R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (10 page)

'Yes, sir,' from all three, but he knew what they were thinking – 'Who the hell is he to stick his nose in? He's only a third-termer himself!' The devil of it was that all the rest of the staff, even Herries himself, tolerated this kind of thing, so long as it was kept within limits, but who could say where those limits ran? He wondered briefly what made him so squeamish about it. Was it the
orgy of bloodletting he had witnessed in Flanders, or the thought that there was already too much gratuitous cruelty in the world?

He went off in search of Skidmore, finding him, as he had half-expected, barricaded in a cubicle in the Bog, the one relatively safe retreat throughout a 'last day but five', or a 'last Sunday but six'. He called, 'Come on out, Skidmore, I want a word with you,' and Skidmore emerged, a pallid little wretch, with a crumpled Eton collar a size too large for him and a tear-streaked face. He said, 'All right, it's nothing to worry about. I only wanted to know why you stood out against Bickford. Wouldn't it have been easier to make your bow to the Founder? All the other new boys have,' but Skidmore replied, 'No, sir, it's an image.'

'An image? What's an image?'

'That statue. You don't bow to images. It's in the Bible, sir.'

He was taken aback. It seemed astounding that, in this day and age, a child like Skidmore should be animated by the spirit of Christian martyrs facing circus lions. He said, wonderingly, 'Is
that
why you preferred to be rooted? You're not pulling my leg?' and Skidmore assured him gravely that he was not, and that there was a hymn they sang in chapel that ran, 'the heathen in his blindness, bows down to wood and stone'. He thought, dolefully, 'Good God, when do you stop learning about boys…?' and just stopped himself laughing.

'What's your father, Skidmore?'

'A minister, sir.'

'Really? What denomination?'

'Wesleyan Methodist, sir.'

'Will you tell him about this when you get home?'

'No, sir.'

'You'd see that as sneaking?'

'Wouldn't it be, sir?'

Like himself, Skidmore was learning. You made your point, where you could, but you didn't brag about it.

'All right, Skidmore. Run along and keep out of Bickford's way if you can,' but then, as the boy turned to go, 'How are you liking it here? In spite of today's business?' and Skidmore said, 'Well… all right, sir. I daresay I'll get used to it by next term.'

'Me too,' said David, grinning, and turned away from the boy's surprised look.

CATALYST IN A BERET

1

T
HE HAT PLUMMETED DOWN OUT OF NOWHERE, BRUSHING his nose and pitching at his feet where it settled like a grey bird making a clumsy landing on the shingle. It was an altogether unremarkable hat, not a beret exactly, and not quite a tam o' shanter, but something in between, slightly larger than the hats French peasants had worn in the fields behind the line and with a tassel like a stalk.

Seconds passed before he realised the hat must have an owner and then glanced up, to discover he had been on the point of walking under the pier when the beret fell. A girl was looking down at him from a height of about twenty feet and the moment he saw her she began to wave, pointing to her head, then down at her beret. He smiled and picked it up, joining her in her dumb show by pointing to himself and then the pier, whereupon she nodded eagerly and put her hand to her mouth, masking a laugh. It was a trick the Second Form practised whenever he made one of his small jokes.

He climbed the shingle bank and vaulted the iron rail on to the promenade, moving along to the turnstile and paying his twopence to pass the barrier. The girl was awaiting him on the far side and he noticed now that she was less sure of herself and looked, indeed, a little shamefaced, again like one of the Second Form caught out in a piece of mischief. But then he noticed something else. She was a very pretty girl, with dark brown hair parted in the middle. She had large brown eyes with long, curling lashes, and small hands and feet that seemed no larger than a child's the way she was standing, feet close together, hands drooping and half-hidden in the folds of a tartan skirt. He said diffidently, 'It is yours, I suppose?' and she replied, breathlessly, 'Yes… thank you very much… it was a silly thing to do! I was leaning
out too far and I grabbed but missed. I say…' as she took the hat and began fumbling in her little handbag, 'I owe you twopence!' but at that he laughed and she did too as he said, 'It isn't every day of the week a girl throws her cap at me.' And then, for want of an idea as to how the conversation could be prolonged, he looked over her shoulder and saw the word 'Teas' on the shore side of the pier pavilion. 'Couldn't we have some tea? Or coffee? Are you with anyone?'

She smiled, implying that she was more expert at this game than he was. 'No, I'm not “with anybody", and I'd love some coffee. I was just going in for some. They make good coffee here. For a pier pavilion, that is,' and they walked along the echoing planks to a cafe that was almost empty. 'Here,' she said, 'my favourite table. You can see the sea,' and indicated a table looking over the western section of the bay.

