by Francis King
Chapter Eight
During our second year at Gladbury Bob’s father, on leave from India, came to lecture one Sunday. I was astonished by how old he looked, with a wispy white beard and a fringe of white hair around his otherwise bald, bulging cranium. He wore a crumpled linen jacket and black trousers, exposing his black, woollen socks, and a soiled dog-collar. Bob’s mother was with him, and she too looked far too old to have a son so young, and far too virginal, with her pale, narrow face, and pale, thin lips, to have a son at all.
The lecture was about the work of the mission in southern India, and Bob was deputed by his father to operate the lantern. There was a lot of giggling when the slides appeared upside down or when, Mr Williams having clicked repeatedly with the small device in his right hand, they appeared not at all. ‘ Oh, come on, Bob!’ he would exclaim irritably; or ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Wake up!’
There were fuzzy pictures of colleagues, some white but most brown, who were doing ‘an absolutely marvellous job’, who were ‘quite selfless,’ who were ‘ totally indispensable’. We were shown sufferers from leprosy, grinning abjectly into the camera while they displayed a bandaged hand or foot; a deformed baby without any arms; a man whose right leg had swollen to a huge size because of elephantiasis. Later Bob told me that, while he was still with his parents in India, he had seen an elephantiasis sufferer whose ‘balls reached amost to the floor – bigger than footballs’. Mr Williams spoke of how the love of God reconciled all these people to the sadness of their fates. He also spoke repeatedly of the need for funds, no doubt because after the lecture there was to be a collection.
The headmaster, Mr Curry, sat up on the dais beside the screen, glowering at us each time that a mishap with the slides caused us to giggle. Perhaps I giggled more loudly than the others. Certainly I was all at once aware that it was at me personally that he was now glowering, rather than at the whole assembly. I bit the inside of my cheek, I pretended to blow my nose violently.
‘I want you to give really generously,’ Mr Curry exhorted us when the lecture was over. ‘ I’m sure you all agree that this is a cause deserving of all the support that we can offer.’
Later Bob told me that he had put a button into the bag when it was passed to him, before its descent among the rest of us. So it was that, when on the following Sunday Mr Curry came to announce the total, he told the congregation that he was glad that the sum was as large as sixteen pounds, three shillings, two pence and – a button. There was contempt in the emphasis which he gave to the last word.
Mr Williams thanked us all for having been such an attentive audience. He seemed to have been totally unaware of our giggles. We clapped hesitantly, unsure whether this was appropriate on a quasi-religious occasion. He gave a little bow and grinned, to reveal ill-fitting butter-yellow false teeth. Then he turned to Bob: ‘All right, Bob. Just bring the slides with you and I’ll see to the projector.’
Bob pushed the last two slides into the second of the two boxes, each made of battered leather, and then got to his feet, one box in either hand. He approached the edge of the dais on which the projector had been placed and stared at me. I knew that reckless, impudent look so well. Then he stepped off the dais. With an ‘Oops!’, he slipped, foundered, crashed to the floor. The boxes bounced on either side of him, with a sound of shattering glass. I was certain that he had skillfully engineered the apparent accident.
‘Oh, you – you stupid, stupid boy! You nincompoop! Can’t you ever do anything right?’ Mr Williams was livid. Then he controlled himself: ‘Oh, never mind, never mind! Let’s see the extent of the damage,’ He hurried across the hall, from one dais to the other, and opened one of the boxes. Shards of glass scattered from it. Then he wailed: ‘Oh, lord, lord, now what am I going to do? The day after tomorrow I’m supposed to be giving this talk at Sedbergh and on the day after that … It’ll be no good without slides.’
The boys tried to humiliate ‘Bighead’ about his parents. ‘They’re ancient!’ one of the monitors told him. ‘Are you sure that they’re not your grandparents?’ someone took up, and another: ‘Or your great-grandparents?’
‘How on earth did they manage to do it?’ The question, from a boy with the features of a fox, evoked general guffaws.
