‘All right.’ It was the first thing Tim had said since he woke up and found himself here. The words came out in a croak from his dry lips, swollen where he had grazed them falling.
‘I wasn’t allowed to see you this morning.’ The man looked round for a chair, but there were none left.
‘Sit on the bed,’ the fat man said, interested. ‘What’s it matter?’
‘Better not risk it.’ the tall man folded his arms and turned slightly to block the fat man without being noticeably rude. ‘Did you get my message?’
Tim shook his head.
‘What a pity. I said to tell you I’d be back tonight. I didn’t want you to think we’d abandoned you.’
A policeman? He did not talk like one, but that was the thing. You didn’t know. Tim lay with the back of his head pressed into the hard pillow, his eyes fixed on the man’s friendly face, shadowed round the mouth and chin. He could feel his heart pounding under the tidy bedclothes. Would the man notice that as a sign of guilt?
‘My name is Paul.’ He had a very deep voice that came out of his throat, not his head, like some people. ‘Do you want to tell me yours?’
Oh, no. Oh, no. You don’t trick me that way, mister. He had stubbornly refused to tell anyone his name since lie had woken with a headache and vomit in his mouth, and the nurse had said, ‘What’s your name, dear?’ before he had finished chucking up.
The man thought for a moment, then he looked at the plaster, and asked, ‘How’s the arm?’
‘All right. Had a bit of an accident. Nothing much.’
‘Yes. I know. I hope it doesn’t hurt.’ After another pause, his face creased into a smile again, and he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
Tim shook his head.
‘You don’t remember then — last night. The Samaritans? You rang our number, 333-4000. Do you remember that?’
333-4000. He could feel the holes of the dial, slippery with his blood. ‘It was a woman. She spoke to me.’ ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘I can’t stop the blood.’ ‘Where are you?’ They had been joined in a secret fear.
‘You asked for help,’ the big man said, ‘and so I went to try and help you. Near the old water tower on Flagg’s Hill. I found you behind that broken wall. But it’s not surprising you don’t remember. You were bleeding very badly.’
‘You — you were there?’
‘Yes. I’m still here, if you want me. Don’t worry. I know you can’t talk now. You’ve been through a pretty rotten time. I’ll come back, if you want. Would you like me to?’
Tim could feel his face growing hot and swollen. The tears were on his lashes again. He blinked and a tear fell, wet on the side of his nose, salt in his mouth.
‘My name is Paul,’ the man said again. ‘333-4000. The Samaritans. If you want me, you can get Sister to ring us.’
‘I wouldn’t cry,’ the chubby man said, after the bell had emptied the ward and the nurses were carrying out the flowers. ‘Was that your old man? I say, was that your old man?’ Tim would not look at him, but he knew that he was turned humpily on his side, staring with his sticky eyes.
Tim put the back of his good wrist across his eyes, as if the light hurt. My name is Paul... My name is Tim. All right, I mucked it up. That’s it then. If you are at the end of your tether ... Under the stairs, with his dream face staring in the mirrpr, and the thing done. But even that I couldn’t do. Even that I mucked.
WHAT I WANT FROM NEXT YEAR. D. GERALD BRIGGS
Next year I leave and get my car licensed. Next year I go forth as it’s said to meet the world with equal terms, except that for my generation it will never be equal to them who have got it made while we were still too young to know.
At home on Saturday morning, Paul was correcting essays. Alice answered the telephone in the bedroom, and came to the sitting-room door with white grease on her face and her hair back-combed straight up from her scalp. ‘St Peter’s on the line. They’ve got a throne for me in paradise and want to know if you’re good for the fees.’
‘I’ve got a policeman here,’ Peter was speaking from the Samaritan Centre. ‘He’s asking about the boy you went out to on Thursday night. 200 says you saw him in the hospital yesterday. Do you know his name? Not that I’d tell the copper, but it would be useful to know.’
‘He wouldn’t tell me anything. Poor kid, I think he’s terrified.’
‘He would be. I’ll keep the law off his neck, and you—’
‘Do you think I should go again? He didn’t seem to want me.’
