Arthur & George

by Julian Barnes

  This happens again, and then again. His parents do not punish him, but their evident disappointment in their first-born—stupid at school, a baby on the way home—is as bad as any punishment. They discuss him over the top of his head.

  “The child gets his nerves from you, Charlotte.”

  “In any event, it cannot be teething.”

  “We can rule out cold, since we are in September.”

  “And indigestible items of food, since Horace is not affected.”

  “What remains?”

  “The only other cause the book suggests is fright.”

  “George, are you frightened of something?”

  George looks at his father, at the shiny clerical collar, at the broad, unsmiling face above it, the mouth which speaks the frequently incomprehensible truth from the pulpit of St. Mark’s, and the black eyes which now command the truth from him. What is he to say? He is frightened of Wallie Sharp and Sid Henshaw and some others, but that would be telling on them. In any case, it is not what he fears most. Eventually he says, “I’m frightened of being stupid.”

  “George,” his father replies, “we know you are not stupid. Your mother and I have taught you your letters and your sums. You are a bright boy. You can do sums at home but not at school. Can you tell us why?”

  “No.”

  “Does Mr. Bostock teach them differently?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Do you stop trying?”

  “No, Father. I can do them in the book but I can’t do them on the board.”

  “Charlotte, I think we should take him into Birmingham.”

  Arthur

  Arthur had uncles who watched their brother’s decline and pitied his family. Their solution was to send Arthur to be schooled by the Jesuits in England. Aged nine, he was put on the train at Edinburgh and wept all the way to Preston. He would spend the next seven years at Stonyhurst, except for six weeks each summer, when he returned to the Mam and to his occasional father.

  These Jesuits had come over from Holland, bringing their curriculum and methods of discipline with them. Education comprised seven classes of knowledge—elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric—with one year allotted to each. There was the usual public-school routine of Euclid, algebra and the classics, whose truths were endorsed by emphatic beatings. The instrument deployed—a piece of India rubber the size and thickness of a boot sole—had also come over from Holland, and was known as the Tolley. One blow on the hand, delivered with full Jesuitical intent, was enough to cause the palm to swell and change colour. The normal punishment for larger boys consisted of nine blows on each hand. Afterwards, the sinner could barely turn the doorknob of the study in which he had been beaten.

  The Tolley, it was explained to Arthur, had received its name as a Latin pun. Fero, I bear. Fero, ferre, tuli, latum. Tuli, I have borne, the Tolley is what we have borne, yes?

  The humour was as rough as the punishments. Asked how he saw his future, Arthur admitted that he had thought of becoming a civil engineer.

  “Well, you may be an engineer,” replied the priest, “but I don’t think you’ll ever be a civil one.”

  Arthur developed into a large, boisterous youth, who found consolation in the school library and happiness on the cricket field. Once a week the boys were set to write home, which most regarded as a further punishment, but Arthur viewed as a reward. For that hour he would pour out everything to his mother. There may have been God, and Jesus Christ, and the Bible, and the Jesuits, and the Tolley, but the authority he most believed in and submitted to was his small, commanding Mam. She was an expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire. “Wear flannel next to your skin,” she advised him, “and never believe in eternal punishment.”

  She had also, less deliberately, taught him a way to popularity. Early on, he began telling his fellow pupils the stories of chivalry and romance he had first heard from beneath a raised porridge stick. On wet half-holidays, he would stand on a desk while his audience squatted around him. Remembering the Mam’s skills, he knew how to drop his voice, how to drag out a story, how to leave off at a perilous, excruciating moment with the promise of more the next day. Being large and hungry, he would accept a pastry as the basic price of a tale. But sometimes, he might stop dead at the thrill of a crisis, and could only be got going again at the cost of an apple.

  Thus he discovered the essential connection between narrative and reward.

  George

  The oculist does not recommend spectacles for young children. It is better to let the boy’s eyes adjust naturally over the years. In the meanwhile, he should be moved to the front of the classroom. George leaves the farm boys behind and is placed beside Harry Charlesworth, who is regularly top in tests. School now makes sense to George; he can see where Mr. Bostock’s chalk is stabbing, and he never again soils himself on the way home.

  Sid Henshaw carries on making monkey faces, but George barely notices. Sid Henshaw is just a stupid farm boy who smells of cows and probably cannot even spell the word.

  One day, Henshaw rushes at George in the yard, barges him with his shoulder, and as George is recovering himself, pulls off his bow tie and runs away. George hears laughter. Back in the classroom, Mr. Bostock asks where his tie has got to.

  This presents George with a problem. He knows it is wrong to get a schoolfellow into trouble. But he knows it is worse to tell lies. His father is quite clear about this. Once you start telling lies you are led into the paths of sin and nothing will stop you until the hangman slips a noose around your neck. No one has said as much, but this is what George has understood. So he cannot lie to Mr. Bostock. He looks for a way out—which is perhaps bad enough anyway, the start of a lie—and then he simply answers the question.

  “Sid Henshaw knocked me and took it.”

