by Jane Gardam
But our last meeting was so horrible and unhappy and I wish you could have written, even once, years ago, to put that right.
Nobody had told me that you have a stammer and nobody had probably told you that I had one then (Sir cured mine) and I think [the pen began to take on a most uncharacteristic volition of its own] that I tried just to forget you. The Ingoldbys were so kind. Just now I’ve seen a photograph of you on the mantelpiece here at the aunts—first time I’ve seen them since you were here when I was eight—taken in 1914, and you don’t look all that much older than I am now. It made me very regretful. I felt you might be a father I could have talked to.
However, no go. So would you very kindly read the following points that will state briefly my reasons for not wanting to come and live with you in Malaya or Java or S’pore or wherever?
(1) I should at Christmas be going to Oxford for an interview at Christ Church for a place after the War.
(2) I want, after that, to volunteer for the Army.
(3) For me to be “evacuated” out of danger now, at my age, is absolutely unheard of in England at the moment. I should have to travel with children aged between seven and twelve. Whatever would the ship’s company think of me?
(4) I would lose my English friends for life. It would be a continuing stigma. I am six-foot-two and look older than my years. I am very fit.
and (5) and sorry to sound gung-ho, but I believe that I should be fighting for my country. I can’t run away. You haven’t heard Churchill. Even people like you, the bitter ones of ’14/18, listen to him. I have lived in this country since you sent me here as almost a baby. Had there been [the pen was beginning to race and Eddie’s face wasp red with a rage he had had no knowledge of] any friendship, any contact, between us, if you had once written to me not just handed me that pin-box, it might be different.
I shall argue these points with my aunts—though they seem to be very indifferent listeners. I’ve tried to argue with the school. All they say is that until I am eighteen you can do more or less what you like with me.
Do you want me with you on these autocratic and loveless terms?
Sincerely, E. J. Feathers
He read the letter through, and by the end of it was seeing not the god-like young soldier of the photograph but the father who had turned up at Sir’s Outfit soon after the Ma Didds’ affair, the affair that was—and still was—his closed, locked box. He saw a lank and trembling figure sitting in Sir’s study, the mountain trees of the Lake District tossing blackly about in the wind through the window behind him. The figure had sat cracking his finger joints.
Sir had kindly left the two of them together (“just out here if you need me, Feathers’s”) and father and son, neither clear which of them Sir was referring to, had stared long and hard at the pattern on the carpet.
Eddie remembered the hands. How his father had clasped and unclasped them. How the knuckles had cracked like pistols. He remembered the thin shanks of his father’s legs in the old-fashioned European suit; the bald head; the lashless eyes that looked almost blind. How the man shifted in his chair, said nothing, looked at a wristwatch far too big for the wrist. The watch that must have come through the Great War with him. The watch in the photo. Maybe it had been an amulet?
Eddie had been far too frightened to speak and reveal his stammer, especially after he heard a long staccato rattle begin in his father’s throat and realised—who better?—that his father stammered, too. He became inexorably mute. His father was asking a question. If he tried to answer it, his father might think his son was mocking him.
Tears came. Eddie did not look again at his father’s face. The patterns on Sir’s carpet swelled and ran together into chaos and oblivion.
When Sir returned, father and son both jumped up and Sir said to Eddie, “Away you go then,” and Eddie fled back to the classroom, to Pat Ingoldby and the lead soldiers under the desklid, and nobody ever mentioned this interview with his father again.
Once, only once, had Eddie met the aunts. Yet he knew that these aunts no longer talked about their brother. Not a breath in them confessed to the twitching, half-mad widower with the yellow face and strange eyes. (Once at Ma Didds’s one of his cousins, probably Babs, had said, “Your pa has malaria,” and the other had said, “No, he doesn’t. My mother says it’s opium.”) Nor did these Bolton aunts, out on the numbing golf course, any longer ever say a word about the young, quizzical, handsome, alert spirit that had been their brother and with whom they had grown up.
