I quietly replied that he was mistaken. I protested that I did not hate him, but even as I spoke I realized that that wasn’t true. I hated him for being what he was, for walking with his parents into the farmyard that morning, for thinking he had a place in the past. I might have confided in him but I did not want to. I might have said that I remembered, years ago, Miss Pritchard coming to see my mother and what Miss Pritchard had said. I had eavesdropped on the stairs that led to the kitchen, while she said she believed there was something the matter with me. It was before the death of Dick, after I’d discovered about my mother and the man who was now my stepfather. ‘She dwells on her father’s death,’ Miss Pritchard had said and she’d gone on to say that I dwelt as well on the conversations I’d had with old Mrs Ashburton. I remembered the feeling I’d had, standing there listening: the feeling that the shell-shock of Mr Ashburton, carried back to Challacombe from the trenches in 1917, had conveyed itself in some other form to his wife, that she, as much as he, had been a victim of violence. I felt it because Miss Pritchard was saying something like it to my mother. ‘There are casualties in wars,’ she said, ‘thousands of miles from where the fighting is.’ She was speaking about me. I’d caught a mood, she said, from old Mrs Ashburton, and when my mother replied that you couldn’t catch a mood like you caught the measles Miss Pritchard sharply replied that you could. ‘Folie à deux the French call it,’ she insisted, an expression I welcomed and have never since forgotten. There had been folie à deux all over this house, and in the garden too, when he came back with his mind in pieces. She had shared the horror with him and later she had shared it with me, as if guessing that I, too, would be a casualty. As long as I lived I would honour that folie in their house. I would honour her and her husband, and my father and Dick, and the times they had lived in. It was right that the cruelty was there.
‘Of course I don’t hate you,’ I said again. ‘Of course not, Ralphie.’
He did not reply. He stood in the centre of the drawing-room with his glass in his hand, seeming like a beast caught in a snare: he had all the beaten qualities of such an animal. His shoulders slouched, his eyes had lost their fire.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘You may stay here,’ I said, ‘with me.’ Again I smiled, wishing to make the invitation seem kind. I could feel no pity for him.
‘How could I?’ he shouted. ‘My God, how could I? I lose count of the years in this house. I look at you every day, I look at your eyes and your hair and your face, I look at your hands and your fingernails, and the arch of your neck. I love you; every single inch of you I love. How can I live here and love you like that, Matilda? I shared a dream with you, Matilda, a dream that no one else but you would have understood. I longed for my quiet life, with you and with our children. I married you out of passion and devotion. You give me back nothing.’
‘You married me because I was part of something, part of the house and the estate –’
‘That isn’t true. That’s a rubbishy fantasy; not a word of it is true.’
‘I cannot help it if I believe it.’ I wasn’t smiling now. I let my feelings show in my eyes because there was no point in doing otherwise any more. Not in a million years would he understand. ‘Yes, I despise you,’ I said. ‘I have never felt affection for you.’
I said it calmly and bent my head again over my embroidery. He poured more whisky and sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I spoke while still embroidering, magenta thread in a feather of my peacock’s tail.
‘You must never again touch me,’ I said. ‘Not even in passing me by in a room. We shall live here just as we are, but do not address me with endearments. I shall cook and clean, but there shall be no parties. Your parents are not welcome. It is discourteous to me to give parties behind my back and to employ people I do not care for.’
‘You were told, you know perfectly well you were told –’
‘You will fatten and shamble about the rooms of this house. I shall not complain. You will drink more whisky, and perhaps lose heart in your dream. “His wife does not go out,” people will say; “they have no children. He married beneath him, but it isn’t that that cut him down to size.’ ”
‘Matilda, please. Please for a moment listen to me –’
‘Why should I? And why should you not lose heart in your dream because isn’t your dream ridiculous? If you think that your Challacombe estate is like it was, or that you in your vulgarity could ever make it so, then you’re the one who is deranged.’
