R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘Why not? It’s true.’

  ‘Then come on down and I’ll introduce you. The others have gone off in high dudgeon, all sharing a taxi. Carter’s already made his bow. The king is dead. Long live the king!’

  They went out, passing the side table where Hoskins’s new record arrested in the middle of a chorus, still lay on the portable.

  ”Bye, ‘bye, blackbird,’ David said, and when Algy muttered ‘What?’ he said it was nothing, just a private joke for Sax Hoskins and Tuppence.

  ‘In a place like this, distinguished for nicknames, you ought to find a more dignified one for that mite,’ said Algy.

  2

  The letter came by the afternoon post, an innovation since the Challacombe sorting office had acquired a van for its country round.

  He saw it lying on the tray on the landing when he came up from afternoon classes to make himself a pot of tea before devoting an hour or two to the final chapter of ‘The Royal Tigress’, now standing in a foot-high pile on his desk and crowding all his other correspondence to one side.

  He saw at first glance that it was from Julia and that she was still in America. With a feeling of elation he carried it into the living-room, and settled to read it slowly, relishing every line. But then, his eye leaping down the page and catching a phrase, he read swiftly, imbibing its contents like a draught of bitter medicine:

  …They tell me it takes about eight days door to door for a letter to cross The Pond, Davy. So, by the time you get this, I will have been married. Mrs Hiram Ulysses Sprockman, no less. Sonorous but… well… rather sweet once you get used to it. This will come as a shock to you, but I’m not apologising for that. I’d apologise to a little man but you’re not a little man. Given a few years you’ll be the biggest one Bamfylde has ever seen. Everything I said to you the night you asked me to marry you still holds good. I would have been a terrible flop as a schoolmaster’s wife, worse even than as a parson’s wife, for parsons, these days, are often anxious to get in on the act and keep up with the latest fads and fashions. A good schoolmaster isn’t so daft. He tends to adapt with more dignity. I’ll always remember your proposal as the greatest compliment anyone ever paid me. Much greater than Arthur’s and Hiram’s, for neither really knew me as you did. But that wouldn’t make it right in anything but the purely physical sense and as regards that I give you full marks. Ten out of ten, for loving. It would do for most men but again, not for you, not since you’ve matured and distilled all you learned and suffered in France into a kind of – how can I put it? – a rejuvenating elixir. For the exclusive benefit of generations of Bamfeldians.

  That elixir would have been watered down if I had been around when it was being mixed, stirred and seasoned, and I don’t mean by this you shouldn’t ever think of marrying again. You should. Given the kind of luck you once had, and deserve again, you’ll make some lucky wench a wonderful husband, providing she has the sense to give you your head, and not go for the old impossible – changing a man into her image of what she thinks he ought to be.

  As to me marrying Hiram, well, I’m not pretending I’m in love with him and I’ve told him so, over and over again. I didn’t tell you but he had already proposed twice when we met again by chance that time. But Hiram doesn’t need your kind of wife. He’s been married to commerce ever since he discovered what fun it was to make money. What he needs – what he is getting – is a mistress-cum-manageress. Apart from that, he’s kind and considerate and intelligent, as you were quick to notice.

  Well, there we are, Davy. I’ve cut the knot for you and left you free to push on and I still don’t know whether or not the Governors gambled on you or kept you in cold storage. Touching that, will you let me give you one last piece of advice? Stay where you are, no matter what. I couldn’t say why but I know Bamfylde is right for you, and whilst you’d do a good, conscientious job elsewhere it wouldn’t be an inspired one.

  My best love to little Grace. I adored her. She’ll grow up to be a credit and a solace to you.

  My love to you, too, Davy. I’ll never forget you and if you care to write and keep in touch I’d always be happy about that, although I leave this entirely to you.

  Very, very affectionately,

  Julia

  He drifted across to his study and sat down at his littered desk, trying hard to come to terms with the new situation. Julia married. Julia’s cheerfulness and stimulus denied him. And this, on a day when he had to begin all over again and practise his trade under the cold eye of a stranger.

