She was too, more of a favourite than even Algy knew, for besides having Winterbourne to teach her to paint in watercolours, she now had ‘Sax’ Hoskins teaching her the Charleston and the lyrics of all the dance hits that were crossing the Atlantic in a flood just then.
‘Sax’ was the current Bamfylde jazz enthusiast. His five-piece band played at all the weekly dances, and there were even rumours that he would begin training as a professional when he left. He was a noisy, uninhibited chap, with no other interests or attainments to his credit, and approached David one day after seeing Grace at her exercises.
‘Excuse me, sir. It might sound daft but couldn’t we make that drill of hers a bit more interesting? I mean, if she is supposed to exercise the muscles in that way, wouldn’t dancing help?’
‘Dancing? What kind of dancing? Folk dancing of some kind?’ but at this Hoskins looked outraged. ‘Good Lord, no, sir! Real dancing. Modern steps. The foxtrot, two-step and waltz. Even the Charleston, if she’s up to it!’
David said, chuckling, ‘Well, I don’t see why not, so long as she doesn’t overdo it,’ and Hoskins said, ‘I’ll watch that, sir. After all, she’ll want to learn ballroom dancing in a year or so. They all do, sir. My kid sisters are absolute dabsters, and they’re not much older than Grace.’
So it was done. Hoskins carried his portable gramophone up to the living-room at Havelock’s and put on a number he described as ‘just the job’. It was called ‘Crazy Words, Crazy Tune’, and David looked on as Hoskins taught Grace how to shuffle her feet this way and that, and cross over, and perform all manner of ritual hand gestures while doing it. She seemed extraordinarily quick to catch on so that Hoskins pronounced her ‘a natural’. ‘She’s quicker on the uptake than my sister Margaret,’ he said, ‘and Miggs won a box of chocolates for shimmying at a concert.’
One way and another it was a memorable, rollicking term, and for once he was sorry to see them depart six days before Christmas when, in the period between first light and nine a.m. the place emptied and then, magically, was still.
The next day the station taxi called to take him and Grace to catch the Bristol train for Wales, where they were spending Christmas, this being ‘Granmam Powlett-Jones’s turn’. Some of the Sunsetters helped load their bags and as the battered old Belsize ran over the frosty surface of the east drive, and swung left to pass along under the playing-field hedge, Grace voiced a thought that had occurred to him while he was making the early morning tea. She said, ‘It’ll be fun seeing Granmam and Auntie Gwynneth, and Uncle Ewart and Auntie Megan. But I’ll miss everyone here, won’t you, Daddy?’
‘Well, let’s say I shall by the day they all descend on us again,’ he said. ‘Let’s see, when is that exactly?’
‘January the nineteenth,’ she said. ‘New boys arrive the day before.’
You could never catch Grace out on any Bamfylde milestones.
Part Four
* * *
AVE ET CAVE
One
* * *
1
FEW AMONG THOSE ACCLIMATISED TO HOWARTH’S GLACIAL classroom expression would have spotted anything amiss with him that particular morning, some halfway through the tight-rope term, that is to say, towards the end of February. But David, who looked upon the dry old stick as friend and counsellor, noticed it as he helped himself to his bacon and eggs from the side-table in Big Hall.
It was not that Howarth looked more disdainful than usual, or more likely to erupt in the quiet, deadly way he reserved for the fool and the chatterer. He picked at his food with his customary air of distaste, and crumbled his toast with the air of a man disposing of an unpopular relative’s ashes, and all the time kept his deceptively neutral gaze on his customary focal point, namely the kitchen hatch at the far end of the hall. Yet David noted something particularly wary about him, and something supremely world-weary too, as he raised his coffee cup and sipped as though sampling hemlock, then set it down again, noiselessly, for Howarth hated racket above all Bamfylde’s shortcomings.
