by Ursula Bloom
He arrived there at ten every morning, though it is true that the barouche which drove him across London changed ultimately to a taxicab, or to the Met. (so handy at South Kensington, so convenient at Blackfriars). He would turn in at the little alley, always cool, even in the hottest weather, and he would pause in the doorway, approving the tall building and the discreet notice-board; later still, smiling like an inscrutable mandarin at the newly painted words ‒ ‘and Son’. It was hard that he should have been forced to let some of the offices, but this had to be. The publisher did not come until 1912; even then times were good and life was prosperous, but unfortunately there were many who blended teas and sold them; the market was becoming crowded and fraught with difficulties. Also, James Blair did not shape easily to new systems of advertising.
The old aromatic days of Bohea and Green tea had made way for the cheaper form of living. Life was not so leisurely. He was wont to say that modern people did not know a good cup of tea when they tasted it, and certainly never gave their palates time to indulge it properly. But James Blair, who was an old man before he was ever a young one, would have disliked the trend of any new generation.
In the office there was Mr. Minch, who managed it. Mr. Minch was a shrivelled little nut of a man; he wore a seedy greened coat, which buttoned too high, and his trousers were cut close to his narrow legs, long after the fashion for such trousers was dead. Fashion did not affect Mr. Minch any more than the passing of decades affected his master.
On the day that old Mr. Blair died Mr. Minch put on a black tie.
‘It’s respectful,’ he told his wife.
‘They won’t think it a liberty, you don’t suppose?’
Jessie Minch lived in terror that her husband would lose his job, and she would have to forgo the little house she held so dear, a little house of smooth, ugly bricks with a slate roof; but it was good to her. It was in Dulwich, and attached on either side to similar houses, all of which had sour front gardens, where only irises grew, and long, thin back gardens, which advertised the day of the week by the wet linen flapping on Monday, the ironed linen on Tuesday, the ‘starches’ on Wednesday, and the ‘smalls’ on Thursday.
Jessie Minch had married a man very much older than herself, because her people kept hinting that it ‘was time she got off’. She hated the sound of the tea office, just as she hated the thought of James Blair, whom she had never seen. Mr. Minch set his master on a pedestal. He aped him. In the office he fawned and bowed before the omnipotence of James Blair; but he had only to take the train home, to walk out of Dulwich station and up the refined grandeur of the Croxted Road into the little but far less refined street where he lived, and he was James Blair.
He walked in at his own door as a hero in strutting imitation of his own particular hero. He insisted in his own house that this must be done and that must be finished; he became the martinet that, in working hours, his master was to him.
Jessie knew that the present Mr. Minch was not the man whom she had married just before the Great War; she knew that the kindly side of her Mr. Minch had been murdered in the tea office. Once she had asked her husband why he had never married before the forties. It was that Sunday evening when they went down the river on a steamer to Teddington ‒ an unfortunate evening, because, going too close to a willow tree, Mr. Minch’s new straw boater had been swept into the water, which had infuriated him. Mr. Minch told his wife that he had married because Mr. Blair had done so, and gradually she realised that if James had never looked at Marguerite, Ebenezer Minch would never have looked at his Jessie.
Once she said: ‘What would you do if he sacked you? Times aren’t like they have been; people say they’ll never be the same again.’
‘I’m making it so that he never can sack me,’ said Ebenezer.
He had coached his memory until he could quote any letter that had ever come into the office; he had a faculty for recalling initials, which stood him in good stead. He missed nothing, and at that time he hoped that marriage would soften James Blair and make him more understanding of the vital importance to Ebenezer Minch of keeping his job and his home. Once he had seen Marguerite Blair, one summer evening when she called at the office for her husband. She was lovely. She radiated youth in that drab setting, like some lovely flower set in a dining-room, and made but lovelier for the dreariness around it. She was so different from Jessie Minch that Mr. Minch drew in a quick breath and felt queerly that he had been ‘done’, and felt he hated life and everything appertaining to life: in particular Marguerite Blair, with her joyous, lovely youth.
