Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked. It was, frankly, necessary to know this sort of thing. One did not wish to place a chap in a position of academic and pastoral responsibility, only to find him landed with quite the wrong sort of spouse. Anything was possible these days. Young women cavorting with the Upper Sixth in states of half undress and what-have-you.

  ‘No, sir,’ Roland said, but his smile gave away his pleasure as he thought of Alice back in Oxford, with her neat blonde head and her thoughtful expression, bent over her work. He saw her well-ordered pens and reference books beside her on that funny little desk at the top of the Morgans’ house. ‘Jeffreys is a dunderhead’. Oh, dearest Alice! What a bright, adorable girl she was. Absolutely one in a million. It delighted him to think that one day, quite soon, he would be parking his size twelve shoes at the end of her bed as a matter of simple and gratifying routine. Alice would be marvellous once she had got over her shyness. How could she possibly not be? He had never dreamed of pressuring her; not really pressuring her. And her modesty, for all that he found it difficult at times, was a part of what he had come to esteem about her so highly. He would marry Alice and she would be wonderful. Nothing could possibly be a problem. His own parents were very fond of her and her parents – well, they would come round to the idea. They were decent sorts, after all. Little bit nouveau, but fundamentally full of thoroughness and good sense. He envisaged that his father would marry them. He wondered tenderly whether Alice would stumble over her marriage vows. ‘I, Alice Amelia, take thee thee, R-roland Al-Alla-11-Alexander to be my lawful w-wedded husband.’

  ‘No, I’m not married,’ Roland said, glowing slightly as he spoke. ‘That is to say, not yet.’ Dr Gubbins looked up at him acutely. ‘My girlfriend has eight terms ahead of her,’ he continued. ‘I wouldn’t want marriage to get in her way.’

  ‘Ah, she’s with you at Oxford,’ mused the doctor with approval. Everything about Roland appeared to meet with his approval. ‘Jolly good,’ he said. ‘PPE?’

  ‘Classics,’ said Roland.

  ‘Ah yes indeed,’ said the doctor with enthusiasm, thanking God that it wasn’t Sociology. Or French. He was keen to have his senior staff meet Roland. And also Mrs Gubbins.

  ‘These little chess players of yours,’ he said. ‘Care to bring them up in the spring? Few of the front-runners, what do you say? Bring the little woman with you.’

  Roland drove to Yorkshire in the Citroën DS. It was a pleasure to drive in his beautiful old car through the moors and dales. It comfortably accommodated the four little boys who constituted the pick of his first-form chess players, plus himself and Alice. Alice had been puzzled by the invitation to herself and a little reluctant to come. She had her first set of exams that term and would have preferred to stay at home with her ancient texts. And she was furthermore not much at ease with the prospect of three nights in a boys’ public school, but Roland had jollied her out of misgivings. He knew very well that the occasion would have less to do with his chess players and more to do with himself; that effectively he was being interviewed and so indeed was Alice. But he had not told her that for fear of alarming her.

  ‘Oh come on, sweetie. It’s “The North”, isn’t it? I thought you had people up there?’

  ‘B-but a headmaster,’ Alice said.

  ‘Well, you’ve survived a clergyman, haven’t you?’ Roland said. ‘Come for my sake, poppet. Let me show off your prettiness a bit.’ Alice winced just slightly. ‘I would like your company,’ he said.

  Roland enjoyed the trip enormously. He was in no way aware that to Alice he was not showing up to best advantage. First, he was greatly, complacently bigoted about the north of England; bigoted and genially patronizing. He considered it the repository of people – good, plain, simple sorts – who had not had quite the vision or the enterprise to make something of themselves. Of course once upon a time there had been George Stephenson and the traction engine and so on, but that, unfortunately, was history. ‘The North’, in these present times, was full of people who expended their energies on growing leeks, on breeding pigeons, on eating faggots with mushy peas, and also on voting Labour. Admittedly, Yorkshire had, in the past, been capable of producing the odd decent cricketer. Credit where credit was due. But even this was now history.