David’s eyes rested for a moment on a buff, typewritten envelope, neatly slit, lying at Howarth’s elbow and presently, speaking very quietly, he said, ‘Not bad news, I hope?’ Howarth’s bleak gaze turned on him and he saw that he was right. The face of the man under its frigid mask was deeply troubled as he muttered, ‘Doing anything tonight?’ and when David shook his head, ‘Come up and take a gill then. After prep bell,’ and got up abruptly, striding down the centre aisle between the massed tables and out. He took the letter with him but left a barely tasted cup of coffee and most of his rasher and toast.
He was in command of himself again several hours later, and had the tray of drinks and his usual box of Gold Flake set before the fire when David joined him at eight. ‘Must have given myself away. Wouldn’t have said so but evidently I did.’
‘Not to anyone but me. What’s up?’
Howarth got up and crossed to his tidy desk, opening a drawer and taking out a large silver-framed photograph, of the type usually kept on a piano or mantelshelf. It was a studio photograph of a girl about twenty, wearing a style of dress popular about twenty-five years before. The features were very delicate and the small, slightly prim mouth sensitive, the hair was fluffy and looked very fair. David studied the photograph, recalling a chilly confidence on the bench under the fives court more than eight years before, when Howarth had mentioned the girl who turned him down for a stockbroker. He had never referred to her since and was not a man one questioned on personal matters.
‘Was the letter from her?’
‘It was about her. She died, six months ago.’
‘You didn’t know?’
He said, petulantly, ‘I haven’t kept in touch with her. She had a son nearly as old as you!’
It was curious how certain David was of the closeness of the link between news from some matter-of-fact executor, and Howarth’s ravaged look at breakfast and somehow the circumstances were uncharacteristic. He had always thought of Howarth as a man proof against deep feelings. Yet here was evidence of another kind. Clearly there had never been any other woman for Ian Howarth.
‘I’m sorry. It’s hit you pretty badly.’
‘Like the very devil, but don’t ask me why. Haven’t set eyes on Amy Crispin since the spring of nineteen-hundred and six.’
‘You keep her photograph handy.’
‘Out of sight. You’ve never seen it before, and nobody else ever will. Not until they poke around my things and wonder what the hell to do with it. Keep me company, P.J.,’ and he poured two more pink gins, larger ones than usual.
David said, carefully, ‘You want to talk about her?’
‘I don’t know. There isn’t a day when I haven’t thought about her. But talking, that’s different. As you must know to your cost.’
It drew them closer somehow. Not much but a little. Himself nursing a half-healed wound, with its unpredictable ache and Howarth, outwardly the eternal bachelor, mourning a certain Amy Crispin, lost to him a quarter-century ago. Howarth said, at length, ‘What the devil can it be to you, anyway; a man at the receiving end of a real tragedy?’
‘Beth and I had six years together. They were very happy years.’
‘That’s a point of view,’ Howarth said. ‘I wonder if Amy or I could have said the same.’
‘Were you engaged?’
‘For more than a year. Do you know what they paid an usher in ‘03? And you think we’re underpaid now! I was getting a hundred and thirty a year at Beckworth Grammar School, and I was twenty-four. It was late to change horses and in any case I had no mind to, then or later. If I have a vocation it’s teaching. Like you, my friend.’
‘I daresay she could have waited.’
‘For how long? Five years? Ten? She wanted children and went elsewhere for them. I never held that against her.’
‘Was she happy?’
‘I always assumed so.’ He sat thinking a moment and then, with a grunt expressing protest at his own se
ntimentality, he took out the letter and passed it across the table. It was the lawyer’s letter, but its content was arresting, perhaps on that account. Howarth had been left the sum of eight thousand pounds by the late Amy Hodgson, née Crispin, together with his pick of the library at a house called Clearwood Court in Sussex. There was a brief footnote to the letter. Seemingly in an agony of embarrassment the lawyer had added, in his own handwriting,
I feel it my duty to quote the relevant passage from my client’s codicil, relating to the bequest, viz. ‘To Ian Howarth, whom I remember with the greatest affection.’
