Sunday Best

by Bernice Rubens

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, and I caught the sob in his voice, ‘I know ’he wasn’t my Dad, but I miss ’im.’

  I took his head in my hands. To hell with how he construed it. The boy was in pain, and no one could have done less than simply to acknowledge it. ‘I’ll go and see your mother,’ I said.

  Mrs Johnson was alone. It seemed that she had not moved from the position in which I had last seen her. She looked up as I came in and smiled weakly. I went straight over to her. ‘How are things?’ I said.

  She shrugged her lovely shoulders. ‘I was wondering why you haven’t been,’ she said. ‘Tommy keeps talking about you. He knows. He heard everything. And he won’t believe it when I tell him it isn’t true.’ Then, as a complete non-sequitur, ‘The cremation is on Thursday.’

  ‘You have to forgive me for my absence,’ I said. ‘But we have Mr Parsons away from school, and I’ve been saddled with all his work. I’ll come and see you in the evening. Will Tommy be going?’

  ‘No, he’ll be staying with his aunt, Jack’s sister,’ she added.

  I wondered how that lady fitted into Tommy’s new family tree.

  ‘It’s best for him to get away,’ I said limply. ‘What are you going to do? After the funeral, I mean. Are you going to stay here?’ I tried to hide the persuasion in my voice, but she’d caught it.

  ‘D’you think I ought to leave?’

  I detected a distinct pleading in her voice, a helplessness, as if she were placing the decision for her whole future into my hands, and as if to confirm this, she laid her hand on my knee.

  Now I want to make a few things clear at this point. I had nothing to do with that initial move. My knee just happened to be there, but it was she who put her hand on it, and a woman’s hand on a man’s knee, and a bereaved hand at that, can be the beginning of many things. And of course, my knee trembled. I defy any man to keep a stiff upper knee in such circumstances. She took it as response, as well she might. ‘D’you think I ought to leave?’ she said again, with more of a challenge this time.

  In response, I placed my hand on her knee, not crosswise over hers, for that, I intuitively felt, would be asking for trouble, but lying as a parallel, a position slightly more thoroughbred, and still, though marginally so, excusable by affection. I should, of course, have taken the precaution of occupying my other hand, in my pocket perhaps, but since it was free, she took it, and placed it, quite logically I suppose, given as she was to symmetry, on her other knee. There was now no longer any need for conversation, for there was already enough between us, and it had nothing to do with love. I knew that for my part at least, it was lust. Nothing more, nothing less. And I assumed that for her it was likewise, prompted perhaps by a need to confirm herself once again amongst the living. But all this is irrelevant, since lust does not concern itself with motivation. On reflection, it is of course possible, that both of us, having been accused, thought that we might as well be guilty. And so our hands wandered, detached from all thought, manoeuvring a gradual state of undress.

  And it was thus that Tommy, arriving slippered on the edge-to-edge, found us, fumbling, writhing and apart.

  I looked at him, not immediately connecting the horror on his face with my own state of partial undress. And then I saw his mother’s skirt hoiked up to her thigh, and I thought she was disgusting.

  ‘You’re filthy and rotten,’ he shouted at us both, ‘and I’m going to tell my Dad.’ He drew his breath, stunned by his own horrible confusion. ‘I’m going to tell everybody,’ he screamed. ‘Everybody. I’ll shout it in the street.’

  I clapped my hand over his mouth. ‘You don’t understand,’ was all I could say. ‘Your mother was overwrought.’ I realized that at one time I had offered that plea for his mother before.

  ‘Overwrought,’ he sobbed, and I found it hard to stifle a feeling that he couldn’t even spell the word, ‘You’re always saying that. But I’ll tell everyone. I mean it. You’re just dirty and rude. ’Er too,’ he nodded in the direction of his overwrought mother who, by this time, had lowered her skirt.

