R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (85 page)

He read the good news in Willoughby's face the moment he ran up the steps and met him in the act of lighting his cherrywood pipe beside the receptionist's desk.

'Went like clockwork,' he said, eagerly. 'A boy. Seven pounds, three ounces, and yelling his head off! About an hour ago, soon after matron's phone call actually.'

'Chris?'

'She's bonnie. And drunk with triumph. Never knew such a stayer. She'd absolutely made up her mind to it. She'll take me more seriously in future, I hope. I was always telling her there was absolutely nothing to stop her producing a live child.'

'An hour ago, you said? Should I go in?'

Willoughby considered, drawing noisily on his pipe. 'I'd leave it a bit if I were you. She's asleep. It's only three-thirty yet. Suppose you accompany me on a couple of local calls, we take a dish of tea in Glossops then pop back here about five-thirty? They can manage headless for that long, can't they?'

'Yes, but poor old Howarth is dying, Doc.'

The news didn't surprise him. He said, 'Amazed he lasted this long. Tough old bird.' Then, shrewdly, 'He talked you into letting him go back there, I imagine?'

'I don't regret it. Should I?'

'No, no. Kindest thing to do. Made it much easier on him, but you'd better go on pretending to be shocked. Some of the parents might think it wasn't quite the thing in the circumstances,' but David said, 'To hell with that. If Alcock could die on the premises why couldn't Howarth? He was as much a part of the place as Algy and I'm going to miss him like hell.'

'Queer chap,' Willoughby said. 'Frankly I have always respected him without being able to like him. But you did both, didn't you?'

'I knew him better than most people.'

He found her much as he had found Beth when he had called in this same place for the same reason eighteen years before. Radiant, and extraordinarily pleased with herself, so much so that he thought, smiling, 'Why the devil did she ever bother with politics? This is what she really wanted. Maybe it'll take some of the steam out of her and that can't be a bad thing. We've all got too much head of steam these days.'

She said, 'Have you seen him yet? He's an absolute cherub, Davy, and very much the Celt. Or will be, as soon as he loses that outraged look they all seem to start off with. Long bones and lots of dark hair. No doubt at all about him being yours,' and he said, letting his hand run over her own smooth brown head, 'Fine time to be telling me that. Was it as bad as you thought?' and she said, 'No, not as bad as the last miss, and a lot more rewarding.'

He didn't stay long. He had a suspicion amounting to a certainty that Howarth would have gone by the time he got back, and it seemed a shabby thing to cloud her happiness with such dismal news. He drove back through
the gathering dusk and stopped a mile or so beyond Quarry Hill, where he could just see the lights of Bamfylde winking under long, blue trailers of mist. The day had brought good news and bad, like most other days up there, and it crossed his mind that it might be an idea to marry the events by naming his son Ian, after Howarth. In a way, the crusty old chap had seemed to move on to make room for the child. Chris had wanted to call him David but he had had too much experience with duplicated initials to agree to that. In a place like Bamfylde identity mattered, and two David Powlett-Joneses about the place simply wouldn't do. He wondered how Grace would take it, a baby brother eighteen years her junior, and decided it didn't really matter much, for Grace wouldn't stay indefinitely. One or another of her swains would come asking for her in a year or so and he wondered, briefly, which of them it was likely to be. His money was on Winterbourne, who made no secret of his affection for her. He remembered seeing them only last summer, strolling up towards the planty hand in hand, not the least bit interested in the match against Somerset Stragglers being fought out on the pitch.

It was curious how life seemed to weave a pattern that was not in the least haphazard, as it so often seemed to be. His own, for instance, and Keith Winterbourne's and Grace's, all linked by the fatal circumstances of that sultry day in 1925, when Winterbourne had appeared out of a blinding rain-storm and drawn him into that hideout he had beside the rushing stream.

He restarted the engine and went along the level stretch to the foot of the plateau, where a rather fussed Renshaw-Smith signalled him as he turned in at the corner of Nicolson's to head round the main buildings.

