R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘Good heavens, how could I do that?’

  ‘The same way as I’ll have to if you don’t,’ he said, ‘and passing the buck to P.J. won’t work either. Too magisterial. Not him, of course, but his mantle of office. No, I’m serious. You’d be doing me a favour and, after all, it’s a job that comes within the province of a head’s wife. Ellie Herries got landed with it often.’

  She said, obstinately, ‘I won’t do it without Davy’s approval,’ and he said, with one of his rusty chuckles, ‘Leave P.J. to me. Told him a good many home truths in his time. Ask him if you don’t believe me.’

  The upshot was that she made her debut as counsellor within forty-eight hours, trapping Bradshawe in her parlour when the treacherous Howarth sent him over with a note, with strict instructions to wait for an answer. The note read,

  Since you didn’t see fit to invite me to the wedding I didn’t buy you a wedding present. Here is a hot-plate for hot potatoes.

  Respectfully,

  Ian Howarth

  Below was a postscript,

  Fragile. Handle with care!

  She had the greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face as she said, ‘Er… do sit down, Bradshawe. I won’t keep you a minute,’ and watched him out of the corner of her eye as she went across to the bureau and wrote,

  No hot-plate, thank you. I’m sitting on one, thanks to you,

  and sealed it.

  She said, as he rose, ‘Hold on a minute, Bradshawe, we haven’t met before, have we?’ and he mumbled that they had not.

  ‘I’m just making tea. Will you stay and have some?’

  He looked at her suspiciously, she thought, but he could hardly refuse so he sat down again, stuffing the note in his pocket. She called through to Rigby, ‘Make it tea for two, please, Rigby,’ and then, deciding on the direct approach, ‘I had a chat with Mr Howarth yesterday. He tells me you’ve had a wretched term so far. Would you care to talk about it, to someone right outside? It would be confidential. I wouldn’t dream of passing it on to the headmaster or Mr Howarth, if you preferred not.’ And when he said nothing, ‘You see, I’ve had personal experience of this divorce muddle myself. Nobody has to tell me how awful it can be.’

  He looked at her with a touch of wonder, a nice-looking boy, with serious grey eyes and a friendly mouth. Tall and well-made for his age and possessing, she would say, exceptionally good manners.

  ‘Did Mr Howarth tell you he had written to my people, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes. But it didn’t help, did it?’

  Rigby padded in with the tray, set it down and went out again. She turned her back on him to pour and he said, ‘My mother keeps saying she put it off until I was old enough to understand. That if she had had her way they would have split up years ago. I… well, I don’t really believe that. I mean, in a way it shifts the blame on me, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How does it?’

  ‘Well, things must have been getting worse all the time. They quarrelled, of course, but everyone’s people have a bust up now and again, don’t they?’

  ‘If they’re human they do. What’s your Christian name, Bradshawe?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Nick… Nicholas, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, look here, Nick, it’s time you faced up to something. As your mother implies, you’re quite old enough. People drift apart for all kinds of reasons, but a divorce in the family isn’t the end of the world. It used to be but it isn’t now. I dare say more than a dozen boys here have parents who have got themselves divorced and married again, and nobody a penny the wiser. The thing is, everybody is an individual, and has his own life to lead. You can sometimes help but not all that much. Do your sympathies lie in one direction or the other?’

  ‘Not really. I gather my father has been running around with his secretary but mother… well, in a way she asked for it. I mean, ever since I can remember she’s filled the house with people, all kinds of people. Painters, writers and so on – drips most of them, and father was all for a quiet life.’

  ‘I see. Are you an only child?’

  ‘I’ve got a brother older than me. He was here several years ago. He’s married now.’

  ‘Have you discussed it with him?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to know. He says the governor is in his second childhood, and the mater isn’t through her first yet, and all one can do is write ‘em off. How can a chap do that? I mean, after all they are one’s people.’

  ‘It’s not bad advice for all that. Providing it’s done kindly. Would it be so very difficult?’