But Marguerite had died when her son was born, and Jessie Minch always felt in some strange way that she had failed her husband, because she ought to have died too, even though she had no son. She should have copied Marguerite in detail, as Ebenezer copied James Blair.
They never had any children, and the marriage that once she had cherished had become merely an irksome bond. She slaved in her home, and was only criticised and bullied in the evening when Ebenezer came back. James Blair was always held up to her as an example.
Nothing could ever alter this house, she told herself; she was tied here. But she could take a pride in the spotlessness of the step, and the brass, and the sheen on the lace curtains, knowing they invoked the envy of her neighbours, which was at least stimulating. Her marital impetus was dead. Jessie Minch knew quite well that she hated her husband.
Under the big-leafed walnut tree Emily and Hugo sat in summer, and played games together and dreamed dreams and made plans for the future. Emily liked to pretend with him that thewalnut tree was a ship, because anything to do with the sea reminded her of Mr. Binns, who, contrary to naval tradition, was peculiarly faithful. His ship had been sent to foreign parts on a tour called a ‘three-year commission’. He sent fascinating post-cards of matadors from Spain, of faldettas from Malta, and later of rickshaws from ‘Hong Kong side’. He lavished an expensive silk shawl on Emily, who did not know what to do with it, and was embarrassed but flattered by it.
‘It’s too lovely for me,’ she said.
When Mr. Binns came back they were to be married, though first of all they’d have to ‘get engaged,’ she explained. Getting engaged was fixed apparently for a special date like your wedding day, and although Mr. Binns had already written asking Emily if she would wait for him, and she had said yes, she insisted that they weren’t properly engaged yet.
The walnut tree was Hugo’s ship, and one day he would sail away in it. He’d be a cadet, and a midshipman with a telescope and lots of buttons; because he felt sure that his father would relent before that time, and ‒ like the fairy stories ‒ he would live happily ever after.
When Hugo was eight and a half he and Emily went up to London for the day to buy a school outfit. There were grey flannel suits, and a coral pink tie which took Emily’s fancy, and coral pink turndowns to the grey stockings, which were very tasteful. It all coincided with the unexpected return of Mr. Binns, some six months early owing to a difficult illness. He had met them at Lyons’ Corner House, where they had a most lavish meal, with a ‘Knickerbocker Glory’ each, an ice-cream the quantity and quality of which nearly finished little Hugo’s digestive capacities.
Emily and Mr. Binns were affectionate, and afterwards they all went to the ‘gods’ at the Coliseum. James Blair would have been indignant had he known that his son was sitting in the elevenpennies, close to the roof, in company with a common sailor; but James Blair never did know about it.
The outfit arrived at Lynton Lodge three days later, and Emily spent the next fortnight in stitching Cash’s name-tabs on to everything. Suddenly Hugo grew homesick; it came like a rash before a childish complaint.
‘I don’t want to go away,’ he said.
‘But, Master Hugo, you’ll be happy with the other little gentlemen. You’ll have somebody to play with.’
‘I want you,’ he insisted.
‘But I shall be getting married.’
He said: ‘You are go
ing to marry Mr. Binns?’
‘Yes, at Christmas, and if you are a good boy you shall come to the wedding, and have a nice big bit of cake all for yourself.’
Encouraging as that thought might be, he wasn’t certain about it. He felt that in some curious way he was being fooled.
The last night in the night nursery he felt a yearning. When he came back it wouldn’t be quite the same any more. Emily’s iron bed would have gone. Her pictures would still be here, he supposed, but it would be different. He would be a big boy, for only big boys went away to school, and came back for the holidays, and talked footer and maths and such subjects.
Emily came in last thing at night, and stood there looking down at him, shielding the candle so that the beams did not fall on his face. Then she stooped and kissed him tenderly.
‘Emily, Emily, will it be all right?’ he asked.
And she answered in her old sentimental way: ‘Yes, ducks, of course it’ll be all right. Quite all right.’
