They went out into the street, meeting a light flurry of snow that was beginning to lie on ice below. She took his arm, explaining, half-seriously, that she was obliged to with two-inch heels and a glacial pavement. She said, as the station lights came in view, ‘All that, and you haven’t told me a thing about yourself. All I know is your name, your profession and the fact that you taught a cousin of mine who took off for Malaya.’
‘We’ll have another chance, I hope.’
‘I don’t know when. I’m not likely to get to Devon, except on a charabanc trip, taking in Clovelly and the Doone Valley.’
‘You will,’ he said, with a strong inward conviction, ‘and before the tourist season begins. Your platform is five, isn’t it? Mine’s two. I can catch a local five minutes after your train.’ They stopped at the barrier. Beyond it he could see the stocky figure of Routledge, beckoning. She said, ‘Wait, Davy… can you tell me one good reason why I should unload to that extent on someone I’ve only met twice?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a fallacy that professional schoolteachers are just talkers. If they’re interested in the job, as I am, they have to learn how to listen. I must be progressing.’
2
The letter came when he stood in most need of it, when he had reached a new low, despite his good resolutions on returning to Bamfylde at the start of the tight-rope term.
He had renewed his resolve to concentrate on his subject, and on his book, with the intention of keeping well clear of Alcock, and going out of his way to avoid a clash. He saw himself as a kind of Perrin, in the schoolmaster’s cautionary tale by Walpole, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, that had been a subject for common-room jokes since it had passed from hand to hand in the early ‘twenties. Like the wretched Perrin he had found himself repeating; ‘It will be better this term… it might be different this term.’
But it was not. He did succeed in finishing the book to his satisfaction but by late February, when the moor looked its dreariest he came to the conclusion that Bamfylde, Algy’s Bamfylde that is, was dying on its feet. Not academically, and not from a numerical or economic standpoint, but inwardly, as though Alcock had petrified it.
The rhythms within rhythms that had been such a comforting feature of the place were shattered and he doubted if anyone would ever be capable of restoring them. Something of the national mood of flatness and political stalemate had invaded its draughty corridors. The Choral Society was all but defunct. Carter’s beloved O.T.C. was a ritual exercise, performed every Wednesday afternoon. The Debating Society had wilted under rigorous censorship. Entertainments, uninhibited in Algy’s day, were now limited to classical plays that even Howarth thought a crashing bore. The emphasis was on work and exam-passing, so that the gulf widened between the clever boys and the slackers, one group exulting in their exemption from compulsory games, the other becoming bored and listless, so that even the occasional flash of mutiny showed as no more than a ripple. The rugby and cross country enthusiasts missed Irvine’s stimulus. Molyneux, who lived off the premises, was no substitute as games master, and David had not been offered the job, although he still went out on the runs as whipper-in, and played an occasional game in the senior scrum. Alcock kept mostly to himself, the remote, austere abbot of a monastery where all the monks were at odds with themselves.
It was difficult to put one’s finger on the major cause of the decline and Howarth, Barnaby and himself, who clung together these days (‘Like three old drunks going home in a storm,’ Barnaby jested) occasionally searched for it over a bottle of gin in Howarth’s quarters. Barnaby may have touched on a root cause when he said, ‘Place reminds me of a Regency rake who has undergone religious conversion. He’s much more likely to pass the Golden Gate but he’s damnably poor company at home.’ Howarth had another analogy; ‘It’s getting to smell like a grammar school in a red-brick town. Well-scrubbed and antiseptic, but me? God help me, I’m nostalgic for the smell of damp-rot and boiled greens, of Herries’s days.’
Then, one dull overcast morning, he found the letter on his hall table, the envelope addressed in strange, flowing handwriting very legible despite the fact that it looked as if it had been dashed off in a hurry. The postmark was ‘Taunton’ and he opened it unsuspectingly, thinking it must be from someone’s mother, making enquires about a new boy’s winter cough or a supply of underclothes.
