A Song of Sixpence (19 page)

Scott came to meet me halfway to the wicket. Pale with anger and disappointment he greeted me with a string of scarifying bad words.

‘The bowling is absolute blank, blank tosh. These blank, blank toads have simply got themselves out. Just keep your blank end up and let me do the scoring.'

These profane injunctions did little to fortify me. I was so wretchedly nervous when I went to the wicket that I forgot to take guard. The game had degenerated into farce and in the interests of cricket must be terminated at once by my dismissal. The first ball shaved my wicket, the second hit me a sad crack on the elbow. It was then the end of the over.

While the field changed, Heston, who was umpiring at my end, strolled towards me, hands in the pockets of his long white coat.

‘Straight bat,' he said mildly. ‘Don't run away from them.'

In the events that followed Scott-Hamilton was the hero, I merely the accessory to the fact. It is enough to report simply and briefly that, with incredible good fortune, I stayed there for more than three-quarters of an hour, surviving by the skin of my teeth, while Scott hit up another thirty-one runs. His score was seventy-seven, my total no more than a miserable seventeen, but beyond keeping my wicket intact I had one moment of glory, when, off what proved to be the last ball of the match, I ventured on a square cut that somehow sped past cover point then trickled to the boundary. I did not realize that it was the winning hit until I saw Scott waiting for me to walk to the pavilion.

In the pavilion, as we took off our pads, he brushed off all congratulations.

‘I never believed I would have the misfortune to know such a blank collection of blankety toads. You, Harry, were the toadiest of the lot. Lucky there was one toad,' he announced, ‘who wasn't altogether toadish.' Then turning to me: ‘You'll come home to tea with me, won't you, Carroll?'

The invitation went to my head like wine. This was the final accolade, an honour and an intimacy I had never hoped, to attain. My powers in the game had already raised me well above myself. Now I floated, disembodied, an elected member of the élite.

When we had changed we set out, Scott, Harry and I, sauntering towards their house, which stood quite near, in a secluded position, behind the wood. On the way over we discussed the match, Harry with his usual sense of fun, Scott mockingly amused at Mr Cunningham's discomfiture. To me the master had not appeared at all upset at the defeat of his side, rather the contrary, and apart from his unfortunate teeth he seemed a genuinely nice sort of man. He had clapped me heartily on the back and said ‘Well played' as we came off the field. But it was enough that for reasons of his own Scott detested him. Strolling along easily in my new-found arrogance I derided the unhappy Cunningham, inventing comic names for him, of which one, ‘Rabbit Teeth', won approval. Scott said that it would
stick.

The grounds of the house were imposingly large. We went along an avenue of chestnut trees that revealed a paddock on one side and distantly on the other the fruit and vegetable garden, where two men were working, and beyond which I made out an inviting row of glasshouses. A shrubbery and a rock garden appeared next before finally we came to the house, a half-timbered mansion draped in virginia creeper, fronting a wide stretch of lawn flanked by twin herbaceous borders.

A woman, tall, thin, with greying hair and a distinguished look, was crossing the lawn as we approached. She was wearing gardening gloves and carried a trug in which lay a profusion of full-blown roses.

‘Mother,' Scott said, ‘this is Carroll. I've asked him to tea.'

She smiled pleasantly, viewing us all, not with the outgiving affection my own mother would have shown, but with a certain aristocratic, faintly amused contraction of her brows which, to my shame, I now preferred.

‘How did the match go?'

‘We won, naturally,' Scott said offhandedly.

‘Behold the two heroes, Mother. I made a duck.'

‘Oh, you wretch, Harry. Never mind, you'll have tea with me when I've finished cutting.' Turning to go, she said: ‘Then you may tell me all about it.'

Scott led the way into the house, through the hall and along a passage at the back to a green baize-covered service door.

‘Let's have a drink,' he said, pushing open the door. ‘You won't mind coming in here?'

Gaily, in a free and easy manner, I followed them to the kitchen which was large, white-tiled and well lit. At the window a smartly dressed maid was polishing silver while a stout cook, with her back to us, was at the stove bending over the oven.

‘We'd like some ginger beer, Bridgie.'

‘Take it then,' said the cook, over her shoulder. ‘But leave these pancakes be, Master Harry, they're for the mistress's tea.'

