R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  The thought occurred to him, as he crossed the forecourt and passed under the windows of the head’s house, ‘Funny a dog should make more impact on all three of them than a man dying of heart failure within shouting distance of where they slept,’ but then, partly on account of the incident, he was able to get Alcock and Alcock’s reign into some kind of perspective. ‘I’ll talk it over with Algy, then put it out of mind,’ he promised himself, as he turned down the flagged corridor to supervise tea.

  2

  The Saturday before the election he begged a loan of Molyneux’s car and ran over to Bilhampton. It did not seem to matter now whether or not he involved himself in politics but Christine, drawn and exhausted after six weeks’ nonstop campaigning, would not hear of him speaking at either of the two meetings he attended. ‘Your field is wide open again,’ she said, ‘and what sort of selfish bitch would I be to stand in your way a second time?’ When he told her he was not disposed to play the field again, and that it was extremely unlikely, after the row preceding Alcock’s death, that the Governors would short-list him for the job, she said this was no time at all for a professional man of any kind to enlist with so-called Bolshies. ‘It’s like rolling a boulder up Snowden,’ she said. ‘There’s a kind of hysteria running loose, as if the country was waging some kind of patriotic war. The National Government is seen as a lifeboat, and whoever won’t jump aboard and give thanks to God is off their rocker. One would have thought, with nearly three million on the dole, and wage cuts all round, the tide would be running for us, not them! Not on your life. You should hear the gibes I’ve had thrown at me, and from people living on pittances! ‘You’re the bastards who have landed us in the mess!’ someone shouted at me on Thursday, as if the British Labour Party had engineered the Wall Street crash, back in ‘29. It’s absolutely incredible what people will believe if it’s told them often enough. There are chaps about here wearing blue rosettes and taking home thirty-five shillings a week to a tied cottage they can be evicted from at any moment. Talk about a working-class Tory being too green to burn, that’s an understatement. You can dry green wood but how the hell do you light a fire with solid ivory?’

  He sympathised with her but could have wished she was equipped to take things more philosophically. People were scared, he said, scared stiff of losing even that thirty-five shillings a week, and probably saw a national government as the only solution. Moreover, who could blame them, with men of MacDonald’s stature, and Snowden’s famed integrity, leaving the ranks? ‘Don’t mention those names to me,’ she snapped, ‘and as for that word “national”, for heaven’s sake, get it straight, Davy. It isn’t national, it’s Tory! How long will it be before they drop the pretence and that charlatan with it? What happened to Lloyd George when he did a deal with the Tories in 1916?’

  ‘Lloyd George probably wishes he could back-pedal right now. So will Ramsay when things have gone off the boil.’

  ‘Do you think we’d have him back after this? The one thing that cheers me up is the prospect of him losing his seat and having to ask the Tories to find him another. Look, I can’t waste any more time, Davy. I have to go over my speech for this afternoon.’

  It was a very different Christine Forster, he reflected, from the girl who had lain in his arms beside Windermere two short months ago. She was strong, and very dedicated, but she would need all her strength and dedication to maintain the pace for long. The afternoon meeting was thinly attended, and depressing apart from the interruption of a few hecklers, but there was serious trouble at the evening rally, with constant interruptions, a spate of abuse, and, at one time, the prospect of a general scrimmage. No warm-up speaker could make himself heard and Christine was greeted by the slow handclap and backrow jeers of ‘Find yourself a man and get yourself a couple of kids!’ ‘Chuck it, love, and come and give us a cuddle!’ and a few mild obscenities. It was all he could do to stop himself getting up and fighting his way over to one lout who bawled, ‘Yer ol’ man run orf, didn’t he, ducks? And buggered if I blame him!’ a sally that was greeted by a gale of laughter and another scuffle in the aisle.

