Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  Chapter 21

  When Alice woke in the hospital bed, she had been dreaming of Whitecross and Pyecroft. There had been some sort of explosion and Pyecroft was crying. Waking was like rising from the bottom of the sea. There was a pressure on her ears and steel bands seemed to bind her chest.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ she said. Her speech was slurred and unintelligible. There was a nurse with her, who was fussing with something attached to her arm.

  ‘There now, pet,’ she said. ‘There now.’ She had a voice a bit like Grandma’s. Alice had broken a collarbone and three of her ribs were cracked. The pain in her chest was like intense bruising.

  ‘Where’s Roland?’ she said.

  Roland, having been treated for shock and minor lacerations, had telephoned Mrs Gubbins from the hospital. The chess tournament was over by then and so was Evensong. The boys were in the dining hall having their supper. He would stay to get a report on Alice’s condition, he told her. Then he would return as soon as possible to the school. Mrs Gubbins was all concern. She would drive over immediately, she said, and wait to run him back.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ he said. Then the nurse called him to Alice.

  That was the most gruelling encounter of Roland’s life thus far. He knew also that ahead of him, at the school, lay the gauntlet of kindly well-wishers, and that there was no prospect of being properly alone until he had delivered himself of the four small boys, whom he would have to convey southward by train. He understood, deeply and certainly, that Alice did not love him and that she would not marry him. The Citroën was a watery wreck along with all his hopes and in the Citroën was his jacket which he had torn off in the wake of the fall. In the pocket of the jacket was the pretty silver ring with the little blue stones like cornflowers.

  His meeting with Alice was brief and, on his part, constrained by a stiff propriety. Roland was not much given to raking at sores, which seemed to him both unmanly and a pointless waste of words. He made no reference to the part he had played in her rescue and, in his hurt, which he shielded under distant politeness, he considered neither how drugged Alice was, nor how confused about what had actually happened. He stopped short at the foot of her bed and considered her smile inappropriate.

  ‘How are you?’ he said briskly, clearing his throat.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, rather stupidly. She took in very little other than that he was wearing an unfamiliar shirt. ‘Your shirt has checks on it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Roland said indifferently.

  ‘Will your car be all right?’ she said. ‘I think we crashed.’

  Roland winced briefly, controlling irritation. ‘We’re alive,’ he said curtly. ‘I daresay that’s more important.’ Alice smiled at him again, rather dreamily, overcome with drowsiness.

  ‘I dreamed about Pyecroft,’ she said. ‘I think he was crying.’ Roland brushed this aside as whimsical irrelevance. It injured him that she showed herself suddenly so thoroughly deficient in taste.

  ‘I must be off now, Alice,’ he said. Alice tried to raise her hand but failed. The limb would not move for her.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  ‘I shall leave by train in the morning,’ he said. ‘I telephoned your people about an hour ago. They’ll be here by noon tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice said. She blinked at him, not really minding that she did not know what he was talking about. She was occupied with the unfamiliar, weaving plaid of his shirt. Did the thin white vertical stripe go under the broad horizontal stripe, or over? She could not determine it. ‘Don’t go,’ she said again.

  ‘I’m afraid I have been pestering you,’ he said. ‘It won’t ever happen again.’ He stepped forward and reached out coldly, formally, to shake her hand. She tried again to raise her arm but failed. Roland withdrew towards the door. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘All the best to you. Goodbye, Alice.’

  ‘I’m so tired,’ Alice said and she blinked at him again. ‘Are you so tired as well?’ Roland made no reply. His mouth curled tensely as he turned and walked quickly out of the room. ‘I’m so tired,’ Alice said again, but this time she said it to the ceiling. Then she fell asleep.

  Dr Gubbins poured brandy for Roland and called him ‘my poor dear chap’.

  ‘And the better half?’ he mused kindly. ‘Three cracked ribs, eh? A broken collarbone? Dear-dear-dear, oh dear.’

