School for Love (3 page)

Slow and very careful footsteps began descending from the top of the house, but Miss Bohun appeared to hear nothing. She sighed again and said: ‘I’m tired. You must not be surprised, Felix, if you sometimes find me thoughtful or tired. You see, I’m a pastor. I have my own little church, my own little flock, and I have to give so much to them. So much. Also, as you will have noticed, I have my troubles here as well – all the result of giving a home to those unwanted elsewhere. I have only tried to be kind, only tried to be good.’

Felix felt embarrassed, but he was also much moved. Miss Bohun had been kind to him, too; she had given him a home when he was unwanted elsewhere. She glanced up to find him gazing at her, his cheeks pink, his eyes round with gratitude, and a slight smile and warmth of colour touched her own face. ‘One day, perhaps,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you about my religion,’ then she broke off as Mr Jewel at last reached the lower stairs.

He was a little, old man, with a square, snub face that even now, grey and worn with old age as it was, looked more like the face of a school-boy than of a man. He grinned at Felix and gave a sort of salute by lifting a knotted hand to the grey stubble over his ears. Miss Bohun did not look at him or introduce him. Felix, smiling back at him, said: ‘How do you do?’ as though there had been no omission. Mr Jewel nodded in reply. He lowered himself slowly into his chair but, once in it, he set about his soup without a pause, making a lot of noise as it went down. Miss Bohun’s mouth turned down. As soon as the soup was finished, Mr Jewel waited for the next course, holding to the sides of his chair and giving quick glances at the door through which Frau Leszno would enter. Felix watched him happily, feeling that Mr Jewel’s presence had taken a weight from the air. It was evident, however, that Miss Bohun did not feel like that. Once or twice she sighed deeply and she had nothing to say. Frau Leszno came in with a plate of greenish mash.

‘I hope you like beans done in this way,’ Miss Bohun said to Felix, ‘they’re so good for you. When I was at school we used to be shown how beans burnt with a blue flame, just the same as meat. That means they’re full of carbohydrates.’

Mr Jewel did not speak throughout the meal. After a long silence had followed Miss Bohun’s remark about the beans, Felix managed to ask: ‘Could I have a plug put in for a reading-lamp, Miss Bohun?’

She frowned down at her beans: ‘You don’t need two lights in that room.’

‘I’d rather have a reading-lamp. I brought my mother’s. It’s a Venetian glass bottle, ruby glass with gold on it,
and she made the shade herself. I’d like to have it. I’ll pay for the plug, of course.’

‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Bohun as though beset on all sides. ‘Well, if you mean to pay for it, I suppose I can’t refuse; but only one light burning at a time, mind you.’

Felix promised.

When he had finished the last course, of bread pudding, Mr Jewel at once started the ascent to the attic. Miss Bohun said in very bright tones to Felix: ‘Well, I must be off to my “Ever-Readies”. Wet or fine, the “Ever-Readies” shine. Perhaps you’d like a hot bath after your journey? Just ask Frau Leszno to light the boiler. I’m afraid there’s no electric light in the bathroom. You’ll have to take this little lamp.’ She put on a raincoat, bound her head in a ginger-coloured scarf, and went with a light step from the house.

The thought of the hot bath cheered Felix. When Frau Leszno came in to clear the table he asked her politely if she would be kind enough to light the boiler. She gave him a bleak stare from her pale, globular eyes, then seemed abruptly to shut off her expression. Hiding all she thought and felt beneath the humble whine of her voice, she said: ‘I shall see.’

Felix wandered round the living-room that contained Frau Leszno’s table and six chairs of cheap, varnished wood; her horse-hair sofa – he sat down on this and found it very hard; Miss Bohun’s desk; a dresser to take the household china; and, placed on either side of the electric fire, two chairs with wooden arms. Hanging up on the coat-hooks beside the front door was a sheep-skin coat that filled half the room with a heavy odour of mortality.

He found nothing to hold his attention except, on the desk, six shabby little books with titles like
Handbook of Rumanian, Russian in Twenty-five Easy Lessons
and
Hungarian Without Tears
. He wondered if Miss Bohun could possibly be learning all these languages. Later he discovered she collected these old grammars in order to use the phrases for her own dictation to pupils; now, impressed and curious, he took them to the table and studied them for want of anything better to do.

