'Nut case!' David muttered. The whole place is one multiple nut case. It's criminal to send little boys in here even in crocodiles.' He crossed the quad to the J.C.R., passing only Brougham, whose head was cushioned in a new scarf.
There was a letter from Mrs. Shepherd's insurance company promising their 'advices' in the matter of the car accident. What was the mysterious lore that reversed singulars and plurals in the business world? David wondered. On the rare occasions when he had a suit made his tailor referred to 'the trouser'.
There was a letter from Tony too. David opened it second like a child keeping the tinned peaches for last. He took a knife out of his pocket to slit the envelope cleanly.
Dear David.
Thank you very much for the poem. I think it is jolly good.
Saturday will be all right because my verrucas are worse and I poked them with Armstrong's sheath-knife to help. I had a parcel from my aunt with jelly babies and some Brighton rock. I gave the jelly babies to the Ghoul's dog. Would you like the rock because I don't like rock?
Lots of Love, Tony.
PS. I will bring the rock in ease.
David took a card and an envelope, and shoving aside a runic review called Medium Aevum, sat down at one of the J.C.R. desks.
'Good!'
'BRIGHTON ROCK
Alas! Eternal Brighton Rock!
Aunt has sent yet another stock.
You can go on biting,
But can't eat the writing,
As far as you bite on
It still says, Brighton.'
David sighed. Lang was probably right about him. After a moment he added:
'Jelly Babies
Give dogs rabies.
Give the Ghoul's hound
One pound
Regularly!'
Stamping the envelope, as he wasn't sure whether the messenger system delivered to choir schools, he put it in the J.C.R. box.
Thompson's staircase was at the back of St. Cecilia's Small Quad. The landing was covered with mud from last term's rugger fields. David looked out of the window. Below him was a wing of domestic Tudor done on the cheap, but the roof tiles were old stone ones; thick, and chipped at their lips like oyster shells.
There was a movement behind him. Turning, he found Thompson's door open, and the back of his earlier pupil going down the stairs. David waited respectfully. Sure enough Thompson emerged and descended, looking neither to right nor left. When he returned he looked straight through David and entered his room again. David could now decently knock on the half-open door.
Thompson was an intense, birdlike man who made quick, meaningless movements which were apt to be alarming. When David entered he was standing in front of the fireplace. He dropped his chin on his chest like a marionette expressing embarrassment, looked up sharply, and as promptly dropped his head again. David thought he could hear his chin hitting his thorax.
'Ah. Rogers!' he said, the last syllable getting lost in his tie. 'Sit down.'
David sat, first moving a set chessboard. Thompson never actually played chess, but when a world champion in Moscow seemed frozen in stalemate Thompson quietly thawed him out in the privacy of his room.
'I'm going to talk to you, Rogers.' Thompson looked up. The puppeteer had yanked the head string violently. I hope you won't mind. No? Very well then.' He grabbed the sheets of cardboard that were David's essay. 'Swift. Awful' But Johnson - Samuel, Where are we?' He shuffled David's boards like giant cards, then began to read in a nervous monotone.
'Zzz. "The many and obvious fallacies in Johnson's literary criticism have caused some critics to deny him any power of imagination. This is at once true - and absurdly false. Johnson had in fact a terrible imagination, as Mrs. Thrale's custody of Johnson's padlock, and much else besides, suggests. But in the pre-Krafft-Ebing darkness Johnson had no choice but to deny himself its licence with all his might. Simply, Johnson equated imagination, or the pre-valence of imagination at least, with madness. Johnson says as much himself in several places ..." Zzzz. Paragraphs. "For Johnson, then, imagination meant two things: it was responsible for what he called his vile melancholy, but it was responsible as well for the sexual fetishism which he had no hope of understanding, and so could only conclude to be madness. That is why, in his criticism, we find Johnson denying creative power to the imagination of poets, and insisting, as Hagstrom phrases it, that 'mental actions be relegated to primary perceptions'." This is rubbish, Rogers. Absolute rubbish. But then you go on. Zzz. "There are, however, curiosities in Johnson, criticism which are not so smugly explained by a flip through a text book ..." Now, Rogers, we may be smug. Yes, we are smug, I think. You are smug. But we never flip through a text hook. Ever! Are you in love?' Thompson was looking straight at David with his head collapsed on one shoulder.
