R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (72 page)

'Yes, sir. Thank you. You didn't mind me mentioning it?'

'I'm very glad you did,' David said, 'but gladder still you had the sense to raise it in private. Baiting sects on account of race, religion or colour is wrong on any account, wouldn't you say?'

'Yes, I suppose it is, sir,' and Nixon pottered off, still only half-convinced, so that David reflected both he and Bamfylde owed Christine Forster a debt for dumping Ulrich Meyer in their midst. The funny little chap was already serving as a catalyst.

He went through Big School door into his quarters and saw, on the hall table, a pile of letters that had arrived with the midday post. One from Chris
was among them. She was keeping her promise to write once a week and this one was post-marked Cincinnati. She was well-launched on her tour, it seemed, and he was looking forward to the pleasure of reading her latest news when he heard an apologetic cough at his elbow. Little Meyer was standing there, as usual at attention. He was holding an unsealed letter, addressed to 'Fraulein Forster', but with nothing else on the envelope. He said, 'Well, Meyer? What can I do for you today? and Meyer said, 'Sir, I have made my report to Miss Forster. I would be happy if you would address this letter for me. After approving it, of course.'

'You mean you want me to look it over for grammar, Meyer?'

The child did not blink. 'No, sir. The grammar is correct. I took great pains with the composition. But you will want to approve what I write.'

'Censor your letter? I don't want to do that. We don't censor boys' letters home. Why should I have to read yours in particular?'

'Sir?'

He realised that Meyer was confused and said, 'Come inside, I'll try and explain,' and they went into the living-room where lunch was laid. 'Sit down, Meyer, and listen. It was polite of you to invite me to read it and I will, of course, if you really wish it. But don't get the idea it's standard practice here. Most of the boys would be angry if they thought masters read their private mail, and rightly so. Letters to parents and friends are personal, private things, and everyone is entitled to personal privacy as a right, do you follow me?'

'Yes, sir… but it is unusual, is it not? I mean, that would qualify as an English custom?'

'Well, you could put it that way. Now then, do you really want me to read it before I address it? Or would you honestly prefer that I didn't?'

Meyer seemed to give the matter considerable thought. Finally he said, extending his hand, 'I wish to observe all your customs, sir. If I am to become an Englishman that is important, is it not?'

'I think it is, Meyer,' and improbably he thought of Beth and how, in these circumstances, she might have reached out and hugged the child, as someone in desperate need of love. He experienced the same impulse, almost as though it was relayed to him, but all he said was, 'Here's a letter from Miss Forster with her last address on the back. Copy it down, seal it and put your letter in the post-box.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you sir,' and Meyer clicked his heels and gave his formal little bow.

He was relieved, a fortnight or so later, that Meyer had decided to observe English customs. Chris wrote saying

You might be interested to learn Ulrich sees you as a combination of Luther and Frederick the Great, with a dash of Moses thrown in. It's quite obvious he's settling there, as I knew he would with you to keep an eye on him, so I want to say thank you again, Davy, for making the effort, when you obviously have so much on your plate.

I'm two-thirds through this tour now and it looks as though I shall be home in the spring. There's talk of me being put forward for Ben Cathcart's constituency, in Openshawe South, when he retires and this is far better than I hoped. It has a Labour majority of over eight thousand, so, given ordinary luck, I couldn't fail to get elected. I won't catch you on the hop again, Davy. We'll meet somewhere as soon as I get back, and if it's term-time you'll have to drop everything and come.

It was good to think of her impending return after all this time but he was resigned now to her marriage to politics. With a seat like Openshawe South in the offing she was already as good as elected, and once in Parliament she would be lost to him. He filed her letter with all the others and locked the file away. It seemed to him a symbolic gesture.