Bob smiled, totally unfazed. ‘Well, you’ve heard of Isaac in the Bible, haven’t you? His father Abraham was a hundred years old when he was born and his mother was ninety. My father and mother are a modern Abraham and Sarah. That’s all.’ He shrugged his shoulders, pulled a face and laughed. As so often, he had cleverly undercut their ridicule. There was nothing worse that anyone could say.
Chapter Nine
One Parents’ Weekend during that second year, when Ma was away in Monte Carlo with the rich, elderly man whom both she and I called The Lord of Hosts, because he was a peer and because he gave such frequent and lavish parties, Bob suggested that I should have lunch with him and his parents in the hotel at which they were staying. Ma always stayed at the four-star Dolphin, even though on one occasion there had been a fuss about a cheque which had bounced, not once but twice; but the Williamses had put up at what was more a pub than a hotel, surrounded by housing estates far out in the sprawling, smoky suburbs. To reach it, Bob and I had to use our bicycles.
As we sat down in the dining-room, I was already wishing that I had not agreed to come. Another boy, whose father owned a Lagonda and whose mother had been on the stage, had also invited me to lunch. I did not much like the boy, but to be with them all on a picnic near Tintern Abbey or on the banks of the Wye now seemed far preferable.
‘Shall we all have the soup?’ Mrs Williams said firmly, after a perusal of the menu. Ma had often told me that ‘ No one who is anyone has soup at luncheon.’ But I nodded: ‘ Fine.’ ‘And the roast pork afterwards?’ I nodded again. ‘Oh, and some ginger beer for the boys,’ she told the waitress. ‘You’d like ginger beer, boys, wouldn’t you?’
‘Frost would much rather have some real beer,’ Bob said. ‘That’s what he always drinks when he’s out with his mother.’
Both parents stared at me in shocked amazement.
‘No, no. He’s talking nonsense. Please!’ I had begun to blush. ‘Ginger beer is fine.’
‘Oh, do stop playing the ass!’ Bob’s father told him.
Literally playing the ass, Bob hee-hawed, making everyone in the dining-room turn round.
‘Bob! Stop that!’ His mother slapped the menu down on to the table top. She looked yellow and tired. Later, Bob was to tell me that she suffered from recurrent bouts of malaria.
‘Sorry, Mater, sorry!’ I doubt if he had ever called her ‘Mater’ before.
Mr Williams, clearly feeling obliged to make conversation with me but at a loss how to do so, began to question me about my studies. How far had I progressed in Latin? What period of history were we doing in my class? Was I past quadratic equations? He even ventured a question in French, in a terrible accent, to test how proficient I was in the language. Through all this inquisition I could not help noticing how much food he and his wife devoured. ‘Isn’t either of you interested in any more of these excellent roast potatoes?’ he asked at one moment; and at another moment it was she who was asking: ‘No one for any more parsnips? We don’t want to waste them, do we?’
We sat in the lounge over coffee so weak that it might have been tea. Bob had found, among a pile of out-of-date copies of Punch, Farmer’s Weekly, The Lady and Tatler, one of those puzzles once so common in the waiting-rooms of dentists. Face screwed up with determination, he lay back in his chair, tipping the little balls now this way and now that.
Eventually his mother said: ‘Oh, Bob, do put that down and drink your coffee!’
For a moment he did put it down. Then, having sipped at his coffee, he picked it up again.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bob!’ Now it was his father.
Even then, I had a strong social sense. I was as bored as Bob but I would never have dreamed of revealing that I was. Despera
tely I tried to make conversation, now putting my own questions to Mr Williams instead of answering his. Was it terribly hot during the summer in India? Had he ever shot a tiger? (‘Oh, dear me, no! What an idea!’ was his answer to that one.) Was it true that women in India committed suicide on the deaths of their husbands? I could see that all this feigned interest was beginning to please him. He became more and more animated, leaning forward in his chair and cracking the joints of his knobbly fingers as he held forth. Bob yawned and yawned again and gave the puzzle an angry shake, so that the little balls rattled from side to side. Eventually he chucked the puzzle across to an empty chair some way distant from us and picked up a copy of Tatler.
