A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  ‘What will you join?’ asked Richard. ‘The Army?’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  ‘A county regiment?’

  ‘Yup—if I can.’

  ‘But you’ve got a commission in the Terriers.’

  ‘Two pips,’ admitted Bateson, ‘they’ll help.’

  The landlord swayed with admiration and the old men cringing on their settle regarded Bateson’s almost fatuous good looks with little blinks of awe and wonder from their wet, blue eyes.

  ‘If you ask me‚’ said the landlord, ‘it’ll be the spring. I give it the spring. What do you say, Charlie——? I was telling of these gentlemen here, I give it the spring.’

  Charlie, a stout brooding individual, nodded and the rest of the old men rocked with their mute sagacity.

  ‘The sooner we had a showdown the better‚’ Bateson declared, causing more mandarin assent from the tired, wind-shriven faces on the settle. There was a heightened interest in the absurdly blue old eyes as Bateson spoke and it was obvious that he was already the hero. The spring, it seemed, suited everybody.

  Listening to these beery generalizations, not one of them so profound that it could silence the businesslike bell, or the satisfying plob! as a dart entered the board, Richard began to think rather grimly of his predicament. What was he doing here, in Stourfriston, he wondered, if, as they were saying, there was going to be a ‘showdown’? Why wasn’t he doing what he liked in these last few weeks which marked the beginning of the end? Perhaps he ought to have gone abroad, or tried to write a book, or just done something quite simple, though satisfying—like tramping and sketching in the Hebrides. Being an expert when it came to procrastination, the wastefulness of even lolling against the bar of the ‘Golden Fleece’ now occurred to him as something he ought not to be doing. There would only be time from now on for him to think about essential things. The book on the rug and the fire he had left burning in his room came back to him. He was no longer in control, he realized—not without a feeling of relief. So now he could give up huge issues, such as whether it was a mistake his coming to Copdock, or whether Quentin would continue to shine at his expense. He could just be. Fate had turned into a big hand in which the world lay with no more stability than if it were one of those Christmas-cracker games consisting of a glass-fronted pill-box around which small silver balls hurtle hopelessly unless by chance they happened to get caught momentarily in this hole or that. If that was all that he had to say in the matter, why did he struggle? What was going to happen to him could neither be planned for nor rejected it seemed. It would just—happen. Soon—perhaps in the spring as they all seemed to think—the palm in which they lay so helplessly would shake and send them all rushing helter-skelter round the periphery of disaster. The enormity of discovering himself on the brink of a great historical tragedy was too novel, too confusingly gay and sad for him to dread it. Quentin dreaded it whole-heartedly he knew. What on earth would happen to Quenny he wondered? Bateson’s clear, authoritatively-vowelled voice drivelled on. It wasn’t boastfulness on his part; he just hadn’t the energy to keep silent. Beer and the watchful company had robbed him of all that. He was enjoying himself. He chattered with disarming gaiety about the Jerries and the Maginot defences and air warfare until even the old men began to lose sight of the ghastliness of what they had once endured and recollected their own bewildered soldiering as a ‘bit of a spree’. So it went on until closing-time.

  They returned and got into the school the back way. The path by the garden-room-cum-Gymnasium was a welter of unswept snow. Limp swags of it flopped from the eaves.

  ‘Can’t make it out,’ said Bateson—his feet had just become entirely and unexpectedly soaked—‘all this thaw. You listen to the forecast? I could have sworn they said it was going to be a brass monkey night.’

  Copdock was steeped in its own special darkness. Here and there a window glimmered with a puny light. The wind felt its way along the tall Victorian walls like an inquisitive hand, touching the shutters and interfering with fastenings and sashes. On the far side the assured silhouette of a Sheraton chair cast against an oiled silk blind caught Bateson’s eye.

  ‘What luck,’ he said, ‘the Winner’s gone up!’

