An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Score?’ Taplow said, plainly startled.

  ‘It’s maturing, if you ask me. Do you remember us talking, not all that long ago, about earlier maturation among adolescents nowadays? Well, out in the world, so to speak, it can be of a raw and pretty hideous sort. Wasn’t I saying something about sex in the telly culture? I ought to have been, because I think about it quite a lot: sex as simply an arena for predatory grab. But in places like this, variously absurd as they are, what is undoubtedly sexual feeling of a sort has scope to express itself, and test its muscle, in a more decently human way. God knows what the thing can be called. One has to use “romantic friendship”, or some such corny phrase. But there’s something to be said for it, so far as nudging kids in the direction of civilised adult feeling and behaviour is concerned.’

  ‘I see,’ Taplow said seriously – although he was no doubt as surprised as I was by this fresh facet of Johncock’s thinking, and may also have been wondering whether Johncock was quite the man for the job he had been proposing. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that what we’re confronted with at the moment is a pretty kettle of fish. What are those two runaways up to? Educating each other for a mature citizenship? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘Quite precisely what they’re up to isn’t all that important.’ It was with some surprise that I heard myself break in with this. ‘The essential point is, Tim, that the occasion of their flight seems to hitch on to what Clive has been talking about. Hayes – who has certainly been thrown quite off balance by one thing or another – believes himself to be rescuing little Daviot from Heaven knows what, here in School House. I think Hayes has received some almost vicious prompting from an irresponsible uncle – but that’s by the way. The main fact is that a kind of chivalrous impulse appears to be at work. What sort of boy is being rescued from the dragon I scarcely know.’

  ‘Little Daviot,’ Taplow said a shade defensively, ‘isn’t all that bad. Silly, no doubt.’

  ‘And stage-struck? Father Edwards tells me he’s that. It may be a factor in their plans. Daviot may believe immediate stardom awaits him, if he can just get away from Helmingham.’

  ‘But what about Hayes?’Johncock asked sharply. ‘Can he be dotty enough to believe that?’

  ‘I don’t think he can.’ I was in fact certain of this at once. ‘But now there’s another thing. My Hayes is not the only Hayes on the run.’

  ‘Robert, what the devil do you mean by that?’ It was plain that Taplow was irritated again.

  ‘Hayes’s father is in gaol, you remember. Or, rather, he has been in gaol. He walked out of it the day before yesterday. So far as I know, he’s still at large.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ Johncock demanded, ‘that he and his son have made a rendezvous, and with young Daviot to keep them company?’

  ‘It does seem a possibility. I had Edwards break to the boy the news of his father’s foolish behaviour, and Robin then seems to have packed up at once and departed from us. It’s conceivable that his father’s act was something the boy had reason to expect. But I incline to the view that it was just a final stroke toppling his remaining good sense.’

  ‘We’re getting nowhere,’ Taplow suddenly exploded. ‘Bloody nowhere! And meanwhile the story is running through the whole school?’

  ‘It will certainly be doing that,’ I said. ‘Thank goodness half-term is only a few days away.’ At Helmingham, I ought to explain, this particular half-term in the year is quite a considerable affair, the entire school dispersing for a week. ‘There will be a bit of a breather in that.’

  ‘There will be six hundred boys let loose on the land,’ Johncock said. ‘Not to speak of small contingents going to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. And all with this story on their eager young lips. Well may we bless half-term.’

  I hadn’t thought of this, and for a moment we all fell silent. Then suddenly the door of Taplow’s study was flung open by Jubb – a Jubb who bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘The Honourable Mr Justice Daviot!’

  And thus the fugitive David’s grandfather arrived on our scene.

  It was like being called upon to be upstanding in court. But the visitor showed neither annoyance nor amusement at Jubb’s performance, advancing upon Taplow and shaking hands in silence. He seemed quite as old as even English judges are allowed to be, and he was handsome in a heavy way. Still having a fairly clear picture of David Daviot in my head, I tried to imagine Sir Henry at his grandson’s age. Was the handsomeness of the one distinguishably related to the beauty of the other? Naturally I found no answer to this – and now Taplow was introducing us.

