Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  'We've had a lot of trouble with foreign boys in the past, you know. They're really so different in their ways.'

  'Yes,' said David, who saw no other possible rejoinder to this profundity.

  Mrs. Jones had collected a cup of tea and one of the larger cakes, and now stood planted in the middle of the hearth-rug. Her eyes were extraordinary. They were light blue and large, yet wanting in any attractiveness due to an excessive protrusion. These, together with the heaviness of the surrounding face, one of whose chins Mrs. Jones was in the process of scratching, suggested that her temperature was selfish and unstable. Probably she took pills for a heart, and was conceivably a member of the Cardiac Fellowship. Following this uncharitable line of thought, as with his eyes he followed the abortive figure of Mrs. Jones down to the carpet, David couldn't help observing that her massive legs were reminiscent of some species of tropical pot-plant in the foyer of a Brighton hotel.

  'Headmaster, do drink your tea up before it gets cold,' Mrs. Jones said irritably.

  David glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see a row of boys, or perhaps servants, before whom Jones' prestige must he upheld. But there was no one. He passed his eye round the room. The centre-piece appeared to be a large television set, before which was drawn up the settee where Jones was crouched. Apart from these items of furniture there were two further armchairs and a bureau whose extended leaf bore a stack of notepaper whose letter-head announced it as coming from The Headmaster, St. Cecilia's Choir School. A book-case ranged beside this contained a copy of the Public and Preparatory Schools Yearbook for 1957, an A.A. Road Maps, a very large Bible, quite the smallest Pocket Oxford Dictionary David had ever laid eyes upon, and an assortment of volumes in shiny dust jackets whose subject matter he guessed would be confined to various aspects of the English scene. The pictures on the wall had been chosen with the same wholesome and conservative eye as those in the hall which had horrified David on his first visit. Here, in fact they were Gainsborough's The Blue Boy; and another scriptural scene with emphasis on the suffrage of little children. Above the mantelpiece, and between two Stafford dogs whose hideousness placed their authenticity beyond doubt, two further little children, poetically ragged urchins this time, and perhaps the good poor, were depicted launching a toy boat on what might have been the Serpentine.

  David's eye recoiled sharply from the china spaniels, and took refuge in Mrs. Jones. 'These foreign boys are on some sort of exchange with a couple of yours?' he hazarded. He had rejected 'ours' as sounding rather presumptuous at this stage of his employment.

  Mrs. Jones transferred the attention of her scratching finger to another chin. David saw now that it was a nervous gesture.

  'Well, yes, that's it really. Two of our boys have gone to these foreign boys' schools.' Mrs. Jones paused, as if doubting whether she'd given the first chin sufficient attention. 'The Headmaster and I think it's so nice if boys can get away like that for a term, you see.'

  David said he saw. 'Tony, I know, was very grateful for his term in Vienna,' he added, partly to sustain the pleasantry, but more for the sake of pronouncing Tony's name aloud. 'One of our this term's boys comes from Vienna. Oh, l do hope he won't be as naughty as the last one, Headmaster!' She turned to Jones, who merely grunted. 'He was the only boy in our time at the school whom the Headmaster had to send home. He stole apples,' she explained.

  'How dreadful!' Too late David realised his acting couldn't match the boldness of the words and hurried on. 'Where does the other one come from?'

  'From Paris.'

  'I think I'll put Hans Gunther von Manz, and the other boy, Rassignac, in your special charge Rogers,' Jones interrupted. 'You can give them English tuition, or anything yon like when you're free.'

  'Right,' David said heavily in a tone which he hoped Suggested that he was already giving consideration to a carefully devised course for these two unknowns.

  Mrs. Jones cleared the tea things. She looked with even greater distaste at the Negro's head on David's cane. David noticed that Jones hadn't called him 'my dear boy'. Jones

  seemed a more timid, and certainly less natural, man in the presence of his wife. He sorted out some papers that had become stuck to the hot-water jug.

  'We still don't know whether Hamley's supposed to be going to Vienna or not, dear. Can you get on to Colonel Hamley and find out?'

