Wrote For Luck (6 page)

A
t some point in the remote past somebody had dropped a bottle of ink on the lip of the rush-mat carpeting. Over the years the stain had faded from light-blue to cobalt, finally to an indeterminate shade of grey. He would have missed it had it not been there. The secretary, who had shuffled the sheets of paper on her desk three times and pretended to read them twice, said, exaggeratedly, ‘The Headmaster will see you now, Mr Crowther,’ like someone impersonating a secretary in a
Carry On
film, and he stood up and put the copy of the Old Boys’ newsletter, with its picture of the rugby team touring New Zealand, back on the circular table. Like the headmaster, the secretary was new, and had been heard to say that the fifty-yard walk to the noticeboards was an imposition. The boys, shrewd in these matters, had already nicknamed her ‘Ma Baboon’.

The path to the headmaster’s study lay across a tiled passage, sealed off at one end by locked double doors. Here there was a view out of the window into the Cathedral Close and several portraits of evil-looking old men in clerical robes. He wondered how many times he had taken this journey. Two hundred? Three? Routine made you unobservant, less vigilant of the nets that might be thrown out to pinion you. He pressed on into the study, past the gas-fire that sometimes worked if you kicked it in the right place and towards the immense oblong
desk where the new headmaster sat making desultory remarks into a telephone. ‘A child-focused paradigm,’ Crowther heard him correct his caller, ‘irrespective of the core competencies.’

The new headmaster was short and stout and had the vestiges of a West Midlands accent. However, he had stopped saying ‘righty ho’, which showed a conciliating spirit. When he saw Crowther he waved excitedly, put down the telephone and said, in a single, unpunctuated stream of words: ‘Very good of you to come and see me won’t you take a chair great deal to discuss.’

Crowther took his chair, which was the one that slumped alarmingly to the left, and found himself marking the changes that had been effected since his last visit in the summer. The engraving of the Wensum at Pull’s Ferry was still there and the view of the city from the high ground, but the drawing of the chapel had made way for a photo of what looked the debauched aftermath of the Chelsea Arts Club ball, but turned out to have been taken at the last meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference.

‘Very good of you,’ the new headmaster said again. Crowther resolved to concentrate more thoroughly, so that if anything was said with specific application to himself he should not look foolish. ‘Hear very good things about your extra studies classes GCSE boys,’ the new headmaster said unexpectedly, but with just enough of a glint in his eye to let Crowther know what was going on.

‘Oh yes,’ Crowther heard himself saying. He would admit nothing. Answer only direct questions. That was the way. ‘I mean…’ the new headmaster said. Another thing about the
new headmaster was his habit of not finishing sentences, of allowing these streams of words to dry up on the river-bed leaving only inference to re-hydrate them.

‘What exactly..?’ he said again, and Crowther found himself explaining, in rather incriminating detail, about the classes, which encouraged, and occasionally compelled, rather wooden boys to read and discuss moderately abstruse contemporary poems. The new headmaster was already nodding his head. ‘Poetry…’ he said vaguely.

Crowther wondered what he meant by this. That he approved of it? Feared its corrosive influence? Outside it had begun to rain and there was a fine drizzle blowing over the Nelson statue and the spindly trees. It turned out that the new headmaster was advocating caution, if not variety. ‘A topical discussion, perhaps.’

Crowther knew all about topical discussions. ‘The wider context,’ the new headmaster ventured. It turned out that a parent, one Crowther particularly disliked, had written to disparage poetry and press for basic economic theory. ‘A very interesting suggestion,’ he heard himself saying. It was always a mistake to listen to parents.

The rain was coming down quite hard now, and a few boys, briefcases lofted above their heads, scuttled furtively between the chapel and the music centre. ‘Valuing the work put in,’ he heard the new headmaster say. There was something else going on here, he thought, an undercurrent of trouble he could have done without, a way in which, however subtly and respectfully, the values on which he had fashioned his existence were being called into question. Someone in the
common room the other day had said that the new headmaster, known to be in favour of co-education and new universities, was also keen on early retirement. ‘Look forward to hearing…’ the new headmaster finished up. What did he look forward to? Crowther didn’t know.

