‘Yes,’ said the Housemaster. Again he stroked his moustache. ‘What is required from Nelson is a change of attitude. Attitude, Nelson. You understand a word like attitude?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s just not interested in school, Mrs Skelly.’
‘I’ve no room to talk, of course. I had to leave at fifteen,’ she said, rolling her eyes in Nelson’s direction. ‘You know what I mean? Otherwise I might have stayed on and got my exams.’
‘I see,’ said Mr MacDermot. ‘Can we look forward to a change in attitude, Nelson?’
‘Hm-hm.’
‘Have you no friends in school?’ asked the Housemaster.
‘Naw.’
‘And no interest. You see, you can’t be interested in any subject unless you do some work at it. Work pays dividends with interest . . .’ he paused and looked at Mrs Skelly. She was inhaling her cigarette. He went on, ‘Have you considered the possibility that Nelson may be suffering from school phobia?’
Mrs Skelly looked at him. ‘Phobia, my arse,’ she said. ‘He just doesn’t like school.’
‘I see. Does he do any work at home then?’
‘Not since he had his bag with all his books in it stolen.’
‘Stolen?’
Nelson leaned forward in his chair and said loudly and clearly, ‘I’m going to try to be better from now on. I am. I am going to try, sir.’
‘That’s more like it,’ said the Housemaster, also edging forward.
‘I am not going to skive. I am going to try. Sir, I’m going to do my best.’
‘Good boy. I think, Mrs Skelly, if I have a word with the right people and convey to them what we have spoken about, I think there will be no court action. Leave it with me, will you? And I’ll see what I can do. Of course it all depends on Nelson. If he is as good as his word. One more truancy and I’ll be forced to report it. And he must realise that he has three full years of school to do before he leaves us. You must be aware of my position in this matter. You understand what I’m saying, Nelson?’
‘Ah ken,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘You go off to your class now. I have some more things to say to your mother.’
Nelson rose to his feet and shuffled towards the door. He stopped.
‘Where do I go, sir?’
‘Have you not got your timetable?’
‘No sir. Lost it.’
The Housemaster, tut-tutting, dipped into another file, read a card and told him that he should be at R. K. in Room 72. As he left, Nelson noticed that his mother had put her knee up against the Housemaster’s desk and was swaying back in her chair, as she took out another cigarette.
‘Bye, love,’ she said.
When he went into Room 72 there was a noise of oos and ahhs from the others in the class. He said to the teacher that he had been seeing Mr MacDermot. She gave him a Bible and told him to sit down. He didn’t know her name. He had her for English as well as R. K. She was always rabbiting on about poetry.
‘You, boy, that just came in. For your benefit, we are talking and reading about organisation. Page 667. About how we should divide our lives up with work and prayer. How we should put each part of the day to use, and each part of the year. This is one of the most beautiful passages in the whole of the Bible. Listen to its rhythms as I read.’ She lightly drummed her closed fist on the desk in front of her.
‘“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot . . .”’
‘What page did you say, Miss?’ asked Nelson.
‘Six-six-seven,’ she snapped and read on, her voice trembling, ‘“A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to wear down and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance . . .”’
Nelson looked out of the window, at the tiny white H of the goal posts in the distance. He took his bubble-gum out and stuck it under the desk. The muscles of his jaw ached from chewing the now flavourless mass. He looked down at page 667 with its microscopic print, then put his face close to it. He tore off his eyepatch, thinking that if he was going to become blind then the sooner it happened the better.
MY DEAR PALESTRINA
‘COME ON, LOVE, it’s for your own good,’ she said. Rooks from the trees above set up a slow, raucous cawing. Cinders had spilled on the footpath and they cracked and spat beneath their shoes, echoing in the arch of the trees overhead, as they walked the mile from the town to Miss Schwartz’s place. The boy stayed one pace behind and slightly to the left of his mother. To show her determination, she had begun by taking his hand but it seemed foolish to be seen dragging a boy of his age. Although now they were separate they were so far gone along the road that she knew she had won. The boy stopped at the old forge and stared at the door into the dark, listening to the high pinging of the blacksmith’s hammer.