It was from Christine Forster, announcing triumphantly that she had been adopted as prospective candidate for the South Mendips division, a rural constituency where Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire merged, for the most part agricultural but with several small industrial pockets, including one small coal mine, a glove factory, and several leather-processing centres. ‘It really is a forlorn hope,’ she said.
The Tory majority here is over fifteen thousand, and they’ve never even elected a Liberal, although one came close in 1911. It means starting from scratch, because they’ve never had a Socialist candidate, but the Trade Unions have got their foot in the door at two or three of the factories and there’s potential in the farm labourer’s vote. The Liberal candidate seems a colourless chap and his vote has been dropping steadily since the 1918 election. We could even run second, if we put our backs into it, and that would encourage the party to field more women candidates. What I really want to know is, will you be a dear and come over and support me on the platform at my adoption meeting next Saturday? It’ll be a very modest affair in the Church Institute, at Bilhampton, the constituency capital (pop. 2,301) but you wouldn’t have to speak if you didn’t want to, although I’d be very flattered if you gave us a blessing. Wire me if you can come. If you can’t, I’ll understand and write again, sending on press cuttings, providing the press bother to report it. One other thing that I thought you might like to tell Bamfylde. My cousin is in Malaya, up-country on a rubber plantation. (I said ‘tea’, didn’t I?) The poor boy lost an eye a year or so ago in a hunting accident but the other wasn’t impaired and now he has a glass eye that he turns to unique advantage. He has persuaded the poor devils who work under him that the eye can see them whether or not he has it in. He puts it in a glass of water and leaves it on the bungalow steps when he goes off for a drink, declaring that it keeps the helots at work when his back is turned. The feudal tricks you Bamfeldians practise in far-flung outposts!
She signed it, ‘Affectionately’, as Julia Darbyshire had signed her letters. Warmed, and excited at the prospect of seeing her again, he dashed off a reply saying she was to look out for him on Saturday and ran down to broadcast the story of Ridgeway’s glass eye. It might cheer the old hands who remembered him. There were still four or five of his contemporaries, and a story like that was certain of a place in Bamfeldian lore.
He told Howarth and Barnaby about Christine that same night, mentioning that he was attending the adoption meeting, but saying nothing of her invitation to sit on the platform. He knew that Howarth despised all politicians, and that Barnaby had voted Liberal all his life, but they had all grown accustomed to his party loyalties by now. Barnaby agreed to stand in for his one Saturday period.
He set off in high spirits early Saturday morning and soon after midday caught the branch line train to Bilhampton, a pretty, sleepy, red-roofed little market-town at a junction of two sluggish rivers. He had not expected to be met at the station but there she was, looking very spruce in a navy two-piece, and a short ocelot coat, a scarf over her brown hair. She called, gaily, ‘Welcome to Rotten Borough!’ and kissed him on the cheek, and then, smiling, ‘I know precisely what you are thinking – that this ensemble doesn’t fit the party image – but you’re wrong, you know. Cloth caps are fine for the lads, but this place needs a boost. The Member’s wife is a frightful frump, despite her husband’s seat on God knows how many boards, and the Liberal is a bachelor who trots around in tweeds and a pork-pie hat. It was nice of you to come, Davy. I appreciate it very much. Now let me give you lunch at the Bull. It’s a nice old pub and you can meet the troops.’
It w
as, he reflected, a very different Christine Forster from the disconsolate girl he had met in Wales two months before. Selection, over the heads of three young men, had boosted her self-respect and it seemed to have done something for her appearance too, for she had obviously made a favourable impression on the middle-aged men composing the constituency committee. More than that, there was no question but that she meant to be boss down here, and was unlikely to let herself be regarded as a kind of mascot, the impression he had got watching her in the company of Routledge and the Valley stalwarts.
The adoption meeting was a great success. Unlike so many of these occasions it had dignity, and a sense of purpose, and perhaps it was this that encouraged him to call her aside during the coffee-break and take her up on the offer to speak.