St. Winifred’s was run by the Reverend Mr. Thorne. It accepted only the sons of gentlemen, and there had been some difficulty over getting Hugo Blair within its hallowed lists, because the Rev. Mr. Thorne had pernickety ideas as to what constituted a gentleman.
‘Usually,’ said he, in an unpleasant interview with James Blair, whom he didn’t like, ‘I only accept the sons of professional people.’
‘Tea to-day is a science,’ said James Blair cautiously. ‘The professions are overdone. You may have difficulties in collecting your fees from professional people. I can pay by return of post. I make it a rule to pay all my accounts as rendered.’
Mr. Thorne, though impressed at the thought of parents who settled all accounts by return, still felt reluctant to accept the son of an unprofessional man.
‘You must forgive me,’ he said coldly, ‘but tea savours of trade.’
James Blair was used to getting his own way. He disliked the interview in the headmaster’s study, with the ostentatious desk and the heavily framed photographs of illustrious old boys (sadly in the minority). One had been a foreign princeling. James Blair had inspected this shrewdly before Mr. Thorne came in, and he appreciated the thought of a son who consorted with princes; not that there were any princes at St. Winifred’s at the moment, not even the very dark ones like young Mahommed Bey.
James Blair and Mr. Thorne did not like one another. But it was a business transaction; one could offer an account, the other could pay. On these terms Hugo was accepted.
Hugo arrived at school by car, accompanied by his father, which in itself had meant a terrifying journey for the boy. Neither of them spoke to the other, and when the car turned in at the wide gate with the big notice-board, ‘St. Winifred’s Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen’, the child craned forward, eager to see into what manner of new world he was projecting himself.
He saw the playing-fields, bravely green, and the drive rising smoothly beside them, twisting sharply round before the large, red brick house which stood behind a border of herbaceous flowers. He saw a walnut tree, thickly laid with heavy leaves about its warped boughs, and he suddenly knew that he was going to like the place.
He said so.
‘I’m going to like this place.’
‘That’s a good thing, because even if you hate it you’ll have to stay here,’ was the uncompromising reply.
The car stopped. A steward in a pink galatea jacket came to the door and opened it. Hugo eyed him with apprehension. Emily had warned him that school might be different, even dangerous, and his opinion of his fellow men was biased by his intimacy with his father. He realised that people like Mr. Binns were charmingly good-natured, but he thought that those in authority like his father, and very obviously schoolmasters, could be hard and cruel and very stern. He had had no experience of companionship, for Mr. Blair had not encouraged other children to the house. He himself had had a companionless childhood, save, of course, for his brothers, and he did not suppose that Hugo could need friends. The child’s time had been spent in a prison of four walls, in an exercise yard which was a garden with a walnut tree rising out of a quick hillock, and with the one holiday at Southsea. But then he had never recognised it as being prison, but had thought that being home it must be a lovely place, and that now, quite honestly, he was going to something very much worse.
They were escorted to the headmaster’s drawing-room, made beautiful with flowers ‒ so much more beautiful than his own home that Hugo could not understand it at all and stood bewildered by it. He liked Mrs. Thorne, in her fluttering blue frock, with her kindly smile, very young, and obviously rather nervous. She took Hugo’s hand.
‘We’ll be friends,’ she said.
He was afraid of Mr. Thorne, more because Emily had prepared him to be afraid than because of anything that Mr. Thorne actually did.
‘I tell him that his schooldays will be the happiest of his life,’ said Mr. Blair, and his unpleasant lips curled in a thin half-circle, down at the corners, pursed in the middle, as though recalling the menace of his own schooldays.
The boy looked helplessly at the master.
‘I’ll take him to see Matron,’ suggested Mrs. Thorne, and she took Hugo’s hand as they went through the hall together.
He thought that it was a beautiful place for a school, because he had expected it to be austerely stiff. But it was pretty, with flowers in bowls, and dazzling brasses, and a heavy old rum keg at the corner, with a fascinating device upon it.
