by Jane Gardam
‘He saw a foot-print. On a Friday.’
‘One point for foot-print but Friday was a person. Why was he Friday?’
‘Please Miss—’
‘Please Miss Flint.’
‘Please Miss Flint, he was another boy at Mr Crusoe’s school.’
‘Mr Defoe’s school. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. Over two hundred years ago and we’re still reading it today. Why?’
‘Because you make us.’
‘“Because you make us, Miss Flint.” I do not. If you don’t want to read it, you needn’t. I’ll find you something else, you silly young nut. Stop laughing. If you don’t want to read it you’ll miss a lovely story. I’m going to tell you it first though—it’s too long for you to read by yourselves yet. What’s thar awful noise?’
‘It’s the bell, Miss Flint.’
‘Bell?’
‘It’s the end. What have we to do for prep?’
‘Prep?—Oh—’
(Prep?) ‘Oh. write me a story. Even if it’s only two lines long. I promise I’ll read every single word. Stand up. Say good morning. Put your tie straight, Biggles. And don’t all write about Gegg. It’ll make him conceited. Goodbye.’
‘Please Miss Flint, when’re you coming back?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘Yippeee!’
And then—again—alas.
‘Please,’ said the dispirited boy still hanging Smike-like in the hall of The New House School—and I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen him trailing a broom—‘Please, you’re to go up to see the Headmaster.’ ‘Very well,’ said I, flushed with power. ‘Show me up, please. Come back. Show me up please. Oughtn’t you to be in class by the way?’ (Wherever were these words coming from?)
‘Mr Benson’s not in today,’ he said again.
‘Things are different when he’s here?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, miss, very.’
And there, in Mrs Zeit’s bedroom, the room in which I had been cossetted and pitied for Paul Treece’s death, where still some slight ghost of Paul Treece lingered, where I had expected soon to be embraced as a daughter, sat the owner of The New House School, freckly, porridgy, flaccid, wan.
‘One pound’, he said, ‘per term, per boy, per class. One class, twenty boy maximum.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Five mornings a week all subjects. Supervision of football. Dinner duty on occasion, secretarial duties here for me. Cleaning of this study and the landing outside. Light shopping. Position to be surrendered when suitable male teacher available.’
Down through the mince-smelling orangery, over the cemented terrace, along the empty drive again and not a boy in sight. Silence like an old people’s home with the inmates shovelled away, silent as the old nunnery, but none of the nunnery’s confidence, happiness or life.
And home.
Mr Benson and Alice waited, and Alice became a whirlwind of anger and Mr Benson turned and thumped a mantelpiece so hard that glass prisms jangled and a clock under its dome gave a twang of surprise. ‘I can’t do it. Oh and I want to do it,’ I said. ‘But it’s too much. I’d fail.’
I went off to my desk. There was a whisky-bottle in the drawer. I poured two inches and then another inch, and after a while an inch again.
Oh the humiliation. But they would be indulgent to me now. It was a relief to be here—in my own setting again, safe behind my own hand-built stockade. Oh, Robinson Crusoe, ‘ship-wrecked often, though more by land than by sea’. I drooped above the whisky. Soon they would come with my tea. They would be good to me. Dear Alice, so kind to me.
But tea did not come.
Nor yet did supper, which Alice usually brought on a tray. I poured more whisky and went to the kitchen, but no one was there. The house seemed empty. We were without lodgers until the regular summer visitors arrived to see our housekeeping expenses through the winter. I called about the house. No answer.
I walked out on to the sand-hills and there I saw Alice and Mr Benson in very determined conversation, Mr Benson with clasped hands and hung head, nodding occasionally, rather sharply. They had seen me. They looked at me. They looked away. They went on talking.
After a time they got up and came over to me, still talking, and Alice said, ‘We’ll go in. Come along,’ and though Mr Benson drew back to let me pass in front of him, Alice marched in front of us both straight into the house and up to the drawing room. I followed, feeling carefully from one chair to the next, on account of my exposure to the brisk fresh air. Mr Benson stood by Aunt Frances’s piano in the middle of the room, looking to the left and to the right.
