R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (60 page)

'I look anaemic? I'm losing my sex-appeal?'

He said, taking her cup, 'Who lives here? Who is your landlady?'

'Dora Beavis,' she said, 'a widow with three cats called Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. She's a strict Methodist. However, we're in luck tonight. She and her blasted cats have gone to Langport to stay with a sister.'

'I've got to drive back tonight. I'm on duty tomorrow, and Molyneux wants his car. But I'm staying here until the small hours. I'll make sure I get away well before daylight.'

She made no protest. The temperature of the dismal room was rising a little, now that the curtains were drawn, and the gas-fire had been singing for half an hour. He turned off the overhead light and the outlines of the cheerless place were softened. 'Go to bed,' he said, 'God knows, you look as if you need some sleep,' and she replied, 'That's gallant of you, after a hundred-mile drive, and the prospect of another in slashing rain.' Then, forlornly, 'I need you right now more than sleep, Davy.'

He took her at her word. There was not much room in the narrow bed but in one another's arms they found at least a temporary solution to their problems. She might be tired out, he thought, but she still had reserves of vitality and enfolded him with desperate eagerness, too impatient and too much in need of solace to give a thought to contraceptives.

She said, before she drifted into sleep, 'That would just about put the tin lid on it, wouldn't it? A candidate, separated from her husband, and several
months gone.' But there was a trace of laughter in her voice.

3

She must have been as tired as she looked. About five o'clock, long before it was light, he relit the gas-fire, slipping a shilling into the meter and glancing over his shoulder to see if the click had disturbed her. It had not, so he dressed quickly in the feeble orange glow, determined to let her sleep on until one or other of her supporters roused her. She looked more or less herself again, with colour in her cheeks. Deep sleep had brought a total relaxation of her face so that he was able to see her less as a woman than one of his first-termers, relieved by sleep of the strain of keeping up appearances during the day. He thought of himself as having loved Beth to the limit of his experience but it had never quite reached the pitch of intensity he felt for her at this particular moment. He and Beth had achieved what he thought of as a supremely successful partnership, but Beth had never stood in such terrible need of his protection, had never once appeared to him so defenceless and spent. In the last few years Chris had taken any amount of hard knocks, and the passage between her awakening at university, and last night's rowdiness in a small-town drill hall, was marking her spirit, now masked in sleep that would sustain her for another day or so. After that, he would say, it would be touch and go, depending upon how she fared at the polls. He was sure of one thing. She was not capable of absorbing humiliation on a grossly wounding scale.

He had seen himself, up to that time, as a committed radical but he understood now that he was really no more than a dilettante. Bamfylde had replaced his hunger for social justice, quickening in him since his schooldays in the Valley. He was much tougher, too, and far more resilient. Trench warfare had seen to that long before he had come of age. It was something she would have to work out for herself, win or lose. Nobody could help her much, except maybe by the odd word of encouragement at the right time and place. He took one of her leaflets from the bamboo plant-table in the window and wrote, in the glow of the fire,

You needed sleep. Good luck and God bless. I love you very much, so bear this in mind, no matter what happens on Thursday. God knows, dearest, love is what it's all about really. If it isn't, does it matter who runs the show? One
other thing – you look younger, prettier, and more desirable than ever at this moment.

Davy

He put the leaflet, written side up, on the chair where she had thrown her clothes and tiptoed out, groping his way down the steep stairs to the front door and striking a match to help him grapple with its fastenings. The doorknob felt greasy under his hand and the narrow hall smelled unpleasantly of cats.

4

The furore of the Governors' meeting, followed by Alcock's death, and Chris's dilemma, had banished all thought of his book from his mind. Perhaps he was beginning to see it, in retrospect, as a mere time-consuming enterprise over the ups and downs, mostly downs, of the last few years. A means of escaping, for an hour or so, first from the pressures of grief, then Alcock's nagging presence. At all events he had forgotten it completely, so that he stared at Barnaby uncomprehendingly when, soon after noon that same Sunday, he saw him waving a newspaper as he passed under the front of Nicolson's on his way to confer with Heffling, head prefect, about the prep roster for the ensuing week. Barnaby shouted,
'Hi,
there! You're being very modest, aren't you? I knew we had a literary presence about the place, but I was under the impression he was a cub, not a lion!'

