At half-term his father and Gillian came. They stayed in the Grand, and Michael had lunch and tea there on the Saturday and on the Sunday, and just lunch on the Monday because they had to leave in the afternoon. He told them about his friends, Carson and Tichbourne, and his father suggested that next half-term Carson and Tichbourne might like to have lunch or tea at the Grand. ‘Or maybe Swagger Browne,’ Michael said. Browne’s people lived in Kenya and his grandmother, with whom he spent the holidays, wasn’t always able to come at half-term. ‘Hard up,’ Michael said.
Tichbourne and Carson were in Michael’s dormitory, and there was one other boy, called Andrews: they were all aged eight. At night, after lights out, they talked about most things: about their families and the houses they lived in and the other schools they’d been at. Carson told about the time he’d put stink-bombs under the chair-legs when people were coming to play bridge, and Andrews about the time he’d been caught, by a policeman, stealing strawberries.
‘What’s it like?’ Andrews asked in the dormitory one night. ‘What’s it like, a divorce?’
‘D’you see your mother?’ Tichbourne asked, and Michael explained that it was his mother he lived with, not his father.
‘Often wondered what it’s like for the kids,’ Andrews said. ‘There’s a woman in our village who’s divorced. She ran off with another bloke, only the next thing was he ran off with someone else.’
‘Who’d your mum run off with?’ Carson asked.
‘No one.’
‘Your dad run off then?’
‘Yes.’
His mother had told him that his father left her because they didn’t get on any more. He hadn’t left her because he knew Gillian. He hadn’t met Gillian for years after that.
‘D’you like her?’ Andrews asked. ‘Gillian?’
‘She’s all right. They’ve got twins now, my dad and Gillian. Girls.’
‘I’d hate it if my mum and dad got divorced,’ Tichbourne said.
‘Mine quarrelled all last holidays,’ Carson said, ‘about having a room decorated.’
‘Can’t stand it when they quarrel,’ Andrews said.
Intrigued by a situation that was strange to them, the other boys often asked after that about the divorce. How badly did people have to quarrel before they decided on one? Was Gillian different from Michael’s mother? Did Michael’s mother hate her? Did she hate his father?
‘They never see one another,’ Michael said. ‘She’s not like Gillian at all.’
At the end of the term the staff put on a show called Staff Laughs. Cocky Marshall was incarcerated all during one sketch in a wooden container that was meant to be a steam bath. Something had gone wrong with it. The steam was too hot and the catch had become jammed. Cocky Marshall was red in the face and nobody knew if he was putting it on or not until the end of the sketch, when he stepped out of the container in his underclothes. Mr Waydelin had to wear a kilt in another sketch and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard were dressed up in rugby togs, with Cocky Marshall’s and Mr Brine’s scrum caps. The Reverend Green – mathematics and divinity – was enthusiastically applauded in his Mrs Wagstaffe sketch. A.J.L. did his magic, and as a grand finale the whole staff, including Miss Brooks, sang together, arm-in-arm, on the small stage. ‘We’re going home,’ they sang. ‘We’re going home. We’re on the way that leads to home. We’ve seen the good things and the bad and now we’re absolutely mad. We’re g-o-i-n-g home.’ All the boys joined in the chorus, and that night in Michael’s dormitory they ate Crunchie, Galaxy and Mars Bars and didn’t wash their teeth afterwards. At half past twelve the next day Michael’s mother was waiting for him at Paddington.
At home, nothing was different. On Saturdays his father came and drove him away to the house near Cranleigh. His mother talked about Dolores Welsh and Mr Ashaf. She hadn’t returned to work in the West End. It was quite nice really, she said, at Mr Ashaf’s.
Christmas came and went. His father gave him a new Triang locomotive and Gillian gave him a pogo-stick and the twins a magnet and a set of felt pens. His mother decorated the flat and put fairy-lights on a small Christmas tree. She filled his stocking on Christmas Eve when he was asleep and the next day, after they’d had their Christmas dinner, she gave him a football and a glove puppet and a jigsaw of Windsor Castle. He gave her a brooch he’d bought in Woolworth’s. On January 14th he returned to Elton Grange.
