‘Christ, what a time we’re having with that boy for Harrow,’ her husband would say, and she would make a sighing noise to match the annoyance he felt, and smile to cheer him up. It was extraordinary what he had achieved with the dullards he took on, and she now and again wondered if one day he might even receive a small recognition, an OBE maybe. As for her, Milton Grange was recognition enough: an apt reward, she felt, for her marital agreeableness, for not being a nuisance, and coming up to scratch as a wife.
Just occasionally Mrs Digby-Hunter wondered what life would have been like if she’d married someone else. She wondered what it would have been like to have had children of her own and to have engaged in the activity that caused, eventually, children to be born. She imagined, once a year or so, as she lay alone in her room in the darkness, what it would be like to share a double bed night after night. She imagined a faceless man, a pale naked body beside hers, hands caressing her flesh. She imagined, occasionally, being married to a clergyman she’d known as a girl, a man who had once embraced her with intense passion, suddenly, after a dance in a church hall. She had experienced the pressure of his body against hers and she could recall still the smell of his clothes and the dampness of his mouth.
But Milton Grange was where she belonged now: she had chosen a man and married him and had ended up, for better or worse, in a turreted house in Gloucestershire. There was give and take in marriage, as always she had known, and where she was concerned there was everything to be thankful for. Once a year, on the last Saturday in July, the gardens of the school were given over to a Conservative fete, and more regularly she and her husband drove to other country houses, for dinner or cocktails. A local Boy Scout group once asked her to present trophies on a sports day because she was her husband’s wife and he was well regarded. She had enjoyed the occasion and had bought new clothes specially for it.
In winter she put down bulbs, and in spring she watched the birds collecting twigs and straw for nests. She loved the gardens and often repeated to the maids in the kitchen that one was ‘nearer God’s Heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth’. It was a beautiful sentiment, she said, and very true.
On that June afternoon, while Mrs Digby-Hunter dropped into a doze beneath the beech trees and Sergeant Wall removed the weeds from a herbaceous border, the bearded Mr Beade walked between two rows of desks in a bare attic room. Six boys bent over the desks, writing speedily. In the room next door six other boys wrote also. They would not be idling, Mr Beade knew, any more than the boys in the room across the corridor would be idling.
‘Amavero, amaveris, amaverit,’ he said softly, his haired lips close to the ear of a boy called Timpson. ‘Amaverimus, Timpson, amaverint,’ atnaverint.’ A thumb and forefinger of Mr Beade’s seized and turned the flesh on the back of Timpson’s left hand. ‘Amaveritis,’ he said again, ‘amaverint’ While the flesh was twisted this way and that and while Timpson moaned in the quiet manner that Mr Beade preferred, Dympna and Barbara surveyed the sleeping form of Mrs Digby-Hunter in the garden. They had not washed themselves. They stood in the bedroom they shared, gazing through an open, diamond-paned window, smoking two Embassy tipped cigarettes. ‘White fat slug,’ said Barbara. ‘Look at her.’
They looked a moment longer. Sergeant Wall in the far distance pushed himself from his knees on to his feet. ‘He’s coming in for his tea,’ said Barbara. She held cigarette smoke in her mouth and then released it in short puffs. ‘She can’t think,’ said Dympna, ‘She’s incapable of mental activity.’ ‘She’s a dead white slug,’ said Barbara.
They cupped their cigarettes in their hands for the journey down the back stairs to the kitchen. They both were thinking that the kettle would be boiling on the Aga: it would be pleasant to sit in the cool, big kitchen drinking tea with old Sergeant Wall, who gossiped about the village he lived in. It was Dympna’s turn to make his sandwich, turkey paste left over from yesterday, the easy-to-spread margarine that Mrs Digby-Hunter said was better for you than butter. ‘Dead white slug,’ repeated Barbara, laughing on the stairs. ‘Was she human once?’
Sergeant Wall passed by the sleeping Mrs Digby-Hunter and heard, just perceptibly, a soft snoring coming from her partially open mouth. She was tired, he thought; heat made women tired, he’d often heard. He removed his hat and wiped an accumulation of sweat from the crown of his head. He moved towards the house for his tea.
In his study Digby-Hunter sat with one boy, Marshalsea, listening while Marshalsea repeated recently acquired information about triangles.
‘Then DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘must be equal in all respects to –’
‘Why?’ inquired Digby-Hunter.
His voice was dry and slightly high. His bony hands, on the desk between himself and Marshalsea, had minute fingernails.
