Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  David, too, suffered from frustration. From the start he saw himself as an amateur — a term whose literal derivation Tony was quick to comment upon. His colleagues would spend an hour dissecting some character trait in a boy which David, having grasped intuitively, would deny space to in his conscious thought. The prominence of the superficial in conversation made him afraid. Perhaps indeed there was nothing behind it.

  Jones was no mean offender. He would talk to a boy in Rhetorical periods. Argument might not interrupt their rhythm, and so logic ceased to have meaning. Witnessing this abnegation of value, David could feel nauseated.

  Hayden, Samuel and the curate were honest straightforward men. For David the flashpoint was Wallace. The boys were not wrong in calling him pansy. He tickled their chests in the dormitory and patted their heads in the dining hall. He had smoking-jackets, hair oil, and lizard-skin shoes. He was small and frivolous — not a fat, moody being like Amelia Jones, but a creature effete, and with the pathetic flamboyance that comes to those who recognise their tottering decadence unconsciously, and are lost and afraid. Flirting with young boys the way Wallace did was indeed pathetic. It could be hideously rationalised. David sought some sterner ethic. He left Wallace well alone, and consorted largely with the rotund Samuel for whom life held no ambition save to be able to park his car in a lane at night in order to capture moths in the headlamps. Sometimes too he drank lager with the curate who knew an enormous amount about railway engines.

  In all his impressions David realised that the capacity to create was the virtue won from a genius to destroy. Sometimes there was a great deal of hate in him. He hadn't needed Lang to tell him this.

  He never discovered what motivated Amelia Jones. Her mentality was as insipid as a nursery print. There could be no doubt that she was 'good', and none that she was 'sincere', but this reflection was the more appalling to David in discovering to him the vastly divergent sincerities of different worlds.

  The excruciating agony was watching the moral logic of Mrs. Jones at work. The case of the French boy's breakfast was a milder instance of this. Alain resolutely refused to eat 'a proper', which by definition is an 'English' breakfast. Amelia Jones' conclusions were immediate, and displayed an astonishing mental alacrity. Of course he had been eating sweets in the night!

  Jones himself, as David early discovered, would retreat whenever he could, and particularly at the first signs of any crisis in the school, to the understair cupboard which was known as his office. Here, among a chaos of letters and accounts, he held silent communion with his golfing photographs, and the framed etching of the Gloucestershire church of which he had once been the untroubled incumbent. David's eyes strayed with relief to these things whenever he had to visit Jones there as the decoration of the shabby room stung his sense of harmony unbearably. Among other things there was on the floor a linoleum like blood trampled into butter. Despite this it was, together with the staff bed-sitting rooms, the only corner of the school where Mrs. Jones never set foot.

  Hayden, the curate, Samuel and Wallace, were all in some degree victims of Tony's tilting. The ladies of the establishment, with the exception of Mrs. Jones, he gallantly spared. and even befriended. Jean Poole, in fact, he presented with a small photograph of himself in token of her former complicity in getting him off games.

  Tony convinced himself that it was the lack of his photograph which was holding up the appearance of his record. The photographs were processed, he chose a straightforward portrait, and this was despatched. Jean received a naked head, which Tony lovingly decapitated, etherealised, and fixed in sepia, having elicited the various processes from David while his concentration was directed elsewhere. A selection was prepared for Tony's aunt; and David jealously duplicated the entire opus.

  David's motor insurance was paid. It's effect was to remind him poignantly of his lost mobility. That night the Oxford Mail was scanned, and the next afternoon they inspected a 1934 Austin Seven. Tony took one look and said, "Frescobaldi", I think. It's just what we want.' And so Frescobaldi, with an impressive cork in lieu of a radiator-cap, and gears whose selector-rods had occasionally to be sorted out by hand subsequent to the removal of the top of the gear-box itself, came into commission. Its previous owner had fixed to the windscreen a boldly printed notice which read: Help stamp out New Austin Sevens. The appeal was as mysterious and pathetic as it was uncompromising. The notice was allowed to remain.

