‘She was a Waldinfield,’ Bateson said. ‘It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t told you that before now.’
‘She’s pretty—or perhaps I mean—nicer than you’d expect her to be. Her sort, I really mean.’
Fatigue was rapidly overtaking Bateson. The long tramp, the determination he had put into the evening, his own helpless loquacity; these things bundled one upon another began to weigh him down like clumsy garments impeding the movements of his graceful body. He yawned openly and continuously.
‘Yes she is,’ he agreed. ‘Oh, Gawd …! It’s a long time since I felt like this. Last Thursday to be exact. Poor Mrs Winner, she used to worry about me! I think she imagines all the four-ale bars are full of greasy old Fagins. B-bad company I suppose is what she’d call it. Well anything was preferable to squatting in Common-Room watching Canon Ribbs listening to a prom. How did you get on with your paper-doll?’
Startled, Richard answered, ‘Oh all right.’ In the thick grey light he felt Bateson studying him and realised that he was genuinely curious about this. In fact, that Bateson actually longed to know. In Bateson’s case, however, there was little need for words. Richard could see that the basis of his weariness wasn’t what he had had to drink, or the pennant of chatter he had maintained all the way to, and all the way back, from the ‘Case is Altered’, but the aftermath of love.
In Stourfriston the church clock chimed a quarter-to-eleven. A solitary figure was parading the market place like a tourist doing the arena at Aries. At first they identified it with a local policeman on his rounds, but something in the way the precise head was frequently turned to observe some shop corner or the water-spouts gripped by gargoyles on the roof of the church and the reflective attitude generally when the figure paused, caused Bateson to start hard with his smudgy eyes.
‘M’Tooley …’ he said softly.
Although it was impossible for the figure to have heard, or even see them from where it stood by the dark angle made by the church porch, it moved out at once into the empty, but well-lit square and walked briskly across to them. It was Mr M’Tooley.
‘Hallo,’ he said; ‘it should be ill-met by moonlight, except that it’s nice to see you and there doesn’t happen to be a moon!’
‘Getting a breather?’ Bateson asked with forced casualness.
‘We’ve been playing bézique,’ stated Mr M’Tooley, as though that explained everything. ‘In fact we’ve only just stopped.’ He made it sound distinctly daring. ‘Then I came out to get a breather, as you say. Have you ever noticed Stourfriston by night; particularly I mean? All the beautiful worn old plaster-work high up over the shops and the big porches over the doors which become quite elegant again when one can’t see to read the doctors’ and dentists’ plates nailed all over them. It hasn’t changed a bit, you know, since I first came to it. … Not a scrap.’ He glanced at them in turn. In the soft late evening light the steep bald head and gingery, badly-shaved jaw had the guileless evanescence of a fading fresco. ‘Did you have a good day at Sheldon?’ he asked, turning to Richard and Richard remembered afterwards that it was the first time someone had made an enquiry about his activities in that direction without the faint tink! of their inquisitiveness accompanying it.
‘Oh excellent, thanks.’
‘Miss Bellingham is delighted with the arrangement …’
‘Oh …?’ This time they both turned and stared at Mr M’Tooley, but Mr M’Tooley, walking a little aside and a little apart, noticed nothing. When he went ahead to unlock the side door of Copdock, Batson muttered, ‘The fellow’s a monk; a natural, bloody monk …’
When he had locked the door from the inside, Mr M’Tooley swung the key from its iron ring for a thoughtful second or two, then said, ‘Bateson, I may as well let you have this now.’
‘Now …?’
‘For ‘rounds’ tomorrow night. It is your turn isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes; of course.’
Mr M’Tooley laid the tips of his stubby, ill-kept fingers against the tired red skin of his eyes and rubbed softly in a languid gesture of abnegation. ‘Call it a day,’ he said.
‘You can say that again!’ Bateson favoured Americanisms, and in a way the peculiarly brash element of the poetry in them suited him.
Mr M’Tooley, who had begun to climb the stairs, turned and looked suddenly frightened, almost shocked. ‘What …?’ he demanded. And then, ‘Oh, I see …’ as the harmless vacuity in the faces of a couple of beery, wintry young men was conveyed to him. He said no more. The transitory, nibbled-away, faded-Giotto look returned to possess him and when he creaked away into the darkness of the staff wing it was like a shade withdrawing.