He was so disarmed by her assurance that he forgot his manners and sat down without waiting for her. She said, trying to coax him out of his shyness, 'What a nice thing to happen on the first day of the holiday. Yes, I know, you'll be wondering why I said this was my favourite table. I've been here four years running, you see. My sister and brother-in-law live here. He's a dairyman, and I come up on my unpaid week each spring. The paid week, in September, I'm expected to spend at home, and that isn't nearly so much fun. My name is Marwood, Elizabeth Marwood. What's yours?'

'Powlett-Jones,' he said. 'David,' and was surprised when she brought her hands together, like a child expressing glee. 'Why, that's better still!' she cried. 'David is my favourite boy's name. It used to be Paul, until I had a fresh look at the Acts. Then I had second thoughts. Paul was a killjoy, don't you think? But David was a proper old rake and much more human, if you see what I mean.'

There was absolutely no resisting her. She had the charm and ebullience of a pretty child of about eight, reared by a pair of indulgent parents, and yet this assumption was not supported by her clothes. They were obviously off-the-peg clothes, chosen by someone who had to watch pennies. The tartan skirt, ending halfway up the calf, was all the rage that year, and the white silk blouse was almost certainly run-up by a home-plied needle. Hers or her mother's, he wondered? Shoes and handbag were of cheap imitation leather, and the heart-shaped cameo brooch at her breast was what his mother would have called a 'gee-gaw'. She had strong views about gee-gaws, dismissing them as an indication of extravagance in a woman.

A waitress arrived with a pot of coffee and Elizabeth poured, after asking him if he liked it black or white, and this surprised him a little. It was not until he became a member of the mess, in 1917, that he had known the difference or, indeed, so much as the taste of coffee. In Pontnewydd everybody drank tea.

He had an opportunity to look at her closely while she was pouring, deciding that she was one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen, although his experience was limited. Up to the outbreak of war he had been too busy with his studies to join his elder brothers in skirmishes at choir practice, and Eisteddfod rehearsal that led, in most cases, to walking out, and a wedding at one of the innumerable chapels. Then, during his years in the army, he had rarely seen a woman, except the hard-faced daughters of estaminet madames, or nurses of all ages, who had no time to spare for skylarking with wards full of the wreckage swept from one battlefield or another. And, on top of that, with most of his youth spent, he had chosen to live in another male preserve, so that he was not surprised to find himself tongue-tied in the presence of an attractive, talkative girl. Her friendliness, however, encouraged him to make an effort, and he said, 'You pour like an expert. Do you work in a restaurant or hotel?' and she said he was getting warm, for she worked in 'a sort of hotel'.

'An orphanage?'

'A hospital, in Swansea.'

She did not fit his idea of a nurse. Most of the older nurses, he recalled, had been martinets, sharp with their tongues, bossy and always in a hurry, and now that he thought about it they had all seemed mature, whereas she was hardly more than a girl, no more than nineteen, he would say. He wondered about her involvement in the war, for he had learned to tell at a glance those who had been scarred by the bloody business. Usually it showed in the faces of the young and middle-aged but there was no hint of it here. She was fresh, eager, unspoiled, chock-full of vitality.

He heard her say, 'A penny for them?' and hastily he re-focused his mind. 'Eh? I'm sorry… I was wondering… you being a nurse, I mean. Did you nurse soldiers?'

'No, worse luck,' she said, 'the staff nurses always hogged the men's wards. I was still a probationer while the war was on, and was fobbed off with the pensioners. The matron never encouraged probationers to nurse younger men. She seemed to think it might make them sit up and take notice too quickly!'

He laughed, responding gratefully to her sparkle. She said, 'Were you in the army? You were, weren't you? I can tell, somehow. All the men who were in
the trenches have that same look, as though…' but she checked herself, stirring her coffee so vigorously that it slopped into the saucer.

'What were you going to say?'

'It doesn't matter. Men who were out there don't want to talk about it.'

She was not only pretty and forthcoming, he decided, but discerning for a youngster of her age. He said, 'That's so, but I've been far luckier than most. Not only coming through more or less intact, but having something to take my mind off it when I was discharged.'

'When was that?'

'Over a year ago. I got a Blighty, in the autumn of 1917, and started teaching as soon as I was boarded. It's amazing how it helped. The war already seems something that happened when I was a kid.'

'Well, don't make it sound as if you were in your dotage,' she said cheerfully. 'How old are you, Mr Powlett-Jones?'