‘Because DEF –’
‘Because the triangle DEF, Marshalsea.’
‘Because the triangle DEF –’
‘Yes, Marshalsea?’
‘Because the triangle DEF has the two angles at the base and two sides equal to the two angles at the base and two sides of the triangle ABC –’
‘You’re talking bloody nonsense,’ said Digby-Hunter quietly. ‘Think about it, boy.’
He rose from his position behind his desk and crossed the room to the window. He moved quietly, a man with a slight stoop because of his height, a man who went well with the room he occupied, with shelves of textbooks, and an empty mantelpiece, and bare, pale walls. It was simple sense, as he often pointed out to parents, that in rooms where teaching took place there should be no diversions for the roving eyes of students.
Glancing from the window, Digby-Hunter observed his wife in her deck-chair beneath the beeches. He reflected that in their seventeen years at Milton Grange she had become expert at making shepherd’s pie. Her bridge, on the other hand, had not improved and she still made tiresome remarks to parents. Once, briefly, he had loved her, a love that had begun to die in a bedroom in a Welsh hotel, on the night of their wedding-day. Her nakedness, which he had daily imagined in lush anticipation, had strangely repelled him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d murmured, and had slipped into the other twin bed, knowing then that this side of marriage was something he was not going to be able to manage. She had not said anything, and between them the matter had never been mentioned again.
It was extraordinary, he thought now, watching her in the garden, that she should lie in a deck-chair like that, unfastidiously asleep. Once at a dinner-party she had described a dream she’d had, and afterwards, in the car on the way back to Milton Grange, he’d had to tell her that no one had been interested in her dream. People had quietly sighed, he’d had to say, because that was the truth.
There was a knock on the door and Digby-Hunter moved from the window and called out peremptorily. A youth with spectacles and long, uncared-for hair entered the sombre room. He was thin, with a slight, thin mouth and a fragile nose; his eyes, magnified behind the tortoiseshell-rimmed discs, were palely nondescript, the colour of water in which vegetables have been boiled. His lengthy hair was lustreless.
‘Wraggett,’ said Digby-Hunter at once, as though challenging the youth to disclaim this title.
‘Sir,’ replied Wraggett.
‘Why are you moving your head about like that?’ Digby-Hunter demanded.
He turned to the other boy. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘If the two angles at the base of DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘are equal to the two angles at the base of –’
‘Open the book,’ said Digby-Hunter. ‘Learn it.’
He left the window and returned to his desk. He sat down. ‘What d’you want, Wraggett?’ he said.
‘I think I’d better go to bed, sir.’
‘Bed? What’s the matter with you?’
‘There’s a pain in my neck, sir. At the back, sir. I can’t seem to see properly.’
Digby-Hunter regarded Wraggett with irritation and dislike. He made a noise with his lips. He stared at Wraggett. He said:
‘So you have lost your sight, Wraggett?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why the damn hell are you bellyaching, then?’
‘I keep seeing double, sir. I feel a bit sick, sir.’
‘Are you malingering, Wraggett?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then why are you saying you can’t see?’
‘Sir –’
‘If you’re not malingering, get on with the work you’ve been set, boy. The French verb to drink, the future conditional tense?’
‘Je boive –’
‘You’re a cretin,’ shouted Digby-Hunter. ‘Get out of here at once.’
‘I’ve a pain, sir –’
‘Take your pain out with you, for God’s sake. Get down to some honest work, Wraggett. Marshalsea?’
‘If the two angles at the base of DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘are equal to the two angles at the base of ABC it means that the sides opposite the angles –’
His voice ceased abruptly. He closed his eyes. He felt the small fingers of Digby-Hunter briefly on his scalp before they grasped a clump of hair.
‘Open your eyes,’ said Digby-Hunter.
Marshalsea did so and saw pleasure in Digby-Hunter’s face.
‘You haven’t listened,’ said Digby-Hunter. His left hand pulled the hair, causing the boy to rise from his seat. His right hand moved slowly and then suddenly shot out, completing its journey, striking at Marshalsea’s jaw-bone. Digby-Hunter always used the side of his hand, Mr Beade the ball of the thumb.
‘Take two triangles, ABC and DEF,’ said Digby-Hunter. Again the edge of his right hand struck Marshalsea’s face and then, clenched into a fist, the hand struck repeatedly at Marshalsea’s stomach.
‘Take two triangles,’ whispered Marshalsea, ‘ABC and DEF.’
‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’
‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’