  ‘Mr Syson,’ Taplow said. ‘Mr Syson is the housemaster’ – and he hesitated for a moment – ‘of the boy Hayes.’

  I didn’t much care for this, since Taplow might almost have been saying, ‘of the wretched defendant’. But Sir Henry shook hands and murmured something polite.

  ‘And this,’ Taplow went on, ‘is Mr Johncock, an assistant master, who is entirely in our confidence.’ I didn’t greatly care for this either, since it might have been a formula for presenting a superior kind of clerk. And Sir Henry said nothing, gave Johncock a bow, and then a brief straight look. Whereupon Johncock, with what I thought admirable composure, gave a bow in his turn, said something inaudible to Taplow, and left the room.

  ‘And now,’ Sir Henry Daviot said with a quite indefinable largeness of courtesy as he allowed himself to be ushered into a chair, ‘we can put our heads together over this unfortunate episode. We can try – if the expression isn’t too portentous for such a vagary – to probe its occasion.’ He paused on this. ‘One wonders,’ he went on, ‘whether the boys have run away to sea – whether as stowaways or as cook’s apprentices. The adventure stories used to make it out in that way.’

  I was surprised by this almost trivialising remark. It seemed out of character. It seemed to be this even although the judge’s character was something I knew nothing about. But I recalled telling myself that it would be the instinct of anyone in his position to be chary of inflating a delicate family affair. Not that the old man hadn’t acted promptly enough. For here he was, post-haste from London, in his grandson’s housemaster’s study. I wondered whether he had called on John Stafford first.

  ‘I needn’t tell you, sir, that we are all deeply concerned – and myself in particular – over what has happened.’ Having begun, very properly, with this, Taplow promptly took the initiative in asking questions, and I realised with relief that he was going to show up well. ‘Has David been in correspondence with you throughout the term so far?’

  ‘Certainly. The customary weekly letters, Mr Taplow. There has been little of anything that hinted distress in them. But there are matters about which letters from school are prescriptively uninformative. Or am I insufficiently up to date? My own schooldays are rather far behind me.’

  ‘One can scarcely generalise, Sir Henry. Judging from some letters that I get from parents, there are boys who send home a regular bill of indictment every week. Robert, would you agree?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘But I’d guess it to be minority behaviour. Public school education is appallingly costly nowadays, and probably four boys out of five are conscious that their parents are making considerable sacrifices to manage it. So they make their reports home as favourable as possible.’

  Sir Henry inclined his head slightly. Previously, he had been turning it from one to the other of us with an air of greater attention than I felt we warranted. He had only to listen with sufficient patience – his attitude seemed to imply – and truth would emerge, whether we liked it or not.

  ‘What about the summer holidays?’ It was perhaps with a shade less of confidence that Taplow thus took the initiative anew. One doesn’t – he might have been reflecting – ask a judge questions. Contrariwise. ‘Did David offer any suggestion then that he was unhappy at school?’

  ‘Had he done so, Mr Taplow, it is quite certain that I should have inquired into the matter rigorously. But there was nothing of
the sort. It is true that I saw less of him that I would have wished. He was active over his own concerns – and particularly in the way of theatre-going. I saw to it that it was commonly with an older companion.’

  ‘He is very taken up with the stage, is he not? And has shown signs of possessing some talent as an actor. One idea already in the air is that his leaving us so abruptly is conceivably connected with precocious and obviously unrealistic theatrical ambitions.’ Taplow paused on this. But Sir Henry, who was all large attention, said nothing. So Taplow went on. ‘Yet I’m afraid – and I mustn’t conceal it for a moment – that there is some reason to believe that your grandson has indeed been unhappy here in School House for some time. There have been instances of bullying, and perhaps of other forms of misbehaviour, which I am ashamed to say I have been too slow to spot and jump on. I am doing something positive about it now.’ (This, I supposed, was a reference to the proposal to recruit Johncock in the fight against juvenile crime.) ‘But, so far as David is concerned, that may be a matter of locking the stable door a little on the late side.’

