R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (33 page)

Bristow, boldest of the new boys, spoke for all of them. 'How do you mean, sir? Help her pour out?'

'No, by George! Quite the reverse. Let
her
do the pouring.
And
all the passing round. That's her job as hostess. Just keep the conversation going and don't laugh, whatever you do. If she thinks any of you find it funny she'll be very upset and I don't want her upset. She's been through a very rotten time.' He hesitated a moment, then took the plunge. 'Do any of you here know what happened a year or so ago?'

Most of them looked blank but Bristow spoke up again. 'I do, sir. There was a motor-smash on Quarry Hill and Mrs Powlett-Jones was killed, sir.'

'My wife and Grace's little sister. Grace was badly knocked about but she pulled through.'

They stared at him with embarrassed sympathy. Then Grindling said, with an effort, 'Er… just leave it to us, sir.'

And he did, to such good effect that, ever afterwards, he had a particularly soft spot for the Michaelmas intake of 1926. Grace sat at the head of the table and poured, looking like a tiny grandmother entertaining a flock of grandchildren on their very best behaviour, but then, Bristow, already qualifying for the role of Second Form humorist, made everybody laugh describing an adventure he had in Boulogne that summer, when he had lost his way and talked French to a gendarme. Then Grindling played 'Autumn Ride' on the upright piano Mrs Ferguson had left behind, and made them laugh again by declaring that the piano needed tuning, and Grace limped around the circle with a bowl of crystallised fruits and everyone seemed genuinely reluctant to leave when the prep bell went. Bristow, he noted with approval, bowed from the waist in Grace's direction, and thanked her very politely on everyone's behalf, and they all went off with a slice of his cake wrapped in paper napkins.

'That was absolutely splendid!' he said, as soon as the door had closed on them. 'You did it just as well as your mother. I'm only sorry Winterbourne
wasn't here to see it,' and she replied, mildly, 'Oh, he would have felt silly among boys that age.' She said it as if Winterbourne would soon be up here celebrating his own thirtieth birthday.

So the days sped along, to half-term and onward to the Michaelmas climax, the opera, staged in Big Hall two days before break-up. A rather sad occasion this, for it was Algy Herries's last. 'Twenty-three in a row!' he crowed, as they were wedging him into his First Lord's uniform. 'That's a run, if you like! Only D'Oyly Carte can equal that and this role is my second favourite. I've always had a weakness for Ko-Ko.'

David, sitting in as understudy for Rapper Gibbs at dress-rehearsal, had a surprise in store for him, however. At the given moment in marched four marines, sent to their stations downstage by a piping command of a midshipman, and it was as well he wasn't accompanying at the time for, from under the band of the flat white cap, peeped Grace's dark curls and the try-it-on-the-dog audience cheered, presumably all in on the secret. Young Masters, it seems, cast as the midshipman, had gone down with a feverish cold, and Algy, taking Helen Arscott into his confidence, had coached Grace to take his place. She had no words to learn, other than the command, and among all those white bell-bottomed trousers her limp did not show. But David had a bad moment, remembering Beth as Buttercup, in 1921, and it took him a minute or two to recover. It was reckoned a great joke to play on a member of the staff and Algy, apologising afterwards, said, 'I daresay it gave you a jolt but it tickled her no end and the audience too, as you noticed. She's a great favourite, they tell me.'

She was too, more of a favourite than even Algy knew, for besides having Winterbourne to teach her to paint in watercolours, she now had 'Sax' Hoskins teaching her the Charleston and the lyrics of all the dance hits that were crossing the Atlantic in a flood just then.

'Sax' was the current Bamfylde jazz enthusiast. His five-piece band played at all the weekly dances, and there were even rumours that he would begin training as a professional when he left. He was a noisy, uninhibited chap, with no other interests or attainments to his credit, and approached David one day after seeing Grace at her exercises.