  Mrs. Jones groped more resolutely at her neck, and her eyelids drooped momentarily in assent. David, for his part, couldn't contain a smile. He thought of Hamley, whose stomach couldn't support a slice of fried bread, faced with a plate of Viennese pastries veritably inflated mit schlagrahm; and of the armless Hamley, to whom a long hour in the Stephansdom might have been extended as a courtesy. And suddenly, no doubt through some unconscious train of association, the veil parted in David's mind to reveal an image of Tony as true to the life as if it were before him at that moment in the ground-glass screen of his Rolleiflex. Tony's face was contorted with horror as he regarded a lipstick in the outstretched hand of a wardrobe mistress, over whose forearm were draped a number of sailor-suits. But David hardly noticed her. His mind was reeling back before the magical interplay of line and colour that made up the composition of Tony's face. The high, almost disdainfully pencilled arches of the brows above his grey eyes; the strangely fragile structure of the cheek-bones sweeping back to his impish ears; the

  too-perfectly moulded fashion model's nose; the incongruous suggestion of a tried compassion that lurked about the jaw and lips of a face whose texture and colouring was otherwise that of innocence, and which played, perhaps, the larger part in dividing Tony's beauty from any pretty boy of similar age.

  All this, and particularly the superbly-cut lips, which were parted in horror at the proffered cosmetic, David endeavoured to transfer into memory as soon as the first shock of recognition was past. But then the image was gone; lost, if not irretrievably, then at least beyond summoning in the crystal reality of its original form. Memory might reproduce the scene but only as a blurred photograph.

  David got to his feet and discovered he had cramp in the toes. Seizing his stick, he hobbled to the door and opened it for Mrs. Jones who was trundling forward with the trolley. He smiled at her almost indulgently as she departed.

  He recalled his remarking to Tony that he wished he were a painter, and Tony's indignant assertion that he was a composer. The Symphony in G was still only a collection of disjointed themes with an inspirational key change, which alone would require a weight of time and mathematics to orchestrate. The unorthodox vocal sonata, on the other hand, which when completed and recorded in the manner he proposed would represent an entirely new employment of the boy soprano, was barely begun. The blight here was time. Tony was thirteen and eleven months. His voice might lose control tomorrow and be dead within ten days. Alternatively, it might enter a period of gradual decline drawn out over a period of months, when it would be criminal to put it through the arduous tests the sonata would demand at a single run through, let alone the rehearsing that a satisfactory professional recording would involve. Though David had had no formal training in the choral field, he knew Tony's was a voice that might happen once in a generation. Furthermore, the boy seemed to have achieved a peak of training that was no mean credit to St. Cecilia's, and to be possessed as well of an innate musical intelligence the lack of which left many technically accomplished boys' voices helplessly wanting in an imaginative interpretation. Tony, in a word, was a genius. But his genius, like his physical beauty, must soon decline.

  David, oblivious to the huddled form of Jones as Jones was oblivious to him, stared out through the window to find his melancholy echoed in the garden where the sun had left what must be Mrs. Jones' personally-tended rose beds. He scowled at a further group of concrete gnomes. A white cat, perhaps the one the boys called Palestrina, uncurled itself from beneath the feet of one of them and slunk round to the western side of the building to enjoy the last of the sunshine. The problem was not new. One trained a
boy hard, perhaps from when he was eight. At twelve be might be fit to sing, and sing with increasing usefulness for eighteen months or two years. But just when his lungs were beginning to be able to support, and his throat to control something other than thin squeaks, and more, when he was beginning to have some intimation as to what music was about, he was finished. Who enjoyed the brief season of his achievement anyway? At St. Cecilia's a few old ladies who tottered in from Headington and North Oxford, and a clutch of those smooth Anglicans who didn't know a soprano from a piccolo. Not for the fast time David asked himself why he had never been to hear Tony sing in the Temple. He was still unsure of the answer.