  ‘May I trouble you for the loan of a train timetable, sir?’ Roland said. Dr Gubbins looked quite flustered.

  ‘Now look here, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘You’re not at all recovered. Absolutely no sense in leaving us in a hurry. Pitch camp here for a day or two. Only wants me to get your headmaster on the blower.’ He pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Your boys will make do splendidly and I’m quite sure your dear intended will be in no hurry at all to see you go.’

  Roland was not accustomed to dissembling. He knew that to announce the dissolution of his hopes with Alice would not look terribly good. It would suggest that the motor accident had been in some way attendant upon emotional crisis, which of course it had. But there was nothing else for it. And the way he felt right then, perhaps he did not want the job there anyway.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I must tell you that Alice is no longer my “intended”. All that – well it came unstuck this afternoon.’

  Dr Gubbins looked most distinctly out of countenance. He juggled a bit with his brandy goblet and put it down. Then he picked it up again.

  ‘Well bless my soul,’ he said. ‘I’m very surprised to hear this. Very surprised.’ He got up and went to the window. ‘If the young lady has changed her mind,’ he said, ‘it may well be that she will change it back again. Excellent young fellow like you.’

  Roland stared fixedly into the amber liquid in his glass. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It seems that I have all along not properly understood her feelings.’ He could not have been expected to appreciate that Alice had not understood them either.

  Pyecroft had won the chess tournament. He had been presented with a small silver goblet, like an egg cup with joke-shop ears. He was holding it under the bedclothes after lights-out. He knew that his father would be pleased about it and it was something he could write about in his next letter to make up for what had happened about Thursday’s cricket match. Also he was pleased because Mr Dent would be proud of him. He had lain awake in the strange, cold dormitory, hoping that Sir would’ve come in and spoken to him about it, but he hadn’t. Pyecroft started to cry. He had been away at school for a term and a half and he wanted to go home. He wanted to be with his mother and his little sister Ellie. His mother had used to collect him from his day school in the car and drive him home and give him tea and help him with his prep and he’d always got ‘Excellent Work’. She’d sometimes watched afternoon television with him and called him ‘Georgie’, but at school he hated people to know that he was called Georgie, because then they’d call him ‘Georgie-Porgie Pudding and Pie-crust’ and tease him and say he kissed girls, which he never did. He wanted to go home and not be at school any more, but then he wouldn’t ever see Whitecross and Whitecross was his best friend and had come to his house over Christmas. When the school clock struck midnight he lost count. He thought he had counted thirteen. Then he fell asleep. That was more than could be said for Roland, who heard the clock strike three.

  Mrs Gubbins drove them to the railway station in time for the mid-morning train. Roland thanked her and shook her hand and settled the children in their seats around a table in a non-smoker. His manner was more peremptory than usual as he handed out sheets of squared paper and set them an exercise on co-ordinates. Whitecross, who opened his mouth to protest, looked at Roland and closed it again. Roland looked at his watch.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Make a start. I’ll be back to check it in thirty minutes.’ Then he took himself to the buffet car and drank a cup of black coffee. Once he had drunk it, he sat and stared expressionless into the landscape.

  ‘Sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘E
xcuse me, sir.’ He was standing in the doorway of the buffet car with a small, electronic chess set in his hand. Roland looked up irritably.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. Whitecross cast about, improvising, hoping to snatch at something he could want.

  ‘We were all wondering, sir,’ he said. ‘Will you be coming on the trip to Snowdonia, sir?’

  ‘Yes of course,’ Roland said. ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you busy doing your prep?’

  ‘Well sir, it only took us about twenty minutes,’ he said. Roland looked at his watch. He had been staring out of the window for over an hour.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Whitecross. I suppose that I have been rather unpleasant.’

  ‘Just a bit, sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘Play you at chess if you like, sir.’ Roland sighed and made the effort.

  ‘All right. Sit down,’ he said.