‘Don’t have me to go back, Danny, or I’ll make an example of you.’ She waited, looking over her shoulder at him. His eyes were still red from crying.
Miss Schwartz had a beautifully polished brass knocker on her black front door. It resounded deep within the house. It seemed a long time before she answered. When she did, it was with politeness.
‘Yes, can I help you?’
The boy’s mother smiled back and nodded down the path to where the boy was standing.
‘I want him to have piana lessons,’ she said.
Mrs McErlane, panting after the walk, fell into an armchair, propped her bag on her knee and listened as Miss Schwartz struck single notes for her Danny to sing. His voice was clear but not rich and still had reverberations of the long afternoon’s crying in it. Her long pale finger poked about the piano and no matter where it went Danny’s voice followed it. Then she played clusters of notes and Danny repeated them. She asked the boy to turn away and struck a note.
‘Can you find that note?’ and Danny played it. She did this again and again and each time the boy found it. At the doorstep on the way out Miss Schwartz said that the pleasure in teaching would be hers. Auf wiedersehen.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Mrs McErlane on the way home. ‘Anyway it will be good for you. It’s a lovely thing to have. The others is too old to learn now.’
Danny said nothing but hunched his shoulders against the darkness and the cold of the night that was coming on.
‘I hated to think of that piana going to waste,’ she said.
Because the McErlanes had a boy young enough to learn, it was they who got the piano when Uncle George died. They also got a lawn mower and a vacuum cleaner, even though they had no carpet in the house.
The piano came in the night when Danny was in bed. When he had visited Uncle George, Danny would slip into the front room on his own and climb up on the piano stool and single-finger notes. He liked to play the white ones because afterwards, when he struck a black note it was so sad that it gave him a funny feeling in his tummy. The piano stool had a padded seat which opened. Inside were wads of old sheet music with film stars’ pictures on the front.
Bing Crosby, Johnny Ray, Rosemary Clooney. He had heard her singing on the radio.
A cannon-ball don’t pay no mind
Whether you’re gentle or you’re kind.
It was about a civil war. He liked the way she twirled her voice. When he tried to sing that song he always put on an American accent.
Two brothers on their way
One wore blue and one wore grey.
After school he walked to his first lesson on a road that fumed with dry snow and wind. The door of the forge was closed and the place silent. On the way out a car passed him, returning to town. A white face pressed itself up against the back window. White hair, blue glasses and a red tongue sticking out at him. Mingo. Danny hated Mingo, with his strange eyes and white fleshy skin. Some of the boys in school had told him that Mingo was from Albania and they were all like that there.
Miss Schwartz had a warm fire blazing i
n her front room.
‘You must be cold,’ she said. ‘Come, warm your hands.’
Danny held out his chapped hands and felt the heat on them. He rubbed the warmed palms on his bare knees, trying to thaw them out. Miss Schwartz smiled.
‘You are such a good-looking boy,’ she said. Danny stood embarrassed, his brown eyes averted, looking down at the fire. His blond hair had been cuffed and ruffled by the wind and gave him a wild look.
‘You look like the Angel Gabriel,’ she said and pulled her mouth into a wide smile. ‘Sit down – near the fire – and let me tell you about music.’ She spoke with a strange accent, as if some of her words were squeezed into the wrong shape. Her mouth was elastic. Danny knew every word she said but it was not the way he had heard anybody talk before.
‘What kind of music do you like?’
‘I dunno,’ said Danny after a moment’s thought.
‘Do you have a favourite singer?’
‘I like Elvis.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said, still smiling. ‘What I am going to tell you now you will not believe. You will not understand it, but I have to tell you all the same. I will teach you about things. I hope I will nurture in you a love you will never forget.’ The smile had disappeared from her face and her eyes widened and drilled into Danny’s. ‘Music is the most beautiful thing in the world. Today beautiful is a word that has been dirtied, but I mean it truly. Beautiful.’ She let the word hang in the air between them.