‘Look Paul, he asked for our help. Let’s try and give it. Go back today and try to get through to him, will you?’
Visiting hours on Saturday were from two to six. Paul could go to the hospital on the way back from taking his son out to lunch. Jeff was still at Burlington, the school where Paul and Alice had once lived in a faded, comfortable house with trellis on the brick for roses, and twenty boys perpetually clumping up and down the bare wooden stairs and the dormitory passage.
At the time of the scandal (’She’s nothing but a drunken nymphomaniac’), the school had offered halfheartedly to let Jeff stay out his four years, not expecting that he would, since every boy, master, wife, maid and local tradesman knew about Alice and the Assistant Head’s wife’s Australian cousin. Paul had wanted Jeff to leave, but he could not insist without seeming unwilling to pay the full fees, which would be charged now that he was not on the staff.
‘Don’t let him stay,’ Alice had begged, in the drying-out clinic where Paul had taken her. ‘How can you want to, Jeff?’ she wailed at her son. ‘After the things that bastard said about me!’ But the boy had set his mind to it, sticking out his lower lip, crusted with impetigo at the time. Outside, he told Paul, ‘I’m not going to let her spoil my life, or you because you can’t handle her.’ Frighteningly, he had grown up, grown away. Paul could not talk to him. Somehow he managed to find the extra money, and Jeff had stayed at the school.
Alice would not go there, not this Saturday, or ever, so Paul went off alone. It was a long drive, through country that became increasingly familiar and dear to him as he went farther inland. Here had been much of his life. The grammar school in the quiet Cotswold town which never grew larger or smaller. The rivers and hills and tunnelling lanes, the misted forests of childhood. The stone farmhouse where he had found his father sitting on a sack in the grain shed the night after they slaughtered his infected cattle. They had moved away after that, his father glumly caring for another man’s stock, but many years later, after the war. Paul had jumped at the chance to go back.
Ten years at Burlington, seven of them in Archway. The chunky brick house which had been built on at the end of the main building had been the favourite home of his marriage. Until everything went wrong.
‘And if we’re raking up the past,’ Alice said sometimes when they were not, ‘you were doing your share of the boozing at Archway, in case you forgot. If those damn boys had been less unconcerned, you’d have got kicked out long before.’
Paul drove in at the back gate, past the beech hedge, the tarred toolsheds, the neglected orchard where the grass was never cut because of the daffodils, and where Alice would have hung her laundry if she had been that kind of woman. There was laundry there now, small children’s things and the home-washed shirts of a thrifty young wife.
Paul drove through the brick arch to the paved yard where there had once been stables, now sheds for bicycles, sports gear, mowing machines, the pottery shop with the zig-zag chimney which had been built for a wash-house. He stayed in the car for a minute or two. He had hoped that Jeff would be watching for him and would come out. Which was more stupid, for Paul to be a coward at fifty, or for Jeff, at sixteen, to be unaware?
Paul got out of the car, put his foot on the familiar granite step and went into the back hall, which still smelled of linseed oil and the red scouring soap the school had always used, oblivious to the advent of detergents. Two boys in sweaters and running shorts, jumped down the l
ast flight of stairs and pivoted round the pineapple newel post as boys had done for years, the carving almost obliterated by squeaking palms.
The boys were not familiar. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ They edged past, their legs white and knobbly.
‘Is Jeff Hammond up there?’ Paul asked.
‘No sir, I don’t think so.’ The boys went on, but as they opened the door, one of them stopped for a glance back and then jumped out over the high granite step to be able to tell the other, ‘Hammond’s father — you know.’
The present housemaster’s wife was in one of the front rooms, hair pinned up but coming down, an air of small children about her: pins stuck into the band of her skirt, a mess like baby’s dribble on her blouse, a torn book in her hand.
‘Oh, Mr Hammond, how nice.’ She had been the new geography master’s wife when Paul was here, living down in the village, invited to the duty sherries, but not the intime parties where Alice would get stoned and Paul would forget that he must be up at seven to shout his boys into the showers. ‘Is Jeff expecting you? He went up to the library, I think. Do come in and sit down, though it seems silly inviting you into your own house, doesn’t it? I hope it doesn’t make you feel dreadfully sad,’ she said, kindly deciding that this was a better approach than pretending to know nothing.