Nothing was different at Elton Grange either, except that Cocky Marshall had left. Nobody had known he was going to leave, and some boys said he had been sacked. But others denied that, claiming that he’d gone of his own accord, without giving the required term’s notice. They said A.J.L. was livid.
Three weeks passed, and then one morning Michael received a letter from his father saying that neither he nor Gillian would be able to come at half-term because he had to go to Tunisia on business and wanted to take Gillian with him. He sent some money to make up for the disappointment.
In a letter to his mother, not knowing what to say because nothing much was happening, Michael revealed that his father wouldn’t be there at half-term. Then I shall come, his mother wrote back.
She stayed, not in the Grand, but in a boarding-house called Sans Souci, which had coloured gnomes fishing in a pond in the front garden, and a black gate with one hinge broken. They weren’t able to have lunch there on the Saturday because the woman who ran it, Mrs Malone, didn’t do lunches. They had lunch in the Copper Kettle, and since Mrs Malone didn’t do teas either they had tea in the Copper Kettle as well. They walked around the town between lunch and tea, and after tea they sat together in his mother’s bedroom until it was time to catch the bus back to school.
The next day she said she’d like to see over the school, so he brought her into the chapel, which once had been the gate-lodge, and into the classrooms and the gymnasium and the art-room and the changing-rooms. In the carpentry shop the P.T. instructor was making a cupboard. ‘Who’s that boy?’ his mother whispered, unfortunately just loud enough for the P.T. instructor to hear. He smiled. Swagger Browne, who was standing about doing nothing, giggled.
‘But how could he be a boy?’ Michael asked dismally, leading the way on the cinder path that ran around the cricket pitch. ‘Boys at Elton only go up to thirteen and a half.’
‘Oh dear, of course,’ his mother said. She began to talk of other things. She spoke quickly. Dolores Welsh, she thought, was going to get married, Mr Ashaf had wrenched his arm. She’d spoken to the landlord about the damp that kept coming in the bathroom, but the landlord had said that to cure it would mean a major upheaval for them.
All the time she was speaking, while they walked slowly on the cinder path, he kept thinking about the P.T. instructor, unable to understand how his mother could ever have mistaken him for a boy. It was a cold morning and rather damp, not raining heavily, not even drizzling, but misty in a particularly wetting kind of way. He wondered where they were going to go for lunch, since the woman in the Copper Kettle had said yesterday that the café didn’t open on Sundays.
‘Perhaps we could go and look at the dormitories?’ his mother suggested when they came to the end of the cinder path.
He didn’t want to, but for some reason he felt shy about saying so. If he said he didn’t want to show her the dormitories, she’d ask him why and he wouldn’t know what to say because he didn’t know himself.
‘All right,’ he said.
They walked through the dank mist, back to the school buildings, which were mostly of red brick, some with a straggle of Virginia creeper on them. The new classrooms, presented a year ago by the father of a boy who had left, were of pinker brick than the rest. The old classrooms had been nicer, Michael’s father said: they’d once been the stables.
There were several entrances to the house itself. The main one, approached from the cricket pitch by crossing A.J.L.’s lawns and then crossing a large, almost circular gravel expanse, was grandiose in the early Victorian style. Stone pillars supported a wide gothi
c arch through which, in a sizeable vestibule, further pillars framed a heavy oak front door. There were croquet mallets and hoops in a wooden box in this vestibule, and deck-chairs and two coloured golfing umbrellas. There was an elaborate wrought-iron scraper and a revolving brush for taking the mud from shoes and boots. On either side of the large hall door there was a round window, composed of circular, lead-encased panes. ‘Well, at least they haven’t got rid of those,’ Michael’s father had said, for these circular windows were a feature that boys who had been to Elton Grange often recalled with affection.
The other entrances to the house were at the back and it was through one of these, leading her in from the quadrangle and the squat new classrooms, past the kitchens and the staff lavatory, that Michael directed his mother on their way to the dormitories. All the other places they’d visited had been outside the house itself – the gymnasium and the changing-rooms were converted outbuildings, the carpentry shop was a wooden shed tucked neatly out of the way beside the garages, the art-room was an old conservatory, and the classroom block stood on its own, forming two sides of the quadrangle.