  But he hadn’t. He was crossing the hall attired rather monkishly in a bunched-up Jaeger dressing gown, its cord trailing and writhing in his wake like a sorry adder. His hair, clapped raggedly above each ear, looked like a pair of old brushes. He wore his spectacles and when he passed the clock he stared over them with a mixture of despair and accusation. The only light in the hall came from a gas-arm held out against the fanlight. There was a nice sense of the historic in its little tongue of flame. It illuminated them all—including Mr M’Tooley, who manifested an unsuspected elegance of paisley robe swirling about his crisp pyjamas in spite of the fact that he was visibly shuddering with cold. As they entered, Mr Winsley jerked to a standstill and Mr M’Tooley turned with one of those small classical gestures he could not subdue, like ‘Ha! Who calls?’, which had the effect of turning his paisley into something more praetorial. Then Mr Winsley shuffled unhappily towards them, his ankles glimmering feebly like peeled sticks inside his unlaced boots.

  ‘We’re sorry …’ began Bateson in a rather dumbfounded voice. This was the scene he had dreaded for a long time. The Winner’s ire at his harmless little jaunts had boiled over—probably because he’d taken young Brand with him, he thought. Oh well … He shrugged in an effort to set his philosophical detachment in motion. Why should he worry! How much longer was all this going to last anyway? He waited for the prim reprimand. But in vain, Mr Winsley’s nervous fingers which danced so accusingly against the dirty cuffs of his dressing-gown were directed in their very evident despair against a higher intrusion on his peace.

  ‘She was so well,’ he insisted, ‘such a wonderful colour …’

  ‘The doctor will soon have some good news for us,’ said Mr M’Tooley in his neat voice.

  Mr Winsley looked at Bateson. ‘I went up as usual,’ he explained, ‘at five, you know, and there she was, writing letters, stamping them herself—with energy …’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Bateson, who was actually relieved.

  ‘Can I do anything?’ enquired Richard, whose newness at Copdock coupled with the general way in which he was being ignored was beginning to make him feel de trop.

  ‘You?’ Mr M’Tooley asked with a little fluttering laugh.

  ‘Doctor Manderville is with her now,’ explained Mr Winsley more kindly. ‘But you could do the rounds for me. All the lights and the doors and the windows. Make sure they’re all right, will you, there’s a good fellow.’ And then, ‘No—no—You’d better stay with us,’ as Bateson made a move to escape as well.

  An electric torch stood on a cluttered Pembroke table. By its side laid a gigantic bunch of keys. Each key had a label, made from one of those shapely tags drapers use and scribbled on in Mr Winsley’s efficient hand.

  ‘Do I lock everywhere?’

  ‘Of course not‚’ said Mr Winsley in an amazed tone, ‘just the outside doors. But all lights, mind. And have a look in the dormitories.’

  Relieved to be able to escape from such a tense little situation, Richard picked up the torch and began to wander with a mixture of aimlessness and diligence from room to room and from floor to floor in the somnolent honeycomb of the icy school. First, the ground floor. The kitchen reeked of stale bread, the scullery of washing-up water and the passages leading to them, of both. When he played the torch over the walls, it showed a thin glaze of malefaction imperceptibly creeping to lower levels before it collected itself and fell with a fulsome drool on to the tiled floor.

  He opened each of the main classrooms and peered in, flashing the light round yards and yards of cream distemper, a dull, soiled cream which, because of its hint of dampness, returned a muted lambency of its own. Lower down, under the cream distemper, there was a dado of horizontal stripes and key-pattern worked out in ochre and deep brown paint
. Above the dado, which decided an arbitrary division between art and the work-a-day world, a few highly familiar faces stared out briefly before returning to darkness: General Gordon, the ‘Infant Samuel’, a wistful Tuke youth poised goldenly over Carbis Bay, the examiners in ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ and King George V—the latter looking, perhaps, as kings will never look again. The blackboards, a little less dark than the night, made grey rectangles that were invisibly suspended above the trench-like desks. The frosted globes depending from the gas-mantles hung from their iron settings in big smeary pearls. Now and then Richard paused and hoisted a window up. The sashes closed with a thin shrill scream. On the first floor he put his head inside the Common-Room where the torch, like an informer, fell upon the huge dusty table and picked out the ashtrays which were all very full and looked rather like sordid reliquaries. There was also a copy of Passing Show and of The Times Education Supplement, the last with its middle page half made-up into spills, as well as a twopenny bottle of ink and a quantity of surprisingly good-looking writing-paper headed ‘Copdock House Preparatory School for Boys, Stourfriston, Suffolk’. Richard helped himself to a fair bundle of this and shoved it into his pocket.

