For Love or Money (4 page)

But there was a gleam of hope. How long was it now? In three weeks he’d be seeing Sally, he imagined the flat door, the key in his hand, then telephoning her … but now the battlemented house was clearly visible on the rise to his right. He changed down and turned off the radio. As he got nearer he couldn’t help remembering that Steven had known about the flat for several months now. Luckily Sally had never decided to move in on a permanent basis. George’s dislike for Steven mounted as he thought of the way he’d found out; he’d discovered several envelopes
addressed
to George at the same place in London and had deduced the rest. Lying to Steven was impossible. If he’d guessed about Sally he hadn’t asked as yet.

George pushed open the door and entered the hall … David would be in Devonshire by now.

‘A
ND
if you want results you have to treat it good … like a woman … gently, or you won’t get results.’

Sergeant Peters smiled knowledgeably as he pulled out the wireless aerial to its fullest extent with experienced fingers. Then, bending over the machine as though about to administer a kiss, he started crooning into the microphone, ‘Alpha bravo, alpha bravo, alpha bravo … tuning call …’

Round him a group of boys in battle-dress watched
in-attentively
—one of them was David Lifton.

C.C.F. at Edgecombe School took place every Wednesday afternoon and was not a popular activity. The term was only a week old, yet David found himself listlessly slipping into the old routine as though he’d never left it.

Behind Sergeant Peters’ bald head the phonetic alphabet was written on the board. It might have been the work of a lunatic: echo, charlie, golf, hotel, oscar. Fit subject for the toughest psychiatrist. David idly fiddled with a morse buzzer … di-dah-di-da-dit-da-dit. God knows what that meant.

Outside the classroom window in the main court ten boys of assorted sizes were marching back and forth. ‘About turn.’ Through the closed windows the orders were sharply
distinct
. David thought of their hands holding the rifles … he almost felt the cold metal … in early February too. He shivered.

‘The point of transmittin’ stations is this. The world is round … like this‚’ Sergeant Peters drew a wobbly circle. The chalk grated on the board. ‘Now, sound waves do not go in curves, but like this.’ He drew a series of unsteady
tangents
shooting off into outer space.

David stopped listening; in another quarter of an hour he
would be able to go back to his house, which was a good deal wanner than the classroom. The boys outside had stopped marching. Although only half past four it was already getting dark. Lights from the other side of the court showed more distinctly against the contrastingly dark
brickwork
.

 *

In the housemaster’s drawing-room in Greville, David’s house, Mr. Alfred Crofts was stubbing out a cigarette
nervously
.

‘Really we’re most terribly lucky to have got the man. A bit young perhaps, but a Cambridge Double First …’ he paused to strike home the importance of this find, ‘really an incredible stroke of good fortune.’

His wife continued arranging some flowers on a table in the window.

‘Looks as though we’re in for bit of fog tonight‚’ she said gloomily.

Mrs. Crofts had been in Greville some five years more than her husband. She had graduated from assistant matron to matron and had finally married the housemaster, whose wife had died of a brain tumour three years ago. The
marriage
had been a convenient arrangement for both of them. The housemaster gained a permanent helper to look after his two children and the matron rose to a position which she had coveted even during the late Mrs. Crofts’ lifetime.

She stepped back and admired her creation from a
distance
. Still examining it, she started speaking.

‘I shouldn’t be so optimistic, I can remember any number of highly qualified house tutors who haven’t worked out.’

‘But Mary, he’s young. The purpose of a house tutor is to get to know the boys. Who could be more suitable than a young man for that? Besides as house tutor at twenty-two if he stays at Edgecombe he’ll be in an excellent position to take a house at thirty, and it’s new ideas we’re needing.’

‘Since when have you been thinking of redundancy?’

Such a realist was Mary; he looked at her large figure
framed by the dosed curtains. After years of vitamin pills and radio malt, throat-swabbing and injections, what could one expect but a practical woman? She’d always known the fakes at exam time.

‘Don’t be stupid dear, it’s just that the house hasn’t been doing so well in the Varsity awards and I thought
perhaps
…’

‘Well look at Fowler’s house, he’s almost sixty and the tutor forty and they had four awards last year.’