1

T
HE TERMINAL-SEASON RHYTHM CAUGHT HIM UP AGAIN, SO smoothly and compellingly that he often forgot he was now its arbiter here, with the power to vary the tempo and volume, to throw away the book if he felt like it, and replace it with a new one – but he did nothing so drastic. Most of the changes and adjustments he introduced were marginal, infiltrating themselves into the system within a matter of weeks or days, so that visiting Old Boys of Algy's vintage were rarely prompted to make disparaging comparisons, the privilege of all Old Boys everywhere. His life was a calendar within a calendar, so regulated that he could even predict the weather in advance. Mid-December, for instance, with Chad Boyer back in his former role as the pirate king in
The Pirates of Penzance,
a sequence of tingling frosty days, when the ruts in west drive were coated with ice and Chivenor, head prefect, crossed the lighted quad at lock-up 'clothed in his breath' as Tennyson might have seen him, save that Chivenor carried a large bunch of keys instead of Excalibur. The Christmas lull, with light snow turning to slush, and the lowest boughs of the east drive beeches dripping down his neck as he walked, heavily mufflered down to Chad's cottage for tea and muffins by a familiar hearth.

A new term, slowed by January mire, with a stream of cars arriving in slashing rain, disgorging cargoes of boys for the tight rope term. Howarth's winter cough, booming a warning that his old enemy bronchitis would lay him low before March. The new buildings deserted by the builders' men, who could do nothing in this kind of weather, leaving the half-finished gymnasium raw and skeletal against a grey winter sky.

Then February, with everybody's tempers edgy, Molyneux and Howarth bickering over trivial issues and young Dennison, who had followed Irvine
as geography master, resigning command of the Corps on account of cartilage trouble – few of these things actually impinged on him but the Corps vacuum did, and he made what seemed to those who remembered his earlier prejudices, a revolutionary decision, taking command himself and appearing in the quad for the first time in a brand new khaki outfit, with three pips on his shoulder.

'I feel a very bogus captain,' he told Barnaby, when the latter ironically saluted him. 'I would have wagered ten pounds to a penny you'd never see me in this rig again. But, hang it all, the Corps is there, and no one else seems to have a clue about how to run it. Besides, I'm only half a pacifist nowadays.'

'I daresay the drill book is a bit above your head these days, P.J.,' Barnaby said. 'You won't have them kneeling to receive cavalry, I hope?' But the drill book hadn't changed all that much. They were still using Lewis guns, of the type David had lugged up the line in 1917, still forming fours, still singing the same old songs on route marches, choruses that had brought tears to his eyes on Armistice Day, in 1918, but now seemed as harmlessly nostalgic as carols.

One or two of the Old Boys pulled his leg about his conversion. One (it was Starchy Gosse, now a stockbroker) raising his hat and giving a cheer as he watched Captain Powlett-Jones dismissing his troops on the playing field after the drill competition.

'Permit me to recant too, Pow-Wow,' he said, after following David to his quarters for the obligatory glass of Old Boys' sherry. 'I once regarded you as the envoy of Lenin and Trotsky. You probably don't know how close you came to getting stuck with “Bolshie” instead of the cosy “Pow-Wow"!'

'I knew all right,' David told him. 'I overheard you or your brother discussing me while sitting on Algy's Mount Olympus, so let me tell you something in return. I'm still Bolshie as regards the fun and games chaps like you play in Threadneedle Street. If we'd guillotined the whole damned crowd of you in Trafalgar Square, maybe I wouldn't be doing this now.'

Gosse took the gibe in good part, as they all did whenever they came back here, poking around and indulging in their orgies of reminiscence. His approach to them was that of an equal, with no obligation to counsel and patronise, now that they were out in the world.

March, with weeks of cold, drying winds, hardening the pitches, so that Nicolson's was able to confound the form book by winning the rugby shield, beating Havelock's, the hot favourites, by fourteen points. But March, for him, was a sad month, too, his sister Gwynneth wiring to say his mother had
died in her sleep on Good Friday, a week before he was due to pay one of his biannual visits.

He and Grace travelled to Wales for the funeral, and Grace waited in the crowded little kitchen while he went into the front parlour to take a final look at her, surrounded by armfuls of daffodils and narcissi. She looked not merely peaceful but girlish, so that he caught his breath, wondering how so much sorrow, and so many years of unremitting toil, could leave so small a mark on her features. For her, for him too, at that moment, time stood still and he was looking at the same woman who had gone about her chores that summer evening he sat stunned in the kitchen, choking on the high tea she set before him only hours after they had told her that she had lost a husband and two sons in the pit explosion down the Valley. For sheer grit and stamina there had never been anybody like her, not even in the trenches. She had the kind of faith that made molehills of mountains of trouble, enabling her to absorb any shock, any disaster, any disappointment, with the dignity one associated with eighth-century saints.