  ‘You’re not old enough to understand,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care. You’re rude and filthy, and I’m old enough to understand that, and I don’t care if you are my father, or my teacher,’ he was screaming again, ‘I’m going to tell them all in school, and the headmaster, too. You filthy rude things.’ His dearth of vocabulary infuriated him, and knowing my penchant for synonyms, he felt bound, out of spite if nothing else, to repeat himself again in the same manner. ‘Filthy and rude, both of you.’

  He was over to the door, out of reach, and he gave himself a moment’s pause. Breathless with rage, he stared at the floor. ‘A pair of fucking pigs, both of you.’

  His mother crossed over to him, no longer the accused, and slapped him roundly across the face. ‘I don’t know where you learn such language,’ she said, ‘unless you pick it up at school.’ She turned on me with a look of hatred, and the sudden alliance between the two of them frightened me. Tommy began to cry, and she too, burying their faces in each other’s arms, and I knew I had to get out of there, and leave them both to their own explanations, their own mutual forgiveness. But there was one small practical point. Their entwined bodies were blocking the door. As I walked across the room, I noticed that my trousers were still unbuttoned. With one hand, I made myself respectable, while with the other, I tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, please,’ I said, and I edged my way between them and the door.

  Once outside in the street, I felt as if I had just come out of a cloakroom, and I intended to give it no more importance than just that. I knew I’d left a mess behind, but I didn’t care, because for some reason, I felt that neither of them would ever see me again. I suddenly felt very weary with my present way of life, and I knew that some decision had to be made to change it radically, though what change, or how to engineer it, I had no idea. But I knew that my life could not continue in its pretence much longer, and despite my depression, there was a certain excitement in the thought that some change was bound to come about, even, as I convinced myself, without my own participation. I had thoughts of going home and once more trying on my new Sundays, but pangs of that old father of mine, blunted the edge of that anticipation. All in all, I was lethargic with depression. I turned back to look at the Johnson house, and had it been on fire, it would not have moved me. I gave a fleeting thought to the two broken people inside and was furious with their gross interference with my life. I looked at my own house, but that too held nothing for me, save the delights of the ‘Femina Boutique’, and that, after all, was something, in spite of the rage that my father was pumping inside me. I grabbed the railings hard, trying to throttle his rude ghost, and then I felt myself weeping.

  I am almost ashamed to write that word, for I am not a man given to tears. And still I have no notion of why I cried. I remember only that I wanted to rid myself of Mrs Johnson and her son, of my poor joyless and childless Joy, of my mother and father too, and of all the loud unhappiness that I had tunnelled into other people’s lives. I’ll say that word again. I wept uncontrollably, and I don’t give it to you as a plea in mitigation. I’m a bastard really, and a sentimental one at that.

  Chapter Nine

  That last piece of confession took a great deal out of me, and it has taken some time to recover my old rotten self. There is not a great deal that is gentle in my nature, but occasionally it gets the upper hand. Not that I resent it. I simply do not know how to deal with it. Friends, such as I have, have told me to let it take its course, that I am a better man than I allow myself to be. But I dare not give way to whatever kindness is within me, for the virtue destroys my defences. In truth, I do not like myself very much. That, too, is a defence I suppose, for it makes pointless any attack you may wish to make on me. You are right. I am rotten, and deserve no one’s concern, and if at any time I should be repentant of my behaviour, I beg you to ignore it. Remorse would be a lapse in me, as much as kindness. I hope we are no
w on the old footing again, and I can go back to my sorry tale.

  On Thursday, the day of the funeral, it was raining. As a child, holding my mother’s hand, and seeing a funeral in the rain, she would tell me that the world was weeping for the one who had died. So that when a cortège passed under a blazing sun, it was a devil going to his own, and the world was smiling. I never quite rid myself of this conviction, and occasionally it was shaken, as it was on that Thursday, when I couldn’t understand how anyone could mourn the passing of a man like Johnson, who, when dead, looked uncommonly like my own father. I hoped it would clear up by the afternoon, not so much as a more fitting salute to Mr Johnson’s obsequies, but because I feared spoiling my new Sundays, which were already laid out on my study couch in preparation for my first and probably fatal sortie.

