If We Were Villains

The set for Lear is spectacular. The floor is tiled with plexiglass mirrors that catch every reflection in sight. Hanging from the ceilings are fiber optic cables that, when lit, transform the stage into a night sky. As the performance draws closer, the fourth-years can hardly sleep with anticipation and anxiety. Alexander returns from the hospital and spends two hours every week with a nurse and the school psychologist. Colin and Filipa keep a close eye on him. Oliver often sleeps with Meredith. Sometimes he spends the night in his room with James. James is restless and often sneaks out in the middle of the night. A blood-soaked Richard often appears in Oliver’s dreams. Sometimes James and Meredith appear too, cast as Oliver’s lovers.

The first performance of Lear is a hit. The final tragic scene (Lear and his daughters die in Act V, Scene 3, along with Edmund) moves the audience to tears. A cast party is to follow, though none of the fourth-years are very excited about it. The party itself is muted and James is nowhere to be found. Oliver goes looking for Meredith and finds her in the garden, distraught and in tears. There is something she needs to tell Oliver but she decides to wait until the next day. Oliver hugs her, and she leaves to get a drink. Oliver now goes looking for James and finds him in the library. He is standing on a table close to an open window. The room is ablaze with burning candles. Oliver asks James to get down. James complies, but again begins to speak in quotes, mostly lines from Lear. Oliver tells him he is drunk, but decides to play along, answering James with quotes. As they speak in lines, James begins to act more desperately, alarming Oliver. James shouts “farewell” and runs out (374). Oliver follows him to a bathroom where James has broken a mirror with his knuckles. Oliver tells James he wants to help, but James must tell him what’s going on. James throws his weight against Oliver, winding him. Oliver, who is bigger than James, overpowers him and holds him down. James relaxes and Oliver lets him go. James walks out to the kitchen and asks Wren to come to bed with him. Oliver is too dismayed to notice Meredith never came back with the drink.

Oliver cannot find Meredith. He asks Filipa if he can sleep in her room. The next morning, when the rest of the fourth-years are out, Oliver cleans the castle. He visits Richard’s room, undisturbed since the cast party after Caesar, and is overcome by grief and forgotten affection. Next, he goes to his room, smoothing the bed he imagines James shared with Wren the previous night. As he makes the bed, he notices the mattress appears torn near the foot of the bed. He takes off the sheet and sees a big gash in the mattress, slightly smeared with blood. Oliver reaches inside the mattress and pulls out an old boat hook, blood clinging to its cracks. Realizing this is the tool used to kill Richard, he grabs it and stumbles out.

Oliver now knows that it was James who killed Richard. He rushes to the undercroft at the FAB and hides the boat hook in the locker. By the time he’s done, he is already late for the night’s performance of Lear. Oliver rushes backstage and changes for the performance. During his scene with James, he improvises until James is forced to pay attention to him. With a look, Oliver conveys to James that he knows his secret. The play goes on.

Oliver waits for James in the dressing room. He spots Meredith, dressed as Goneril. He is relieved to see her and gives her a kiss. Meredith is elusive about where she was last night but promises to tell him later. Oliver asks her not to kiss James the way she did during rehearsals with Gwendolyn. Meredith angrily asks if he is jealous of James or of her and leaves. The scene onstage ends and James enters the dressing room. Oliver drags him outside into the lawn and tells him he found the boat hook. James confesses that he killed Richard, though that was not his intention. It was an accident.

The night of the Caesar cast party, after Oliver and Meredith locked themselves in her room, Richard was seized by an “uncontainable rage” (394). He threw Wren with force when she tried to stop him from going into the woods. Later, Wren asked James to go after Richard to ensure he didn’t hurt himself. James found Richard in the woods. Richard began taunting James and pushing him around. He asked James to admit he and Oliver had feelings for each other and leave “his” girls—Meredith and Wren—alone. An incensed James began to head back into the castle and Richard threw him against the old boathouse. James crashed into the door. He grabbed the boat hook lying on the floor to defend himself and hit Richard hard. Richard fell into the water. Assuming he was dead, James ran away, still holding the boat hook. He ran into Filipa in the castle. Filipa understood what he had done and took him to clean up, burning his bloody clothes in the fireplace. Oliver realizes Filipa has known about James all along. He tells James they will figure things out. They head back to the theatre to perform the rest of the play.

As they perform the second half of the play, Oliver notices Colborne in the audience. Meredith is speaking to Colborne. James and Oliver freeze on stage and their lines have to be said by their understudies. Frederick and Camilo finish off the play the best as they can. The audience claps uncertainly. Colborne approaches James and Oliver and says, “We couldn’t play make-believe forever. Are you ready to tell me the truth” (405)? Oliver knows what he has to do. He tells Colborne he is ready. Colborne stares at him in disbelief.

To save James, Oliver tells Colborne he kills Richard. Colborne doesn’t quite believe him as Meredith has told him she suspects James was behind the murder. Oliver sticks to the story that he killed James out of jealousy over Meredith. Oliver is arrested and the further performances of Lear cancelled. Oliver’s lawyer pleads murder out of imperfect self-defense. Filipa agrees to testify as Oliver requests, but Meredith, who seems to know the truth, claims she cannot remember anything. Oliver is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Colborne doesn’t believe Oliver is guilty and keeps pressing him to tell the truth, but Oliver stays quiet.

James visits him Oliver before the trial, asking him not to go through with his false confession. But Oliver feels that he is partly responsible for Richard’s death because it was he who followed Meredith upstairs, and he who stopped James from jumping into the water to rescue Richard. When James asks Oliver the reason behind taking the fall, Oliver tells him, “You know why” (409). He is done pretending he doesn’t love James. After Oliver’s sentence, James visits him regularly for a few years, but then stops, unable to bear the sight of Oliver in prison in his place.

Oliver finishes his story. Colborne thanks him for confirming suspicions he has long held. Oliver tells Filipa he wants to see James. Filipa sadly informs him that James died by suicide four years ago, shortly after his last visit to Oliver in prison. A wretched Oliver feels Richard’s spirit has had its revenge on him and James. He asks Filipa for Meredith’s address and heads to Chicago, where Meredith now lives. Meredith slaps Oliver when he shows up at her door and then lets him in.

Meredith tells Oliver that she and James kissed for real after Gwendolyn’s class. Later at the Lear party, James grabbed her violently in the bathroom, raving like a crazy person. Meredith asked him what was wrong and he told her she wouldn’t believe him if he told her. Meredith immediately realized that James was behind Richard’s death and fled. That night she left for the police station and told Colborne what she suspected. Oliver had found her crying in the yard after a drunken James had grabbed her violently. Oliver begins to cry. He and Meredith hold each other.

Though it is never discussed, it is decided Oliver will stay with Meredith indefinitely. He begins to think of his bed with Meredith as “our” room (421). One day when Meredith is off filming, Filipa visits Oliver with a pair of identical envelopes found in James’s abandoned car near the lake where he died by drowning. One contains a note of farewell, and the other, addressed to Oliver, has a page of handwritten Shakespearean verse. The lines, in James’s hands, are from Pericles, a “strange obscure passage” (422). These would have been the last words of Pericles, had he not asked for help. Realizing the lines are a clue, Oliver begins to research the death of James. He learns James’s body was never found. The novel ends on this enigmatic note, suggesting James may be alive.