'Twenty-two. And you?'

She blushed and then threw her head up, smiling. He noticed her white, even teeth, and her elfin prettiness touched him again, so that he was aware of the sense of renewal he derived from the juniors at Bamfylde. 'I'm nineteen today,' she said, and for some reason the news disposed of the last of his reserve.

'You are? Well, we can't celebrate on coffee. Wouldn't you like an ice or something?'

'No, thank you,' she said, laughing, 'but if you're free and on your own we might… well, we could have lunch. Not here. I know a cafe in the town where the food isn't at all bad,' but then her irrepressible high spirits hitched on a small snag of modesty and she said, 'I say, this is awful! I'm absolutely throwing myself at you. First the beret, then asking myself out to lunch. For all I know you've got a girl somewhere. You might even be married!'

'I'd be lucky where I work. There's four hundred boys, twenty-odd masters, most of them bald and grey, and two women. One is like your matron, the other a middle-aged widow. How's that for credentials?'

'Couldn't be better. Tell me about it. Is it a boarding school, one of those famous ones? And what do you teach? No, let me guess.' She put a finger in her mouth. 'French or Latin, isn't it?'

'You're not much good at guessing, Miss Marwood. History. And a little English to the juniors.'

'You don't look like a schoolmaster.'

'I'm very glad to hear it, especially from someone nineteen today. All right, I'll tell you about it if you like, but let's go out along the prom so far as Rhos. Then we'll have lunch, as you suggest, and after that… well, I was thinking of taking one of those afternoon charabanc trips to Conway Castle. I haven't been there since I was a kid. You'd be very welcome if you'd like to come along, but I'll almost certainly bore you if you do. Edward the First is one of my favourites. And me a good Welshman! How's that for heresy?'

That was how it began, effortlessly and casually, yet the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, beginning with the drop of a beret from the head of a saucy girl, leaning over the rail of the pier at Colwyn Bay and ending in an involvement that was to shape the course of his life as surely and permanently as his arrival at Bamfylde, when he was still in a state of shock and nervous and physical exhaustion. Bamfylde had been a kind of staircase that he was obliged to ascend falteringly, grabbing at handholds and footholds represented by individuals like Algy Herries and Howarth, and by experiences like the first confrontation with the Lower Fourth and his attempt to console Briarley. Elizabeth Marwood offered herself as a smooth, level stretch, one he could pass without stress of any kind, someone who, in herself, was the very essence of hope, sanity, sweetness and promise, someone of his own generation who was able to convince him that, despite all that had happened out there under the growling bombardments, innocence survived, and was already throwing up new, green shoots. He sensed this much that first day and within a week he was gloriously certain of it. But by then, of course, he was hopelessly in love.

2

He never forgot the smallest particular of their first day together, their encounter on the pier, the walk along the promenade, lunch at a cafe called The Lantern, the chara trip to Conway and the almost comic deference she had shown him when he linked the valerian-sown ruins with events that had occurred there. And after that there was the visit to the churchyard to see the seven-spiked grave, featured in Wordsworth's poem, the row up the river, tea at a cottage on the quay next door to the Smallest House in the World, and then back to Colwyn Bay to meet her dairyman brother-in-law, Griff, and her
sister Esther, who welcomed him into their flat over the shop as though he had been an old friend they had unexpectedly re-encountered.

But even that was not the end of it. In the evening he took Elizabeth to a variety concert in the pier pavilion and afterwards, when he saw her home, he kissed her at the gate. A very shy, restrained kiss it was, his first since party days in the Valley, a thousand years ago. Yet it did something to him, reviving, deep within him, a sense of being and existing, that snapped the final cord attaching him to the dried-out husk of a man he had been in the rejuvenating months at Osborne, a restoration of youth that he had come to accept as dead and buried, along with his generation, a quickening of ambition passing into his bloodstream like a powerful stimulant. It was too vitalising a mood to waste in sleep, so, instead of returning to the Y.M.C.A. where he was staying, he went back to the pierhead and leaned on the rail, looking out across the whispering bay and watching a sliver of moon ride the piled-up masses of blue-black clouds. He caught himself murmuring her name, catching and savouring its six syllables, and on its utterance the memory of her soft, eager lips returned to him, the final bonus of what he saw as the most exhilarating day of his life. He remained there a long time until he recalled he had no key and there was no night porter at the hotel. Then he moved on, smiling at the prospect of rousing the hotel at one in the morning but not caring a damn, for he saw himself then as a wandering drunk who, against all probability, had found his way home.