‘Ah, but in classics and history, our last tutor was a languages man. There are always more going in classics and history, and with the right man on the premises … well we’ll soon see.’

It didn’t really wash and he knew it. House tutors were only responsible for a small amount of extra-curricular tuition, as well as delegating for the housemaster.

She seemed to have got, if anything, larger recently, in spite of her diet. Crofts looked at the folds of flesh that had started to appear under her chin and the downward sag of her cheeks. He also noticed that her lipstick wasn’t on straight. Her mouth looked weak and formless, but her eyes behind those pink-rimmed spectacles were as hard and clear as amethysts. Still he hadn’t married her for beauty. At fifty he’d been lucky to find a wife at all—he picked up a book and opened it. His wife got up.

‘I’m just going to say good night to Jane.’ He nodded and then started reading.

 *

The last three years had not been kind to the house in a good many ways. Two house tutors had left and the last one had not only been thoroughly unsatisfactory but drank too. The final ugly scene had been during house prayers when he had collapsed. No, this new man was going to be a
success
, and if he wasn’t … nothing would be allowed to leak out.

News had also reached the headmaster of boys in his house photographing junior boys and selling the pictures in
the school to seniors. Crofts’ inquiries had led to nothing, although the practice on the surface appeared to have stopped. Another scandal might call his position in
question
. An early retirement could after all seem natural enough.

 *

Upstairs his wife was with his daughter Jane.

‘Is Jane going to be a good girl this evening? … Of course she is. No crying tonight. Daddy’s very tired this evening.’

She kissed her stepdaughter briskly on both cheeks and switched off the light.

Impressions can be pretty firmly imprinted on a child by the time it’s four, she thought. She’d never approved of the way Fleda Crofts had brought up her daughter; now if
she’d
had the chance earlier, there’d be none of this whining at night. She shut the door and went downstairs to the kitchen. Once seated at the table she began to grate some cheese, turning the handle with brusque sharp movements. This new man was going to work out if she had anything to do with it. Poor Alfred, he did look so strained. The lines that ran from the side of his nose to the corners of his mouth seemed definitely more pronounced and he had developed a twitch under his right eye. But she would protect him. She had always felt sorry for him. What he had always needed was a strong personality at his side and Fleda had been such an ephemeral little person.

The lumps of cheese in the grater had already almost gone. If there was trouble this time, she at least would not shirk dealing with it thoroughly.

 *

At the back of the same building, in another wing, David Lifton was impatiently climbing out of his rough khaki trousers. In spite of the cold he felt sticky after wearing these thick and rarely-washed clothes. There were six other beds in the dormitory but for the moment David was the
only person there. When he had changed into his school suit he took a letter out of his breast pocket. It was from his mother. She told him that she was worried about him and hoped that there was nothing on his mind. Did he feel a gap of communication with her? Why hadn’t he written? There really was nothing wrong? He would tell her if there was? Why hadn’t he spoken to her as he used? David slowly folded the letter and replaced it in his pocket. There wasn’t very much to say. He would answer each question as well as he could to reassure her.

Yet something had changed. He still loved her but
recently
somehow he had started to see her as though for the first time. That vague and all-enveloping rosiness contained in the word ‘Mummy’ had sometimes fallen away. The veil of the world of the taken-for-granted had occasionally parted and the result had been profoundly depressing. He had started to learn new things about her. It had been so easy to believe that what one saw of her was all there was to know. Anyway were these changes in him and not in her? Perhaps that was why everything seemed different. David frowned. Yet his mother’s piety, her spasmodic periods of interest in him, and her violent fits of remorse for her
neglect
all seemed new. If she had previously concealed these flaws it was a deceitful betrayal.

David hadn’t thought about George’s position much. The idea of his sleeping with his mother had rarely worried him. It had all begun when he was too young to question. It became part of the taken-for-granted about Mummy, part of the impression. George became right because Mummy liked George, and because Mummy liked George, David liked George; and home was home with George and Mummy and Steven and David.

