by D. J. Taylor
Henrietta was standing in the gap between the French windows making what looked like quite complicated semaphore signals.
‘It’s Nick wanting a word.’
‘Oh God,’ Clive said, not altogether failing to disguise his pleasure at being rung at ten o’clock at night by the firm’s senior partner. ‘Well, if he wants it he’d better have it, hadn’t he?’ He strode off, a big man poised expertly on oddly tiny feet, and they watched the back of his striped pink shirt disappear into the house.
‘Sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘Not a particularly brilliant thing to say.’
‘Gracious,’ Mark said tolerantly. ‘You mustn’t mind about that. Clive’s a bit preoccupied by the proposal.’
‘The pipeline in Azerbaijan one?’
Clive and Mark had arrived at twenty to nine by taxi, grey with fatigue, clutching ring-bound files and what looked like the print-out from an old-fashioned computer but was actually the outpourings of a Russian telex machine.
‘Clive won’t be a moment.’ Henrietta came labouring back onto the patio, flapping vaguely at a midge cloud that hung in the doorway. Even on the low-key occasions, a category which surely included this entertainment of your husband’s understrapper and your husband’s understrapper’s girlfriend, being Clive’s wife must be rather a strain, Lucy deduced. Her eye fell again on the paperback of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
‘It’s wonderful isn’t it?’ Henrietta said before she could be asked. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve read it. And the film. That was wonderful too, wasn’t it? Quite made you want to go and stay there. Wherever it was set, I mean.’
‘It didn’t make me want to go and stay there,’ Lucy said diplomatically, ‘but I think I know what you mean.’
‘And it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ Henrietta went on fiercely. Her white, plumpish face was oddly animated, Lucy thought, like one of those TV game show contestants suddenly enriched beyond expectation. ‘I mean, why it is that writers come to write things.’
‘Beckett wrote for luck.’
‘For what?’
‘I read it in some book of interviews. The Paris Review or somewhere. He said that whenever he sat down consciously to write, he was doing it for luck.’
Once again Lucy knew, instinctively, that she had said the wrong thing. Henrietta looked perplexed. More than perplexed, Lucy divined.
‘Do you know,’ she said – and years later Lucy would recall the look of injured innocence on her face – ‘I think you must be making fun of me. He couldn’t possibly have done that. There must have been another reason.’
‘I suppose it was all to do with him being Irish.’
‘You are making fun of me,’ said Henrietta, not crossly, Lucy thought – which might just have been warranted by the circumstances – but with an almost plaintive dolefulness. ‘I never heard anything so silly.’
They watched her pad off again through the French windows. In the kitchen they could see Clive stalking back and forth, bellowing excitedly into the mobile.
‘Looks as though you got the job,’ Lucy said. ‘Do you know, what Clive gets paid a year is probably the entire budget of the series I’m working on at the moment. I figured it out.’
‘Honestly Lu, that’s not much of a comparison.’
‘All the same,’ Lucy said, smiling brightly at Henrietta as she wheeled back into view bearing a tray of champagne flutes, ‘I just felt like making it.’
Later, quite a bit later, they rolled home in a cab down Putney Hill, through tiny streets sunk in darkness. Curiously, this was the time Lucy liked best about her life with Mark: that companionable ten minutes or so of padding around the silent house, checking the answerphone and the fax, setting out briefcases for the dawn. The morning’s post and the stack of estate agents’ brochures lay where she had left them on the kitchen table. Looking at Mark as he lurked at the foot of the bed, his game and still slightly frantic face looming happily through the shadows, Lucy wondered – something she’d never got to the bottom of in the three years of their relationship – if this serenity, this pleased matter-of-factness was genuine, whether it didn’t just denote some part of him held permanently in reserve.
‘I didn’t make it up,’ she said. ‘Beckett did say he wrote for luck.’
‘I’m sure he did.’ She could see him blinking thoughtfully at the pile of management magazines on the bedside table. ‘I think it was just a bit much for Henrietta.’
