R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (92 page)

The point is, I see no advantage at all in telling him and for his sake more than yours. Your wife can't very well hold it against you, for it all happened years before you met her, but adolescents have enough problems these days without adding to them by presenting them with a choice of loyalties. In the final instance, I leave it to you, of course, whether you tell your wife or not, but the best course would seem to be to leave it right where it is and just – well, keep a fatherly eye on him, something that will come naturally to you, David. That's about it except to say goodbye and good luck always. I still think I did the right thing in refusing to marry you. You never would have made it, David, with me in tow. I'm not the domestic type, and I would have vegetated down there and might even have degenerated into a nag, but that isn't to say I haven't thought of you often, and always, always, with great affection.

My love to you both,

Julia

He sat there a long time with her letter held lightly in his hand, thinking of the dark, slender boy, at this moment joining in popular choruses with all the other Sunsetters in Big Hall, trying hard to see him as something more personal than a unit in the long, long procession of youngsters who had passed through his hands in the last twenty-two years. He found himself quite unable to do this, although, now that he came to think of it, the boy had always had something of the look of his brother Huw about him, the seventeen-year-old who had gone down the pit with his father and elder brother that May morning in 1913, and never surfaced again. But his immediate concern was not with young Sprockman but with the woman who lay dying – was probably dead by now – six thousand miles away, across an ocean and a continent, and he saw her as he recalled her that morning when she had awakened him with a breakfast tray in her Camden Town flat, a final courtesy after what he had never ceased to regard as a gesture of rare generosity. He had a curious sense then, of being almost the last survivor of his generation, a stubborn piece of flotsam
that had somehow managed to weather the nonstop buffeting of the years, embracing as they had two World Wars, linked by a long period of slump and uncertainty. He knew he would follow her advice, leaving both Charles and Chris in ignorance of the relationship. It would do the boy no good, and although Chris would almost surely take a tolerant view of it, she might see it as a circumstance that down-graded her own son, the boy she had been at such pains to have, and largely, he suspected, on his account.

He got up and went into the quad, then down the draughty stone passage to Big Hall, where the concert was still in full swing. Buck Suttram, inheritor of the Sax Hoskins mantle, was leading community singing with what his cronies called Buck's squeeze-box, an ungainly piano accordion. They were singing, 'Roll out the Barrel' at the tops of their voices, and he caught a sidelong glimpse of Chris, joining in the chorus and smiling up at the stage. Then, as the song came to an end, somebody shouted, 'There'll Always be an England', and there was an immediate howl of dissent. He was glad about that. Like him they would consider that a blushmaking number, out of tune with the national mood that was now, thank God, one of stark realism. Somebody else shouted, 'Get Clark! Get Clark and his banjo!' and it was not until Charles Sprockman was pushed forward that he remembered 'Clark' was the nickname they applied to his own son, turned thirteen now, and tall for his age.

He had not known until then that Charles Sprockman was a dab hand with the banjo, specialising in Western ballads. He mounted the dais with an engaging grin and began to strum 'Oh, Susannah', a ditty they all seemed to know.

He withdrew to the passage, pausing a moment to listen to the rollicking chorus:

Oh, Susannah!

Don't you cry for me,

I'm going back to the Oregon

With the banjo on my knee…

His eyes pricked a little, standing there in the strong draught, and he gathered his gown about him and sought the solitude of the quad, finding that a sickle moon had come out from behind the belt of blue black clouds, and was riding high across Middlemoor. There was just enough light to make his way round past Outram's and the fives court, then diagonally across the field to his compulsive anchorage, Algy's thinking post.

In the flare of a match he saw that it wanted ninety minutes to midnight when the year, surely the most momentous year in history, would be dead and done with, except for the history books. He was glad to see it go. It had brought a reprieve certainly, but at what he could never cease to regard as a prohibitive price, with a lot more owing, he wouldn't wonder. But that was the way of things, even up here, where the setting never changed and the stream of life flowed on and on, over rapids and through occasional green pastures.

The moon clouded over momentarily and he waited, drawing on a cigarette, until it rode out again, clear and white above the indistinct blur of the planty.

Improbably, in this subdued light, it recalled the winter landscape of 1916–17 in Flanders when the future, as now, had seemed dismal and unpredictable. They wouldn't invade now, he supposed, and that might mean they had missed the bus after all, but that, in itself, decided nothing. Sooner or later they would have to be invaded, thrown down and flattened, and how was this possible, with jackboots already planted from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians, from Narvik to Benghazi? It wasn't, or not in the foreseeable future, and yet… could such an obscene tyranny endure indefinitely, with one offshore island holding out under a nonstop bombardment?

This time he looked back across the centuries for his sign, ranging eras as far distant as those of Alfred, Hereward the Wake and the bloody chaos of Stephen's reign. Things must have seemed pretty hopeless then for those holding the short end of the stick, for the poor and landless, for what Masefield would call the man hemmed in by spears. But something gainful had emerged from it. Magna Carta; Simon de Montfort's so-called Parliament; centralised government, and a rule of law under Edward I and later Henry VII. Nothing much, perhaps, or not until Cromwell and his successors won a constitution from their overlords, and city merchants held backsliding kings to ransom. It was always a long, pitiless haul, with any number of backward lurches, but finally, inch by inch, democracy had been dragged onward and upward, and he wondered, fitfully, who did most of the heaving when it came down to bedrock. It wasn't the privileged and the wealthy, and it wasn't the masses, thrusting upward from below, for almost all their efforts had been swiftly neutralised by reaction. If he was asked to name a class to which most of the credit was due it would be that section of the community he had once affected to despise, the petty bourgeoisie, and who were the petty bourgeoisie when
you thought about it – thought about it really hard? They were the kind of Englishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen who were neither rich nor poor, intellectual nor illiterate, well-endowed or down-and-out, the section who sent their sons here, to a place like Bamfylde, to acquire, through books, example and, above all, a mingling and sharing of ideas, a creed of common sense and tolerance. They were the end products of all the Briarleys, the Christophersons, the Hislops, the Winterbournes and that long-shanked, open-faced stripling, playing 'Oh, Susannah', in Big Hall at this very moment, himself the product of a few minutes' exchange of affection between a rather gallant woman like Julia Sprockman, and a three-hundred-a-year schoolmaster, both in search of a momentary escape from loneliness.

