‘Yes sir,’ Whitecross said.
‘Tell him his bat’ll keep till the week after next,’ Roland said.
‘Yes sir,’ Whitecross said. He hovered for a moment. Roland began to drink his tea.
‘Whitecross,’ he said after a while. ‘If you hang about here any longer, I might begin charging you rent.’
‘Yes sir,’ Whitecross said. Then he left.
Roland looked out of the window. ‘Such beautiful country,’ he said.
Alice said nothing for a bit. ‘I feel sorry for him,’ she blurted out abruptly.
Roland smiled at her. ‘He’s a nice kid,’ he said. ‘That goes for both of them. Thick as thieves since the first day of term. Shouldn’t wonder if it doesn’t last them all of their lives.’ You’re not my best friend, Mavis, Alice thought resentfully. You’re only my second-best friend. Gertie is my absolutely-absolutely best friend. Ever since last week. Alice did not think that Pyecroft was an especially nice kid. But she still felt sorry for him.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ she said again. Roland smiled at her again. It did not cross his mind at that moment that Alice was throwing him some kind of challenge, because Alice was not confrontational. Nor that she was expressing any serious unease about him. He was never very analytical about his role as a teacher. He was highly effective, that was all. And what had he done? He had let little Pyecroft know that he would not license rudeness about another member of staff. He had been quite emphatic, it was true, but there was no sense in pussyfooting around just because a child was a little bit shy. That way he would only get more shy. And if one didn’t make these things clear in the first form one only stored up trouble for later on. In any case, there was never very much point in laying down the law ineffectually. Not if you expected to be obeyed. He had barred the child from participating in precisely one cricket fixture and that was it. Hardly the end of the world. Of course the boy was a bit crestfallen and would probably cry himself to sleep that night. That was life. Rough with the smooth and all that. As for Whitecross – well, he had the gift of the gab. This was not surprising, given that his father was one of the country’s more flamboyant QCs. He had been thoroughly delightful and entertaining, as he very often was -just so long as you didn’t give him his head too much – and his performance over the new Gray-Nicholls was really most accomplished and amusing. But perhaps all this talk about discipline and cricket bats and algebra and so on it was hardly the darling girl’s day-to-day milieu.
‘I’m sorry about the ever-present jackboot, sweetie,’ Roland said gracefully. ‘Rather unavoidable in present company. Little bit tedious for you, I’m sure.’
Alice shook her head. It wasn’t a little bit tedious, she thought. It was a little bit repellant. She wasn’t quite sure why. She didn’t feel superior to Roland. Quite the reverse, in fact. And she conceded that if she were in charge of Roland’s boys, they would probably be running riot all over the café. They would probably not know one end of the Gray-Nicholls Scoop from the other and they would probably not have their Symmetry completed for Tuesday. And Burnley would probably not sing anything like as accurately or sit anything like as ramrod still in the choirstalls every Sunday, waiting for his cue in the Nunc Dimittis. But they would probably all get by. There was something so terribly strange, so terribly disturbing to her about it all. Made worse, somehow, because she was so certain that Roland was not sadistic, as doubtless some of the masters were. It was his very straightness that she found deterring. What point was there in drilling children as if you were grooming an officer class for the next war? Yes sir; no sir; three bags full sir. David’s children were much more fun to be with. They talked crazy nonsense that made you laugh. They talked back to you as if you were just another person and not as if you were Monty of El Alamein. If you had said to Thomas, ‘Are you asking to get beaten, Morgan?’ he would have pulled funny faces and made farty noises and said, ‘Have you got a pea for a brain, Jug-head’ – or something to that effect.
‘He’s a smashing kid, is little Pyecroft,’ Roland said. ‘Bright as a button. And, frankly, he’s absolutely right about old Braithwaite. Hopeless bloody package. Should have been drowned at birth.’ He took off his glasses while he spoke and wiped them idly on a napkin. Then he put them on again. ‘Incessantly bloody sarcastic,’ he said. ‘And victimizing.’
‘V-victimizing?’ Alice said, wishing to air her own sarcasm just a little, but Roland seemed to miss it.
‘Ineffectual too,’ he said. ‘Except in making even boys like Pyecroft take against Maths. He’s my head of department. Ah well.’ Roland had never mentioned to her before that his head of department was a trial. He was much too courteous to impose his grumbles on her, or to bore her in any way with shop. ‘Poppet,’ he said, with a gentle, nice solicitude, because he thought she had the look of being wrung out, ‘are you very tired? We’ve not much further now.’ Alice shook her head.