  Dr Gubbins’ school, of course, would be quite another matter. An elite southern implant, set in beautiful, rural North Yorkshire, with an intake of bright, enterprising boys who spoke Standard English, had all performed creditably in the Common Entrance Examination and were now benefiting from the marvellous open countryside and the bracing, cleaner air. The servants would be natives, of course. One might have some difficulty understanding them at first, but that could be overcome. Once one was attuned to the lingo.

  Alice went north every year after Christmas; well north of Dr Gubbins’ part of North Yorkshire. She and her parents visited her grandmother who still lived in the terraced cottage in a mining village where her father had grown up. There was an old iron range in the living room over which Alice’s grandmother hung her washing and in which she baked her bread. She adored her son and was proud of him, and of his glamorous, get-ahead wife and his dear little daughter, her favourite grandchild. She was pained by Harry’s voting habits, admittedly, but she courteously never referred to them. She called Alice ‘pet’, and ‘a little old-fashioned ’un’, and took her to meet old Mrs Benn and old Mrs Ball, whose fifty-year-old daughter Margaret did beautiful crochet work and minded her invalid father-in-law whose leg had been crushed in a pit accident midway between the Wars when he was no more than a lad of sixteen. Alice’s grandma said ‘B’ye!’ when anything surprised or excited her. Her voice cracked with vigorous laughter and she still did her laundry by hand or in what she called ‘the boiler’. Much as her son and her daughter-in-law had tried to foist technology upon her, she had displayed no interest at all in having her own machine, nor even in the idea of the launderette, which she resolutely referred to as ‘the washhouse’.

  In the car on the way up to Yorkshire, Roland’s boys affected silly Yorkshire accents and made jokes about bingo halls. They pointed out arthritic old yokels from the car windows and said ‘ee by gum’ if ever they saw one of them wearing a cloth cap. In between, they talked incessantly in their jarring little posh voices, dropping anecdotes with regard to their parents’ importance and telling knock-knock jokes in French.

  ‘Frappe frappe.’

  ‘Qui est-ce?’

  ‘C’est Monsieur le Docteur.’

  ‘Sir? What do you call a man with a spade in his head, sir?’

  ‘Sir? And then, you see, my grandfather was actually asked to rule the island, sir. But unfortunately he was far too busy.’

  The boys were called Whitecross, Pyecroft, Burnley and Craggs. They did not appear to have any first names. Roland was fond of his clever little boys and rather proud of them. He was also sufficiently sanguine to tolerate Alice’s relative constraint with them, attributing it, as he did, to her inexperience with exuberant male children. He seemed untroubled by their prattle. Only once, when Whitecross had talked almost literally non-stop for fully fifteen minutes, Roland had said firmly, mid-anecdote: ‘Put a sock in it, will you, Whitecross?’ And Whitecross had actually stopped. The silence pulsed expectantly for something like thirty seconds and then, into its tautness, Burnley sang the Orlando Gibbons Magnificat.

  Burnley sang with astonishing purity. He had entered Roland’s first form from a highly repressive and much esteemed choir school where his clear, unwavering soprano voice – soprano for not very much longer – had been rigorously and accurately trained. It did not enter Burnley’s mind as he sang how radical was his text, nor how startlingly written from below, but he enunciated beautifully. ‘He hath scattered the proud in the ee-maj-in-ay-see-on of their hearts’, sang Burnley, who five minutes before had been miming the yokels in the Hovis advertisements.

  For Alice, Roland’s trite little burgeoning toffs, who laughed at the likes of her grandm
other’s friends, simply gave her a new and profounder respect for David Morgan, who had so resolutely kept his children in the state schools. They might not teach very much, he said, but they taught people how to live with each other. She could see that – given ten years – if you were to put Roland’s pupils in a working man’s club, they would never merge and blend; never talk merely as one man to another. They would store up hatred and envy and they would very likely emerge with a working man’s knee in the groin. Roland, admittedly, was different. Roland talked courteously to almost everybody. He was full of kindness and he never bragged. Never. Moreover, Roland was not rich. Yet even he, merely by opening his mouth, had had the capacity to make Alice’s wealthy and successful parents feel put down. And why was he so obtuse about privilege and snobbiness and bigotry? It was a kind of appalling innocence he had. An incurable, complacent blind spot. Right now it made Alice extremely queasy.

