by Boyd, Neil;
Fred said him and the Tom were as close as two toes, and under his tuition Thomas became more and more one of the gang.
Each morning, as the chauffeur opened the car door for him, he stepped out smart as a new pin. When he climbed back in at four in the afternoon, he was increasingly disheveled.
One afternoon, Fred said to me proudly, “The Tom’s really one of us now.”
He had a black eye and blood was trickling down one nostril. His socks were around his ankles, and he had lost the toecap of one shoe. His pockets were bulging, Fred said, with a hazel twig for finding water. Half a bicycle chain. A yard of licorice laces wrapped around a rabbit’s foot. Two keys from doors long demolished. Several small bull’s-eyes sucked down from big bull’s-eyes. Dozens of cigarette cards of soccer players. A completely bald and wrinkled conker, tough as concrete, that had knocked out sixty or so smart brown conkers, “as well as two teeth, Father,” Fred added delightedly.
Thomas, waving from the back of the limousine to his pals, was the picture of contentment.
Just before Christmas, Miss Maggie Whelan, the form teacher, received a printed invitation to take the class to a party at Trent Hall, Thomas’s home, south of the Thames. Sir Basil was hiring a bus.
On the Saturday afternoon, I was in the school as the children were preparing to leave. Maggie Whelan was something of a genius with the kids, but I didn’t envy her the task of keeping them in order in a fashionable house.
Twenty children had turned up, among them Fergus who never washed. Water, he claimed, made his face shrink. The others pulled his leg for having dates in his ears and lice in his hair big as lizards.
I called the roll. Among those present were:
Freda, a fat friendly girl who used to slap people for no reason and always licked her plate.
Johnny, who had no buttons to his pants, so he wore them back to front just in case.
Billy, who went everywhere like an ant. He wasn’t a thief, but he tended to put things in his pockets and forget they were there.
Janice was a delightful girl, but she couldn’t stop giggling even in church and her nose bled at least three times a week.
Finally, Wilkie Jones, who answered Yeah-yeah to his name. He was a bit too free with his penknife, and even his mum agreed he wasn’t usual. He was cross-eyed and walked around as if he’d just had a bang on the head.
Only Frank Pettit was missing. His dad was a socialist, the sort that chews nails and spits rust. He wouldn’t let Frank come to the party because he passionately believed that rich people should be poor like everyone else.
Just before three, Father Duddleswell walked in with a beaming smile. He ruffled the hair of one child and tucked in the shirt of another.
That was alarming.
“God’s innocent wee darlin’s,” he called out above the din.
I was highly suspicious of his good humor.
“Don’t expect me to go with Miss Whelan,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think of it, Father Neil.”
I relaxed.
“Maggie’s mum just rang to say her daughter has gone down with the flu. You are on your own.”
The atmosphere on the bus was electric, as if were going to the seaside or the cup final at Wembley.
“Turn the music up, mate,” Fred called out to the driver.
“Isn’t it loud enough?” I said.
“I like it so loud you can’t hear it, Father.”
We had one call to make: to pick up Titch Walsh.
I got out of the coach and knocked on the door. Mrs. Walsh, in between puffs, was giving Titch last-minute instructions.
“Mind your manners, my boy. Say yes, missis, no, missis. Don’t bloody swear or smoke. An if you break somethin’, be sure and hide it.”
“Can Spot come, Mum?”
Spot was a mongrel that sat up begging with sincere Salvation Army eyes.
“Not even if he cries pink tears,” I said, bundling Titch into the coach.
Trent Hall was a mansion set in ten wooded acres. The kids gasped when they saw it.
“The Tower of bleedin’ London,” one of them said.
Thomas was at the front door with a tall footman who the kids took to be his dad. They were disappointed to find Sir Basil was a trim, blazered gentleman with sparse white hair parted in the middle like a sucked fishbone.
Sir Basil offered each child a limp hand cold as ice cream.
“How’d y’do,” he squeezed through tight lips. “How’d y’do.”
The kids did not reply or simply grunted, “Okay, mister,” as they gazed in awe at the paneled hall and marble staircase.
“Blimey,” Fred whispered, “you could build our estate inside this place and a church, too.” He turned to Thomas. “Is that funny little bloke really your dad?”
“He is very nice actually,” Thomas said loyally.
“Looks old enough to be his own dad,” Fred said. “And why don’t he give his nose a haircut?”
“Glad you could come, Padre,” Sir Basil said to me. He pointed to two or three antique vases. “I rely on you to keep the troops in order, what?”
Lady Penelope was in the drawing room. Thomas introduced the children all in one as, “Friends of mine, Mama.”
Mama was stretched out on a chaise longue all teeth and lashes, stroking a Pekingese called Sir Georgie and smoking a cigarette through a gold holder. In her hands was a copy of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. She exhaled and smiled but never took her eye off her book.
“How very sweet,” she said, sourly. “Now run along and play, my pet.”
Outside, I heard Fred ask, “Does your mum always smoke through a straw, Tom? And what’s that funny smell on her?”
Servants seemed to be everywhere, worse snobs than their employers. They smiled at my charges in a way that showed deep resentment at this intrusion into their well-ordered lives.
