But it wasn’t the pursuit of his sisters that worried Jonathan most: it was what they would learn by the carpentry shed or in the seclusion of the hydrangeas. It stood to reason that their pursuers would let things slip. ‘Cuthbert’, Tottle would say, and Margery would laugh, saying she knew her father was called Cuthbert, Then, bit by bit, on similar occasions, all the rest of it would tumble out. You giggled when the Hen was imitated, the stutter she’d developed, her agitated playing with a forefinger. Cuthbert’s walk was imitated, his catchphrases concerning the older values repeated in self-important tones. ‘Bad taste’ another catchphrase was. When the pomposity was laid aside and severity took its place he punished ruthlessly, his own appointed source of justice. When the rules were broken he showed no mercy. Other people’s fathers were businessmen or doctors, Bakinghouse’s was a deep-sea salvage operator. No one mentioned what they were like; no one knew.
‘Margery,’ Jonathan said in the furniture-room when Georgina and Harriet were receiving tuition from their father. ‘Margery, do you know what a boy called Tottle looks like?’
Margery went pink. ‘Tottle?’ she said.
‘He’s one of the first three leading into church. There’s Reece and Greated, then usually Tottle.’
‘Yes, I know Tottle,’ Margery admitted, and Jonathan knew from her casual tone that what Tottle had said about Margery smiling back was true.
‘Tottle sent you a message,’ Jonathan said.
‘What kind of a message?’ She turned her head away, trying to get her face into the shadows.
‘He said to meet him by the carpentry shed next term. Seven O’clock the first evening.’
‘Blooming cheek!’
‘You won’t, will you, Margery? He made me promise I’d tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t have.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Tottle’s not all that nice.’
‘He’s not bad-looking if he’s the one I’m thinking of.’
Jonathan didn’t say anything. Bakinghouse’s father might turn into some kind of predator when he was at the bottom of the sea, quite different from the person Bakinghouse knew. A businessman mightn’t be much liked by office people, but his family wouldn’t know that either.
‘Why d’you think Mummy’s so nervy, Margery?’
‘Nervy?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Margery nodded. She didn’t know why their mother was nervy, she said, sounding surprised. ‘When did Tottle give you the message, Jonathan?’
‘Two days before the end of term.’
Lying in bed the night before, he had made up his mind that he would pass the message on when Georgina and Harriet were occupied in one of the classrooms the next day. Best to get it over, he’d thought, and it was then that he began to wonder about their mother. He never had before and clearly Margery hadn’t either. He remembered someone saying that the Hen was probably the way she was because of Cuthbert. ‘Poor old Hen,’ a voice in the dorm had sympathized.
‘Don’t tell the others,’ Margery pleaded. ‘Please.’
‘Of course not.’
Their mother overheard things in the laundry-room when boys came for next week’s sheet and clean pyjamas, and in the hall when she gave out the milk. As someone once said, it was easy to forget the poor old Hen was there.
‘Don’t meet him, Margery.’
‘I told you I wouldn’t.’
‘Tottle’s got a thing on you.’
Again Margery reddened. She told her brother not to be silly. Else why would Tottle want to meet her by the carpentry shed? he replied; it stood to reason. Tottle wasn’t a prefect; he hadn’t been made a prefect even though he was one of the oldest boys in the school. Had he been a prefect he wouldn’t have been the third boy to enter the church on Sundays; he’d have led a battalion, as the five houses into which the school was divided were called. He wasn’t a prefect because the Headmaster didn’t consider him worthy and made no secret of the fact.
‘It’s nothing like that,’ Margery persisted.
Jonathan didn’t want to argue. He didn’t even want to think about Tottle now that the message had been delivered. He changed the conversation; he asked Margery about Miss Mole, one of the mistresses who taught her, and about whom Margery was sometimes funny. But he hardly listened when she told him. It hadn’t occurred to him before that Tottle was in some way attempting to avenge himself.