'What the hell are you waffling about?' he called back, but then he saw that the newspaper in Barnaby's hand was yesterday's
Times
open at the book page. The Sunday papers would not get here until late afternoon, so that they had formed a habit of saving Saturday's papers to combat ennui between Saturday night and Monday morning.

He said, excitedly, 'There's a review of my book in there?'

'There is, my dear chap, and a regular corker! It's either a first-class book, or you've struck uncommonly lucky with a critic.' Then, bleakly, 'Are you telling me you didn't look for it yesterday?'

'I was travelling,' David said. 'Would you lend me that paper, Barnaby. You can have it back.'

'I don't want it back. You can mutilate it as far as I'm concerned. Everyone else has read it, but you can't expect anyone but me or Howarth to glance at the book reviews on the way to the sports pages. Take it, and congratulations,
and I mean that, P.J.'

'Thanks very much, Barnaby. Will… er… has Howarth seen it?'

'Probably not. He was off duty yesterday and over at Algy's. And the old bird doesn't usually surface until Sunday afternoons if he can help it. Were you supposed to be taking lunch today?'

'Yes, I'm duty wallah.'

'I'll take it for you. We can't expect bona fide authors to sit watching boys stuff themselves with boiled cabbage and beetroot on occasions like this.'

David thanked him and set off across the playing field to Algy's thinking post where, in the two winter terms, the roller was parked under its tarpaulin. There were a few boys about but just then the lunch-bell rang and within minutes the field was empty. He sat on the shaft of the roller and read the review from start to finish. Then he went back and read it again, letting his eye rove up and down the column in search of phrases that pleased him most, those in which the reviewer, who signed himself 'John Ellicott', had used to emphasise an overall theme that here was someone who could make an absorbing narrative out of the confused canvas of fifteenth-century England.

Ellicott made his first point (or perhaps his literary editor made it for him) with the headlines: 'FRESH SPARKLE ON DULLED SURFACES – HIGHLY READABLE ACCOUNT OF WARS OF THE ROSES', and on the same theme –

Amateurs interested in English history, in the middle decades of the fifteenth century, approach it with the certain knowledge that they will soon lose their way in a welter of warring dynasties. Until now, that is, for an unknown biographer (this is his first published book) has shown that patience plus enthusiasm can crop something very palatable from these pastures. The book is The Royal Tigress, a study in depth of Margaret of Anjou and her period, and the author is David Powlett-Jones, a West Country schoolmaster, a man with an obvious passion for the bloody struggle of York and Lancaster from first St. Albans to Bosworth Field…

Here followed a summary of the narrative that was more than a busy journalist's rehash of the publisher's blurb.

It requires more than a detailed knowledge of the period to convert shadowy figures like the saintly Henry VI, his vitriolic French wife, the Duke of York, Warwick the Kingmaker and others into the flesh-and-blood portraits Mr Powlett-Jones has drawn for us. He has brought to this thinly chronicled period a searchlight that reveals some of the motives and methods of power-hungry men, of the kind frequently encountered in later centuries. It is this that makes the book unique. As well as being as exciting as a well-constructed thriller, it is a warning to all men in high positions who allow personal ambition and pride to dominate their lives. Most of them, as we know, came to a very sticky end and Tudor England was the richer for their demise. But, apart from being a cautionary tale, this book is a romance set in the twilight of feudalism. The author is, I suspect a romantic, who began writing The Royal Tigress biased in favour of Lancaster. He ended a dedicated Yorkist. Edward IV, that genial, womanising giant, is seen here as the first modern sovereign of England, and his brother, the much-maligned Richard of Gloucester, as its last warrior king. Between them, the one consciously, the other unconsciously, they prepared the way for modern England.

In addition are portraits of many colourful characters; Margaret herself, indomitable, cruel and always unlucky; Tiptoft, the sadistic scholar, who said to his executioner 'Behead me with three strokes, in honour of the Trinity'; the Kingmaker, playing for high stakes all his life and dying like a gladiator at Barnet and many others. Mr Powlett-Jones has also taken the trouble to make a study of the military strategy and tactics of the period, supplying us with comprehensive maps of the campaigns. Altogether an extremely readable book and one that can be recommended to student and layman.