Something about the evening’s small talk came back to her. ‘This pipeline job. Will you have to go out there?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder. Clive will probably want me to project-manage it. Do you mind?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘It will probably mean waiting a bit on the house.’
Lucy had seen this coming. ‘How long?’
‘Well, two or three months. The spring, maybe. Prices may even have fallen a bit by then.’ He picked up one of the magazines. ‘You can do most things from Azerbaijan these days, but I don’t think buying a house is one of them.’
Lucy was surprised by the sense of loss that this brought, surreptitiously, into view. The Allardyces’ lawn; the child’s white face at the window; the thought that you shouldn’t be expected to put up with this degree of obtuseness from someone you loved; all these thoughts briefly but inconclusively contended in her head.
There was silence for a moment. Lucy fell asleep almost immediately, woke up for a second or two to see Mark brooding over a book called Managing the Blur: Corporate Life in the Connected Economy. She went back to sleep thinking of the little woman in the house in north Oxford whose book on the Gawain poet, she reflected, might have sold five hundred copies, Henrietta’s placid face under the light, a feeling that could have been contempt, or envy, or some quite different emotion lost now amid the coffee cups and the darkling south London lawn.
—2001
Teeny-weeny Little World
At some point in the remote past somebody had dropped a bottle of ink on the lip of the rush-mat carpeting. Over the years the stain had faded from light-blue to cobalt, finally to an indeterminate shade of grey. He would have missed it had it not been there. The secretary, who had shuffled the sheets of paper on her desk three times and pretended to read them twice, said, exaggeratedly, ‘The Headmaster will see you now, Mr Crowther,’ like someone impersonating a secretary in a Carry On film, and he stood up and put the copy of the Old Boys’ newsletter, with its picture of the rugby team touring New Zealand, back on the circular table. Like the headmaster, the secretary was new, and had been heard to say that the fifty-yard walk to the noticeboards was an imposition. The boys, shrewd in these matters, had already nicknamed her ‘Ma Baboon’.
The path to the headmaster’s study lay across a tiled passage, sealed off at one end by locked double doors. Here there was a view out of the window into the Cathedral Close and several portraits of evil-looking old men in clerical robes. He wondered how many times he had taken this journey. Two hundred? Three? Routine made you unobservant, less vigilant of the nets that might be thrown out to pinion you. He pressed on into the study, past the gas-fire that sometimes worked if you kicked it in the right place and towards the immense oblong desk where the new headmaster sat making desultory remarks into a telephone. ‘A child-focused paradigm,’ Crowther heard him correct his caller, ‘irrespective of the core competencies.’
The new headmaster was short and stout and had the vestiges of a West Midlands accent. However, he had stopped saying ‘righty ho’, which showed a conciliating spirit. When he saw Crowther he waved excitedly, put down the telephone and said, in a single, unpunctuated stream of words: ‘Very good of you to come and see me won’t you take a chair great deal to discuss.’
Crowther took his chair, which was the one that slumped alarmingly to the left, and found himself marking the changes that had been effected since his last visit in the summer. The engraving of the Wensum at Pull’s Ferry was still there and the view of the city f
rom the high ground, but the drawing of the chapel had made way for a photo of what looked the debauched aftermath of the Chelsea Arts Club ball, but turned out to have been taken at the last meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference.
‘Very good of you,’ the new headmaster said again. Crowther resolved to concentrate more thoroughly, so that if anything was said with specific application to himself he should not look foolish. ‘Hear very good things about your extra studies classes GCSE boys,’ the new headmaster said unexpectedly, but with just enough of a glint in his eye to let Crowther know what was going on.
‘Oh yes,’ Crowther heard himself saying. He would admit nothing. Answer only direct questions. That was the way. ‘I mean…’ the new headmaster said. Another thing about the new headmaster was his habit of not finishing sentences, of allowing these streams of words to dry up on the river-bed leaving only inference to re-hydrate them.
