Her unexpected coolness made it even more difficult than he had imagined and silently he cursed Beth for putting him into such a ridiculous situation. Suppose she laughed in his face? Suppose she denied she had ever been in the Coombe? Blades would almost surely support her story, and that left his word against the two of them. Algy would believe him, of course, but Carter wouldn’t, or would pretend not to, if only to make a score. He said, measuring his words as in the witness box, ‘I’m here at the insistence of my wife, Mrs Darbyshire. Before I talked it over with her I had made up my mind to go to the head, and let him cope with it the best way he could. I say that because I want you to understand from the first I don’t like saying what I came to say. As a matter of fact, I find it horribly embarrassing. I was on my way home across the Coombe yesterday afternoon. I saw you and Blades down by the stream.’
She flushed, the colour of her cheeks at odds with the shade of her hair but, apart from that, showed no particular response. He went on, hurriedly, ‘You must realise a thing like that can’t go on. Sooner or later someone else would see you and if it was one of the boys he wouldn’t report it, simply pass it on. From that moment both you and Blades would be in an impossible position…’ He broke off because she had moved away, across to the little dormer window overlooking the quad. It was very quiet down there at this hour, with everybody in class. The noon sun flooded the room with golden light, revealing its shabby paintwork and plaster, despite pathetic efforts she had made with chintzes and a few reproductions, among them Millais’s ‘The Order of Release’. He noticed something else, a silver-framed picture of a second lieutenant on the mantelshelf and recognised the cap badge as that of the Hampshires. Her voice, when she spoke, was very small, the voice of a child.
‘You say your wife advised you to come to me? Does that mean you don’t intend making it public?’
‘I suppose that depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On all kinds of things.’
‘On one thing really. Whether we’ve been lovers.’ She faced him, bracing herself, as though for a blow. ‘Well, you can set your mind at rest as to that. We haven’t, and wouldn’t have been. On my honour, for what that’s worth in your eyes.’
Suddenly he felt disarmed and very much on the defensive, as though he was at pains to explain to her he wasn’t here to pry into her private life. He said, ‘I believe you.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Partly because I overheard a word or two you said before I backed away. I didn’t follow you there. It was pure chance I saw you, and chance again that you didn’t hear me coming down the path. But my job, as I see it, is to consider Blades, and I suppose that’s why I’m here. The head would have to sack him the moment he knew.’
‘And you wouldn’t want that?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I’ve always liked Blades. He’s not…’
‘Not the type you’d expect to imagine himself deeply in love with a woman eight years his senior?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been at this job since I came out of the army five years ago. You learn something new every day. He’s the starry-eyed kind, I suppose, but the bright ones often are.’
‘Is that frowned upon in a place like this?’
‘Not necessarily. The point is… I… I don’t see how it could have started, how someone as adult as you could have let it begin, and develop to the stage it had up to yesterday. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve the right to question him, I suppose, or Carter has, as his housemaster.’
‘No!’ The word was flung at him, more of command than an appeal. ‘Not Carter! Anyone but Carter. I can imagine how he would go about it…’ And then, with a gesture of helplessness, ‘Give me a minute or two. Sit down. Let me think, just for a moment.’
He lowered himself carefully into a small, cane-bottomed chair. She stood quite still for thirty seconds, then crossed over to a bureau, opened a drawer and took out some papers. He said, ‘If they’re his letters I don’t want to read them. God knows, this is complicated enough as it is.’
‘It’s not a letter,’ she said, extracting two sheets of paper, ‘but you asked me how it began. Read that. Then I’ll do what I can to explain. After that we might, conceivably, come to some kind of… well… arrangement. But that would be up to you.’
He took the sheets and saw at a glance that the top one was half-filled with a couple of verses by Herrick, copied in Blades’s precise handwriting. It was entirely deficient of the flourish of a seventeen-year-old, whose hand was not yet formed. He was familiar with the poem, one called Upon Julia’s Clothes.
When as in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes!
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
He glanced up, not yet taking her point despite the obvious one as regards her Christian name.
‘Read the other page.’
He took the second sheet and read:
How easily from there to take
My Julia’s hand, and for her sake
Forswear all sleep and lie awake
The long night through,
And conjure with a fancy fine
Of making gentle Julia mine
Of seeing in her eyes the shine
Of her love too.
O, I could dream by day and night
Of consummating my delight
At Julia’s entrancing shrine.
But how could such reward be mine
For dusting off some musty book?
I’ve been well paid – by one sweet look.
‘This is his? He gave it to you?’
‘He sent it through the post.’
‘Those last two lines, what’s behind them?’
‘Nothing very subtle. It was just his way of making sure I identified him.’
‘You mean this arrived out of the blue?’
‘No, I’d been here a fortnight and almost made up my mind to leave. I’ll tell you why later if you’re interested. I was on my way up here one wet morning when my attaché case burst open and some books fell out. Keith… Blades appeared out of nowhere, and scooped them up. When he saw they were muddy he insisted on carrying them up here and cleaning them off with his handkerchief. It would have seemed churlish not to let him.’
‘And then?’
