For Joe, too, Gentille was a source of disappointment. On the previous day he had been very much struck by her. His irritation at finding Alice accompanied had melted upon Gentille’s arrival. He had been attracted to her by precisely those attributes that Christina had taken against. He had admired her stylish cool and her pale, understated sexiness. He had been charmed, and a little provoked, by the whiff of superciliousness implied in the arch of her eyebrows and by the careful rationing of her smiles. He appreciated – as only he among the party could – the exquisite cut of her subtle, cloud-grey clothes.
Joe was not a devotee of afternoon tea which, in general, he considered a somewhat tedious, Anglo-Saxon plate-balancing ceremony epitomizing the mores of his mother-in-law. He had assumed that Gentille would bring to it a little touch of Paris; that her catering would be in conformity with the nature of her appearance. So it jarred with him when, in place of the petits fours and the tarte aux fraises (‘ “It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s,” said Mrs Ramsay’), there appeared a plateful of fan-shaped, shop-bought, sawdust cookies of the kind that Alice’s mother referred to as ‘petticoat tails’ and an item to which Roland now referred as ‘Mother’s Victoria Sponge’.
For Roland’s mother, wife of a clergyman, this confection had been the mainstay of all her parish fund-raising activities, but to Alice’s husband it appeared as two hefty, aerated discs, coarse-textured and wedged together with a layer of violent red jam.
‘The parents left just yesterday,’ Roland said, issuing slices of the item on small, square plates, along with napkins and little silver forks. ‘What a pity they missed you, Alice.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘That is a shame.’
More shame, her husband thought, unreasonably, to leave behind them a cake such as this, bearing witness to the hazards of excess baking soda and showing a terrible want of eggs. The sponge, he decided, was certainly spongy. It was like chewing on cheap cushion filling.
* * *
‘More cake there, Christina?’ Roland said.
‘Oh, please,’ Christina said eagerly, and she offered him her plate with a smile. ‘Oh, please. This really is the most delicious cake, Mr Dent,’ she said.
Dutifully, Joe forked up a second mouthful of Roland’s mother’s cake, but the sponge, with its too liberal outer dusting of confectioner’s sugar, had made a trap for his unsuspecting larynx. He was seized with a fit of coughing and he reached at once for his tea-cup. The action succeeded in causing a beige puddle to appear in his saucer – a puddle that he knew was designed to drip all over his clothes.
Goddamnit, he thought, what was he doing there? And where the hell was his hostess?
Gentille had early on been called away to the telephone and now he became aware that his daughters were being swept away upstairs by the wiles and persistence of little Ellen and Lydia. He was left undiverted to observe his wife who was like a person regressing in reunion with a childhood favourite. Reference to the shared past had made Alice livelier. It had raised her spirits and enhanced her looks. How pretty she was, he thought. Her eyes so blue and sparkling. The colour in her cheeks.
But then, to pit against these advantages, was the disconcerting fact of Alice’s diction. Something had happened to Alice’s speech. She was talking very fast and had commandeered Roland’s attention in order to indulge in a form of culturally specific bubble-talk, that excluded him. He found it boring and irritating. Much of it, as it struck his ear, had to do with Oxford place-names. It required frequent reference to one or other of that city’s streets and these, he considered, were being uttered as if in sacred mantra. Averagely boring names, as they seemed to him. He observed that the suffix ‘street’ was generally being substituted by the prefix definite article. Thus, ‘Turl Street’ had become ‘The Turl’ and ‘Broad Street’ had become ‘The Broad’. Alice made reference, now, to New College Lane – new, as he guessed, because it had been new somewhere round 1103. Goddamnit, so what? How about the Pyramids? How about the Pantheon? He wanted suddenly to rub her little parochial nose in the dust around the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut.