  The care and maintenance of Frescobaldi replaced a lack in both their lives; but David saw that there was still something wanting in Tony's. He had left his tropical fish behind him in Devon.

  One morning fate intervened. Waking early, as he often did, Tony roused David excitedly to announce that there was a bird in the room. Still drugged with sleep David muttered that he was aware there was a bear and would it stop behaving violently, whereupon Tony only shook him harder. When he was sufficiently awake he followed the boy's pointing finger. Sure enough there was a bird; huddled on the inside windowsill. Its eyes were closed and it looked totally depressed.

  'It's asleep,' said Tony.

  David raised his eyebrows. 'Are you going to wake it?'

  'How?'

  David sank back and closed his eyes. 'Tones …'

  The boy ignored him. 'That's funny!" he said. 'It's a swallow.'

  'It couldn't be,' David explained patiently, still with his eyes closed, 'it would have migrated by now.'

  'I'm off ' Tony said.

  'Where?'

  "To the public library. It opens at eight.'

  David opened his eyes. 'Can't that wait?'

  Tony shook his head. 'It might need special food or something ... Keep me some toast if I'm late for breakfast, and fob off the Major if he misses me.' He still peered curiously at the bird.

  'Remember there's no need to cross the road; said David.

  'All right! ' The boy laughed, and was gone.

  David took another look at the bird when he got up. It had nestled its beak on to its puffed-out breast feathers and was trembling slightly. There was a fine grey streak running down the back of its head; but it certainly looked like a swallow.

  'It's a mutant!' Tony announced happily when David next saw him in the break. 'I couldn't find a picture of it so I rang up the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. They usually try and kill them.'

  'Who? The Institute?'

  'The other swallows, you idiot, Rogers !'

  'Well, how do we persuade it to fly south? It looks too sleepy to me.'

  'They say it never will fly south now,' Tony explained.

  David was doubtful. 'We could try pointing authoritatively. But let's go up.'

  'We'll have to look after it, so what shall we call it?' Tony said on the stairs.

  'Byrd,' David suggested. 'Since it's obviously determined to be a native.'

  Tony placed a saucer of milk in front of the huddled form on the sill while David looked on feeling rather redundant.

  The boy was perplexed, even resentful. 'Why the hell should the others leave it behind? It's more beautiful than ordinary swallows.'

  In the succeeding days Byrd showed no inclination either to die, or to become more sociable. As Tony put it, he was unhappy. The boy constructed him a cardboard box filled with cotton wool, and eventually, though with considerable reluctance, Byrd moved in. He was offered all varieties of branded canary seed and large quantities of warm milk, which he consumed gratefully, but without undue demonstration, and his feeding soon became ritual. His comfort, too, was very carefully considered: David being forbidden, among other things, to smoke in his room except when the curtains were drawn in case Byrd didn't like it. So he became a permanence. Tony referred frequently to 'the three of us', and Byrd shared their existence uncritically.

  The Argo recording came out at the end of the third week of term; a complimentary copy preceded it by two days. Tony behaved very well; modestly sucking his lip and swinging one foot when it was played to the school. The private celebration
was more eventful. Champagne was bought. Byrd was offered but declined, a silver thimbleful; Frescobaldi had a dash poured into his radiator, before it was again corked up; and Tony got joyfully drunk on approximately the amount offered to them both. In fact he was wholly possessed by a spinning, lyrical joy, and eventually fell asleep in his second best suit. For this he never really forgave himself.

  The recording was superb. Tony had acquitted himself with a control which, in its immediacy, was virtually embarrassing, One heard it and held on to one's chair. The volume, intricacy, and precision defining of phrase, formed a combination that was uncanny, and certainly without precedent in any existing recording of a boy soprano.

  After a second glass of champagne David went downstairs and bequeathed the remainder of the bottle to the Major. Then, while the boy slept in a crumpled heap beneath a blanket, he went to work on the final stages of his soprano concerto. At 3 a.m. the conclusion was sufficiently assured as to justify a large whisky, and when the first daylight feinted its, rectangular halo about the curtain the job was done.