The mild interest of stumbling upon what Bateson had described as ‘one of Danny-boy’s cat-that-walks-by-itself acts’ was swiftly superseded by a far more repellent sensation. Darwin, the caretaker, in one of his fruitless attempts ‘to get forward’, as he called it, had decided that gone eleven at night was a favourable time to rootle clinkers from the bowels of the Heath Robinson arrangement in the boiler-room. He was also in charge of some simple, though protracted, task in the kitchen. Since he was never known to shut a door after him the mingled stenches of soot and boiling marrow-bones belched fitfully up through the stair-well. Bateson’s lips parted and his eyes closed. ‘I thought I could be sick, and now I know,’ he said.
Upstairs, in his own room, with the skull from Dunwich as sole witness, he was.
Richard spent a futile hour before sleeping going over in his mind the treacherous successes which had lured him on to so complete a frustration. The image of Daphne trolled through his thoughts. He dropped off with the bemused idea of her lying rigidly beside him like an acquiescent pipe-cleaner.
13
MR WINSLEY gave Mr M’Tooley three minutes before saying Grace. Using such a scale of tolerance it might be estimated that he would have allowed Richard two minutes, perhaps, and wouldn’t have waited for Bateson at all. He certainly wasn’t anxious nor even irritated as he gave a last look in the direction of the door for Mr M’Tooley before doling out porridge from a vast dull grey can. Grey steam from the porridge settled on his spectacles. He plobbed it uncertainly into dull grey plates. The porridge too was grey, though more oleaginous than viscous, slipping from the scoop with every reluctance. An exciting, rather merry whirling noise followed his passing of each full plate.
‘No whizzing!’ he shouted.
And at once the noise ceased and the thick plates passed decorously from hand to hand.
‘Who whizzed?’ demanded Mr Winsley, slightly beside himself. ‘Did you whizz?’
‘Me, sir?’
‘I’m talking to Funnell. He knows who I’m talking to.’
‘Oh me, sir! No, sir.’
‘Well who did—somebody did. I won’t have it, do you hear? That’s the way fine plates get cracked. Has anybody seen anything of Mr M’Tooley?’
‘Me, sir?’
‘You’ve seen him, Funnell?’
‘No, sir. I just thought you were asking me if I’d seen him, sir.’
Mr Winsley removed his spectacles and peered all round the long, thin H of trestle tables which constituted the dining-hall. He wasn’t as yet apprehensive, but on the other hand, he wasn’t quite happy. He had conceded three minutes and it was now a quarter past eight. The rods of cold sunshine made him blink unbearably.
‘Pink-eye,’ explained Funnell to his neighbour, observing this. ‘It’s a disease.’
Richard leant forward and said, ‘Shut up, Funnell.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Bateson then entered and took his place and said, ‘’Morning, Mr Winsley. ’Morning all.’ The greeting was acknowledged with a faint slobbery, porridgy titter, not entirely without affection. Bateson either missed breakfast or he was very late for it. No amount of remonstrance, not even when it came from the highest level, had ever managed to cure this shortcoming. His conviction that breakfast was an offensive beginning to any day had the seal set on it that
moment when his own plate of porridge, helped on its way by a dozen busy hands, arrived before him like a lukewarm quoit. He closed his eyes and ate.
‘Mr M’Tooley said nothing to you about not coming down to breakfast I suppose, Mr Bateson?’
Bateson, for whom for once the prospect of three hours on a rugby field presented no delight, looked startled. He hadn’t a hangover, in fact his head and his stomach shared the impression of a tremendous clarity. Instead a delicate fatigue had set in, an exquisite listlessness so unconnected with food, or for desire for conversation, that he was at great pains not to disturb it. Two mouthfuls of porridge told him how wise he was being to stand firm in this intention. The nauseous yapping of the boys at his end of the table decided him to close his ears, so when the Winner’s bewildered enquiry came to him he was practically senseless. M’Tooley? Breakfast? What on earth was the old man nattering about! Perhaps it was something to do with last night…. Somewhat resentfully, he let a trickle of intelligence seep through into the delicious vacuum of his brain.
