Mrs Silly
Michael couldn’t remember a time when his father had been there. There’d always been the flat where he and his mother lived, poky and cluttered even though his mother tried so. Every Saturday his father came to collect him. He remembered a blue car and then a greenish one. The latest one was white, an Alfa-Romeo.
Saturday with his father was the highlight of the week. Unlike his mother’s flat, his father’s house was spacious and nicely carpeted. There was Gillian, his father’s wife, who never seemed in a hurry, who smiled and didn’t waste time. Her smile was cool, which matched the way she dressed. Her voice was quiet and reliable: Michael couldn’t imagine it ever becoming shrill or weepy or furious, or in any other way getting out of control. It was a nice voice, as nice as Gillian herself.
His father and Gillian had two little girls, twins of six, two years younger than Michael. They lived near Cranleigh, in a half-timbered house in pretty wooded countryside. On Saturday mornings the drive from London took over an hour, but Michael never minded and on the way back he usually fell asleep. There was a room in the house that his father and Gillian had made his own, which the twins weren’t allowed to enter in his absence. He had his Triang train circuit there, on a table that had been specially built into the wall for it.
It was in this house, one Saturday afternoon, that Michael’s father brought up the subject of Elton Grange. ‘You’re nearly nine, you know,’ his father said. ‘It’s high time, really, old chap.’
Elton Grange was a preparatory school in Wiltshire, which Michael’s father had gone to himself. He’d mentioned it many times before and so had Michael’s mother, but in Michael’s mind it was a place that belonged to the distant future – with Radley, where his father had gone, also. He certainly knew that he wasn’t going to stay at the primary school in Hammersmith for ever, and had always taken it for granted that he would move away from it when the rest of his class moved, at eleven. He felt, without actually being able to recall the relevant conversation, that his mother had quite definitely implied this. But it didn’t work out like that. ‘You should go in September,’ his father said, and that was that.
‘Oh, darling,’ his mother murmured when the arrangements had all been made. ‘Oh, Michael, I’ll miss you.’
His father would pay the fees and his father would in future give him pocket-money, over and above what his mother gave him. He’d like it at Elton Grange, his father promised. ‘Oh yes, you’ll like it,’ his mother said too.
She was a woman of medium height, five foot four, with a round, plump face and plump arms and legs. There was a soft prettiness about her, about her light-blue eyes and her wide, simple mouth and her fair, rather fluffy hair. Her hands were always warm, as if expressing the warmth of her nature. She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so. She talked a lot, getting carried away when she didn’t watch herself: for this failing, too, she regularly said she was silly. ‘Mrs Silly’, she used to say when Michael was younger, condemning herself playfully for the two small follies she found it hard to control.
She worked as a secretary for an Indian, a Mr Ashaf, who had an office-stationery business. There was the shop – more of a warehouse, really – with stacks of swivel chairs and filing-cabinets on top of one another and green metal desks, and cartons containing continuation paper and top-copy foolscap and flimsy, and printed invoices. There were other cartons full of envelopes, and packets of paper-clips, drawing-pins and staples. The carbon-paper supplies were kept in the office behind the shop, where Michael’s mother sat in front of a typewriter, typing invoices mainly. Mr Ashaf, a small wiry man, was always on his feet, moving between the shop and the office, keeping an eye on Michael’s mother and on Dolores Welsh who looked after the retail side. Before she’d married, Michael’s mother had been a secretary in the Wedgwood Centre, but returning to work at the time of her divorce she’d found it more convenient to work for Mr Ashaf since his premises were only five minutes away from where she and Michael lived. Mr Ashaf was happy to employ her on the kind of part-time basis that meant she could be at home every afternoon by the time Michael got in from school. During the holidays Mr Ashaf permitted her to take the typewriter to her flat, to come in every morning to collect what work there was and hand over what she’d done the day before. When this arrangement wasn’t convenient, due to the nature of the work, Michael accompanied her to Mr Ashaf’s premises and sat in the office with her or with Dolores Welsh in the shop. Mr Ashaf used occasionally to give him a sweet.
‘Perhaps I’ll change my job,’ Michael’s mother said brightly, a week before he was due to become a boarder at Elton Grange. ‘I could maybe go back to the West End. Nice to have a few more pennies.’ She was cheering herself up – he could tell by the way she looked at him. She packed his belongings carefully, giving him many instructions about looking after himself, about keeping himself warm and changing any clothes that got wet. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said at Paddington on the afternoon of his departure. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll miss you so!’
He would miss her, too. Although his father and Gillian were in every way more fun than his mother, it was his mother he loved. Although she fussed and was a nuisance sometimes, there was always the warmth, the cosiness of climbing into her bed on Sunday mornings or watching Magic Roundabout together. He was too big for Magic Roundabout now, or so he considered, and he rather thought he was too big to go on climbing into her bed. But the memories of all this cosiness had become part of his relationship with her.
She wept as they stood together on the platform. She held him close to her, pressing his head against her breast. ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’
Her tears damped his face. She sniffed and sobbed, whispering that she didn’t know what she’d do. ‘Poor thing!’ someone passing said. She blew her nose. She apologized to Michael, trying to smile. ‘Remember where your envelopes are,’ she said. She’d addressed and stamped a dozen envelopes for him so that he could write to her. She wanted him to write at once, just to say he’d arrived safely.
‘And don’t be homesick now,’ she said, her own voice trembling again. ‘Big boy, Michael.’
The train left her behind. He waved from the corridor window, and she gestured at him, indicating that he shouldn’t lean out. But because of the distances between them he couldn’t understand what the gesture meant. When the train stopped at Reading he found his writing-paper and envelopes in his overnight bag and began to write to her.
At Elton Grange he was in the lowest form, Miss Brooks’s form. Miss Brooks, grey-haired at sixty, was the only woman on the teaching staff. She did not share the men’s common-room but sat instead in the matrons’ room, where she smoked Senior Service cigarettes between lessons. There was pale tobacco-tinged hair on her face, and on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she wore jodhpurs, being in charge of the school’s riding. Brookie she was known as.
The other women at Elton Grange were Sister and the undermatron Miss Trenchard, the headmaster’s wife Mrs Lyng, the lady cook Miss Arland, and the maids. Mrs Lyng was a stout woman, known among the boys as Outsize Dorothy, and Sister was thin and brisk. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were both under twenty-three; Miss Arland was pretty and Miss Trenchard wasn’t. Miss Arland went about a lot with the history and geography master, Cocky Marshall, and Miss Trenchard was occasionally seen with the P.T. instructor, a Welshman, who was also in charge of the carpentry shop. Among the older boys Miss Trenchard was sometimes known as Tampax.
Twice a week Michael wrote to his mother, and on Sundays he wrote to his father as well. He told them that the headmaster was known to everyone as A.J.L. and he told them about the rules, how no boy in the three lower forms was permitted to be seen with his hands in his pockets and how no boy was permitted to run through A.J.L.’s garden. He said the food was awful because that was what everyone else said, although he quite liked it really.