R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (68 page)

He said nothing of his suspicions to Manners when the senior reported. In his own mind there was little doubt but that Crispin had gone there deliberately, seeking not warmth but oblivion, and the nearness of their escape
made him catch his breath. He thought, 'I didn't handle it right, I should have offered the kid tea and gone to work on him straightaway – anything but let him mooch off like that, with his packload of misery…' but Manners helped without knowing it, saying, 'He's a frightful weed, sir, one of the worst we've ever had. He does everything you tell him but no more, if you follow me, sir. He's just the kind who would sit there like a kipper and wait to get cooked.' He paused and it crossed David's mind that Manners might be wondering if his own approach to Crispin had not contributed to his fag's wretchedness. A moment later this was confirmed as he added, 'I… er… I did try talking to him straight, sir. Early in the term I told him to pull his socks up and try harder at games. Would you like me to have another go at him, sir?'

'No,' David said, definitely, 'just try putting yourself in his place once in a while. He's cut off from his people, and hasn't the knack of making friends. Not everybody has, you know.'

It was no use telling Manners to hold his tongue about the incident. It would be all over the school by now, and even if it wasn't it would leak as soon as he put the coke-hole out of bounds.

He went over to the library and browsed about looking for a book that might help to take Crispin out of himself. He found a copy of Williamson's
Tarka the Otter,
slipped it in his pocket and went up the slate staircase to matron's room. Crispin, she said, in her quaint hospital phrase, was 'comfortable'. The vomiting had probably prevented unpleasant after-effects, although he might have a bad headache for a day or so. He had taken soup, and kept it down, and later a cup of tea and a purgative. Ma Kruger was a great believer in purgatives and, crafty as some of her patients were, few found means to avoid swallowing them.

He said, 'I'll pop in and have a word with him. He wanted a book,' and left her to her darning, going through into the sick bay built the year after the fire.

Crispin was sitting up in bed looking at nothing. He said, as soon as David pulled a chair up, 'I meant it to happen, sir. They say if you sit there long enough you pass out.'

'Never mind all that, Crispin. It's time you and I put all our cards on the table. We've got to scrape a hole for you somewhere, and if you don't feel like co-operating try and see it from my point of view. What sort of headmaster would I be if I let boys get so depressed that they did what you did today? And don't kid yourself that your case is an isolated one. I've been at Bamfylde
fourteen years, and there's always a few who can't settle in. You don't sing, I suppose?'

'No, sir' Mercifully he seemed to find the question amusing. 'I sound like a stick on railings, so Mr Renshaw-Smith says.'

'And there's no one game you like more than another?'

'Not really, sir.'

'You're not bad at English subjects. Maths aside, you've always had pretty good reports.'

'That doesn't get you far at a place like this, sir.'

'No, it doesn't.' He thought hard. 'There must be something you can do that nobody else can. There always is, Crispin. The key to getting by at a place like Bamfylde is to find that something, and build on it. It doesn't matter a jot what it is, so long as you're better at it than the next chap. Can you think of anything? Anything at all?'

'I play the handbells, sir.'

'Handbells?'

'I've got a set, sir. My uncle left them to me when he died. He used to go around playing them at charity concerts, and… well… I got interested, so he taught me. They aren't as easy as they look, sir.'

'I'll wager they aren't. Where are they now?'

'In my box in the Sunsetters' store, sir.'

'You've never had them out since you came here?'

'No, sir. It seemed… well… a bit cissy, sir.'

'Cissy my foot! It's a very old English craft, and very few people can play them as they should be played. You can ring out recognisable tunes?'

'Oh, yes, sir. I can do all the carols.'

'The carols? Well, that's promising. We've got a carol service the night after the opera and that could be a star turn. Have you got the nerve to stand up on the stage in Big Hall and play, in front of the whole school?'

'I'd need to practise, sir. It's a long time since I had them out.'

'Then I'll tell you what you do. You bring them over to my house after prep tomorrow night. Only my daughter and I will be there and you can practise all you like. Then we'll make sure you get star billing at the carol service, a surprise item on the programme that not even Mr Renshaw-Smith knows about in advance. Will you do that?'

'Are you sure they won't laugh, sir?'

'At carols? Expertly played on old English handbells? You can take it from
me they wouldn't. Everyone will be pestering you for a go at them, you see if I'm not right. How do you feel now?'

'Still muzzy, sir.'