  Where it concerned Tony, the problem of the brief season was particularly acute, being obviously complicated by personal feelings. As with the photographs, David felt compelled to record a permanence: but a permanence that would be of more universal appeal, and also more living to themselves. He could hope for none greater than that Tony should perform a work of his own. For the time being at least, the boy had the voice; and he had both the musical intelligence, and the lungs in his scaled-down Donatello chest.

  'I'd better make myself more familiar with the school,' David said.

  Jones passed a hand through his thinning hair. 'Yes, you do that, Rogers. Excellent idea. Good heavens, that train'll be here any minute and Samuel's not arrived. Hayden will have to take first duty. Watch him, Rogers. Watch him and learn, there's a good follow.' Jones looked down triumphantly at the paper on the table. 'Your first job will be to escort the school to prayers in the Chapel tomorrow at nine.'

  'The college Chapel?'

  Jones looked surprised. 'But of course, my dear boy!'

  'Right,' David concluded uneasily. As he turned to the door he had hastily to flatten himself against the wall. Mrs. Jones was agitated and her colour dangerously heightened.

  'Emergency, Headmaster!' she announced. 'Emergency!'

  David had the impression that the words were a recognised signal at which the whole household must spring into some carefully rehearsed sequence of action. He stiffened instinctively.

  'That ball-cock in the boys' bathrooms again,' said Mrs. Jones.

  David's puzzlement cleared as he recalled Mrs. Jones' showing him what she termed the geography of the house on his arrival. 'I'm quite an experienced hand with lavatory cisterns' he volunteered to Jones.

  But the Headmaster was already following his wife meekly into the hall. David turned less hurriedly into the wake of the odd couple. It occurred to him to wonder now whether the Viennese who had 'stolen apples' with such unprecedented consequences had not perhaps urinated thoughtlessly in Great Quad or on to Mrs. Jones' rose beds.

  There was nothing methodical about David's exploration. Instead he strayed more or less aimlessly about the still largely deserted building. The train had evidently not yet arrived, but the occasional swish of tyres on gravel announced the delivery of boys being returned by car.

  From the doorway of one of the dormitories David was able, unobserved, to witness the odd spectacle presented by the reunion of three of these. At first the boys, plucked from their holiday environment of familiar homes and informal clothes, then dressed up and driven through the September afternoon to be deposited at this focal point, barely recognised each other's existence or else were prepared to do so only with a formality that was both touching and comic, Gradually, as a new toy was dragged from a night-case and reluctantly shown, a name, or a common memory recalled, or an argument begun, the adjustment quickened visibly. Then, with the impatient hand on a sleeve demanding the return of a Dinky-toy, or the now uninhibited laugh at the recollection of what somebody had done with his milk, the pattern or readjustment was complete, and the home environment of parents, sisters and brothers had become as remote and unthinkable as the school one must have seemed only hours before. As the secure sense of familiarity grew with the greater frequency of physical and mental contacts, so the noise grew also.

  The scene was one David was to discover in different forms, and among different groups in all parts of the building. Here and there, too, sitting on the one righted chair in a form-room whose furniture was otherwise stacked in an untidy heap, or else wandering listlessly down a corridor, and feeding himself periodically from a paper-bag in his pocket, he came across the born outsider. One of these was brushing-up a geometry theorem, another was talking soulfully to some offspring of Palestrina in a dark corner, and a third had discovered a box of coloured blackboard chalks, and with tensed face was expressing himself luridly whilst he still might.

  Wherever David went he was constantly struck by the beauty of such boys as he met. 'Yes, sic' he owned to himself aloud. Of course, there was nothing like Tony's', and probably nothing, he told himself dryly, that wouldn't have suffered disillusionment after a few weeks of the familiarity that a classroom must impose. But now, and recently released as he was from the long period in hospital, he found himself at moments overwhelmed by the wealth of so many young forms, while the confinement of these supple bodies in their uniform clothes disturbed him not a little. He became acutely apprehensive of the impact Tony must have upon him that night. Meanwhile, he reflected, the pleasure he took in some of the boys he saw about him now was not very far removed from the sudden upsurge of joy he had experienced among the wildly blown trees and scattered rooks when he had taken his first faltering walk in the Great Park. And if this were so, there should be no matter.