‘Music is why I do not die. Other people – they have blood put in their arms,’ she stabbed a fingernail at the inside of her elbow, ‘I am kept alive by music. It is the food of love, as you say. I stress that you will not believe me, but what you must do is trust me. I will show it to you if you will let me. Rilke says that music begins where speech ends – and he should know.’
Danny looked at her and the two pin-head reflections of the fire in her eyes. She was good-looking, with a long thin face and a broad mouth which she was constantly contorting as she wrestled to make the strange words clear. She did not wear lipstick like his mother. Her jet black hair was pulled back into a knot at the back of her neck and her parting was straight, as if ruled. Danny had seen her from the back when she played the organ in church and occasionally when she had come into the town shops, a dark figure hardly worth notice, her basket on her stiff forearm, her wrist to the sky. But here she seemed to fill the room with her talk and her flashing hands. All the time she sat on the edge of her chair, leaning towards him, talking into him. He swayed back as far as his stool would let him.
‘Wait,’ she said. She got up and went over to a bureau and took out a sheet of paper from a typewriter. She held it up.
‘Look. Look hard at this.’
Danny looked but could see nothing, only the slight curl at the bottom of the page where it had lain in the machine.
‘I give you a white sheet of paper. It is nothing. But the black marks . . . The black marks, Danny. That is what makes it important. The music, the words. They are the black marks,’ she said, and her whole face blazed with passion. ‘I am going to teach you those marks. Then I am going to teach you to make the most wonderful music from them. Come, let us begin.’ As she sat down at the piano she snorted, ‘Elvis Presley!’
When the lesson was over Miss Schwartz got up and went out, saying that they both deserved a cup of tea. Danny sat on the piano stool and looked at the room. It was a strange place, covered in pictures. Behind the pictures the wallpaper was dark brown, or else so old that it looked dark brown. There were plants in pots standing in saucers all over the place. Large dark green spikes with leathery leaves, small hanging plants, one with a pale flower on it. The wind pressured round the house and buffeted in the chimney. He could hear the ticking of fresh snow on the windows and the drone of a lorry taking the hill.
‘I hope it lies,’ he said to himself. The fire hissed and blew out a small feather of flame.
Miss Schwartz, carrying a tray, closed the door with her toe, which peeped out from her dressing-gown. It was of black silk, long to the floor and hanging loosely about her body. On the back it had a strange Chinese pattern in scarlet and green and silver threads. It reminded Danny of the one the magician wore in the Rupert Bear strip in the Daily Express.
‘Now, while we drink our tea I will have to play you some music,’ she said. She lifted the lid of one of the pieces of furniture and put on a record. She turned it up so loud that the music bulged in the room. Danny had never heard anything like it and he hated it. It had no tune and he kept waiting for somebody to sing but nobody did. He ate two biscuits and drank his tea as quickly as he could. Then she let him go.
On his way home the January wind cut his face and riffled the practice music he carried clenched under his arm. In the telephone wires above he heard the sounds of a peeled privet switch being whipped through the air again and again and again. At the forge he crossed the road to have a closer look. It was more of a shack than a building, with walls made of corrugated iron and hardboard of different faded and peeling colours. Someone had cleaned a paintbrush by the door or had tried out various colours on the wall. The place was surrounded by bits of broken and rusting machinery from farms. From the dark came the rhythmic sound of hammering. Danny edged into the open doorway and it stopped. A man’s voice came out of the blackness.
‘What do you want, lad?’
Danny jumped.
‘C’mere,’ said the voice. Danny moved to the threshold, trying to see into the gloom. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Just looking.’
‘Well, you’ll never see from out there. Come in.’