'Then get some sleep. Matron says you'll have nothing worse than a headache in the morning. You needn't come in. Take it easy over the weekend. Good night, then.'

'Good night, sir.'

He went out, feeling a good deal more hopeful than he went in and thinking, 'A purgative can't do him much harm but a big hand up on that stage will do him untold good.'

He went down and out into the quad, standing a moment with the wind whipping his gown and sniffing the air for snow. It was time it fell, having been threatening for two days now. From the direction of Big Hall he could hear a solo – Frobisher, playing the Grand Inquisitor in Algy's revival of
The Gondoliers,
and singing 'There Lived a King', one of Beth's favourites. A soft burst of laughter came from the lighted windows of the Outram senior dorm, then Vinnicombe's bellow at a skylarker making the most of the few minutes before lights out. He thought, 'God knows, we get problems, but taken all round we seem to cope with 'em better than the politicians.'

He hunched his gown and turned in through Big Hall arch to look in on rehearsals.

3

The thought returned to him often during the last fortnight of term. An island in the torrent; a small bastion of refuge, where some kind of order still prevailed, where most things worked fairly well, where there was fellowship of a kind missing since Algy's day, a time when the outside world had seemed to steady before shooting off course again. Now, as Yeats might have said, 'all was changed, changed utterly' out there beyond school bounds. The old doctrine of Free Trade, bulwark of the Empire for so long, discarded, alienating Philip Snowden, the one man of genius left in the Cabinet. Hunger-marchers proliferating. De Valera, arch-enemy of the old-style British, of which Bamfylde, like it or not, remained a symbol, triumphing at the Irish polls. World conferences that resolved nothing. Mosleyites confronting the militant Left on streets where, only a few years ago, a General Strike had been staged without a casualty. And it was worse still overseas. France, her
President shot down, was in turmoil. The Japanese were making nonsense of The League of Nations covenant. And all about them was a confusion of tongues, a bankruptcy of policies. But at Bamfylde, in that final month of 1932, things were more hopeful. Algy's
Gondoliers
played to thunderous applause, and Crispin, darting up and down his trestle table in Big Hall, won the status symbol of Bamfylde with his handbell rendering of 'Silent Night' and 'The Holly and the Ivy', for thereafter he was known as 'Ringer' and with a nickname integration was achieved.

Watching his performance David felt he had earned the right to a little smugness, for Ringer Crispin was only one of many manifestations of the new reign. Aside from the Gilbert and Sullivan revival, Renshaw-Smith's Choral Society was thriving, spurred on by a Certificate of Merit gained in the Devon Music Festival, and his changes in discipline had produced no explosion. After the oppressive atmosphere of the Alcock era, there was a geniality in the common room that had not been evident in the 'twenties, when Carter kept tempers on edge most of the time. Hislop settled in effortlessly, a different Hislop to the bull-necked extrovert who had shouted the odds on the sports field. He had developed a flair for maths somewhere in exile and, even more surprisingly, a taste for authority, so that Gibbons, Havelock's new housemaster, appointed him house-prefect the day he reached the Sixth. David, watching him take parade one morning, wondered how he would act if he stumbled on a pontoon school in the old smokers' hideout behind the stacked trunks in the covered playground. Or what he would do if he caught one of his cronies studying the formbook. Howarth and Barnaby seemed to have entered into a tacit conspiracy to give him the kind of loyalty they had given Algy, and sometimes he saw the three of them as the new Magi, ageing harmoniously in the wilderness. Grace, her stillness seasoned by a developing sense of humour, was a great help to him during weekends and holidays, and even parents accepted her as his semi-official chatelaine, whereas Old Boys of recent vintage never thought of her as anyone but his deputy.

Thus, one way and another, the gap left in his life by Chris closed to some extent. He missed her, of course, but not as keenly as he would have thought. Mostly he was so busy, too busy indeed, to heed his publisher's plea that he begin work on another historical biography.

Financially he was better off than he had ever hoped to be, with a salary of six-fifty a year, free living expenses and about three hundred a year from royalties on
The Royal Tigress.
Chris told him his book was on display
in Montreal bookshops, and that there were two copies in the University library. She wrote, on the average, once a week, chatty, mildly affectionate letters that seemed unrelated to the woman he had held in his arms in the seedy bedsitter at Bilhampton. She had detached herself, somehow, not only from him but from the British scene, so that sometimes he wondered if she would ever settle here again or, if she did, would see him as someone too pedestrian for her taste.

