‘It’s my mother,’ he said, aware that these words were inept and inelegant.
‘I’m Mrs Lyng,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She held out her hand and Michael’s mother took it.
‘The Matron,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of you, Mrs Lyng.’
‘Well actually,’ Outsize Dorothy contradicted with a laugh, ‘I’m the headmaster’s wife.’ All the flesh on her body wobbled when she laughed. Tichbourne said he knew for a fact she was twenty stone.
‘What a lovely place you have, Mrs Lyng. I was just saying to Michael. What a view from the windows!’
Outsize Dorothy told Miss Trenchard to go on getting Verschoyle’s things together, in a voice that implied that Miss Trenchard wasn’t paid to stand about doing nothing in the dormitories. All the women staff – the maids and Sister and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard – hated Outsize Dorothy because she’d expect them, even Sister, to go on rooting in a locker while she talked to a parent. She wouldn’t in a million years say: ‘This is Miss Trenchard, the undermatron.’
‘Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have much time for views at Elton,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She was looking puzzled, and Michael imagined she was thinking that his mother was surely another woman, a thinner, smarter, quieter person. But then Outsize Dorothy wasn’t clever, as she often light-heartedly said herself, and was probably saying to herself that she must be confusing one boy’s mother with another.
‘Dorothy!’ a voice called out, a voice which Michael instantly and to his horror recognized as A.J.L.’s.
‘We had such a view at home!’ Michael’s mother said. ‘Such a gorgeous view!’ She was referring to her own home, a rectory in Somerset somewhere. She’d often told Michael about the rectory and the view, and her parents, both dead now. Her father had received the call to the Church late in life: he’d been in the Customs and Excise before that.
‘Here, dear,’ Outsize Dorothy called out. ‘In Marlborough.’
Michael knew he’d gone red in the face. His stomach felt hot also, the palms of his hands were clammy. He could hear the clatter of the headmaster’s footsteps on the uncarpeted back stairs. He began to pray, asking for something to happen, anything at all, anything God could think of.
His mother was more animated than before. More fluffy hair had slipped out from beneath her headscarf, the flush had spread over a greater area of her face. She was talking about the lack of view from the flat where she and Michael lived in Hammersmith, and about Peggy Urch who’d come to live in the flat directly above them and whose view was better because she could see over the poplars.
‘Hullo,’ A.J.L. said, a stringy, sandy man, the opposite of Outsize Dorothy and in many ways the perfect complement. Tichbourne said he often imagined them naked in bed, A.J.L. winding his stringiness around her explosive bulk.
Hands were shaken again. ‘Having a look round?’ A.J.L. said. ‘Staying at the Grand?’
Michael’s mother said she wasn’t staying at the Grand but at Sans Souci, did he know it? They’d been talking about views, she said, it was lovely to have a room with a view, she hoped Michael wasn’t giving trouble, her husband of course – well, ex-husband now – had been to this school in his time, before going on to Radley. Michael would probably go to Radley too.
‘Well, we hope so,’ A.J.L. said, seizing the back of Michael’s neck. ‘Shown her the new classrooms, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Shown her where we’re going to have our swimming-pool?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Well, then.’
His mother spoke of various diseases Michael had had, measles and whooping cough and chicken-pox, and of diseases he hadn’t had, mumps in particular. Miss Trenchard was like a ghost, all in white, still sorting out the junk in Verschoyle’s locker, not daring to say a word. She was crouched there, with her head inside the locker, listening to everything.
‘Well, we mustn’t keep you,’ A.J.L. said, shaking hands again with Michael’s mother. ‘Always feel free to come.’
There was such finality about these statements, more in the headmaster’s tone than in the words themselves, that Michael’s mother was immediately silent. The statements had a physical effect on her, as though quite violently they had struck her across the face. When she spoke again it was in the whisper she had earlier employed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m ever so sorry for going on so.’
A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy laughed, pretending not to understand what she meant. Miss Trenchard would tell Miss Arland. Sister would hear and so would Brookie, and the P.T. instructor would say that this same woman had imagined him to be one of the boys. Mr Waydelin would hear, and Square-jaw Simpson – Cocky Marshall’s successor – and Mr Brine and the Reverend Green.
‘I have enjoyed it,’ Michael’s mother whispered. ‘So nice to meet you.’
He went before her down the back stairs. His face was still red. They passed by the staff lavatory and the kitchens, out on to the concrete quadrangle. It was still misty and cold.
‘I bought things for lunch,’ she said, and for an awful moment he thought that she’d want to eat them somewhere in the school or in the grounds – in the art-room or the cricket pavilion. ‘We could have a picnic in my room,’ she said.
They walked down the short drive, past the chapel that once had been the gate-lodge. They caught a bus after a wait of half an hour, during which she began to talk again, telling him more about Peggy Urch, who reminded her of another friend she’d had once, a Margy Bassett. In her room in Sans Souci she went on talking, spreading out on the bed triangles of cheese, and tomatoes and rolls and biscuits and oranges. They sat in her room when they’d finished, eating Rollo. At six o’clock they caught a bus back to Elton Grange. She wept a little when she said goodbye.
Michael’s mother did not, as it happened, ever arrive at Elton Grange at half-term again. There was no need for her to do so because his father and Gillian were always able to come themselves. For several terms he felt embarrassed in the presence of A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard, but no one at school mentioned the unfortunate visit, not even Swagger Browne, who had so delightedly overheard her assuming the P.T. instructor to be one of the boys. School continued as before and so did the holidays, Saturdays in Cranleigh and the rest of the week in Hammersmith, news of Mr Ashaf and Dolores Welsh, now Dolores Haskins. Peggy Urch, the woman in the flat upstairs, often came down for a chat.
Often, too, Michael and his mother would sit together in the evenings on the sofa in front of the electric fire. She’d tell him about the rectory in Somerset and her father who had received the call to the Church late in his life, who’d been in the Customs and Excise. She’d tell him about her own childhood, and even about the early days of her marriage. Sometimes she wept a little, hardly at all, and he would take her arm on the sofa and she would smile and laugh. When they sat together on the sofa or went out together, to the cinema, or for a walk by the river or to the teashop called the Maids of Honour near Kew Gardens, Michael felt that he would never want to marry because he’d prefer to be with his mother. Even when she chatted on to some stranger in the Maids of Honour he felt he loved her: everything was different from the time she’d come to Elton Grange because away from Elton Grange things didn’t matter in the same way.
Then something unpleasant threatened. During his last term at Elton Grange Michael was to be confirmed. ‘Oh, but of course I must come,’ his mother said.
It promised to be worse than the previous occasion. After the service you were meant to bring your parents in to tea in the Great Hall and see that they had a cup of tea and sandwiches and cakes. You had to introduce them to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Michael imagined all that. In bed at night he imagined his father and Gillian looking very smart, his father chatting easily to Mr Brine, Gillian smiling at Outsize Dorothy, and his mother’s hair fluffing out from beneath her headscarf. He imagined his mother and his father and Gillian having to sit together in a pew in chapel, as naturally they’d be expected to, being members of the same party.