He flicked over the pages, then whistled in amazement. ‘Look at this! Would you believe it?’ He held out the magazine. ‘There’s Mervyn’s mater!’ He began to read out the caption in a derisive parody of a county voice. ‘The Honourable Mrs Leo Frost, with friend in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.’ The only thing wrong with the county voice was that he pronounced the aspirate of the Honourable, as he always did, in mockery.
Hands clasped, Mr Williams leaned forward in his chair, revealing those butter-yellow false teeth. ‘Is your mother, er, a member of the aristocracy then?’ he asked.
‘Well, yes – of a sort.’
‘Then your father …?’ He was becoming increasingly excited.
‘No. My father’s just a plain Mister.’
‘His mother’s the daughter of a duke,’ Bob put in, knowing that this was not true.
‘Oh, shut up! Actually, she’s the daughter of a peer.’ Snob that I then was, I took pleasure in establishing this.
‘And what would his title be?’
I told him. ‘At least, that’s what he was. Grandad’s dead now. Ma’s – my mother’s – cousin is the present Lord. But they don’t really get on.’
‘He went to prison,’ Bob said. ‘You must have read about it in the papers. For assaulting a police officer who stopped his car when he was drunk. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that. Or been drunk when driving.’
Mrs Williams scowled at her son.
‘His mother’s grandfather was that General – General Lymot – who gave the order for his troops to fire on that huge crowd in Bhopal,’ Bob continued. ‘Hundreds and hundreds were killed.’
‘I’d no idea you were one of that family,’ Mr Williams said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this, Bob?’
Instead of answering, Bob held out the magazine to his father. ‘Isn’t she a stunner?’
‘She’s certainly, er, striking,’ Mr Williams conceded after a hurried glance.
‘But what on earth is she wearing on her head?’ Bob now demanded, holding out the photograph to each of us in turn. ‘Frost, what on earth is she wearing on her head? It looks like a giant cowpat.’
‘Bob, please!’ Angrily, Mr Williams snatched the magazine, snapped it shut and returned it to the pile on the table.
Mrs Williams yawned, placing the back of her hand, with its worn wedding-ring and its garnet signet ring, up to her pale, narrow lips. ‘Deary me! I feel quite sleepy after that excellent lunch. I think that I’ll toddle upstairs for a little snooze.’
Bob jumped decisively to his feet. ‘I’m afraid we ought to be getting back.’
‘Getting back!’ Mrs Williams wailed. ‘But I thought you could stay out till seven.’
‘Oh, no!’ Bob lied. ‘We have to be back by three thirty.’
‘But I thought … Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. You see, we have choir practice.’ Neither Bob nor I was in the choir.
‘You never told us you were in the choir, Bob!’ Mr Williams said.
‘Didn’t I? Oh, I got in last term. Frost got in as soon as we arrived here – before his voice had broken.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful news. But it does seem odd to have a choir practice on a Sunday evening when parents are down for the weekend.’
Bob shrugged. ‘It’s rotten luck.’
‘Well, if you have to go, you have to go.’ Mrs Williams sighed. Suddenly she looked far frailer and older than before, her shoulders slumped and the corners of her mouth turned down, to emphasise the deep lines on either side of it. ‘Then we won’t see you before our departure, I suppose?’ The next morning they were returning to London. The morning after that, they would be off again to India, for another four years of duty.
When the time came for goodbyes, Mrs Williams clutched Bob to her, with a gulping moan. ‘Oh, Bob, Bob, Bob! These separations! Why, why, why?’ Tears began to gush out of her eyes and coursed down her cheeks.
‘Well, that’s what the Good Lord wants of us,’ Mr Williams said, in a tone which suggested that he was not really convinced of this. He put an arm round his wife: ‘Now, buck up, Mother.’
Angrily she turned her head round and up and glared at him. There was hatred in that glare. I was amazed and frightened by it.
Out in the yard, where we had left our bicycles, Bob suddenly began to laugh. He laughed on and on, as though in mounting hysteria. Then abruptly he stopped. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘ I just couldn’t take any more. There are times when they just don’t seem related to me, related to me in any way at all. Do you ever feel that about your mother?’
‘No.’ There were times when I felt related to her far too closely, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.