'You won't have heard about poor Howarth,' he said. 'He died, quite suddenly, about two hours after you left. I was going to ring the nursing home but Barnaby said you had other things to worry about. How is Mrs Powlett-Jones, Headmaster?'

Renshaw-Smith had never been able to bring himself to use an informal mode of address and David had been obliged to accept his rectitude.

'She's fine. Just presented me with a seven-pound boy. You're the very first to know.'

'I
am?
She
has?
But that's splendid! …Absolutely splendid! …Congratulations, Headmaster!'

He was so delighted that chance had chosen him for the honour of being the first Bamfeldian to hear the great news that he forgot for a moment he had been the bearer of such gloomy tidings. David said, to correct any impression
Renshaw-Smith might have that he was taking Howarth's death calmly, 'I saw Howarth this morning and realised then that he was critically ill. I've just been talking to Dr Willoughby about him. I'll have to get him over right away.'

He parked the car and stared up at the windows of Nicolson's, relieved in a way that old Howarth was released, but sorry he died without learning that Chris's guts and determination had been rewarded. They had always got along very well, Howarth having seen her as a fighter the day she arrived and he recalled again that it had been Howarth who urged him to put Chris to work in the Cradle.

He cut through the kitchen passage, out into the quad, then into his own house, where Rigby told him Grace was with matron, tracing laundry that had gone astray and been the subject of tiresome correspondence.

'Shall I tell her you're back, sir?'

'No, Rigby. I'll see her at dinner.'

'Very well, sir. I'll be serving in twenty minutes.'

He went into the study, where the day's correspondence was spread out on the right-hand side of his desk, with a note from Grace telling him which letters had been answered, which were pending. One unopened letter marked 'Personal' lay there. It had an American stamp and a Boston postmark. He opened it absentmindedly and was amazed to find it was a letter from Julia Darbyshire, the first he had received since that day in 1927, when she had written telling him of her marriage to Sprockman, the restaurateur. He let his eye run down the pages with a sense of wonder that the letter should reach him today of all days.

It had a breezy, impersonal note, almost as though they had been corresponding regularly all these years, and concerned her eldest son, Charles, now almost eleven. She was asking if he would have room for him next term, when he would be coming up to twelve. She had two other children, both daughters, but Hiram Sprockman had died the year before, leaving her comfortably off. She had a poor opinion, it seemed, of the American educational system,

You recall what an Anglophile Hiram was and he was determined to send the boy to an English school as soon as he reached his teens. He liked you, and I told him everything I remembered about Bamfylde, even the reason I left. That made him laugh for nearly a week. Shortly before he died he asked me to try and get Charles fixed up there as soon as he was old enough, so here goes. If there's no vacancy, or if you have any prejudice against Americans, I'll understand,
but I'm sure Charles could manage the entrance exam. Drop me a line saying yes or no, because if it's no I shall send him to Canada. And if you're wondering how I knew you were still there (and headmaster to boot!) put it down to our business efficiency over here. All I did was to call our advertising agency, giving the name and location. They called me back in twenty minutes with all the details, including the fees. I hope you're well and happy, P.J. I've never ceased to think kindly of you.

Affectionately,

Julia Sprockman (née Darbyshire in case you've forgotten all about me!)

He poured himself a whisky and sat at his desk, trying to imagine what she looked like now, what her son and daughters were like. He had no snapshot of her and could only recall, at this distance, that she was pretty, broad-featured, and had once had luxuriant hair, tresses she used to torment poor Blades, down in the goyle that summer day so long ago. Yet, although his memory of her was vague, erased perhaps by Beth and Chris, he found the prospect of Charles Sprockman coming here a pleasing one, partly because Sprockman had seemed so English somehow, and recalling this there came to him the American's quote from one of Rupert Brooke's letters: 'There walk, as yet, no ghosts in Canadian lanes… at a pinch one can do without gods, but one misses the dead…' One did miss the dead and he wondered if he should go and look at Howarth, but he did not feel equal to it. The boys would have to be notified officially, and he supposed he would have to make an announcement in the morning, but there would be no service at Stone Cross. Howarth had left explicit instructions concerning that, and had asked to be cremated. He heard the quad door bang and Grace's footsteps on the flags and rose quickly, suddenly glad of her company.