'No,' David said: he'd spoken more violently than he'd intended.
'Have you a nice girl?'
"I had one once, sir ...'
'Yes, yes! I don't mean you should go that far. Just walks. Literary teas. With a volume of Donne. Know what I mean? Better work!' For some reason Thompson was jangling his hands like an athlete limbering up. 'Won't do, Rogers. It's smug, smart, pretty, slick, facile. 'Understand what I mean?'
David gazed at a cornered pawn on the chessboard.
'Are you what the New Science calls neurotic?'
'Well, yes. Rather,' David said lamely. In a minute they'd both be weeping. He liked Thompson. If it ever came to Calvary Thompson would be there with vinegar. He wouldn't know what to do with it; but he'd make the gesture.
'We'll say no more about Johnson.' Thompson was decisive. For some time David had felt pressure building up in his Pre-frontal lobes. Now there was the faint prompting of a soprano line.
'Have you got anything on Thompson? Thompson, Rogers, The poet!'
'Oh, yes.'
That's better. Not one of your sillier glosses, I hope. Thompson's an ancestor of mine,' he added inconsequentially.
'I think I left Thompson in my room.'
'Come!' Thompson's descendant was advancing on him like a Thurber creature. David surrendered the file.
Thompson began to buzz quietly. Then the buzzing became articulate. "For Thompson, surely, is less a poet than a curious indicator to which the literary historian may point to demonstrate innumerable things. It is perhaps unfair to pick out single lines of Thompson like, 'The foodless wilds /Pour forth their brown inhabitants'. But the sad and prosaic may be found equally readily in whole passages:
The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth
With looks of dumb despair; then sad-dispersed,
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'
This is a nicely observed picture of offended sheep; but it is also abominably funny, which of course it was never meant to be."'
David swallowed. An ancestor, the man had said. But Thompson's buzzing had dropped an eighth, and the harmony became almost whimsical.
'"Thompson is said by Dobree to have been most successful in his sentimental cameos. Perhaps wrongly, I found these hard to take.
'In vain for him the officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing and the vestments warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mighty storm, demand their sire
With tears of artless innocence.'
When one has read Winter one is prepared to believe anything of Thompson, and so it is without surprise that one discovers him to have been the author of Rule Britannia."'
The new Thompson accomplished a roll into the Minor. Zzz - ZZZ. "Before discovering the places where Thompson was a poet - and there are some discoverable by him who wades long enough…" ZZZ.'
David's chair began to vibrate. It was astounding. A piccolo man with the tonal depth of a bassoon. The rumbling became articulate again,
"Despite his two faults of excruciating diction and diffuseness, Thompson sometimes hits the ball when it soa
rs red and unmistakable into the sky. My examples come from Dobree, because I got sleepy long before Thompson got his eye in." Zzz. "In passing one might note that Thompson's diction is not all hackneyed. He was a pioneer too, and seems to have invented a new verb, to thick-urge, as in the phrase:
'…a blackening train
Of clamorous rooks thick-urge their weary flight'."'
The contemporary Thompson threw out his chin and tossed the file into David's lap. 'I suppose you know you could get a First if you weren't just damn silly?'
David mumbled and moved his shoulders around like Fernandel. He found now that if he tacked 'Sir' on to a sentence it sounded wrong. It was a secret of voice inflection one lost after school. He said nothing.
David bundled towards the door. Thompson seemed to be snapping at invisible mosquitoes. He looked over his shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Sure enough Thompson was going to the lavatory, and pretending to anyone who might be watching that he wasn't.
'Stay just where you are, Rogers!' Crawley ordered.
The outside door of Thompson's staircase had closed behind David. Crawley backed steadily away from him like someone about to deliver Fair play with a six-gun. From ten yards Crawley called loudly:
'What news, you old bugger, still on probation then?'
The gaggle of tourists that passed between them at that moment did nothing to muffle the cheerful shout. When David opened his eyes the tourists had gone and Crawley was coming back towards him with a furious scowl. 'Won't do,' he said, shaking his head.