Alice’s talk was suddenly littered with examples of alien terminology. She made reference to ‘wellington boots’ and to ‘Marmite’ and to ‘Morris Minors’. She relayed an anecdote requiring verbal recourse to hot water bottles which she had taken to calling ‘hotties’. She had adopted silly, dated adjectives like ‘grotty’ and ‘scrotty’, which all appeared to be interchangeable. Joe slumped pointedly in his chair and sighed and cast his eyes to the ceiling.
And there, suddenly, to lift his spirits beyond piffling national proscription, he saw something beautiful. Depicted naked and in delicate bas-relief, was the fleeing figure of Venus worked in stucco. She was just beyond the range of Cupid who, with the assistance of a flock of dimpled putti in mid-flight, was carrying her billowing nuptial cloak. The groom, he observed, was biding his time as he leaned prettily against a broad, knotty oak. He was wearing nothing but his martial boots and a graceful Athenian helmet.
Joe got up. Goddamnit, he thought, the time was pushing on. He needed a drink and, more than that, he needed Alice, naked and white and silent as stucco, in that charming, low-beamed bedroom back at the old coaching inn. That was what he was paying for and the hotel didn’t come cheap.
‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let’s go check out the park. Come on. It’s getting late, isn’t it?’
Christina’s disappointment with the afternoon had come in phases one and two. The beautiful dark boy was indeed a guest of the family, but both boys had gone out. They had undertaken to be back for tea but in the event they had returned late, bearing a tale of a punctured inner tube and a repair kit missing its rubber solution. They had come just in time to be co-opted on to a walk where the alignments had not gone as Christina might have hoped. The line-up here was sabotaged by the intervention of her father and by the weediness of that unlikeable Mrs Dent.
Christina had expected that her mother would walk beside her dear old friend and that her father would accompany the Mermaid Woman. Either that, or he would give his attention to the two ebullient little girls. But no. Instead, the Mermaid Woman had excused herself and cried off. She would use the time to supervise the children’s bathing, she said.
‘Tilly is not a great walker,’ Roland said. ‘Her ankles don’t bear up awfully well.’
And what would one expect, Christina mused with venom. The Mermaid Woman could only glide. She could not walk. Of course!
In the vacuum, then, the beautiful dark boy had appended himself with unerring instinct to the person of Christina’s father. He had done so, in truth, because the girls themselves – with their Pollyanna looks and their orthodontally orthodox teeth – held no interest for him, while in the father he perceived something of a kindred spirit. He appreciated there a degree of egotistical power. Jago was not unattracted by power. He had always held so much of it himself.
Christina was therefore obliged to adopt the galling role of spectator as she watched another example of her father’s instant bonding. The two of them had claimed each other in spirit. Released, respectively, from the tedium of the tea-cups and from the frustrations of an inadequately equipped puncture repair kit, each grew in humour and high spirits. They walked on ahead in the bracing air, not only through the park and round the lake and over the playing-fields but, thereafter, through the music rooms and through the chapel and through the centre for computer studies. They walked through the theatre and through the physics laboratories and, as they did so, they bounced off each other, talking with animation and cracking the air with their bursts of laughter.
They talked of weights and folios. They talked of bytes and scores. They talked of balanced forces and of circuits and of volts. And then, finally, when they lingered in the theatre, amid the props of last term’s Hamlet, Christina heard that they talked about the idea of the Objective Correlative.
Passed over and bruised by the fact of her own re
lative ignorance, Christina was obliged to walk behind with her sister who accompanied the small blond boy. Both were almost completely silent, but she sensed, in spite of this, that a sort of communion had grown up between Pam and Peter. Immediately ahead of them, Alice walked with Roland.
‘He knows nothing at all about volts and circuits,’ Alice was saying, with a slightly brittle volubility. ‘And as to English field sports – well –’ She paused and laughed. ‘He’s a genius at bullshit, actually. Inspired crap artist and that’s the truth.’
