R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  Part Eight

  * * *

  PLENITUDE

  One

  * * *

  1

  YEARS LATER, WHEN TWENTY-THREE NEW NAMES HAD BEEN added to the memorial outside, when he could look back on the period between his second marriage and the weeks preceding the summer of Dunkirk, he thought of the interval as his time of plenitude, strangely at odds with everything that was piling up outside. That, however, was an ultimate verdict, after he and Chris had met and survived a crisis that was new to him but morbidly familiar to her. So that, whereas he viewed it as no more than another sizeable hump in the rhythm of the years, she saw it as something infinitely more threatening and hazardous than he would have admitted at the time, shrugging it off as her playing-in period, the equivalent of a sensitive new boy’s first school year.

  It was at one with much that was happening in the world outside, where there seemed no prospect of harmony, where trouble flared in one capital or another, and her worst fears of the early ‘thirties were justified, but her own inward struggle had no link with world turbulence, or the looming threat of war. It was a deeply personal challenge, fought without benefit of his armour, his sense of dedication, and there were times, many times, when she envied him his anchorage here in this small, close-knit community. His roots were well down and manifold. Hers, such as they were throughout that testing time, were pitifully shallow, save only the one, strong fibre of her love for him and what this place seemed to have made of him over the years.

  It was a more sophisticated honeymoon than the sedate fortnight at Shanklin with Beth, in 1919. They took turns to drive her silver bumble bee all the way from Calais to Brittany, then down through the chateau country of the Loire, of which he had written in his single literary foray but had never visited. They enjoyed perfect weather, staying at old inns and eating alfresco meals beside the dusty high-roads. She found him an entertaining guide, for as they moved south to Gascony, then south-east to Carcassonne and Marseilles, and finally north to the battlefields of his youth, loose ends of his undisciplined reading would return to him, prompted by some place-name like Poitiers, or the signboard of an inn calling to mind some jack-booted, blustering character from the past, who had made his outcry and departed, forgotten by all but historical magpies.

  In St. Emilion, for instance, he told her the story of Madame Bouquey, who had hidden the fugitive Girondins in her courtyard well, and paid for the impulse on the scaffold in Bordeaux. Near Chalons, his excitement describing the final rally of the Imperial Army in 1814 made her laugh aloud, but who could help sharing his enthusiasm? Farther north, when they drove through the miraculously restored pastures and red-brick villages of the 1915–18 battlefields, he again surprised her, for she had looked for a sombre approach to this tormented ground, where his generation had died, but found instead detachment, so that she said, ‘I made sure you’d sheer away from this part of France, Davy. I would have, in your place. What happened here, not so long ago, must have scarred every man who survived it.’

  ‘Yes, it did that,’ he replied, thoughtfully, ‘but I had to come back nevertheless. Perhaps just to satisfy myself how completely Bamfylde had exorcised the past. Maybe the equivalent happened with some of the others who came out of it with a whole skin. What I mean is, a man had to start fresh or cut his throat and, taken all round, I’ve been lucky.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I had a job I could lose myself in before the guns had stopped firing. I had Algy as counsellor and friend. I had Beth for more than six years, then Grace, and now I’ve got you. A fair deal all round, wouldn’t you say?’

  She wondered if it was, and whether it was the job, or a generous measure of domestic peace that had played the major part in his rehabilitation and thought, on balance, it was the former. For although she saw him as two men, the thruster with an idée fixe, for which he was prepared to sacrifice anything, and an amiable lover, respecting mental privacy and claiming his own as the price of that indulgence, it seemed to her that Bamfylde was never far from his thoughts. Or only in moments of rarefied intimacy, when he seemed to her very young and ardent for a man who, as he was fond of reminding her, was ‘pushing forty’.

  And here there was another aspect of him that surprised her. He had learned something very valuable from that girl Beth, whatever kind of person she had been, the trick of blending positive virility with an innate respect for a woman’s body, so that she could never quite decide whether he approached her as conqueror or pilgrim.

  He was surprisingly frank about his first marriage. He told her of Beth’s eagerness to conceive a child as soon as they were married, and her recurrent disappointments at her failure to produce a son in the time left to them, and it made her wonder whether she, too, was likely to fail in this respect, for time was running on and she would be thirty next birthday. She said nothing of this to him, however. Although children were important to her, she had an idea they were not a vital factor to him. After all, he had so many substitute sons, with more coming all the time, and it was his passing reference to September’s recruits that made her aware of this and vaguely uneasy regarding her ability to adjust to Bamfylde as effortlessly as he promised. It sparked off her very first doubt regarding the irrevocability of marriage to a school rather than a man.

  They were on their homeward stretch, driving west from Newhaven across open stretches of the New Forest. He said, as they took the road to Ringwood, and pulled in to picnic at a spot overlooking a bramble-sown pasture, ‘It was just about here they ran that Fool Monmouth to earth. He’d come a fair way from Sedgemoor, and what courage he had had run out of the toes of his boots.’

  ‘How was he caught?’

  ‘He was collared by a couple of militiamen hiding in a ditch, with a few dried peas in his pocket. The real tragedy of that uprising was that Monmouth valued his head above his dignity.’

