Then, just four days after their return — Christmas is approaching, and the boys have taken to counting days — an upper-school boy breaks through the ice while playing on the school pond. They are in the midst of a cycle of rapid melts and sudden freezes, and the boys have been warned to be careful. Charlie happens to be present: it is the afternoon break and he is returning books to the school library. The water in the pond is less than a yard deep, but the bottom is littered with rocks and discarded old junk. In summer, when the water is low and the sky clear, one can see the shape of an old bedstead rusting at its bottom, like the wreck of a steamer lost near the shore.

It’s this very shallowness that causes the injury. The boy’s skate hits something at an awkward angle, and his ankle and knee buckle. He is screaming so much, they have a hard time dragging him out of the hole and onto the thicker ice. There is blood on his trouser leg, hard to see at first, then dyeing the ice a vivid crimson. Low down on the shin, a thick, jagged spike pokes a bulge into the wet wool that nobody dares touch or even name. Worst of all is the pungent yellow Smoke that comes out of him, out of his mouth chiefly, along with his screams. It does not rise like a plume but rather crawls along at ankle-height then falls to the snow as a fine yellow powder, impossibly bright, like the jar of sulphur on the shelf in chemistry class.

It’s Charlie who beds the boy’s head on his knees until the school nurse arrives. His name is Westwood. Peter. They share a bench in Greek.

“Help me,” Peter keeps shouting up at Charlie’s face, not five inches away, and Charlie strokes his hair and promises he will be fine. By the time the nurse gets there, Westwood has passed out, his blood steaming in the cold air.

The boy is saved, but for several days the school lives in suspense over whether his leg will come off. It doesn’t. When Charlie’s trousers return from the laundry, he can trace the outline of the boy’s Soot as a faint yellow line that runs from knee to mid-thigh. Disquieted by this, Charlie requests special permission to deposit the trousers in the school’s charity box, destined for an orphanage in London. He’d rather burn the pair but this, he is reminded, is against the rules. Charlie recalls the incinerator at Oxford station. They broke the rules easily enough on their return from London.

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