  This was, perhaps, a little on the trite side, and David’s grandfather received it in silence. I felt it was my turn to speak.

  ‘And that, Sir Henry, is where my boy – a very senior boy – comes in. He has formed a friendship with David – a warm friendship of a schoolboy character – and seems to have arrived at an exaggerated view of your grandson’s sufferings. Hayes, in fact, has been thrown a little off his balance – and I suspect, moreover, that he has been receiving bad advice from an uncle. The result has been his removing David from the school in a kind of rescue operation. It is absurd and no doubt reprehensible. But there has been some spark of honourable feeling in it.’

  ‘Mr Syson, if the facts turn out to be as you state, your verdict may be valid enough. For then what we are confronted with is mere juvenile folly which can be soon mended. So I hope you are right.’

  This seemed a judicious and temperate speech, and I wondered why I wasn’t quite satisfied with it. Then I saw that there lurked in it an odd proviso. Whether my facts were right or not, what could there possibly be in what Johncock had dubbed the Entführung that the term ‘juvenile folly’ wouldn’t adequately cover? Asking myself this, I thought I saw what must be in our elderly visitor’s head. If the elopement, like most actual elopements, was as well as a rescue a prelude to specific sexual activity, this would be something beyond the bounds of mere folly in his mind. It was a way of thinking with which I had no great sympathy – observation having confirmed me in the view that with adolescent boys more harm is done by creating an uproar over such spontaneous affairs than by letting them run their brief course to a conclusion. But perhaps Her Majesty’s judges were more or less obliged to subscribe to a different opinion. And of course when I was myself aware of anything of the sort going on I was always in considerable anxiety about it, since it could put careers at hazard and occasion acute distress in a boy’s home.

  ‘Whatever the precise facts may be,’ Sir Henry was saying, ‘we have to address ourselves to the task of running our young friends to earth – or to sea, if they do happen to have engaged themselves as cabin-boys. We need not, I feel, be in a hurry to call in the police, or publicise the affair in any way. There is no substantial sense in which harm is likely to have come to them. At the worst they may have met with a road-accident, and be in hospital with broken limbs and no disposition to identify themselves. Even so, matters will straighten themselves out.’ The judge paused on this, and I had a momentary sense that he didn’t quite believe what he had said. There was, in fact, some deep agitation hidden in him. ‘We must bestir ourselves, nevertheless. I wonder what money they have. Not, I imagine, very much. I certainly don’t believe in giving a child like David a great deal.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said. ‘Hayes has his own bank account, and I have reason to believe he was given a cheque for what may have been a substantial amount by an uncle only a couple of days ago.’

  ‘The irresponsible uncle,’ Taplow asked, ‘that you believe to be a nigger in the woodpile?’

  ‘Yes, Tim. Tandem. Mrs Hayes’s wealthy brother.’

  Sir Henry, for the first time since he had sat down, stirred in his chair. For a moment, I believe, his attention had lapsed from us. And it was oddly, somehow, that he now spoke.

  ‘That name,’ he said. ‘A common enough name, I suppose.’

  ‘Tandem?’ I repeated in surprise. ‘I never heard the word as a surname before.’

  ‘No, no—Hayes. I mean Hayes.’ The judge was now sitting stiffly in his chair, and the brief look he directed on me made me feel much like a man in a dock. ‘Mr Syson,’ he said sternly, ‘is information that I ought to have received being withheld from me?’

  ‘Most certainly not, Sir Henry.’ Although for a moment angry and confused by this abrupt hostile treatment, the explanation of it was clear to me at once. It had simply not entered my head that our visitor was unaware of having sent to prison the father of my Head of House. But why – unless he had indeed made a call on John Stafford – should he know anything of the kind? ‘I must apologise,’ I went on. ‘I’ve been taking something for granted about your bearings in this affair. Robin Hayes, the boy who has gone off with David, does happen to be the son of a man you had to deal with not many months ago. A case of embezzlement by a country solicitor.’