Eddie went through the address book on the desk until he found his father’s name. After Kotakinakulu, there were many crossings out. The current address seemed to be Singapore. It did not sound very grand. A back-street address. An instinct, some gentle gene in Eddie, made him write a P.S. before he licked the air-mail envelope:
P.S: I should like to say, though, Father, you’ve been very generous to someone you clearly found it impossible to like. Now that I’ve really thought about it, your wanting me to come to you in order to survive the War seems [he was going to write “very civil”] a miracle of unexpected kindness.
Eddie
And so, he thought, I spoil my case.
He did not go to the golf-course lunch, but found his way below stairs to a kitchen where a diminutive old woman was folding paper spills for the grate. She looked depressed and paid him no attention, so then he lay on his bed in a room with eiderdowns and heavy flowered curtains and huge lampshades and wondered if this was all.
He stayed on, apparently invisible, for a week. And then for several weeks, while he waited to hear from school about the Oxford interview. There was no reply to his letter to his father and, though he often wondered if today there might be a cable, none came. He spent the days mugging up for the possible Oxford interview—there was a good public library in the town—and thinking unhopefully about life. From his bedroom window, steamed with delicious heat from a Victorian iron radiator, his dreams merged into other bedroom windows. One, that mystified him on the edge of sleep, was an unglazed slit with the black knives of banana plants against a black sapphire sky. This dream always woke him.
His Bolton bedroom now was rich in Lancashire splendour, the carpet pure olive-green wool overflung with white roses. The heavy curtains, interlined for the black-out, were damask within and without. The eiderdown was of fat rose-pink blisters and beside the bed was a lamp with pink silk and bead fringes. The wallpaper could have stood by itself, thickly embossed with gold, and the blankets were snowy wool, and satin-bound. “You are in the best spare,” said Muriel. “The wardrobe may be a Gillow.” “Now put the fire on if you need it,” said Hilda. “Both bars. We have to go out now.”
Going out was their refrain. Eddie’s life was beyond their interest. They dwelt like Siamese twins in each other’s concerns and in the present moment. Every morning they came down to the breakfast-room talking before they saw you but telling you their plans. Their eyes were always blanks. They were always in one of a number of uniforms but always the same as each other. There was the Red Cross officer with stripes and a cockade; the WVS plum and dark green; a scarlet and grey ensemble reminiscent of the North-West Frontier; and a white and navy serge with wings on the head indicative of some variety of military nurse. They left the house every day by eight-thirty and were never home till supper. On Sundays they were up betimes for the eight o’clock Communion, and later sat knitting gloves and listening to Forces Favourites. There was a nice medium sherry before a heavy supper each evening. The midget maid crept about doing wonders with the chores and a muscular woman came in for the rough and a man for swilling down the yard. Each day Eddie ate his lunch alone at one end of the mahogany dining table, also a suspected Gillow, laid up with lace mats and shining silver. He received no mail and the phone never rang for him.
“Now, don’t you overwork,” they shouted. “You’ll get in. It’s your father’s old college. There’s a nice flick on at the Odeon,” and they clashed shut the vestibule door not intere
sted in his answer.
The winter gathered. Once or twice he grew desperate to telephone the Ingoldbys but dared not because of Pat’s bombshell: It’s family stuff.
The air-raids in the North-West had for the moment stopped but the dogfights went on in the South-East and Eddie wondered whether Pat had his pilot’s wings yet. “They’re sending them up after twelve hours’ instruction,” said an old soldier at the golf club. “They’re running out. Slaughter of the innocents.” “I heard after six hours,” said someone else. “Six hours’ flying instruction and they’re in their own Spitfire.”
According to the six o’clock news on the wireless each evening huge numbers of the Boche were being shot down, twice as many casualties as our own. But the bulletin always ended with “a number of our own aircraft are missing.”