The secretary laboured grimly into the room, looking more than ever like some text-book illustration of Darwinian theory, and he went back along the passage and out onto the tarmac of the playground, where the morning’s detritus included three oranges, an empty aspirin packet and a dog-eared copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal
.

It was not, in the end, the new headmaster’s fault, he thought to himself, driving home down a road along which lorries ferrying rubble from the site of the new shopping mall alternately surged and concertina’d. The new shopping mall, he knew, would merely displace the city’s commercial heart: a dozen new premises opening up half-a-mile from a dozen others ceasing to trade. But it was what people wanted. Teeny-weeny little world, he thought. A painter – was it Edward Burra? – had said that about a war-time Rye threatened by bombs: the same principle applied. No, the new headmaster was as much a victim as himself, not an
ubermensch
, but a minion sent to do that titan’s bidding. But this understanding did not make him any more sympathetic to the new headmaster: if anything, it made him crosser.

Parking the car in its square of luxuriantly unweeded gravel, he found himself wondering exactly what the values were that he feared were being called into question. No one, after all,
was asking him to suspend his powers of judgment. Or were they? He knew that it was nonsense to pretend that basic economic theory was more valuable to a teenager than the poems of Geoffrey Hill. Or was it? He had a nasty feeling that he was being got at for believing in things whose superiority he could not absolutely prove. Doubtless there were people somewhere who thought a West Midlands accent demonstrated authenticity, roots, a vindicated purpose. Well they were wrong.

The house, whose silence he had looked forward to, was full of small, unsettling intrusions. In the kitchen he found his wife’s cousin Finula and her fast friend Cecily – quartered on the premises this past week – having one of their terrible conversations. He was used to his wife’s cousin Finula and even, up to a point, to her friend Cecily – engrossed, amnesiac creatures in their late fifties – but dealing with them required tact. ‘Mead is a very excellent drink,’ he heard his wife’s cousin Finula saying. Rather than preposterously free associating, Cecily gave one of her trademarked laughs – a full-throated sea-lion’s bark that had once, in a country lane, caused serious disturbance to a flock of sheep. Head down over the stove as he made his coffee, he attended to the conversational ebb and flow, which resembled a series of inexpertly flung javelins each landing a field’s length from its intended target.

Once Finula had engaged him in a literary conversation. Did he think
Atonement
was a nice book? It depended on what you meant by a nice book, he shot slyly back. After all, hadn’t George Orwell once said, apropos of Dali, that great art could still want burning by the public hangman? But you could not have this kind of conversation with Finula. Just as he had no
vocabulary with which to discuss her profession, which was some kind of local government work, so she had no vocabulary to discuss books. Remembering this he deduced that in some way Finula and the new headmaster were confederate: each lacked the ability to discriminate.

Beyond the window the Norfolk fields descended into autumnal twilight. His wife came smiling into the room, and Finula and Cecily ceased to exist. ‘The Mannerings want to extend their garage,’ she said – the Mannerings lived at the bottom of the garden – ‘and put up a conservatory. Do we mind?’

‘Of course we mind,’ he said. The new headmaster; Cecily and Finula; the Mannerings. They were all the same, he thought, agents of the
ubermensch
, wreckers and despoilers.

Obscurely, after months of one-man guerrilla warfare, he found he had an ally. Most of the school staff were young, keen and sporty. Mr Deloitte, the art master, was old, cynical and treated the badminton set to an occasional negligent supervision. ‘You’ll get nowhere with the new man,’ he explained. ‘He’s one of the change for change’s sake brigade. There’ll be girls in here in a couple of years, I daresay. The boarding house is beyond saving. But you can have a lot of fun bamboozling him. They never understand irony, of course. And whatever you do, don’t refuse that offer of staff rep. on the governing body.’

‘They won’t want me,’ Crowther said, thinking of the letter that had lain on his desk since the end of last term.

‘They’ve no choice, have they?’ Deloitte said. ‘Senior man, aren’t you? Do you know, the wretched character’ – he meant the new headmaster – ‘actually gave some parent my home
number. Had some fishwife ring me up to ask if Johnny would pass his GSCE.’