Roland was finding Alice’s manner increasingly disconcerting. He was not quite reading her correctly. He recognized that somewhere inside the person who walked beside him, with her fluent but compulsive retro-speak and her edgy, barbed merriment, was the same shy, stammering girl who had once been the love of his life. He thought it possible that she was making a play for him, and his sense of propriety told him to discourage it. He found himself disappointed in her. He found her changed, even though her appearance was almost completely the same. To allow her to continue would merely be to become her victim all over again. And had she not already once driven his beautiful old Citroën into the Tees?
Thirteen years ago, Roland reflected, Joe Angeletti had come along and won this woman with the extravagant landscapes of his mind; had drawn her into antres vast and deserts idle and into rough quarries and hills. Roland had known in a moment that his chance with her was history. For what power, he thought, the romance of the familiar in competition with the romance of the strange?
He turned to her and spoke pointedly. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that in these matters, loyalty is the watchword.’ Alice was shaken by the put-down and startled by what she read as Roland’s sudden, schoolmasterish pomposity. She could think of nothing further to say.
Christina, who could not hear the words that he spoke, observed that Alice’s nape took colour, and that – while her father and the beautiful dark boy talked on – a silence had finally fallen upon her mother.
And then the afternoon turned. Something happened. It could so easily not have happened and, having happened, it changed the sisters’ lives. Joe, having learnt from his thirteen-year-old interlocutor that the school in recent years had opened its doors to girls, had immediately conceived the idea that his daughters should join the school’s ranks. He had conceived it, on the spur of the moment, for a bundle of reasons, both legitimate and otherwise, and, having done so, he stuck to it with all the force of his dominating personality.
First, there were the public reasons. He knew that Christina had always been attracted to the idea of boarding school and longed to breathe new air. The school’s situation was lovely and the education, on the evidence of his own eyes, was indisputably first-rate. For all the school was some distance from home – and he would, admittedly, have to write frequent airfares into his costs – the family travelled a good bit anyway and the fees for Roland’s school, he estimated, would be as chicken-feed when compared with the price of such a school back home.
And, again, why should his daughters not spend some time in an English school? They had an English mother and travel was broadening to the mind. Cultural diversity in a person’s background was an excellent thing, he considered. It was for this reason, was it not, that both his girls spoke passable Italian. Furthermore, now that Pam and Chrissie were of an age where certain forms of parental supervision were no longer appropriate, the girls, he hazarded, would be generally less at risk from psychotics, muggers and drug pedlars – both within school gates and without.
His other reasons were either those he chose to keep to himself, or those of which he himself was unaware. There was Gentille’s absence from the afternoon, which had insulted his sense of propriety and had put him out of humour. In consequence of it he had been left to feel like an appendage as the schoolmaster had become the focus of Alice’s best attention. What more satisfactory way to redress the balance, he thought, than to delegate to the schoolmaster the care of his two daughters and to keep his wife for himself?
That idea was suddenly most alluring. Things had not of late been terribly good between himself and Alice. He sensed that she had begun to drift away. And now here was his chance. He at once began to envisage a succession of nightly candle-lit dinners, and evenings at the theatre and the opera house, while the girls would be advantageously contained within the bounds of Roland’s school. The way was clear. No problem. Educationally. Pam would thrive almost anywhere, while Chrissie, whose dealings with teachers had more often been fraught with storms, had got on with Roland from the first as though they were made for each other.
And then there was the boy. That marvellous, brilliant boy. Some men care about having male children and other men do not. Joe adored his daughters, would have laid down his life for either one of them, but deep down, buried where he was altogether unaware of it, was a force impelling him to annex the beautiful dark boy.
He began to quiz Roland almost as soon as they returned to the house.
‘But Joe,’ Alice said, who, coming new to the idea, had an instinct to hang on to her children. ‘This is a highly selective school, you know. It’s not like entering the supermarket. Parents will be beating down the doors to get their kids in here.’
‘So what are you saying?’ her husband replied. ‘Are you saying our girls aren’t bright? Or are you saying they are under-educated?’