  She was in tears when he called for her in the committee room behind the stage. The sheer weight and ruthlessness of the opposition was beginning to tell, not only upon her but on her few steadfast supporters. All her committee men looked sullen and despairing, so that David said, for their benefit as much as hers; ‘You’ve made your gesture. That’s all that really matters. People will remember it when things drift from bad to worse. With a majority of over twelve thousand, and a three-cornered contest under these conditions, you can’t expect to get a fair hearing. My advice is to cut out meetings and concentrate on door-to-door canvassing in the factories and working-class districts. Hold an open-air meeting beside every dole queue in the division. Then move on, speaking in every street where there’s a concentration of unemployed. They won’t vote Tory.’

  She said very little during the walk home but at the gate, where he was prepared to leave her, she said, ‘Come upstairs. I’d made up my mind not to ask you in. For my sake, as well as yours, for you must have heard what that swine shouted about me being a married woman, living apart from her husband. They only need a whiff of scandal to put paid to me here, but to hell with all of them!’

  He followed her up a staircase lit by a 25-watt bulb to a front-room bedsitter in the ugly, Londonbrick villa she occupied, near the station. It was a cheerless, anonymous room, with bagged-out furniture, bilious-green tiles in a grate fitted with a small gas-fire, and dun-coloured curtains screening the bed. She did her own cooking here on a primus stove, she told him, and the smell of paraffin did battle with the reek of lino polish and bacon fat.

  He said, ‘Do you have to live in a place like this, Chris? You said something about making use of Rowley’s allowance.’

  ‘I do make use of it. It goes into the funds. We’ve hardly any money to fight the election.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re a game one to be sure. Keep reminding yourself of that. It might help.’

  ‘It did once,’ she said, throwing her off-the-peg coat on the bed, and filling the kettle. ‘It doesn’t now.’

  ‘Because of a bunch of hecklers?’

  ‘Not just them. I didn’t come into this expecting miracles. I knew that at best it would be a long, uphill fight to build a party organisation. No, it was you, I imagine.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Being cut off from you in this way, feeling as guilty as hell every time I’m alone with you, because of what happened the last time you stood up for me in public.’

  ‘But Alcock’s dead. Algy is deputy head now, and Howarth will probably succeed him. Neither would dream of trying to control what I did in my spare time.’

  ‘You’re kidding yourself, Davy.’

  ‘How? I know Algy. He’s a democrat and he’s been teaching democracy all his life.’

  ‘It’s the mood of the country. Nonconformist Socialists are seen as revolutionaries, people who want to drag the whole shooting match down. I know, I’m much closer to this than you, and I know. And as if that wasn’t enough there’s the moral aspect – a man like you, supposed to set an example, tagging along with a married woman.’

  ‘But damn it, you aren’t married in the proper sense. You haven’t set eyes on that damned Rowley for nearly three years.’

  ‘It’s still a stick to beat you with, a smear that can stop you getting what you’re after, what you’ve set your heart on getting, being Gaffer of that place. It’s a very worthwhile objective and a practical one too, for I’ve seen the way all those boys look at you and address you. You’ll make it, but only if I let go of your coat-tails.’

  ‘But can’t you see, I don’t want to make it at the price of losing you? I’m in love with you. More than ever now I see you bruised and battered and still on your feet. What kind of man would that make me, to turn my back on you now?’

  ‘A sane one, with the right priorities in view. You can do untold good at a p
lace like Bamfylde. Not just for the boys who go there, but for all of us.’

  ‘Good God, are you suggesting we should break up on that account?’

  ‘Yes, I am. And don’t imagine it’s a pretty gesture on my part. It hurts like hell, even the thought of it.’

  ‘Then don’t think of it. Because I won’t go along with it. Not now, not ever.’

  ‘What does that mean? We go on meeting and mating in anonymous places? We make love once every six weeks standing up in alleys, or in the back of a car on a moor? No, thank you, Davy. You deserve better than that and so do I. The fact that I was having an affair with that schoolmaster who made the famous Monmouth speech at my adoption meeting wouldn’t only ruin you, it would ruin my candidature. We’re up a dead end, Davy.’