  He was yawning almost constantly—the beer was having its effect—and his head was beginning to feel like an old flock cushion. He felt so tired, he could hardly remember climbing up another staircase when he found himself outside the flimsy partition leading to the junior dormitory. He entered silently. The room was at an angle to the rest of the house and was lined on one side with long, narrow windows that almost touched. A wintry glimmer showed itself at each one. In the barely-realised light, he made out two rows of prim iron bedsteads tapering away into darkness, each one, in its extreme solitariness, like a small, breathing grave. The children sent up a constant, infinitely tender protest from their crumpled sleep. Little mews and sighs melted against each other before they became lost in the general torpid oblivion. One boy spoke and Richard started; something about a pony … a pony—and then there was a grateful slurring back into incoherence. He tiptoed out and closed the door.

  Further along the passage, on his way to the senior dormitory—there were only the two and these divided by another of the snake-like corridors with which Copdock House was riddled—a boy passed him, walking with a curious gravity along the crippling coconut matting, his bare white feet strangely impervious both to the coarseness and to the cold.

  ‘Good night, Sir.’

  ‘Good night, Sanderson—your windows O.K.?’

  ‘I’ll look, sir.’

  ‘Right—Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’

  Then he went to bed. The next floor was staff quarters and the next—well he would hardly be expected to answer for the security there. He wondered vaguely if Miss Bellingham was very ill. And so he might have slept, with that deadness which threatens a breakfast reckoning—the beer pleaded inside him like poppies—had not he possessed a positive genius for being startled. Before this—just before, as a matter of fact—he had blinked into the shaving-glass and reflected, my God! you’d have thought I’d sunk a gallon of the stuff at least … The extreme tiredness he had attributed to the stuffy little pub, coupled with Bateson’s essential dullness, was the true reason for it he supposed. It had broader credentials actually. One was Copdock House, which, like a lump of much used blotting paper, still had some power left to mop up a fair amount of the human spirit. The second was mainly to do with the geographical position of Stourfriston itself. The town lurked in a wooded hollow and was trapped into loitering mists by a loop of shallow river. Where at Lafney every puff of wind was as bright as a new sixpence, the climate of Stourfriston just accumulated, the stale undermost, drugging the senses until the mind no longer even attempted to ward off its importunate languors.

  He was huddled on the bed, rather than in it, when Mr Winsley entered. Mr Winsley knocked first, of course, but because Richard had not the slightest doubt that it was Bateson returning to enlighten him a little about the business downstairs, he appeared, with a book resting on his knees, at a far greater ease than he felt. Even then he would have slid somehow to his feet, but between his sleepiness and his astonishment, he was vaguely conscious that Mr Winsley was forbidding it. He was holding his hand out nervously, and with soothing, extended and conciliatory fingers, was insisting how sorry he was; how very sorry.

  ‘On the face of it, merely a whim, you might say‚’ he explained uncomfortably. ‘She had a bad turn and it frightened her. Her wish for company is really quite normal in the circumstances. Anybody would desire the same …’ A sharp, querulous note was forcing its way into his voice. ‘I said that you would be asleep, that it was late, but—and I can tell you this now—time means nothing where she is concerned. She has put it by. It has become expendable—if you know what I mean—so now there is nothing to regulate her demands. That is why Mr M’Tooley and myself think it would be kind if you would go to her.’

  ‘Of course …’ Richard agreed unhappily. ‘Poor Miss Bellingham,’ he added politely, while all the time a disgruntled rebellion deep down inside him insisted that he was a fool, that all this had nothing to do with him. What if the mechanism of Copdock was limping along to its last few academic shudders—was he to blame? Could he, even with the maximum of truthfulness, remotely care? And why couldn’t old Winsley understand that the amount of loyalty to be handed back in exchange for one’s first month’s salary was infinitely small anywhere. A slate couldn’t slip on the huge roof without the Winner feeling the pain of it. But with himself it was different. He still remained outside Copdock emotionally. It was only its two hundred a year which counted, that and a sort of relief that he was settled. So what else except ‘poor Miss Bellingham’——?