  ‘You can’t hold that against him. Don’t we all when it comes to the crunch?’

  ‘His men didn’t. They had everything to lose and damn all to gain, but at least they didn’t crawl on their bellies, begging for mercy,’ and then he chuckled, saying, ‘There’s a coincidence. John Churchill won that battle for James, and we’ve got a John Churchill coming next term. Youngest we’ve ever enrolled.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Nine. We generally refuse ‘em until they’re eleven, but Churchill’s people are abroad and he’ll go in with the Sunsetters. Timid kid he seemed to me. Hope he doesn’t find it too terrifying.’

  His casual tone irritated her a little. ‘Of course he’ll find it terrifying! Who the devil wouldn’t, at nine? I don’t know what their mothers can be dreaming of to let them go at that age. Thirteen is the absolute minimum to my way of thinking.’

  He still seemed unconcerned. ‘Sometimes it’s not a question of choice. All the Sunsetters’ parents are abroad, some of them in places where there’s no school. What do you do with kids in those circumstances?’

  ‘Anything but isolate them from their families and plonk them down among a lot of young toughs.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how quickly they adapt. Better than some of those who come to us half-spoiled at around fourteen.’

  ‘They have to or go under, don’t they?’

  He gave her an amused, sidelong glance. ‘Well, that’s part of your new job. To mother ‘em a bit.’

  She said, experiencing her second identifiable qualm, ‘What gives you the idea I’m qualified for that? Herries’s wife had years and years of experience.’

  He took her hand, alerted more by her expression than her tone. ‘You aren’t getting cold feet already are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I’m scared for you more than myself.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’ll cope. A lot better with you around than on my own. You’ll find it easier than nursing a constituency. A lot more rewarding too.’

  ‘Davy.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll need time. An
d I’ll need watching.’

  ‘You’ve got time. And I’ll be watching.’ He seemed as though he was about to add something to this but checked himself, pretending to be busy spreading the rug and opening the sandwich lunch they had brought.

  ‘You were going to say something else.’

  ‘Yes, I was. But it’ll sound pompous. God forbid I should take that line with you, Chris.’

  ‘You say what you had in mind.’

  ‘Well, just this. I realise you’ve mortgaged your political prospects by marrying me. It was a spot decision on your part, brought about by hurt pride and the attitude of those idiots up in Manchester. I should be grateful to them, I suppose, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have second thoughts about it. You probably have already.’

  ‘About marrying you? No, Davy. Definitely not.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that exactly. I meant about a candidacy somewhere fairly handy. Get this straight. I wouldn’t stand in your way and I want you to remember that. And as for the school Governors, well, they couldn’t either, for I’m beyond their reach now, so long as I’m up to my job.’ He faced her. ‘If you feel you have to try again and get back in the swim then for God’s sake tell me, Chris. Don’t bottle it up because you think it’ll make things hellishly difficult for me. It won’t, or not to any great extent, and even if it did I’d go along with you all the way.’

  His tolerance touched her deeply, the more so because she knew it cost him something to go as far as this and make so light of any complications that might result from her re-entry into the political arena. She caught his hand where it rested on the door of the car, pulled him down and kissed him.

  ‘Thank you, Davy. That’s you talking but this is my problem. I’ll tackle it if I have to but I’m not going to anticipate it on my honey moon. I love you very much and I’m sure you love me. So why don’t we give me a term or two’s trial?’

  They left it there for the time being. The exchange had helped, if only in stiffening her resolution to do her damnedest to justify his faith in her.

  2

  There was more mothering to be done than either he or she had anticipated. Chance, plus a short waiting-list and an exceptionally high number of July leavers, had combined to lower the average age of the Second Formers by nearly two years and Churchill was not the only nine-year-old among the Sunsetters. There were two others, and several ten-year-olds not really up to the standard of the Second Form, so that David was obliged to improvise and split the lowest unit of the school into two un-equal halves, the Second Form proper, comprising about a score of boys, and what amounted to a First Form approaching a dozen.

  It was a great nuisance for it meant extensive revision of the timetable and a good deal of shuttling to and fro in the Lower School, but it was better than seeing their numbers drop, as they might well have done had he adhered to the earlier age limit.

  He was so busy during those first hectic days that he had little opportunity to devote much of his time to Chris and was relieved when she admitted, without being asked, that Bamfylde was more terrifying at a distance than it was in close up. It seemed to him then that she was settling in very well, especially as she went on to say that the chief factor in her absorption was the unexpected warmth shown her by most of the staff, and all the senior boys, especially those who qualified as his secret favourites. It told him that she had been prepared for a certain amount of resentment on the part of the senior men, like Barnaby and Howarth, but it was soon evident to her that they both wished him well, and enjoyed the exceptional freedom he extended to housemasters. She got on very well with Alison, Boyer’s Scots wife, and with many of the Old Boys, a proportion of whom seemed to share Boyer’s almost mystical friendship with Davy. She took a great liking to Brigadier Cooper after he whispered, on being introduced to her, ‘Just what we were looking for, that husband of yours, m’dear. Been tellin’ ‘em so ever since we began casting round for someone to replace Herries. Difficult chap to follow, but P.J.’ll manage it, given time. Especially with a nice gel like you about the place.’

