He goes down to the yard and stands in the doorway of the cowshed where the head cowman and two dairymaids are milking. The boy pats the rump of each cow and calls it by its name.
The tea for Breakfast in the Kitchen is different from tea in the schoolroom. The cups too are different: thick-lipped and almost as large as basins.
The taste of the tea which he drinks as hot as he can bear to is a strong but thin taste. It lines the mouth with its thin covering: the surface of the covering non-absorbent and shiny like that of mica which they use for lantern slides. Within the mouth, so lined with the taste of tea, there is also the extra-strong exaggerated taste of sugar. This is a taste whose effects are not confined to the mouth. Sweetness is like Eurydice’s thread: it leads from the tongue down the throat and then, mysteriously, through the stomach to the sexual centre, to the tiny region (distinct in a male from the sexual organs themselves) where sexual pleasure accumulates before extending outwards in waves. It is sugar that first induces us to love life.
Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ‘a honey’ but secretes a poison when she is indisposed … in native thought, the search for honey represents a sort of return to Nature, in the guise of erotic attraction transposed from the sexual register to that of the sense of taste, which undermines the very foundations of culture if it is indulged in for too long.
The kitchen smells of bacon and labourers’ boots.
The cook, standing by the range, watches the seven men and three maids eating with an expression of apparent surprise on her face. If she is not harried, it is the expression she habitually wears when watching people eat the food she has prepared. The surprise cannot be at the fact that they eat it with such appetite—for this can surely no longer surprise her. Perhaps it is less personaclass="underline" the elemental surprise provoked by watching anything being devoured and then apparently ceasing to exist.
His aunt strides into the room, ruffles the boy’s hair and then turns abruptly to walk to the low window by the dresser. The maids at the table glance at her timidly. She has gone to the window to see whether she can see her brother. When she is not occupied with the house or some aspect of farm management which her brother has negelected, as soon as she is unoccupied, she becomes anxious and impatient to see him. Like a newly-wed wife she becomes attendant upon him. She has observed that his growing up has disabled him, making him ineffective. What she admires in him is the unwounded boy of twenty years ago. It is to that boy that she has remained faithful.
The other boy, who is drinking his tea, watches her. Her face is close to the window-pane, almost touching it. He knows that she is waiting for his uncle. He has often seen her waiting like this. He slips away from the table and out of the door through the pantry and into the courtyard. Keeping close to the wall of the house, so as not to be seen from inside the kitchen, he creeps round until he is underneath the window at which his aunt is standing. He pauses a moment, a little excited and on the brink of laughter at the thought of the trick he is about to play.
She is waiting for my uncle and bo! it’s me!
He climbs on to a water trough, slowly straightens up and presses his nose against the window-pane. His head comes level with her midriff. For an instant she does not notice him: her eyes are still fixed on the middle distance where she expects her brother to turn into the yard. The boy has time to glimpse from below her face with its fixed gaze. Then he sees her lower her eyes, perceiving him. In changing focus her eyes brighten. As they do so, she smiles and he laughs. Bo!
NUMBERS
A blackboard has been installed in the schoolroom. It is no longer a woman’s sitting room or a nursery. There are schoolbooks on the bookcase. A map of the world, a large area of it pink the colour of a hunting coat to denote the Empire. A clock has been fixed to the wall. An era passed with Miss Helen and the boy recognizes that it is irrevocable. As irrevocable as the fact that he has no father. But the latter fact he has been told, the former he has told himself.
If I see you looking at the clock again, we shall continue our arithmetic this afternoon.
This afternoon I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
If necessary I shall speak to your uncle.
It will make no difference whatever you say.
I beg your pardon?
I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
Stand up!
The tutor also rises, and walks slowly across to the piano. It is a ritual walk, quite unnatural in its slowness, so that the boy may recognize it and foresee its meaning. From the wall above the piano he unhooks a cane.
What is the punishment for impertinence?
One stroke across both hands, sir.
He holds out his hands, palms up.
He has learnt how to come to terms with this punishment. After a stroke the tutor always stares intently into the boy’s face—as though searching for a proof. The boy’s determination to control his face must exactly balance the smarting of his hands. If he over-clenches his face, he becomes self-conscious of his expression and position, and, continuing from this, he may become self-pitying and so cry. If he under-clenches it, the sting in his hands may rise for expression to his eyes and throat quicker than he can control them. Thus he must estimate exactly on each occasion how hard the tutor is going to hit him. He gauges this by the tutor’s breathing and by how, beneath his waistcoat, he draws in his stomach. If his estimate proves correct so that he reveals nothing, so that the tutor searches his face in vain, the boy scarcely suffers at all.
The boy receives one stroke on his left hand if he persists in repeating the same mistake as the tutor was forced to correct on the previous day (e.g. until has one ‘l’ not two): for a mistake repeated more than three times on the same day, he receives a stroke across the right hand: for insubordination (as now) a stroke across both hands: for rank disobedience three strokes. At first this systematized tariff of punishment surprised the boy: by now it seems no more arbitrary than the time announced by the hands of the large clock on the wall. One hour can seem interminable: two hours out of doors can pass unnoticed.
Which is the larger, two thirds or three sevenths?
The boy stares out of the window at Basset’s Wood and senses that there is a trick in the question.
The tutor tells himself that he likes his new charge but that the boy’s wilfulness must be checked lest it be his undoing.
In the cook’s sitting room there is a grandfather clock. The ticking of this clock has a hypnotic effect upon the boy, alone in the room. Its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way the ticking fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him. He has thought of smashing the round window in the clock through which he can see the brass bob of the pendulum, always continuing to swing slowly from side to side after he has abandoned the attempt to count two or three hundred swings.
The cook’s cat settles on his legs and increases the hypnotic effect. It purrs as he rubs its ears. His trance-like state is hung like a hammock between two branches of awareness: the endlessness of time within the house which he can never successfully imagine destroyed (he is seven and a half and he has lived in the house for over five years): and the unconcerned, categorically separate life of the animal on his lap. The warmth of the animal, permeating his breeches, paints the wall of his stomach and the tops of his legs hot.