  That morning, my wife and I breakfasted together, an uncommon occurrence, and without any apparent design. I was relieved to hear that she was spending the whole day at Mrs Johnson’s and would go to the funeral from there. That would give me the privacy and the time to change my clothes in my study. I made a point of informing my wife yet again, that I would not be attending the funeral, owing to pressure of work, and that I would meet her at the Johnson house in the evening.

  I laid my plans with infinite care. I could not afford to be discovered, certainly not before the sortie itself, and I cared little what happened afterwards. For some reason, I felt that post-production planning was not necessary.

  I went to school by the back route and on arriving, went straight to the Cloth’s study to ask permission to attend Mr Johnson’s funeral in the afternoon. It was a slight risk, but I couldn’t get the afternoon off for any other reason. It was a request that could hardly be refused by a man of God, and he was quick to grant it, and with his blessing, too, that I was to be party to a Christian gesture. As I was leaving, he called me back, and again I had the sinking feeling that I had been discovered. ‘I think perhaps I shall put in an appearance myself,’ he said. The late Mr Johnson was a great asset to our Parent Teacher Association. It would be a gesture to his widow. So I shall see you there, Verrey Smith.’ He turned back to his desk. ‘An unhappy occasion,’ he muttered, ‘but in the midst of life, Mr Verrey Smith. You know how it is.’ I left the room. I had not in any way prepared myself for this eventuality and I was a little worried as to how to accommodate the Cloth’s presence at the funeral. Yet it did not occur to me to abandon my sortie as a woman. In fact, the promised attendance of the Reverend Richard Baines added to my excitement. If I could con Baines, I could con anybody.

  During the course of the morning I had occasion to go to the stationery room to replenish my stock. On my way there I had to pass Baines’s study, and I was surprised to find Mr Parsons standing outside in the attitude of a small unruly pupil awaiting his strapping. An encounter, and a dialogue of sorts, was unavoidable. I slowed down as I reached him, and for some reason stared at his fly, expecting, I suppose, to find him unbuttoned. But he stood there, respectable and very much on his dignity.

  ‘You heard about it, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, the Cloth told us on Monday. I’m sorry about it, Parsons.’

  ‘Mr Parsons,’ he said, catching the accusing implication of my mode of address. ‘I am not guilty. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have come to clear my name.’

  I felt like giving him a sweeping brush for all the good it would have done him. ‘You’ll have to have a pretty good story, then,’ I said. Such sympathy as I had had for the man was rapidly waning. ‘A boy doesn’t get into such a state for nothing.’

  ‘It’s his word against mine,’ Parsons said.

  ‘There’s more than his word,’ I ventured. ‘There were apparently other little boys.’

  ‘You’ve been brainwashed, Verrey Smith,’ he said. ‘You and probably the rest of them. I’ve got a fiancée in Brighton. We’re getting married soon. What would I be wanting with little boys?’

  ‘You’d better keep your defence for inside,’ I said, nodding at the Cloth’s door. I noticed Parsons’s eyes for the first time. They watered but not with sorrow. There was something quite disgusting about them. I had no doubt that Parsons made his afternoon forays to the back of the maintenance shed, and there indulged his perversion. I was as sure of it as I was of my own hobby, and the moisture in his eyes was something I had often caught in my own, in moments of extreme sexual pressure and frustration. ‘Look, Parsons,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what filthy business you get up to, but I do care if it involves innocent little boys.’ I could have been the Cloth himself talking, and when I heard echoes of that raspberry voice in my own, I was silent, and felt slightly ashamed. I put my arm on Parsons’s shoulder. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s a rotten business for you, and I wish you luck with him.’

  The Cloth had opened his door. He had obviously heard my last remark, and he saw my hand on Parsons’s shoulder.

  ‘It seems that my little homily of last Monday did not entirely reach home,’ he said.

  I kept my hand on Parsons’s shoulder.