  Something warned him to stop arguing with her now, with her so tired and dispirited, with the echo of that heckler’s gibe ringing in her ears. It was wiser to sheer away and wait for the feverish atmosphere to spend itself, to wait patiently, if that was possible, for some kind of break that would offer hope. Away in the back of his mind was the thought that perhaps this baptism of fire would prove too much for her, that she would emerge so ignominiously from the polls that she would swing away from politics, and if she did that they could soon find a way to get married and put both Rowley and politics out of mind. To his way of thinking, there was not much prospect of him being encouraged to take up the fight again. Even Howarth had as good as conceded that, when he and Barnaby had been speculating idly about Alcock’s successor. The best he could hope for was another stopgap man, and a chance to persuade the Governors, over a long period of time, that he was something more than a born trouble-maker, who had quarrelled with Alderman Blunt, Carter and his headmaster in rapid succession. That might take a decade and by then he would be in his mid-forties, and as set in his ways as old Judy Cordwainer.

  She made tea and they sipped it in silence. He noticed the colour had gone from her cheeks and the sparkle from her eyes. For the first time he understood why she persisted in regarding her nose as a feature that spoiled her looks. The heat and turmoil of the meeting had made it glow in the light of the Wool-worth’s shade. She had lost weight, too, a surprising amount of weight, in a few weeks. He had reason to know that her breasts were round and full but tonight she looked flat chested. Only her elegant legs reminded him of the Chris Forster of Windermere, and earlier.

  He said, earnestly, ‘Listen, Chris, you’ve got to ease up a little. What’s an election, anyway? There’ll be other, luckier elections, with the tide of events on your side. It won’t help to tax yourself this way. You look as if you haven’t had a square meal since we parted in August.’

  A flicker of her independence showed.

  ‘I look anaemic? I’m losing my sex-appeal?’

  He said, taking her cup, ‘Who lives here? Who is your landlady?’

  ‘Dora Beavis,’ she said, ‘a widow with three cats called Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. She’s a strict Methodist. However, we’re in luck tonight. She and her blasted cats have gone to Langport to stay with a sister.’

  ‘I’ve got to drive back tonight. I’m on duty tomorrow, and Molyneux wants his car. But I’m staying here until the small hours. I’ll make sure I get away well before daylight.’

  She made no protest. The temperature of the dismal room was rising a little, now that the curtains were drawn, and the gas-fire had been singing for half an hour. He turned off the overhead light and the outlines of the cheerless place were softened. ‘Go to bed,’ he said, ‘God knows, you look as if you need some sleep,’ and she replied, ‘That’s gallant of you, after a hundred-mile drive, and the prospect of another in slashing rain.’ Then, forlornly, ‘I need you right now more than sleep, Davy.’

  He took her at her word. There was not much room in the narrow bed but in one another’s arms they found at least a temporary solution to their problems. She might be tired out, he thought, but she still had reserves of vitality and enfolded him with desperate eagerness, too impatient and too much in need of solace to give a thought to contraceptives.

  She said, before she drifted into sleep, ‘That would just about put the tin lid on it, wouldn’t it? A candidate, separated from her husband, and several months gone.’ But there was a trace of laughter in her voice.

  3

  She must have been as tired as she looked. About five o’clock, long before it was light, he relit the gas-fire, slipping a shilling into the meter and glancing over his shoulder to see if the click had disturbed her. It had not, so he dressed quickly in the feeble orange glow, determined to let her sleep on until one or other of her supporters roused her. She looked more or less herself again, with colour in her cheeks. Deep sleep had brought a total relaxation of her face so that he was able to see her less as a woman than one of his first-termers, relieved by sleep of the strain of keeping up appearances during the day. He thought of himself as having loved Beth to the limit of his experience but it had never quite reached the pitch of intensity he felt for her at this particular moment. He and Beth had achieved what he thought of as a supremely successful partnership, but Beth had never stood in such terrible need of his protection, had never once appeared to him so defenceless and spent. In the last few years Chris had taken any amount of hard knocks, and the passage between her awakening at university, and last night’s rowdiness in a small-town drill hall, was marking her spirit, now masked in sleep that would sustain her for another day or so. After that, he would say, it would be touch and go, depending upon how she fared at the polls. He was sure of one thing. She was not capable of absorbing humiliation on a grossly wounding scale.