Slowly, sedately, without noticeable excitement, the autumn passed. A cement mixer and tessellations of scaffolding appeared in the Mannerings’ garden. Finula and Cecily departed for Chichester. Several books, a ceramics kit and three copies of
Readers’ Digest
followed them in a brown paper parcel. Still the letter from the governing body lay on his desk. Details of an early retirement package of quite startling munificence were posted on the common room notice board. All these things seemed to him to be connected: they demanded a decision from him that he did not want to make. Finally there came a day when he sat once again in the headmaster’s study in the defective arm-chair.

Outside the rain lashed the Cathedral Close: the secretary sat at her desk making coy, simian grunts. The new headmaster was, if anything, even fatter and had taken to saying ‘righty ho’ again.

‘Question of exploring synergies school already possesses,’ he said at one point.

Did that mean the extra studies class? Crowther couldn’t tell. But he had done his homework, honed his capacity for pastiche.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I see it as a part of our wider programme for individual empowerment.’

The new headmaster blinked in a way that suggested he knew he was being mocked, but could not quite see how the trick was being done.

Crowther found his gaze roaming around the rear wall, which showed further signs of tampering. The engraving of Pull’s Ferry was still there, but the view of the city from the high ground had gone: in its place hung a picture of the new headmaster talking to a man who looked quite like Lord Attenborough from a distance but was actually someone else.

Clarity broke suddenly upon the confusions of the past weeks. ‘Really sorry to hear decision wonder if reconsider,’ he heard the headmaster say in one of his heroic vocal truncations.

‘Actually headmaster…’ he heard himself reply in rather startled correction. As he did this he found the vanished painting rising before his gaze: the squat heap of the castle, vertiginous spire, the rolling plains beyond.

Even teeny-weeny little worlds needed their protectors, he thought, their worms gnawing at the intruder’s vitals, their sanctifying blight. ‘Delighted naturally unexpected,’ he heard the new headmaster say.

The look on his face was oddly like Finula’s in the conversation about
Atonement
– less reproachful than puzzled, realising that a judgment had been made, not knowing why it had come about. Suddenly Crowther felt better, better than he had felt in a long time, lofty, magisterial, eager to appease. The leather arm- rest jabbed agonisingly beneath his ribs.

‘You know, headmaster,’ he said, in what he hoped was a friendly tone, ‘now that I’m joining the governing body I really ought to see to it that you get some new chairs.’

—2007

T
here were people who came to East Creake simply to paint its sky, but they did not come in November. After Michaelmas the light turned iron-grey and the breaking dawn smeared up the cloud behind it so that the effect was not one of Turner-esque tints and hues but like a very pale egg-yolk dragged out over a plate. Just at this moment the light was falling slantwise over the double row of attractively priced paperbacks that Caroline had set out in the window-boxes. Nearer at hand, little aggregations of hardback novels – some of them as recently published as six months ago – rose above the white display table bought for a song from the East Creake furniture mart. Ten feet away there was a terrific jangling noise – like some satanic turnkey wrenching open the gates of Hell – and Nick, with the diffidence that he brought to almost every human activity, came shambling into the shop.

‘I went down to the Fisherman’s Pantry to try and get some herrings,’ he said, ‘but they seem to close up at two these days.’

‘The tea shop’s already shut for the winter.’

Come Bonfire Night the East Creake emporia began to keep odd hours. Even the librarian of the Sailor’s Reading Room, where old salts in oil-skins dozed over the
North Norfolk Mercury
, grew capricious. The Book Bag’s decision to stay open for eight hours a day six days a week was regarded as a dangerous innovation.

‘Sold anything?’ Nick asked in a tone that suggested it was a matter of startling wonder that any shopkeeper ever sold anything to anyone.

‘Mrs Carmody bought that copy of Edward Heath’s
Music: A Joy for Life
. She thought it might do for the choir book group.’

Outside the high street was deserted except for an old man – so old that he had probably been present at the unveiling of the Art Deco war memorial – propping his bike up against the flint wall of the Dog and Partridge.

‘I
knew
that would go in the end,’ Nick said sagely. The £2.95 at which Mr Heath’s leavings had been priced would make their fortunes: anyone could see. The twitch in his upper lip as he pronounced these words suggested to Caroline that he had something disagreeable to tell her. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to go to town again tomorrow.’