  ‘Better get some things on‚’ Mr Winsley insisting impatiently. ‘I’m sorry, you know, Brand. It’s a whim of hers that she should chat to someone, so you had better more or less dress.’ He searched through the inch-wide crevasse where the ginger plush curtains failed to meet and added rather sadly, ‘It’s begun to snow again.’

  At the insignificant door leading to Miss Bellingham’s room, Mr Winsley said, ‘I should just knock and go in, that is what I should do; just knock and go in.’

  Which is what Richard did, first putting up a hand to set his tie straight, rather quickly because any hesitation would soon have degenerated into panic; only to discover that in the rush he’d forgotten to put on his tie and that his collar gaped in a wide summery V. At the same moment, a nervous, not quite voluntary motion of his other hand had flung the door rather unceremoniously open and there he was, inside, with the door being rapidly and efficiently snapped behind him by Mr Winsley. For a second he was a child again at Meridian, holding his breath, closing his eyes against Hibble’s imagined horrors. But here again his instincts were unjustly malignant, bracing themselves against sights and odours that would never come.

  She wasn’t even in her bed, but sat very upright in the roomy armchair. Her feet were propped up by some unseen hassock and her lap was full of papers. A voluminous welter of rumpled embroideries swamped her, which he later interpreted as a peignoir of sorts, but of such grubby richness that it might have served time in a museum. Minutely-sewn glass beads, and small lumpy nodules of thread-work and the terrible manner in which it refused to conceal a thick, soiled linen nightdress, gave it the grande tenue claims of a robe at a rather licentious court. Fold after fold of it muffled, yet could not hide her gaunt and rigid person. Her hair, he noticed, was still a wonder, whisked up above her polished brow like an immensely successful meringue in the lightest, spunaway pinkish-gold mass. Amber trifles rollicked below the dragging, cerise-tipped lobes of her ears. Her fingers were helpless with rings as she made futile efforts to use a small cheap cigarette-lighter. It worked at once when Richard took it and as the soft grey smoke surged between them, she declared,

  ‘Isn’t this fun, Mr Brand!’

  ‘I am glad that you are feeling
better‚’ he replied in a perplexed voice.

  ‘Better——? That strikes me as being a rather rubbishy word, if you don’t mind my saying so! Sit there, will you. No there—where I can see you.’

  The fire burnt away behind him, its heat, pleasant at first then uncomfortable as it gathered at a point in the hollow of his back.

  ‘Now‚’ she said, ‘tell me just what you were doing when they came to fetch you—playing tennis, one might suppose.’

  Richard smiled, tugged at his shirt and said, ‘I think I was reading.’

  ‘Ah‚’ sighed Miss Bellingham, ‘I often think that! How else could one say that one had read all this’—she waved a stiff hand to include the heaped-up bookshelves—‘and yet remember so little of their contents! There, see that one?—No, more to your right; yes that. Hudibras, isn’t it? I was twenty-three when I thought I read that. And where, do you suppose—at Vézèlay, which is in France, you know, and in Burgundy to be particular. We were all staying there, Clare—that’s my sister, our Aunt Winely and Norah Township, as she was then. They had gone for a walk so I took Hudibras up behind the church and sat down in the cold grass and turned the pages over and over and thought I was reading! But I wasn’t, of course. I was watching the monks lolling on the wall. Such dears! So young! They made me think of charity boys as they sat with their knees tucked up under their cassocks and their faces staring out to Auxerre. You don’t know Auxerre, I suppose? All the monk boys had a tonsure about the size of half-a-crown. I remember thinking it the most elegant disfigurement—until we went to Heidelberg where all the students are so clever with scars. Heidelberg—have you been there? No again, I expect …’ She sank back with a curious luxury, spread her hands over the vagrant letters in her lap and said in a tone of the purest regret, ‘How much more there is to say—after one is sure, I mean, that one has said it all! But tell me; what was it that you thought you were reading?’