Nobody, he thought, could be anything but flattered by Mr Ellicott's review,
and he wondered if he could hope for equally encouraging notices from other papers. It occurred to him then that here, if he was looking for it, was an alternative livelihood. A modest one, perhaps (the agent had warned him he would be very lucky to make four hundred a year from historical biography), but a living on a par with the one he was getting now, and this might mean he could abandon teaching if he felt inclined. It occurred to him also that it was strange he had not yet received advance copies of the book, and thought it possible that the parcel had arrived and was unclaimed in the parcels room.

The mere prospect of touching the book, of feeling it under his hand, sent him down the field at a trot to seek out Heffling, head prefect, and ask for the key of the parcels room. Heffling said, at once, 'Sorry about yours, sir… it came Friday afternoon and was on Saturday's list, but you were away, so I asked Taylor to leave it at Havelock's. It must have slipped his memory, sir.'

'Come along with me and get it, Heffling, for this is a magic moment I must share with somebody. Unless I'm mistaken it's my author's copies, copies of the book I've published on the Wars of the Roses,' and Heffling, taken slightly aback, said, 'You've actually written a book, sir? A real book?' and David laughed and said, 'Real enough in that it represents quarts of midnight oil. I began it before you arrived here in the winter of '25.'

It was the books right enough, six of them, clean, crisp and emitting that singular bookish smell everyone here associated with the start of the new school year, when all classes were issued with new exercise books. It was a fatter, heavier book than David had imagined, and the maps and illustrations had reproduced extremely well. Heffling turned the leaves reverently, almost as though he was handling the Book of Kells.

'Gosh, sir,' he said, at length, 'this'll put Bamfylde on the map, won't it? I mean, the chaps will be tickled to death. Even chaps who think history is a bit of a bore.'

It slipped out, a virtual confession that Heffling spent most of David's periods planning the tactics of the next game with Blundell's or Queen's School, Taunton, but Ellicott's review had worked wonders on his goodwill. He said, 'Look here, Heffling, you were the first in on this, apart from Mr Barnaby, who had to remind me I'd written the book at all. Would you like that copy as a keepsake?'

'Me, sir? I'd like that very much, sir!' and then, shyly, 'Would you… could you
autograph
it, sir?'

'Delighted. Never had the honour before. Here…' and he took out his
fountain pen and wrote on the flyleaf,
'For George Heffling, presented by the author on the day of publication,'
and signed his name with a flourish. 'It isn't strictly true. Official publication day is tomorrow, but what's in a day? Hand me those others. I'm going to autograph copies for Mr Howarth and Mr Barnaby, who read it in proof form.'

He left Heffling clutching his windfall and carried the books up to his quarters, wishing Grace was around to share his triumph, but she was pony riding on the moor and lunching at Ma Midden's. He signed copies for Barnaby and Howarth, and a third for his mother, who would never read it but would take it up and down the street, then, just as he was going to seek Howarth, Chris rang, calling from 'The Mitre', the Bilhampton pub.

'Davy? I'm so glad I caught you. I've only got a minute before they pick me up for the motorcade. Motorcade! One Morris, one Austin Seven, and two tradesmen's vans. I just wanted to say thank you… thank you for everything, Davy darling, but especially the note you left. I feel much better, honestly. I don't know how I would have coped last night if you hadn't been there. But when I woke up and found you gone, then read your note and had a cup of tea and a serious talk with myself, things seemed different. I'll show these baskets what I'm made of yet!'

It sent his spirits soaring even higher to hear her talk that way. 'All you needed was a good sleep.'

'Ah,' she said, chuckling, 'but I wouldn't have had that if it hadn't been for you. They always say it's the best soporific in the world, don't they?'

'No hangover?'

'None. I love you, remember?'

'Good. Then here's something that might send your mercury up another point, as it has mine,' and he told her about the review in
The Times,
and the early copies of
The Royal Tigress.