I had not taken my eyes from the peacock’s tail. I imagined a patch of damp developing on the ceiling of an upstairs room. I imagined his lifting the heavy lead-lined hatch in the loft and stepping out on to the roof to find the missing tile. I stood with him on the roof and pointed to the tile, lodged in a gutter. I had removed it myself and slid it down the incline of the roof. He could reach it with an effort, by grasping the edge of the chimney-stack to be safe. I heard the thump of his body as it struck the cobbles below. I heard it in the drawing-room as I worked my stitches, while he drank more whisky and for a while was silent.
‘Damn you,’ he shouted in the end, once more on his feet and seething above me. ‘Damn you to hell, Matilda.’
‘No matter what you do,’ I said, still sewing the magenta thread, ‘I shall not leave this house.’
He sold everything he’d bought except the house and garden. He sold the land and the farmhouses, the Fryes’ and the Lazes’ and what had been ours. He didn’t tell me about any of it until he’d done it. ‘I’ll be gone in a week,’ he said one day, six or seven months after we’d had that quarrel, and I did not urge him to stay.
It is a long time ago now, that day. I can’t quite remember Ralphie’s going, even though with such vividness I remember so much else. There are new people in all the farmhouses now, whole families have grown up; again the tennis court is overgrown. Miss Pritchard died of course, and my mother and my stepfather. I never saw much of them after Ralphie went, and I never laid eyes on Ralphie or even had a line from him. But if Ralphie walked in now I would take his hand and say I was sorry for the cruelty that possessed me and would not go away, the cruelty she used to talk about, a natural thing in wartime. It lingered and I’m sorry it did, and perhaps after all this time Ralphie would understand and believe me, but Ralphie, I know, will never return.
I sit here now in her drawing-room, and may perhaps become as old as she was. Sometimes I walk up to the meadow where the path to school was, but the meadow isn’t there any more. There are rows of coloured caravans, and motor-cars and shacks. In the garden I can hear the voices of people drifting down to me, and the sound of music from their wireless sets. Nothing is like it was.
Torridge
Perhaps nobody ever did wonder what Torridge would be like as a man – or what Wiltshire or Mace-Hamilton or Arrowsmith would be like, come to that. Torridge at thirteen had a face with a pudding look, matching the sound of his name. He had small eyes and short hair like a mouse’s. Within the collar of his grey regulation shirt the knot of his House tie was formed with care, a maroon triangle of just the right shape and bulk. His black shoes were always shiny.
Torridge was unique in some way: perhaps only because he was beyond the pale and appeared, irritatingly, to be unaware of it. He wasn’t good at games and had difficulty in understanding what was being explained in the classroom. He would sit there frowning, half smiling, his head a little to one side. Occasionally he would ask some question that caused an outburst of groaning. His smile would increase then. He would glance around the classroom, not flustered or embarrassed in the least, seeming to be pleased that he had caused such a response. He was naïve to the point where it was hard to believe he wasn’t pretending, but his naïveté was real and was in time universally recognized as such. A master called Buller Yeats reserved his cruellest shafts of scorn for it, sighing whenever his eyes chanced to fall on Torridge, pretending to believe his name was Porridge.
Of the
same age as Torridge, but similar in no other way, were Wiltshire, Mace-Hamilton and Arrowsmith. All three of them were blond-haired and thin, with a common sharpness about their features. They wore, untidily, the same clothes as Torridge, their House ties knotted any old how, the laces in their scuffed shoes often tied in several places. They excelled at different games and were quick to sense what was what. Attractive boys, adults had more than once called them.
The friendship among the three of them developed because, in a way, Torridge was what he was. From the first time they were aware of him – on the first night of their first term – he appeared to be special. In the darkness after lights-out someone was trying not to sob and Torridge’s voice was piping away, not homesick in the least. His father had a button business was what he was saying: he’d probably be going into the button business himself. In the morning he was identified, a boy in red-and-blue striped pyjamas, still chattering in the wash-room. ‘What’s your father do, Torridge?’ Arrowsmith asked at breakfast, and that was the beginning. ‘Dad’s in the button business,’ Torridge beamingly replied. ‘Torridge’s, you know.’ But no one did know.
