R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘I was tempted myself, sir.’

  ‘Ah, I daresay. However, it tells us a good deal, I think.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t be as frank with you as you have been with me. I consider we made a haphazard choice as regards Mr Alcock. We shirked the issue. We owed it to everyone to take more time to probe a little deeper. Do you blame yourself for his death in any way?’

  ‘A little. I was clearly a contributory factor.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Powlett-Jones, and I believe Dr Willoughby told you so at the time.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Well, then, oblige me by putting it out of mind. Alcock was a very sick man and deliberately concealed the fact. The point is, how would you feel about taking over as deputy here? Until the next full meeting of the Board in March?’

  ‘Deputy? You mean, take Mr Herries’s place for the time being?’

  ‘Not exactly. To deputise with confirmation in mind. As a near-certainty, I should add.’

  It had come. After all this time. Right out of the blue, on a frosty December morning, getting on for fourteen years since he had first sat in this room, and shared Algy’s sorrow over the slaughter of the 1913 Fifteen. He was lost for words. His hands shook a little, reminding him again of that first interview, half a lifetime ago it seemed. Before Beth. Before Chris. Before Alcock and the dragging weight of Alcock’ s corpse in his arms. He stammered, at last, ‘I… I’d like that more than anything in the world, Sir Rufus. It’s extremely kind of you to make the offer.’

  ‘It isn’t an offer in that sense. I can’t make it official. You realise that, I hope?’

  ‘Naturally, sir.’

  ‘It would have to have the full approval of the Governing Body. But…’ he came as near to smiling as was possible with that taut, brown skin – ‘I have a feeling that could be managed. With tact and gentle persuasion. I’ll go farther and risk getting myself into a scrape. In your place, Powlett-Jones, I would take it as read. Take over from today and see the term out. I’ll accept full responsibility for that. But first, are there any conditions on your part?’

  ‘Conditions?’

  ‘Preferences, then?’

  He suddenly realised there was one. ‘I’d like to go on teaching, sir, other obligations permitting. The Upper School at least. And perhaps one period a week in Middle and Lower Schools. I would confine myself to current affairs.’

  ‘That could be arranged. We should have to get a junior for history, of course. Anything else?’

  ‘I… er… don’t know exactly how to put this, sir, or not without seeming presumptuous. I’m sure you must be aware of my political outlook. I wouldn’t preach it in class. I never have, or only in the very broadest sense, despite anything you might have heard to the contrary. But I do have to feel free as regards my deep personal convictions. I said nothing about them at the time because they seemed to me irrelevant, but there was friction concerning them between Mr Alcock and myself, especially after I appeared on a Socialist platform a hundred miles from here.’

  Sir Rufus placed his finger-tips together. ‘I know about that. I wouldn’t be much of a Chairman if I didn’t, would I? But we’re looking for someone who cares more deeply for the school than any segment or faction in the world outside. I have it in mind that is true of you. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I also happen to know how you came by those convictions, Powlett-Jones, and they seem relevant to me. In fact, I tell myself that had I been reared in a Welsh valley, and seen my father and brothers sacrificed to industrial greed, then I would have gone through life as a militant radical. More militant than you, probably. It’s mostly a matter of milieu, and mine happened to be different. Cushioned… very conformist. But a judge learns to evaluate each factor objectively. Speaking personally, all I would require is a pledge that you don’t embarrass us on home ground. What you do well beyond that, in the exercising of your democratic privilege, is entirely your own concern. You’re a free-born Englishman – I beg your pardon, Welshman. Many good Welshmen have sacrificed their lives for the liberty of conscience you demand. Who am I to deny it?’ He paused, as though to give David time to digest this, but went on; ‘I’m more than twice your age, Powlett-Jones. I’m older even than Herries, and I’ve seen a great deal in my time. Tyrannies overthrown, new ones set up. The ebb and flow of reforms and repressions in many parts of the world. I have few real convictions left, but I can think of one. This country, although it still has a great deal to learn, maintaining a free society. Its party politics, to me, are a charade. They have a part to play in the democratic process but they remain a charade. This is going to be a stormy decade, and will almost certainly end in a drawing together of all shades of political opinion, here in Britain at least. At a time like this we need flexibility, particularly if our work takes us among growing boys, with their way to make in the world. I think you’re flexible enough. More flexible than most. There’s the bell. I believe Herries promised us some coffee.’