  David discovered the art-room in what, when the building had still been a private house, must have been a conservatory. He stood for a moment before the one wall that was not made of glass, and where there were pinned a number of exhibits on bluish-grey sugar-paper. The paintings were no different from those that might have adorned the similar room at his own private school. There were in fact exactly the same aeroplanes, decorated with exactly the same swastika, for which inheritance Captain W. E. Johns, rather than parental experience, was most probably responsible. David surveyed the collection for a common denominator, and saw at once that this was a direct reflection of the energy and restless movement with which the arrival of the school train had now filled the building. Yet there was something more, that he could only define as joy. Or perhaps it was more nearly expressed by what the Christians called Witness. An aeroplane might not fly, but that it must have fire spurting from its guns and bombs falling simultaneously from its belly. If a ship was not creaming along over an expanse of ocean but was for some reason confined to harbour with heavy black anchor-chains at each end, then a man, if not two, must at that moment be falling from the mast. Again, that old faithful, the two-dimensional cottage in rural setting, positively belched smoke into the summer sky from an altogether unjustifiable number of chimneys.

  Tony, David reflected, looking at this last could sit still and talk. He could write letters or settle down on his hilltop to read music. He had become consciously cerebral, where the authors of these paintings had not. But he had lost none of their innocence.

  'That's mine,' said Hunter, who had somehow appeared beside David. 'The house ... Sir?' Hunter looked up, and David noticed that the rather precious raven fringe of the Ghoul's boating mascot had evaded the scissors for too long. His piercing blue eyes were not unattractive. 'Sir - is it true that you're teaching Mr. Gould's classes?'

  'Some.' David nodded abstractedly. 'Why?'

  The boy looked abashed. 'Sir, well, it's just that Mr. Gould let me be form monitor, sir, and-'

  David cut him short. The little boy's expression made it apparent that he was putting forward his prior claim to mother-love, and was looking automatically to the Ghoul's successor to fulfil his need. 'We'll see.'

  'Thank you, sir. Thank you very much sir!' Hunter ran off as someone called his name and David turned away in some perplexity. It came to him uncomfortably that the job he'd landed was primarily that of a nursemaid. And tomorrow he must escort the crocodile.

  Although the uncarpeted building was now a chaos of slamming doors, s
hrill cries, and racing grey forms, some of which checked themselves dramatically to stare at him with a feigned horror or alarm, and even with an unfeigned delight: who seemed to be under some compulsion to screech to a halt before him on the polished floors, mutter 'Sorry, sir,' before walking respectfully past him, and then breaking into an even noisier run again, he found his way to a large, empty assembly hall that occupied most of a western wing.

  He paused for a moment listening to an authoritative voice which was shouting 'House-shoes! No supper until you've changed into your house-shoes, I said, idiot …' before closing himself into the comparative silence.

  Before him in the empty hall was a Bluthner concert grand. David gave a low whistle and opened the keyboard almost fearfully. He struck a chord, and concluded that someone must have held St. Cecilia, Choir School in pretty high regard. Somehow he couldn't see the Governing Body of the college voting away the money for a piano such as this. He struck a further series of chords. Shafts of late sunlight came through the western window to melt in dazzling pools on polished mahogany. Without further ado David flexed his fingers and went straight into Rachmaninov's Third Concerto, albeit that the orchestration might only be heard in his head. The move was a bold one after his incarceration. Still, he was in uncritical mood - so much so that a moment later he broke off to raise the giant's top before commencing again. David's exuberance swelled irresistibly. He flew off the crest of Rachmaninov's most shamelessly conceited wave at a tangent, spontaneously endowing the Third with a gratuitous orgasm. Then he continued the improvisation in an ecstasy. The Bluthner was superb: so sensitive that it thundered, rippled, and mewed as if actuated directly by the electrical impulses that coursed through his brain.