‘Well, bring back some more copies of
Music: A Joy for Life
,’ she said, not quite humorously. ‘We’ll have a sale.’

Later they had supper in the tiny back-room behind the shop. As the Fisherman’s Pantry had not come up with any herrings, this was limited to ham and eggs on toast. Outside, rushing winds plucked at the shutters and the flimsy guttering. From time to time the light-bulb danced on its wire.

‘Why have you got to go to London?’ she wondered.

‘Tom said he wanted to go through that script again. He thought Barbara might have trouble with some of the jokes.’ Nick wrote plays that were broadcast on the radio and very occasionally performed in obscure provincial theatres. ‘Oh, and Mrs Trent-Browne threatened to put her head round the door. Her choice of words, not mine.’

‘What does Mrs Trent-Browne want?’

‘There’s some kind of village festival planned for the summer. And she said wanted to see how we were getting on.’

Practically everyone she knew wanted to know how they were getting on, Caroline thought. Her mother wanted to know. Her half-a-dozen best friends wanted to know. If it came to that, Caroline quite wanted to know herself. They were prudent and, or so they thought, unexcitable people, but they had bought the lease of the Book Bag on a whim, wandered down the high street one summer forenoon, seen the TO LET sign in its dusty window and, euphoric in the July sunshine, clinched the decision over a crab salad in the Enniskillen Tea Rooms. Trade, brisk enough around the August Bank Holiday, was not quite what it could have been now the tourists had gone. ‘I don’t quite see the
point
of a bookshop,’ a woman in a headscarf who had stopped once outside the half-open door had been heard to say, ‘what with the travelling library and everything.’

‘If I have time,’ Nick said, who would not have time, ‘I’ll call in at that wholesaler and see about some new stock.’ His mind was far away, in third acts and jokes that actresses could understand.

‘You do that,’ Caroline told him.

The next day she shut up the shop after lunch, traversed a row or two of pebble-dash cottages, slipped by the ice-cream parlour and the amusement arcade, each now shuttered up and moribund, and went for a walk along the beach. There were a few fishermen down at the north end, lines drawn tight against the surge of the ocean, and rain coming in on the wind, and the town’s solitary teenage boy throwing
stones against a tin. On the way back she made a detour to the nature reserve and left a handful of leaflets (
If books are your bag, then try the Book Bag
) in the café. A previous drop had been discovered two days later in a waste-paper bin. Not everyone in East Creake’s resident population approved of blow-ins, a category in which Nick, at least, was shocked to find that he was supposed to reside. ‘I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Fakenham,’ he had protested, ‘and my parents live in Burnham Market. What more do they want?’ When she got back to the high street there was a foxy-looking middle-aged-to-elderly lady in an Inverness cape standing on the pavement outside the Book Bag with one hand clasped to the door-knob. Caroline did not like that hand. It suggested collusion, infiltration, colonising intent.

‘My
dear
, so
there
you are. How
nice
to be able to shut up shop whenever you feel like it,’ Mrs Trent-Browne said in her usual blizzard of phantom italics.

‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ Caroline conceded. In the life of East Creake, Mrs Trent-Browne was a mysterious figure, known to enjoy exercising the considerable power she possessed in a capricious manner. She was rumoured to own half the high street, and at her instigation a Women’s Institute lecture on ‘The Exotic East’ had been replaced by a demonstration of flower-arranging techniques.

‘I’ve been
very
remiss in not coming to see you,’ said Mrs Trent-Browne, following Caroline briskly into the shop. ‘Especially now that I hear you’re doing so splendidly.’

There was no getting rid of Mrs Trent-Browne. She poked around in the bargain bin and bought a P.D. James for 75p,
admired the display of cookery books while suggesting that they could be moved slightly to the left, and clucked her tongue over a biography of the Dalai Lama, all the while discussing her plans for next summer’s festival. This was to be on an extensive scale, do wonders for trade, involve the covering of the high street in a deluge of tricoloured bunting and the commandeering of the village hall for a display of horse brasses. By the time she left Caroline had agreed to host an evening in the shop at which one of Mrs Trent-Browne’s friends would read from a volume of self-published poems entitled
Wood Sorrel
.