  ‘Rigby is brewing it now, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then I think I’ll break my rule and smoke one of those cheroots of mine,’ and he took out his worn leather cigar-case, snipped the end with a cutter and lit up, blowing a thin stream of smoke towards Alcock’s freshly distempered ceiling. ‘This is a pleasant room,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought so. But its original atmosphere needs replacing, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Rufus, and I have plans for it.’

  Algy bustled in after a perfunctory knock, carrying the coffee tray. On his heels came Rigby, with a bottle of Old Boys’ sherry, miraculously restored to the cellarette in the parlour. ‘Had a notion we should want to drink a toast,’ he said. ‘Pour it, Rigby, there’s a good chap. Do you remember that toast we drank in the parlour to your twins, P.J.? My word, that was a turn-up for the Bamfylde book! Won’t happen again in my lifetime.’

  With a kind of wonder David watched him hand round the coffee while Rigby, ceremonious as a small-town mayor, filled the sherry glasses.

  2

  There was a price, of course. He was under no illusions regarding that, and was called upon to pay the first instalment only a week or two later, when, on Christmas Eve, he met Chris by appointment outside Piccadilly Underground, and took her to dinner at a restaurant Howarth had introduced to him years ago, a quiet place off Leicester Square, renowned for its cuisine.

  It had been a hectic eight days, with the school breaking up, the Sunsetters’ Christmas to be arranged, Grace to convey to Elmer’s End (it was Grannie Marwood’s ‘turn’ that year), and all manner of plans sketched out pending his return to school the day after Boxing Day, for he wanted plenty of time to work on his blueprints.

  It was a notable end-of-term, one of the liveliest he remembered, as he stood on the steps of the head’s house in the forecourt, and watched the school boneshaker take its final load down to the station at the tail of a procession of private cars, driven by parents who had called to collect their sons. Trunks and hand luggage were trundled out, roped and labelled, the turmoil beginning before it was light, with any number of mufflered boys coming and going, shouting their usual farewell quips.

  ‘Have a good hols, sir!’

  ‘Don’t forget matron’s present, sir!’ Matron was getting married, late in life, and the boys had collected for a leaving present she was unable to accept in person.

  ‘I’m going to miss Grace like nobody’s business, sir!’ – this from Sax Hoskins, who was also leaving them, and finally Heffling, shaking hands with his left because of his plastered wrist, ‘I’ve persuaded the pater to let me stay on until July, sir. Wrote the day I heard what had happened. I had to bluff. He thinks I’m dead set on having another go at the Cambridge but it’s the cricket really, sir.’

  It was touching, he thought, how they had all seemed to come alive again and that within an hour of the news leaking that he would be taking over, and he wondered, a little
anxiously, if he would be able to justify their ebullience and goodwill, or whether, once they had adapted to his headship, they would begin to keep their distance, as they always had with Alcock. Well, that was up to him, he supposed, and it might be a good idea to regard the term ahead as a honeymoon period. He had his own innovations in mind and not all of them would be popular. Besides, it was well known that he was not yet officially appointed, so they had every right to regard him as a caretaker’s caretaker, standing in for Algy, whom many would not recall as the resident occupier of the house at his back.

  Grace came down, looking very pretty, he thought, in her Red Riding Hood cape, trimmed with fur. She seemed to have shot from childhood to full girlhood in a term and was growing more like Beth every day. Her limp was almost unnoticeable now, unless you studied her walk from a distance. Sax swore that she could out-foxtrot any of his holiday partners, whereas Winterbourne, who had offered to collect her, and bring her back from Elmer’s End on January 14th, the day of reassembly, was enthusiastic concerning her ability to capture a mood of the moor with her brush. ‘Especially in spring,’ he told David one night, when they were glancing through her sketches. ‘You see, she’s a spring painter. There’s absolute honesty in every sketch she makes between March and June, but after that… I don’t know… she loses the trick. They might be anyone’s watercolours.’