4

He told them at breakfast, letting the house prefects know in advance that he would ask for a moment's silence in Big Hall, so that the moment he mounted the dais every face turned to him expectantly. He said, once they had resumed their seats, 'You will have heard that Mr Howarth died yesterday. At his own
request we won't be having a special service. Everyone who remembers him, before he was taken ill, will recall how much he disliked fuss and ceremony. But I should like to say a word or two about him, and how much he meant to the school. He was a very good friend to me, ever since I came here as a young man, before any of you were born. Hardly a day passed when he didn't give me the benefit of his experience, and when I became head I couldn't have managed without him. Bamfylde owes him a very great deal. He was a first-class teacher, and I suppose those of you who didn't have time to know him well were sometimes a little scared of him. I know all the new boys were, but the Upper School, and even some of the Middle School, soon realised how wonderfully kind he was. I could give you many instances of his kindness but he would have hated that. I see no reason why I shouldn't tell you, however, that he left everything he had to Bamfylde. Perhaps we should acknowledge his great love of the school by standing in silence for a moment.'

The house prefects took their cue from him and stood, more or less in unison, so that upwards of four hundred heads bobbed up, and upwards of four hundred pairs of eyes studied porridge plates for what seemed to him a long sixty seconds. Then he stepped back and they sat again, subdued and a little embarrassed, so that it occurred to him that he might have chosen the wrong moment. Barnaby disposed of the doubt at once. Leaning forward he said, quietly, 'Thank you, P.J. That was just right, I think. He wouldn't have approved, of course, but we owed it to him, anyway.'

Immediately below, the continuous murmur rose steadily, falling short of its usual breakfast crescendo, a low buzz of conversation against a sustained rattle of china and cutlery. A very Bamfylde sound at this time of day. Some of them, he supposed, might be exchanging comments not on Howarth but on the arrival of Chris's boy at Challacombe, for that, too, would be common knowledge by now. Howarth had often voiced his respect for the speed and deadly efficiency of the Bamfylde bush-telegram. 'Bulletins, I am persuaded, are issued regularly on the hot-water pipes. The way they circulate in gaol,' he had said, and David, remembering this old joke, discovered to his surprise that he could already think of Howarth, not as he had seen him twenty-four hours ago, sick and ravaged, but as Bamfylde would always see him in the future, irascible, frigid and occasionally frightening, but underneath all that as soft as thistledown.

That wasn't quite the end of it, however.

At the Old Boys' annual dinner in London not long afterwards, Masterson,
that year's president, paid a warm if jocular tribute to Howarth in his speech, making gentle fun of his acidity, and even giving an excellent imitation of one of Howarth's quiet eruptions in class. It was well received, for the three hundred assembled here recalled Howarth in his prime and not, as David's audience would remember him, as a tired, ageing man, racked by 'that bloody cough'. But Gilmour, a plump, rosy man in his mid thirties, sitting at the far end of table 'D', had a sobering surprise for everyone when he rose to reply to the last speech of the evening. He said, half-apologetically, 'The president referred to Mr Howarth and I should like to add something to that, something I never felt free to tell anyone until now, for had I done so Howarth would never have forgiven me. Back in 1923, when I was sixteen, and in the Lower Fifth, my father died suddenly, and in tragic circumstances. I won't bore you with details but I have to tell you this. There wasn't much money to go round at the time, and my mother at once gave notice that I would be withdrawn at the end of term. Howarth wrote my mother a letter and, having heard of his death in October, I looked it out and brought it with me. It's short, and like all Howarth's letters, very much to the point. Have I your permission to read it, sir?' He had everybody's attention now and waited for the murmur of assent to die down.