by Nina Bawden
Above all, he was sincere. Behind most people’s sympathy is an awful joy, a mixture of excitement at a friend’s misfortune and nervous relief that now, statistically, it is less likely to happen to them. But when Geoffrey Sandlewood, pacing his turkey-carpeted study like an anxious, slow, grizzly bear, stopped to light her cigarette and said, ‘This is a terrible business,’ she knew it was a terrible business to him, that it had kept him awake at nights.
His hand, holding the match, was shaking. Mary was suddenly reminded of a jumpy dentist she had once attended who was so afraid of causing pain that she used to steel herself in the chair to save his anguish. She said, ‘Johnny was innocent. I know that. He wasn’t used to business. It must be awfully easy to make mistakes.’
He wasn’t as easy to comfort as the dentist. ‘He was the very last boy I would have thought capable of a mistake of that kind.’
He continued his prowling; heavy head, covered with wiry grey hair, thrust forward. ‘He wasn’t a brilliant boy, but he had an excellent character. It shone out of him. He was Captain of School for the whole of his last year.’
From anyone else this would have been ridiculous but coming from Sandlewood, strained, as it were, of farce through the net of his massive sincerity, it was a compelling utterance. A man who had once been Captain of his School was incapable of dishonesty.
But he said himself, with an apologetic smile, ‘And anyway, that apart, he was such an open boy. Unclouded. I didn’t just know him as a schoolmaster. I took him camping two years running. I used to take the boys whose parents were abroad. He struck me as a thoroughly decent boy, not complicated at all, very brave, idealistic, rather—quixotic.’ He frowned as if he had suddenly hit on something there.
‘Tilting at windmills?’ Mary said.
‘Perhaps. No. He wasn’t so imaginative. Perhaps I just mean—brave without purpose.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘There’s no point in going back. Delving into the past. But it wasn’t just here that he did well. He had an excellent record at his public school and during the war.’
‘I know all that,’ she said, suddenly impatient. She had been interested in what he had said about bravery without purpose, but she didn’t want to hear how Johnny had led the rugger team to victory and won a cup for the high jump. She stood up and went to the open window. The boys were playing football in the big field; their voices rose clear and sharp and sweet in the thin air. They wore football shorts and white rugger vests and uniform dark stockings with the school colours on the ribbing. Mary thought of the children who played football on the bomb site in the mews at the back of her flat. Sandlewood said in a worried voice. ‘Of course one always wants to know where one went wrong. I could have been sure, in his case especially, that the School gave a good grounding. He wasn’t a difficult boy.’
She realized, without anger, that he assumed Johnny was guilty. It was something she would have to get used to. She watched the game, thinking of the children on the bomb sites, the grey, asphalt playgrounds and of these children with their small classes, the picnics they held every year on Empire Day, of the marvellously moulded ceilings and Speech Day with the School Song and the Bishop doling out the prizes; for achievement, for endeavour, for good conduct. The whole thing seemed suddenly to belong, like the Lord Mayor’s Show and the Queen opening Parliament and the Stately Homes where you could see over the orangery for half a crown on Saturday, to some quaint, Ruritanian charade.
She said, ‘It’s an awfully expensive preparation for life, isn’t it? It might well make life itself a bit of an anti-climax.’
He chose to take it as a joke, laughing a little reproachfully. ‘Oh—I know all the arguments against our kind of school. But I like to think our detractors are more old-fashioned than we are. We aren’t the last bastion of privilege, you know. We take all sorts of boys.’ He gave her an assured, attractive grin that made him look much younger. ‘We know what we’re up against. We know there’s no point in turning out Empire Builders any more. Though I must admit that I firmly believe some of the same qualities are still useful.’
He was almost convincing, but the hint of nostalgia underlined the truth. She said, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take Martin away,’ and knew that she wasn’t sorry to have this opportunity. She thought: I don’t want Martin to spend the rest of his life looking back over his shoulder.