It explained, David thought, so many things. Not merely Howarth’s bleak and hurried exit from the dining-hall that morning but the threads that made up his entire personality. It was as though, somewhere around 1903, eleven years before the world went raving mad, a young, love-sick schoolteacher in a provincial grammar school had sentenced himself to self-petrification, a penance that had, in the end, transformed him from an eager, dedicated youngster into a wry, ironic husk of a man, racing towards middle age and the ultimate pedantry that awaits all but a very few of the profession. It was a personal tragedy, in its way as much a tragedy as the loss of Howarth’s generation in Flanders, and yet, as David acknowledged at once, the petrification had never been wholly achieved. Somewhere, under the ice of the simulated personality, the original Howarth was still there, trying hard to get out, and once in a while almost succeeding.
‘Eight thousand pounds! That’s a small fortune. What will you do now?’
‘What should I do but leave it in the bank? Money never interested me. If it had, I shouldn’t be here, any more than you.’
‘But, damn it, man, you could retire now if you cared to. Properly invested that would provide an income double the pension you can expect.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the money,’ Howarth said, savagely. ‘It’s discovering, this late, that I could have married the girl if I’d had the nerve. You can’t buy back the fruits of your own folly and cowardice with eight thousand pounds! She must have been miserable with that bloody stockbroker!’
He took another drink and his gin began to mellow him. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, P.J.! Get married again if you can. Don’t play the little gentleman, as I did.’
‘I’m not looking for two lucky breaks, Howarth. Most men don’t get one. You didn’t, it seems.’
‘Well, then, what will you do with your life? Don’t fancy you can live celibate, my friend. Or not without corroding your personality. Some could, but you aren’t made that way and it’s my opinion you know it.’
He wondered if this was true. In the last twenty-two months he had not been aware of physical yearnings, of the kind Beth had satisfied so gaily and so graciously, but who could say whether this was permanent? A time might be approaching when enforced celibacy developed an itch, to be scratched at all costs, or bottled up until it began to warp him, the way he had noticed among ageing bachelors and long-term widowers. In the strictly personal sense the prospect of holding a stranger in his arms was vaguely repugnant to him but would it always be so? He was only just thirty; all things being equal he had another forty years ahead of him. Curiosity nagged him, encouraging him to risk a formidable snub. ‘What did you do about women all these years, Howarth?’ and Howarth, draining his gin, got up and crossed over to his bureau again where he extracted another photograph. From a different drawer, David noticed. It was an enlarged snapshot, featuring a very different woman, a big, blowsy, cheerful girl about twenty-five, with bold eyes and a wide mouth daubed with too much lipstick.
‘I know her, don’t I?’
‘You should. She keeps the Unicorn, over in Challacombe. She didn’t when that photograph was taken. It was partly my money that set her up. Before that she was the barmaid for ten years.’
‘You still call on her?’
‘No, but I could do. She’s a generous soul. She probably wouldn’t charge me nowadays.’
On the face of it it seemed incredible. Howarth, the dry, irascible symbol of rectitude, utterly dedicated to his job, feared and respected by almost everyone at Bamfylde, slipping away to a chintzy bedroom at the Unicorn every now and again and paying cash down for a few moments’ frolic. It occurred to him that Howarth was tacitly offering him solace if he needed it. Not in a spirit of leeriness, like two men drinking and talking women in a pub, but as a sincere gesture of friendship.
He said, deciding to make a joke of it, ‘Well, thanks for the tip. I’ll bear it in mind,’ but Howarth replied seriously, ‘There’s something more important you should think about. If you mean to spend your life here, and not move on if you get the chance, then it’s time you began planning, my friend. Herries will be gone in a few months, and so far there’s been no serious attempt on the part of those idiots on the Board to replace him. Why not put in for the job?’
‘For Algy’s job? As headmaster here? You can’t be serious, man.’
‘I assure you I am. You’ve taken to this place and it seems to have taken to you. The most hopeful sections of it, that is. Well then, since you’ve committed yourself to soldier on to the point of no return why not try to ensure it’s run your way, and not the way of some other officious new broom. Replacing Herries won’t be easy. Whatever this place is it’s his creation and he’s stayed too long to give it flexibility. Someone who had worked under him would have a flying start.’