‘R-roland,’ she said, apparently from nowhere. ‘I’ve got O level Geography.’ Roland smiled at her. Dear, adorable Alice! Just very occasionally her discourse took on something of the surrealistic dottiness of David Morgan’s children’s. Something jumped out at you from nowhere. It amused him. It could be rather charming in a girl – the sudden, idiotic, non sequitur.
‘Oh jolly good,’ he said and he laughed.
‘I’ve got an A,’ she said. Roland’s eyes twinkled. It always entertained him if an adult person so naively, transparently, paraded achievement. It was so absolutely ‘not done’, but then Alice paraded so seldom and she was still so very young. Alice was not yet twenty. How lucky they were, to have found each other so early in their lives.
‘Clever girlie, aren’t you?’ he said appreciatively. He related her remarks to nothing which had foregone. ‘Seriously, sweetie, I’ve never imagined you got into Oxford on very much less.’ Roland always behaved as though ‘getting into Oxford’ automatically denoted superior intellect. Roland had gone from his public school to a university in the Midlands. He had never thought of himself as ‘academic’. More as a ‘practical’ person. She dismissed the issue as not worth pursuing.
Roland looked at the map. While he did so, Alice glanced across the café towards the counter. Whitecross, to the amusement of the others, was trying his hand at satire with the serving woman. Craggs and Burnley were falling about and even Pyecroft was smiling. Whitecross was enquiring exuberantly after ‘Yorkshire parkin’ in his best ‘ee by gum’ voice. He was trying hard not to laugh as he spoke. After a while she turned and looked at Roland. He was still studying the map.
One of them’s putting on a silly voice,’ she said. She didn’t like to say ‘Whitecross’. No doubt if she had known his name, and if she were ever to have used it to the child, he would have been deeply affronted, as if she’d thought he was a girl. ‘Roland,’ she said. ‘I think that you should make him stop it.’
Roland looked up. He cast an eye casually over the quartet of happy little boys at the other end of the room and noticed, to his satisfaction, that Pyecroft had cheered up.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Your boys. They were asking for Yorkshire parkin in silly voices,’ Alice said. ‘You should make them stop it.’
Roland laughed. ‘Oh, good Lord, sweetie,’ he said. ‘Give them a break. They’re children. Let them have a bit of fun.’
‘But it’s not f-funny,’ Alice said. Roland smiled at her a little flirtatiously. He loved the way she looked. Her straight shoulders, her square-cut pale hair, that adorably prim, earnest demeanour she had. He longed to kiss her there and then and would have done if only his pupils had not been in the room. And that morning, when they had stopped in one of those touristy little villages, he had doubled back into an antique shop and had bought her the prettiest little ring. He had made the purchase with extraordinary rapidity, but he knew the moment he saw it that the ring was absolutely perfect for her. Such a delicate, quiet little silver ring with a cluster of small blue stones the colour o
f cornflowers. Roland was cautious in the management of his money, but he knew how to spend it where it mattered. Nothing mattered more to him than that Alice should wear this beautiful little ring as a statement of his esteem and love and unending loyalty; of his intent to honour her with his body and to endow her with his goods. He had written out a cheque, without balking, for nearly four hundred pounds.
‘But it isn’t f-funny,’ Alice said. ‘Roland, it’s much worse th-th-worse th-. Well, I think it’s highly offensive.’
‘You get quite dour once you’ve crossed the Derwent,’ Roland said, balancing affection and levity. ‘My word, poppet, but you do.’
‘I don’t,’ Alice said, sounding quite dour. Roland smiled. An instinct rose in him to tease her just a little, because, really, between those innocent, wide-spaced eyes, like a new kitten’s, which underlined her adorable seriousness and, more recently, the effect of old Morgan’s rather heavy socialist blather, she needed now and again to be coaxed into lightness. He looked up at Whitecross and called to him, beckoning him to approach.
‘Whitecross, come here a moment will you?’ he said. The child approached with alacrity.
‘Sir?’ he said.
‘Find any of that “parkin” of yours, then, did you?’