‘I hardly think that’s necessary.’ He pursed his lips, frowning. ‘None of the boys know what’s happened. We only have The Times in the Prefects’room and that’s dull reading when you’re twelve years old. Naturally, next term we shall have to be careful. Some of them will find out in the holidays. I shall do my best to see he isn’t hurt.’
She felt humiliated by his kindness. ‘It isn’t that. I can’t possibly pay the fees. There isn’t any money.’
If he was surprised, he concealed it. ‘You mustn’t think about that, Mrs. Prothero. We’re a comparatively rich school, luckily. We don’t have to run it as a commercial organization entirely.’
‘I don’t want charity.’
‘Come, come, Mrs. Prothero.’ His smile rebuked her gently. He offered her a cigarette from his gold case and lit it. ‘It would hardly be that. Martin is a clever boy. We’re very pleased with him. We like to keep boys who have a chance to get a scholarship. The school benefits from it, after all.’
It was nicely put, but then he would always put everything nicely. He would never hurt or humiliate a living soul. And then, perversely, she felt stifled by his taste, his manners, his gentle, upper-class courtesy. She had sometimes felt this with Johnny and always when they were at Fitchet. It was as if a vulgar little demon inside her longed to shout rude words, blow raspberries, hurl bricks through their civilized windows. It wasn’t that she hungered for a world where people were ignorant, ill-mannered and cruel. It was simply that Sandle-wood’s world seemed too cosily perfect—like one of those English drawing-room comedies where the carpets are soft, the curtains drawn against the ugly world and no one speaks discordantly or makes a sound that will offend the most fastidious ear. You can’t live in that drawing-room all your life unless you’re very rich or very stupid or very lucky, and the streets outside are colder and harsher. She wanted Martin to get used to them before it was too late.
She said, ‘I would prefer to take him away, I think.’
‘Let him stay until the end of the year, at least.’ He bent on her his peculiarly steady gaze. ‘We often do this, you know. The middle classes aren’t as well off as they were. It’s not the first time. Lots of professional people occasionally find themselves in—difficulties. We’re only too willing to help out.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t accept that.’ She felt a rush of healthy confidence, as if a fresh wind had begun to blow through her mind. ‘I don’t want to be classed with people who want to go on as if the world hadn’t changed. I don’t want anything I can’t pay for.’ It struck her with amusement that this was just the sort of thing her father would have said. The thought of his steady strength, his robust independence, comforted her. She smiled at Geoffrey Sandlewood.
But she had been too abrupt. He met her smile with a frosty look. ‘We have already remitted a proportion of Martin’s fees, Mrs. Prothero. Your husband wrote to me some time ago—when Martin first came to us, in fact.’
The ground fell from under her feet. ‘I’m terribly sorry.… I had no idea…’
He looked ashamed at once. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Prothero. I shouldn’t have told you. It was wretchedly unfair.’
‘No. You were right to tell me.’ She stared at the carpet and thought she would remember the pattern all her life. ‘What do we owe you?’
He said gently, ‘There is no question of a debt. Please believe me. We are glad to do it.’ He looked worried, genuinely distressed. ‘Of course, you mustn’t let it affect your decision, Mrs. Prothero. But Martin’s a sensitive boy—a change at this time might be difficult for him. He’s happy here. These are the only arguments to concern you
. Think it over—until the end of the term, anyway.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll think it over.’
Chapter Fifteen
One day, towards the end of the next six weeks, Clara took Mary out to lunch. Afterwards she kissed Mary’s cheek and told her in a nervous little rush of speech that she was being ‘perfectly splendid about everything’.
