‘We can’t drink their stuff.’
‘We can replace it.’
‘Do take that thing off.’
‘Sorry, I forgot I had it on. My God, I left the bath running!’
Tom raced upstairs. He thought, the sitting-room ceiling will come down and we’ve only been here half an hour!
But all was well. An interesting funnel at one end of the bath conveyed the overflowing water into a depression in the tiled floor where it ran away harmlessly through a grating. Tom took off his shoes and socks and danced on top of the grating, feeling the steamy exuberant water running away between his toes. He tucked up his trouser ends, but the hem of Ju’s négligé got a little wet.
Tom McCaffrey was an object of interest in Ennistone ‘society’. ‘Society’ in Ennistone was, by this time, classlessly elitist; it was also plural. This was particularly evident of the Institute. Indeed the existence and peculiar nature of the Institute helped this process. History too assisted. Ennistone had lost its ‘landed gentry’ early on, and had become democratic and non-conformist well before the nineteenth century. Some notion of ‘the best families’ persisted, well mixed up with high ideals and moral leadership, but even this, by the time of our story, had virtually disappeared. To take an instance, the mind of William Eastcote, an exceptionally good man, probably contained some grain of irrational superiority, while I believe that absolutely no blemish of this sort existed in the mind of Anthea. Snobbery was with us intellectual and moralistic rather than social in the old sense. Groups of people freely ‘set themselves up’ as arbiters and judges with pretensions to cultural or moral superiority. There was, in so far as such initiatives were concerned, an atmosphere of ‘free enterprise’. There were of course members of the Victoria Park ‘old school’ who simply disliked change, there were those who ‘kept themselves to themselves’, and those who hated everybody. There were differences of opinion and differences of style. My point is simply that those who thought well of themselves tended to think they were right rather than that they were grand. Our old Quakerish Methodistic priggishness promoted this advance, if it was an advance; I think it was.
Our ‘society’ looked tolerantly on Tom McCaffrey. Perhaps this was likely to happen since Alex, George and Brian were in their different ways looked at askance: George for obvious reasons, Alex because she was ‘stuck up’, and Brian because he was brusque and sardonic, and in his own way rather priggish. Tom was seen, by contrast, as young, unspoilt, and ‘rather sweet’. He was also pictured somewhat as setting out on life’s journey with a plume in his helmet and a sword at his knee. He was good-tempered and had as yet been guilty of no outrages, in Ennistone at any rate. Mothers sometimes held him up as an example to their sons. ‘There’s Tom McCaffrey, he’s not on drugs or chasing girls all day, he’s got himself into the University, he’ll make something of his life.’ ‘He chases girls in London,’ the sons sometimes darkly muttered. ‘Well, he does it discreetly,’ the mothers would reply, thus further confusing the moral sense of their offspring. It was true that Tom was not seen to chase Ennistone girls. Many of the potential chasees were sorry about this, but were at least spared the chagrin of seeing a rival preferred. Match-makers had long ago decided that Tom and Anthea Eastcote were made for each other. What these two young people thought was still obscure. Tom was also noteworthy and even popular because of the legend of ‘Feckless Fiona’, and folk memories of her charm, her ‘dottiness’, her cheerful happy ways, and her sad early death.
Tom had indeed, after a worthy career at Ennistone Comprehensive School, got himself into a distinguished London college, where he was supposed to be ‘doing well’, though some said he was ‘talented but lazy’. Darker critics predicted a nervous breakdown: after all, the boy had lost both his parents very early and had been brought up by an eccentric emotional step-mother, with two strong-willed mutually hostile half-brothers playing the role of father. However, of this breakdown there was admitted to be no sign.
Tom had, unlike his introspective friend Scarlett-Taylor, little conception of himself; at any rate he did not reflect much about himself, about his character, abilities and prospects. He was not ambitious and had no plans. It is true that he wrote verses, and was even spoken of in Ennistone as a ‘poet’, which Tom knew perfectly well that, as yet, he was not. His future remained enormously far away, separated from him by a vast cornucopious present. He enjoyed his studies and intermittently tried to do well. He was perhaps lazy, at any rate easily deflected to other pleasures, of which he had a great many. Among those pleasures sex was not obsessively primary. Tom was credited, by some of his ex-schoolfellows, with many sexual conquests in London. This supposition was needed to explain his apparent lack of interest in Ennistone girls. Of course some said that he was homosexual, but this was not the general view. In fact, although Tom did not trouble to deny the supposition, he had had fewer adventures than was supposed. He had had adventures but was ruefully aware that he had rarely initiated or controlled these. ‘Knowing girls’ had on occasion decoyed Tom into bed, and Tom had not complained; moreover his vanity was flattered. But whether he had ever been in love was a subject which he often discussed with Scarlett-Taylor.
He often thought about his parents but with a carefully bounded vagueness. He imagined Fiona arriving on that motor bike and at once meeting Alan, as the legend ran; the absolute chance that had initiated his existence. These thoughts were very private. Other people tactfully avoided the subject. There was felt to be something both touching and awful in the circumstances in which Tom had been born and orphaned. Tom felt this too and was gentle with himself. Fiona Gates’s family had not figured in Tom’s life, he was never entirely sure why. Robin Osmore, ‘feeling it his duty’, had said something about the matter when Tom was a schoolboy. It seemed that Fiona, living unmarried with Alan, had written to assure her parents that she was well, but probably without revealing her whereabouts. When she wrote later to announce Tom’s existence and her marriage plans, her parents were shocked and upset. Whatever it was (and Tom had no idea) that had induced Fiona to leave home had certainly not been mended by time and her antics. Heated letters passed between Alan and the father. Alan took the pretext to be angry, and relations were, it was then assumed temporarily, broken off. In fact it seemed that Fiona’s parents were mild inoffensive people, bullied by Fiona, intimidated by Alan, and after Fiona’s death by the McCaffrey phalanx in the form of Alex, George and Brian momentarily united. Stunned by their daughter’s death (they had lost her brother as a child), they went to join cousins in New Zealand. From here, later on, they wrote occasional sad inarticulate letters to Tom, to which he never replied since (he never knew this) Alex in her wisdom destroyed them on arrival. Once she had made Tom her property, Alex never tolerated even the most shadowy hint of any other claim upon him. Alex never spoke of these obscure grandparents, and it was Robin Osmore who told Tom of their decease. Later Tom wished that he had ‘done something’ about them. Later still he felt it was a mystery better left alone. He felt the same, with much more intensity, about his father’s death. Alan had died in some ‘medical experiment’ in a laboratory in Hong Kong. No details ever emerged. When he was a schoolboy Tom thought he might go there one day and find out. He even wondered whether his father had been murdered. He vaguely pictured him as someone who might have been murdered. But more recently he had decided to leave Alan in peace. He was afraid of some awful hurt, some awful pain, which might result from probing. He knew there were demons in his life. He thought he could remember Alan. He could not remember Fiona. He possessed some photographs of his parents: his handsome dark-haired father, a figure of authority, his mother, so curly-haired and pretty, so childish-looking, always laughing. If she were still alive she would not yet be forty years old. He also had, and kept in a little wooden box, her wedding ring. (Robin Osmore had given it to him.) On what appalling evening, in what quiet room, had Alan McCaffrey drawn that ring from the thin white finger of his dead wife?