Harry, who knew his way about, had supplied us with glasses of stone ginger beer, when the cook swung round and straightened, exposing to us a full red amiable face set with a pair of button black eyes. I stiffened, choked on my ginger beer. I recognized her instantly. Bridget O'Halloran, staunch devotee of St Mary's and leading member of the Guild of St Teresa. Did she know me? Idiotic, futile question. Had she not sat beside me in church, walked in the same procession, even passed me occasionally on her afternoon off as she went to the church and I emerged from school? If this damning evidence was not enough, her stare of wondering surprise that plainly said ‘What is
he
doing here, where he doesn't belong, with Master Scott and Master Harry?' would surely have convinced me. And now her expression had changed. I saw that she distrusted and resented my upstart appearance in a society so far above me, a sphere where as an old and privileged servant she had the right to feel at home. I was an offence against the sound established order that she believed in as firmly as she did the Communion of Saints.

She placed herself in a conversational attitude, one hand on her hip.

‘You have a new friend, Master Scott?'

‘Decidedly,' he agreed, drinking deeply.

‘That's nice. He'll be at the Beechfield with you?'

‘No, Bridgie,' Harry interposed. ‘For your private information, he has a weak chest and doesn't go to school at present.'

‘Indeed now, that's interesting. And where does he get his education like?'

‘He has a tutor.'

‘A tutor is it?'

Disregarding Master Harry, who was now helping himself to pancakes, she fixed me with a chilly, penetrating stare. Yet her tone was persuasive as, in a meditative manner, she queried:

‘But surely … haven't I seen you in Clay Street with a school satchel?'

I affected an incredulous smile. It was a feeble effort.

‘Of course not.'

‘Strange,' she pursued. ‘I could have sworn it was you. Down by St Mary's School?'

I was pale. The smile had stiffened on my lips. Ineffectually I tried an edging movement towards the door.

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘You're sure it wasn't you?'

‘I'm dead positive,' I said violently. ‘What the dickens would I be doing down there?'

She considered me for a long moment, then said slowly:

‘And the cock crowed thrice.'

Master Harry went into a fit of laughter.

‘Silly Bridgie. And the cock crowed. Cock-a-doodle-do.'

But Scott-Hamilton, unsmiling, was looking at me very curiously.

‘Shut up, Harry. Let's clear out.'

Tea in the drawing-room where, basking in glory, I had hoped to shine, was a torment. Despite Mrs Scott-Hamilton's puzzled efforts, conversation flagged and died. As soon as I could, I said that I must go.

‘Must you?' said Scott, getting up immediately. ‘Pity you have to leave,' he said with cold politeness, having escorted me to the front door.

‘I have to meet someone,' I said.

He raised his eyebrows with a faint, contemptuous smile.

‘The tutor?' These were his parting words.

I went out of the house and along the avenue, past the two gardeners, the peach house, and the twin tennis courts. Sick with shame and blind with rage I saw nothing. All the hot bitterness of my burning heart was directed against Scott, against all the Scott-Hamiltons, against Beechfield, the cricket club, the entire world, most of all against myself. I loathed and despised myself with a searing and corroding violence that, while it must end in abysmal misery, kept me striding instinctively, in some such manner as the murderer is compelled to return to the scene of his crime, towards St Mary's. Had Bridget's final words stung so fiercely as to stir in my perfidious soul emotions of compunction and contrition that could be assuaged only by a solitary visit to the church? If so, I did not reach that haven of penitence. Beyond the Victoria library at the junction of the main road and Clay Street a game was in progress, a low, common vulgar game of ‘kick the can' played in the public thoroughfare by a ragged scattering of my schoolfellows. My eyes dilated. Here, I thought, are my compeers. Welcomed by acclamation, unmindful of my patrician clothes, I flung myself into the game, running, sliding, kicking, falling in the gutter, shouting and sweating, revelling in the awareness that I was shedding the spurious veneer with which for the past two months I had encased myself.

In the midst of one hectic mêlée I heard a shrill exclamation of dismay. I looked up. An elderly lady in a spotted veil and a feather boa, with a bundle of library books under her arm, was gazing at me in horror. She was Miss Galbraith, one of Miss Greville's tea-party friends who played the violin and painted nicely in watercolours, and to whom, not long before, I had made my bow.