  The sense of urgency, though, was far from burned out. In fact it was only just beginning. David marshalled and rehearsed a small orchestra. In the event this was not easy. Ultimately it consisted of a few undergraduates, some boys from the school, and four ladies from the musical sub-section of the Chapel Friends, to whom David made humble approach, and who proved must enthusiastic.

  The recording was made, and a dozen copies of the ten-inch disc were privately ordered and struck off.

  'That was the end of the road.' Tony announced in a brisk aside, while the musical ladies put away their strings. Later, though, he became petulant and unmanageable, and kneeling on the floor, he talked for a long time to Byrd in strange esoteric terms.

  The records, when they arrived, had faithful chair-creaks and a muttered apology from the choirboy with the cymbals who had nearly decapitated timpani. But the simple, three- movement piece lived despite everything: Tony hovering at height, or else swooping down to taunt the majesty of his alto range like an osprey courting with the face of the sea.

  Tony's sadness lifted when one of the musical ladies wrote him a letter asking him to tea with her children. Characteristically the boy took one of his photos with him in case she should want to paste it to the sleeve of her record.

  Adrian Crawley appeared. He showed small curiosity about David's affairs, and explained he had come simply to talk about himself.

  'God Almighty,' he said dully as, prowling about the room, he came upon a photo of Tony.

  'How did Schools go?'

  'Fourth. Dons must have smelt the embryo artist ... Nothing frightens them more - happy, disciplined intellects. Let one into the club and who knows? He may even start writing thrillers. No! The academics' relationship with the artists is about as profound and embarrassed as is the nobility's with the academics. Know what the Duke of Gloucester said when he met Decline and Fall Gibbon? "Another damn, thick, square book! Still scribble, scribble, scribble, is it, Mr. Gibbon?" Superb judgement, don't you think! Now you've got to smuggle me out of here.'

  'Why smuggle?'

  'Jean Poole,' Crawley said.

  'Good Lord! Is she your Jean?.

  'Was' Crawley began wandering round the room again. 'Do you want Jean in a nutshell? She saw through me ... they all do. D'you know what she calls me? Her second favourite boy - that's little boy, you understand. First favourite's someone called Roo or something - big brown eyes, missing tooth, and a croaky voice. Extraordinarily, he's literate. She used to show me his essays ... I suppose you teach him. Alas, poor Jean! And she wants to marry a schoolmaster. She needs constantly to be told she's loved. All the boys bring her their troubles and so forth. Do they? I wonder? When I was at prep school we were scared stiff of matrons - they were girls.'

  Crawley had reached the window. He scowled at Byrd. 'That thing looks as if it's possessed by the soul of a doomed traveller. A victim of ballad-magic, perhaps ...'

  Rain soaked Oxford. Sometimes the sun broke through so that, prematurely, it assumed its winter look of a mirage city whose dusty gold spires stood in a shallow bowl of mist. On other days the air was cold and clear, and autumn seemed to be guarding her perilous vacuum timelessly.

  The playing fields were flooded. Terry had no need to cultivate verrucas. In the hollow afternoons they tracked Oxford's water-ways; or followed the wandering path of the Scholar-Gipsy around Bagley, Cumnor and Bablock Hythe. Sometimes they took Frescobaldi, but mostly they went on foot, through all weathers, when Tony would insist on walking with his hand in the pocket of David's jacket. David never discovered the significance of this gesture, or thought to enquire about it. Once he endeavoured to return the compliment only to find that the pockets of Tony's suit were too small to comfortably admit his hand, and to be told by the boy that he would rather they weren't stretched out of shape.