He didn’t, as other new boys did, make a particular friend. For a while he attached himself to a small gang of homesick boys who had only their malady in common, but after a time this gang broke up and Torridge found himself on his own, though it seemed quite happily so. He was often to be found in the room of the kindly housemaster of junior House, an ageing white-haired figure called Old Frosty, who listened sympathetically to complaints of injustice at the hands of other masters, always ready to agree that the world was a hard place. ‘You should hear Buller Yeats on Torridge, sir,’ Wiltshire used to say in Torridge’s presence. ‘You’d think Torridge had no feelings, sir.’ Old Frosty would reply that Buller Yeats was a frightful man. ‘Take no notice, Torridge,’ he’d add in his kindly voice, and Torridge would smile, making it clear that he didn’t mind in the least what Buller Yeats said. ‘Torridge knows true happiness,’ a new young master, known as Mad Wallace, said in an unguarded moment one day, a remark which caused immediate uproar in a geography class. It was afterwards much repeated, like ‘Dad’s in the button business’ and ‘Torridge’s, you know.’ The true happiness of Torridge became a joke, the particular property of Wiltshire and Mace-Hamilton and Arrowsmith. Furthering the joke, they claimed that knowing Torridge was a rare experience, that the private realm of his innocence and his happiness was even exotic. Wiltshire insisted that one day the school would be proud of him. The joke was worked to death.
At the school it was the habit of certain senior boys to ‘take an interest in’ juniors. This varied from glances and smiles across the dining-hall to written invitations to meet in some secluded spot at a stated time. Friendships, taking a variety of forms, were then initiated. It was flattering, and very often a temporary antidote for homesickness, when a new boy received the agreeable but bewildering attentions of an important fifth-former. A meeting behind Chapel led to the negotiating of a barbed-wire fence on a slope of gorse bushes, the older boy solicitous and knowledgeable. There were well-trodden paths and nooks among the gorse where smoking could take place with comparative safety. Farther afield, in the hills, there were crude shelters composed of stones and corrugated iron. Here, too, the emphasis was on smoking and romance.
New boys very soon became aware of the nature of older boys’ interest in them. The flattery changed its shape, an adjustment was made – or the new boys retreated in panic from this area of school life. Andrews and Butler, Webb and Mace-Hamilton, Dillon and Pratt, Tothill and Goldfish Stewart, Good and Wiltshire, Sainsbury Major and Arrowsmith, Brewitt and Whyte: the liaisons were renowned, the combinations of names sometimes seeming like a music-hall turn, a soft-shoe shuffle of entangled hearts. There was faithlessness, too: the Honourable Anthony Swain made the rounds of the senior boys, a fickle and tartish bijou, desired and yet despised.
Torridge’s puddingy appearance did not suggest that he had bijou qualities, and glances did not readily come his way in the dining-hall. This was often the fate, or good fortune, of new boys and was not regarded as a sign of qualities lacking. Yet quite regularly an ill-endowed child would mysteriously become the object of fifth- and sixth-form desire. This remained a puzzle to the juniors until they themselves became fifth –or sixth-formers and desire was seen to have to do with something deeper than superficial good looks.
It was the apparent evidence of this truth that caused Torridge, first of all, to be aware of the world of bijou and protector. He received a note from a boy in the Upper Fifth who had previously eschewed the sexual life offered by the school. He was a big, black-haired youth with glasses and a protruding forehead, called Fisher.
‘Hey, what’s this mean?’ Torridge inquired, finding the note under his pillow, tucked into his pyjamas. ‘Here’s a bloke wants to go for a walk.’
He read the invitation out: ‘If you would like to come for a walk meet me by the electricity plant behind Chapel. Half past four Tuesday afternoon. R.A.J. Fisher.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Armstrong.
‘You’ve got an admirer, Porridge,’ Mace-Hamilton said.
‘Admirer?’
‘He wants you to be his bijou,’ Wiltshire explained.
‘What’s it mean, bijou?’
‘Tart, it means, Porridge.’
‘Tart?’
‘Friend. He wants to be your protector.’
‘What’s it mean, protector?’
‘He loves you, Porridge.’
‘I don’t even know the bloke.’
‘He’s the one with the big forehead. He’s a half-wit actually.’
‘Half-wit?’
‘His mother let him drop on his head. Like yours did, Porridge.’
‘My mum never.’