  His first reaction was one of bitterness but almost at once resentment was reduced to indignation that she could have been so damned secretive and left him half-hoping, despite her unqualified refusal of marriage. But then, looking out on the moor, shimmering in the heat haze as far as the lip of the plateau where he had walked into the thunderstorm the day another woman was lost to him, a spring of common sense welled out of his resentment. It wasn’t really ruthlessness on her part. Behind it was discernment, of a kind not vouchsafed to many women, with their eye on the main chance. As man and wife they might have made it but not as consorts, for a woman like her would never have been able to get Bamfylde into his kind of focus. In the end, she would have lost patience, first with it and then with him, and there would have been, as she had warned him, compromise on an ever-enlarging scale. A man shouldn’t compromise with his search for personal fulfilment. He could only compromise with a creed, Carter’s kind of creed, that was really no more than a set of prejudices.

  Well, that was that. Now, all that remained, he supposed, was to decide on an approach to their relationship in the future and he found the answer to that almost at once. What was the point of keeping up an intermittent correspondence? Where was there sense in torturing oneself with sensual images of a vigorous, clear-skinned body stretched on a bed, the kind that would come to mind every time he sat down to write to her? Howarth had probably done that with the memory of Amy Crispin and what had it brought him but hardening of the emotional arteries, and a constant reminder of wasted years? He cleared a space on his desk and wrote, on a sheet of Bamfylde notepaper:

  My Dear,

  I didn’t get the headship. We have a new man… not Carter, thank God. I’m staying on here indefinitely, partly because I can’t be bothered to change, but mostly, I think, because I still have a notion I owe the place something. Congratulations to both of you. You made a neater, swifter job of pulling out of the Sargasso Sea than I did, and you’re clearheaded enough to stay out. Good luck always, Julia dear.

  Very affectionately,

  Davy

  Part Five

  * * *

  IMPASSE

  One

  * * *

  1

  LOOKING BACK ON THE PERIOD OF HIS LIFE THAT HE CAME TO think of as ‘the impasse years’, Powlett-Jones could never be sure of the precise moment when the shadow first touched them, when he and the rest of the rump became unpleasantly aware that one era had ended and another, stormy and cheerless, had begun.

  It must have been during the last few weeks of Algy’s reign, between his first formal handshake with Alcock on the day of the appointment and the final night of term, when he sat below the dais in Big Hall helping Skidmore with the presentations at Algy’s farewell supper.

  It was then, looking directly up at the new man sitting on Algy’s right hand, and noting his impassivity during the farewell address, that he finally acknowledged Alcock’s implacability, for no man, he reasoned, could be completely unmoved (as Alcock obviously was) by Algy’s valediction, a subtle and wholly unselfconscious blend of pathos, humour, gallantry and profound resignation. But there might have been earlier indications of what lay ahead, for he recalled a curious incident in Barnaby’s study, a day or two after he and Carter had finally buried the hatchet – ‘a couple of rejects here to console one another’ as Carter had put it, and very handsomely David thought, considering the bitterness of their feud over a stretch of more than eight years.


  Both had accepted Barnaby’s invitation to partake of ‘real’ coffee in his quarters, at Nicolson’s on a day that school ended at eleven a.m., in honour of the match with the Devonshire Dumplings. Barnaby, a ritual coffee-maker, scowled down at the common room brew and said, ‘With important visitors about the place other ranks can be moderately sure of a bubble-and-squeak lunch. Come and fortify yourselves. Everyone invited.’

  Irvine and Howarth had joined them, and all five sat around talking shop before Carter raised the subject that was in everybody’s mind.

  ‘What do you make of this chap, Alcock? Oughtn’t we to begin trimming our sails?’ An innocent-enough remark one would have thought, hardly calling for Howarth’s testy, ‘Trimming is more in your line than mine, Carter!’ whereupon, anxious to demonstrate that their peace treaty was more than a gesture, David said, ‘No, Howarth. Carter’s right. We ought to have sized him up by now, he’s been mooching about the place ever since he was appointed. Has anyone exchanged more than a word with him?’

  Nobody had, not even Carter who, as they all recalled, had been the first to congratulate the incoming head. Irvine said, with an uncharacteristic touch of malice, ‘He’s been living with Algy. P.J. is the only one with a direct line to the Gaffer. Hasn’t the Old Man leaked anything to his protégé, Davy?’

  ‘He hinted that Alcock was short on humour. Nothing more. I’d say he was a pedant, and will act like one until the place takes him over,’ whereupon Carter said, flatly, ‘It’ll never do that, old man. Never!’

