couple of facts about the setting. Ravengloom heaved up out of the damp Lancashire moors some fifteen miles from a decaying industrial town called Gryme. Originally the country house of an eccentric Liverpool merchant with a fortune made in the slave trade, it had been appropriated by the Order in 1867 and converted into a tortuous complex of cubicles and classrooms, wherein the priests had begun instructing the sons of the Catholic gentry in two dead languages and a Spartan regimen designed to tone their physical and spiritual gristle.
    When Ambrose Syme, aged thirteen, arrived at Ravengloom in the year 1947, he was in most regards quite unremarkable. He was tall for his age, rather bookish, and equipped as most schoolboys are with a sort of erotic condenser deep in his loins that generated a steady stream of vividly pornographic imagery and constantly interfered with his reading. Ambrose’s father, an Anglo-Irish businessman with extensive holdings in Malayan rubber, had himself been educated at Ravengloom, and knew what boys of thirteen were like. He trusted that the Holy Fathers would harness the boy’s impulses and divert them into socially useful channels.
    In the years that followed, Ambrose Syme was first terrorized with visions of eternal damnation, and then taught how to displace energy from the lower part of his body to the upper. The technique employed in his case was somewhat analogous to the operation of the common refrigerator, in which liquid is pumped up through tubes to the evaporator at the head, being turned in the process into gas. This transformation requires the absorption of heat, and thus is the temperature of the refrigerator’s contents lowered. Ambrose Syme did not turn his sexual urges into gas, exactly; rather, he learned to convert them into long, ponderous sentences of a verbose and bombastic turgidity which he then translated into Latin verse, after which he analyzed the form, function, and interrelation of the various parts of the verse, counting the accents and scanning the feet until the heat generated in his nether organs had been drawn off and the primitive thoroughly assimilated to the classical. And this, in a nutshell, is the psychosexual history of Ambrose Syme, a textbook case of compulsory sublimation in the literary mode. In the fullness of time he joined the Order and after a long and rigorous novitiate was ordained a priest and returned to his alma mater to teach classics.
    So far, one would think, so good. Each one of us has a cross to bear, and in Ambrose Syme’s case that cross was the cross of carnal appetite, of which, it now appears, he was cursed with a considerably larger than average amount. For after more than two decades of successfully defusing his desires by aestheticizing them, it seems surprising that he should suddenly succumb to temptation once more, that he should fall. But fall he did, for not even poetry can channel the flood forever; and in his falling he unleashed the full force of his long-dammed lust upon one ill-equipped to repulse it.

    “Ambrose Syme!” cried a feeble voice.
    Ambrose was by this time hurrying along an ill-lit corridor in Ravengloom’s east wing. Passing the rector’s study his progress was once more arrested. The rector was an old, old man called Father Mungo; for many years he had done missionary work in the Zambesi Basin, then returned, like an elephant, to Ravengloom to die. He sat now beside the window of his study with a breviary in his lap. No lights had been lit, and the room was heavy with the gloom of that damp winter day. “Who is that boy?” murmured the old man, lifting a trembling finger to the window.
    Ambrose joined him. Outside the window the ground fell away steeply, then leveled off to a very muddy stretch of rugby pitches. Tramping rapidly across this morass and about to be swallowed by the mist was a boy in a school