But the security of this too had begun to fade. Perhaps it had all started with the realisation that Steven and he had always seen few people, that other parents were different. During the holidays he had been looking at some books in the dusty bookcase in the hall. He’d wondered how they’d got there, having seen them for as long as he could
remember
. Things didn’t just start after all, they were started.
Somebody bought the books years ago and then, having
discarded
them, pushed them into this dusty communal grave. George had been wrong when he told him that things just happened. It wasn’t true. We make them happen. The pile of flies in the dust-sheeted guest-room at Trelawn hadn’t always been there. They could be taken away tomorrow. Like the rabbits too—one moment alive, the next dead. That moment when Steven had gone on hitting the rabbit’s head had decided him. George was wrong, George was
responsible
with his mother for everything that he now saw. His large brown eyes filled with tears; adolescence was
certainly
extremely tiresome.

Later that evening he wrote his mother the sort of letter that she expected. Why should anything be wrong? What was there in particular for him to talk to her about? School affairs probably bored her. George had always told David that a good boy who did the right things and did his work would be all right in the end.

Andrew Matthews, the new house tutor, was sitting in the bar of the ‘Fox and Grapes’ in the village of Edgecombe, half a mile from the school. He was alone. Since he had arrived at the school he had made no friends among his colleagues, only once having entered the common room. So far his teaching duties had not extended to private tuition in the house but apparently he was to give extra classes in classics to the brighter boys of all ages in the house, six in number.

Matthews sipped his brandy appreciatively, swilling each mouthful slowly round his tongue before swallowing it. Although it was out of his teaching syllabus, he had been exploring some medieval French Romances as night-time reading. The ‘epic’ love of Yvain and his fellow knight, Gawain, he found especially diverting. Chrétien was
nevertheless
a little harsh. Who on earth wouldn’t have gone to a tournament with his boy-friend if asked, especially if the alternative was being on time for a date with a girl? And who, once there and enjoying all the fun, could possibly have remembered his previous engagement? He ran a
long-fingered
hand through his smooth black hair, as he started
to read of Yvain’s punishment for not turning up as he had promised:

he clicked his tongue disapprovingly as he read on with occasional help from the glossary. Poor old Yvain, most
unfair
. His dark eyes flicked mechanically from line to line as he swiftly devoured the pages.

He wasn’t ambitious; he’d only wanted a teaching job for a couple of years and had been genuinely surprised when his application for the Edgecombe job had led to an
interview
and final acceptance. He had seen that Crofts was weak and faded at their first meeting. Really the job should prove amusing. Besides, as he had once read in the teacher’s manual, ‘What is needed above all to be a successful teacher is a genuine love of boys’. So conventional, he sighed to himself, the last fling of a twenty-five-year-old adolescent in this cruelly adult world. But the conventional aspects were what appealed to him most in the dealings of knight with knight in the Romances.

He looked up from his book over to where a group of local men were playing darts. The adult male is not an animal I admire, he reflected, stroking the base of his now empty glass; but at public schools there were very definitely those who made up in abundance for the shortcomings of these louts. The more genteel pursuits of a less barbarous age drew his eyes back to his book.

What had Henry James seen fit to call Gilbert Osmond? ‘A sterile dilettante.’ Ah well, there are worse callings in life, far worse, he thought. In a quarter of an hour he had reached the passage where Yvain received the healing
ointment
.

 *

Three days later David was sitting in his study, which he shared with two other boys. He was one of the most junior
boys to be in a study, Crofts having singled him out for his undeniable aptitude in classics. Most of the junior boys lived communally in a large room known as the ‘Hall’. David was sitting in a warm arm-chair looking out of the window over a vista of trees towards the playing-fields. Group of boys in football shirts and different-coloured singlets were wending their way in groups back towards their houses. Behind David, in front of the gas fire, one of his room mates, Chadwick, was making toast using a ruler with an ingenious wire attachment on the end. His mother had just sent three pots of home-made lemon curd. David wondered without much hope whether he was going to be offered some. He had, after all, parted with several tins of sardines during the past week. The grease was still evident on the fender. Chadwick started to hum tunelessly.