Mary kissed her back, ashamed. She felt a fake. It struck her as she walked back to her office that the last six weeks had been a queer, not very real time that she had lived through with remarkably little pain or distress. It was as if the shock of Johnny’s imprisonment had anaesthetized her: everything that had happened since affected her no more than a pin prick on a deadened limb. She assumed from what Clara had said that she must have reacted in all the right ways, to sympathy shown the correct face, distress, shame, and a tender wifely support of her husband. None of it was hypocritical but it wasn’t real either. She had simply abdicated her mind and let convention take over. She thought guiltily that no one had guessed—certainly, Clara had not guessed—that there was nothing behind her face and voice but a foggy vacancy, temporarily let to second-hand thoughts and emotions.
Lester had found her a job—tactfully, not in his own firm but with another group of trade magazines. It was a leisurely job and quite mechanical but apparently she did it well because at the end of the month they raised her weekly wage by ten shillings. She liked the job, the routine was soothing, the chatter of the other typists soothed her like a lullaby. They were the kind of girls she had grown up with, she knew the kind of homes they came from and how they spent their Sundays: the long lie-in, the cup of strong sweet tea brought up by Dad in his shirt-sleeves, the ritual weekly hair-washing, the large Sunday dinner, the walk, the cinema, the cuddle in the park. She felt a deep nostalgia for the small, safe perspective of their lives; when she talked to them, a slight suburban laziness crept back into her own voice.
Sometimes one of them would invite her to have coffee or go to the pictures after work but she always refused. By the middle of the afternoon and overwhelmingly by the evening, the only desire she was conscious of had overtaken her. She longed for sleep. Immediately after supper she went to bed, giving herself up with a sensual pleasure to the sweet feeling of falling into a pit of blackness and delicious silence. She had never needed an alarm clock before, now it wasn’t loud enough. She had to ask the telephone exchange to call her and some mornings they rang for as long as five minutes before she dragged herself painfully upwards, out of a deep well, and stumbled to the telephone.
Except at her job, she saw very few people. She did not go to Fitchet, nor, after one tactfully vague letter did they press her to. Lester, it seemed, had accepted her eccentric independence though she guessed that he deplored it.
Once, she saw Charles. He wrote to her after the trial, a long, gentle letter, saying that he would be glad to help in any way he could and asking her if she would like to go to the theatre one evening. She replied, thanking him for his sympathy and ignoring the invitation. He wrote once more and she didn’t answer. He telephoned the office when she was out to lunch and left his number: she did not ring back. Then he came to see her one evening when she was eating her supper in the kitchen. He brought a rather squashed bunch of violets which he pulled out of his pocket and held out to her. She didn’t take them and he put them down on the table. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a cup of coffee?’ he said.
She poured out the coffee and they sat in the kitchen at opposite ends of the table with the violets and the remains of her boiled egg between them. He asked her how she was, if there was anything he could do. She shook her head: she found she had a physical difficulty in answering him, her tongue seemed thick and swollen in her mouth. When he left, she opened the door for him and his arm brushed against her breast as he passed in the narrow passage. She recoiled as if he had hit her and stood rigid, hands flat against the wall. He looked at her for a moment. Then he said, ‘You don’t have to act like that. I’m not a rapist.’
His voice was a lash of contempt. For a moment she felt as if she had been shocked alive—as if she had just touched a naked electric wire or nearly been run down by a bus. For a little while after he had gone, she cried with anger. She undressed, weeping, and crawled into bed. Nothing—nobody—was important enough to keep her from sleep.
The only person she wanted to see was her father. His response had been categorical, very masculine, very much of his generation and she found it soothing. She had tried to convince him that if Johnny was not completely innocent, he was only partially guilty. He listened approvingly: a Wife should stand by her Husband. But his rigid, intimate acquaintance with right and wrong admitted no fine shades. There was no smoke without fire and British Justice was the finest in the world. He did not condemn Johnny, nor would he make excuses for him but, on the other hand, having once expressed his horror and shame, that was the end of the matter.
‘I’ll stand by you, my girl,’ he said, leaning back in his favourite chair in the best front-room and drawing on his pipe. ‘Whatever happens, you and Martin will always have a Home here.’
