Swan River

by David Reynolds

  On Sunday mornings there was a queue for chapel; we all had to stand in our allotted places, wearing white surplices, so that we could enter the chapel in two parallel white columns. The audience for this spectacle was made up of dons and any visiting parents who were sufficiently interested to attend the hour-long weekly mattins. My place in the queue was immediately behind Jessop.

  One Sunday, another boy tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a needle and indicated that I should jab it into Jessop’s bottom. I wasn’t keen; I had some sympathy for Jessop and there were prefects standing about making sure that we behaved properly. However, when I hesitated, I found there was a group of six or seven behind me, giggling and egging me on. I made sure no prefects were near, and stuck the needle in. Jessop shrieked and jumped in the air holding his bottom. The giggles behind me turned to howls of laughter. Jessop turned on me with a scowl, but at that moment we had to start walking in our parallel lines.

  As we knelt and sat and stood and sang hymns, I regretted what I had done and thought about my father telling me never to conform, never to follow the herd. I had slipstreamed the herd, meekly without thinking.

  * * * * *

  Despite the camaraderie of Hunt, Chandler, Connolly and others, and although I had new things to do like fishing, playing snooker and breaking bounds, I continued, as the terms went by, to dislike my new way of life. I missed my parents, my old friends and my freedom, and felt stifled by rules and timetables, silly traditions, casual insults and inane brutality.

  I affected an air of unconcern; I had a need to pretend – to my parents as well as my peers – that everything was all right, that the indignities did not disturb me. I thought from time to time of my father’s rant against capitalism – ‘I will not suffer from a system I despise’ – and broke rules as and when it suited me. I was beaten by prefects, the housemaster and the headmaster with tedious regularity, but I made certain that I did nothing that could get me expelled. I fitted in to the extent of doing my schoolwork to a reasonable level and playing a role in certain sports, but I greatly disappointed Mr Bird who told me that I didn’t try hard enough, that I was capable of excellence and should not waste so much energy flouting authority.

  Chandler and Connolly, whom I soon came to call by their Christian names, Pat and Peter, were my main accomplices. We weren’t evil; we just smoked and drank, and spent time in coffee bars, betting shops, pubs and cinemas. And, of course, I put a photo of Deborah on my chest of drawers and told the prefects that she was my sister.

  Towards the end of my second term I was beaten by Henderson, the head of house, for the third time for no particular crime – just for an accumulation of small misdemeanours racked up by the prefects on a points system. After the ritual – six strokes delivered in the presence of a witness, the deputy head of house – Henderson asked me to come to his study.

  He told me to sit down on a sofa next to a table with a kettle and instant coffee on it. ‘I don’t like beating you all the time. In fact, I don’t like beating anyone. It’s a bore.’

  I said that I was sorry. I’d try not to break the rules.

  He picked up a packet of biscuits and offered me one. They were chocolate digestives. I took one, he sat down and we munched silently together; his hands dangled between his knees and he stared at the carpet. ‘You’re brainy aren’t you? You’re in the fifth form already.’

  I nodded and said, ‘I suppose so.’ I knew that Henderson was taking a scholarship to an Oxford college.

  He looked at me for a few seconds, then looked down at the carpet, then at me again. He handed me another biscuit and bit into one himself. ‘It can be hard being brainy in a school like this…probably in any school…if I say so myself.’ He smiled. ‘Try to belong, Reynolds. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Belong… here?’

  ‘Yes. There are some good things. Find them.’ He gave me another biscuit. ‘Just ignore the rest.’

  * * * * *

  I wasn’t sure what the good things were, though I guessed that they didn’t include smoking in a hollow tree with Pat Chandler or bicycling to Oxford and trying to talk to girls in Woolworth’s with Peter Connolly.

  Over breakfast at home on the first day of the holidays, I told my parents what Henderson had said about belonging and how I didn’t feel that I did and why should it matter anyway. My father lowered the Guardian, his paper since the News Chronicle went out of business, looked at my mother, and said, ‘Try to belong. “Only connect.” Wise chap, your friend Henderson.’