'Excuse me, sir. It might sound daft but couldn't we make that drill of hers
a bit more interesting? I mean, if she is supposed to exercise the muscles in that way, wouldn't dancing help?'

'Dancing? What kind of dancing? Folk dancing of some kind?' but at this Hoskins looked outraged. 'Good Lord,
no,
sir!
Real
dancing. Modern steps. The foxtrot, two-step and waltz. Even the Charleston, if she's up to it!'

David said, chuckling, 'Well, I don't see why not, so long as she doesn't overdo it,' and Hoskins said, 'I'll watch that, sir. After all, she'll want to learn ballroom dancing in a year or so. They all do, sir. My kid sisters are absolute dabsters, and they're not much older than Grace.'

So it was done. Hoskins carried his portable gramophone up to the living-room at Havelock's and put on a number he described as 'just the job'. It was called 'Crazy Words, Crazy Tune', and David looked on as Hoskins taught Grace how to shuffle her feet this way and that, and cross over, and perform all manner of ritual hand gestures while doing it. She seemed extraordinarily quick to catch on so that Hoskins pronounced her 'a natural'. 'She's quicker on the uptake than my sister Margaret,' he said, 'and Miggs won a box of chocolates for shimmying at a concert.'

One way and another it was a memorable, rollicking term, and for once he was sorry to see them depart six days before Christmas when, in the period between first light and nine a.m. the place emptied and then, magically, was still.

The next day the station taxi called to take him and Grace to catch the Bristol train for Wales, where they were spending Christmas, this being 'Granmam Powlett-Jones's turn'. Some of the Sunsetters helped load their bags and as the battered old Belsize ran over the frosty surface of the east drive, and swung left to pass along under the playing-field hedge, Grace voiced a thought that had occurred to him while he was making the early morning tea. She said, 'It'll be fun seeing Granmam and Auntie Gwynneth, and Uncle Ewart and Auntie Megan. But I'll miss everyone here, won't you, Daddy?'

'Well, let's say I shall by the day they all descend on us again,' he said. 'Let's see, when
is
that exactly?'

'January the nineteenth,' she said. 'New boys arrive the day before.'

You could never catch Grace out on any Bamfylde milestones.

AVE ET CAVE

1

F
EW AMONG THOSE ACCLIMATISED TO HOWARTH'S GLACIAL classroom expression would have spotted anything amiss with him that particular morning, some halfway through the tight-rope term, that is to say, towards the end of February. But David, who looked upon the dry old stick as friend and counsellor, noticed it as he helped himself to his bacon and eggs from the side-table in Big Hall.

It was not that Howarth looked more disdainful than usual, or more likely to erupt in the quiet, deadly way he reserved for the fool and the chatterer. He picked at his food with his customary air of distaste, and crumbled his toast with the air of a man disposing of an unpopular relative's ashes, and all the time kept his deceptively neutral gaze on his customary focal point, namely the kitchen hatch at the far end of the hall. Yet David noted something particularly wary about him, and something supremely world-weary too, as he raised his coffee cup and sipped as though sampling hemlock, then set it down again, noiselessly, for Howarth hated racket above all Bamfylde's shortcomings.

David's eyes rested for a moment on a buff, typewritten envelope, neatly slit, lying at Howarth's elbow and presently, speaking very quietly, he said, 'Not bad news, I hope?' Howarth's bleak gaze turned on him and he saw that he was right. The face of the man under its frigid mask was deeply troubled as he muttered, 'Doing anything tonight?' and when David shook his head, 'Come up and take a gill then. After prep bell,' and got up abruptly, striding down the centre aisle between the massed tables and out. He took the letter with him but left a barely tasted cup of coffee and most of his rasher and toast.

He was in command of himself again several hours later, and had the tray of
drinks and his usual box of Gold Flake set before the fire when David joined him at eight. 'Must have given myself away. Wouldn't have said so but evidently I did.'

'Not to anyone but me. What's up?'