The boy was all jauntiness in return. ‘Oh yes, sir!’ he said emphatically. ‘Bit yummy, sir. Trouble is, Burnley’s just scoffing it all, sir. He’s sort of like a Hoover, sir. It’s because he’s got to be castrated next week, sir. Mr Farnley’s booked him in at the vet’s you see – it’s to keep him in the choir, sir. And now he’s scoffing all the parkin because he’s emotionally disturbed, sir. Could you get him a psychiatrist, do you think, sir?’ Roland laughed. ‘And he’s got foot-and-mouth,’ Whitecross said. ‘So he’s contaminating it all with his disgusting slobber. Just look at him, sir. And we’ve gone and used up all our money, worse luck, sir. We can’t even buy any more of it.’
Roland laughed again. He drew a pound from his trouser pocket and handed it to Whitecross. ‘Buy it on me,’ he said. ‘And don’t make a nuisance of yourselves with the shopgirl.’ The ‘shopgirl’, Alice observed, was significantly older than Roland. She was probably somebody’s mother.
‘No sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘Gosh, thank you sir. Would you and Miss Pilling like some of it, sir?’
‘Not for me, thank you,’ Roland said. ‘Save a small bite for Miss Pilling, would you? She feels very strongly about parkin.’
‘Yes, of course sir,’ Whitecross said. He moved off, hailing his chums across the length of the café and waving his pound in the air. He enacted a small, unsolicited burlesque as he did so, expressly for Roland’s entertainment, price one pound. He did it in the ‘ee by gum’ voice, which was really fairly accomplished as the genre went. Whitecross was the cockiest of the four little smart-arses and clearly held great sway among his peers.
‘Burnley?!’ he cried out. ‘Ee Sow-face! Hast never scoffed all t’ parkin there, lad?! Ee-aye, an’ ’ere’s t’ gaffer’s missus ‘ud fancy a bite of it an’ all! Oh aye! She’s that keen on’t Yorkshire parkin, is t’ gaffer’s missus, as t’ gaffer says she can’t rightly get enough of it.’ This final quip – touched as it was with a kind of innocent double entendre - emerged three-quarters drowned, as Whitecross and all his compatriots showed dangerous signs of choking to death on laughter. Roland looked at Alice.
‘You’re blushing just the teeniest bit,’ he said tenderly. Alice said nothing. They were ganging up on her, she thought. And it had to do with the fact that they could all pee standing up. If you couldn’t pee standing up it seemed that it cancelled out your O level Geography. Roland was infinitely, delicately charmed by the sudden high colour in her cheeks. ‘How pretty you are my Alice,’ he said. ‘Do I deserve anything half so fine as you?’
‘Roland,’ Alice said. ‘Sup-p-p. I th-th-th.’ Roland’s smile was like a small devoted kiss.
‘Come now,’ he said. ‘Stop. Breathe deeply and try again.’ Alice stopped and breathed deeply and tried again.
‘I think I had better go back to Dr Neumann,’ she said. ‘That’s if he’s still alive.’
And they all got back into the car. After that Burnley sang an extraordinary devotional song about St Nicholas, who had apparently leapt direct from his mother’s womb to the font. And then, with his first breath, without the ghost of a stammer, had cried out the praises of God.
Chapter 19
Alice detested old Gubbins. He stank of pipe tobacco and he leaned over her just like Pyecroft’s Mr Braithwaite, with his seriously brown, stained teeth. The chaplain talked clichés in the chapel that night and got Roland to read one of the lessons. And when Roland came back to her and stood beside her in the pew, she thought that he sang ‘All my Hope on God is Founded’ sort of as though God was his commanding officer. And she knew suddenly, very clearly, that she did not love him. Well, ‘love’ him, yes. He was an absolute dear. She would always love him. But not ever have him make love to her. Not love him like that. Let’s not debase the terminology. She did not want his body. There was something about the open, decent muscularity of everything that he stood for that made her retreat from it. She would always be retreating from it. The day had proved to her that that would never change, much as she had somehow expected and hoped that it would. Because nobody could have been worthier and nicer than Roland. Dear, kind, patient Roland. Competent, cheerful, handsome Roland, who would have constructed an emergency survival shelter for her in the tundra if ever that had become necessary; Roland, who could get every schoolboy to hang adoringly on his coat sleeve, simply by issuing grid references. Dear Roland, who had wanted so much to be a soldier – just about as much as he now looked forward to being Alice’s loyal and decent husband.