  My mother put down the Daily Telegraph, reached across the table, picked up my empty cereal bowl and placed it inside her own with the two spoons on top.

  ‘For God’s sake, Mary! David wants to know about belonging…what the boy, the prefect, meant…and all you can do is collect the dishes.’ My father’s voice rose. ‘Lord deliver us!’

  My mother looked at me as if my father wasn’t there. ‘He means you should try to feel part of the school, the community, and take the opportunities on offer, like you do here in Marlow. Don’t fight against it. Learn what you can. There will be good teachers and not so good teachers. He means take advantage of the good ones, enjoy the good things, enjoy yourself… He probably also means: don’t waste time breaking rules.’ She smiled and touched my hand. My report had referred to my being ‘a little unruly’.

  My father licked a Rizla paper and spoke again, in his normal voice. ‘He could also mean: respect the institution. It’s been there a long time. Just that very fact gives it some value.’ This seemed an odd thing for him to say – he who wanted to remove the idle rich and give power to the workers – but I didn’t argue. I just buttered some toast as he went on. ‘There is value in ritual and tradition and, yes, your friend Henderson is absolutely right, it is worth belonging to an institution like that… I mean allowing yourself to feel that you belong… as long as you don’t swallow it all hook, line and sinker. Take the bits that seem good to you.’ I found this confusing. What my mother had said made more sense.

  9

  My Hat!

  Sis spent two and a half months away from London, returning just before Christmas. The party stayed at the house in Devon for three weeks during which Old George arranged an extensive and leisurely sales trip, beginning with visits to old friends in the furniture trade.

  After a few days in a newly-built, red-brick mansion in Prestwick, where Sis played interminable games of cards with the wife and daughters of a red-faced upholstery magnate, dubbed by her father ‘the King of Kapok’, father and daughter moved on to a luxurious old house in the Warwickshire countryside as the guests of a religious and hospitable family called Taylor. Here Sis was allowed more time alone and passed the days outdoors, shrouded in a thick black cloak borrowed from Mrs Taylor. For long hours she sat under a giant cedar at the northern edge of an impeccable lawn; when she tired of sitting she wandered beside a canal which had been diverted from a nearby stream, lined with red brick and filled with goldfish for the pleasure of the Taylor family.

  At the Taylors’ Sis and her father were joined for a weekend by Young George, who had barely spoken to his sister since she jumped from the train at London Fields. Sis was touched that he had come – touched sufficiently to make a short entry in her journal. Clearly he had travelled to see her; he had little in common with the Taylors beyond a generosity of spirit. They hugged and cried together in his dark-panelled bedroom, and he gently urged her to embrace the future and abandon the past.

  She brushed her face against his tickly tweed jacket to remove her tears. Though she saw the good sense of his advice, she knew she couldn’t act on it – not then, perhaps never. She told her brother that he was lucky to be a man, and he replied that he would never behave as Stanley had done. Of course he wouldn’t, but the irony was plain. Her innocent brother had no conception of what Stanley had really done; except for Kate no one ever would.

  He noticed that she had lost weight. He touched her chin and felt her upper arm t
hrough her sleeve. He urged her to eat properly. She knew she should, but told him truthfully that she never felt hungry.

  Sis and Old George went next to the large ramshackle home of a family called Inglesant outside Leicester; here they regularly sat down to eat with a noisy group of eight children, and the huge, maternal Mrs Inglesant urged Sis, whom she considered unhealthily thin, to eat at least as much as her four-year-old.

  Sis became a passive bystander in her own life. She didn’t object to following her father about or to being mothered and bossed by Mrs Inglesant or anyone else; the only thing she objected to was the three-hole earth closet at the end of the Inglesants’ garden. Old George had business to do with his old friends, but father and daughter spent hours and days together, playing chess and talking – although Stanley was never mentioned.