In her absence the shop seemed diminished, turned in on itself, barren and inert. The bargain bin, in particular, appeared to be such a desperate coign of literary vantage that Caroline decided to re-utilise the space for Psychology and Self-help. There were no further customers. Nick came back late, by taxi from Sheringham station, which suggested that the script meeting had gone well, and she told him about Mrs Trent-Browne and the festival.

‘I heard something about that,’ he said. He had bought himself a new scarf, which sat uncomfortably on his thin shoulders like a Lutheran priest’s ruff. ‘Apparently they’re looking for premises for an office.’

‘How did you get on?’ she enquired. As the Fisherman’s Pantry was still keeping odd hours they were eating gnocchi bought at ruinous expense from the up-market delicatessen three doors down.

‘Not so bad at all,’ Nick said. He could be complacent at times. ‘I’ll probably have to go back next week and stay a night or two.’

A storm blew up in the small hours and took half-a-dozen slates off the roof. Without explanation, Nick’s night or two turned into a week and a half. Over the next few days Caroline heard a great deal about the festival. There was an article about it in the weekly paper, a picture of Mrs Trent-Browne statuesque upon the village green and many a rumour about the site of the festival office. There was also a letter from Mr Warburton, the solicitor who had arranged the purchase of the Book Bag’s lease.

‘I thought you said he was such a nice old man,’ Caroline complained, once she had negotiated the complex series of upward revisions on which the renewal of the lease seemed to depend.

Nick’s ear for local gossip was better tuned. ‘I think I heard somewhere that he’s Mrs Trent-Browne’s brother-in-law.’

In retrospect Caroline could never quite tell when she became aware that the place where Mrs Trent-Browne burned to establish her festival office was the Book Bag. No one informed her directly: it must have happened by osmosis. Meanwhile it came as a shock to discover that she was at the heart of a guerrilla war which she could not remember having started. One lunch-time she came back to the shop to find that someone had plundered handfuls of the attractively priced paperbacks from their ledge and flung them all over the pavement. But if Mrs Trent-Browne had her partisans, then, as a practised opponent of local planning applications, she also had her detractors. Two days later there came a handwritten but necessarily anonymous note that read:
tell the old bitch to go to hell
.

November was wearing on. The nature reserve closed up for the winter, and the stone curlews and the oyster-catchers in the reed beds browsed on unregarded. Elderly gentlemen in flat tweed caps could be seen walking to the village hall to play whist. Matters came to a head one Thursday afternoon, when the light had begun to fade and a series of flashes and detonations over the eastern sky made it look as if an alien invasion was in train, and Mrs Trent-Browne descended once more upon the shop. It had been a bad day, bringing a bill from the wholesaler and a letter – an actual letter, such was the gravity of the news it contained – from Nick.

‘My dear,’ Mrs Trent-Browne began. She was unusually flustered, no doubt fearful that the aliens had her in their sights, were about to carry her off into the clouds above Brancaster Staithe. ‘I’ve come to make you an offer.’

Caroline stared at her stonily. Nick, the ever diffident, apparently wanted time to ‘think things over’. Having blown into her life, he seemed all too ready to blow out again.

‘An
offer
,’ Mrs Trent-Browne went on, as if repetition and emphasis would somehow seal the business. ‘Let me have your lease for my HQ and you can move into the Bodega absolutely rent-free. Mr Warburton can fix everything up in a jiffy.’

The Bodega was a failed art gallery on the high street’s outermost margin that smelled of rotting fish. For some reason it was Nick’s scarf that rose in her mind, a scarf that now suggested abandonment, urban sophistication, greener grass. ‘No I won’t,’ she yelled at Mrs Trent-Browne. ‘You’re a nasty, interfering old woman, and I wouldn’t let you have the lease if you were the last person alive.’ ‘My
dear
,’ Mrs Trent-Browne
plaintively, but it was too late, far too late. The nearest thing to hand was the biography of the Dalai Lama, and she absolutely picked it up and threw it at Mrs Trent-Browne’s anguished and departing head. Afterwards she strode in triumph along the stony beach, past the slumbering fishermen and their lines, and the endless worm-casts, on and on into the beckoning blue-grey horizon, where there was no Mrs Trent-Browne, no Nick, no mocking metropolitan neck-wear, only herself, her books and silence.

—2013