Inch of Fortune

by Simon Raven

  But for all this, Esme's education had been a good one. He started it at a smart, finicky and expensive Surrey prep school. After he had been there four years the war and a major scandal (which included Esme) brought this to an end, and he was hurried off to safety (both physical and moral) in Somerset. There he was taught Greek, a subject for which the first school had been too modem, and found himself, in the summer of 1941, elected to the top entrance scholarship of a large and important public school known as Mandat a Domus.

  On arrival there the following September he learnt three things which had so far been carefully concealed from him. The first was that he must be extremely clever, as scholars in general and top scholars in particular were not elected for looks; and the second was that, if they had been elected for looks, he would still have won a good place. He found these two items very encouraging: and when he considered them in conjunction with the third thing he now learnt, which was an unedited version of the facts of life, he felt that there was a vista before him of almost infinite variety and diversion.

  He was right. There was. But there was also, he discovered, a class of men whose life's work it was to prevent people enjoying that vista. Every year more people discovered, like himself, that it was there, and every year the self-appointed vigilants gathered themselves together with more determination than ever to fulfil their proper function as pedagogues, which was, first and so far as in them lay, to obscure the attractions of the prospect, and secondly, where this was impossible, to denounce it as a sinful vision. (It was their way of getting their own back for the inadequacy of their salaries.) Now as the country was involved, when Esme first arrived, in a large and destructive war, and as the men who proffered their services as schoolmasters were in consequence more decrepit than usual, one would have thought they would have had their hands fully occupied with the more profitable business of educating the young rather than with that of afflicting them with their own inhibitions. But not a bit of it. If their hands were more palsied, their denunciations, at the same time, were more impassioned, their watch was more vigilant, and their interference with everybody's amusements was more indefatigable than at any previous time. They even had a new weapon. For in peace-time interference had been conducted in the name of class, morals and, of course, the founder (who was supposed to represent both, but was in fact a revolting Elizabethan profiteer who had sought to cleanse his soul by dispensing a fraction of his ill-gotten fortune in the cause of education): but it was now discovered that the sanction of war could be used for an appeal to 'the old boys in the trenches', whose deaths were accordingly recited at evensong every Sunday. To this appeal, as was rightly thought, only the most corrupt souls could remain deaf; so that Sunday evening was a time of guilt, unhappiness and trembling, for one had just heard solemnly recited the names of twenty men, now dead, whose sacrifice, it appeared, one had profaned and sullied by all the short comings, irreverence and ingratitude one's own recent conduct had displayed. It was an unpleasant charge, and few boys had either the intelligence or the courage to withstand it. Life at school during the war was therefore dull, hagridden, uncomfortable, and, above all, deadened by that deplorable opiate, a sense of guilt.

  Esme's reaction to all this was immediate and, for his years, commendable. He decided first that it would stand him in good stead to work hard and learn as much as possible; and secondly, that on every other score he would do his best to cheat the grudging crowd who wished to curtail his enjoyments. To this end he reckoned his strongest weapon was deceit, for it would have the incomparable advantage of bringing him positions of credit and responsibility, the abuse of which would be a final and unequalled pleasure.

  For a time all went well, and his excellent work received all the commendation it deserved. The trouble came over what people called his character; for while his deceits were woven into a tissue of ingenious device, his natural vanity, combined with a keen sense of humour, prevented him from keeping the necessary silence when a master-stroke had been achieved. What made it worse was that he included among his butts things held practically sacred in time of war, things like the School O.T.C., National Service, God, and the House Spirit — all of which seemed to him merely rather crude excuses for curtailing his (already quite cultured) leisure and interfering with his physical comfort. The usual jingle (able but unstable) began to go the rounds.