The temperature was hovering a degree or two above freezing but he did not feel cold. He seldom did up here, for in peacetime the scatter of friendly lights lower down the slope had warmed his heart, a fire to go home to whenever he needed one. He had need of it now for suddenly, out here in the frosted silence, he felt not cold but frightened. The moonlight held on long enough for him to stride down to within ten yards of the fives court and then, just as it clouded over again, he saw Chris, muffled to the ears, move into the fleeting patch of light. She called, 'Davy? Is that you, Davy?' and, when he answered, 'Anything wrong?'

'No,' he said, 'just popped out to blow the cobwebs away,' and sought her hand.

'I told them you wouldn't mind them staying up to see the New Year in. Is that all right?'

'Yes, it's fine. They'll do it anyway, and we might as well join them. But how about some tea first?'

'I'll make some.' Then, as they moved round the bulk of the new wing to the forecourt, 'You'll be glad to wave goodbye to this one, Davy. The next can only be for the better can't it?'

'Yes,' he said, with certainty, 'it'll be that all right.'

He spun her round as she went up the two steps and kissed her mouth, finding her lips as warm and reassuring as her hand.

'This won't do at all, sir,' she said, laughing. 'Not in front of the children,' and steered him into the hall, slamming the door before she reached for the
light switch. 'It's okay,' she said, offhandedly, 'I saw to the blackout on the way through,' but somewhere, probably in old Rigby's kitchen, there was a window open for faintly, carried on the downdraught in that funnel of a passage, came the sound of the Sunsetters, singing to Buck's accordion. He was leading them in an old community favourite, 'Shenandoah', and the sound had within it comfort and continuity.

3

It was inconceivable as well as unforgivable that he had completely forgotten his appointment with Earnshaw at eleven on New Year's Day.

He had just popped down to the cottage to wish Alison a happy new year and was walking back when he spied Buck Suttram scudding across the rimed football pitch towards the field gate. Buck gestured urgently, and changed direction, arriving out of breath, and saying, 'Someone waiting, sir – been waiting half an hour. Said he had an appointment. Mrs Powlett-Jones said I was to find you and tell you to hurry.'

He remembered then. Earnshaw was a twenty-four-year-old, whom he was interviewing as a possible replacement for Boyer, and he bent his steps to the forecourt where Chris was standing on the steps, looking a little fussed. 'He seemed put out you weren't here, Davy. Said the agency told him you fixed the appointment yourself.'

'So I did,' he said, 'but it completely slipped my memory. I must be going senile,' and he hurried into the study, Chris calling after him to say the visitor had been given coffee on arrival.

He had expected a very different kind of man. The agency had described him as keen, ex-service, and interested in games, so that he had pictured an extrovert like Irvine. The youngster sitting on the window-seat was small-boned, haggard and emaciated, as though he had walked here on short rations, and his blue suit looked, not soiled exactly, but threadbare, as though it had been pressed and cleaned for the interview. In spite of this, however, the unsmiling face that glanced up as he entered was at odds with Earnshaw's general appearance. It was an intense face, with strong features that were emphasised, if anything, by a broad expanse of scar tissue, reaching from the right temple all the way down to the long jawline. The eyes were blue, deeply socketed, unwavering and a little challenging, as though the mind behind them was acclimatised to rebuffs. David said, shaking hands, 'I'm most terribly
sorry. I do apologise. I've been swamped in work this holiday and your appointment got buried under an avalanche of forms and correspondence. At least, that's the only excuse I can offer. Please sit down. You've had coffee, I understand,' and surprisingly the eyes smiled, softening the rather grim expression, and the small, taut body relaxed as Earnshaw said, 'Mrs Powlett-Jones was very kind, Headmaster. She seemed to think you were on the premises somewhere. Please don't apologise. I'm sure you're busy.'

'I oughtn't to be too busy to remember an appointment with someone who has come all the way from town. You are a Londoner, I believe?'

'No, but I've been based there since I got my ticket. I'm Lancastrian. Burnley.'

'And ex-service. The infantry, wasn't it?'

'Ordnance Corps. I was invalided in early November. I'd only been in just over a year.'

It was the word 'invalided' that did the trick. He had a curious sensation then of looking at himself in a time mirror, a jittery twenty-one-year-old, fighting the battle of his life to stave off a fit of the shakes in this same room half a lifetime ago, with Algy Herries prowling about behind this same desk searching for a means to put him at ease. He said, 'You got knocked about pretty badly, Earnshaw?' and Earnshaw said, flatly, 'A Stuka divebombed the lorry I was driving, south of Lille. I was sprayed with petrol. I don't remember a damned thing about it until I came round on the Red Cross ferry. They were still running then. It was less than a week after the breakthrough. But I'm fit now. Or fit enough.'

It was very curious, the speed with which he assembled the bridge between them, almost as though the agency had given him all the facts in advance and he had pondered them overnight. He said, 'I was going to treat myself to something to keep the cold out. You'll join me?' and without waiting for an answer he rose and opened the door, calling to Rigby to bring two glasses, the whisky decanter and the siphon.