Thomas introduced us to his new dog, Blip, a Great Dane that had a superior look on his face as if he knew his license had been paid.
“Is he friendly?” Fred wanted to know, taking a step back from a creature much bigger than himself.
“He listens to the wireless most of the day,” Thomas answered. “He likes the news best. Then Wagner.”
It wasn’t long before the boys and girls, honking and squealing, were strung out through the house like wild geese. They kept coming back to me with items that took their fancy.
Johnny, who collected train numbers, said, “Cor, they’ve got six baths in ’ere. At ’ome we don’t even ’ave one.”
Another grabbed me by the hand and led me to a high-ceilinged room to show me something special. Against the backdrop of a seventeenth-century tapestry was a superb Steinway piano. Fred was half-seated on the stool and pressing down on the foot pedals.
“It won’t go,” he said, breezily. “Must be out of gas.”
I had no sooner ordered him off it than Janice came in to say, “They’ve got ever such posh lavs here but no chains.”
“They don’t need chains, silly,” Fred told her. “They flush on their own, don’t they, Father?”
Fred went to hide and, after a minute, they went after him like a pack of hounds. A quarter of an hour later, Fred, a big chap, reappeared crying his eyes out. They couldn’t find him and now he couldn’t find them. He thought they’d all gone home without him.
The head footman conducted the children to Thomas’s old nursery on the fifth floor where a conjurer was ready to perform. A surly-looking fellow aged about fifty, he had a boil on his cheek like a poached egg.
He kept pulling what Fred openly called “rubbishy things” like playing cards, hankies, and a dead duck out of a hat. One boy said, “Our teacher can do better than ’im wiv only a piece of chalk.”
“Can you saw a lady in ’alf, mister?” Billy w
anted to know.
“’Course,” the conjurer said with a sniff. “Trouble is I can’t put her back together.”
I wasn’t aware that Freda was missing until a maid with plucked and ready-for-the-oven eyebrows whispered in my ear, “A slight problem, sir.”
I left hurriedly to find that Freda had gone to the bathroom. She must have tried all the taps because, without wanting to, she had taken a shower. Now she couldn’t open the door and was screaming operatically for her mum.
I talked her through how to open the door and when she appeared, wet and weeping, I arranged for her to be driven home in a Daimler on her own.
“Can I keep the towel?” was her parting remark.
Tea was served. This too was not uneventful.
As Janice pulled the first cracker, her nose bled into the sugar bowl. Billy stirred his orange juice so fast you could see the bottom of the glass. Next, they were all at it. The juice went all over the fine lace tablecloth. In the middle of the table was a huge jelly shaped like a rabbit, or it was till Titch sneezed it out of shape.
All the while, a manservant in white gloves stood impassively against the wall, his egg-sized thumbs down his immaculate pants.
Fred pointed and said, “What’s he doing, then, umpiring a snooker match?”
I was amazed at how much they got through. They ate and ate until they were parrot green.
I can’t have looked too good myself when, at the end of the meal, I received a curt summons to meet the colonel in the music room.
Sir Basil was kneeling down on a hassock inspecting the piano. There was a deep gash a foot-long underneath the keyboard.
Lady Penelope, clutching Sir Georgie, followed me in and the children were not far behind. We all stood in a circle, silent save for Janice, giggling as usual.
“Who did it?” My voice came out whistly, as if I had a pea up my nose.
“Not me,” said Wilky Thomas. “It were that little dog with the funny face, I bet.”
The colonel who had changed color—like a gob-stopper, Fred said later—straightened up and was, by the look of him, about to explode, when Lady Penelope intervened to shut him up like a safety pin.
“What did you expect, Colonel Barwell-Clarke?” she said, as if she had only just met him.
“Time to go home.”
I guessed, correctly, that Thomas would not be with us after the Christmas break. A pity. Tom liked being with us and we had only begun his education.
The colonel was not available for a handshake as we left. Only Thomas was there to wish us Godspeed, and a footman to check we hadn’t pinched any spoons.
Thomas was glowing. This was obviously the best day of his lonely little life.
“I do hope you enjoyed yourselves,” he inquired anxiously.
Fred gave him a bear hug. “You’re really smashing, you are, mate.” He, too, sensed this was good-bye.
Speaking for us all, he said, “A regular eye-opener, Tom me boy. Real glad we come.”
“Poor Tom,” Fred said to me as we waved from the coach. “Fancy having to live with that barmy lot.”
On the way home, the rain turned to sleet and the children were strangely subdued.
We stopped at Titch’s place to drop him off. I went in with him to make sure someone was home.
“What, back a’ready?” his mum said. “’Ow was it, son?”
“All right. The bus ride was.’”
“’Ope you didn’t break nothing?”
“Wasn’t nothing to break,” Titch said. “It was all grubby old stuff.”
“’Ow was the food?”
“Wasn’t no real food.”
“G’won wiv you.”
“Straight up, Ma. Not even an ’amburger.”
“I thought them toffs was made of money. Just goes to show.”
“What’s for supper, Mum?” Titch said, licking his upper lip.
“It’s in the oven.”