She produced the inevitable sherry, which Paul had learned in ten years to live with, if not to like, and presently Jeff knocked and came in, poking his head owlishly round the door, his shoulders rounded, a pile of books in his long arms.
‘I didn’t know you were here. Sorry, Dad.’ He invariably started off with an apology, which caused Paul, as now, to solicit one.
‘I did say twelve-thirty. I haven’t got too long.’ And that was unfair, since it was not until this morning that he knew he must be back in time to go to the hospital.
‘I’ll just take these books up,’ Jeff said in his gentle, immature voice. ‘Am I OK?’
‘What else have you got?’
‘Nothing much.’ Jeff was wearing rubbed corduroys and a sort of Western leather jacket with remnants of fringe and the nap worn off the shoulders like the back of a baby’s head. Paul knew better than to suggest the school’s regulation grey suit. ‘Do you want me to change?’
‘Look, it’s not what I want — it’s what you think you ought to do. You’re sixteen. I don’t have to tell you to breathe.’ Why did they irk each other so, they who had always been allies against the tough sufficiency of Laura, the catastrophes of Alice?
When Jeff had trotted upstairs in the grubby yellow sandals he wore over thick sweat socks, Paul turned with a laugh and spread hands to the housemaster’s wife, sorting socks in a laundry basket. ‘You wouldn’t think we loved each other.’
‘I think he’s very fine,’ she said. ‘He thinks a whole lot of you, you know. He talks a lot about you, what you write to him, what you and he did last summer.’
‘Does he?’ Paul eagerly believed it.
When he had got Jeff in the car, he said, ‘What’s the matter with your eyes?’ The housemaster’s wife might have thought it odd that he did not know.
‘Nothing.’ Jeff grinned and took off the round wire spectacles and held them in front of his father’s eyes to show they were plain glass. ‘Do you want me to — sorry.’ He started to put the glasses back on, looked at his father, and folded them and put them in his pocket.
‘God, it’s good to get away from here.’ He leaned back and sighed as they drove under the archway.
‘Things are all right though, aren’t they?’ Jeff did not write letters, though he occasionally telephoned, reversing the charges.
‘Oh yes. Great. Mark’s pretty good, if you care about that.’
‘Friends?’
‘Some. They’re all right.’
‘What about games? Any football this year?’
‘Oh come on, Dad,’ Jeff said irritably. ‘I’ve been here long enough to know how to get out of that.’
Crossing the front of the school buildings to go out of the other gate towards the hotel, Paul allowed himself a little treat of nostalgia for the round pancake of lawn, the coloured glass crests in the library windows, the broad oak where his poetry class had sprawled, sucking grass, in the first shimmer of June.
Facile. It was possible to be nostalgic about anything past, even a prison camp, since it represented a part of your own precious life. When he and Alice left Singleton Court, as they would have to eventually, or die, no doubt he would occasionally think fondly of the artificial fire, the bathroom view of other people’s bathroom window-sills across the yard.
Out of the headmaster’s house came the familiar cinnamon tweeds, the patch of freckled skull like a tonsure, the pigeon-toed lope. As always, the little start of recognition, of surprise that he had the nerve to come, before the sincere grin and the double handshake. ‘My dear Paul!’ He had both arms in through the window of the car. ‘The nicest surprise. Have you got a moment? Sheila would love to see you.’
‘The hell she would,’ Jeff said when they had driven on. ‘It must be hell for you coming back here — I mean, it must be hell.’
‘It’s the only way I can see you till next year when you can get weekends. I’m sorry,’ Paul said, as they got to the road, ‘I should have asked you if there was anyone you wanted to bring to lunch.’
‘No thanks.’