‘Neither,’ Alice said. ‘Only that the system here is quite different and the girls are unprepared.’
‘So what?’ her husband said. ‘I defy any school to find a better student than Pam. She’s always been a straight-A student. Besides, she’s musically gifted. Any school would be lucky to get her.’
Roland waited politely for them to finish. He wondered if they were always like this. From what he had seen of Alice’s daughters, they struck him as perfectly acceptable girls and refreshingly old-fashioned in their style. The younger one he liked particularly, and not only because she looked so very much like her mother. She was sparkier, he thought, and less brooding than her sister. Less earnest. He found her a particularly bright and appealing child. His only slight sense of misgiving came from a hunch that Alice’s husband could spell trouble.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we normally admit on the basis of heads’ and housemasters’ – or housemistresses’ – report and performance in the twelve-plus examination. In a case such as your daughters’, we would require applicants to sit some basic tests in English, French and mathematics.’
‘There you are!’ Alice said. ‘The girls don’t know any French.’
‘Not yet,’ her husband said. ‘So what? They’re fluent in Italian. Plus they know a little Spanish. What’s so special about French?’
‘Merely that it isn’t Italian,’ Alice said.
‘In point of fact,’ Roland said, feeling like an umpire at a tennis match, ‘Italian – or Spanish – either will do very well. Both have become increasingly popular. We no longer insist upon French.’
‘And Latin?’ Alice said hopefully.
Roland spoke with caution. He remembered that Classical languages were Alice’s area of expertise. ‘Latin –’ he said, but Alice’s husband immediately interrupted him.
‘The girls know quite a bit of Latin,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you, Alice? Why are you running down your daughters?’
‘Because you’re selling them,’ she said. ‘You’ll be showing off their teeth to Roland next. They know prayer-book Latin. I don’t call that “knowing Latin”.’
Roland coughed, wishing to pull her up. ‘You’ll not like to hear this, Alice,’ he said, ‘but Latin is not really at issue. Time and tide, you know. We have declining numbers wishing to take that option.’
Alice retreated into aggrieved silence as she envisaged her subject trampled underfoot. She gave up. She heard her husband inquire about the scope for his girls to fulfil their Sunday obligation and then he appeared wholly satisfied. She did not rise to make the point that one of his
girls had not fulfilled her ‘obligation’ for almost four whole months.
And so the idea, which had arisen so arbitrarily, took root and became a fact. For Christina, though she suspected her acceptance would be on the back of her sister’s merit, the prospect was one of earthly paradise. She envisaged that, at the end of two months, the beautiful dark boy would rise before her, just as dark and as beautiful as ever. And that this time her father would not be there to get in the way.
Only the talk of Hamlet had given some cause for misgiving and she acknowledged, soberly, the need for certain extended libations of self-improvement.
‘What’s the “Objective Correlative”?’ she said.
Her father looked up in surprise. He was not accustomed to have Christina sue for information. ‘It’s a notion of Eliot’s, used in connection with Hamlet,’ he said. ‘It asserts that the objective facts of the plot don’t correlate with the enormity of Hamlet’s emotion. So the play, he asserts, is a failure.’
Christina pulled a face. ‘That’s crap,’ she said. ‘Because maybe there’s something else about Hamlet’s life that’s helping to screw him up. Maybe there’s something that just never made it on to the page.’
The sound of her father’s laughter threatened to bring her out in spots.
Part Three
Tumbling
The Groupies, the Smart-Arse and the Werewolf
Boarding school. It was a shock. It was not as it had been for Madeline. This was only in part because the school was so terrifically male. Admittedly, there were always too many persons with too much colt energy, forever sliding down banisters, or jumping over lighted firecrackers, or crashing through swing-doors en route to the playing-fields when adult eyes were averted. In the classroom, there was always a person on crutches, or a person wearing head bandages. Sometimes there was a person with an eye-patch. There was almost always a male person who had recently been anointed with antiseptic.
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