‘What a nice smell!’ Michael’s mother whispered as they passed the kitchens, as Michael pressed himself against the wall to let Miss Brooks, in her jodhpurs, go by. Miss Brooks was carrying a riding stick and had a cigarette going. She didn’t smile at Michael, nor at Michael’s mother.
They went up the back stairs and Michael hoped they wouldn’t meet anyone else. All the boys, except the ones like Swagger Browne whose people lived abroad, were out with their parents and usually the staff went away at half-term, if they possibly could. But A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy never went away, nor did Sister, and Miss Trenchard had been there at prayers.
‘How ever do you find your way through all these passages?’ his mother whispered as he led her expertly towards his dormitory. He explained, in a low voice also, that you got used to the passages.
‘Here it is,’ he said, relieved to find that neither Sister nor Miss Trenchard was laying out clean towels. He closed the door behind them. ‘That’s my bed there,’ he said.
He stood against the door with his ear cocked while she went to the bed and looked at it. She turned and smiled at him, her head a little on one side. She opened a locker and looked inside, but he explained that the locker she was looking in was Carson’s. ‘Where’d that nice rug come from?’ she asked, and he said that he’d written to Gillian to say he’d been cold once or twice at night, and she’d sent him the rug immediately. ‘Oh,’ his mother said dispiritedly. ‘Well, that was nice of Gillian,’ she added.
She crossed to one of the windows and looked down over A.J.L.’s lawns to the chestnut trees that surrounded the playing-fields. It really was a beautiful place, she said.
She smiled at him again and he thought, what he’d never thought before, that her clothes were cheap-looking. Gillian’s clothes were clothes you somehow didn’t notice: it didn’t occur to you to think they were cheap-looking or expensive. The women of Elton Grange all dressed differently, Outsize Dorothy in woollen things, Miss Brooks in suits, with a tie, and Sister and Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland always had white coats. The maids wore blue overalls most of the time but sometimes you saw them going home in the evenings in their ordinary clothes, which you never really thought about and certainly you never thought were cheap-looking.
‘Really beautiful,’ she said, still smiling, still at the window. She was wearing a headscarf and a maroon coat and another scarf at her neck. Her handbag was maroon also, but it was old, with something broken on one of the buckles: it was the handbag, he said to himself, that made you think she was cheaply dressed.
He left the door and went to her, taking her arm. He felt ashamed that he’d thought her clothes were cheap-looking. She’d been upset when he’d told her that the rug had been sent by Gillian. She’d been upset and he hadn’t bothered.
‘Oh, Mummy,’ he said.
She hugged him to her, and when he looked up into her face he saw the mark of a tear on one of her cheeks. Her fluffy hair was sticking out a bit beneath the headscarf, her round, plump face was forcing itself to smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Sorry? Darling, there’s no need.’
‘I’m sorry you’re left all alone there, Mummy.’
‘Oh, but I’m not at all. I’ve got the office every day, and one of these days I really will see about going back to the West End. We’ve been awfully busy at the office, actually, masses to do.’
The sympathy he’d showed caused her to talk. Up to now – ever since they’d met the day before – she’d quite deliberately held herself back in this respect, knowing that to chatter on wouldn’t be the thing at all. Yesterday she’d waited until she’d returned to Sans Souci before relaxing. She’d had a nice long chat with Mrs Malone on the landing, which unfortunately had been spoiled by a man in one of Mrs Malone’s upper rooms poking his head out and asking for a bit of peace. ‘Sorry about that,’ she’d heard Mrs Malone saying to him later. ‘Couldn’t really stop her’ – a statement that had spoiled things even more. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she’d said quietly to Mrs Malone at breakfast.
‘Let’s go down now,’ Michael said.