  Mr. Bostock leads Henshaw out by the hair, beats him until he howls, comes back with George’s tie, and gives the class a lecture about theft. After school, Wallie Sharp stands in George’s path and as he steps round him says, “You’re not a right sort.”

  George rules out Wallie Sharp as a possible friend.

  He rarely feels the lack of what he does not have. The family takes no part in local society, but George cannot imagine what this might involve, let alone what the reason for their unwillingness, or failure, might be. He himself never goes to other boys’ houses, so cannot judge how things are conducted elsewhere. His life is sufficient unto itself. He has no money, but also no need of it, and even less when he learns that its love is the root of all evil. He has no toys, but does not miss them. He lacks the skill and eyesight for games; he has never even jumped a hopscotch grid, while a thrown ball makes him flinch. He is happy to play fraternally with Horace, more gently with Maud, and more gently still with the hens.

  He is aware that most boys have friends—there are David and Jonathan in the Bible, and he has watched Harry Boam and Arthur Aram huddling at the edge of the yard and showing one another things from their pockets—but he never finds this happening to himself. Is he meant to do something, or are they meant to do something? In any case, though he wants to please Mr. Bostock, he is not especially interested in pleasing the boys who sit behind him.

  When Great-Aunt Stoneham comes to tea, as she does on the first Sunday of each month, she scrapes her cup noisily across its saucer and through a wrinkled mouth asks him about his friends.

  “Harry Charlesworth,” he always replies. “He sits next to me.”

  The third time he gives her the same reply, she puts her cup noisily back in its saucer, frowns, and asks, “Anyone else?”

  “The rest of them are just smelly farm boys,” he replies.

  From the way Great-Aunt Stoneham looks at Father, he knows he has said something wrong. Before supper, he is called into the study. His father stands at his desk, with all the authority of the faith shelved behind him.

  “George, how old are you?”

  This is how conversations often be
gin with Father. They both of them already know the answer, but George still has to give it.

  “Seven, Father.”

  “That is an age by which a certain intelligence and judgement may reasonably be expected. So let me ask you this, George. Do you think that in the eyes of God you are more important than boys who live on farms?”

  George can tell that the correct answer is No, but is reluctant to give it immediately. Surely a boy who lives in the Vicarage, whose father is the Vicar and whose great-uncle has been Vicar as well, is more important to God than a boy who never goes to church and is stupid and also cruel like Harry Boam?

  “No,” he says.

  “And why do you call these boys smelly?”

  It is less clear what the correct answer to this might be. George considers the matter. The correct answer, he has been taught, is the truthful one.

  “Because they are, Father.”

  His father sighs. “And if they are, George, why are they?”

  “Why are they what, Father?”

  “Smelly.”

  “Because they do not wash.”

  “No, George, if they are smelly, it is because they are poor. We are fortunate enough to be able to afford soap, and fresh linen, and to have a bathroom, and not to live in close proximity with beasts. They are the humble of the earth. And tell me this, whom does God love more, the humble of the earth or those who are filled with wrongful pride?”

  This is an easier question, even if George doesn’t particularly agree with the answer. “The humble of the earth, Father.”

  “Blessed are the meek, George. You know the verse.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  But something in George resists this conclusion. He does not think Harry Boam and Arthur Aram are meek. Nor can he believe it to be part of God’s eternal plan for His creation that Harry Boam and Arthur Aram shall end up inheriting the earth. That would scarcely conform to George’s sense of justice. They are just smelly farm boys, after all.

  Arthur

  Stonyhurst offered to remit Arthur’s school fees if he was prepared to train for the priesthood; but the Mam declined the proposal. Arthur was ambitious and well capable of leadership, already marked down as a future Captain of Cricket. But she did not foresee any child of hers as a spiritual guide. Arthur, for his part, knew that he could not possibly supply the promised gold glasses and velvet dress and seat by the fire if he vowed himself to a life of poverty and obedience.

  The Jesuits were not bad fellows, in his assessment. They considered human nature to be essentially weak, and their mistrust seemed justified to Arthur: you only had to look at his own father. They also understood that sinfulness began early. Boys were never permitted to be alone together; masters always accompanied them on walks; and every night a shadowy figure would perambulate the dormitories. Constant surveillance might undermine self-respect and self-help; but the immorality and beastliness rife at other schools were kept to a minimum.

  Arthur believed, in a general way, that God existed, that boys were tempted by sin, and that the Fathers were right to beat them with the Tolley. When it came to particular articles of faith, he argued in private with his friend Partridge. He had been impressed by Partridge when, standing at second slip, he had taken a blinding catch from one of Arthur’s fastest deliveries, pocketed the ball quicker than the eye could see, and turned away, pretending to watch the ball disappear to the boundary. Partridge liked to bamboozle a fellow, and not just on the cricket field.

  “Are you aware that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception became an article of faith as recently as 1854?”

  “Somewhat late in the day, I’d have thought, Partridge.”

  “Imagine. The Church has been debating the dogma for centuries, and all that time it has never been heresy to deny it. Now it is.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Now why should Rome decide, so far after the event, to downgrade the participation of Mary’s corporeal father in the matter?”

  “I say, steady on, man.”