“I’m bally starvin’,” he said.
10. A Murderer in the Parish
“Father,” Jack Boyle said, blushing as he refused my offer of a chair, “I can’t go through with this wedding.”
The wedding in question was only a week away, and Jack, a thirty-year-old widower, was due to marry Jennie Fletcher, one of the most sought-after girls in the parish.
“Sorry to hear that,” I mumbled, waiting patiently to hear why.
“You see, she doesn’t really love me.”
I took a while to digest this. It was the best reason for a man to change his mind I ever heard.
Then: “I take it Jennie, too, thinks it’s best if you part.”
Jack staggered me by saying, “She doesn’t know yet, Father. I was hoping you’d help me out.”
I first consulted the oracle.
“I reckon,” Father Duddleswell said, “Jack is being sensible. ’Tis no basis for marriage when the bride is still hankering after another feller.”
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Mark Holbrook.”
This was news to me. Mark was a recluse.
“Is Jennie seeing Mark, then?”
“She hasn’t seen him, not in years,” Father Duddleswell answered mysteriously.
I knew vaguely that Mark, an army captain, had come back from the war in ’45 a changed man. I had no idea he was connected in any way with Jennie Fletcher.
Mrs. Pring made it her business to know. Her husband had been killed in the last days of the First World War.
“Mark and Jennie were going strong,” she said. “But the war put paid to a lovely romance, didn’t it?”
Jennie lived with her parents. When I told her that the wedding was off, all she said was, “Thank God.”
Jennie had short black curly hair. No makeup. With her flawless complexion, she didn’t need it. She admitted that she’d been unfair to Jack. She had taken up with him as second best. Not that she ever hoped to marry Mark Holbrook. Not now.
“When,” she said, “he went into the army in 1943, he wrote to me regularly. He used to say as soon as this business is over we’ll get married. Then suddenly, he stopped writing.”
She went to a bureau and brought out a batch of letters tied with pink ribbons.
“Eight years old, Father.” She bit her lip. “I suppose I should’ve thrown them away a long time ago.”
Father Duddleswell was right about Jack Boyle. He was no fool.
This was Jennie’s story.
“The last letter Mark wrote, Father, was on the nineteenth of April 1945. He never told me why he stopped. When he came home, I went with his mum and dad to meet him at the docks. He looked awfully strained. I wanted to throw myself into his arms but something stopped me. I knew at once that all my longings to see him again were in vain. Our world had changed. He didn’t kiss me, simply shook my hand. Our Mark’s a hero, I thought, he’s too good for me now. But I knew that wasn’t true.”
After that, though Jennie only saw Mark from a distance, she still loved him. Or, rather, she found it impossible to love anyone else.
After I left Jennie, I dropped in on Mrs. Holbrook. Her face clouded over as soon as I mentioned Mark.
“My son got top marks in accountancy, Father,” she told me. “He gives all his earnings to charity, never spends a penny on himself.”
“That’s nice,” I said, realizing something was very wrong.
Mrs. Holbrook shook her head sharply. “It’s not nice at all. I tell him, you must save up, son, to get married. And he says, I’ll never do that, Mum.”
St. Jude’s was no different from other parishes. I’ve said before that we had our fair share of soldiers returning maimed from the war. One was blind, others had lost an arm or a leg. One returned home on leave to find all his family had been killed in the Blitz, and he went berserk. In Mar
k’s case, his mind had been scarred.
“When I gave him to the army,” Mrs. Holbrook said without self-pity, “my son was a warm, loving, devout boy. They gave him back to me cold, empty, and no religion in him.”
I said I hadn’t seen him in church.
“It’s like when I scribble something down, Father, and afterward can’t read my own writing. Mark’s like that. I know him but I can’t make him out.”
Even Father D, who knew most of the secrets of the parish, found Mark an enigma.
“Maybe the poor lad feels guilty,” he suggested, “because he lived on when many of his comrades died. Or he had to kill for his country and the enormity of it only hit him afterward.”
My guess was Mark was punishing himself for something, but what? A remark his mother made stuck in my mind. “He keeps repeating, I don’t deserve to live, not after what I did.”
Had Mark done a cowardly thing? I kept the thought to myself.
I promised Mrs. Holbrook to pop in and see Mark. Unfortunately, I chanced to call one evening just as he was leaving. He walked past me without even looking.
The visit was not entirely wasted. His mother said one of Mark’s wartime chums, a man with a limp, had called recently. Mark had given orders that no one from his previous life was to be let in.
She had told a fib, pretended Mark was out, but the man had left his name and address. Lance-Corporal Tim Davidson of Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire. The corporal had said, “Tell the captain, Mum, I was with him on the road to Berlin.”
This was a good lead, Father Duddleswell said. On our first free day, he drove me to Hoddesdon.
After a lot of inquiries, we found Tim at work in the greenhouses where he was foreman. He was a big fellow in a billowy white pullover. With his small head, he matched Father Duddleswell’s description of him as “just like a halibut.”
Over a pint in the local, Tim filled in some of the background for us.
The Allies had crossed the Rhine in March 1945. The war was nearly over, and his company was in the northwest pushing east toward Berlin.