‘… this night,’ intoned the small headmaster nasally, ‘and for ever more.’
‘Amen,’ we all replied.
Saturday night was a pleasant time. After Chapel there were two and a half hours during which you could do more or less what you liked, provided the master on duty knew where you were. You could work in the printing shop or read in the library, or take part in a debate, such as that this school is an outpost of the British Empire, or play billiards or do carpentry, or go to the model-railway club or the music-rooms. At half past nine there was some even freer time, during which the master on duty didn’t have to know where you were. Most boys went for a smoke then.
After Chapel on the Saturday night after I’d visited Fleming’s Hotel I read in the library. I read Jane Eyre, but all the time the oval face of the woman in the hotel kept appearing in my mind. It would stay there for a few seconds and then fade, and then return. Again and again, as I read Jane Eyre, she passed close to my chair in the bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and looked down and smiled at me.
The end of that term came. The Sixth Form and Remove did Macbeth on the last two nights, A. McC. P. Jackson giving what was generally regarded as a fine performance as Banquo. Someone stole the secondhand Penguin I’d bought from Grace Major to read on the train, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Drumgoole and Montgomery were found conversing in the shower-room in the middle of the night.
On the journey home I was unable to stop thinking about Fleming’s Hotel. A man in the carriage lent me a copy of Barrack Variety, but the jokes didn’t seem funny. It was at moments like these that the truth most harshly mocked me. Ever since I’d found the hotel, ever since the woman had stared at me, it had been a part of every day, and for whole nights in my long, cheerless dormitory I had been unable to sleep. My father’s voice had returned to me there, telling again the stories of his friend, and reminding me of his friend’s opinions. My father had disagreed with my mother in her view that de Valera should not hand over the ports to Churchill, preferring to share the view of his friend. At school and on the train, and most of all when I returned home, the truth made me feel ill, as though I had flu.
That Christmas morning we handed each other our presents, after we’d eaten, still observing my father’s rule. We thought of him then, they in one way, I in another. ‘Oh, my dear, how lovely!’ my mother whispered over some ornament I’d bought her in a Dublin shop. I had thrown the dragon with the green glass eyes far into a lake near the school, unable to understand how my father had ever brought it to the house, or brought bars of chocolate or tins of Jacob’s biscuits. To pass to his children beneath my mother’s eyes the gifts of another woman seemed as awful a sin as any father could commit, yet somehow it was not as great as the sin of sharing with all of us this other woman’s eccentric household, her sister and her sister’s husband, her alcoholic aunt, a maid and a dog. ‘That’s Nora McNamara,’ the barman’s voice seemed to say again at our breakfast table, and I imagined them sitting there, my father and she, in that comfortable bar, and my father listening to her talk of the house in Palmerston Road and of how she admired the English aristocracy. I watched my mother smile that Christmas morning, and I wanted to tell the truth because the truth was neat and without hypocrisy: I wanted carefully to say that I was glad my father was dead.
Instead I left the breakfast table and went to my bedroom. I wept there, and then washed my face in cold water from the jug on my wash-stand. I hated the memory of him and how he would have been that Christmas morning; I hated him for destroying everything. It was no consolation to me then that he had tried to share with us a person he loved in a way that was different from the way he loved us. I could neither forgive nor understand. I felt only bitterness that I, who had taken his place, must now continue his deception, and keep the secret of his lies and his hypocrisy.
Afternoon Dancing
Every summer since the war the two couples had gone to Southend in September, staying in Mrs Roope’s Prospect Hotel. They’d known each other since childhood: Poppy and Albert, Alice and Lenny. They’d been to the same schools, they’d all been married in the summer of 1938. They rented houses in the same street, Paper Street, SE4, Poppy and Albert Number 10, and Alice and Lenny Number 41. They were all in their mid-fifties now, and except for Poppy they’d all run to fat a bit. Len was a printer, Albert was employed by the London Electricity Board, as a cable-layer. Every night the two men had a few drinks together in the Cardinal Wolsey in Northbert Road, round the corner from Paper Street. Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, the wives went to Bingo. Alice’s children – Beryl and Ron – were now married and had children of their own. Poppy’s son, Mervyn, married also, had gone to Canada in 1969.
Poppy was very different from Alice. Alice was timid, she’d never had Poppy’s confidence. In middle age Poppy was a small, wiry woman with glasses, the worrying kind you might think to look at her, only Poppy didn’t worry at all. Poppy was always laughing, nudging Alice when they were together on a bus, drawing attention to some person who amused her. ‘Poppy Edwards, you’re a holy terror!’ Miss Curry of Tatterall Elementary School had pronounced forty years ago, and in lots of ways Poppy was a holy terror still. She’d been a slaphappy mother and was a slaphappy wife, not caring much what people thought if her child wasn’t as meticulously turned out as other children, or if Albert’s sandwiches were carelessly made. Once, back in 1941 when Albert was in the army, she’d begun to keep company with a man who was an air-raid warden, whose bad health had prevented him from joining one of the armed forces. When the war came to an end she was still involved with this man and it had seemed likely then that she and Albert would not continue to live together. Alice had been worried about it all, but then, a month before Albert was due to be demobbed, the man had been knocked down by an army truck in Holborn and had instantly died. Albert remained in ignorance of everything, even though most people in Paper Street knew just what had been going on and how close Albert had come to finding himself wifeless. In those days Poppy had been a slim, small girl in her twenties, with yellow hair that looked as though it had been peroxided but which in fact hadn’t, and light-blue mischievous eyes. Alice had been plumper, dark-haired and reliable-looking, pretty in her nice-girl way. Beryl and Ron had not been born yet.
During the war, with their two husbands serving in Italy and Africa together, Poppy had repeatedly urged Alice to let her hair down a bit, as she herself was doing with the air-raid warden. They were all going to be blown up, she argued, and if Alice thought that Lenny and Albert weren’t chancing their arms with the local talent in Italy and Africa then Alice definitely had another think coming. But Alice, even after Lenny confessed that he’d once chanced his arm through physical desperation, couldn’t bring herself to emulate the easy attitudes of her friend. The air-raid warden was always producing friends for her, men whose health wasn’t good either, but Alice chatted politely to each of them and made it clear that she didn’t wish for a closer relationship. With peace and the death of the air-raid warden, Poppy calmed down a bit, and the birth of her child eighteen months later calmed her down further.
But even so she was still the same Poppy, and in late middle age when she suggested that she and Alice should take up dancing again the idea seemed to Alice to be just like all the other ideas Poppy had had in the past: when they were seven, to take Mrs Grounds’ washing off her line and peg it up on Mrs Bond’s; when they were ten, to go to Woolworth’s with Davie Rickard and slip packets of carrots from the counter into the pockets of his jacket; at fifteen, to write anonymous letters to every teacher who’d ever had anything to do with them; at sixteen, to cut the hair of people in the row in front of them in the Regal cinema. ‘Dancing?’ Alice said. ‘Oh, Poppy, whatever would they say?’