  ‘Such camaraderie,’ he spat the word, eyeing my affectionate hand, ‘does little credit to you, Verrey Smith, and perhaps in the process of spring-cleaning this school, it would be as well to look into your own – er – records.’

  I thought for a moment he was going to say wardrobe, and I smiled with relief.

  ‘You have an uncommon sense of humour, Verrey Smith,’ he said tartly, ‘a humour which often leads to the back of the maintenance shed, and other such dubious locations. I am ready for you now, Parsons,’ he went on hurriedly, ‘and you would do me a favour, Mr Verrey Smith, if you returned to your classes.’

  My hand was left in mid-air as he wheeled Parsons round by the tips of his fingers and into his study. I felt the situation was getting quite beyond me, but I didn’t care for the consequences. All that concerned me was that nothing should interfere with my afternoon’s debut.

  I had been dealing with Mr Parsons’s classes for most of the morning, and after the break was the first opportunity I had of taking my own. What confronted me when I entered my classroom was something entirely unexpected and which seemed part of the general conspiracy to thwart my afternoon’s pleasure. A large wreath stood leaning against the blackboard, and for a moment I felt it was for myself, placed as it was against my inalienable property.

  ‘It’s for Mr Johnson,’ the back row chorused. ‘We all paid for it, Sir.’

  ‘That’s very nice indeed,’ I said without much pleasure, feeling that an inordinate amount of fuss was being made over Mr Johnson’s demise. First, the headmaster’s threatened attendance at the burial, and now this wreath, not to mention the fact that I was using the funeral as a funfair of my very own.

  ‘We thought you’d take it with you, Sir,’ Tindall said. ‘Say it’s from us.’

  Another complication. I had to sort it out right away. ‘I think it would be nicer if one of you were to take it himself, as a representative of the class.’

  ‘Let’s vote, let’s vote,’ they shouted, excited at the possibility of some diversion.

  ‘I doubt whether this is a question for voting,’ I said. ‘I think it would be as well to draw a name out of a hat.’ This method, I thought, would take a lot longer and pass the morning without undue frustration. Moreover, by the voting method, there was a sporting chance that one of Tommy’s closer friends would be chosen, and after our last encounter, I couldn’t risk exposing a pupil to Tommy’s confidences. The offer of the hat method appealed to their natural gambling instincts, and they set about writing their names on pieces of paper happily torn from their exercise books. I walked round the class as they each laid their claim, and noticed that most of them were writing in their very best hand as if the prize were a reward for calligraphy.

  I decided to use a satchel as our bran-tub, and I went round collecting the papers. When I reached Tindall, I noticed that he put a handful of his signatures into the bag, and I made him retrieve all
of them as a penance for his attempted cheating. It took me a little while to subdue his violent reaction, and coward that I am, I called upon the whole class to condemn him, because it was, after all, not wholly in their interest that Tindall should be represented a dozen times. The class turned on him and they settled the matter between them.

  I took it upon myself to make the draw, for I trusted nobody. I stood in the middle of the classroom, in view of them all, and shook the satchel for a good mélange. I allowed the nearest boy to hold the bag while I fumbled around inside it. Everybody, with the possible exception of Tindall, was in a state of thorough enjoyment, myself included. What the hell, I thought. Why shouldn’t we get a bit of fun out of old Mr Johnson? He’d caused me enough trouble by dying. I fumbled in the bag, longer than was necessary, in order to prolong the suspense, and then I withdrew a crumpled piece of paper and returned with it to my desk in order to lay it out with ceremony. It held the name of Michael Roberts, in his best writing, and it belonged to the smallest boy in the class, fortunately from my point of view, a close friend of nobody’s leave alone Tommy’s. I declaimed the winner and the name was greeted with roars of disapproval. ‘It’s too big for ’im, Sir. ‘E won’t be able to carry it.’

  ‘I can, so there,’ little Roberts squeaked. The excitement croaked in his voice, and they laughed at him. Poor Roberts was close to tears, an appropriate demeanour, I felt, for wreath-hauling, and I proposed he should leave right away, while grief, whatever its cause, was still upon him.