  ‘Black to suit your mood, sir?’ Whitecross said and he turned the black pieces to Roland’s side of the table.

  ‘Don’t push it, Whitecross,’ Roland said. ‘Nice little chess set you have here.’

  ‘It’s Pyecroft’s,’ said the child. ‘His father sent it to him.’

  ‘Pyecroft’s father sounds like thoroughly good news,’ Roland said.

  ‘Oh yes sir,’ said the child. ‘And he says he’ll take us both hang gliding. That’s when we’re a little bit older.’

  ‘Your move,’ Roland said.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the child. ‘Sir, d’you know my sister?’

  ‘Move, Whitecross,’ Roland said. ‘How the blazes should I know your sister?’

  ‘Yes you do, sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘She came to Ruddigore, sir. I introduced you, remember? She’s got an MGB roadster, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Roland said. ‘I remember.’ Whitecross moved one of his pawns.

  ‘She thinks you’re smashing, sir,’ he said. ‘In fact she made me introduce her.’ He paused for effect. Roland said nothing. He moved one of his pawns. ‘She’s very pretty, sir,’ Whitecross said. ‘And she’s always had heaps of boyfriends.’

  ‘She talk as much as you do, Whitecross?’ Roland said.

  ‘No sir,’ said the child.

  ‘Good,’ Roland said. ‘Your move, Whitecross. Get on with it, will you?’

  Chapter 22

  Harry and Valerie Pilling arrived the following day. They had taken the express train to Darlington and had rented a car from there. They were at their daughter’s bedside shortly after midday. Roland’s communication of the previous evening had been delivered to them with the same stiff restraint as he had shown in his leave-taking with Alice. It had not crossed their minds to consider whether he had been injured or badly shaken; nor whether anything had passed between him and their daughter to have caused in him such a coolness. They had been very much affronted by it and by other things as well. That he should have involved their baby in a motor car accident by allowing her to drive without a licence; that he should, on top of this, have made clear his unabashed intention to abandon her in hospital and travel south next day with a party of schoolboys – but what else would one have expected? Roland was a cold fish. A schoolmaster who put on airs. He was never their sort of person. Never the man for little Alice.

  It was a great relief to them to find that their daughter was sitting up in bed and playing rummy with such a nice young man. He was the driver of the small white van. They kissed her and praised her for her bravery and shook her visitor warmly by the hand.

  ‘Aye, she’s champion,’ Matthew said, in his engaging Bobby Shafto accent, so much stronger than Alice’s father’s. ‘She’s been that plucky – haven’t you now, my pet?’ The Pillings did not read this as impertinence. They read it as northern friendliness. For Harry Pilling, in particular, his bond with Matthew Riley was immediate and warm. Their backgrounds were not at all dissimilar. Besides – though he was decently modest about it – it seemed that the boy had saved dear Alice’s life.

  Matthew Riley had grown up in a mining village not twenty miles from Grandma’s home. His father, way back, had been a rural Irish immigrant who had trained pit ponies until the mines had ceased to use them. Then he had been kept on as a gardener until the pit closed down in the sixties. Matthew was born that year, a latecomer in the family. His father was fifty when he was born; an ageing man with nothing much to do. He grew marrows in the back garden and kept – in a drawer along with his tobacco pouch – a handful of dog-eared holy cards from his rural Irish past. In one of these, the Blessed Virgin Mary was depicted being assumed into heaven with her feet on pink-tipped clouds. Her eyeballs were turning upwards in a manner Matthew had seen only once on a man who had collapsed on the bus with an epileptic fit.