‘It’s perfectly all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the key for ‘rounds’ tonight.’
‘Then you’ve seen Mr M’Tooley?’
‘Oh yes,’ Bateson said comfortably, still thinking of their meeting the night before.
Mr Winsley didn’t look so much relieved, as mildly angry. All this obtuseness! He could hardly blame Bateson, not in front of the school anyway. ‘You come to my study after Prayers, Funnell!’ The beastly, sniggering creature! He’d change all this soon.
‘Me, sir?’ Funnell, who had been sawing his way through a wedge of practically incinerated liver with, what was for him, exemplary fortitude, was outraged. ‘Just because the old bastard had to have somebody to wallop with his elevenses!’ he told Sellars, his neighbour, furiously.
They all met half an hour later in Big School for Prayers. The boys sat on three sides of a square which was completed by a dais on which Mr Winsley sat with the other masters a little to the rear of him. Canon Ribbs conducted Prayers. The Canon didn’t live in the School. He was the Rector of Stourfriston and the combining of a little teaching with his normal parish duties was generally thought to be a kindness shown to Miss Bellingham, since the reason for his doing it could scarcely be financial, the Canon being notoriously well-off. He wore his dignity with an air of Tractarian splendour and the more sophisticated boys assured each other that he was retained by the Belle entirely because of his distingué lint-white locks and vintage Balliol accent (1893–6), which had disarmed in their time an entire legion of well-trained, though ill-bred, busybodies such as Ministry of Education inspectors. Anything lying within the nature of that kind of trouble, and it was the Canon who coped. Or should there be difficulties in any of the neighbouring parishes, it was still the Canon, this time in his capacity of Rural Dean, who smoothed them out. ‘Pouring oil on troubled vestries,’ was how Lindsay, an extraordinarily odd boy whom one wouldn’t have expected to have found at Copdock at all, described it.
Lindsay was one of a handful of boys who had stayed on at the school after the preparatory period, so justifying the brochure, which boasted that highly qualified staff would be able, because of the exclusive nature of the establishment, to guide a child from his earliest schooldays up to the standard required for University Entrance. Most parents didn’t trust Miss Bellingham that far and took care to withdraw their sons when they became old enough to go to March—if they could afford it—or to the local Grammar School if they could not. Although there was some injustice in this—since both Mr Winsley and Miss Bellingham were well able to get results when they wanted them—such defections had their consolations. It meant that the Sixth was so small that the few boys of whom it comprised received what amounted to a year and a half’s excellent private tutoring. Only a boy who was a fool could muff his entrance examination after such privileged treatment. The names of those who had succeeded, with the names of the Colleges which had benefited in brackets beside them, were painted in gold letters on a light-oak board, hanging in Big School. Lindsay’s had just been added. ‘Sidney-Sussex 1939’ it said, a trifle more glowingly than the rest. Lindsay, in this pleasant limbo in which he now found himself, between the teachers and the taught, was amusing himself during prayers with a little private game called ‘Catching the Canon’s Eye’. The Canon, thought Lindsay, was looking anxious this morning. So was the Winner. He glanced around rapidly. And so were they all decided Lindsay—except Mr M’Tooley, and he was mystifyingly absent. At that moment Lindsay scored a point. The Canon stared straight at him. Lindsay stared straight back. Disconcerted, the Canon’s gaze fled to Queen Alexandra, pausing to absorb the sepia panache of her photographed jewels before its interest winged on and came to rest on the gas brackets. Not El Greco, thought Lindsay unkindly, seeing the Canon’s upturned eyeballs; not even Holman Hunt, though varnished hard-boiled eggs would not be an improper comparison.
They sang a hymn by Mrs Hemans, the boys’ voices promoting the bathos of the words to a level of exquisite absurdity. Macro-Webb, one of Lindsay’s companions in the Sixth, strummed out the accompaniment on an ancient instrument by Grover and Grover which had once had pride of place in the old Copdock House drawing-room. The Canon’s beautifully shaved jowls quivered as he joined in.