‘Laurence! What are you doing! With these dreadful little ragamuffins!'

‘Playing.'

‘Oh, no, no, not with these frightful young hooligans. You must go home at once.'

‘I won't.'

‘Do come away with me, dear.' She took my arm. ‘You must.'

‘No,' I shouted, breaking free. ‘I won't come away. These are my friends. You can go to h––l.'

The game proceeded until dusk. I did not give up until I felt myself completely purged. Then, pledging myself to more games when school took up next week, I set out for home, with a tear in the knee of my flannel trousers, exhausted, dirty, and sad, but for the moment at peace.

Oh, the dreariness of that ensuing winter when, under perpetually weeping skies, I passed, with lowered head, a shadow of myself, to and from St Mary's School, travelling by the unfrequented back road, avoiding all that pertained to Beechfield in such a manner as my peasant ancestors had shunned the famine-stricken, typhus-ridden town of Bandon. Unhappily this alternative route presented me, on occasions, with a painful reminder of my fallen state since it was unpredictably the choice of the St Anne's junior ‘crocodile', thus confronting me at a turn of the road with a double line of young girls, swinging along in their fetching green uniforms, aristocratic, arrogant, yes, all of them arrogant to the point of insolence, and to whom I must yield the pavement by stepping humbly into the gutter. As I stood there, an ignored obscenity, one in particular held my eye, a captivating little blonde with long double flaxen pigtails that swung with her dashing step. She it was who, by her fascinations, confirmed my outcast state. By chance I even learned her name. As she swept past with her indubitably snub nose in the air and never a side glance, her partner in the parade remarked, in the high, affected Ardfillan voice: ‘Oh, I say, Ada, how absolutely jolly!' Resuming my way, Ada became the touchstone of the unattainable, the token of my miseries, the central figure in fantasies which I created, not only by day but more often at night, in bed, before I fell asleep. Then Ada, dear Ada, watched rapturously, in company with Heston and George Gunn, while I carried my bat for a century at Lord's. Permutations and combinations of my Ada complex transported me, the brilliance, the mutual admiration in our exchanges dazzled me. How often did she lean towards me and exclaim: ‘Oh, I say, Laurie, how absolutely jolly!' And on what flights was I borne by her daily letters!

Dear Laurie
,

How can I thank you enough for the exquisite orchids. And how splendid your being so friendly with Lady Meikle that she allowed you to pick them in her beautiful big conservatory. I will keep them as a constant reminder of your thoughtfulness.

Please don't imagine I didn't see you when I passed the other day. I had to pretend not to.

Have you been to the moor lately? It would be nice if we could meet there one day. But of course we are kept in very strictly at St Anne's. That's why it is so jolly to be able to write you.

Affectionately yours, Ada

I wrote these letters after my homework and dropped them into the letter-box so that I should find them when I set out for school next morning. On my way to Clay Street I read them with a beatific smile fixed upon my lips, which, alas, slowly faded as cold reality dissolved a dream, springing not from any seductiveness Ada might offer, but only from yearning for her esteem.

Fortunately, after some weeks I began to be bored with Ada. Perhaps she was tired of me, for her letters noticeably cooled off and eventually ceased. But it is truer to say that she was supplanted by a humbler being, possibly more worthy of my affection. I had fallen in love with Amoeba Proteus.

The chance discovery of an elementary textbook of zoology of Miss Greville's entitled
Pond Life
had sent me, idly at first, in pursuit of the protozoa. But it was a chase which, to my salvation, soon became a passion, supplanting my botanical researches of the past year, convincing me that I must become a scientist.

As spring came in I returned from my moorland expeditions not with a packed vasculum but with scum-filled jars that teemed with fascinating life and which, once my eye was glued to the tube of Miss Greville's Zeiss, gave me the entry to an unknown world peopled with amazing microscopic creatures whose elaborate activities, from the swallowing of diatoms and formation of food vacuoles to the halving of chromosomes and division of the nucleus in the final act of partition, filled me with wonder, an emotion that intensified as, passing from these primary cells, I came upon rarer and wilder inhabitants of this subaqueous jungle, the solitary volvox, the whirling rotifer, the shapely polystomella. And what joy, when, one March evening, a glorious paramecium, with all its cilia waving, swam majestically through the green algae into my field of vision.