Howarth got up and crossed to his tidy desk, opening a drawer and taking out a large silver-framed photograph, of the type usually kept on a piano or mantelshelf. It was a studio photograph of a girl about twenty, wearing a style of dress popular about twenty-five years before. The features were very delicate and the small, slightly prim mouth sensitive, the hair was fluffy and looked very fair. David studied the photograph, recalling a chilly confidence on the bench under the fives court more than eight years before, when Howarth had mentioned the girl who turned him down for a stockbroker. He had never referred to her since and was not a man one questioned on personal matters.

'Was the letter from her?'

'It was about her. She died, six months ago.'

'You didn't know?'

He said, petulantly, 'I haven't kept in touch with her. She had a son nearly as old as you!'

It was curious how certain David was of the closeness of the link between news from some matter-of-fact executor, and Howarth's ravaged look at breakfast and somehow the circumstances were uncharacteristic. He had always thought of Howarth as a man proof against deep feelings. Yet here was evidence of another kind. Clearly there had never been any other woman for Ian Howarth.

'I'm sorry. It's hit you pretty badly.'

'Like the very devil, but don't ask me why. Haven't set eyes on Amy Crispin since the spring of nineteen-hundred and six.'

'You keep her photograph handy.'

'Out of sight. You've never seen it before, and nobody else ever will. Not until they poke around my things and wonder what the hell to do with it. Keep me company, P.J.,' and he poured two more pink gins, larger ones than usual.

David said, carefully, 'You want to talk about her?'

'I don't know. There isn't a day when I haven't thought about her. But talking, that's different. As you must know to your cost.'

It drew them closer somehow. Not much but a little. Himself nursing a half-healed wound, with its unpredictable ache and Howarth, outwardly the eternal
bachelor, mourning a certain Amy Crispin, lost to him a quarter-century ago. Howarth said, at length, 'What the devil can it be to you, anyway; a man at the receiving end of a real tragedy?'

'Beth and I had six years together. They were very happy years.'

'That's a point of view,' Howarth said. 'I wonder if Amy or I could have said the same.'

'Were you engaged?'

'For more than a year. Do you know what they paid an usher in '03? And you think we're underpaid now! I was getting a hundred and thirty a year at Beckworth Grammar School, and I was twenty-four. It was late to change horses and in any case I had no mind to, then or later. If I have a vocation it's teaching. Like you, my friend.'

'I daresay she could have waited.'

'For how long? Five years? Ten? She wanted children and went elsewhere for them. I never held that against her.'

'Was she happy?'

'I always assumed so.' He sat thinking a moment and then, with a grunt expressing protest at his own sentimentality, he took out the letter and passed it across the table. It was the lawyer's letter, but its content was arresting, perhaps on that account. Howarth had been left the sum of eight thousand pounds by the late Amy Hodgson, née Crispin, together with his pick of the library at a house called Clearwood Court in Sussex. There was a brief footnote to the letter. Seemingly in an agony of embarrassment the lawyer had added, in his own handwriting,

I feel it my duty to quote the relevant passage from my client's codicil, relating to the bequest, viz. 'To Ian Howarth, whom I remember with the greatest affection.'

It explained, David thought, so many things. Not merely Howarth's bleak and hurried exit from the dining-hall that morning but the threads that made up his entire personality. It was as though, somewhere around 1903, eleven years before the world went raving mad, a young, love-sick schoolteacher in a provincial grammar school had sentenced himself to self-petrification, a penance that had, in the end, transformed him from an eager, dedicated youngster into a wry, ironic husk of a man, racing towards middle age and the ultimate pedantry that awaits all but a very few of the profession. It was a personal tragedy, in its way as much a tragedy as the loss of Howarth's generation in
Flanders, and yet, as David acknowledged at once, the petrification had never been wholly achieved. Somewhere, under the ice of the simulated personality, the original Howarth was still there, trying hard to get out, and once in a while almost succeeding.

'Eight thousand pounds! That's a small fortune. What will you do now?'