David was nettled. 'I should ruddy well think not!'
'Testing the inane greetings of this place,' Crawley said absently. 'Look, Roger, I can walk with you just as far as the Great Quad. I'm doing another charity job for the blind.' 'Your dependent ten thousand?'
'Yes.' Crawley looked up sharply. 'And work doesn't come easily with a girl - I'm getting married.'
62
63
'Funny,' David interrupted relentlessly, 'Thompson's just been advocating one for better work.'
Crawley stopped in his tracks. 'Our work is not the same Rogers. You're an academic; but I'm alone. I'm an artist.'
'No! That's a big word, you know.'
'Please let me speak,' Crawley said. I must leave you in ten yard's time and I know what it is that's going to destroy the world. Lack of communication - reciprocal communication: cultural, political, intellectual - whatever you like. But more, it's snobbery and self-deceit, which are artificial, protective barriers that prevent communication. You see Cowley workers streaming out of the dogs. What do you feel? Rogers! I'm asking you a question, for God's sake!'
'Oh! Superior. 'That I'm a better bloke - an entity with a brain something more than brute. That I should meet them on some level. But one never will.'
Crawley had sat down suddenly in the Small Quad. He stared at David wildly. 'I've communicated!'
'Or I have,' David said. 'You have to leave me here, remember?'
'You're the first person I've reached! The first of my people!'
'I thought we were all your bloody people,' David called over his shoulder.
He walked through into the Great Quad. The sun had sunk below the battlements leaving a slab of sleepy warmth trapped between the walls. He stepped out under the Bell Tower and there it was: a hot orange inexplicably glued to the spire of St. Aldate's.
David made his way to the number three bus stop, and then had to stand. Port and sherry with Thompson sandwiched between them. No, two Thompsons. A shadowy poet, and a convulsive bird-man in Glengarry tweeds. It was too much. A baby was staring at him like a cameo of Thompson's. It brought up wind, lolling over its mother's shoulder. 'Me too,' said David. 'But it'll go with a bang when K. looses the I.C.B.M.s aligned on Brize Norton. No time for decisions, let alone revisions. No time to finish a song.'
Mrs. Kanter was on the first landing.
'Oh, Mrs. Kanter. My little brother will be coming to tea with me here on Saturday. I hope you don't mind?'
The woman beamed. 'Why, Mr. Rogers, of course not! I didn't know you had a brother though! '
'Yes. He's at St. Cecilia's choir school.'
'How lovely! And how old is he?'
'Thirteen.'
Mrs. Kanter slapped her girth. I'll make you a cake then! Does he like chocolate?'
'Very much.' David said without hesitation. 'But, please, you really mustn't bother…'
'Bother! Don't be silly, Mr. Rogers. Whose house is this now?'
'Why, yours.' David was puzzled.
'Well, just don't you be silly in it, then!' Mrs. Kanter announced triumphantly. David smiled. The dramatic way the working class delivered their rhetoric seldom wanted ingenuity. 'And it's no bother,' Mrs. Kanter went on, 'just don't you worry about it. I'll have it in your room dinner-time Saturday. You go on now!'
David knew a command when he heard one. 'You're very kind. Really.' He closed the door and hurled himself on to the bed. 'Lousy liar, Rogers,' he said aloud. He felt in the cupboard beside him. 'You deserve MacVitie's digestives instead of dinner.'
Chapter 10
'Thank you for those other poems,' Tony said when David met him at the bottom of the field. There was a flush along the high line of his cheek-bones, and he was wearing his flannel suit. He hadn't brought the 'plane.
'Well, they're not poems really. Just rhymes.'
The boy had pulled himself up on to the fence, and now he perched there looking at David oddly. 'I like them very much.'
David smiled. 'Come on. I hope you don't mind being my brother this afternoon. We'll have tea at my digs. My landlady's made a cake for you.'
'We won't have to have tea with her, will we?'
'No, of course not!'
The boy seemed relieved. He smiled happily as he got into the car. 'Before I forget - the rock!' He pulled a huge stick out of his pocket. 'Think of it as a symbolic gift if you like.'