‘There she was blubbing away, and I could feel nothing, nothing whatever. Except an impatience to get away from her. Does that strike you as terribly unnatural?’
It did. But I replied with no more than a shrug. Then I asked: ‘Are we going back?’
‘Of course not, idiot!’ He mounted his bicycle and rang the bell once, twice. We’re going out to Pulverton.’
‘To Pulverton!’ Why on earth should we be going out to that dank little country town, little more than a long row of thatched cottages surrounded by council estates similar to the ones now surrounding us? ‘ What are we going to do in Pulverton?’
‘We’re going to have tea in the Green Cockatoo. If you have some money on you, that is. Dad forgot to tip me and I forgot to remind him.’
‘What’s the Green Cockatoo?’
‘A tea-shop. Where else would we have tea?’
‘But why do we have to go there? It’s miles and miles. And it’s far too hot for bicycling.’
‘Wait and see!’
It was during a Field Day, which had occupied me along with most of the rest of the boys, that Bob had first visited the Green Cockatoo. Although he was later to have a ‘good’ War as a boffin in the obscure world of Intelligence, at that time, claiming to be a pacifist, he had refused to join the OTC. The head monitor, our housemaster and finally Mr Curry had all tried to persuade him of the error of his views; but, as so often, opposition merely made him more obdurate.
‘I was cycling past and suddenly, in the doorway, there she was!’ At this point, abreast, we were flying down a hill, in a wind so strong that he had to shout to be heard.
‘Who was?’
‘This girl, idiot, this girl! You’ve never seen anything like her.’
But when we arrived at the Green Cockatoo, a thatched cottage in that low jumble of thatched cottages, the ‘girl’ turned out to be a woman, plump, placid, with coarse, deeply waved red hair, who must have been at least thirty. As we placed ourselves at one table, she was serving another. Bob leaned across our table to whisper to me: ‘That’s her. That one’ – he made a gesture with his head – ‘not that old hag over there.’ To me both were old hags.
His attempts at flirtation were embarrassingly clumsy. When the woman asked us: ‘Well, what would you like?’, he leered at her: ‘Do you really want to know?’ Later, as she set down the tea things, he peered over the V revealed as her cotton dress fell away from her ample breasts, and announced: ‘ I can see all kinds of wonderful things in the happy valley that I’m sure I ought not to be seeing.’
After more of this, she said in a lazy, goo
d-natured voice: ‘Oh, give over, do!’ She turned to me: ‘Is he always like this?’
I did not know what to answer, having never been with him and a woman who attracted him. I gave an embarrassed laugh.
Suddenly – he had been watching her as she hurried from one table to another – he announced to me in a voice so loud that I feared that everyone must have heard him: ‘I’ve got a cock-stand.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
He insisted on our spinning out the tea, now calling for some more cakes and now for some more hot water.
Eventually, the waitress came over with the bill. ‘I’ll give you this now. I’m about to be off.’
‘You’re leaving us! How could you be so cruel?’
She gave a resigned sigh. ‘Oh, stow it, do!’ Then she turned to me. ‘Can’t you keep him in order?’
Again I gave that embarrassed laugh.
‘Where are you going?’
‘What business is that of yours, I’d like to know?’
‘Don’t tell me you’re meeting a boyfriend. That would be too cruel.’
She giggled. She was beginning to enjoy the badinage. ‘That’s my secret,’ she said.
Once she had vanished, Bob decided that there was no more reason for us to stay there. Disconsolately he got astride his bicycle. ‘Oh, fuck! She must have a boyfriend already.’
‘She’s not exactly young, is she? She might be married,’ I added.
‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!’
For a while we bicycled in silence. Then, after we had left the village behind us, he began to curse quietly to himself: ‘Oh, fuck! Oh, bugger! Oh, shit, shit, shit!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’ve got to do something about this cock-stand. She’s given me this hellish cock-stand and I can’t get rid of it.’
Soon after that, he slowed down, dismounted, and wheeled his bicycle into a copse beside the road. Reluctantly I followed him.
‘Look at it! Just look!’ He had unbuttoned his fly. Now with a grimace, he held his swollen cock out in his hand for my inspection.