  Oddly enough, however, his acknowledged irresponsibility, far from keeping him in mean positions, seemed actually to contribute to the swiftness of his promotion. The explanation was twofold and very simple. In the first place, he had the great gift of confessing his sins, with the utmost ingenuousness and with apparent shame, just when (as he very well knew) he was about to be summoned and called to account. (His technique in promising new starts was unrivalled.) And secondly, his house-master had a firm nineteenth-century belief in the essential goodness of all intelligent people — provided, of course, their intelligence was not allowed to become atrophied. It followed therefore that if an intelligent person like Esme was misbehaving, it was due to his having inadequate opportunity for the exercise of his gifts. This delusion he himself was not slow to encourage. Among Oxford men, it seems, the belief about man loving the highest dies hard: for even three and a half years of Esme were not taken as confutation.

  The upshot of it all was that in September of 1945, Esme found himself a foundation scholar of a well-known Cambridge college, assistant head-monitor of his house, and with a year to kill before leaving school. For it had been decided that to send him straight to Cambridge at seventeen and a half would not give the opportunity for the final development that was required of his moral backbone. A further year at school, it was hopefully assumed, with even greater responsibilities, would at last take care of that. Nobody had yet realized that in Esme's case the moral backbone, like the appendix, had been in a condition of desuetude from birth.

  As for Esme himself, he had decided that after four years' genuine hard work this last should be spent in cultured relaxation. As the war was now over no one could really object to culture (though even over this there was a good deal of muttering); it was Esme's ideas of relaxation (opportunities for which in his present position of trust were almost unlimited) that really did him in. One day the monitor next beneath him, who stood to inherit his position, after overhearing a particularly scabrous scries of uproarious confessions, persuaded himself that the path of duty was plain and led to the house-master's study.

  Esme was summoned without delay. He employed his confessional charm as never before, he promised new starts of Arctic severity and Utopian cleanliness, he even said he would get confirmed. But for once he had gone too far. His parents appeared on the following day: and Esme was taken away, tearful but unregencrate, to the accompaniment of a chorus he was often to hear again — 'I always said that boy was heading for a bad end.'

  Somehow or other he came through the Army with his reputation slightly mended. A War Office Selection Board was deceived by his good manners, and he had been despatched to an Officers' Training School in India. Here it was reckoned impossible to fail one's commission, as too much public money had been spent on getting one there for the most incompetent cadet to be allowed to return ungazetted. Esme, furthermore, made up to his platoon officer by pretending to be ill but refusing to go sick, in consequence of which he was excused unpleasant tasks and received an excellent report.

  True, there had been a little incident on his return. For while he had been lucky enough to be commissioned into an extremely smart regiment, his first colonel had been shrewd enough to classify him as he deserved, and had had him attached to a regiment of Artillery — and an inferior one at that. One day an inspecting brigadier found rust on one of his guns. The Commanding Officer sent for him, and remarked rather tartly that he had promised the regiment a half-holiday if the inspection went off well: due to Esme it hadn't, and the half-holiday was therefore cancelled. What, enquired Esme, had been wrong? There had been rust, that was what had be
en wrong, on Mr Sa Foy's second gun. 'But, sir,' entreated Esme, 'I'm sure it was only a very little rust' — a reply considered insolent in the extreme. Esme was allowed to retain his commission, but thereafter to do very little more than carry unimportant despatches from Larkhill to Salisbury. This suited him very well, as it was both unexacting and provided variety; but his final report was equivocal, and after all that occurred it was only by a hair's breadth that his college allowed him to come up.

  But come up he did (after all, they said, he had been commissioned), explaining to all his friends that he was now receiving another chance, approximately his hundredth, and they must really not encourage him to misbehave. Now as luck would have it, he had spotted his father in the act of falsifying his income-tax return and had thereupon blackmailed him into providing a very adequate allowance. Against this, he had developed a new tendency (precluded, of course, at school but encouraged by the Army) towards extremely lavish expenditure in the matter of food and drink. To do him justice he had a gift and a passion for entertaining that afforded as much pleasure to others as expense to himself. And indeed for a year all went well, for he had returned to his old habit of hard work, and a twenty-first birthday so far increased his annual income that the adverse balance for the twelvemonth was no more than a mere two or three hundred pounds. On this occasion he received a cheque and a final warning.