The centre of what he thought of as his political gravity was shifting and he was inclined, on the whole, to lower his sights and put his faith in tradition, in ripeness, habit and continuity. Even old Howarth commented on the change when David championed Britain at a gin-party discussion in Nicolson's on Howarth's fifty-sixth birthday.

'I can give you twenty years, P.J.,' he said, jovially, 'and Barnaby can give you fifteen, but at heart you're less of a radical than either one of us, notwithstanding that reputation you once had as a firebrand. You should watch it, lad, before the Bamfylde fungus gets a fatal hold on you.'

But then, he told himself, he had excuses for feeling paternal these days. Chad Boyer appeared the first day of the Christmas holidays, seeking temporary quarters, and when David asked him what he meant by 'temporary' he looked, as Algy Herries would have said, 'felon-shy', and added, half-apologetically, 'Well, the fact is I've just taken a three-year lease on your old cottage, over at Stone Cross, P.J. A bachelor room is out, I'm afraid. You see, there's Alison.'

'Alison who?'

Boyer grinned. 'My wife, Pow-Wow.'

'Great God, you're not thinking of getting married?'

'I am married,' Chad answered, grinning. 'Alison and I are on our honeymoon, as from last Tuesday. We were married in a Manchester Register Office, and she's outside now, awaiting the abbot's permission to cross the monastic threshold. Shall I fetch her in?'

'Well, for God's sake,' David said, quite taken aback, 'you'll have to, won't you? You can't expect the girl to bivouac on Exmoor in December,' and he ran to the window to peep out at a still, rather keyed up figure, hunched in the passenger seat of Boyer's ancient Austin Seven. She had flaming red hair, a small, pinched face, and a very definite air of uncertainty, so that he called, 'Grace! Go out and fetch Mrs Boyer in while I give this room a tidy.'

It was very difficult to surprise Grace, even at twelve-and-a-half. She threw
aside her apron and ran out into the forecourt, where they watched her trying to coax Alison Boyer out of sanctuary. Boyer said, 'It's that Scots girl I mentioned at Easter, Pow-Wow, the one who was a domestic at the school, and came to me for coaching. I suppose you think I'm crazy on my salary.'

'That depends,' David said, remembering his own spot proposal on Colwyn Bay railway platform, in 1919. 'How did it develop, exactly?'

'We were both lonely and very much down in the dumps, and… well, we kind of grew together. She's a real brick, and a tonic when she forgets to be shy. She's got the Celtic awe for all seats of learning. Oh, I daresay you'll think me an absolute idiot for saddling myself with a wife at this stage, but there it is and I don't regret it. I asked her to marry me the day I got your letter saying you'd wangled it.'

He moved around the room, glancing at all the familiar pictures and pieces of furniture brought over from Havelock's. 'It's like a dream, Pow-Wow. I mean, you being Gaffer here, and me on the staff. Sometimes I pinch myself and wonder if I'll wake up in that bloody awful attic I occupied in that prep school, or find myself back in the Havelock dorm, with Dobson and Ridgeway snoring away on either side of me.' Then, seriously, 'They say you're making a rare go of it, Pow-Wow. Would you say you were?'

'Feeling my way, Chad. It's trickier than it looked from the outside. I'm even beginning to appreciate some of Alcock's points of view, particularly as regards parents.'

'But not us, I hope?'

'No, Chad, not you. The O.B.s have been marvellous, and so have Howarth and Barnaby. They're beginning to call us the New Magi now, the heirs of Judy, Bouncer and old Rapper Gibbs.'

Grace came in with Alison, who looked even smaller and more uncertain in the open. She gravitated to Boyer at once and David noticed, with approbation, that she obviously adored him. Her red head finished level with his broad shoulders, and a gleam of sunshine, touching her hair, made it glow like a fire in a draught. She had cornflower-blue eyes, a small chin as resolute as Beth's and the kind of handknitted jumper that Beth had worn when she was dressing on a nurse's salary. He thought, 'It's odd he should be bringing her to that old cottage of ours. Like watching yourself in a mirror of time… hard to believe Beth made her bow to Algy and Ellie in this room, thirteen years ago…' but then he remembered his manners and said, 'I should be used to Chad surprising me, Mrs Boyer. Congratulations, and I hope you'll be very happy here. Chad
was, but it's going to take us a little time to get used to him at the distributing end of authority. He was a holy terror here in his salad days.'