He spoke, as he wrote his letters, in capitals and with stern munificence. He might have been a Victorian peer offering his abandoned daughter shelter in the old family home, instead of a hard bed in a tiny house that in recent years had become an old man’s lair, dark, frowsty and not even particularly clean. It might have been comic, she thought, but it wasn’t; it was an attitude as wholesome and refreshing as a glass of cold milk on a boiling day.
She looked at him, puffing his foul pipe, slippered feet propped on a hassock, his cherished possessions on a table at his side—a framed, signed letter from Kitchener, sent to him when he got his D.S.M. in the first war, an elaborate fob watch bought with the first money he ever earned and three small wooden elephants, whose origin she had never discovered—and felt as safe as she felt in bed. She thought of the text that had always hung above her bed in this house and remembered that when she was a child, she had confused the eye of the Lord with her father’s eye; bright, humourless and righteous, it watched over her in everything. His narrowness was his strength; she thought that in a way it had stunted her moral growth. She did not believe as he believed, nevertheless, she had always been checked and confined by his views. Now she had shaken them off, grown out of them as out of a childhood dress, too worn, too small, she felt naked. She did not know what was right and what was wrong, any more. She could only answer him in the kind of words he would expect her to use.
‘It’s sweet of you, Dad, but I ought to stay in the flat. Johnny would like me to. I want to have it ready for him to come back to.’
He nodded solemn approval and she felt a sharp disgust with herself. She said, suddenly wanting comfort, ‘The awful thing is—most of the time I feel so bored.’
‘That’s only to be expected,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock. The mind needs boredom as the body needs sleep. It’s Nature’s way.’
He looked at her through a cloud of smoke. ‘You look as if you could do with more sleep. You look pale. Do you eat enough? You’ve got to keep up your strength, you know.’
She saw him every Saturday and the questions were always the same but they never irritated her as they would have done once.
‘Do you see Clara? A fine girl—but she’ll never be the woman her mother was.’
His pronouncements were frequently mysterious but they did not irritate her either.
‘How’s Martin? At least, you’ve got that to be thankful for. The boy is getting a good education. Boarding school is the finest thing out for a boy.’
‘I’m going to see him tomorrow,’ she said.
That was the sixth Saturday after Johnny had gone to prison. She had not wanted to see Martin before, she had not wanted to lie to him, though the lies would have to start sometime.
‘What are you going to tell him?’
She hesitated. ‘Just—that Johnny’s away o
n a business trip.’
The flesh of his forehead drew together, making a deep, vertical mark between the bristly eyebrows that were still thick and dark. ‘I’m glad you’re going. It’ll be a comfort to you.’ He tapped out his pipe deliberately in the brass ashtray and reached out for the book he had been reading. It was a paperback with a blood-stained knife on the cover; Mary was always astonished by her father’s reading matter. He turned the pages carefully with strong, swollen fingers and took out three pound notes, very new and crisp, quite uncreased. He handed them to her. ‘I’d like you to take him out properly. Give him a good lunch. Boys expect it.’
She took the money. There was a painful lump in her throat.
He said, ‘What are you going to do with him in the holidays? You’ll still be working. London’s no place for a boy if his mother is out all day.’
‘I expect Lester will want him to go to Fitchet.’
‘Well—he’ll be all right there.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘It’s good of Sir Lester to take such an interest in him. Not every man would, in his position. You mustn’t take it for granted, you know.’
‘I don’t,’ she said humbly.
‘I’m glad of that.’ He paused. ‘Now if—if mind you—Martin would like it, I would be just as happy to have him here. The other day I looked out some old tools of mine, sharpened them up a bit. I could teach him a bit of carpentry and the lady next door has very kindly said she would cook our dinner. I don’t expect Martin would enjoy my cooking much.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’d like to have him. Just tell him that. Not that he ought to come because his Grandad wants it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t tell him that.’