  He sounded so emphatic that Barnaby raised an eyebrow. ‘What makes you so sure of that? It managed to mellow everyone here, didn’t it? Not much but somewhat. Even Howarth,’ but then rendered the gibe harmless by winking very solemnly and refilling Howarth’s cup.

  ‘Call it a hunch,’ said Carter and then, with a nod at Barnaby, that might or might not have been an acknowledgment of his hospitality, he slammed down his cup and stalked out.

  ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo? What brought that on?’

  This, from Irvine, whereupon Howarth growled, ‘Pique. Plain, unadulterated pique. The little man has been given the cold shoulder and wants us to restore circulation.’

  It was not often that David ran counter to Howarth and never had on Carter’s behalf. He said, carefully, ‘You might as well know, all three of you, that Carter and I have settled our account.’

  ‘You might have settled yours, my friend,’ Howarth said sourly, ‘but don’t bank on Carter paying up. You should have learned by now that common room feuds never heal. Invariably they fester.’

  ‘Well, this one won’t,’ David said, and went on to give an account of his meeting with Carter in the library annexe on the first day of the Governors’ meeting. ‘As for Carter being the first to shake hands with Alcock, why read anything into that? I’d have done it myself if I’d thought of it. My impression is Alcock is difficult to classify.’

  Howarth yawned, indicating that the subject bored him, but it was one of these infelicitous occasions when everyone makes the wrong remark at the wrong moment. Irvine, always baffled by abstracts, said, ‘Tell you something else. There’ll be no more bonus free periods like today’s, for cricket or rugger. Man isn’t interested in games. Probably never played anything but croquet in his whole life.’

  ‘That raises him a notch in my estimation,’ said Howarth, and went out before Irvine could protest, and although Howarth’s contempt for games was a long-established school joke, David could see that the bull-necked Irvine, whose tireless coaching had made Bamfylde the most formidable school side in the West, was upset.

  He said nothing, however, but followed Howarth out, so that David had an uncomfortable suspicion that the arrival of Alcock might mean a reshuffling of common room alliances. For a moment he was tempted to explore this thought with Barnaby but thought better of it, remembering that Barnaby made a point of never quarrelling with anyone and would explain why when he could find anyone to listen. Trudging across the moor on one of their hikes he had once said, ‘A man can’t teach Horace and Cicero all day and fall to bickering between times. It’s all been said before, P.J. A long, long time ago.’

  He continued to think about it from time to time, however, inclined to dismiss the notion that a stranger, not yet in office, could introduce new tensions into the place, and yet, it did occur to him, as the last weeks of term ran out, that the Lent tight-rope was making an unseasonal appearance in high summer. It could only be, he reasoned, the impending departure of Algy, whom everybody liked, and most of them revered. Halfway through the head’s farewell speech he changed his mind again.

  Algy was not rated high as a speechmaker, an after-dinner speaker that is, where the neatly turned phrase, and the gilded platitude, is almost obligatory. He was, however, a breezy chatter-up and today, somewhat to everybody’s surprise, he excelled himself. He seemed, almost, to be voicing stray thoughts and deductions rather than saying his official goodbyes, and acknowledging the gift of silver tableware, inscribed with his name and dates. Instead of addressing himself to a rambling tour of something over sixty years of Bamfylde history (a speech that everyone present felt his due) he preferred to present a potted raison d’être of the profession, illustrating his theme with all manner of sly jokes at the expense of boys, staff, Governing Body and himself. Mostly himself, for Algy appreciated a joke against himself above all others.

  ‘…Occasions like these are free gifts to the professional windbag… I could keep you here until rising bell, telling you Bamfylde stories, most of which would qualify as thrice-baked chestnuts… Things I have seen and experienced, since I came here as a scared little toad of eleven. By Christopher, I was scared too, now that I think of it! Oblige me by passing that on to the smallest and scruffiest of your September intake, Mr Alcock. Who knows? It might cheer him up a bit.’

  But Alcock, legs neatly crossed, arms carefully folded, did not so much as blink.