  Such tacky little icons had no meaning at all for Matthew, nor for any of his sisters, though at each of their births a priest had come along and urged them towards the font. It was all a part of what he despised about his father. Matthew was a bright, engaging child who, as the youngest in the family and the only male, had commanded a fair chunk of his mother’s attention. By this time all but one of Mrs Riley’s daughters was married and she had nurtured Matthew in his progress through the junior school and had seen him off to the secondary school with the highest hopes for him in her heart. He had not disappointed her. She had kept him at school until his eighteenth year, after which he had gone on to take a degree in Maths and Physics at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

  None the less, the year in which Alice met Matthew had not been a good one for him. It had been a year of set-backs. Matthew was an ambitious young man, who had determined early in life to direct himself in a manner as unlike his father as possible. To this purpose he had solicited the advice of his lecturers as to the possibility of going on to graduate work, either in London or in America. He had filled out various application forms and had been interviewed in London by a well-disposed academic, prepared to act as his supervisor. Everyone, including Matthew, assumed that his exam results would be high enough for him to get a grant.

  Old Mr Riley timed his dying for maximum inconvenience. He went into his death routine on the morning of Matthew’s first examination paper and lingered until the fourth and fifth. It was an ugly death, during which Matthew’s life was full of ambulance drivers and crying women and holy cards and the priest. It was full of green bile and wheezing and hollow-eyed ghouls in the men’s surgical ward of the hospital to which Alice was now consigned. More surprisingly to him, the fact that his feelings for his father were profoundly negative produced in him turbulent and highly distracting emotions. In short, he fudged his examination scripts and emerged with a lower second which did for his chances of a grant. He had been marking time since the funeral, rethinking his prospects and working, meanwhile, as a van driver for a firm of china manufacturers for whom he delivered to a range of wholesalers. That was not exactly what he was doing when he encountered Alice and Roland on the bridge, but his boss, who was fond of him, had occasionally allowed him the use of the van at weekends. He had not been injured at all in the confrontation. His van had not even been touched. He had simply braked and watched in astonishment, as the girl in the Citroën had inexplicably swung the car into the river.

  When Alice was tired and needed to rest, it was Matthew who ushered her parents to the hospital canteen. It was Matthew who fetched them cups of tea and arranged their lodgings and ran their errands. In doing so he rode easily over the barriers of age, unfamiliarity and circumstance.

  Over the ensuing three days, the Pillings’ gratitude towards Matthew Riley grew and flowered. They cared little for the old Citron on the riverbed, nor for the circumstances by which their daughter had got it there, but their hearts went out to the golden boy who had managed to get Alice out. The details hardly concerned them. They concentrated on the fact that Matthew Riley had stuck around while Roland had indefensibly retreated and that Matthew had fortuitously been on the bridge. They knew by his own engagingly modest account that Matthew had shatte
red the window glass of Roland’s motor car with a hammer which he happened to have had in his van. They were reassured by his approachable style and much affected, on the evening of the third day, by his story of his dying father and the fudged examination scripts. Clearly what the boy needed was a start in life. What Matthew needed was a patron and a nice little job down south.

  ‘Double your wages for a start, my lad,’ said Harry Pilling. ‘Be doing myself a favour.’

  Harry Pilling’s idea was that Matthew Riley would live rent-free in one of the executive units which he would decorate to his employer’s specifications in his own time. He would exchange the little white van for a grey one with his new employer’s name on it, and would work by and large in the area of landscape gardening. Mr Pilling had no doubt that Matthew was a handy lad and canny upstairs into the bargain. If, after a month, his work was pleasing, he said – and there was little doubt in his mind that it would be – Harry Pilling would keep him on part-time throughout the duration of his graduate studies, which would be funded through an interest-free personal loan.

  If Harry Pilling had had any intention at that stage to make Matthew both his right-hand man and his son-in-law, he was not in any way aware of it, but thus it was that Matthew Riley became the hired man. He worked hard and he prospered and he pleased his employer exceedingly. He resumed his plans immediately to pursue his studies in London and, in the bedroom of the ‘unit’ which he had helped to decorate and refurbish, he installed his Maths and Physics textbooks along with all his other reading matter – his three paperback adult adventure stories, his brace of joke books, his half-dozen old Giles cartoon collections and his most recent twelve-month run of the Beano. In the living room he kept his computer magazines.