Everyone was crowding around Torridge’s bed. The note was passed from hand to hand. ‘What’s your dad do, Porridge?’ Wiltshire suddenly asked, and Torridge automatically replied that he was in the button business.
‘You’ve got to write a note back to Fisher, you know,’ Mace-Hamilton pointed out.
‘Dear Fisher,’ Wiltshire prompted, ‘I love you.’
‘But I don’t even –’
‘It doesn’t matter not knowing him. You’ve got to write a letter and put it in his pyjamas.’
Torridge didn’t say anything. He placed the note in the top pocket of his jacket and slowly began to undress. The other boys drifted back to their own beds, still amused by the development. In the wash-room the next morning Torridge said:
‘I think he’s quite nice, that Fisher.’
‘Had a dream about him, did you, Porridge?’ Mace-Hamilton inquired. ‘Got up to tricks, did he?’
‘No harm in going for a walk.’
‘No harm at all, Porridge.’
In fact, a mistake had been made. Fisher, in his haste or his excitement, had placed the note under the wrong pillow. It was Arrowsmith, still allied with Sainsbury Major, whom he wished to attract.
That this error had occurred was borne in on Torridge when he turned up at the electricity plant on the following Tuesday. He had not considered it necessary to reply to Fisher’s note, but he had, across the dining-hall, essayed a smile or two in the older boy’s direction: it had surprised him to meet, with no response. It surprised him rather more to meet with no response by the electricity plant. Fisher just looked at him and then turned his back, pretending to whistle.
‘Hullo, Fisher,’ Torridge said.
‘Hop it, look. I’m waiting for someone.’
‘I’m Torridge, Fisher.’
‘I don’t care who you are.’
‘You wrote me that letter.’ Torridge was still smiling. ‘About a walk, Fisher.’
‘Walk? What walk?’
‘You put the letter under my pillow, Fisher.’
‘Jesus!’ said Fisher.
The encounter was observed by Arrowsmith, Mace-Hamilton and Wiltshire, who had earlier taken up cro
uched positions behind one of the chapel buttresses. Torridge heard the familiar hoots of laughter, and because it was his way he joined in. Fisher, white-faced, strode away.
‘Poor old Porridge,’ Arrowsmith commiserated, gasping and pretending to be contorted with mirth. Mace-Hamilton and Wiltshire were leaning against the buttress, issuing shrill noises.
‘Gosh,’ Torridge said, ‘I don’t care.’
He went away, still laughing a bit, and there the matter of Fisher’s attempt at communication might have ended. In fact it didn’t, because Fisher wrote a second time and this time he made certain that the right boy received his missive. But Arrowsmith, still firmly the property of Sainsbury Major, wished to have nothing to do with R.A.J. Fisher.
When he was told the details of Fisher’s error, Torridge said he’d guessed it had been something like that. But Wiltshire, Mace-Hamilton and Arrowsmith claimed that a new sadness had overcome Torridge. Something beautiful had been going to happen to him, Wiltshire said: just as the petals of friendship were opening the flower had been crudely snatched away. Arrowsmith said Torridge reminded him of one of Picasso’s sorrowful harlequins. One way or the other, it was agreed that the experience would be beneficial to Torridge’s sensitivity. It was seen as his reason for turning to religion, which recently he had done, joining a band of similarly inclined boys who were inspired by the word of the chaplain, a figure known as God Harvey. God Harvey was ascetic, seeming dangerously thin, his face all edge and as pale as milk, his cassock odorous with incense. He conducted readings in his room, offering coffee and biscuits afterwards, though not himself partaking of these refreshments. ‘God Harvey’s linnets’ his acolytes were called, for often a hymn was sung to round things off. Welcomed into this fold, Torridge regained his happiness.
R.A.J. Fisher, on the other hand, sank into greater gloom. Arrowsmith remained elusive, mockingly faithful to Sainsbury Major, haughty when Fisher glanced pleadingly, ignoring all his letters. Fisher developed a look of introspective misery. The notes that Arrowsmith delightedly showed around were full of longing, increasingly tinged with desperation. The following term, unexpectedly, Fisher did not return to the school.
The Collected Stories Page 81