R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (54 page)

'We're good for each other,' she said, and then, smiling, 'Now I wonder if that's ever happened before?'

'The carving?'

'No, a front pew kiss.'

'They've had the occasional wedding here.'

'Ah, but that's not the same. It would be done standing, there by the altar. And a chaste kiss at that.' Then she added, 'If the cards don't fall your way, if they back Alcock and put the pressure on you, would you make a fresh start, at another school?'

'No.'

'What then?'

'I'd take that tip given me in Bilhampton and have a crack at politics.'

'Could you afford to?'

'I've got a bit put by, and could use it to keep me going while I nursed a constituency. It would have to be one with real prospects.'

'Not like mine, you mean?'

'You'll get promoted, as soon as they've had a chance to assess your worth. One good fight at Bilhampton and you'll be nominated for an industrial seat up North…' but she wasn't listening. Presently she said, 'I suppose I ought to be hoping those Governors do come down on Alcock's side. That way I'd have a sporting chance.'

'I don't follow. What has the Governing Board got to do with your chances?'

'You can be very thick, Davy. Put it like this. If you win then that's it, so far as I'm concerned. Oh, I daresay we'd go on seeing one another occasionally, but it would be a case of me trotting down here, and soon enough, wallowing in Bamfylde, you'd regard everything happening outside as trivial. Not yet, maybe, while you're still in your thirties, but later, when you're “over the hill” as they say. Now look at the other side of the coin. If Alcock wins you'll prise yourself loose and it's possible we'd make a formidable team.'

'As a pair of candidates?'

She looked at him steadily. 'No, with you as candidate and me loading for you.'

He saw it as a graceful compliment. Of all her associates only he understood how deeply she was committed and how passionately she needed to justify herself in her chosen field. That she was ready, eager even, to step down on his account, and put her enthusiasm to work on his behalf, struck him as a very positive expression of faith in him.

'You'd do that? For me?'

'Why not? One of my rare qualities is that of knowing my own mind and having the nerve to act on it. You're very fond of me, Davy. But I'm very much in love with you.'

It didn't really astonish him. By now he was growing used to her devastating honesty. She went on, 'That doesn't obligate you in any way, and I wouldn't have owned up to it without the special circumstances.'

'You mean Rowley's refusal to make separation final? Because if that's so I've got a say in it now, considering what you've just said. “Fond” was your word and it's an understatement, Chris. There have been plenty of times since we met…'

She said, gently, 'Hold it, Davy! Don't say more than you need. This came from me, and the circumstances I mentioned have nothing to do with Rowley. It concerns you and how you feel about me and about women in general. You were very deeply in love with Beth. That's my impression anyway, and there's never much wrong with my instincts. You could make do, and put up a pretty good show of living, but there would always be a big slice of you that no other woman could possess. You can protest as much as you like but it's true, and deep down you know it.'

It was all but dusk in here now but light enough to see her eyes searching his and she was not the kind of person who would settle for anything short of
the whole truth, or the truth as she saw it.

'It wouldn't be the same and you're right about a very special relationship. But don't most couples feel that in the first years of marriage? Beth was only twenty-five when she died. I'll say this, however.' He took her hand, gloveless and passive, 'With a person like you it would be the nearest I could ever come to starting all over again, and that's more than enough for me. Is it enough for you?'

She shrugged. 'What point is there in answering that? I'm not even in a position to try.'

'I'm not so sure about that. He's been abroad for years, hasn't he? If he stays over there indefinitely I daresay you could get a divorce on grounds of desertion. He might change his mind, might even want to marry again himself. So far as I know you haven't even corresponded with him, except through lawyers.'

'I made enquiries, though, and it's a dead end. Knowing Rowley, it's likely to stay one. I said his family behaved well towards me but as regards divorce they'd range themselves with him. Catholics of their kind take their religion much more seriously than we do. It isn't something they put on and off like an overcoat. They wouldn't lift a finger to help, and told me so when I raised the matter a year back.'

'Then to blazes with him. We owe ourselves some consideration, don't we? I'm not that stuffy.'

'You mightn't be and I'm not. But, as I said in the first place, it doesn't depend on us, does it? If you still have any hope of qualifying for a headship you've more sense than to pursue that line of thought, Davy. The odd weekend is one thing. A permanent relationship, with you in the running for a post of that kind, is quite another. Besides, I might want children. Have you ever thought of that?'

He saw himself trapped in a web of conflicting loyalties and her availability, implicit in her honesty, was an entirely new factor in their relationship up to that moment. It had about it the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, with a dash of French farce thrown in for good measure. It had progressed, at a bound, from the camaraderie of their first encounters, to a stage where he was more than half in love with her and she was avowedly in love with him. Yet it promised little. They were trapped, not only by her situation but by his. It represented an equation. Rowley, plus Chris, equals stalemate; Powlett-Jones, plus Bamfylde minus Chris, equals celibacy. And there were any number of incidental factors,
among them Alcock, Alcock's impact on his future, Chris's involvement with politics, and that hint of hers about children.

He gave it up. It was too much to conjure with without isolating every factor and examining them individually. He said, 'Well, I'm a free agent right now, and likely to be until those damned Governors get around to sorting the muddle out. Let's get out of here, and go back to my quarters. You don't have to drive back tonight, do you? I could get you a room in Challacombe for a few days and come over every evening.'

'On your home ground? Under everybody's nose? Use your head, Davy!'

'Where, then? And when?'

'Are the Governors likely to meet before you break up for the holidays?'

'I don't know. I wouldn't think they'd make a final decision. There's only a couple of weeks to go, and they don't usually meet in August.'

'Well then, we'll find some neutral ground. It's time I took a holiday anyway. Until then, just hold me a little.'