‘Shall I leave you then?’ said Alice.
‘No, no.’
‘I think I’d better. It’s your place, not mine.’
‘Oh sit down Mr Benson, for goodness sake,’ I said and sat down myself, hard on Mrs Woods’s chair. Dust puffed out. I could not remember anyone sitting in thar chair for years.
Then slowly Mr Benson sat and looked seriously into the grate and I began to feel rather frightened.
Time went by and I began to feel greatly frightened, for Alice sat down, too. She sat down with me in my drawing-room. Alice, the maid.
‘Miss Polly,’ she said, ‘Mr Benson has something to tell you. He has bought The New House School and is to be the next Headmaster.’
‘Mr Benson! But I met the Headmaster this afternoon. He said nothing—Well, you know what he said.’
‘He’s a very sad fellow. I don’t think he knows what’s happening. I was hoping—’
‘But then, you’re rich Mr Benson! You must have been rich all the time.’ I was totally sober.
‘No. The school was on the rocks. I borrowed the money. I am quite happy—’
‘But—oh, good. Well done. Well, I do congratul—’
‘I have something to ask you.’
‘There,’ said Alice. ‘Now I can go away while you get on with it. As is only right.’
I looked at Mr Benson who smiled showing very square determined teeth I had not before noticed and for a moment his face allowed itself to go full rip. He looked joyous. A lunatic thought came to me. He was about to propose.
‘I want to ask you’, he said, ‘to let me have Alice.’
‘Oh, I can’t possibly spare Alice.’
‘I have asked her to be my wife. I asked her a great time ago. I have asked her often. She has always said no, until this afternoon.’
‘Oh. Yes, I see. That is wonderful for Alice.’
‘It’s wonderful for me. Miss Flint, I think you knew. I think you guessed. You are pleased. I always said you would be pleased.’
Alice. A headmaster’s wife.
‘Oh of course—’
‘We shan’t be far away.’
‘Far away? Alice won’t go? You won’t leave Oversands?’
‘We shall of course live at the school. Of course,’ and the square teeth were revealed again.
‘Yes, I see.’
‘I take up my position next term. We shall have the summer holidays to set the new regime going. I shall be interviewing staff and engaging building contractors. Getting out the new time-table usually takes a week. I have done this for some years already. There will be new boys and new parents to alert and see. A great deal to do and of course the wedding and honeymoon.’
‘Oh, honeymoon.’
‘We shall be married from Alice’s home in Skinningrove.’
‘Alice’s home? But Alice’s home is—’
‘Yes. Her mother is determined to give the reception.’
‘I didn’t know. Of course she goes home at Christmas, but—’
‘Her father is a miner, as of course you know.’
‘Oh yes. Is he?’
‘You will be guest of honour of course.’
‘When—?’ I saw my fingers slowly rubbing and pleating together the skirt of my dress—the first sign it is said of old age in a woman. ‘When do you? When have you—?’
‘In one month,’ said Mr Benson. ‘That gives
you time to find Alice’s replacement. Now, shall we bring Alice back? I shall find glasses and lemon barley-water for us all to drink to future days.’
‘Oh Alice!’
‘Oh Miss Polly!’
‘It had better be Polly.’
‘Oh never. Oh, who’ll you get next to replace—?’
‘I can never replace you.’
‘Oh Miss Polly, whatever will you do? It was do or die. I had to do it. After today it was kill or cure. It’s your only chance.’
I wanted to say, ‘But can you stand this man, Alice? His time-tables and talk!’
‘And oh, Miss Polly, the price of whisky!’
‘Hem, heremmm,’ said Mr Benson, ‘You will of course be able to start your classes next term Miss—Polly. I can assure you there’ll be no cleaning of the landings.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ I said, ‘it was the—well, I think as much as anything the shopping. And the uncertainty—I should have had to leave, he said, when a male teacher became available.’
‘The nerve!’ cried Alice.