  But Partridge was already addressing the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, pronounced only five years previously. Why should all the popes of centuries past be implicitly declared fallible, and all popes present and future the opposite? Why indeed, Arthur echoed. Because, Partridge rejoined, it was more a question of Church politics than theological advance. It was all to do with the presence of influential Jesuits high up in the Vatican.

  “You are sent to tempt me,” Arthur would sometimes reply.

  “On the contrary. I am here to strengthen your faith. Thinking for ourselves within the Church is the path of true obedience. Whenever the Church feels threatened, it responds by imposing stricter discipline. It works in the short term, but not in the long. It’s like the Tolley. You are beaten today, and so you do not offend again tomorrow or the next day. But not offending for the rest of your life because of a memory of the Tolley is a nonsense, is it not?”

  “Not if it works.”

  “But in a year or two we shall be quit of this place. The Tolley will not exist any more. We need to be equipped to resist sin and crime by rational argument, not the fear of physical pain.”

  “I doubt rational argument will work on some boys.”

  “Then the Tolley by all means. And the same in the world outside. Of course there must be prison, and hard labour, and the hangman.”

  “But what is the Church threatened by? It seems strong to me.”

  “By science. By the spread of sceptical teaching. By the loss of the Papal States. By the loss of political influence. By the prospect of the twentieth century.”

  “The twentieth century.” Arthur mused on this a moment. “I cannot think that far. I shall be forty by the time the next century begins.”

  “And captain of the England team.”

  “I doubt it, Partridge. But not a priest, at any rate.”

  Arthur was not exactly conscious of his faith weakening. But thinking for himself within the Church slipped easily into thinking for himself outside it. He found that his reason and conscience did not always accept what was placed in front of them. In his last year at school, Father Murphy came to preach. High in the pulpit, fierce and red-faced, the priest threatened sure and certain damnation for all who remained outside the Church. Whether their exclusion came from wickedness, wilfulness or mere ignorance, the consequences were the same: sure and certain damnation for all eternity. There followed a panoramic description of the torments and desolations of Hell, especially designed to make boys squirm; but Arthur had stopped attending. The Mam had told him what was the case; and he now gazed up at Father Murphy as at a storyteller he no longer believed.

  George

  Mother teaches Sunday school in the building next door to the Vicarage. Its brickwork has a diamond pattern to it which Mother says reminds her of a Fair Isle comforter. George does not understand this, though wonders if it has anything to do with Job’s comforters. He looks forward to Sunday school all week. The rough boys do not attend: they are running wild in the fields, trapping rabbits, telling lies, and generally going down the primrose path to everlasting damnation. Mother has warned him that in class she will treat him exactly the same as everyone else. George understands why: because she is showing them all—equally—the way to Heaven.

  She tells them exciting stories which George can follow easily: like Daniel in the Lions’ Den, and the Burning Fiery Furnace. But other stories prove more difficult. Christ taught in Parables, and George finds he does not like Parables. Take the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. George understands the part about the enemy planting Tares among the Wheat, and how you shouldn’t gather up the Tares in case you root out the Wheat at the same time—though he isn’t entirely sure about this, because he often sees Mother weeding in the Vicarage garden and what is weeding except gathering up the Tares before they and the Wheat are fully grown? But even ignoring this problem, he can go no further. He knows the story is all about something else—that is why it is a Parabl
e—but what this something else might be his mind will not reach to.

  He tells Horace about the Wheat and the Tares, but Horace does not even understand what Tares are. Horace is three years younger than George, and Maud is three years younger than Horace. Maud, being a girl, and also being the youngest child, is not as strong as the two boys, who are told it is their duty to protect her. Quite what this involves is left unspecified; it seems to consist mainly of not doing things—not poking her with sticks, not pulling her hair, and not making noises in her face as Horace likes doing.

  But George and Horace prove inadequate at protecting Maud. The doctor’s visits begin, and his regular inspections cast the family into a state of anxiety. George feels guilty whenever the doctor calls, and stays out of the way, in case he is identified as the prime cause of his sister’s illness. Horace feels no such guilt, and cheerfully asks if he may carry the doctor’s bag upstairs.

  When Maud is four, it is decided that she is too frail to be left on her own all night, and that neither George nor Horace, nor even the combination of the two, can be trusted with her nocturnal care. From now on she will sleep in their mother’s room. At the same time, it is decided that George will sleep with his father, and Horace will have the nursery to himself. George is now ten, and Horace seven; perhaps it is thought that the age of sinfulness is approaching, and the two boys should not be left alone together. No explanation is given, and none is sought. George does not ask whether being put to sleep in his father’s room is a punishment or a reward. It is how things are, which is all there is to be said.

  George and his father pray together, kneeling side by side on the scrubbed boards. Then George climbs into bed while his father locks the door and turns out the light. As he falls asleep, George sometimes thinks of the floor, and how his soul must be scrubbed just as the boards are scrubbed.

  Father is not an easy sleeper, and has a tendency to groan and wheeze. Sometimes, in the early morning, when dawn is beginning to show at the edges of the curtains, Father will catechize him.