  He looked confused and she realised she would have to be more explicit. ‘Before this happened, did you get along with them? Both of them?’

  ‘More or less. I didn’t see much of the governor and, as I say, mother was always surrounded by long hairs. They left me pretty much to myself.’

  ‘Then what is it that’s upset you so much?’

  He said, with a baffled frown, ‘Well, it’s being a sort of referee. I mean, a chap doesn’t want to know all the grisly details, does he? They’ve split up and that’s that. I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Do you answer their letters point by point?’

  ‘I try to.’

  ‘Well, here’s my advice for what it’s worth, Nick. Stop trying. Keep in touch, the way you used to, a letter every week to each of them but full of school gossip that they’ll find frightfully boring. Don’t comment on a thing they say, and if you see another appeal to the ref coming up throw that letter in the wastepaper basket without reading it. My guess is they’ll soon leave you alone to get on with your own life. Does that make sense?’

  Surprisingly, and rewardingly, he smiled. He had, she thought, a very wise smile for a lad of fifteen. ‘Yes, it does. It makes a hell… a real lot of sense.’ He stood up, carefully replacing his cup on the tray. ‘I’d better get back with this note. Mr Howarth said he was waiting for it,’ but he didn’t go and finally went on, ‘Er… was that note about me, ma’am?’

  She said, with a smile, ‘Yes, it was, Nick, As a matter of fact, Mr Howarth insisted I had a chat with you. He seemed to think I could do it better than he could, or the head could, but I’ll tell you this. They’re both very much on your side, and so am I after what you’ve told me. Will you give what I suggested a try for the rest of the term?’

  ‘Yes, I will. And thank you, ma’am… I just had to spill it to someone. That’s the trouble with a place like this… I mean… regarding things outside… a chap tends to go round in circles.’

  He held out his hand and she shook it, thinking as he left, ‘That’s about right. That is the trouble with a place like this and not only for the Bradshawes.’ She was aware, however, of having made her first real contribution and it gave her a lift until she reflected that she had only been able to make it by chance. Very few boys would have been as frank and explicit as Bradshawe about a personal problem. To run a place like this had seemed a more or less straightforward job from a distance, a matter of training and educating boys within a system of do’s and don’ts, but it wasn’t like that at all, not when you saw it from the inside. It was a task of fearful complexity, where it was so easy to lose one’s way and flounder. All manner of unlooked for situations arose day by day and each demanded a personalised approach. In a way – and she grudged the admission – Davy was right. Education, of the kind outsiders associated with schools, was a relatively unimportant part of boarding-school life. The human side of it, the sheer effort needed to keep a place as unwieldy as this on a level keel, required infinite imagination, endless patience and heaven knows what else besides. The case of Nick Bradshawe, for instance, was no more than the tip of one iceberg, and here she was, preening herself for having smoothed it off, so to speak. Yet people like Davy and Howarth and all the other old stagers were expected to do what she had done off the cuff and still get boys through the examinations the outside world demanded of them.

  The Bradshawe incident did have a side-effect, and that despi
te the fact that she did not discuss it with him. It made her aware of the true breadth of the demands made upon conscientious schoolmasters like Davy or Howarth, but it also increased the sense of her own inadequacy, so that it was fortunate that, within a month or so, her thoughts were switched by the near-certainty of a pregnancy, a circumstance that somehow surprised her, so much so that she kept her own counsel about it until the helterskelter of the end of term was behind them and she had him more or less to herself.

  The opportunity occurred on the night of the old year, a few hours after she had received confirmation from Doc Willoughby. They had both attended a Sunsetters’ party and after that a mild celebration with Howarth, Barnaby, Boyer and Alison, and he dropped off to sleep at once while she lay awake, listening to the storm getting up over the moor and marshalling its forces for an onrush on the school. Presently it struck and a dislodged slate from the roof went crashing down into the forecourt, landing with a noise loud enough to wake him.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A slate. You’d best get someone to look at that roof before term begins.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ he mumbled sleepily but she said, ‘Don’t go to sleep again, Davy. I saw Doc Willoughby this afternoon, while you were in town getting the party supplies.’