They sat on in the pew for another hour or so, until, carried faintly on the evening breeze, they heard the sound that had regulated his life for more than twelve years now, the far-off clang of Bamfylde's handbell, swung by the latest successor of Nipper Shawe, going his rounds as far as Algy's thinking post. Then, silently acknowledging the summons, they walked the half-mile back to school.

3

Alcock went out of his way to avoid him, or so it seemed through the fag-end of the term. Whatever Sir Rufus Creighton was about he confided in no one, yet Algy Herries, who dropped in for a chat one evening during the final week of term, was convinced something was stirring out there. 'Don't ask me for evidence,' he said, 'for I couldn't produce any. I can only tell you I know those stone-faced arbiters of our destinies and if I don't, who should? There are probably the same three sets of plotters hard at work. The liberals, chivvied along by Brigadier Cooper. The conservatives, rallying to that bounder Blunt. And the uncommitted or, as Cooper would put it, the Any-Way-For-A-Pinters. They're a majority, I'd say. They hate decisions, and are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid making one.'

'And Sir Rufus?'

'Ah, that joker is out on his lonesome, and prefers it that way. You mightn't
believe it to look at him, but he's a slave to the pursuit of power.'

'Then it's Creighton I should concentrate on, isn't it?'

'You leave him alone,' warned Algy, severely. 'Believe me, I know what's best for you. The pressure has eased, hasn't it. Since you despatched that letter?'

'Alcock and I haven't exchanged two consecutive sentences this term, if that's what you mean.'

'So much the better. We all talk too much.'

'But in God's name, Algy, it ought to be possible for adults to run a place like this without resorting to petty intrigue. Damn it, I sometimes think I'm back at school myself, and nursery school at that – “He was my friend before he was your friend, so there!” '

'You should have learned my boy, that only the rare spirits grow in mental stature after the age of, say, five-and-a-half. Whenever one does he qualifies as an Immortal. I'm off now. The confounded parochial church council is meeting at seven-thirty, and I'm in for another stint of smoothing ruffled plumes. My advice to you is to get right away from here for a bit. Go somewhere anonymous. Have you any plans for the long break?'

He was obliged to lie. 'Grace is spending a month with her aunts in Kent, then another week at the seaside with cousins. I thought I might go north, after I've paid a duty visit to the Valley.'

'Good. Well, write if you have to but meantime, put it out of mind. I'll keep in touch with the brigadier by phone. He's our only source of news.'

A day or so later the thirteen-week turmoil reached its brief climax. Homesick boys crossed the final day from their pocket calendars. Trunks came tumbling down from the platform over the covered playground. The Corps, headed by its band, marched off to entrain for a week's camp at Tidworth Pennings.

'Have a good hols, sir!'

'Can I move into the Senior dorm next term, sir?'

'Cookson's leaving, sir. Who'll be Havelock's house perk, sir?'

And from the departing Cookson, 'Keep me in touch, sir. I'd like to know if Havelock's hold on to that shield.'

The staff scattered. Barnaby to his beloved Greece, Howarth to town for his annual spree (what did he do up there alone at the Strand Palace, David wondered?), others to the seaside. All save Molyneux who appeared, burdened with kit, to announce that he was attempting a new climb in the French Alps.
'Always the chance he might fall into a very deep crevice,' Howarth said, never having caught on to Ferguson's successor. 'Is there any likelihood of us meeting in town, P.J.?'

'Not until early September.'

'By early September,' Howarth grunted, 'I shall be back here, getting ready for another three months' purgatory. Enlivened, I hope, by a display of fireworks.'

'That's very likely,' David said, and was surprised, and even a little embarrassed, when Howarth shook his hand and said, in a rare moment of expansiveness, 'Well, I don't have to tell you where my money is going, P.J. Take Herries's advice. Get clear away and forget the whole damned lot of us for a month,' after which he withdrew hastily, as he invariably did after a display of human feeling.

They met, by appointment, at Exchange Station, Manchester, half an hour or so before the train to Windermere pulled out. She arrived by taxi from London Road Station, a breathless, carefree Christine Forster, who somehow reminded him of an overgrown schoolgirl who had given her chaperon the slip.

They had exchanged letters as regards the locality of her 'neutral ground'. He had favoured Anglesey but she said Anglesey was Welsh, and not neutral enough, and had suggested they should go to Skye, Mull, or another of the Western Isles. She had had second thoughts about this, however, reasoning that the Hebrides, at this time of year, was almost always wet, and she was badly in need of sunshine.

'It's different for you,' she said, over the phone, 'you're country-based. I've spent the last six months drinking tepid tea in terrace houses and my evenings in committee rooms that haven't seen soap and water since the election of 1918. I've found a place for us at Windermere.'

'Are you absolutely sure you want to leave your constituency at a time like this?' he said, when he met her. 'They say things are hotting up at Westminster, and there might be a snap election any moment,' but she said, coolly, 'Have I ever tried to teach you your business? Pipe down, Davy. Let's try a little cheerful sin for a change,' and held up her left hand, displaying what looked like a new wedding ring.

He said, sharply, 'Is that Rowley's? Because if so, take the damned thing off.'

'It isn't Rowley's. I popped his long ago. It's the Christmas cracker variety,' and she kissed him, at an awkward moment as far as an oncoming porter was concerned, for the three of them collided and the porter scattered his burdens on the platform.

It would take time, he thought, to adjust to this high-spirited girl, who seemed to find in him a source of release denied her for a long, long time, but before their first twenty-four hours together had elapsed he was attuned to her gaiety and lack of inhibition, seeing her as an unlikely amalgam of Beth, in what he thought of as their middle period, Julia Darbyshire, before he made the mistake of committing himself, and a dash of the extroverts in the Lower Fourth.