But his mother didn’t hear this remark, engaged as she was upon making a series of remarks herself. She was no longer discreetly whispering, but chattering on with even more abandon than she had displayed on Mrs Malone’s stairs the night before. A flush had spread over her cheeks and around her mouth and on the portion of her neck which could be seen above her scarf. Michael could see she was happy.
‘We’ll have to go to Dolores’ wedding,’ she said. ‘On the 8th. The 8th of May, a Thursday I think it is. They’re coming round actually, Dolores and her young chap, Brian Haskins he’s called. Mr Ashaf says he wouldn’t trust him, but actually Dolores is no fool.’
‘Let’s go down now, Mum.’
She said she’d like to see the other dormitories. She’d like to see the senior dormitories, into one of which Michael would eventually be moving. She began to talk about Dolores Welsh and Brian Haskins again and then about Mrs Malone, and then about a woman Michael had never heard of before, a person called Peggy Urch.
He pointed out that the dormitories were called after imperial heroes. His was Drake, others were Ralegh, Nelson, Wellington, Marlborough and Clive. ‘I think I’ll be moving to Nelson,’ Michael said. ‘Or Marlborough. Depends.’ But he knew she wasn’t listening, he knew she hadn’t taken in the fact that the dormitories were named like that. She was talking about Peggy Urch when he led her into Marlborough. Outsize Dorothy was there with Miss Trenchard, taking stuff out of Verschoyle’s locker because Verschoyle had just gone to the sanatorium.
‘Very nice person,’ Michael’s mother was saying. ‘She’s taken on the Redmans’ flat – the one above us, you know.’
It seemed to Michael that his mother didn’t see Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard. It seemed to him for a moment that his mother didn’t quite know where she was.
‘Looking for me?’ Outsize Dorothy said. She smiled and waddled towards them. She looked at Michael, waiting for him to explain who this visitor was. Miss Trenchard looked, too.
‘It’s my mother,’ he said, aware that these words were inept and inelegant.
‘I’m Mrs Lyng,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She held out her hand and Michael’s mother took it.
‘The Matron,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of you, Mrs Lyng.’
‘Well actually,’ Outsize Dorothy contradicted with a laugh, ‘I’m the headmaster’s wife.’ All the flesh on her body wobbled when she laughed. Tichbourne said he knew for a fact she was twenty stone.
‘What a lovely place you have, Mrs Lyng. I was just saying to Michael. What a view from the windows!’
Outsize Dorothy told Miss Trenchard to go on getting Verschoyle’s things together, in a voice that implied that Miss Trenchard wasn’t paid to stand about doing nothing in the dormitories. All the women staf
f – the maids and Sister and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard – hated Outsize Dorothy because she’d expect them, even Sister, to go on rooting in a locker while she talked to a parent. She wouldn’t in a million years say: ‘This is Miss Trenchard, the undermatron.’
‘Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have much time for views at Elton,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She was looking puzzled, and Michael imagined she was thinking that his mother was surely another woman, a thinner, smarter, quieter person. But then Outsize Dorothy wasn’t clever, as she often light-heartedly said herself, and was probably saying to herself that she must be confusing one boy’s mother with another.
‘Dorothy!’ a voice called out, a voice which Michael instantly and to his horror recognized as A.J.L.’s.
‘We had such a view at home!’ Michael’s mother said. ‘Such a gorgeous view!’ She was referring to her own home, a rectory in Somerset somewhere. She’d often told Michael about the rectory and the view, and her parents, both dead now. Her father had received the call to the Church late in life: he’d been in the Customs and Excise before that.
‘Here, dear,’ Outsize Dorothy called out. ‘In Marlborough.’
Michael knew he’d gone red in the face. His stomach felt hot also, the palms of his hands were clammy. He could hear the clatter of the headmaster’s footsteps on the uncarpeted back stairs. He began to pray, asking for something to happen, anything at all, anything God could think of.
His mother was more animated than before. More fluffy hair had slipped out from beneath her headscarf, the flush had spread over a greater area of her face. She was talking about the lack of view from the flat where she and Michael lived in Hammersmith, and about Peggy Urch who’d come to live in the flat directly above them and whose view was better because she could see over the poplars.
The Collected Stories Page 55