There was roast lamb for lunch. The Headmaster carved it. There was mint sauce, and carrots and mashed potatoes.
‘I think we learned a thing or two this morning,’ the Headmaster said, ‘I hope we can compliment ourselves on that.’
Was he as bad as they said? Jonathan wondered. It was ridiculous to say he was like Mussolini, yet it had been said. ‘Bully-boys are always a bit comic,’ a boy called Piercey had suggested. ‘Hitler. Mussolini. Cromwell. The Reverend Ian Paisley.’
‘Jonathan.’ His mother smiled at him, indicating that he should pass a dish to Harriet. By the end of the holidays she would be far less taut; that was always so. She and Mrs Hodge and Monica would launder blankets and clean the dormitory windows and polish the linoleum and wash down walls where it was necessary. Then all the beds had to be made and the dining-hall given a cleaning, the tables scrubbed and the serving range gone over with steel-wool. Hodge would clean the dining-hall windows because they were awkwardly placed. Crockery that had been broken during term would be replaced.
‘Sorry,’ Jonathan said, moving the dish of carrots towards his youngest sister. By the end of the holidays, though still subdued and jumpy, Mrs Arbuary would be more inclined to take part in mealtime conversation. Her hands would not quiver so much.
‘Mrs Salkind telephoned in the middle of our labours,’ the Headmaster reported. ‘Apparently the Salkinds are being posted abroad. Did you know this, Jonathan? Did Salkind say?’
Jonathan shook his head.
‘Apparently to Egypt. Some business thing.’
‘Did Mrs Salkind give notice?’ The hopeful note in his mother’s tone caught in Jonathan’s imagination. With a bit of luck all the other parents might give notice also. Again and again, that very afternoon, the telephone might ring and the news would be that father after father had been posted to distant parts. The school would close.
On the contrary,’ the Headmaster replied. ‘No, quite the contrary. Our Master Salkind will be flown back and forth at the expense of some manufacturing company. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, I believe it is, that pay the piper where Salkind senior is concerned. I recall correctly, Jonathan?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’
‘No cause for fear, old chap. Heavy-duty vehicle springs, if I am not wildly astray, once featured long in a conversation with the senior Salkind. Buses, lorries, military transports. Now, it seems, the good man is to instruct the Egyptians in their manufacture, or else to set up a factory, or generally to liaise. The good Mrs Salkind did not reveal.’
While speaking, the Headmaster cut the meat on his plate, adding potatoes and carrots to each forkful. He paused to eat between sentences, so that what he said came slowly from him. When the children were younger they had fidgeted during their father’s mealtime dissertations. They had since learned not to.
‘No, the reason for the good lady’s telephone call was to inquire if Master Salkind might have extra French.’
Not wishing to listen, Jonathan thought of Tottle again. The older boy’s rather big, handsome face appeared clearly in his mind, a smile slung lazily across it. He glanced at Margery, seated opposite him, Was she, too, thinking about her admirer, visualizing him also? Was she wondering what it would be like to meet him as he’d suggested, what he’d say, how he’d act?
‘French, apparently, is commercially de rigueur in Egypt, or at least in the Salkinds’ corner of it.’
In the darkness of the dormitory there were confessions of desire. When one voice left off another began. Tales were told of what had been seen or heard. Inten
tions were declared, pretences aired.
‘Though, truth to tell, I can hardly think of a reason why French should feature in any way whatsoever since the Egyptians have a perfectly good language of their own.’
The confessions of desire had to do with film stars usually, occasionally with Lady Di or Fergie, less often with Reene or Monica.
‘Were you aware of that, old chap? French in Egypt?’
‘No.’
‘I think, you know, the good lady may have got it wrong.’
Tottle intended to try it on, and then to laugh in that way he had. He would put his big face close to Margery’s, he’d put his big lips on to hers, and his hands would go all over her, just as though it wasn’t real, just as though he was pretending. And later on, with someone else, it would be the same for Georgina, and for Harriet.