  ‘Well I’m blessed!’ Taplow said. I had already told him of this odd fact, but he had clearly forgotten about it. ‘It certainly adds a touch of irony, or something of that sort, to the picture.’

  ‘No doubt it may be viewed in that light, Mr Taplow.’ The judge somehow contrived to make this colourless remark sound particularly courteous. I told myself that he had regained his composure – and the reflection made me realise that he must momentarily have lost it. What could account for this, I didn’t know. Perhaps it was merely that there was an additional humiliation in the fact that the companion his grandson had chosen to bolt from school with was the son of a convicted criminal. But now it occurred to me that there was another piece of information that David’s grandfather should have.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to mention,’ I said, ‘that Hayes’s father, who has been in a place called Hutton Green, has absconded from it. I had the news from the Governor – he happens to be a schoolfellow of mine – the day before yesterday, and I had it passed on to the boy at once. It seems possible that it was the final prompting to his own departure from Helmingham.’

  ‘With my grandson.’

  These words arrested me – precisely because they were otiose and made no contribution to our discussion. And Sir Henry Daviot, one could see, was not a man for idle reiteration. Again I had the sense of his being upset. The mere fact of the identity of Robin’s father had startled him, and now it was almost as if he had for a moment been positively alarmed on being told of the convicted man’s senseless behaviour. Perhaps it was no more than a kind of reflex action. Perhaps judges and magistrates regularly experienced a brief sensation of the kind on learning that somebody they had sent to prison had broken out and was on the prowl again. The same reaction mightn’t attach to the mere knowledge that such a man had finished his regular sentence. It would be an irrational feeling in either case, since released criminals, although sometimes prompted to take it out of witnesses and accomplices who have offended their sense of justice, seldom if ever have a go at the beaks who have judged their case.

  However all that might be, Sir Henry was quickly composed again, and had now turned to address me with the habitual formal politeness of the bench.

  ‘Mr Taplow and I,’ he said, ‘have of course discussed my grandson’s character on former occasions. I have, I believe, a fairly clear view of David – although it is undoubtedly true that small boys can pack surprises. Some of the most astonishing things I have ever heard in court have come from juveniles who could scarcely get their noses above the witness box. That is by the way. Of the boy Hayes I know nothing
at all. I wonder, Mr Syson, whether you would be good enough to afford me some view of him?’

  It was a reasonable request, and if it disconcerted me this must have been because it further conjured up in Tim Taplow’s study something like the atmosphere of a law court. I did my best to give a fair picture of the unfortunate Robin, and when I had finished Sir Henry made me a grave bow and thanked me for having been a great help to him. It was exactly as if I had been a very junior counsel who had been hopefully rambling before him.

  ‘I wonder,’ he then said blandly, ‘What the boy’s contemporaries think of him – and whether perhaps any of them has been in his confidence? Has he a particularly close friend in Heynoe, Mr Syson?’

  ‘His fellow-prefect, a boy called Macleod, is certainly his closest friend.’

  ‘Then I wonder whether Macleod might be sent for?’

  This was decidedly taking charge of things. But again the request was a reasonable one, given the unfortunate situation in which we found ourselves.

  ‘Certainly we can talk to Macleod,’ I said. ‘But, if you will excuse me, I’ll go and fetch him myself. Where friends are concerned, one wants to avoid the effect of a summons.’

  Sir Henry received this with a nod as of cordial agreement, but he mayn’t have been too pleased. Nor was I quite contented with myself. The Hayes affair was turning me prickly. I had come thoroughly to dislike Mr Tandem. I wasn’t exactly disliking the judge. But I did feel that there was some still-hidden facet to him which might prove awkward at any time. Saying something about being back in ten minutes, I left the room. Taplow and his visitor, I told myself, could have another chat about David’s character.

  I glanced at my watch, and saw that I might have to yank Macleod out of class by means of a messenger and a chit – a procedure always to avoid if one could. But it wasn’t so. Macleod had a free hour, and I found him in the library.