  It was his second year that provided at once his justification and his indictment. For in the course of it he won a university prize, took a very passable First, spent more money than ever, and didn't have a twenty-first birthday. Throughout the year his overall debt had been mounting steadily: his father, who had now decided that honesty was the best policy where income-tax was concerned, remained severely indifferent: and the Bursar of his college, a kindly man, accepted with increasing reluctance, throughout the autumn, the winter and the spring, a series of plausible explanations of delay and apologetic promises of not too distant payment. But by the middle of the summer he felt he had borne enough. Meanwhile the unrepentant Esme gave a large and satisfactory party to celebrate his First, and was on the verge of disappearing, without leaving an address, to spend a tasteful vacation with (and off) a woman of his acquaintance, when he was summoned by the Bursar and treated as we have seen. It was too bad. Had the note come twelve hours later it would have come too late. Esme had stamped and raved but there was no help for it. The Cambridge-Badlock train contrasted unfavourably with the Golden Arrow.

  II

  So here he was at Badlock station and with half-an-hour to kill before Mrs Fairweather's car could be expected. 'Tea,' he thought, left the station, and turned into the main street at the traffic lights. Here he was encouraged to find that alternate signs said alcohol and tea, while an unpretentious church tower at the end of the street looked as though it had been a silent witness of long standing to the excellence and indispensability of both. What a nice place, said Esme to himself, a nice, dreamy, Trollopy — that is, Trollopean — sort of place, where I'm sure it is always tea-time.

  The first cafe he came to was unambiguously shut and in a state of decay as well. He passed the Red Lion, the Green Dragon and the Duke of Panton (coach-house) and was told in the second café that teas had ceased to pay off in Badlock, as all the natives had it at home to save money and no outsider ever stopped. In a minute or two he began to understand why. Gould he get cigarettes? he asked. They supposed so, they said, as if everyone in Badlock had given up smoking. Well where? They didn't seem rightly to know the answer, but perhaps — no, not there — perhaps somewhere else: he'd see the sign. Fenland mentality, thought Esme, inbreeding, very John Caldigate, not a bit Barchester. The sun went in as though in agreement with him, and the place began to look more like the ghost-town it rightfully was, the unattractive graveyard of the prosperity it had known in the days when the Cam was a wealthy trade-river and the wares of all Europe were sold on its banks.

  Ungay, thought Esme, and found he could only buy the worst possible cigarettes — a transaction which took all of ten minutes, since any native who entered the shop was accorded instant priority, even though he himself was in the middle of his purchase. And unfriendly, he added to himself, without bothering to count the change and thereby being defrauded of one and sixpence.

  But things looked brighter again when he returned to the station (still without any tea), for there was a large Rolls-Royce of powder-blue awaiting him. It was Esme's dream of unequalled bliss, a dream nourished since the nursery, that one day he might be rich enough to buy and travel (Please hurry up, Perks: her ladyship's train is due) in a powder-blue Rolls-Royce. It was a splendid omen. He sat in front with the chauffeur, right on the edge of his seat, and quivered with excitement.

  'How many cars has Mrs Fairweather got?' he enquired.

  'Five,' said the chauffeur, 'if you count the garden van and the farm brake.'

  Esme was fully prepared to count both.

  'But what are the other two?'

  'Cadillac and Austin. The Austin's hanging off the railings in the park.'

  'How did it get there?'

  ' 'Er Majesty put it there,' said the chauffeur grimly.

  'How?'

  'Because she didn't look what she was doing. That's how.'

  'Does she often have accidents?'

  'More often than not. She'll drive a good car on to the scrap heap in less time than she'll get into bed. Round the comers at fifty with the tyres shrieking — then it's, "Why ain't these tyres been attended to, Simpson, what do you suppose I pay you for?" '

  'Have you been with Her Maj— have you been with Mrs Fairweather long?'