He stood there aware of a sense of loss but no grief, for they told him she had given no sign of pain, or even discomfort, on retiring to bed the night she died. She had even spent the morning giving the parlour a spring-clean, as though she had a premonition it was likely to be seen by strangers within the week. All the wreaths and sprays surrounding the coffin trailed the usual black-edged cards, with assurances that struck him as a little smug, even though he was accustomed to the conventions of death in the Valley. 'Safe in the arms of Jesus', 'Gathered to her eternal rest' and 'In the certain hope of a glorious resurrection'. He wondered if the neighbours who had penned them had possessed her kind of faith, a deep-rooted assurance in the natural order of things, an unassailable belief that a Blessed Redeemer would forgive her sins, if she had any, and reunite her with the stocky little man buried a few miles from here, far below the surface of the mountain. It was a faith that had sustained her through every trial and hazard, something intensely personal that had very little to do with the chants, prayers and affirmations proclaimed in the Elim Chapel down the hill. No one he had ever met had possessed such a faith, fused as it was with a sense of duty, and an obligation towards everyone her life had touched, a faith impervious to grief and penury, the faith of a child, buttressed by loving parents against every eventuality, even death itself. A faith like that was worth a million in the bank, and half a dozen Bamfyldes. Yet, in a sense, he had been able to borrow a little of it over the years. The
spark it had lit in him as a child had never been entirely extinguished, as he had once believed, by the crashing bombardments of the Somme, and the long, dragging ordeal of Passchendaele. It had survived, to be blown upon by Algy and others on the moor, by the fortitude of kids like Briarley and Winterbourne, by Beth's love, by the patience of young Grace, by the friendship and encouragement of men like Howarth and Barnaby, but, above all, by a sense of contributing that had grown upon him like another skin, a little every year, a fraction every term.

He squeezed the small, cold hand and went back into the kitchen where Ewart, his brother-in-law, was sitting smoking half a Woodbine. Ewart said, 'There's four years left on the lease yer, Davyboy. You wouldn't have no objections to me and Gwyn moving in and taking it over, would you now? It's three shillings a week under the rent we pay for our rabbit-hutch, and me being on short-time…'

'Whatever bits and pieces she left are Gwyn's and Megan's, Ewart. That was always understood. Aren't things any better up here?' and Ewart said a little but not all that much. The Valley had never recovered from the strife and shutdowns of 1925 and 1926.

'Why don't you think about moving south? There's no future here and you're still in your prime.'

'What else could I do, boyo? Been underground since I was fourteen, I have.'

'How much do you earn in a good week?'

'Three-five,' Ewart told him, 'and I'm one of the lucky ones.'

He thought, 'We pay our groundsmen four pounds a week and they have accommodation thrown in. Old Westacott is due to retire in September, and that means everybody will move up one. I wonder if I could wangle Ewart the handyman's job? Or if he'd accept it, with me being head. I'll have a word with Gwyn after the funeral.'

As he had half-expected, his sister had reservations. 'Suppose I should talk him into it,' she said, 'would it be right? A headmaster, with a sister married to the odd-job man? What I mean is, wouldn't it make you look a little bit silly, Davy? Because if it did Mam wouldn't have heard of us going. You know that, boyo.'

'Mam was old-fashioned that way. I tried to talk her into coming down when I first got the job but she wouldn't and I daresay that was the real reason. However, times have changed. I've got Old Boys with degrees taking
jobs as counter-jumpers and clerks, and in one way it's a good thing. If things improved in the mines you could always move back. Why don't you think it over?'

'I'll do that,' she said, 'and thanks anyway, Davy,' and she kissed him.

2

Chris rang as he had feared, in the first week of the new term, when it was impossible to snatch a weekend and meet her in London on her way up north, where she was due to be interviewed by the selection committee of the Openshawe South Division. Her candidature was regarded as a near-certainty, for she was on a short list of two, opposed by another academic. 'Male, of course,' she said, 'but wet. He's written a book on political economy. I tried to read it. It was like eating my way through four helpings of Bamfylde suet pudding.'