‘What exactly..?’ he said again, and Crowther found himself explaining, in rather incriminating detail, about the classes, which encouraged, and occasionally compelled, rather wooden boys to read and discuss moderately abstruse contemporary poems. The new headmaster was already nodding his head. ‘Poetry…’ he said vaguely.
Crowther wondered what he meant by this. That he approved of it? Feared its corrosive influence? Outside it had begun to rain and there was a fine drizzle blowing over the Nelson statue and the spindly trees. It turned out that the new headmaster was advocating caution, if not variety. ‘A topical discussion, perhaps.’
Crowther knew all about topical discussions. ‘The wider context,’ the new headmaster ventured. It turned out that a parent, one Crowther particularly disliked, had written to disparage poetry and press for basic economic theory. ‘A very interesting suggestion,’ he heard himself saying. It was always a mistake to listen to parents.
The rain was coming down quite hard now, and a few boys, briefcases lofted above their heads, scuttled furtively between the chapel and the music centre. ‘Valuing the work put in,’ he heard the new headmaster say. There was something else going on here, he thought, an undercurrent of trouble he could have done without, a way in which, however subtly and respectfully, the values on which he had fashioned his existence were being called into question. Someone in the common room the other day had said that the new headmaster, known to be in favour of co-education and new universities, was also keen on early retirement. ‘Look forward to hearing…’ the new headmaster finished up. What did he look forward to? Crowther didn’t know.
The secretary laboured grimly into the room, looking more than ever like some text-book illustration of Darwinian theory, and he went back along the passage and out onto the tarmac of the playground, where the morning’s detritus included three oranges, an empty aspirin packet and a dog-eared copy of Les Fleurs du Mal.
It was not, in the end, the new headmaster’s fault, he thought to himself, driving home down a road along which lorries ferrying rubble from the site of the new shopping mall alternately surged and concertina’d. The new shopping mall, he knew, would merely displace the city’s commercial heart: a dozen new premises opening up half-a-mile from a dozen others ceasing to trade. But it was what people wanted. Teeny-weeny little world, he thought. A painter – was it Edward Burra? – had said that about a war-time Rye threatened by bombs: the same principle applied. No, the new headmaster was as much a victim as himself, not an ubermensch, but a minion sent to do that titan’s bidding. But this understanding did not make him any more sympathetic to the new headmaster: if anything, it made him crosser.
Parking the car in its square of luxuriantly unweeded gravel, he found himself wondering exactly what the values were that he feared were being called into question. No one, after all, was asking him to suspend his powers of judgment. Or were they? He knew that it was nonsense to pretend that basic economic theory was more valuable to a teenager than the poems of Geoffrey Hill. Or was it? He had a nasty feeling that he was being got at for believing in things whose superiority he could not absolutely prove. Doubtless there were people somewhere who thought a West Midlands accent demonstrated authenticity, roots, a vindicated purpose. Well they were wrong.
The house, whose silence he had looked forward to, was full of small, unsettling intrusions. In the kitchen he found his wife’s cousin Finula and her fast friend Cecily – quartered on the premises this past week – having one of their terrible conversations. He was used to his wife’s cousin Finula and even, up to a point, to her friend Cecily – engrossed, amnesiac creatures in their late fifties – but dealing with them required tact. ‘Mead is a very excellent drink,’ he heard his wife’s cousin Finula saying. Rather than preposterously free associating, Cecily gave one of her trademarked laughs – a full-throated sea-lion’s bark that had once, in a country lane, caused serious disturbance to a flock of sheep. Head down over the stove as he made his coffee, he attended to the conversational ebb and flow, which resembled a series of inexpertly flung javelins each landing a field’s length from its intended target.
Once Finula had engaged him in a literary conversation. Did he think Atonement was a nice book? It depended on what you meant by a nice book, he shot slyly back. After all, hadn’t George Orwell once said, apropos of Dali, that great art could still want burning by the public hangman? But you could not have this kind of conversation with Finula. Just as he had no vocabulary with which to discuss her profession, which was some kind of local government work, so she had no vocabulary to discuss books. Remembering this he deduced that in some way Finula and the new headmaster were confederate: each lacked the ability to discriminate.