Jeff was fairly uncommunicative at lunch. He drank beer, and Paul kept some sort of conversation going, but his questions about Jeff’s news brought only monosyllables, and his news of himself was clearly of little interest. Some parents and boys from the school came into the hotel restaurant, and Jeff put the spectacles on again. He was rather waxy and pale, the pinkish scars of the impetigo still staining the skin of his mouth and chin.
‘Sick of school?’ Paul asked casually, getting out his wallet to pay the lunch bill, higher on term-time Saturdays since there was nowhere else to go.
‘No — why?’ Jeff looked up through the fake lenses.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I wondered if you ever regretted your decision. At the time you had to make it, you were under a pretty bad strain. We all were.’
‘I told you then,’ Jeff looked at the middle of his father, not at his face. ‘I wasn’t going to let my mother spoil my life.’
There was nothing to do after lunch except sit in the cinema and watch a second-rate film. Paul dozed and Jeff fidgeted and muttered and groaned as the film got worse. But when Paul woke, looked at his watch and saw that he must go, Jeff was quite sullen, although he had been throwing himself about in his seat and complaining: ‘I can’t stand much more of this.’
Paul did not get to the hospital until after six, but he went up to the ward anyway, hoping that he might find a nurse he knew.
The ward was closed for the Saturday night concert. From the corridor, Paul could hear some basic guitar chords and pleasant young Anglo-Saxon voices singing that ‘De Lawd He know ‘bout all de hungry chillun.’
He looked into the office. Good luck, Nurse Drage was in there, sneaking a cigarette. She was an intense, impulsive girl with her hair scraped back behind enormous ears and her stiff cap riding her forehead like an American sailor.
‘My God, you scared me.’ She jumped up, with her cigarette inside her hand, even more like a sailor.
‘Where’s Sister?’
‘At supper. I’m in charge here.’ She stuck out her apron front and put on Sister’s voice. ‘The ward is closed, my good man.’
‘I know I’m late, but I promised that boy — the one with the wrist — that I’d come back. Has he told you what his name is?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s been asleep since I’ve been on. Is he one of yours?’
Paul did not answer. Nurse Drage put out her cigarette, dropped the stub in her pocket, wiped the ashtray with a square of gauze dressing and put that in her pocket too. ‘Sister’s got another twenty minutes,’ she told him, and then as De Lawd ended to no clapping, she took a quick look down t
he corridor and said, ‘Quick — sneak in before they start again.’
The next song was beginning, but all the men and boys in the beds and chairs turned like a theatre audience to look at Paul coming in. He raised a hand in apology to the two serious boys and the singing girl with the sweet triangular face, and tiptoed round the side of the ward from bedrail to bedrail, as if the middle of the floor were a torrent.
The boy by the end wall had his eyes shut and was either asleep or pretending to be. He was very young, perhaps not yet out of his teens. His light hair, badly cut too long ago stuck up at odd angles on the pillow. His face was narrow, with a small delicate nose like a girl and fair flushed skin that could not need much shaving. The grazes on his mouth and cheek made him look victimized, the outflung arm a plea for mercy.
As Paul sat looking down at him, he opened his eyes, frowned, closed them again and then opened them and opened his mouth as if he might say something.
‘How are you?’ Paul asked, when he did not.
‘All right.’ The music was loud enough for them to talk without being heard by the chubby man, propped on a thick elbow to listen. ‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’
‘I’m sorry I was late. I had to go to Oxfordshire. My son’s at school there,’ Paul said, for something to say, not expecting the boy to care, but his eyes brightened and he asked, ‘How old’s he?’
‘Sixteen. Bit younger than you. Where did you go to school?’
‘Not much of a school. I didn’t mind it. Does your son?’
‘Not too much. The work’s all right, but he hates games and he seems to be a bit of a loner. He doesn’t go round with gangs of friends.’ Paul was feeling his way, trying to keep the boy’s interest.
The boy nodded. ‘What’s his name then?’
‘Jeff.’ Paul talked a bit more about his son and the school and the lunch and the film they had seen. People in trouble usually wanted you to listen and not talk about yourself, but this boy seemed to want it the other way round. He wanted more about Jeff, perhaps to keep from having to talk, perhaps because some drift of fantasy was making Paul a father?
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