‘That will not be so. Please take more potatoes, Miss—er—Polly—Flint.’ (We were sitting all together to three chops round the kitchen table.) ‘One morning a week to start with, the proper scale of pay, with increments as time passes. French and German, but also a little general work which we shall call English.’
‘You can do it, Miss Polly.’
‘I wonder why you think so?’ I felt so tired. ‘I loved it this afternoon but—’
‘There, then!’
‘But I was probably just showing off. Acting. I’ve had no training—I’ve never been to school.’
‘Some can, some can’t—isn’t it so, Selwyn? Miss Polly—’
‘Alice tends’, said Mr Benson, ‘almost invariably to be right—though neither she nor I was right this afternoon. We mismanaged that. You should not have gone to the school alone.’
Later, as Alice and I washed up together—I dropping the last good plate—she said, ‘You see, Miss Polly, Selwyn’s scared. He’s a right mix, Selwyn. Don’t listen to the bombast. He’s just whistling in the dark. He’s still a scared man, though I’ve done a lot for him. France and that could still come back. I’m scared, too, but that’s between ourselves—coming only from Skinningrove and no airs and graces. Headmaster’s wife—Alice! Miss Polly, we’ll need you bad.’
‘He didn’t say that.’
‘He’s proud. But he knows it. The school’s going to need you for tone. They’ll be right vulgar common folk sending their little lads at first, just so they can say they sent them to a private school.’
‘I don’t think I’ll impress them. I don’t see me adding any tone. I’ve noticed people think me very funny.’
‘You’ve got something, though, Miss Polly. There’s something to you. It’s being brought up by people not usual. Not caring what’s thought of them. And brains. That great book you’re writing. I tell everyone.’
‘Colouring game is what you called it last.’
‘I only said it after years. I got so frightened for you. I saw you disappearing. All washed up and marooned and far away. But you won’t be now. I know it. I know, I truly know. This is to be the right thing for us all.’
So they were married. I gave them Aunt Mary’s spoons and my Chinese work-box. Under Alice’s care the school flourished and filled and Mr Benson strutted forth in university gown and mortar-board with fierce glances and a kind heart and people began to love them both. Boys spilled about the grounds, swiped balls across the tennis-courts of neat mown green, began to be allowed about the town in smart black blazers and black-and-white caps—and their fathers gave enormous pots and cups of heavy silver for prizes on Sports Days, when Mr Benson wore his blazer of sunset-stripes and a panama hat so large and silky cream it would have graced even Mr Woods of Africa.
Mr Thwaite often attended the Sports Days, and Maitland came, too, dressed in brown tussore and a picture hat and carrying a reticule. Mr Thwaite looked very frail now, his old legs wrapped in rugs against the sandy wind which tossed the names of events and competitors, cried down hand-held megaphones, about the sky. Once Mr Thwaite gave the prizes and a speech which was all about the weather, but the wind took the speech away, too, so that nobody heard it, though they all clapped enthusiastically at the end and told each other how lucky the school was to have him there as he was some sort of lord.
And I, Polly Flint, was always there—at the Sports Days and at the Speech Days and every ordinary day—the weekdays and week-ends, early and late, and ‘the yellow home’ became ‘The Yellow House’—a school boarding-house, and I moved into the front two rooms of it. The dining-room table was covered with red felt and then a white cloth on top and ten boys ate round it noisily and enormously. Upstairs in Mrs Woods’s room six boys slept with lockers and photographs of home beside them and as many books and toys as they liked. When I walked home after school at the end of each day, the smallest school-house boys always accompanied me as far as the gates, talking hard and prancing. And when I turned back at the stile to wave to them, they were always there. And so passed some beautiful years.
For Alice’s marriage had saved me, had shown me my course. ‘I saw my deliverance indeed visibly put into my hands, all things easy, and a large ship ready to carry me any whither I pleased to go.’
And so, how happy now I had become at the yellow house; and one Saturday afternoon, two and a half years later, there came the most miraculous day in my life. For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern.