‘But since Master Salkind’s French is shaky an extra hour a week will hardly come amiss, eh?’
Everyone agreed.
The days of those Easter holidays went similarly by. The children of the Headmaster spent long afternoons on the grey sands that stretched beyond the shingle and the sea-front promenade. They sat in the Yew Tree Café sipping Coca-Cola and nibbling cheap biscuits. When their week’s pocket-money ran out they crouched instead among the furniture of the furniture-room. Every morning Georgina and Harriet were given tuition by their father, and Jonathan and Margery read, alone in their rooms.
Tottle was not again mentioned, but as the weeks passed Jonathan found himself more and more dismayed by all that his imagination threw at him. It felt like that: as though heavy lumps of information were being lobbed in his direction, relentlessly and slowly. They dropped into the pond of his consciousness, creating little pictures. They nagged at him, and the intensity of colour in the pictures increased, and faces and expressions acquired greater distinctness.
Two nights before the holidays ended, restlessly awake, Jonathan arrived at a decision. The next afternoon he did not accompany his sisters to the sea-front and the Yew Tree Café, presenting them with the unlikely excuse that he had some history to read. He watched them set off from the window of his bedroom, delayed another twenty minutes, and then went slowly downstairs. He paused again, in doubt and trepidation, before he found the courage to knock on his father’s study door. He had no idea how he might express himself.
‘Yes?’ the Headmaster responded.
Jonathan closed the door behind him. The study smelt, as always, of his father’s pipe tobacco and a mustiness that could not be identified. Glasspaned cupboards were full of textbooks, There were supplies of chalk and geometrical instruments, globes of the world, cartridges for fountain pens, stacks of new exercise-books, blotting paper, pencils. His father sat behind his desk, a pipe in his mouth, the new term’s timetables spread out before him.
‘Well, old chap? Come to lend a hand?’
Beyond the geniality lay the ghost of the Headmaster’s termtime self, of severity and suspicion. Pomposity wasn’t what mattered most; talk of ‘Older values’ and ‘bad taste’ was only tedious on its own. ‘Bloody hypocrite’, some boy – neither Tottle nor Piercey – had said once. ‘Nasty brute’.
‘Always tricky, the summer timetables.’
Jonathan nodded.
‘Cricket’s greedy,’ the Headmaster said. ‘Where time’s concerned.’
‘Yes, it is.’
His father knocked the ashes out of his pipe and drew a tin of tobacco towards him. All his life, Jonathan had been familiar with these tins: Three Nuns the tobacco was called, orange lettering on a creamy ground. He watched his father pressing the coiled shreds into the bowl of his pipe. His father knew: that was what Jonathan had at length deduced. His father had so determinedly separated Private Side from the school because he knew the girls must not be exposed to crudities. His father knew, but he didn’t know enough. You couldn’t insist there was a shutter that came down just because you pretended it did. You couldn’t insist Old Mudger was a Mr Chips just because he looked like one.
‘Girls out somewhere?’ his father said.
‘I think so.’
A match was struck, the tobacco caught. Jonathan watched it reddening, and smoke streaming from between his father’s tightly clenched teeth. There was no conversation they could have. He could not mention the voices in the darkness of the dormitory, the confessions of desire, the declarations of intention. He could not tell his father he was despised for being the person he was, that boys were sorry for a woman they likened to a hen. He could not warn him of Tottle’s revenge, nor suggest what lay ahead for Georgina and Harriet. Lying awake the night before, he had wanted to protect his sisters, and his mother also, because they were not to blame. And in a way he had even wanted to protect his father because he didn’t know enough, because he blustered and was oppressive, and went about things stupidly.
‘Well, I’d best get on, old chap,’ his father said, applying himself once more to the sheets of paper that constituted the summer timetables. The balding head was bent again. Smoke eddied about it complacently.