  The trip was also a new and daunting opportunity to watch Roland wearing his schoolmaster’s hat unrelievedly for hours and hours on end. Until the trip such opportunities had been brief and fairly intermittent; a few minutes here and there, if ever she had called for him at his school which was almost never. Now it was interminable and most of it stuck in a car.

  Alice found herself not very comfortable with Roland’s crowd control, highly effective as it was. Given how gentle and patient and courteous he invariably was with her, his manner with the children surprised and shocked her with its rigorously Spartan style. Roland was unambiguously disciplinarian in a comfortably pragmatic sort of way. He was uncomplicated and untroubled by the inequalities of command and he perceived a great convenience in the expedient of short rope. Since this was tempered by his energy and competence, his basic kindness and his obvious commitment, his boys all evidently adored him. But to Alice, right then, it was distasteful. Roland had become a dictator with four small subjects in a row in the back of his car. The cues by which he either laughed with them or censured them, or hemmed them in with protocol, were ones which she could not read.

  And being out of the schoolroom was making things a little harder for the children. Alice could appreciate that. The situation implied a degree of informality which left the boundaries of licence and prohibition somewhat blurred. In the circumstances, Roland’s judgements seemed to her really most curious at times. He had allowed Whitecross, for example, to make a belittling reference to ‘girls’.

  ‘Here,’ Roland said, passing the Ordnance Survey map unceremoniously over his shoulder. ‘Pyecroft, give us the route. 8753. Just beyond the station. Got it?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the boy. ‘But wouldn’t Miss Pilling like to navigate, sir? She’s sitting beside you, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be thick, Pyecroft,’ said Whitecross. ‘Miss Pilling’s a girl!’ Half-suppressed mirth and gigglings emanated from the back in response to this idiotic remark, yet Roland said absolutely nothing. This was because he too thought it was funny, Alice realized. When she looked at him he was experiencing a certain difficulty in trying not to smile. And what was so funny, when she had got an A for her O Level Geography, while Roland’s snotty little first-formers were still four years away from taking it?

  On the other hand when Pyecroft had been a little bit outspoken about one of the other masters, then Roland had made a great palaver about it and had practically held a summary execution – even though he had told her afterwards that what the child had said was true.

  ‘Sir?’ said Craggs. ‘Can me and Burnley have extra time on our Symmetry, when we get back, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Roland said. ‘Tuesday is the deadline.’

  ‘But sir, that’s not fair, sir,’ said Burnley. ‘Mr Braithwaite’s given Pyecroft till Thursday, sir. Because of him being in the chess team, sir.’ Roland ignored him.

  ‘Sir?’ Craggs said candidly. ‘Why are you always so strict, sir?’

  ‘Because,’ Roland said, baldly stating the truth, ‘that way life is a lot simpler for me, and rather more difficult for you. You’re at school, Craggs, not watching Sesame Street. I don’t exist to stand on my head for you, do I?’

  ‘No sir,’ said Craggs.

  ‘Least you’re not all weedy and sarcastic, sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘You’re not always picking on people.’

  ‘Not like Mr Braithwaite,’ Pyecroft said with feeling. Alice understood that he was speaking, however audibly, to Whitecross and not to Roland. ‘And he’s got these hairs growing out of his nose,’ Pyecroft elaborated. ‘And he pongs like anything when he leans over your Algebra.’

  Roland, in response to this injudicious gripe, seemed suddenly to exude an aura of ominous, court-martialling silence. He stopped the car while the four boys held their breath, and contrived an effective pause before going into action. Then he turned upon the already quailing Pyecroft a fixed, withering stare of quite intimidating censure. Pyecroft, Alice thought, was really the most bearable of the four boys. He was smallish and rather nice to look at, and – granted that he talked like all the others – he had, on the whole, exercised a greater degree of reticence.

  ‘Are you asking to get beaten, Pyecroft?’ Roland said. The child could not look at him. He looked down into his lap and he began to sweat. The tips of his ears had turned an embarrassing luminous pink.