It was the early summer of 1939. I was walking home from school where I had been teaching in the morning, then sorting Selwyn Benson’s letters for he was busy with a cricket match and Alice supervising visitors’ teas—the maids all terrified of her—and it had grown thundery and hot. I walked slowly. I was thinking of my strange madness of long ago, my obsession with my paradigm, Robinson Crusoe, now quite gone, fled like the end of a love-affair, the bird flown from the shoulder. The fever over.
Oh such a great many years.
I decided to go home by the church and look at the graves of Aunt Mary and Mrs Woods for I had taken lately—like an old church lady—to visiting the church on Saturday afternoon. I passed the sexton’s grave and thought that there should be a black but comic poem about a sexton’s grave. I looked at the lonely, meaningless sick-beds of the other graves, pulled weeds out, thanked God that from my purgatory with the works of old Defoe I had emerged with a sense of God and resurrection; and I went into church and sat myself down in a pew at the back.
Women were working in the church for Sunday. Funny old birds. They sounded like birds, too, calling about from one part of the church to another. One was fluttering about the altar and another buffing about at the inside of the holocaustian windows polishing them even brighter, one was tightening up screws in the leading, some twittered round the brasses. Two ostrich-like ladies moved heavily-weighted sticks about over red tiles. Their talk was scarcely words. They spoke in the up and down conversational notes of birds in the evening in quiet woods.
I had grown, the past year, to love this music. To love the church, to begin to take part in this particular kind of song. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said the lady at the altar, ‘everyone’s oh-dearing today.’ ‘Sand everywhere, sand everywhere!’ called another, sweeping a lot of it down a grating. ‘Sand, sand,’ and Christ looked down from beneath the thorns of Jerusalem.
‘Here’s Miss Flint to help us. Now then, Miss Flint, it’s a beautiful day.’
‘It’s hot,’ I said, ‘it’s hot.’
‘There—I’ve fastened that window,’ said the lady with the screwdriver. ‘It’s been loose since the bombardment of nineteen-fourteen. Oh this church is a show! Miss Flint—if you’d known it once.’
‘I’ve known it from the start,’ I
said, ‘since I was six. But I wouldn’t come to it. I was a rebel.’
‘Oh, but I remember your Aunt Mary. What a saint. We always said she should have been a nun. And Miss Frances. We all loved Miss Frances. That wasn’t much of a marriage—’ And the birds began to sing like mad and louder with excitement when the parson arrived.
He was a new parson, said to have been a local lad, he was hungry-looking, with a Grangetown accent and frayed cuffs to his suit. He put his arm round some of the women and called out greetings. I thought of Mrs Woods who had said you shouldn’t talk in church. All the ladies warmed and turned to him, like chickens running at feeding time. I saw Mrs Woods’s dark, outraged face—and found I loved that, too.
‘Hello, Miss Flint,’ said the priest. ‘Sheltering from the thunder?’
‘Just calling.’
‘We’re in for some dramatics. You ought to get home. Can I give you a lift over the marsh?’
‘Over the marsh? There isn’t a marsh any more. It’s two steps. I’m all right thank you.’
‘In your wonderful house,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of that, by the way?’
‘Thought of the yellow house?’
‘If there’s war they’ll have you out of it. You’re nearly in the sea.’
‘That’s what they said last time, but it came to nothing. We stayed put.’
‘It’ll be different this time.’
‘Will there be a war, Father?’ asked an old lady.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’ll be a war. Very soon now.’
We stood together in the porch the priest and I. I said, ‘Look—on the top of the tower on the school. D’you see the telescope? When I was a small child—well about twelve—I saw that telescope for the first time on the way to church and thought it was an angel.’
‘‘Did they sort you out?’
‘I didn’t tell. Well, only our poor Charlotte. The maid. But look—it’s back. The old telescope. Selwyn Benson found it in the cellar.’
‘It’ll be back down the cellar again when the war starts’.’
We walked together across the marsh field. He said, ‘Polly Flint. Do you know, I asked you once for a kiss?’