She said, eagerly, ‘You mean it? Well, that’s fine, Davy! But will you let me give you a hint? Cut the flannel and say something factual, on the lines of what you said to me that first time we met. About your job as you see it, and the ammunition you feed boys.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ he said, laughing, ‘this meeting is about you. You’re the star here tonight.’
‘Maybe, but I’ve got my reasons. This is Monmouth country. In that market-place out there nine local weavers were hanged for their share in that uprising.’
‘But it wasn’t a popular uprising in that sense. Monmouth was a royal bastard, and a feeble one at that.’
‘It was a case of the people versus the others, and that’s good enough for me. Moreover, it’s a local banner, so why can’t we wave it?’
He had a conviction that she was hedging, that her insistence on reference to a local revolt two-and-a-half centuries ago was based on instinct, an instinct that rested on something more subtle than an attempt to highlight Bilhampton. It was a woman’s attempt to establish that the Socialist cause was attracting intellectuals and here was proof of it, a schoolmaster, who taught at a public school, but was ready to champion her in public.
He took her advice. Years of dominating The Lump, on its long haul from Second Form to Sixth, had disposed of any inhibitions he might have had addressing an audience. He spoke authoritatively and lucidly, giving the town its place in the history of the Englishman’s struggle to wrest power from the hands of narrow, sectarian interests, and prepare the ground for real democracy, and because the Bilhampton victims of Jeffries’s Bloody Assizes were local, whose family surnames were still familiar to his audience, he made his impact. ‘They died in what we should think of as a poor cause,’ he concluded, ‘but it wasn’t as poor as all that. The men who came out to fight for Monmouth, in that wet summer so long ago, were responding to an impulse that has brought the Englishman into conflict with local tyrants down to this day, a determination to have a say in how he is taxed and governed. Sometimes, his leaders have been demagogues, or opportunists, but that did not keep him at home, making do on the leavings tossed him by entrenched privilege. He came out, generation after generation, often dying for a principle, and today we are privileged to hold the torch. Not only with a vote but under trained leaders, of the calibre of this young woman, whose educational qualifications could earn her a thousand a year if she had an eye on the main chance. My advice, for what it is worth, is lend her a hand. And when the time comes to vote for her, in the certainty that she cares deeply for the descendants of men Kirke’s dragoons hanged from the end of a rope, at the command of a pedant in Whitehall.’
The weight of applause astonished and embarrassed him, so much so that he took small heed to the rest of the proceedings, not excluding the speech of a minor Cabinet figure Transport House had sent from London. But afterwards the politician set the seal on his success by singling him out saying, ‘Ever thought of politics as a career, Powlett-Jones? You might do worse, with your natural feel for an audience. I’ve no doubt we could find a constituency for you to nurse,’ and while David was wondering how to reply to this, he caught a glimpse of Christine’s flushed, smiling face over the politician’s shoulder, and she answered for him, saying, ‘Leave him be, sir. He’s far more help to us where he is, preaching the gospel in the tents of the Philistines. Isn’t that so, Davy?’
‘It’s what I’m better qualified to do, enjoy it or not,’ David said, and momentarily his mind returned to Bamfylde under Alcock, and he wondered if, since Algy’s departure, he could claim to have preached the gospel in the way she claimed on his behalf.
3
He stayed overnight and on Sunday morning, having borrowed the local Secretary’s Austin Seven, she drove him round the constituency. About noon they stopped at the summit of Coverdale Beacon, dominating the plain and giving a view, in clear weather, of the three counties.
It was a fitfully sunny day, with the very first hint of spring in the wind, and great masses of cloud casting shadows as they drove across the lightly wooded landscape.
‘I haven’t thanked you properly, Davy. You can’t have the least idea how much you being there meant to me. You were the jam on what looked like being a stodgy helping of rice pudding. Do you mind if I kiss you?’
‘Mind? Damn it, I’ve been wondering ever since I saw you on the platform how I could get your mind off politics for a few minutes.’