  After Leicester they spent some days in Dublin, and at the beginning of December passed through London en route for Paris, staying at Norfolk Road overnight. It was Sis’s first trip to France and she was, as her father had intended, distracted by the newness and strangeness; she was amazed by Old George’s ability to speak what sounded like fluent French and by the fact that he had close friends there, too.

  They travelled to Brussels and then to Antwerp, where in a hotel room by the harbour, with trams ringing and rattling in the street below, she stared into a mirror and realised that she was caring about something again; she found that she missed her home, her brothers – funny Ernest and kind, sweet George – and Little Alice, to whom she felt almost like a mother – and Kate; she would love to see Kate. She knew she had upset her and longed to explain, to try to make her understand; then Kate would forgive her. She was not a scarlet woman. She was just Sis, an ordinary woman who had fallen in love. It was just bad luck that the man had been…no good? A villain? A deceitful fool? He was those things, but he was also good-looking and clever, and she remembered how he had made her happy. She still loved him, imagined that she would always, but knew that she could not see him again.

  In Antwerp she began to write normally, lengthily, in her journal again, for the first time since the horrible night after the dinner at Romano’s. She wrote no more about Stanley, but filled two pages with observations of her father.

  She had always loved him, of course, but now she felt a new admiration: for his easy-going ways, his strong sense of morality and the calm, competent way that he dealt with life. She wondered what he would have done if he had discovered the full truth about her passion for Stanley, and decided that for once he would have been nonplussed – torn down the middle between his moral values and his love for her. She wrote about his wit, his jokes, his twinkly eyes; the affection and respect that he had received from so many people of different kinds in different places as they had travelled. She praised his work, his furniture designs which he was constantly engaged in selling and to which she had seldom given a thought.

  This is not to say that in a hotel in Antwerp, Sis suddenly regained her spirit. When they returned to London three days before Christmas, something she both dreaded and looked forward to, she felt awkward, as though she was an outsider; she found it impossible to respond to the cheerfulness, and especially to Ernest who had a noisy new lady friend. When he spoke to her seriously and said how sorry he was, she was pleased and they hugged, but otherwise his natural banter, with which she had lived happily for twenty years, depressed her. With all of them she became withdrawn and, when asked her opinion on household matters, an arena she had formerly ruled, she simply agreed to anything that anyone suggested.

  On Christmas Eve, Kate came with Kathleen and they had a long talk in Sis’s bedroom while Little Alice minded the child. Kate told her how hard it had been for her to understand, that she had thought for days about what Sis had told her, but that she had had a flash of understanding; she too had once felt passion – for her husband, Henry, Sis’s Uncle Gibson. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she said.

  Sis didn’t laugh. She understood and was struck by the humdrum nature of her position. She had simply fallen in love with the wrong man. That was all. Many women, like her aunt, seemed to find the right man; some found no man at all; a few, like her, made mistakes.

  Kate told her that she was still shocked by the thought of the room in the Borough and of Stanley’s raincoat. But she smiled as Sis blushed – and confirmed Sis’s own opinion that she was not ‘a bad woman or a sinner’.

  The family had a quiet Christmas, apart from the frequent presence of Ernest’s new lady friend, a young woman from the East End with a Cockney accent who performed in the music halls. The New Year party of course had to happen, but was a sombre affair compared with the previous year’s. Sis spent the time quietly telling Kate and the sympathetic Lew and Ada Johnson about Dublin and Paris and Antwerp. When the supposedly deaf retired policeman, Uncle Coleman, told her that he’d heard that she had had ‘a bit of trouble’, she sparked up and retorted that she was surprised that he had heard anything.

  * * * * *

  Sis took up her former routines, without enthusiasm but now without resentment; her role was to make her father happy, and she no longer looked for anything else. He, in turn, began taking her to dinners and parties; he was invited to many and he now made sure that she was invited too.