The place smelt of metal and coke fumes and oil. Danny could make out a man in a leather apron. He looked too young to be a blacksmith, with his tight black curly hair.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked. When Danny told him he thought for a moment. ‘Your Da’s a bus driver? Am I right or am I wrong?’
The man talked as he worked, heating a strip of metal in the coke of his fire and hammering it while it was red. Each hammer blow pulsed through Danny’s head like the record at Miss Schwartz’s.
‘And what has you up this end of town?’ Danny told him he was going to music.
‘To Miss Warts and all?’ he shouted. ‘I wonder would she like this song?’ He began to sing loudly, and bang his hammer to the rhythm, ‘If I was a blackbird’. When he came to the line ‘And I’d bury my head on her lily white breast’, he winked at Danny. He had a good voice and could get twirls into it – like Rosemary Clooney. When he had finished the song, he asked Danny about school. He didn’t seem to think much of it because he said it was the worst place to learn anything. He talked a lot and Danny helped him to work the bellows for his fire. When he took the red hot metal out of the fire, it had tiny lights that flashed and disappeared. The man said that that was the dust touching it and burning up. As the smith worked, Danny looked at his arms, not muscled, but tight with sinews and strings, pounding at the metal. He shouted to make himself heard over his work.
‘The schools make the people they want. They get rid of their cutting edge. That’s how they keep us quiet.’ He nodded that he wanted Danny to pump harder. ‘It’ll not always be like that. Our time will come, boy, and it’ll not be horseshoes we’ll be beating out. No, sir.’
Danny was breathless with the pumping. The blacksmith looked at him, raising one eyebrow.
‘Are you the lad that was very ill not so long ago?’
Danny breathed and nodded.
‘Then maybe you better quit and be off home.’
Danny picked up his music from the cluttered bench and blew the brown rust from it. As he left the man shouted after him,
‘Just give us a call any time you’re passing, son.’
Danny tried to walk the road in step to the fading ring of his hammer.
When he came through the back door his mother yelled at him,
‘Where’s the good cap I knitted for you?’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh, sorry, I left it behind.’
She began to help him unbutton his coat, scolding with concern.
‘You are not strong yet, you know. I don’t know what that woman was thinking of, letting you out without it. Are your ears not freezing?’
‘I’m O.K.’
‘You are not indeed. I never met your equal for catching things. There’s not much the doctors don’t know about that you haven’t had. Twice over maybe. You must look after yourself, Danny.’
The boy went up to his room and lay on the bed. His mother was right. He seemed to be constantly ill. The last time had been the worst. The one nice thing he could remember about it was having the bed made while he was in it. He would lie there while his mother pulled all the bed-clothes off, then she would straighten the sheet beneath him, tugging it with exaggerated grunts. ‘The weight of you!’ she would say. He would run his fingers fan-like across the smoothness under him. His mother, separating out the clothes and standing at the end of the bed, would flap the upper sheet to make it fall soothingly on top of him. It came slow and cool and milky down over him with a breath of cotton-smelling air. It was almost transparent and he could look down at his feet and see himself in a white world – his tent, his isolation. The light came through, but he was cut off. He made no attempt to take the sheet down from his face. He heard her voice, then felt the heavier blankets fall across his body, the light disappearing. Only then would he turn back the sheet and look at her. He had wanted to remain suspended in the moment of the sheet, in its relaxation and whiteness, but it always came to an end. He knew that he made peaks at his head and at his toes. He had seen furniture covered this way, and his grandfather in the hospital morgue.
‘Now sit up for your medicine.’ It had been white too. Cloying sweetness trying to disguise a revolting base flavour. His father gave him sixpence if he could keep it down. After a week he had a shilling on his bedside table. His mother opened her mouth when she gave him the stuff. She set the spoon down and lifted the bowl in readiness. His tongue furred with the mixture. Little squirts of warm saliva came into his mouth and he gagged but it stayed down. ‘Good boy. Another sixpence. Sure, you’ll be rich by the end of the bottle.’
Collected Stories Page 14