Free In the Time of Greenbloom by Gabriel Fielding

wanted to call out loud to whatever gods there were, powerful listening gods who would hear and understand and explain to the Badger and to them all that this was wrong;that no one had any right to behave like this, that the knots in the net spreading out from that one word in Monsieur Camambert’s class, were knots tied by Blind Men in nothing more binding than cotton, and that they should be instantly broken.
    But none of this could be said; it went on somewhere behind his eyes as a series of unfinished scarcely visualised pictures, and he realised that just as the Badger seemed to him to be so infinitely old that he was far away on a high hill, he himself must seem just like any ordinary boy to the Badger.
    â€œYes, Blaydon?”
    â€œNothing, sir. It was only that you gave me your permission to go to my brother’s wedding tomorrow.”
    Could it be that he had forgotten? that it was not a trap after all? The Badger never forgot anything; his memory was as clean as his small cold-bathed body, as crisp as his white cuffs; but perhaps, this once, just this once, he had forgotten.
    â€œYou said you’d written to my people sir.”
    â€œSo I had.” The words were really sad as though the Badger were more disappointed than was John himself. “But now I shall not have time to write to them again. I shall have to telegraph them at their London hotel.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œPerhaps before you go, Blaydon, you could give me the address; your father omitted to mention it in his letter to me.
    The Russell Hotel, Russell Square; but if he said he did not know it the Badger would not be able to tell them and they themselves might ring up.
    â€œI’m afraid I don’t know it, sir.”
    â€œReally?” He leaned slowly back in his chair so that it creaked. “Perhaps then it is just as well that this has happened, Blaydon; because you would have found it a little difficult, in your ignorance, to meet your parents for the luncheon they had arranged, would you not?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    As clearly as John himself had seen it, the Badger had seen the lie; and he knew that for the Badger it had blotted out the last little chink of light at the bottom of his lair; had confirmed him of the rightness of the latest of his fifty years of actions as a headmaster. They looked at each other dully.
    â€œVery well Blaydon you may go.”
    â€œThank you sir.”
    He ran to the door as he had remembered running to doors all his life; quickly so that he might reach them before his sobs could be heard or the contortions of his face be apparent. In the passage, he closed it behind him and walked, holding his breath, back to the day room.
    In the darkness, above the whispers and smuggled laughter of the others, he could hear, in the eaves, the hooing of the wind: wind, which, like thunder travelling down the sky over strange downs and distant towns, might only a few minutes before have resounded over the very roof of the Russell Hotel where the family were staying; where soon they would all themselves be going to sleep.
    Even in the midst of their preoccupation, their gaiety and excitement over the family’s first wedding, they must surely have thought of him and missed him a little. Nearer home, he was sure, Mother would never have permitted this awful thing to happen; she would personally have ‘tackled’ the Badger and wanted to know exactly why John was being prevented from coming; and when she had heard the Badger’s reasons she would either have over-ridden him by a storm of vehemence, or undercut him by a sudden display of extraordinary sweetness. She must have been too busy, too concerned with trying to appear smart and happy in front of Prudence’s very London family; otherwise she would certainly have done something; for whenever she could find the time she loved him. She probably loved him as much as Nanny did and a great deal more than Melanie who, of