‘He stayed about ten minutes. I had the kettle on and gave him a cup of tea. He began telling me about himself, the way any boy of his age might. What he liked. What he hated. What he wanted to do when he left school. I suppose I encouraged him, partly because he struck me from the first as being a very charming boy. But that wasn’t the sole reason.’
He looked up at her, but seeing her lip quiver looked down again at Blades’s verses. She went on, ‘I hadn’t spoken two words to anyone real for months. Before I came here I’d gone weeks without talking much to anyone at all. I see now how much he read into my eagerness to listen. The next day the poem came.’
‘You could have ignored it. Wouldn’t that have been simpler for everybody?’
‘Simpler? Yes, it would have been simpler. But it seemed to me, at that time, that it would have been callous too. At least, that’s what I told myself. I realised later it wasn’t the truth.’
‘What was the truth, Mrs Darbyshire?’
‘That I was nearer the end of my tether than I realised. Or anyone else realised. I asked him up here. I honestly meant to tell him he had been stupid and, well a little presumptuous, but to do it as kindly as I could. But then I realised he hadn’t written the verses as a joke or a try-on. He intended them to be taken at face value.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure. I daresay you find it difficult to believe, Blades being one of the white hopes at Bamfylde, but it’s true. He is intelligent. Very. But he’s also highly strung and seventeen. Didn’t you fancy yourself in
love at that age, with the first woman who looked at you as if you were a man?’
‘I was seventeen in August, 1914, Mrs Darbyshire.’
‘Well, that makes it a little easier. For me, I mean.’
She went across the room and lifted the photograph from the mantelshelf. ‘That was my husband. I say “was” because the man there is just as dead as the million others in France, even though I’m still married to him. I only had one week with Arthur. What’s left of him is still at Netley, and likely to stay there so long as the law regards euthanasia a crime instead of a duty. Maybe you’re wondering what all this has to do with Keith Blades?’
He wasn’t. Something of Beth’s intuitive awareness of the complexity of the situation stirred in him, at least enough to make him glad he had followed her advice.
‘Well, there is a link, but Blades didn’t forge it. I did, by giving myself away.’
‘How, exactly?’
‘I said my piece. It had a hollow ring but I said it. Blades just stood there, waiting politely for me to finish. Finally I did, in a flood of tears.’
Somehow it wasn’t improbable. Blades being lectured on his forwardness but sensing, behind the rebuke, the pent-up wretchedness of a lonely, distracted woman, deeply touched by his approach, and not knowing how to deal with it.
‘It was all he needed. He put his arms round me and kissed me. Just once, and on the head. He held me but he didn’t say anything. He’ll make some girl a wonderful husband one day. I hope it’s soon and that she appreciates him. It took me a longish time to pull myself together and everything emerged when I did, all the wretchedness and strain of the last few years, neatly bottled and corked since 1919, when they first showed me the man they said was my husband. Everything else developed from that, you might say.’
He got up, not wanting to hear any more. Suddenly he did not give a damn about Blades’s involvement. Only hers, and the savage wounds the war had inflicted on her, more pitiless, he would say, than on him and his like. He said, ‘You don’t have to go on, Mrs Darbyshire. I served three years out there and was pretty well used up myself when I came here, in 1918.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘What made you take this job in the first place?’
‘I thought it might be a way back.’
‘It was, for me.’
‘It wouldn’t have been, if you hadn’t taken out insurance on a happy marriage. I’ve not met your wife but she must be an intelligent, compassionate woman. Well, it’s that much easier for a man, especially with men in such short supply.’ She paused for a moment as he stood hesitantly by the door. ‘I’ll tell you something else. That’s how I came to see Keith, young as he is – one of the few whole men left on earth. It wasn’t easy to keep it on its original level, tenderness on his part, overwhelming gratitude on mine. Sometimes it was all I could manage to stop myself begging him to take me and he knew it. If it hadn’t been for his essential decency you might have had a real mess to sort out. After all, I’m still human, in spite of feeling like a dried-out husk for so long. And it’s not as if I’ve never held a man in my arms. I did, that one week, before Arthur was recalled for the March offensive. Then I had to do a crazy thing like this, surround myself by hundreds of healthy male animals. I should have known myself better.’
He was able to smile. ‘That’s asking a lot at our age, Mrs Darbyshire. Mostly it doesn’t happen till we reach the fifty mark.’
She looked at him steadily, still holding the framed photograph of the young lieutenant in the Hampshires. ‘You’ve been very kind, the sort of man Keith led me to expect. Is it fair to ask you what you intend doing now?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave that to you. You couldn’t have been more frank, and I daresay Herries would understand. But Carter and the others wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t suffer alone.’
She said, slowly, ‘Would you trust me to see Keith once again? I could tell him we had been seen, and that I’d received a friendly warning. Also that I was leaving at the end of term, having decided how utterly stupid it was from his point of view and mine?’
‘Would he be likely to accept that as final?’
‘He’d have to, the way I put it. I should tell him I’d had better news from the hospital, that my husband was on the mend, and I had to go to him.’
‘Very well, you do that. I’ll go now, before the five-minute bell.’
‘Could we… would you… shake hands on it?’
