While speaking, the Headmaster cut the meat on his plate, adding potatoes and carrots to each forkful. He paused to eat between sentences, so that what he said came slowly from him. When the children were younger they had fidgeted during their father’s mealtime dissertations. They had since learned not to.
‘No, the reason for the good lady’s telephone call was to inquire if Master Salkind might have extra French.’
Not wishing to listen, Jonathan thought of Tottle again. The older boy’s rather big, handsome face appeared clearly in his mind, a smile slung lazily across it. He glanced at Margery, seated opposite him, Was she, too, thinking about her admirer, visualizing him also? Was she wondering what it would be like to meet him as he’d suggested, what he’d say, how he’d act?
‘French, apparently, is commercially de rigueur in Egypt, or at least in the Salkinds’ corner of it.’
In the darkness of the dormitory there were confessions of desire. When one voice left off another began. Tales were told of what had been seen or heard. Intentions were declared, pretences aired.
‘Though, truth to tell, I can hardly think of a reason why French should feature in any way whatsoever since the Egyptians have a perfectly good language of their own.’
The confessions of desire had to do with film stars usually, occasionally with Lady Di or Fergie, less often with Reene or Monica.
‘Were you aware of that, old chap? French in Egypt?’
‘No.’
‘I think, you know, the good lady may have got it wrong.’
Tottle intended to try it on, and then to laugh in that way he had. He would put his big face close to Margery’s, he’d put his big lips on to hers, and his hands would go all over her, just as though it wasn’t real, just as though he was pretending. And later on, with someone else, it would be the same for Georgina, and for Harriet.
‘But since Master Salkind’s French is shaky an extra hour a week will hardly come amiss, eh?’
Everyone agreed.
The days of those Easter holidays went similarly by. The children of the Headmaster spent long afternoons on the grey sands that stretched beyond the shingle and the sea-front promenade. They sat in the Yew Tree Café sipping Coca-Cola and nibbling cheap biscuits. When their week’s pocket-money ran out they crouched instead among the furniture of the furniture-room. Every morning Georgina and Harriet were given tuition by their father, and Jonathan and Margery read, alone in their rooms.
Tottle was not again mentioned, but as the weeks passed Jonathan found himself more and more dismayed by all that his imagination threw at him. It felt like that: as though heavy lumps of information were being lobbed in his direction, relentlessly and slowly. They dropped into the pond of his consciousness, creating little pictures. They nagged at him, and the intensity of colour in the pictures increased, and faces and expressions acquired greater distinctness.
Two nights before the holidays ended, restlessly awake, Jonathan arrived at a decision. The next afternoon he did not accompany his sisters to the sea-front and the Yew Tree Café, presenting them with the unlikely excuse that he had some history to read. He watched them set off from the window of his bedroom, delayed another twenty minutes, and then went slowly downstairs. He paused again, in doubt and trepidation, before he found the courage to knock on his father’s study door. He had no idea how he might express himself.
‘Yes?’ the Headmaster responded.
Jonathan closed the door behind him. The study smelt, as always, of his father’s pipe tobacco and a mustiness that could not be identified. Glasspaned cupboards were full of textbooks, There were supplies of chalk and geometrical instruments, globes of the world, cartridges for fountain pens, stacks of new exercise-books, blotting paper, pencils. His father sat behind his desk, a pipe in his mouth, the new term’s timetables spread out before him.
‘Well, old chap? Come to lend a hand?’
Beyond the geniality lay the ghost of the Headmaster’s termtime self, of severity and suspicion. Pomposity wasn’t what mattered most; talk of ‘Older values’ and ‘bad taste’ was only tedious on its own. ‘Bloody hypocrite’, some boy – neither Tottle nor Piercey – had said once. ‘Nasty brute’.
‘Always tricky, the summer timetables.’
Jonathan nodded.
‘Cricket’s greedy,’ the Headmaster said. ‘Where time’s concerned.’
‘Yes, it is.’
His father knocked the ashes out of his pipe and drew a tin of tobacco towards him. All his life, Jonathan had been familiar with these tins: Three Nuns the tobacco was called, orange lettering on a creamy ground. He watched his father pressing the coiled shreds into the bowl of his pipe. His father knew: that was what Jonathan had at length deduced. His father had so determinedly separated Private Side from the school because he knew the girls must not be exposed to crudities. His father knew, but he didn’t know enough. You couldn’t insist there was a shutter that came down just because you pretended it did. You couldn’t insist Old Mudger was a Mr Chips just because he looked like one.
‘Girls out somewhere?’ his father said.
‘I think so.’
A match was struck, the tobacco caught. Jonathan watched it reddening, and smoke streaming from between his father’s tightly clenched teeth. There was no conversation they could have. He could not mention the voices in the darkness of the dormitory, the confessions of desire, the declarations of intention. He could not tell his father he was despised for being the person he was, that boys were sorry for a woman they likened to a hen. He could not warn him of Tottle’s revenge, nor suggest what lay ahead for Georgina and Harriet. Lying awake the night before, he had wanted to protect his sisters, and his mother also, because they were not to blame. And in a way he had even wanted to protect his father because he didn’t know enough, because he blustered and was oppressive, and went about things stupidly.
‘Well, I’d best get on, old chap,’ his father said, applying himself once more to the sheets of paper that constituted the summer timetables. The balding head was bent again. Smoke eddied about it complacently.
Jonathan went away, softly closing the study door behind him. He ran through the empty corridors of the school, and down the hydrangea drive. He ran along the sea-front, looking for his sisters.
Kathleen’s Field
‘I’m after a field of land, sir.’
Hagerty’s tone was modest to the bank agent, careful and cautious. He was aware that Mr Ensor would know what was coming next. He was aware that he constituted a risk, a word Mr Ensor had used a couple of times when endeavouring to discuss the overdraft Hagerty already had with the bank.
‘I was wondering, sir…’ His voice trailed away when Mr Ensor’s head began to shake. He’d like to say yes, the bank agent assured him. He would say yes this very instant, only what use would it be when Head Office wouldn’t agree? They’re bad times, Mr Hagerty.’
It was a Monday morning in 1948. Leaning on the counter, his right hand still grasping the stick he’d used to drive three bullocks the seven miles from his farm, Hagerty agreed that the times were as bad as ever he’d known them. He’d brought the bullocks in to see if he could get a price for them, but he hadn’t been successful. All the way on his journey he’d been thinking about the field old Lally had spent his lifetime carting the rocks out of. The widow the old man had left behind had sold the nineteen acres on the other side of the hill, but the last of her fields was awkwardly placed for anyone except Hagerty. They both knew it would be convenient for him to have it; they both knew there’d be almost as much profit in that single pasture as there was in all the land he possessed already. Gently sloping, naturally drained, it was free of weeds and thistles, and the grass it grew would do you good to look at. Old Lally had known its value from the moment he’d inherited it. He had kept it ditched, with its gates and stone walls always cared for. And for miles around, no one had ever cleared away rocks like old Lally had.