Beyond the window the Norfolk fields descended into autumnal twilight. His wife came smiling into the room, and Finula and Cecily ceased to exist. ‘The Mannerings want to extend their garage,’ she said – the Mannerings lived at the bottom of the garden – ‘and put up a conservatory. Do we mind?’
‘Of course we mind,’ he said. The new headmaster; Cecily and Finula; the Mannerings. They were all the same, he thought, agents of the ubermensch, wreckers and despoilers.
Obscurely, after months of one-man guerrilla warfare, he found he had an ally. Most of the school staff were young, keen and sporty. Mr Deloitte, the art master, was old, cynical and treated the badminton set to an occasional negligent supervision. ‘You’ll get nowhere with the new man,’ he explained. ‘He’s one of the change for change’s sake brigade. There’ll be girls in here in a couple of years, I daresay. The boarding house is beyond saving. But you can have a lot of fun bamboozling him. They never understand irony, of course. And whatever you do, don’t refuse that offer of staff rep. on the governing body.’
‘They won’t want me,’ Crowther said, thinking of the letter that had lain on his desk since the end of last term.
‘They’ve no choice, have they?’ Deloitte said. ‘Senior man, aren’t you? Do you know, the wretched character’ – he meant the new headmaster – ‘actually gave some parent my home number. Had some fishwife ring me up to ask if Johnny would pass his GSCE.’
Slowly, sedately, without noticeable excitement, the autumn passed. A cement mixer and tessellations of scaffolding appeared in the Mannerings’ garden. Finula and Cecily departed for Chichester. Several books, a ceramics kit and three copies of Readers’ Digest followed them in a brown paper parcel. Still the letter from the governing body lay on his desk. Details of an early retirement package of quite startling munificence were posted on the common room notice board. All these things seemed to him to be connected: they demanded a decision from him that he did not want to make. Finally there came a day when he sat once again in the headmaster’s study in the defective arm-chair.
Outside the rain lashed the Cathedral Close: the secretary sat at her desk making coy, simian grunts. The new headmaster was, if anything, even fatter and had taken to saying ‘righty ho’ again.
‘Question of exploring synergies school already possesses,’ he said at one point.
Did that mean the extra stud
ies class? Crowther couldn’t tell. But he had done his homework, honed his capacity for pastiche.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I see it as a part of our wider programme for individual empowerment.’
The new headmaster blinked in a way that suggested he knew he was being mocked, but could not quite see how the trick was being done.
Crowther found his gaze roaming around the rear wall, which showed further signs of tampering. The engraving of Pull’s Ferry was still there, but the view of the city from the high ground had gone: in its place hung a picture of the new headmaster talking to a man who looked quite like Lord Attenborough from a distance but was actually someone else.
Clarity broke suddenly upon the confusions of the past weeks. ‘Really sorry to hear decision wonder if reconsider,’ he heard the headmaster say in one of his heroic vocal truncations.
‘Actually headmaster…’ he heard himself reply in rather startled correction. As he did this he found the vanished painting rising before his gaze: the squat heap of the castle, vertiginous spire, the rolling plains beyond.
Even teeny-weeny little worlds needed their protectors, he thought, their worms gnawing at the intruder’s vitals, their sanctifying blight. ‘Delighted naturally unexpected,’ he heard the new headmaster say.
The look on his face was oddly like Finula’s in the conversation about Atonement – less reproachful than puzzled, realising that a judgment had been made, not knowing why it had come about. Suddenly Crowther felt better, better than he had felt in a long time, lofty, magisterial, eager to appease. The leather arm- rest jabbed agonisingly beneath his ribs.
‘You know, headmaster,’ he said, in what he hoped was a friendly tone, ‘now that I’m joining the governing body I really ought to see to it that you get some new chairs.’
—2007
Blow-ins