Half an hour later, when he supposed the water must be hot, he lit the lamp, got his dressing-gown, towel and soap, and crossed the wet yard to the bathroom that was opposite the kitchen. The rain had stopped but a damp, icy wind was blowing. The bathroom was a large, draughty, whitewashed room in which a small bath and a boiler stood lost in one corner. The air was so cold he knew before he touched the boiler it had not been lit. He stood for some moments not knowing what to do, then he returned to the yard.

There was a light in the kitchen; his disappointment gave him courage to go over and open the door. Inside there was a dark, dirty-looking room smelling of stale grease and lit only by an oil-lamp, but it was warm. A young man sat on a back-tilted kitchen chair, his feet on the table. As the door opened, he looked up from his book.

‘Is Frau Leszno about?’ asked Felix.

‘She has gone to bed.’

‘She promised to light the boiler for the bath.’ As he said this, Felix realised she had not promised; she had merely said: ‘I shall see.’

The young man said: ‘Did she?’ with cold disbelief, and
added casually: ‘Speak to her yourself. She’s in her room.’

The warmth of the kitchen held Felix in spite of the young man’s dark, discouraging stare. He asked: ‘Are you Nikky Leszno?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think perhaps you could light it? Or could you show me how?’

‘I don’t know how.’ Nikky returned to his book and Felix had no choice but to go.

Out in the yard again, he saw that what he had thought was the second window of the kitchen was a separate small room. He knocked on the door.

‘Bitte?’ came from Frau Leszno.

‘Oh, Frau Leszno, you did not light the boiler.’

There was a pause, then Frau Leszno agreed complacently: ‘No, I did not light it.’

‘Would you light it now?’

‘No,’ said Frau Leszno. She sounded pleased with her own decision, but could not resist adding in her usual whine: ‘Why should I myself trouble with such a thing? No, I do not light it.’

Felix went back to the bathroom and examined the boiler. Under the tank there was a small stove to take fuel – probably wood. If he could find the wood-shed, he might be able to light it himself. He went outside and looked round. The sky was black but by the glimmer that came from the surrounding windows, he could see there was a passage running into darkness at one side of the house. That might lead to a shed. He followed it, touching with his finger-tips the wet, stone house-side, and came out to the garden at the back. There was nothing to be seen but a great black space. The rain had washed the
snow away; the wind poured in from the blackness, steady and cold as a wind from the sea. He stood on the path, peering into the dark but unable to distinguish anything. He knew he would not be able to find where the wood was kept. . . . Somehow this seemed at that moment worse than anything else that had happened to him since his mother’s death. He had thought himself lonely at the Shiptons’, but now it was as though he had never known real loneliness before.

As he stood he remembered a story he had read once about a peasant who, after his wife’s funeral, had gone alone at midnight into the fields and called to her: ‘Come back to me,’ but when her voice from the remote distance answered: ‘I come,’ he had fled in panic back to his hut and barricaded the door. Felix knew if he could now call to his mother and hear her voice in reply, he would not flee from her. No, he would run, run into the black sea and fling himself into her arms. He opened his mouth and whispered shyly: ‘Come back to me.’ The wind swept his whisper into silence. Suddenly he shouted: ‘Come back, come back, come back,’ but there was no reply. There was no movement, no sound but the roaring wind.

He returned down the passage feeling that his mother, by dying and leaving him like this, had abandoned him utterly.

Back in the house, he could not find Faro. He went to his room and left the door ajar in the hope she might find him.

Lying cold in bed, he tried to return to his dream of his mother in the boat, but that now seemed as remote as she was. He stared into nothingness, thinking he would never sleep, never feel warm again. At last Faro jumped
on to his bed and he felt her paws, soft and heavy, move with a cautious certainty up to his face; her whiskers touched his cheek as she sniffed to be sure of him, then, like an arrow-tip of ice, her nose pointed between the sheets. He raised the covers for her. Slipping like silk into his arms, she curled warm against his body and lay with her chin on his shoulder, purring contentment. He wrapped his arms round her. Comforted, kissing her between the ears, he whispered: ‘I love you.’ He pressed his face into her fur and said: ‘Faro, darling little Faro . . .’ but in a moment, when he meant only to say ‘Faro’, he found he was saying: ‘Mother’ and all the tears he had kept back that day streamed down his face until, he slept, exhausted.

As the days passed, life did not change much in Miss Bohun’s house. Felix was at a loss about it. Except for Faro, there was nothing here with which he could feel any contact. His longing for his mother was fixed like an ache in the centre of his chest and there was nothing to disperse it. From it the routine of his new life spread about him, winter bleak.