‘Why not?’
Her hand was cold, and small as a child’s. He clasped it and turned away, trudging down the curving stairway to the quad. The sun was blazing out here but there was no warmth in it.
He was never quite sure how the strange affair worked itself out during the remaining seven weeks of summer term. Julia Darbyshire refused Beth’s invitation to call at the cottage and he understood why. There is no comfort for the sick in taking tea with those who fancy themselves secure in their own immortality. But he did notice traces of her ultimatum in Blades, whom he found himself watching closely through the next week or so. Outwardly the boy gave no sign that he was in despair, a state of mind the very young sometimes find consoling. His work did not suffer and he had always been one of those who liked to walk alone. But one day, after Nipper Shawe’s lunch-bell set everyone about him desk-banging and scurrying, he gave himself away to some extent. He sat on, hands deep in his pockets, looking directly at the dais in the Fifth Form but not seeing it. His eyes were clouded and his expression drained. For a moment David was tempted to descend to floor level and have a word with him but he thought better of it.
Instead he gathered up his books, nodded briefly and stalked out, leaving Blades the sole occupant of the big room and its ineradicable smell of apple cores, blotting paper, exercise books, chalk and dust.
Part Three
* * *
THE BELL IN THE BRAIN
One
* * *
1
BAT FERGUSON DIED EARLY IN THE LENT TERM, 1925. HE WAS getting on for seventy, years past retirement age, but had hung on, hating the notion of uprooting himself and seemingly very fit. Yet in the end Bat Ferguson literally flapped himself to death.
He had taught in Bamfylde classrooms for forty years and collapsed at the apex of one of those furious bouts of exasperated energy that were in the repertoire of every mimic in the school. According to the death certificate, simple heart-failure killed him, but the wits put another suspect in the dock, one Dixon, a day boy of the Lower Third. For Bat was in the very act of pouncing on him when he choked, and crashed his length against the blackboard.
Witnesses who tried to revive him affirmed the dramatic truth of Bat’s last moments. He had just descended on Dixon, renowned throughout Lower School for his buzz-saw Devon brogue, demanding, at the top of his voice, to be told the colour of the pencil he flourished. Dixon, an attentive boy, knew the word and answered up promptly. ‘Le crayon est vert, m’sieur!‘ but because he was Dixon the word emerged as “verrrrrert” and sounded like a long, half-stifled belch.
It was too much for poor Ferguson, who pranced (this from Archer the Third, who was within touching distance) exactly two feet in the air, descending like a thunder-cloud screaming, ‘Vair, idiot boy! Vairr!’ It was his final word and Mrs Ferguson, with Gallic stoicism, received him into her house, where he died ten minutes after Dr Willoughby’s arrival.
Mrs Ferguson did not find his death incongruous and neither, for that matter, did Bamfylde. Everyone seemed to think of it as a very fitting end, thoroughly in character, a veteran Roman soldier, shouting defiance at a swarm of barbarians. Dixon was rather upset but he cheered up as soon as he realised that a little of the savage splendour of the occasion reflected upon him, a thirteen-year-old who had slain a grown man with a single word, and a foreign word at that. He was given the rest of the day off and cantered his pony home, arriving at his father’s farm pale, proud and extremely hungry.
Behind him the machinery of a state Bamfylde funeral went slowly
into action, with directives for black ties for all, and special armbands for the boys of Havelock’s house. Ferguson, as a stripling, had enrolled in a Paris student corps for the 1870 war, and remembering this Carter moved in on the act and selected a Corps firing-party for the graveside. Mrs Ferguson produced a tricolour for the coffin and this was thought equally proper, for although Bat had been born in Scotland, of good Scots parentage, he was always regarded as more than half a Frenchman. In steady Exmoor drizzle the long procession wound its way over the half-mile to Stone Cross churchyard where Bouncer, walking ahead in dripping surplice, recited the burial service. This was strictly according to the English prayer-book and some of the dead man’s former pupils, remembering how a chance remark in their mother tongue had so often driven the dead man into a frenzy, thought it in poor taste. As Morgan-Smith put it, turning away from the grave and regretting that the solemn occasion prohibited a dash across to Ma Midden’s yard in search of apple turnovers, ‘It was all I could do not to convert the final Amen into Fin.’
Everybody regretted Bat Ferguson’s passing but nobody save his wife mourned him in the real sense of the word. No one, that is, except Towser, his faithful Airedale, who made several careful tours of Havelock’s dormitories, passages and linen rooms in search of his absent master. Unable to find him, he slumped in his basket in the Fergusons’ living-room and refused to eat until Madame Ferguson, with a French lack of sentimentality concerning animals, shrugged her shoulders and would have ignored him had not David, who came to pay his respects after the funeral, asked how the dog was taking it.
‘Very foolishly,’ she told him. ‘Three suppers have been thrown away. It is a waste of good meat and my husband would have disapproved. What am I to do with a dog that will not eat, M’sieur Powlett-Jones? I am preparing to leave on Saturday. I am going home to Beauvais, to live with my sister and brother-in-law, and they do not approve of household pets. I shall take the dog to the vet to be destroyed.’
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