  A favourite walk became the towpath out beyond Godstow. They watched the building of a bridge that would eventually join the severed arms of the new by-pass. Beyond it, where the heavy green river and wide fields spread beneath the dark shape of Wytham Woods, there was solitude. At its banks the river played a restless game with the reeds. Some were broken, the greater part of their lengths fallen on the water. Currents, whose motions were invisible to the eye, would draw an olive blade beneath the surface and, as mysteriously, relinquish it again, so that the banks were constantly alive although the body of the stream seemed barely to flow at all. Down-river they watched the same water tumbling through a weir and wondered whether its turmoil was indignation or joy. It was on the towpath that Tony, forging ahead for once, suddenly halted, clicked his muddy heels together, and began to sway regularly from side to side.

  'I'm a pendulum,' he said as David came up. 'Hold me minute ... to stop me.'

  David laughed. 'If you want to be metaphysical, Tones, then I'd say you were a grain of sand in the top of an hour-glass. The hell of it is I don't know which.

  Later on the same walk Tony plucked a straw from a ravaged cornfield. He held it, protruding, in his teeth. 'Clutch!' he said, as articulately as he could; bubbling over with the ingenuity of his conceit. The wit went to his head. He lay the straw on David's back; first instructing him to bend double. 'The last!' he explained. 'It's called Tony Sandel.' Then he galloped away.

  For the rain the boy had a grey plastic cape and sou'wester. Being Tony's they matched. It was dressed like that that crouched motionless in Wytham Woods when they saw the badger. He was trying to photograph it; holding the Rolleiflex ready in his hands. The rain poured down, lashing his face like silver needles that could only make him smile. David stared wildly at the boy's concentrated expression beneath the turned-up rim of the ridiculous hat. His body seemed crushed by a steel press, and a sudden depression lurched like mercury between his temples. The weight lifted as Tony clicked the shutter. In the same moment David knew how much he had become a part of his own being.

  Often Tony became wild. He would intersperse fits of animal joy with passages of tenderness whose lyricism was raised to a degree where it became comic. There was the day he found the pool of mud. Bringing his heels together, as on the occasion when he had been a pendulum, he fell backwards into it with the same lunatic confidence with which he had once leapt from the bath-tub. He was in his waterproof cape, but even so the behaviour struck David as being close to masochism, until he discovered he was wearing games clothes underneath. It had all been a put-up job; which perhaps was worse.

  'Elephants,' said Tony inexplicably; then stopped laughing only gradually like a mill-race rejoining its parent stream.

  David suffered other moments of pain. The worst was in class. Tony had just finished punctuating a sentence on the blackboard, and had had rubbed it off with the duster. He propped one foot on the cross-bar of the easel's front legs, and turned his face to David, waiting. Sunlight filled the head of the room where Tony stood; splashing on the soft silver of his clothes and hard gold of his limb
s, it was reflected by the dancing particles of chalk-dust. David watched him as helpless as he had ever been. Suddenly irrational jealousy changed to terror, because the bright gems of dust were touching the boy. He stood there careless; and the effrontery of the chalk-dust was unbearable. David felt sick and afraid.

  In his dreams Tony would become confused with the image of the grain of sand in the hour-glass.

  One day Tony said, 'Tell me about Italy.'

  David told him about the wide-eyed fields of France. Of the traditional route to the south running through the broad belt of vineyards, and the towns with their almost legendary wine names, until it reached the rough landscape of Van Gogh with its gnarled scrub, its hard, broken angles, and bright, grease greens. He told him about the sharp Mediterranean foreground; the haze which distorted distance, and produced perspectives that were alien to northern eyes, and about the blue of the sea and sky. He did his best to describe the hill-top towns of central Italy with their black-eyed, gap-toothed houses, which were dusty clay boxes miraculously defying gravity. He told him of Florence, Siena and Arezzo; and ranged wherever his memory led him from the Lombardy plains and the magic of Venice, to Perugia and Orvieto, and the sinister, inky hills around Rome.

  Tony was avid for repositories of statuary. David had to confess he had seen very little. But the boy pressed him repeatedly for details of Italy in the first weeks of term. David began to suspect that he dreamed of it as the Great Good Place.