Jonathan went away, softly closing the study door behind him. He ran through the empty corridors of the school, and down the hydrangea drive. He ran along the sea-front, looking for his sisters.
Kathleen’s Field
‘I’m after a field of land, sir.’
Hagerty’s tone was modest to the bank agent, careful and cautious. He was aware that Mr Ensor would know what was coming next. He was aware that he constituted a risk, a word Mr Ensor had used a couple of times when endeavouring to discuss the overdraft Hagerty already had with the bank.
‘I was wondering, sir…’ His voice trailed away when Mr Ensor’s head began to shake. He’d like to say yes, the bank agent assured him. He would say yes this very instant, only what use would it be when Head Office wouldn’t agree? They’re bad times, Mr Hagerty.’
It was a Monday morning in 1948. Leaning on the counter, his right hand still grasping the stick he’d used to drive three bullocks the seven miles from his farm, Hagerty agreed that the times were as bad as ever he’d known them. He’d brought the bullocks in to see if he could get a price for them, but he hadn’t been successful. All the way on his journey he’d been thinking about the field old Lally had spent his lifetime carting the rocks out of. The widow the old man had left behind had sold the nineteen acres on the other side of the hill, but the last of her fields was awkwardly placed for anyone except Hagerty. They both knew it would be convenient for him to have it; they both knew there’d be almost as much profit in that single pasture as there was in all the land he possessed already. Gently sloping, naturally drained, it was free of weeds and thistles, and the grass it grew would do you good to look at. Old Lally had known its value from the moment he’d inherited it. He had kept it ditched, with its gates and stone walls always cared for. And for miles around, no one had ever cleared away rocks like old Lally had.
‘I’d help you if I could, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent assured him. ‘Only there’s still a fair bit owing.’
‘I know there is, sir.’
Every December Hagerty walked into the bank with a plucked turkey as a seasonal statement of gratitude: the overdraft had undramatically continued for seventeen years. It was less than it had been, but Hagerty was no longer young and he might yet be written off as a bad debt. He hadn’t had much hope when he’d raised the subject of the field he coveted.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent said, stretching his hand across the width of the counter. ‘I know that field well. I know you could make something of it, but there you are.’
‘Ah well, you gave it your consideration, sir.’
He said it because it was his way to make matters easier for a man who had lent him money in the past: Hagerty was a humble man. He had a tired look about him, his spare figure stooped from the shoulders, a black hat always on his head. He hadn’t removed it in the bank, nor did he in Shaughnessy’s Provisions and Bar, where he sat in a corner by himsel
f, with a bottle of stout to console him. He had left the bullocks in Cronin’s yard in order to free himself for his business in the bank, and since Cronin made a small charge for this fair-day service he’d thought he might as well take full advantage of it by delaying a little longer.
He reflected as he drank that he hardly needed the bank agent’s reminder about the times being bad. Seven of his ten children had emigrated, four to Canada and America, the three others to England. Kathleen, the youngest, now sixteen, was left, with Biddy, who wasn’t herself, and Con, who would inherit the farm. But without the Lallys’ field it wouldn’t be easy for Con to keep going. Sooner or later he would want to marry the McKrill girl, and there’d always have to be a home for Biddy on the farm, and for a while at least an elderly mother and father would have to be accommodated also. Sometimes one or other of the exiled children sent back a cheque and Hagerty never objected to accepting it. But none of them could afford the price of a field, and he wasn’t going to ask them. Nor would Con accept these little presents when his time came to take over the farm entirely, for how could the oldest brother be beholden like that in the prime of his life? It wasn’t the same for Hagerty himself: he’d been barefoot on the farm as a child, which was when his humility had been learned.
‘Are you keeping yourself well, Mr Hagerty?’ Mrs Shaughnessy inquired, crossing the small bar to where he sat. She’d been busy with customers on the grocery side since soon after he’d come in; she’d drawn the cork out of his bottle, apologizing for her busyness when she gave it to him to pour himself.
The Collected Stories Page 168