At last he set off for the Oxford entrance exam in a blizzard and a series of unheated trains, each one packed down every corridor with troops, all smoking, drinking, sleeping, hawking, balanced against each other or jack-knifed on their knees on the floor. Coughs, oaths, laughter, glum silence, sudden waves of idiotic singing (Roll out the Barrel, Tipperary) from the War before. The final train groaned out of a station to stop as if for ever outside Stratford-on-Avon in the dark. Planes droned above. (“Dorniers?” “No, Messerschmitts.”) More soldiers sank upon their haunches, heads into their spread knees, asleep. The crumpling sound of bombs, the W.C.s surrounded by the desperate, jigging up and down. When you did get inside, heel holding the door to behind you, the lock broken, the floor awash, the smell was rank, no water in the taps. No lavatory paper. “Roll me over in the clover,” sang the soldiers who mostly had never seen clover. “Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.”
Eddie burst from the train at Oxford station and looked for someone on the gate to take his ticket and tell him how far his college was. There was no one and no taxi. No one at all. It was bitter midnight and in his head he could still hear the horrible singing.
Then, stepping out down a dark road something changed. Out from clouds sprang a great white moon and showed pavements and roads of snow, sleeping buildings, spires and domes all stroked by dappling snow. There was not a soul, not a light and not a cry.
Over some bridge he went in such dazzling moonlight he wondered there were not crowds turned out everywhere to see it. He walked exalted, his feet light and the moon came and went, and then soft flakes began to fall. He looked back and saw his footprints already softened by the snow, the snow ahead of him waiting to be imprinted. He had strayed into medieval Oxford like a ghost.
And nobody to direct him and he was growing cold. A great silent street widened. A church stood in the middle of it, its windows boarded, its glass taken into safety. He wondered whether its door might be open and then saw opposite a large building that might be a hotel where he might try to get them to answer a bell and tell him where to go. Then, behind him, he heard a sound from the black church and all at once there was a figure beside him, a muffled-up giant who was graciously inclining his head towards him, the head bound about by some sort of scarf. The man was wearing a flowing macintosh like the robe of someone in the absent stained-glass.
“May I help you? Did I frighten you? I was in the church.” The young man swung a key. He was very young indeed to be a clergyman. He, too, must be a ghost.
“I’m looking for a college called Christ Church.”
“You are going in absolutely the wrong direction. Follow me,” and the soft and boneless giant went padding away with Eddie following.
“There,” he said, in time. “Straight ahead.”
“My train was late.”
“Bang hard for the night-porter. Are you all right now?”
The snow had stopped and the moonshine gleamed out again.
“Excuse me, are you—someone in the church?”
“No. I do fire-watching there. And praying. I’m a student.”
Eddie felt his kindliness and confidence and cheerfulness.
“Goodnight,” said the young huge fledgling. “Good luck. I suppose you’re up for the entrance exam?”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m joining up.”
Eddie felt ridiculous regret. And then confusion. Somehow, he knew this man.
“Thanks,” he said. “It was a mercy I met you.”
They went their different ways, but when Eddie stopped and looked back, he found that the muffled giant was doing the same thing, looking back at him.
“Feel sure I know you,” Eddie called. “Very odd.”
Then the man waved and padded out of sight down a side street and Eddie was trying to rouse his college.
As he fell asleep in a monkish bed in a mullioned room he thought: How can I possibly leave all this for Malaya?
A few days later, “I suggest,” said the man who might in time become his tutor after the War, if that time ever came, “I suggest that you come up as soon as possible.”
“Does that mean I’m accepted, sir?”
“Of course. Goes without saying. You wrote excellent papers yesterday. Well taught. Were you at Sir’s? I thought so. And your public school is very clever with closed scholarships, though I hear you are rich enough not to need one.”
(Am I? thought Eddie. I’ve ten shillings a week.)
“Now, I suggest you volunteer for the Navy. It takes them a year to process you, so you can get your Prelims done with here, before you go, and you’ll have a toe in the door for when you’re demobilised. You’ll be reading history?”