* * *
Dr and Mrs Gubbins were besotted with Roland and pleased by his choice of woman. They made genteel innuendoes over dinner in the dining hall where the food was unspeakable and where Dr Gubbins said grace in a sort of posh-voiced Latin which sounded exactly like Miss Trotter’s – rather as if they were both ventriloquist’s dummies in those nostalgically revived recordings of Uncle Mac on Children’s Hour. Alice always made Latin sound as much like Italian as possible. It was a futile gesture; a small candle which she kept alight for Jem. ‘The Ancient Romans were not Italians, Veronica! Dear me, no! They were a highly disciplined and very hygienic people.’
Roland was highly disciplined and very hygienic. And he was definitely not Italian. Good Lord no! Alice had never seen Roland unshaven. One probably could have drunk Jackson’s Orange Pekoe from his groin guard as the unwashed Iona Morgan had saucily volunteered. Alice shuddered and she faltered in the hymn. That night she and Roland would sleep in adjoining bedrooms. What if the wall had a sliding panel? What if old Gubbins was seriously kinked and had fixed up two-way mirrors behind the reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy which hung over the fireplace?
‘Sorry, God,’ Alice said, inside her head. ‘I have really given you very little attention all of my life. And here I am in church singing a hymn to you and what I am really thinking about is Roland’s groin. Inside Roland’s well-pressed trousers lies a sort of Giant Mollusc. And I don’t want it. I really would rather not think about it, if you could help me to that. I really and truly cannot contemplate the prospect of Roland’s crotch with anything like equanimity. Is there something seriously the matter with me? It must surely be that I do not want anybody’s crotch, if I do not want Roland’s. The only men I have ever sighed for are John Donne, one-time Dean of St Paul’s and the Reverend Gerard Hopkins, S.J. And then, of course, most curious of all, there is Sarastro, Grand Master of the Brotherhood. Two of these are dead and the third never existed. Never will.’ But how can I be saying these things, Alice thought. And to God of all people! And I a guest in his house! And what is this that I’m saying? I the secular one that has never leapt up to the font? Am I saying that I hanker after wacky, religious men? Because one of these poses in his winding sheet and bese
eches God to ravish him and batter his heart. The second swings like a hallucinated yo-yo. God oozes for him, and flashes, and rips him open with the lion’s claw. Sometimes God comes to him like Darth Vader in charge of the E S T clinic. As for Sarastro – what is he? A religious poseur in the Temple of Wisdom? An abductor? A manipulator? A sort of decadent, alternative Pope? Or what is he? Can one take him straight? One might bloody well have to, since he has the power and the magic. Sarastro can make devouring lions appear in the forest and he can set tables there too, like holy altars of food. Wine issues from the ground for him, like the ooze of oil, crushed. Then, of course, there are Messrs Gordon McCrail and Saul Gluckman – champions respectively of the Latin Mass and the Talmud. But maybe I only care for these two because they were filtered to me through Jem. I savour the taste of Jem’s word-magic more than Roland’s mouth on my mouth. These things Alice did not venture to address to God directly.
‘The way I am is not the way that you meant us to be, dear God – Sir,’ she resumed and she felt herself, like Pyecroft, trying not to cry. ‘You meant us to go forth and multiply and Roland would be excellent for that. He is designed to make a very satisfactory mate. He is healthy and loyal and indefatigable and kind and lovely to look at. Roland is a “verray, parfit gentil knyght”. Any woman with half a brain would jump at him. Look. I’m sorry. If I could be as easy and straight and normal and generally satisfactory as Roland, well, I would be. Really I would. But I couldn’t be in a million years. My most venial sin must lie in seeming so. Because Roland will not believe that I am not all these things and I, in my weediness and inexperience, have led him on. Can I say in mitigation that Roland has never seriously listened to a word I say? I know it’s true that I stammer and that I’ve stammered rather badly for most of this year.’ And then a light entered Alice’s mind. ‘I stammer worst when I’m with Roland,’ she said. ‘Roland is the problem. What a terrible pity. What a charming man. Please God. Seriously. I cannot remove my undies for Roland Alexander Dent; for a person who says “Pyecroft is turning out a nice little batsman”. I can’t. Oh, please God, spare me for eternity from confrontation with Roland’s crotch.’
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