  According to my father, Kate encouraged this while Young George protested, thinking, probably rightly, that his father was hoping that Sis would find another, more appropriate, man; there was something undignified, her brother thought, about her being put on show in the hope of finding an admirer when she was still so hurt and vulnerable.

  But she enjoyed being her father’s constant companion. She dressed well, behaved politely, her wit gradually returned, and she knew that he felt good as he entered rooms – grand and not so grand – with her on his arm.

  At the end of April Ernest married Rose Porter in a church in Bethnal Green. The aunts, uncles and cousins, down to the smallest Sparrowhawk, were there. Young George was best man; Old George, for once resplendent in formal dress, walked down the aisle beaming with the bride’s mother on his arm; Sis caught the bride’s bouquet outside the church and giggled with Kate.

  On a still, humid evening early that summer of 1890, Sis and her father dined at the Johnsons’. The french windows in the dining room were open to a rose-filled garden where five men and five women loitered over pre-dinner drinks. Sis and Old George knew everyone present except a handsome man of medium height whom Ada Johnson introduced as ‘a sort of brother-in-law’. He was the brother of Ada’s much younger sister’s husband. His name was Tom Reynolds.

  He seemed uncomfortable in the company; as he stood awkwardly beside his brother and his host, sipping whisky and listening to them discuss whether Gladstone could become Prime Minister again, Sis guessed he would rather have been anywhere but there. When he took his place at the table, he still seemed ill at ease even though the two people he knew well – his brother and his sister-in-law – were sitting close to him.

  Tom Reynolds was a thirty-one-year-old bachelor, with the type of good looks that can make men or women forgettable because they have no memorable features. He had a rakish, brown moustache – more fashionable than distinctive – swept sideways from the corners of his mouth. My father said of him that, like many handsome men, he was shy and frequently diffident; women had been drawn to him, but he had backed off, seeming to push them away as if to say, ‘Why me? I’m no one special.’ He was a good listener, enjoyed one-to-one conversations, but became tongue-tied in a group. He was the eldest of seven children; his brother Bill, who was facing him across the table, was five years younger and an ebullient, non-stop talker.

  Sis was sitting on his left and sensed his awkwardness; he was fiddling with his fork and seemed to be pretending to listen to his brother who was still talking loudly about Gladstone. Sis leant towards him and asked him why she hadn’t seen him there before.

  He explained himself, his relationship to Bill and – through Bill’s wife Sarah – to Ada Johnson;
and she explained herself, her father’s long friendship with Lew Johnson.

  He told her about his work, at the Welsbach Incandescent Light Company in Westminster, and about the intriguing Baron von Welsbach who had invented the dazzlingly bright, almost everlasting gas mantle. Sis discovered that he travelled to Germany and Belgium from time to time, and that he knew Antwerp well – it was his favourite city. They talked enthusiastically about the port, about Notre-Dame Cathedral and its famous Rubens, Descent from the Cross, and about other Rubens in the Royal Museum. Sis noted that he had two pet expressions, ‘Tommy-rot’ and ‘My hat’ – the way he said ‘My hat’, in particular, made her smile. When she mentioned the printer Plantin, his house and the museum of his work in Vrijdagmarkt, Tom became ecstatic in his praise for the man whom he described, with many ‘My hat’s, as a genius.

  The food came and went, glasses were refilled, and they talked on. She liked talking to him, appreciated his dry, self-deprecating humour, and she noticed that fine lines radiated from the corners of his eyes and vertical furrows appeared in his cheeks when he smiled. One of his stories made her laugh out loud, and she saw him begin to relax.

  Dropping his voice and leaning closer to her – he seemed almost to have forgotten that there were others at the table – he told her about his family, his eccentric, portrait-painter father, dead more than ten years, and his mother who ran a small boarding-house in Bournemouth and who still had five children at home. With good-humoured derision, he spoke of his ‘crazy’ sister Emily who was constantly unwell but believed that God would, one day, make everything all right. It was clear that he had little time for God-botherers.