  He had seen himself, up to that time, as a committed radical but he understood now that he was really no more than a dilettante. Bamfylde had replaced his hunger for social justice, quickening in him since his schooldays in the Valley. He was much tougher, too, and far more resilient. Trench warfare had seen to that long before he had come of age. It was something she would have to work out for herself, win or lose. Nobody could help her much, except maybe by the odd word of encouragement at the right time and place. He took one of her leaflets from the bamboo plant-table in the window and wrote, in the glow of the fire,

  You needed sleep. Good luck and God bless. I love you very much, so bear this in mind, no matter what happens on Thursday. God knows, dearest, love is what it’s all about really. If it isn’t, does it matter who runs the show? One other thing – you look younger, prettier, and more desirable than ever at this moment.

  Davy

  He put the leaflet, written side up, on the chair where she had thrown her clothes and tiptoed out, groping his way down the steep stairs to the front door and striking a match to help him grapple with its fastenings. The doorknob felt greasy under his hand and the narrow hall smelled unpleasantly of cats.

  4

  The furore of the Governors’ meeting, followed by Alcock’s death, and Chris’s dilemma, had banished all thought of his book from his mind. Perhaps he was beginning to see it, in retrospect, as a mere time-consuming enterprise over the ups and downs, mostly downs, of the last few years. A means of escaping, for an hour or so, first from the pressures of grief, then Alcock’s nagging presence. At all events he had forgotten it completely, so that he stared at Barnaby uncomprehendingly when, soon after noon that same Sunday, he saw him waving a newspaper as he passed under the front of Nicolson’s on his way to confer with Heffling, head prefect, about the prep roster for the ensuing week. Barnaby shouted, ‘Hi, there! You’re being very modest, aren’t you? I knew we had a literary presence about the place, but I was under the impression he was a cub, not a lion!’

  ‘What the hell are you waffling about?’ he called back, but then he saw that the newspaper in Barnaby’s hand was yesterday’s Times open at the book page. The Sunday papers would not get here until late afternoon, so that they had formed a habit of saving Saturday’s papers to combat ennui between Saturday night and Monday morning.

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p; He said, excitedly, ‘There’s a review of my book in there?’

  ‘There is, my dear chap, and a regular corker! It’s either a first-class book, or you’ve struck uncommonly lucky with a critic.’ Then, bleakly, ‘Are you telling me you didn’t look for it yesterday?’

  ‘I was travelling,’ David said. ‘Would you lend me that paper, Barnaby. You can have it back.’

  ‘I don’t want it back. You can mutilate it as far as I’m concerned. Everyone else has read it, but you can’t expect anyone but me or Howarth to glance at the book reviews on the way to the sports pages. Take it, and congratulations, and I mean that, P.J.’

  ‘Thanks very much, Barnaby. Will… er… has Howarth seen it?’

  ‘Probably not. He was off duty yesterday and over at Algy’s. And the old bird doesn’t usually surface until Sunday afternoons if he can help it. Were you supposed to be taking lunch today?’

  ‘Yes, I’m duty wallah.’

  ‘I’ll take it for you. We can’t expect bona fide authors to sit watching boys stuff themselves with boiled cabbage and beetroot on occasions like this.’

  David thanked him and set off across the playing field to Algy’s thinking post where, in the two winter terms, the roller was parked under its tarpaulin. There were a few boys about but just then the lunch-bell rang and within minutes the field was empty. He sat on the shaft of the roller and read the review from start to finish. Then he went back and read it again, letting his eye rove up and down the column in search of phrases that pleased him most, those in which the reviewer, who signed himself ‘John Ellicott’, had used to emphasise an overall theme that here was someone who could make an absorbing narrative out of the confused canvas of fifteenth-century England.

  Ellicott made his first point (or perhaps his literary editor made it for him) with the headlines: ‘FRESH SPARKLE ON DULLED SURFACES – HIGHLY READABLE ACCOUNT OF WARS OF THE ROSES’, and on the same theme –