The garden was green and cold; the house colder. Most days the sky was stormy. Miss Bohun said the rains had been unusually heavy that year; indeed it had been an unusual winter altogether, for snow fell only about once in a decade and the Arabs were saying the Jews must have brought it from Europe. When she noticed Felix shivering, she told him the winter here was so short, no one bothered to combat it; it had to be suffered and let pass.

Felix would awake in the morning with Faro still in his arms and both of them would move reluctantly out of bed into the icy room. Each day seemed to lie ahead grey and purposeless. He would begin it by going downstairs in his dressing-gown and crossing the yard to the bathroom. As Miss Bohun saw nothing extraordinary about this, he supposed there was nothing extraordinary, but he caught the worst cold he had ever had. He began to remember
his mother as warmth, comfort, happiness – things he must learn to live without.

Before he arrived, Miss Bohun had arranged for him to have lessons with a Mr Posthorn of the Education Office. Mr Posthorn was a busy man; he not only had his government job but tutored some Arab boys of wealthy family who hoped, when the war ended, to go to an English university. He had agreed to ‘fit Felix into his spare time’, which meant that some mornings Felix went to Mr Posthorn’s office and was told to study this or that, while occasionally Mr Posthorn could spare an hour to drop in to Miss Bohun’s and give Felix some instruction. Most of Felix’s day was spent in study in his bedroom. He knew he would not get far in this way and he knew also that Mr Posthorn would have been willing to give him more attention had he, like Miss Bohun, not been disappointed in him. Miss Bohun said or did nothing that gave Felix any clue as to how he had failed her, but Mr Posthorn, after testing his knowledge, spoke without hesitation: ‘What on earth have you been doing with yourself since you left school in England?’

Felix explained that in Baghdad he had taken lessons with an old English lady, an ex-governess to a royal family, who had taught him English composition, French, drawing, geography and history. Unfortunately she had known less Greek, Latin and mathematics than he knew himself. His mother had treated lessons there as a joke and said: ‘Never mind, darling, when the war’s over we’ll make up for lost time.’ The Shiptons, like Mr Posthorn, had been shocked to discover how little Felix knew and had told him that as he would have to earn his living one day, he had better start studying at once for his Matriculation. Mr Posthorn said:

‘Your parents ought to have been ashamed of themselves, keeping you away from school during the most important years of your life. I can’t understand it. Your father was an educated man, wasn’t he?’

Felix explained: ‘It wasn’t my father’s fault. Mother wouldn’t let me go back to England when the war started. Father was cross, but Mother said: “If he goes I may not see him again,” and she wouldn’t have, either.’

Mr Posthorn said: ‘You’ll never make up for it,’ but Felix, although he knew it to be a serious matter, could not really care. It was as though the important part of his life were already over; only blankness lay ahead. Like the Jerusalem winter, it was only to be suffered and got over. Yet, before his mother’s death, he had begun to feel excited about his life that was, he supposed, just beginning. The war was ending. Soon they would be able to go where they liked – there was the whole world to see. He had begun to have bursts of wild exhilaration. He felt then that something was growing within him that gave an excitement and brilliance and wonder to everything. But when his mother died, the wonder had gone like a light snapped off. He could see no reason for doing anything now. It would be like dressing up, or acting a play, or writing a book, on a desert island. Sometimes, when his own life flickered again in him and he knew the future was still there, he wondered in desperation if he could try and please Miss Bohun. Could he become something – a famous general, say, or an admiral? – to impress her? There was no warmth in the idea. And what would she care?

At meal-times he would feel drawn to stare at her face, which was colourless as plaster, the eyes nearly always hidden behind the thick, plaster-coloured lids. Even when
she lifted her face to speak or call Frau Leszno, she would not open her eyes. Her mouth was never more than a minus sign drawn under the thin, drooping tip of her nose. Often the sign drooped too, as though something near her was distasteful to her, but more often she held it firm and straight against her teeth. When caught staring, Felix would look away at once, nervous, repelled, yet drawn to look again as soon as it seemed safe. One day he realised she reminded him of a praying mantis. A mantis had come into his room once in Baghdad and hung motionless all night on the curtain – a narrow insect, like a green stick, silent, shut up in itself. This likeness made her even more strange to him, almost monstrous, and she was the stranger for having a religion of her own. She told him nothing about this; she seemed to have forgotten her promise to tell him one day, she seemed for long stretches to forget him altogether.