  There was significance here, he supposed. Grace had always seemed a springtime person, ever since he had lifted her from the taxi that brought her back from that Kentish convalescent home five years ago. For him, as for Winterbourne, Hoskins, and even for young Coxe, the embryo vet, she carried the promise of the primrose and the daffodil whenever she moved among all these boisterous young ruffians, indeed, she introduced a little extra fragrance into the place at all seasons of the year, and although he knew it was time she became a weekly boarder over at Challacombe, he still delayed making the change. One of the things he had looked forward to most was a crumpet tea with Grace, when winter dusk was closing in on the moor. He made a rapid check of her exact age as she ran down the steps, carrying a book of patterns she had been inspecting, prior to replacing Alcock’s neutral curtains. Eleven years, eight months, from the day he dashed up these same steps, in response to Stratton-Forbes’s annunciation of her arrival, down at the long-jump pit. She looked older. Around thirteen, he would say, but then, she had always seemed mentally and physically mature after that tight-rope walk between life and death when she was a mite of five.

  She said, in between his farewells of boys, ‘Never mind them a minute, Daddy. This is most important. Rigby is going to order the curtains for us when he goes into Challacombe tomorrow. Which do you prefer? I’ve pinned back the two I like best, the rose pink and the primrose yellow.’

  ‘Primrose yellow,’ he said without hesitation. ‘It’s you, Grace.’

  She ran up the steps again and he resumed his farewells. It was going to take a lot of getting used to, this ordering and rearranging of what he never ceased to think of as Algy Herries’s house. The last car sped away, its tyres scattering gravel. A few Sunsetters (they always looked forlorn at this moment of term) emerged from big School arch with a ball for a puntabout, and he spared them a sympathetic thought, boys with parents at the ends of the earth, thinking of them no doubt at this time of year. Then he remembered that Barnaby, who was spending Christmas at school, had promised to take them all into Challacombe to see a gangster picture at the Capitol Cinema this afternoon, and bent his mind to his own affairs. They promised to keep him pretty well occupied until he left for town on the twenty-third.

  She looked her usual, pert self as she emerged from the Regent Street exit at six o’clock sharp on Christmas Eve. She had bought herself a pair of Russian calf boots and they looked very fetching on her long, pretty legs. She had matched them with a Cossack-type hat, perched at an angle, so that he thought, ‘She looks more like a well-heeled Tory’s wife than the only Socialist candidate to emerge with credit from that shambles,’ and told her so, as soon as she had kissed him.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Very civil of you, sir! I’ve never actually kissed a headmaster before, although I had my bottom pinched by one in Yorkshire. “The Octopus” we used to call him at Chapel. You look pretty spry yourself, Davy darling. Where do we celebrate? I’m going to drink half a bottle of champagne tonight, I promise you!’

  They walked along Coventry Street to Leicester Square and all the way she held his arm, her touch giving their relationship a permanence it had not had on earlier occasions. Her conversation was sustained but brittle, a shade too chirpy, he thought, and this was confirmed two hours later, when the cadaverous waiter, who had been hovering about them all evening, bustled away to attend to a stage party in the far corner of the room.

  ‘You’ve got something to tell me yourself,’ he said. ‘You’ve been saving it for the right moment,’ and suddenly she looked disconcerted and said, staring hard at her glass, ‘Yes, I have, but I should have known one can’t keep guilty secrets from old Pow-Wow. It’s a plan, at least, you could think of it as that. It might help. I don’t know. It’ll depend on you, I suppose. Like everything else in the end.’

  He said, dismally, ‘Let’s hear it. At least we’ve wined and dined.’

  ‘It’s two things, really, one hinging on the other. One is an offer I’ve had – no, not of a good constituency, but an exchange, under a Labour Party Educational Trust, the Jesmond Foundation. I’ve been selected as the likeliest young hopeful to take advantage of a year at Montreal University. They have very advanced syllabuses over there – far wider in scope than most of ours. I’m told I could get a Canadian degree in a year. Not that that means much in academic terms, but from the practical viewpoint it could do me a lot of good, and give me the edge on most candidates. Providing I emerged with credit.’