Mr Winsley mouthed gibberish. The words of the hymn crawled about on the white page of his hymnbook like insects and no vestige of their meaning reached him. He was obsessed by the possible fate of Mr M’Tooley. So ridiculous to oversleep he told himself; so worrying for other people! M’Tooley hadn’t gone to bed late last night—in fact he’d gone up before the rest of them. And he’d seemed quite happy; quite the same, that, is, since nobody could call him a happy man and any lowering of his natural low spirits would tend to reveal him as positively morose. No, he hadn’t been morose, Mr Winsley told himself. Rather the reverse if anything. Supposing —no: he mustn’t even think such things … Anyway, M’Tooley was a Catholic or at least an Anglo-Catholic, and that was nearly as bad, and any suggestion that he might … Mr Winsley strove valiantly with the hymn. Why had the damned thing got hundreds of verses! Why hadn’t he slipped upstairs to see for himself between breakfast and Big School? Why was Lindsay winking—perhaps he wasn’t. Everything was so indistinct this morning. His eyes were playing him up again. It was these spectacles. He’d have to get bi-focals after all. Was Minna right in saying that Dessy (Why did she call him that? Such a disgusting abbreviation) was getting a bit, well, peculiar? He hadn’t actually noticed such a thing himself, although that was nothing to go by. It was a good thing in his estimation not to have time to dwell on the derangements of others. His thoughts wandered helplessly on, and when it came to the point where it was his duty to dismiss the school to its various classrooms, his mouth dried up and he was unable to utter a sound.
The Fourth in particular were delighted. First Mr M’Tooley’s glaring absence and now the Winner gawping like a fish. They turned to smirk at one another, plainly enchanted by the prospect of a day of confusion. But such hopes were short-lived. Before he had quite realised it himself and with that suppressed gift for strategy which belonged to the manqué side of his nature, Mr Winsley was deploying what remained of his forces. There would be no games, he announced; instead Mr Bateson would take over the Fourth for an extra period of maths.
A token groan for the cancelled rugger—no one was overeager to strip in an unheated pavilion, nor to separate themselves from mud later with nearly cold water—was speedily turned into a more genuine grief at the thought of the extra maths. Only Bateson himself was truly pleased. After the evening at the ‘Case is Altered’ he felt what he called, ‘fragile’. The idea of a morning spent sitting in Mr M’Tooley’s chair was infinitely preferable to plodding up and down a soggy pitch in the company of twenty horrid yelling boys.
‘Fourth and Fifth to the North Room then, and you, Lindsay, you can carry on with what we were doing in the Sixth yesterday, only I should miss Book Three of The Faer
y Queen and continue where it says, ‘It often falls, in course of common life’—I think on page two hundred.’ Mr Winsley was now in huge command of the situation. ‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘if we are still shorthanded, the Fourth and the Fifth will divide; the Fifth to go on as usual with Mr Brand—Agrarian Disputes, isn’t it?’ He snuffled, pleased with this instance of what he termed, ‘keeping a finger on the pulse’, ‘and the Fourth can do their prep in class instead of after supper. All right?’ He looked up and down the rows of vapid or meditating faces. He smiled and his dentures flashed a confidence he was far from feeling.
Richard, who had listened to all this in only a desultory fashion, suddenly realised that there had been no mention of what he was to do.
‘Silly old fool,’ he muttered to Bateson, as he edged his way to the front of the noisily dispersing school, ‘He’s left me out.’
Bateson grinned laconically. Things, he implied so far as he himself was concerned at any rate, were perfect.
The Canon and Mr Winsley descended from the dais.
‘Ah, Brand,’ said the Canon. ‘Er, ‘morning. Much warmer, don’t you think! Mr Winsley’s just been telling me that poor old M’Tooley‘s feeling a bit groggy—A naval term, wouldn’t you think, Cadman? The poor fellow’s probably had an extra tot of rum when they were sea-sick … Fascinating these scraps of slang which penetrate our general usage …’ He sniffed himself to an apologetic stop. Mr Winsley was looking hard at him and Richard fancied that he saw an unspoken decision concluded between the two pairs of moist weak eyes. At the door Mr Winsley turned and said, ‘You coming too, Brand?’ which Richard, correctly, interpreted as an order. He joined them in the entrance hall.
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