Her lips were as warm and responsive as they had promised to be. There were aspects of her, temperamental aspects that, until then, had reminded him a little of Julia but now, letting his fingertips trace the length of her cheek, he had a very poignant memory of his wife, lying in his arms in the winter half-light of the cottage bedroom at Stone Cross. It was odd, he thought, that she should choose that moment to say, ‘I know what happened to you, Davy. I was curious, and asked around when I went back to the Valley after Christmas. You’ve come through it with more credit than you give yourself, do you know that?’ He said nothing, testing the strength of the affirmation, so she went on, ‘It would have embittered most men, coming on top of that pounding you had in France. You’re still very much a lonely person, however, and that shows too.’
‘Only away from Bamfylde.’
‘It means that much to you?’
‘Pretty well everything.’
‘That invitation you had last night – politics, and the power to work in a wider field – it makes no appeal at all to you?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was because it struck me that if it did we could do it together. It would be more fun with you around. You’re a rare bucker-upper or didn’t you know?’
‘I seem to have lost the trick of boosting myself lately.’
He told her something of the changed situation at school, of its cheerfulness under Algy Herries and its decline, in all but material ways, under Alcock. She said, ‘He sounds as absolute horror but you don’t have to suffer him. You’re young enough to make a shift, aren’t you?’
‘It isn’t so simple. A school is a tribe. You can’t switch tribes as if you were getting on and off a bus.’
‘You can if you’re going in the wrong direction.’
‘There are all kind of factors. Loyalty to the boys, old and new. Loyalty to the rump of the original staff, to the school servants even. Some of them have been there since before Algy’s time.’
She said, smiling, ‘Down under all that smouldering Celtic banner-waving you’re a bit of a Tory, Davy. The very nicest kind of Tory and they do exist.’ Then, with a sincerity that he found uplifting. ‘You will keep in touch? Come over whenever you can, as soon as I find permanent digs in the constituency, and write to me when you can’t. I say, I’m making all the running this afternoon, aren’t I?’
‘I’ll help you out when we’ve got a bigger car. Or when the ground isn’t so soggy.’
That made her laugh and she kissed him again, switched on and drove off down the hill. They said little until she had bought her platform ticket, and accompanied him over the bridge to the down line. Then, as he found a seat in the little train, ‘Would I be welcome if I ran myself over to Bamfylde as soon as I g
et myself a car? I’ve got my eye on a third-hand sports.’
‘Why don’t you pick up some of your separation money and buy yourself a new one?’
‘You know better than to ask that. Well?’
‘You know better than to ask if you’d be welcome.’
The guard, slamming doors with the flourish obligatory to all official door-slammers at small stations in the shires, blew his whistle. She lifted her hand and, as the train pulled away, he had an even more vivid memory of Beth, standing where he was standing now, framed in the window of a third-class compartment, with himself where Christine stood. It was the moment prior to surrendering to that impulse on Colwyn Bay Station, nearly twelve years ago, followed by the leap on to a moving train that had had such bitter sweet consequences.
The comparison was so poignant that he almost cried out to her to hurry but then, as the train gathered speed, she disappeared behind a cloud of smoke.
Five
* * *
1
HE WAS TAKING LOWER THIRD HISTORY WHEN CHRISTOPHERSON Major arrived. Beguiling thirteen-year-olds with Owen Tudor’s dalliance with the widowed Queen Catherine, a favourite of theirs and his, for somehow, the way David told the story, the knowing impudence of the philanderer reached out to them over more than five centuries.
Christopherson Major, duty monitor of the headmaster, arrived on the crest of a ripple of laughter, David having quoted Tudor as saying, ‘Madame, since you can’t understand a word of my spoken Welsh, I will sing everything I say, in the hope of conveying my regards for you in music.’ He often clowned his way through a Lower School period in this way, improvising dialogue and dialect to match it. His justification, had he been asked for one, would have been that it was the only way to capture the laggards’ attention for the red meat of history later on.
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