‘But this isn’t the school, it is just our house,’ said Mrs. Thorne, and she opened the dividing door which led into the school. He saw freshly painted walls and long tiled corridors, the bleakness of rooms which had little furniture, the bareness of blackboards. They went up stone stairs, hand in hand. Now he saw the dorms, with an avid eye for their gaily coloured blankets and their lockers. It was so much better than anything that he had expected that he felt a thrill knowing he was privileged to live in such masculine surroundings.
He knew now that the pictures of ‘Cherry Ripe’ and of ‘Bubbles’ had been babyish; that really it had been humiliating to have Emily attend him; that he had gone up a rung on the ladder of life, and was a man in the fuller sense of the word.
Matron was large and rotund, her ample waist encircled by a shining band of starched linen, her wrists correspondingly dressed. She had a large face too, and astigmatised eyes behind thinly gold-rimmed glasses. Her hair was neither yellow nor red, but reminded him of the mottled sunflowers, the little short ones that grew in the garden at Lynton Lodge. She called him by his surname, which was exhilarating; she was not in the least nanny-ish like Emily, but rather off-hand, which fascinated him.
‘If you want anything you’ll come to Matron,’ said Mrs. Thorne.
But he wouldn’t.
He had done with women; those days were past and over; now he was a man’s man, and his destiny was to live amongst men. He couldn’t tell them about his feelings, of course, but in his heart he made a vow: he was eight years old and through with women.
It was a good school.
If it had not been so contrary to all codes he would have admitted that he liked it better than home; but nobody did things like that. In class he was intelligent, but at first sickly afraid of his masters, all save Mr. Powell, who was something in the light of a national hero at St. Winifred’s, because he had a motor-bicycle and a sports car, and understood the matrimonial obligations of caterpillars.
Later on Hugo found that masters were not there to be cruelly autocratic, as his father had taken pains to suggest, with a sadistic smile on his thin lips. The masters were human. They understood boys and had taken up teaching because they liked youth. They were happy.
Class was exciting, games were exciting, walks were exciting, especially when Mr. Powell took them, and taught them about the insects in the hedgerows and the growing corn in the fields, and the way to tell if it would be a fine day to-morrow.
On Sundays there was chapel, and singin
g hymns, and after lunch the glorious opportunity to spend one penny of his weekly sixpence in Mrs. Thorne’s drawing-room. The little boys lined up before the door and Mrs. Thorne herself doled out the sweets. There were anxious debates as to how the most could be obtained; orange balls were prime favourites, but it would be unthinkable to spend the whole penny on one brand, so four were purchased for a halfpenny, which left as much again to be expended on another source. The choice lay between bull’s eyes and fruit drops, or halfpenny bars of chocolate, thin, and liable to melt quickly in hot young hands.
This mental agony of indecision over, they went into the grounds on the summer afternoons, and the precious sweets were eaten there. A few licks would be taken from a luscious orange ball, and then it would be set aside on a convenient plantain, only to be taken up again for further affectionate licks when the mouth became so abundantly full of saliva that further delay was a torment. Always before tea-time all would be eaten, and the week’s great treat would be over, though there would be tea, with special fruit cake, and evensong to follow it.
By the end of the term he loved them all. He loved Barnes minor, and Jackson, and Williamson, and little Morton who slept in his ‘dorm’. (Known as the early birds). They were all men. He beamed if a prefect smiled upon him, knowing that it had made his day; he felt hot and glowing if Mr. Powell spoke to him. He dreaded going home again, even though it would mean seeing Emily. But he always remembered that she was a woman, and in this world of men women were outclassed. He knew, even then, that he could not meet his father as a man, because there was between them the irrevocable barrier which was already indestructible.
Two days before the term ended, when Matron was in the throes of packing, and in such a temper that nobody asked her willingly for anything, he had a talk with Mr. Thorne. The boy was in the garden; he had been fiddling with a piece of elastic which he was trying to make into a catapult, entirely forbidden by the authorities, when the headmaster came up. ‘Hello, Blair!’