  ‘I think Briggy is an old duck,’ she told Davy later. ‘Has he always been a fan of yours?’

  ‘I struck lucky with his boy my first term here. It works that way sometimes.’

  She derived a certain amount of amusement from learning her way around and discovering where to tread softly and where to take a chance. ‘It’s a bit like the Habsburg Court,’ she said one day, ‘a frighteningly complex system of protocol, checks, counterchecks and balances, with all kinds of silent pressures and intrigues going on, and you hovering over the safety-valve watching for explosions. Really, you men are the most colossal frauds! For centuries you’ve been accusing women of gossip and backstairs politics, and we’re absolute amateurs at the game compared with you!’

  ‘It doesn’t get you down, then? That aspect of it?’

  ‘Not a bit. As a matter fact, it makes me feel superior.’ And he had laughed and gone blithely about his business, unaware that there were other aspects of Bamfylde that were not so easily dismissed.

  One was the obvious lack of flexibility about the system, despite the humanising effect David had obviously had on the school. Tradition, she supposed, was all very well at a remove, but the experience of the last few years, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, pulled against her ability to take the rigidity of the school calendar seriously especially when it seemed to her to push education into second place. The high spots of each term were as fixed as the stars, beginning in October with the first of eight runs, and the play-offs of Senior and Junior house matches. Then there was the opera and ceremonial Middlemoor run, the choral Society’s concert, the drill competition, Sports Day, the War Office Certificate ‘A’ exam and interminable games of cricket. The new school year began with Speech Day and the Armistice Service and by then they were into the cross-country and rugby seasons again, and inside this framework of special occasions were countless minor rituals, so that she sometimes wondered what the parents were getting for their money in the way of down-to-earth education, for sport and red-letter days invariably took precedence over instruction. She raised this subject with David one night and found that he could be very touchy when the rituals of the school were questioned.

  ‘I’ve been trying to explain for years that education isn’t a matter of textbooks and blackboards,’ he said. ‘At least, it isn’t in schools of this kind. That was an article of faith with Algy.’

  She took a calculated risk then, saying, ‘But you’re head now, Davy, and Algy, dear old chap that he is, stands for the past. The boys here are going out into a highly competitive world, aren’t they?’

  ‘Damn it,’ he said, irritably for him, ‘you’re talking just like Carter before the Stoic outstepped his limits and he came over to our side. Of course they have to be taught something, and of course they have to be coached through the Cambridge Senior or some qualifying exam, but that isn’t why they’re here. Go and read Tom Brown and see what the old Squire had to say about it.’

  She was tempted to reply that Squire Brown had lived in the days of privileged classes and virtually no taxation, but she was not sure enough of her ground to risk a first quarrel. All the same, his extreme sensitivity bothered her, inasmuch as it threw her back upon herself and made her uneasily aware that she had no real place in his life in term-time. And term-time, she reflected, consumed two-thirds of the year. Clearly he was now a fervid convert to tradition and equally clearly she was not and never would be. From then on the open cheque he had handed her regarding her freedom to apply to Transport House for a candidature was prominent in her mind, so much so that twice she sat down and began a letter reminding the party of her existence and availability. She threw both letters in the wastepaper basket. Instinct warned her that, notwithstanding his pledge on the last day of their honeymoon, endless problems might result from taking up the challenge again. Instead, she looked around for some means of integrating more closely into the worl
d of school and making some kind of attempt to justify her existence other than a kind of camp-follower.

  She found it, oddly enough, through Howarth, whom she had come to like and respect as a man at war with humbug. Howarth gave her her first tenuous foothold by privately seeking her advice on Bradshawe, yet another of those unfortunates pulled apart by divided loyalties after his parents (surely, in this instance, the world’s prize idiots!) sent him a stream of letters explaining their individual views on the rights and the wrongs of their divorce.

  Bradshawe, an intelligent fifteen-year-old, was making heavy weather of the issue, or so Howarth told her. From a cheerful extrovert of a few months ago, he had become morose and solitary, and his work, according to a consensus of opinion in the common room had gone to pot. ‘Tell me, Mrs P.J., as an expensively educated woman, how would you tackle it from my stand-point? Those fools are imposing unnecessary stress on the boy. As his housemaster I feel I’m falling down on the job and that really rattles me.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m qualified to advise someone who has been at the job as long as you,’ she protested, but he growled, ‘Oh, don’t give me mock modesty! You’re much nearer Bradshawe’s age than I am and must have ideas, so let’s have ‘em! You can rely on me to throw ‘em back at you if they’re too academic.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘you could try writing to each parent, pointing out the damage their letters are doing.’

  ‘I tried that at the beginning of term and all that happened was I got a blow-by-blow description of the fracas. Puerile nonsense it was, too – wretched woman can’t even spell, and she finished her bleat with a split infinitive.’

  She laughed, deciding that, in this kind of situation, Howarth could be funny. ‘I’ll tell you what might work,’ he went on. ‘I’ll brief you on the case and you have a straight talk with the boy.’