  He was wide awake now and sat up, switching on the bedside light. ‘You’re okay? Nothing wrong?’

  ‘Nothing to get worked up about. I’m pregnant,’ and his reaction to the bald statement was so dramatic that it reminded her of situations she had seen in so many bad films and plays, and had dismissed as improbable until now.

  ‘Good God! This is a hell of a time to tell me. In the middle of the night, when we’ve accounted for half a bottle apiece!’

  ‘I wasn’t sure myself until teatime, and I could hardly tell you in front of the Sunsetters or a bachelor staff, could I?’

  He laughed then and hugged her, holding her in a way that told her he was delighted but was attempting to play down his initial sense of shock.

  ‘You’re glad about it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure yet. Yes, I think so… but… ‘

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I would have liked a little more time to play myself in.’

  He rubbed his eyes. ‘Rubbish! You’re doing fine…’ but then, as an afterthought, ‘This will put paid to any prospect of a candidature. Does that bother you?’

  ‘No. I’ve put that out of mind, Davy.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. I told you…’

  ‘I know you told me, but it wouldn’t work. This will, maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean, Chris?’

  She kissed his cheek. ‘Dear Davy. You’re so bright in some ways and so dim in others. No, not dim exactly, but the tiniest bit prejudiced. That’s Bamfylde’s fault I suppose. You can’t live and work in a place like this without taking it for granted that everyone else sees the place through your eyes.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘That a child of my own will give me real purpose in your life. I really haven’t got one yet, you know.’

  He thought about this for a moment. She granted him that. He was always willing to take time to see someone else’s view, a rare trait in schoolmasters in her experience. Finally he said, ‘I went through a longish period of uncertainty when I came here, Chris. Several times, during those long-drawn-out rows with Carter and Alcock I almost threw in the towel, but I’m damned glad I didn’t. It’s even more difficult for you, I imagine, without a defined role, and I’m only absolutely sure of one thing. You’ll find one, with your brain and guts. I’d back all I have on that.’

  ‘You already have,’ she said, and then, ‘Go back to sleep now. We’ll get around to making plans in the morning. We’re not pushed for time. It isn’t until the end of summer term.’

  The storm built up, prowling round the buildings like a sullen enemy looking for a chink in the defences, but it didn’t bother her. She felt reassured somehow, and more hopeful of the immediate future than she had been since the Bradshawe incident.

  3

  The feeling grew on her isolating her from the place as a whole and even, to an extent, from him, so that she persuaded herself she was beginning to get things in proportion at last. It would be fun to have a child, especially his child, and the prospect released her into a more tranquil world, an intensively private one where she was content with her role as a bystander, a touchline supporter of Bamfylde’s day-to-day being.

  Her health remained good and the slight embarrassment she experienced moving among so many males with a swelling figure was a small price to pay for the mounting confidence she felt in herself. The winter tailed off, with its frosts and gales, and spring came, a dry, windy, sunny spell, lasting through April and May. But then, like a vicious kick from behind, her new-found peace was shattered in an hour and she was lost again, this time out of sight and sound of a guide.

  It struck without even a token warning, a sudden spell of dizziness, and a single spasm of pain, as she was climbing the stairs to the first landing to see how the decorators were getting on with the little room overlooking the quad that had been selected as a nursery. She caught the iron rail of the banister and stood there, waiting for the spell to pass before moving up the last few stairs into the bedroom and finally she reached it with a sense of panic mounting in her as she hauled herself over the threshold and fell sideways across the bed.

  The second spasm made her cry out and old Rigby heard her from the stairwell, calling up anxiously, ‘Is that you, ma’am…?’ and when she was unable to answer she had a terrible certainty that she would die here alone before anyone was aware of what was happening. Mercifully he called again, ‘Ma’am? Did you call?’ and she knew then that Rigby was her sole chance of summoning help and shouted, ‘Rigby! Up here…!’ and the old chap came at a trot, peering round the edge of the bedroom door and blinking at the sight of her sprawled sideways across the bed.

