The headmaster changed the subject, asking how the rivers were. The fishing was better than ever he’d known it, Mr Gorman reported, and he retailed experiences to prove the claim. ‘Isn’t it all that matters in the long run?’ suggested Mr Gorman, and Mr Angusthorpe readily agreed that it was. He would refrain from repeating to his wife the information about the marmalade that tasted of tin, or the absence of variation where vegetables were concerned. He left the bar at nine o’clock, determined to slip quietly into bed without disturbing her.
In the middle of that night, at midnight precisely, the Angusthorpes were awakened simultaneously by a noise from the room beyond the new partition.
‘Put a pillow down, darling,’ a male voice was saying as clearly as if its possessor stood in the room beside the Angusthorpes’ bed.
‘Couldn’t we wait until another time?’ a woman pleaded in reply. ‘I don’t see what good a pillow will do.’
‘It’ll lift you up a bit,’ the man explained. ‘It said in the book to put a pillow down if there was difficulty.’
‘I don’t see –’
‘It’ll make entry easier,’ said the man. ‘It’s a well-known thing.’
Mrs Angusthorpe switched on her bedside light and saw that her husband was pretending to be asleep. ‘I’m going to rap on the wall,’ she whispered. ‘It’s disgusting, listening to this.’
‘I think I’m going down,’ said the man.
‘My God,’ whispered Mr Angusthorpe, opening his eyes. ‘It’s Jackson Major.’
At breakfast, Mrs Angusthorpe ate margarine on her toast and the marmalade that had a taste of tin. She did not say anything. She watched her husband cutting into a fried egg on a plate that bore the marks of the waitress’s two thumbs. Eventually he placed his knife and fork together on the plate and left them there.
For hours they had lain awake, listening to the conversation beyond the inadequate partition. The newly wed wife of Jackson Major had wept and said that Jackson had better divorce her at once. She had designated the hotel they were in as a frightful place, fit only for Irish tinkers. ‘That filthy meal!’ the wife of Jackson Major had cried emotionally. ‘That awful drunk man!’ And Jackson Major had apologized and had mentioned Mr Angusthorpe by name, wondering what on earth his old headmaster could ever have seen in such an establishment. ‘Let’s try again,’ he had suggested, and the Angusthorpes had listened to a repetition of Mrs Jackson’s unhappy tears. ‘How can you rap on the wall?’ Mr Angusthorpe had angrily whispered. ‘How can we even admit that conversation can be heard? Jackson was head boy.’
‘In the circumstances,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe at breakfast, breaking the long silence, ‘it would be better to leave.’
He knew it would be. He knew that on top of everything else the unfortunate fact that Jackson Major was in the room beyond the partition and would sooner or later discover that the partition was far from soundproof could be exceedingly embarrassing in view of what had taken place during the night. There was, as well, the fact that he had enthused so eloquently to Jackson Major about the hotel that Jackson Major had clearly, on his word alone, brought his bride there. He had even said, he recalled, that the Slieve Gashal would be ideal for a honeymoon. Mr Angusthorpe considered all that, yet could not forget his forty years’ experience of the surrounding rivers, or the information of Mr Gorman that the rivers this year were better than ever.
‘We could whisper,’ he suggested in what was itself a whisper. ‘We could whisper in our room so that they wouldn’t know you can hear.’
‘Whisper?’ she said. She shook her head.
She remembered days in the rain, walking about the one-horse village with nothing whatsoever to do except to walk about, or lie on her bed reading detective stories. She remembered listening to his reports of his day and feeling sleepy listening to them. She remembered thinking, once or twice, that it had never occurred to him that what was just a change and a rest for her could not at all be compared to the excitements he derived from his days on the river-bank, alone with his mind. He was a great, successful man, big and square and commanding, with the cold eyes of the fish he sought in mountain rivers. He had made a firm impression on generations of boys, and on parents and governors, and often on a more general public, yet he had never been able to give her children. She had needed children because she was, compared with him, an unimportant kind of person.
She thought of him in Chapel, gesturing at six hundred boys from the pulpit, in his surplice and red academic hood, releasing words from his throat that were as cold as ice and cleverly made sense. She thought of a time he had expelled two boys, when he had sat with her in their drawing-room waiting for a bell to ring. When the chiming had ceased he had risen and gone without a word from the room, his oaken face pale with suppressed emotion. She knew he saw in the crime of the two boys a failure on his part, yet he never mentioned it to her. He had expelled the boys in public, castigating them with bitterness in his tone, hating them and hating himself, yet rising above his shame at having failed with them: dignity was his greatest ally.
She sat with him once a week at the high table in the dining-hall, surrounded by his prefects, who politely chatted to her. She remembered Jackson Major, a tall boy with short black hair who would endlessly discuss with her husband a web of school affairs. ‘The best head boy I remember,’ her husband’s voice said again, coming back to her over a number of years: ‘I made no mistake with Jackson.’ Jackson Major had set a half-mile record that remained unbroken to this day. There had been a complaint from some child’s mother, she recalled, who claimed that her son had been, by Jackson Major, too severely caned. We must not forget, her husband had written to that mother, that your son almost caused another boy to lose an eye. It was for that carelessness that he was punished. He bears no resentment: boys seldom do.
Yet now this revered, feared and clever man was suggesting that they should whisper for a fortnight in their bedroom, so that the couple next door might not feel embarrassment, so that he himself might remain in a particularly uncomfortable hotel in order to fish. It seemed to Mrs Angusthorpe that there were limits to the role he had laid down for her and which for all her married life she had ungrudgingly accepted. She hadn’t minded being bored for this fortnight every year, but now he was asking more than that she could continue to feel bored; he was asking her to endure food that made her sick, and to conduct absurd conversations in their bedroom.
‘No,’ she said, ‘we could not whisper.’
‘I meant it only for kindness. Kindness to them, you see –’
‘You have compensations here. I have none, you know.’
He looked sharply at her, as at an erring new boy who had not yet learnt the ways of school.
‘I think we should leave at once,’ she said. ‘After breakfast.’
That suggestion, he pointed out to her, was nonsensical. They had booked a room in the hoteclass="underline" they were obliged to pay for it. He was exhausted, he added, after a particularly trying term.
‘It’s what I’d like,’ she said.
He spread margarine on his toast and added to it some of the marmalade. ‘We must not be selfish,’ he said, suggesting that both of them were on the point of being selfish and that together they must prevent themselves.
‘I’d be happier,’ she began, but he swiftly interrupted her, reminding her that his holiday had been spoilt enough already and that he for his part was intent on making the best of things. ‘Let’s simply enjoy what we can,’ he said, ‘without making a fuss about it.’
At that moment Jackson Major and his wife, a pretty, pale-haired girl called Daphne, entered the dining-room. They stood at the door, endeavouring to catch the eye of a waitress, not sure about where to sit. Mrs Jackson indicated a table that was occupied by two men, reminding her husband that they had sat at it last night for dinner. Jackson Major looked towards it and looked impatiently away, seeming annoyed with his wife for bothering to draw his attention to a table at which they clearly could not sit. It was then, while still annoyed, that he noticed the Angusthorpes.