  ‘…I could spin yarns of long ago, when anyone with more than six mistakes in Sunday dictation was flogged by that brute Wesker. God, in His supreme mercy, endowed me with an ability to spell. But I was caught on “rhododendron” and had them rooted out when I came here as head. I could spin yarns of Wesker’s time and yarns of the day before yesterday, when I overheard something to my advantage while seated on Mount Olympus, otherwise known as Spyglass Hill…’

  For half a minute he paused to allow the laughter to subside. Almost alone, among those crowding the hall as far as the kitchen hatches, Alcock was ignorant of the fact that Mount Olympus, otherwise known as Spyglass Hill, was not to be found on any local ordnance map but was the head’s privy, with its stained-glass Judas window, opening on to the quad. The man could be forgiven, perhaps, for looking bewildered at the immoderate reception accorded this innocent-sounding remark but not, David thought, for withholding a token smile when Algy went on to say that he overheard one boy tell another how he managed to gouge ten shillings from his father to add his name to the farewell gift subscribers’ list. ‘He then contributed a mere five and was gracefully complimented by the head boy for his extreme generosity.

  ‘No matter…’ and here Algy picked up the silver teapot, lifted its lid and glanced inside, ‘…I wouldn’t like to give anyone the impression that I’m complaining. It is indeed a very handsome reminder of my twenty-three years here as headmaster, and the subscriber in question – no names, no penal drill – can always salve his conscience by slipping across the parish boundary on the first Sunday of Michaelmas term and dropping the missing coins into my offertory plate.’

  Not a muscle of Alcock’s face twitched. He might, David thought, have been listening to a lecture on bimetallism, so that Carter’s remark – what was it? – the man’s inability to identify with Bamfylde, suddenly had relevance, and the laughter, renewed and prolonged had no power to cheer.

  He had missed a quip or two by then but Algy was now ambling towards his climax, with his audience silent again as he tried to explain what
he saw, what he had always seen, as the true function of a headmaster. ‘It isn’t an instructor. Any reasonably staffed school should have plenty of trained instructors on hand. And it isn’t an administrator, either, or never has been in my case. Anyone here will tell you that, judged on my paperwork alone, I wouldn’t qualify for a remove every other year. No, no, I’ve seen myself, latterly at all events, as a kind of co-ordinator of all the aims and impulses that keep a place like Bamfylde alive and useful. Education, in the generally accepted sense of the word, has never rated very high on my list of priorities. All that the best of us can do is to teach boys how to educate themselves between their time of leaving here, and their time of crossing that Rubicon, that comes, for most of us, at about twenty-five, when the memory sponge is getting soggy and we tend to read and forget.

  ‘I’ve had plenty of first-class scholars through my hands since 1904, but I can’t claim much credit for their academic successes. They would have been achieved at any school, given the same material. But helping to equip two generations of predatory males with the qualities of patience, tolerance, good fellowship and the ability to see someone else’s point of view – qualities I see as the keystones of democracy – that’s something else. I’ll pipe down now – did I catch a gusty sigh of relief from the back? But let me close with a final anecdote, one that came to mind when I was riffling through the Old Boys’ register this morning, in search of inspiration for this interminable valediction.

  ‘It was a very trivial incident but it must have impressed me at the time. Why else should it have stayed in the mind for nearly twenty years? It concerned two boys, Petherick and ‘Chuff’ Rodgers, who accompanied me over to Barcombe by train, when we were giving a charity performance of that year’s opera. It was Christmas time, of course, and the train was very full. We finally secured seats in a compartment where a young woman was nursing a baby. Within minutes of starting out the baby was dramatically sick… I remember poor Petherick’s expression well, as he took refuge behind my copy of The Times. Upside down it was, but a thing like that wouldn’t bother Petherick. He was one of our sky rockets, and went on to become president of a famous insurance company, and collect the O.B.E., or whatever they give the cream of insurance brokers. But I wasn’t thinking so much of Petherick but of Chuff. Always unlucky, he had been sitting alongside the mother, and was thus on the receiving end of the business. I didn’t know what to do but Chuff did. He whipped out a handkerchief – the only clean handkerchief I’d ever seen him sport – leaned across, wiped the baby’s face and then the mother’s lap. And when I say “wiped” I mean wiped. It wasn’t a dab. It was more of a general tidy-up, all round. After that we had a tolerably uneventful journey, with Rodgers making soothing noises all the way to the junction.