  ‘The doctor… quickly… then the head, but phone first!’

  He had his wits about him, senile as he appeared to most people, and was gone in a flash as the waves of pain crashed down on her submerging everything save a sense of maddening frustration that she was going to lose the baby within the hour. Then, unaccountably, the room seemed half-full of people, among them Davy and the matron, and her sense of time and place evaporated so that she was adrift on an ocean of pain and wretchedness, with only occasional glimpses of land in the form of Davy’s anxious face and the fumbling hands of the matron as they wrestled with her clothes and tried to ease her into bed.

  Willoughby must have arrived soon afterwards but there was little he could do but ease the pain to some extent and then, quite suddenly, she was aware that some hours must have passed for the sun patterns on the west-facing wall had lengthened telling her that it was evening. She heard Willoughby say, ‘Take it easy, now… it’s all over,’ and she wanted to ask if there was any chance that a seven-months-old child could live but could not frame the question for her mind was still confused and her strength utterly spent.

  It was nearly twelve hours later that she came to grips with it, opening her eyes to find the room empty save for the matron, who was standing by the tall window, her back to the bed, looking out on dawn creeping over the eastern edge of the moor. She looked cool and very clinical in her uniform, so cool that Chris found herself hating the woman’s detachment. She said, ‘It was stillborn, wasn’t it?’ and the woman gave a slight start and turned back to the bed, saying, ‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Powlett-Jones. A boy. I am sorry…’ but stopped, looking troubled and embarrassed.

  ‘Where’s my husband?’

  ‘He’s asleep, I think. He was here until an hour or so ago. Doctor made him go and take a nap. Shall I fetch him?’

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t want him fetched and she didn’t want his sympathy or anyone else’s sympathy. Anythin
g anyone said to her now would sound banal and would stoke the rage and bitterness that glowed in her like a furnace.

  ‘Could you eat something? Some soup, perhaps?’

  ‘Later. What time is it?’

  ‘Getting on for six. At least let me get you some tea.’

  ‘Very well.’

  She did not want the tea but she did want to get rid of the woman, if only for a few minutes. The sense of doom and failure enfolded her like a huge, soggy blanket and she turned her face from the wan light, lying still until matron came rustling in with the tea.

  ‘Did Dr Willoughby give any reason?’

  ‘He said it might be one of many… maybe a fall, or some heavy exertion.’

  She wanted to hurl the teapot at the woman’s head. She had had no fall, had done nothing out of the ordinary beyond climbing a few extra stairs. But it was her second dead child and she remembered she had told Willoughby of the first.

  Davy came in, saying little but sitting by the bed and holding her hand. What was there to say, anyway? Then Willoughby tried the medical guff ‘Chance in a thousand… no reason at all why she couldn’t bear a live child… happened sometimes quite inexplicably touched off by an incident too insignificant to be recalled…’ She wished them all to the devil, along with the scores of boys who erupted in the quad at stipulated intervals during the day, their assemblies and dispersals regulated by that damned bell.

  A day or so later Davy tried a new tack. They would go away on a long Continental tour the day term ended. Down the Rhine, maybe, to Switzerland and then Italy if she fancied. Her responses were mechanical and he did not press her, sensing that the depression was too deep to be charmed away by reassurances and promised treats.

  In another day or two she was allowed up but had no wish to go downstairs and still took her meals in the bedroom. They brought her books but she could never summon enough concentration to get beyond the first paragraph or two. All day the sun shone strongly through the southern window and in the evening, when Davy came up to take supper with her, the room was flooded with the pink reflection of sunset on the rim of the moor. On the third day she had been out of bed, he said suddenly, ‘You’ve got to snap out of it, Chris. Not for my sake but your own. God knows, I realise how keen you were to have that child and why, but this isn’t you. You’re a fighter and you’ve got to come to terms with it sooner or later. Willoughby swears there’s absolutely no reason at all why you shouldn’t have a child and I never once heard him use soft talk on a patient.’