“I’m not quite sure, sir, what . . .”
“Your father was here. How is he? Still about, I hope?”
“He lives in Malaya. Well, I think he may be in Singapore now. I hardly know him.”
“I’m sorry. I heard shell-shock? Poor chap. But he’ll be proud of you now.”
Eddie swam with guilt. Ought he to say? His father had ordered him out of the country. His father had no notion or memory of Oxford. His father had—shell-shocked or not—organised a passport and visa and made his sisters get Eddie his jabs. He was to be “an evacuee.” Well, he would not do it. No. He would come to Oxford where he was welcome and admired and befriended and a familiar ghost had directed him to a safe haven after midnight. He would say nothing.
“May I come up next term, sir?”
“Ah, not quite so fast. But leave it to me. We’ll find you a room in Meadow Buildings, where your father was.”
As he fell asleep in the beautiful ice-cold room with his coat and the hearth-rug over the blankets, and watched the moon light the snowy rooftops, he briefly wondered about money. Will my father pay my fees if I refuse to go out to him? Will my scholarship be enough? I might be poor. I’ve never been really poor. Well, hell, so what? And he watched the moon bowling along, lighting the sky for the bombers.
I could live and die here, he thought. They’ll never destroy this. I’ll stay and fight for it.
And with these noble thoughts he slept.
By morning the snow had gone as if it had been dreams and it was raining hard and the pavements soiled and splashy. From the mullioned window could be seen people hurrying, bent forward, miserable and mean along the streets, and it was not the fairy city any more. The bedroom door opened and a lugubrious man called a Scout came carrying hot water in a jug across to a washbowl and asked if he would be taking breakfast early so that his room might be cleaned? For some panic- stricken reason Eddie said, No, he would be leaving before breakfast. “Very good, sir,” said the Scout, eyebrows raised, and Eddie wondered whether to leave him a tip and, if he didn’t, whether it would be remembered next term and held against him. In the end he left a shilling on the dressing-table, took his bag and went head forward into the slushy street. As he butted along against the wet and the umbrellas, bicycles wetting his trousers as they passed him, melancholy struck. Was this place after all a delusion? It was criminally cold. Nobody had said goodbye to him. Hot water in a jug and the W.C. three flights
down. Not a word about the date of his return. And he was bloody hungry. He turned into a tea-shop because the steam on its windows promised warmth, but once inside it was cold and crowded and dark, with people sitting in buttoned-up clothes. A long and silent queue stood by the counter, each one holding a ration book in a gloved hand and hoping for an extra cake.
But yet there was a sort of warmth there in the fug and Eddie edged further in to the shop where there were tables and chairs. They were all smoking and reading newspapers or warming their hands on their coffee cups. He sat down at a table where a girl was leaning back in her chair, smoking through a cigarette holder and watching him. Her legs were crossed and one high-heeled shoe was swinging up and down from her big toe.
“Is it all right to sit here?”
He sat, and looked around him to see what was on offer in the way of breakfast.
“I’ve not had breakfast,” he said. “I’m up here for my entrance exams. I suddenly wanted to go home, so I skipped breakfast. Now I’m hungry.”
“Which college?”
“Christ Church.”
“You’d have been given a good free breakfast there. Even in the vacation. Quails’ eggs and flagons of porter I shouldn’t wonder. Small talk about the Christ Church Beagles. It won’t survive the War, you know, Christ Church. Thank God. You don’t look exactly Christ Church. I’ll say that for you.”
“I don’t know a thing about it. I was told to apply. It could have been St. Karl Marx’s College for all I know about it.”
“I’ll bet your father was there.”
“Yes, he was. Actually. I can’t help that.”
She leaned forward to the ashtray, looking at him carefully, and he looked back into bright hazel eyes which were somehow familiar. He remembered the giant who had also been familiar.
I’m over-tired, he thought. Over-excited. “I’ve not seen my father in ten years,” he told the girl. “He’s a very hard-working civil servant. Out East.”