  The prospect of not seeing her for a year dismayed him. In the months ahead he was going to need her as much as she had needed him before the election.

  ‘How do you feel about it? Honestly. No hedging.’

  ‘I should enjoy it, if I could separate it from you, Davy.’

  ‘But we can’t separate it, can we?’

  ‘It might be wise to try. At least for a year.’

  ‘Say exactly what’s in your mind.’

  ‘You know what’s in my mind. What’s been in my mind concerning you for long enough. The plain truth is, Davy, you simply can’t risk an affair with me. I believe you know that but won’t face it. Not that I blame you. I have enough trouble doing it myself.’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that you might be exaggerating the risks?’

  ‘No. It hasn’t and it won’t. Listen here, Davy. I’ll draw a picture for you. We go on seeing one another – not as close friends, that’s quite another thing, but as lovers. Okay, we’re careful. We keep a sharp lookout. We only meet in out-of-the-way places. That’s a dreary enough prospect, but we’d cope, I daresay, until the unlucky moment, don’t say it mightn’t come because it would. Hundreds of boys pass through your hands. Sooner or later we’d run into one and he’d talk. “Hi, Porky, what do you know? I ran into old Pow-Wow with that cousin of Ridgeway’s. He’s doing okay. They were staying as man and wife at the same hotel!” The snippet is relayed and sooner or later a parent comes to hear of it. She passes it on, and it gets expanded a little. “But I know her! A married girl, with a husband somewhere, the one who turned her back on her family to stand as a Socialist. Of course, Powlett-Jones is that way himself isn’t he?” From there it’s anybody’s guess. All I know is that it would damage you, might even bring you down, seeing that all Bamfylde parents are Tories. Do you want me to let my imagination run ahead?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s something in what you say. I’d be a fool to deny it.’

  ‘Well, then…’

  ‘That’s the rub, Chris, the “Well, then…?” What are you really saying? That now I’m acting head of Bamfylde, with every prospect of it being made official, we shou
ld stop seeing one another? Break it off? Finish?’

  She said, tracing a pattern in breadcrumbs, ‘I’m saying we should give this break we’ve both had a fair chance. For a year at any rate. You won’t miss me nearly as much as you think you will. You’ll be fully stretched in that job.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ll get by.’

  ‘And a year from now?’

  ‘All kinds of things can happen in a year. A year ago we hadn’t even met.’

  ‘You said something about a plan.’

  ‘A sort of plan. It’s sheer coincidence this offer leads to Canada. Rowley was still in Canada the last time I heard.’

  ‘Where does that take us? Assuming he’s still there, and assuming you get to see him and talk to him?’

  ‘I don’t know, Davy. How could I know? It’s getting on for three years since I set eyes on him.’

  ‘I know, Chris. You could sue him after seven. That’s four years from now, and God knows how long after that the divorce comes along. I’ll be forty and you’ll be over thirty. You once mentioned children.’

  ‘Don’t make it harder, Davy.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Yes, it is possible. You’ve got what you’ve always wanted and worked for, and I’m making progress. How many can say as much in their mid-thirties and late twenties?’

  ‘It isn’t enough. Not for me.’

  ‘It’ll have to be, Davy. At least for the time being. Deep down you know that.’

  The sparkle had gone from the evening. Across the restaurant the stage party was erupting. Jokes and laughter emerged from it and the place was filling with customers, most of them oiled with Christmas cheer. Gloominess invaded him, making objective thought and discussion all but impossible. First Beth, then Alcock and now this. And away behind that a serious-eyed boy coming home with his satchel, to be told at a street corner that his father and two brothers had died underground. And after that the trenches. Three unspeakable years of trudging to and fro across a desolate swamp, three years of seeing friends torn and mutilated. When the hell did life settle and lie on an even keel? When could a man hope to enjoy the fruits of personal fulfilment, of the kind he had glimpsed so briefly, in the early days of his marriage? He said, beckoning the waiter, ‘What choice do I have? What choice do I ever have?’ and she said, ‘How about me, Davy?’