‘But good God, Howarth, you’re senior to me by twenty years. Why not you?’
‘Can you see me assuring mothers that their little darlings won’t be corrupted by the writing on the lavatory walls? Or that Bloggs Minor, solid from the neck up, is a future Cabinet Minister? Don’t talk bloody nonsense, P.J.’
‘Well, then, Carter, although God forbid. Or Barnaby, for that matter. He was upset when Algy gave me Havelock’s after Ferguson died.’
‘Barnaby’s a pleasant chap but he isn’t headmaster material. He’s too amiable and too close to his subject. Administration and real authority would send him out of his mind. How does communion with the Ancients qualify a man for the job of modernising this place, without converting it into a factory, of the kind Carter and his ilk regard as essential? And speaking of Carter, he’s already backing himself for the job.’
David had heard a vague rumour to this effect but Howarth’s positive statement shocked him into reassessing his own future. He could never work here under Carter, or anyone like Carter. Their methods, theory and practice were too opposed, and suddenly what had so far proved a fireside chat with an intimate ran him into an impasse. He said, sullenly, ‘If Carter was appointed I’d resign. I wouldn’t even wait until I found another billet.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that. Well?’
‘What are his chances?’
‘Only fair. He’s got Alderman Blunt in his pocket, and can probably win over one or two of the fence-squatters, men too timid to jump down until Herries is out of the way.’
‘Suppose he got it, what would be his line?’
‘Overnight modernisation, with the emphasis on science and technical education. New labs, I daresay, and men like yourself replaced with nonentities. History and the classics don’t cut much ice with Carter.’
‘But Bamfylde isn’t that kind of school.’
‘A school is what a headmaster makes it.’
‘But there are several Old Boys on the governing board. They wouldn’t stand for a complete reversal of policy.’
‘They mightn’t see it as that. Who knows? Maybe Carter is right. This is 1927, and Herries’s conception of the place is 1907, or earlier. Don’t forget he was a year old when Prince Albert died.’
‘Bamfylde could be brought up to date without making a bonfire of everything Algy brought to it.’
‘By someone like you, someone with imagination plus drive. Not otherwise.’
‘I’ve been here eight years, and I’m five years younger than the most junior headmaster in the country, discounting dayschools. What chanc
e would I stand?’
‘About the same chance as Carter. I’d say you were about even at the moment. It would mean canvassing, of course.’
‘You mean soliciting votes among the Governors?’
‘In the nicest possible way.’
‘I don’t think I could do that.’
‘You’d have to, old boy. And you jolly well would if it meant keeping Carter out. You could begin on Brigadier Cooper. He’s very partial to you, I hear. Converted by that son of his, no doubt.’
‘Will Herries have any say in it?’
‘Officially, no. Unofficially, quite a lot.’
He sat pondering a moment, his thoughts centring on the likely reaction of both Brigadier Cooper, ‘Warrior’ as older Bamfeldians thought of him, and Algy Herries. Headmaster at thirty. Headmaster of Bamfylde. In authority over men like Howarth, old Bouncer Acton, Rapper Gibbs, Barnaby and even Carter if he didn’t resign. It was preposterous and yet, if it meant a choice between him and Carter, he couldn’t stand aside without a fight, even if it was only a token fight. He said, ‘I’ll think about it. No more than that, Howarth,’ and then, with a slightly baffled expression, ‘You’d serve under me?’
Howarth permitted himself the luxury of one wintry smile. ‘What choice would I have, so long as I stayed on the job? I’m well past the point of no return. Besides, I daresay you’d need your Eminence Grise!’
Down in the quad the end-of-prep bell jangled. On its final, jarring notes, the hum of the manumitted rose to a subdued uproar. David got up. ‘Thanks for the gin, Howarth. And thanks for your trust. I’ll think about it, I really will.’
R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield Page 26