David stowed it away ceremoniously. A disquieting thought occurred to him. 'Tony, you're not an alto, are you?'
'No, soprano. Well, that is, actually I'm rather unique…'
'I know.' David was looking at the line of the boy's nose.
Unexpectedly, Tony twisted round giggling. He seized the lapels of David's jacket and tugged them.
'I meant my voice.'
'All right. Tell me about your voice.'
'It's almost mezzo,' the boy said, releasing David. 'I'm first soprano, but I can sing most of the alto range as well.'
David started the car. Excitement had tightened his stomach. He began mentally to revise his soprano line; dropping into cool grooves like the fluting on Lang's porcelain bowl,
'You do like singing, don't you?'
'For specially favoured patrons, yes.' said Tony. David glanced at him. His tone had held an odd mixture of emotions. But now his attention was distracted by the shops they were passing. 'There are frog flippers in that window,' he said.
David felt breathless on the stairs. He didn't want Mrs. Kanter to pop out; yet a part of him wished that she would.
She didn't appear, however. Sure enough, in the middle of his table was a chocolate cake covered by a paper hat. Tony's grey eyes widened.
'Who's the hat for?'
'The cake, of course. To keep the flies off,'
'There aren't any flies.'
The boy was standing by one of the high dormer windows. He had hung his cap on the back of the door as they'd come in. Now he said apologetically, 'I'm sorry my suit is rather worn.'
David looked up from arranging cups. 'It's very nice, but I'd wondered why you'd put it on?' Tony, he realised, matched the cerebral-grey paintwork of his room.
The boy looked confused. 'It's all-wool,' he said at a tangent. 'New College have ten per cent of nylon in theirs – but I like their red, white and black socks better than ours.' He looked down depreciatingly at his wine-and-blue-topped stockings. 'Our suits are better, though.' He moved his knee forward. 'Feel.'
David felt
the hem of his jacket. 'You're a funny boy, Tony,' he said lamely: he had cut out 'little' just in time.
The boy wandered away, petulantly almost, and struck a chord on the piano. Then he swung round, suddenly animated. 'The Ghoul's always on at us about us looking scruffy and about New College.' he said. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his shorts, then splayed them out, drew them up over his stomach, and rocked back on his heels. Then, catching sight of David's gown on the back of the door, he unwound himself, draped it over his shoulders, and took up the same stance again. Leaning right back on his heels, and struggling to control an inane grin, he mimicked: ' "The boys of New College School, which on an old map you will see is situated, not inappropriately, at the apex of Lovers' Lane and Saville Road, never look scruffy! What's more, their manners..." ' But it was no good. Intoxicated by his own performance, Tony folded up in mezzo-soprano giggles, and fell back on the bed.
After a moment he scrambled off again, straightening the bedspread. 'They have to take their caps off to cars on zebra crossings, too,' he said in his own voice, when he had recovered.
' "Manners Maketh Man" - belated Wykham foundation.'
Tony had discovered David's tripod. Do you take photos too, then?' He seemed to have forgotten both his scorn for the nylon in New College's suits, and his covert admiration of their socks. 'So do I! Isn't it funny?' He had perched on the edge of a chair and was looking intently at David with the grey eyes under brows which a god must have pencilled as the final expression of his own wonderment. 'About you and me, I mean. You know about model 'planes, and about music and about photographs as I do. I think we're sort of bound ...' Tony looked down: he'd lost his composure.
David stared across at him. He was a ravishingly beautiful boy. The word 'ridiculously' rose in his mind because it alone could express the enormity of the boy's beauty without conceding its terror. And this, of course, was just the nervous brinkmanship Lang had accused him of. 'I think so too, Tony.' He got up impulsively. "Tea! I'll show you the camera afterwards.'
The boy looked up again with a brilliant smile. David went out of the room to fill the kettle. When he returned Tony was kneeling on the hearth-rug, turning over the pile of records he had tipped out of their rack. He had inverted his right hand; the third and index fingers were in his mouth, and his nose was nuzzled into the palm. As David entered the room, he quickly withdrew the fingers. David pretended not to have noticed, and lit the gas ring.
Sandel Page 7