  Two weeks,' said the man desperately, 'and not a day too long. Morning, noon and night, "Why, why, why?" "I've driven for twenty years," she says, "and never an accident yet. And now you don't have them tyres blown up and I'm all strung up in the railings." And her doing sixty in the Park. In jug, that's where she'd be by rights, and wouldn't I love to take my notice to 'er there? "Leaving, Simpson?" she says, "Already?" she says. "It's like this, ma'am," I says, "if I stay a wreck longer, I'll be straight out of 'ere into an 'ome." "You're just like all the rest," she says, "afraid of work and that's the size of it." I'll tell you, sir, she 'asn't kept a man nor a woman for a straight month in fifteen years, what with 'er nagging and 'er nerves and 'er 'ealth and 'er 'usbands — that's it now, sir, ten o'clock from the near-side lamp.'

  Esme saw they had turned up a long gravel drive, on either side of which were fields of young com. The drive was descending slightly, and he saw that it turned left behind a clump of trees after another two hundred yards. The house was visible to the left of the trees, Georgian it seemed in the distance, and surmounted by an entertaining cupola which contained a four-faced clock. The two faces he could see were in aggressive disagreement.

  They turned behind the trees and drove into a little courtyard formed by one side of the house (to their right), a sort of kitchen annexe in front of them, and, on the left, a large garage, obviously a converted coach-house. The garage was decorated by a pigeon-cote, so that the whole court was filled with the slow cooing and clumsy fluttering of the birds — a sound too often drowned, as Esme later discovered, by the hysteria of last-minute departures.

  The chauffeur whisked him through the open front door and left him in a long, low drawing-room, every corner of which was crowded with vases of beautifully grouped flowers. On either side of the French windows, which opened on to a walled rose garden, were hung two enchanting and unusual Renoirs, while to offset these views of fairyland a magnificent Degas of a girl at work with an iron was hanging on the far wall. The hunched figure seemed to ignore and yet to dominate the entire room, to gather it together, as though she held in her teeth threads that branched out to every part and object of it.

  'There you are,' said a voice. It was not quite so formidable as over the wire, it had shrunk, as it were, till it merely belonged to an energetic but unimportant member of the Women's Services. Mrs Fairweather
was clutching a dachshund puppy and was soaking wet.

  'Fell into the carp-pond,' she said, 'the puppy that is, too young to join the carp, I felt, and McTavish was too busy thinking about his suit to go in himself. Always the same, you see, everything left to me. Gome and talk while I bath.'

  They went upstairs to a bathroom that was crammed with photos of everything from Royalty as naval cadets to Mrs Fairweather dressed as a coster. Esme politely placed himself just inside her bedroom.

  'That's better,' she said, sending her clothes hurtling past him and flinging herself into the bath. 'Now then — Terence — it's him you've come about? Good. McTavish thinks he knows everything, so I'll get my bit in first. Lock the door or that niece of mine will poke her silly face in.'

  Esme walked stiffly through the bathroom and locked the door. 'O-o-h-kay then,' she said as he returned to his station in the bedroom, 'well, there's two of them, Terence and Bellamy, good Scottish families — by-blows. Bellamy's all right, plain and good like rice-pudding, happy at Eton, fond of cricket.'

  Then a look of regret came into her face. It had once been quite a pretty face — still was perhaps — but soap and water revealed it as white and worn, and under her eyes where she had dolloped heavy mascara patches there remained two lined and rather ludicrous pale-blue crescents.

  'It's Terence who gives the trouble,' she said, 'I can't even have them together now. He had to leave Eton — McTavish will tell you — so I sent him to Switzerland. He charms all the analysts and he charms me — then we find him beating the gardener's boy. Then he's mad about America, comics and uniforms and gangs — sent there in the war, my fault as usual I suppose. If he wants a thing he takes it — or orders it, which is worse, and round comes a motor-bike on approval. No real rows yet, thank God, but it's not for the want of trying. He got a lot of guns from Americans near here — kept them in his play-box, tommy-guns and Lugers. A good job I know the local policeman, that's all. It was just perfect heaven when the Commandant found out.'