  ‘… sir,’ he said, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Look at me,’ Roland said determinedly, giving him no place to hide. ‘Get your head up, boy.’ The child raised his head and fixed his eyes with enormous difficulty in the region of Roland’s left shoulder. ‘That’s better,’ Roland said. ‘Speak up now, Pyecroft. Don’t mumble.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the child. I-I mean, no sir.’

  ‘No sir what?’ Roland said. Oh, God in heaven, Alice thought. It made her cringe inside. She had never thought aggressively about Roland, but right then, when her eyes fixed on the ice axe in his cubby hole which he had bought that very morning on the way up in preparation for a trip to Snowdonia, she felt a momentary itch to lodge it in his skull, just to break the tension. Couldn’t he see that the child could hardly speak?

  ‘I’m waiting, Pyecroft,’ Roland said.

  ‘No sir I don’t want to get beaten sir,’ said the child.

  ‘Good,’ Roland said. ‘Then I think we understand each other. You in the eleven for next Thursday?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the child.

  ‘I shall arrange to have you replaced,’ Roland said. ‘Mr Leeming will be advised about it just as soon as we get back.’ A muscle in the child’s face twitched, then stopped. He looked as if sentenced to death. He half opened his mouth in timorous horror and froze.

  ‘Do you have anything to say?’ Roland said.

  ‘No sir,’ said the child.

  ‘Good,’ Roland said. ‘Then we’ll go on.’ He turned slowly and started the engine. Heavy silence. Alice resented it. In the back, the child was obviously struggling not to cry. The air in the car was toxic. All of them – she and all four children – had been poisoned by the fallout, and for what? So that Roland could close ranks with some disgusting old fart with smelly breath.

  Soon afterwards they stopped to stretch their legs and to refresh themselves at a roadside café. Everybody was talking again, except for Alice, though Pyecroft had lost his jauntiness. Roland sat with Alice, drinking tea. The children were at the other end of the room, buying Cokes at the counter and sticky things to eat. Suddenly Whitecross was at Roland’s elbow.

  ‘Sir?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir.’

  ‘What is it?’ Roland said.

  ‘Sir?’ said Whitecross. ‘You know Pyecroft, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ Roland said. ‘I know Pyecroft.’

  ‘Well—’ said Whitecross. ‘He’s upset, sir.’

  ‘I know,’ Roland said nicely. ‘Of course he is.’ He said it wholly without guilt, as though Pyecroft’s state of mind had no bearing on himself as the means of provoking it.

  ‘Please sir. He wants to know, sir – couldn’t you just
beat him and then let him play in the match, sir?’

  Roland looked curiously at Whitecross. ‘You his messenger, are you?’ he said.

  ‘Well sir, he’s sort of a bit shy, sir,’ Whitecross said.

  Roland smiled at him. ‘Yes, I know that,’ he said. ‘But he does know how to speak, Whitecross.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘See he’s just got this new bat, sir.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Roland said with genuine interest. ‘And what sort of new bat has Pyecroft got?’

  ‘It’s a Gray-Nicholls Scoop, sir,’ said Whitecross.

  Roland looked impressed. ‘That’s a very nice bat,’ he said. ‘Mind, he’s turning out a very nice little batsman is Pyecroft. Very stylish. He deserves it.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘See, his father’s just bought it for him, sir. He’s spent all week knocking it in, sir.’

  Roland nodded. ‘I’m sure he’s taking good care of it,’ he said.

  Whitecross paused before resolving upon a new tack. ‘It’s been a bit like the porter’s scene in Macbeth, sir,’ he said. ‘Pyecroft and his new bat.’ Roland looked at him curiously. ‘ “ Frappe-frappe-frappe”, sir,’ Whitecross said, valiantly attempting to woo Roland with entertainment on behalf of his friend. ‘ “Here’s a frapping, indeed!”’

  Roland laughed. If this goes on much longer, Alice thought, I will quite literally die cringing. Right here in the café, in front of Roland and the children.

  ‘So you see, sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘About Pyecroft’s bat, sir – well – he’s been sleeping with it beside his bed every night, sir.’

  Roland put a hand on the child’s shoulder. ‘Whitecross,’ he said kindly, ‘he can’t play. I won’t let him. Now you know that and so does he. All right?’ Then he took his hand back again.